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Angular Router - vsavkin http://victorsavkin.com/post/145672529346/angular-router ====== wardobello A must read for anyone thinking about Angular2	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why You Didn't Get the Job - fecak http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/06/20/why-you-didnt-get-the-job/ ====== ChuckMcM This is pure awesomeness. I've rejected people for all of those reasons but haven't ever put them together so succinctly. The one that can really swing my vote one way or another is the lack of passion. To be clear you are probably passionate about _something_ , and I don't mean "getting paid to work here." For example when I was with Google (and even earlier at Sun) I interviewed candidates who were passionate about wanting to work at the company but were not passionate about any thing in particular the company was doing. Their passion was 'to be employed by <company X>' and I would ask them "Ok, so lets say we hire you and you've achieved your goal, now what are you hoping to achieve?" only to get crickets. That is always hard to get past. ~~~ fecak Thanks for reading. I've received many of these responses lately on some job candidates and thought there was some value in compiling them for engineers that may be interviewing. I could certainly see where candidates might get hung up on working for a particular employer without necessarily being as passionate for their role there. I don't see that too often as I tend to recruit for smaller software firms, but I'm not at all surprised that you would see that at Google, Sun, Apple, etc. ------ geebee Interesting part about the "fanboy" complex, where programmers insist on working with specific technologies. Unfortunately, some segments of the recruiting industry do encourage this behavior. Once a programming language or framework is established, it can be difficult to get a job without direct experience. There's a short, narrow window of opportunity when a technology first appears where nobody has much experience and people can learn on the job, and that's the magic moment to gain experience. Queue the stampede. For instance, when EJB hit, a lot of Java devs thought that if they didn't gain experience with this new technology quickly, they'd be shut out. And I did start to see job postings that specifically required EJB experience, not just general java experience. I get the feeling that the industry has moved away somewhat from this type of skills matching, but hacker news can give you a distorted view on how things work. Lack of experience with a specific technology is less likely to hurt you here than with a consulting/body shop attempting to put square pegs in square holes. But even this article recommends that you gain deep experience in a technology and avoid becoming a "jack of all trades" (while at the same time advising against being a fanboy for a specific technology). This isn't necessarily inconsistent - there is a meaningful difference between being a fanboy to the exclusion of all else and being an expert with depth in a particular technology, but it can be a tight line to walk. ~~~ fecak Well said, and I could claim some guilt in years past about jumping on the next big thing and encouraging my network to learn what seemed to be on the horizon. I still keep track of trends and will mention them to candidates, but I now try to tell engineers (particularly younger ones) that they should try to experience several languages and tools to become better at the overall craft. Deep engineering experience seems to be acquired by seeing variety. I think the fanboy comment would be attributed to someone today walking into an interview and saying they 'only want to work in (specific language)', which would be a turnoff to most companies. Having passion for a technology is good and engineers will always have preferences, but being willing to help out where you can will have greater value. ------ at-fates-hands What a great read. I've recently run the gauntlet on interviewing and I'm acutely aware of all of these. I only have one issue which is about the section on "Candidate showed a lack of passion". I'm completely passionate about development. I do freelance work, I build stuff outside of my 9-5 job, I go to conferences and meet-ups locally. But I know developers who are much better JavaScript and Ruby guys than me. They have more experience, but don't do nearly the same amount of stuff outside of work that I do. Does that "lack of passion" about the industry and their profession make them a less worthy candidate than myself? ~~~ eshvk Yeah, I was uncomfortable with that too. There are two sets of people I know: Folks of the kind that you mentioned who are incredibly good programmers but who have other interests outside life. In fact one of the smartest coworkers I knew spent half his time at work and the other half time in a band and he was extremely productive. Another group are the people who have a personality which doesn't exude visible signals for passion: They probably never hang out at meetup groups or conferences, but they quietly hack away in their own time without tweeting about it or whatever. From a macro perspective they are "passionate" for sure but are susceptible to false negatives especially in the highly noisy interview setup. ~~~ fecak A lot has been written about passion lately, and even another recent blog post of mine is relevant ([http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/04/17/how-employers- measure-...](http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/04/17/how-employers-measure- passion-in-software-engineering-candidates-and-how-to-express-your-passion-in- resumes-and-interviews/)). I don't think passion has to be demonstrated by 'only' doing coding 24 hours a day, or going to meetups every day. I know very good technologists who don't attend meetups or hackathons, but you can tell in how they talk about technology that they have passion. It's hard to quantify, but I think for the most part good companies tend to get it right more often than not. ------ jwegan Another one to add is personality. Generally at the end of the interview there are two questions I have to answer: 1) Can the candidate do the job? 2) Can I work 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week, under stressful situations with this person? I've had candidates just rip apart their past co-workers and previous companies. Sure you might have some gripes with how things were done at your previous company, but make sure you don't end up portraying yourself as someone that is difficult to get along with. ------ bitdiffusion Not sure where this one fits in (passion? commitment?) but having a candidate mention that they "don't do overtime... ever" half-way through an interview when nothing has been mentioned about over-time is a serious turn-off. Sure - people have families and not everyone is geared up for 18-hour work days - but sometimes the sky is falling and companies need an employee that isn't going to disappear out the door at 5:01 PM when the place is burning with a "well that's me for today! good luck guys!" ~~~ fecak If a candidate says they are 'never' willing to work overtime, they are probably in the wrong business. I can't say I've ever had someone tell me never. Most engineers understand that there are going to be at least some support or production situations that need to be addressed beyond standard biz hours. I wouldn't say that is passion or commitment - having some expectation of at least occasional overtime is probably just a minimum requirement. ~~~ alinajaf Just to clarify, if someone stayed late to fix something on Tuesday and then clocked off early on Wednesday in lieu, would that count as overtime in your definition? ~~~ fecak It would in mine. ------ Killswitch What the heck is going on in that top image? ------ kenrikm Interesting read, seems to nail the main points really well. P.S Why is the Wordpress stament at the top in Ruby? ~~~ fecak Thanks. Would you rather see it in something else? ~~~ notJim I would rather it was a logo. Currently, it comes off as kind of precious. It was actually quite distracting. I came to your blog to read an article, and found myself presented with this bit of text, which I initially mistook for the beginning of the article. ~~~ fecak I think it will be a logo at some point, this site and my company site are rather new and works in progress. I sincerely appreciate the feedback. ------ gallerytungsten An overly large sense of entitlement and lack of passion are the two biggest red flags for me. Someone with a great attitude but lack of skills can be trained; someone with a bad attitude can't be fixed (at least not by the hiring organization). ------ alinajaf Great article, though I do some of these things and have never really had trouble securing work, some examples: _Candidate has wide technical breadth but little depth_ and related: _not uncommon, particularly for folks that have perhaps bounced from job to job a little too much_ I think this describes me, though I'm not sure how to define technical depth here. The only benefits I can see (technically) from staying at a company for more than a year or so would be greater domain knowledge and perhaps a greater understanding of the long-term implications of architectural decisions. As for technical depth in terms of skill, IME I've found that job-hopping has dramatically increased the speed at which I've been able to gain expertise. For example, I've worked at some places where, for cultural reasons, there's no call to do fat-client javascript applications, with more of a focus on server-side technologies like stored procedures. Conversely, where the front- end stuff was more important, I got much better at organizing large javascript codebases and creating web services to interact with them. Had I worked at only one or the other, I would have lacked technical depth in the area I was missing out on. _Candidate displayed a superiority complex or sense of entitlement_ - Guilty as charged! Unless I'm being hired as a consultant, I generally tend to wrap-up interviews when I realize the technical staff I'd be reporting to don't have as much technical ability as I do (for my own, entirely subjective measure of technical ability). Also, I don't work with PHP, Java or anything related to Microsoft. I'll also disqualify companies where I feel like they have bad process, or if there's any social weirdness in the interview (I've experienced everything from off-the-cuff anti-Semitism to the interviewers shouting at each other). I don't mind a flexible work schedule, i.e. I work late on a Tuesday and then I go home early on a Wednesday, but overtime without pay is not an option. _Candidate talked more about the accomplishments of co-workers_ - Programming of any significance is a team sport. Sometimes a potential hirer will ask "Do you have any experience with problem X?" and my answer is often "Yes, alongside other developers" or "Not directly, but I was involved in discussions about X when we were dealing with it at #{company_name}" or even "No, but I was talking about X with #{someone} at #{some_tech_meetup} and he said they were trying #{some_solution} which sounded like a sensible strategy. I think it's probably better than #{other_solution} because it means that #{benefit_of_first_solution}". As long as I discussed some of the tradeoffs of various options and managed to adequately demonstrate my understanding of the technology, I think the interviewers were happy. I feel somewhat uncomfortable taking _full_ responsibility for achievements at any company I work at, because in practice it involves mulling over ideas, discussing pros and cons and coming to a solution together. ~~~ fecak Good points. Depth is hard to measure, but generally I find that clients will ask a question about a specific programming topic and start off basic. When the candidate gets that right, they go a little deeper with the second question and the candidate fails. It's like being able to name all the baseball teams but none of the players - that would be breadth but not depth. You might come across as a baseball fan initially, but not on further review. RE: entitlement - I don't think what you are describing is a superiority complex as much as coming to a realization that you are more senior than the person - no complex, just a fact I'd say. Companies that have bad process should be off limits for you as well, I don't think that is entitlement but rather some basic expectations. Not being willing to work at all with PHP, Java or MS could be perceived as entitled if everyone else has to dive in on those from time to time. Agreed with your ideas re: co-workers. The key being that you demonstrate the understanding. It's not so much about claiming responsibility as it is about being curious about your surroundings and interested in things beyond your individual contribution to the project. ~~~ alinajaf > Depth is hard to measure, but generally I find that clients will ask a > question about a specific programming topic and start off basic. When the > candidate gets that right, they go a little deeper with the second question > and the candidate fails. My experience bears this out. In one of the best interviews I had the interviewer essentially picked items off my CV and asked me more and more about them until I was forced to say "I don't know". This was supposedly deliberate (i.e. they wanted to see a) how much knowledge I actually had and b) what I would do at the limits of it). I came away from that interview with no idea of how well I did, but I got the job! > Not being willing to work at all with PHP, Java or MS could be perceived as > entitled if everyone else has to dive in on those from time to time. In a tougher market I might be singing a different tune, but at the moment there's just so much work out there that I think the average developer can afford to be a little picky, or entitled as it were. Not saying it's right, it's just what it is. ~~~ fecak I don't disagree, it is currently a seller's market in most places if you are skilled. ------ timaelliott Great article but I have to wonder.. is it actually relevant today? With the huge demand for engineers and the utter lack of even somewhat qualified engineers, I wonder if people actually are still having a tough time landing a job? ~~~ pyre Whenever I hear/read these comments, my first thought is always that the speaker/poster is from The Valley, and assumes that every place is like The Valley (or that everyone with technical skills wants -- or can -- move to The Valley). In other words, "The Valley" isn't the answer to life, the universe and everything. [Also, there can't be that high of a demand for engineers, because I've been denied jobs for the most trivial of reasons. I was denied a job once for not being able to answer a Python trivia question about something that took me 5 minutes to learn from the Python documentation.] ------ jmomarty amazing!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Running Lua on Mac OS X - ruda http://rudamoura.com/luaonmacosx.html Lua is a lightweight programming language and has good reputation among game engines. In this article, you will learn how to install and use the latest version of Lua (5.2.1) on Mac OS X Mountain Lion, Lion or Snow Leopard. ====== ajacksified I haven't used Rudix, but I've had great success using Brew; I switch between 5.1 and 5.2 easily using the process I explain at [http://thejacklawson.com/2012/09/switching-package- versions-...](http://thejacklawson.com/2012/09/switching-package-versions- with-brew/index.html). Brew also has Luajit, which I use 99% of the time; it's the environment I run in production because it's so much faster. ~~~ brntbeer I personally prefer brew over other package management systems, especially given that it's open source. Rudix is probably just as good, but I can't see other people fixing packages in a github/issue format like i could with brew. ------ meric Also checkout <http://luadist.org> It's like pip but for Lua. ~~~ ajacksified Also check out Luarocks. It has a wide variety of packages, and of people I've spoken to, it's the preferred package manager. It's also available on brew. <http://luarocks.org>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
$10 laptop coming from India on February 3rd, or so they say - erickhill http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/30/10-laptop-coming-from-india-on-february-3rd-or-so-they-say/ ====== gravitycop Indiatimes link posted earlier: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458077>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Everyone will be a software engineer and barely any will know how to code - BerislavLopac https://qz.com/778380/the-future-is-software-engineers-who-cant-code/ ====== geofft (2016) And it's a little surprising that the state of the world hasn't seemed to move since then - I'd still point to Excel. ~~~ JJMcJ Excel, world's most used programming tool. Excel, also the world's favorite computer game, where you play with numbers till you get the answer your boss wants to see.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How preparations for tomorrow’s satellite wars could ruin life as we know it today - robg http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200809/space-war ====== ckinnan "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. 'We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. " Eisenhower's Farewell Address, 1961 ------ kenver How does showing you can shoot down other peoples satellites protect your own, when the people who _might_ do it to you dont have many anyway. "If you shoot down our 444, we'll shoot down your 43". Just seems to me like another obscene waste of money to show you can do something that you would never want to do anyway. Destroying the _enemies_ satellites would more than likely damage your own in the process. ~~~ tjic Rephrase it this way: "How does demonstrating that we can shoot down 100% of China's spy satellite resources in response to them shooting down 5% of ours deter them from initiating hostilities ?" > Destroying the enemies satellites would more than likely damage your own in > the process. You're making assumptions about what percent of our orbital resources are not yet in orbit and are instead bunkered in hardened silos waiting to be deployed. You're assuming that the answer is 0%. ~~~ kenver Good point about the bunkers. Would they really initiate a conflict in space knowing they could only shoot down 5% though? Seems to me if you cant take them all in one go then you probably shouldn't bother. ~~~ tjic EXACTLY.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mozy goes Mac--First really useful Mac Backup solution - mattculbreth http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/25/mozy-goes-mac-first-really-useful-mac-hard-drive-backup-solution/ ====== mattculbreth I've been looking for a good backup solution, so this is cool. I'd looked at Carbonite before but it had a Windows version only.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Sony needed to have basic digital protection. It failed - nsns http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/21/sony-hacking-north-korea-cyber-security ====== tracker1 Isn't Sony part of the group that insists that Google should _know_ what is legal content from what isn't and that DRM is essential and cannot be broken? I really hope that if the movie doesn't air here in the U.S. that it becomes quickly available on DVD/BluRay or leaked to torrents... That said, it's possible they reviewed it and realized it was just a bad movie? In any case, despite the fact that the people who made this breach are likely scumbags... it couldn't happen to a more deserving company imho... I still shudder at the crap Sony Music's infected "CD" discs caused. (Assholes) ------ CamperBob2 They had _plenty_ of "digital protection," all of it aimed at harassing lawful purchasers of its content.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
An example of exploiting two fixed vulnerabilities in Firefox on Windows - DyslexicAtheist https://github.com/0vercl0k/CVE-2019-11708 ====== geofft Note this is not a 0-day, this is a fully-worked-out example of exploiting two vulnerabilities fixed in May and June of this year. Worth reading for knowledge, but as an end user, just make sure you've restarted your browser at least once since June and haven't turned off auto-update. ~~~ leeoniya [https://archive.is/20130414124019/http://ha.ckers.org/blog/2...](https://archive.is/20130414124019/http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070803/mozilla- says-ten-fucking-days/) ~~~ Natfan That link 404s, here's one that works: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150102232217/ha.ckers.org/blog...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150102232217/ha.ckers.org/blog/20070803/mozilla- says-ten-fucking-days/) ------ DangerousPie Can we add something to the title to clarify that these bugs were fixed months ago? Eg. "(fixed in June)"? It's still an interesting post, but nowhere near as worrying for Firefox users as it sounds. ~~~ dang Ok, added above. ------ crumbshot Interested readers should check out the author's earlier work exploiting CVE-2019-9810: [https://github.com/0vercl0k/CVE-2019-9810](https://github.com/0vercl0k/CVE-2019-9810) And their fantastically detailed writeup of a PoC they wrote for that vulnerability: [https://doar-e.github.io/blog/2019/06/17/a-journey-into- ionm...](https://doar-e.github.io/blog/2019/06/17/a-journey-into-ionmonkey- root-causing-cve-2019-9810/) This exploit is different in that they use the arbitrary read/write primitive gained by CVE-2019-9810 to flip a couple of bits and patch out a few instructions with the effect of removing the security boundary between a normal web page and XPCOM. The interesting difference in this exploitation approach is there's no need for ROP chains and shellcode, as you have all the XPCOM components available to use. Once they're in that privileged context in the content process, they escape its sandbox by exploiting CVE-2019-11708. This works by sending an particular IPC message to the parent process, that causes a web page of the exploiter's choice to load in that process. In this case, the choice is to exploit CVE-2019-9810 again, then use XPCOM components to drop an executable to disk and run it. Awesome work, and a real pleasure to read, it's satisfying to see such well- commented and clear exploit code. ------ rahuldottech The thing is, most of these exploits also affect Tor browser, because it's built upon Firefox. Other than using a VM or a live distro like Tails , is there any other way for OR users to be _safer_ when running the regular Tor browser bundle, such as by utilising third-party sandbox software? ~~~ ErikCorry Most likely you are _less safe_ using Tor than using a regular Firefox or Chrome with no VPN, because using Tor automatically means nation state attackers are going to target you. So you have to do extra work just to break even. Google EgotisticalGiraffe for details. ~~~ rahuldottech There's no way this is true. Even if nation state actors _are_ more likely to target you just for using Tor, even if it's for completely regular browsing, Tor provides a _lot_ of additional protection and anonymity. ~~~ DyslexicAtheist I initially got hung up on the GP assertion that users are _most likely_ better off with Firefox. It depends on the threat model. But after thinking about it for a while, I agree with GP. Those people thinking about such topics constantly might not be the average user. I would not feel safe installing Tor on my parents computer and telling them it is safer to do all their browsing now with Tor. Threat models matter otherwise we'll end up applying wrong security tools: *"use Signal. use tor." when the right thing would have been to meet in person wearing a fake mustache, and keep a pebble in your shoe to change your walk. GP's advise makes sense for anyone who does not know what Tor is (most people). They are off better if we symlink their "Internet Button" from the desktop to Firefox, install uBlock and NanoDefender for them. If they're still adventurous teach them about creating/editing "multitab containers" (though I bet we've lost most of them by now). ~~~ dmos62 > GP's advise makes sense for anyone who does not know what Tor is Whether or not someone knows of Tor doesn't influence her threat model or privacy requirements, and therefore doesn't influence what measures can help. Other than that, I agree that you have to be aware of the threat model and what given tools provide. ------ est31 > It uses CVE-2019-9810 for getting code execution in both the content process > as well as the parent process and CVE-2019-11708 to trick the parent process > into browsing to an arbitrary URL. I wonder why is the privileged parent process even allowed to execute unsigned Javascript from the network? IIRC it already has eval support turned off. I get that it's hard to get rid of privileged Javascript completely (Servo thankfully made the choice early on to not do that at all), but is there any feature that requires downloading & executing Javascript from the network in the privileged parent process? ~~~ kevingadd Signed javascript isn't really a concept that exists anywhere. I'd love it if it did, it's a gaping hole in the internet security model. Mainline FF loads lots of unsigned user-controlled JS as-is (prefs.js, for example) so the closest thing you get is signing on entire extension bundles. There is the Subresource Integrity mechanism ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Security/Subresource_Integrity)) as a stopgap for this but it doesn't really provide something useful in this case because the load target has to be known in advance and you can't provide a hash for top-level content in the URL. ~~~ est31 Add ons must be signed by Mozilla I think. Also, add ons that have privileged access require a special signature that Mozilla only uses for their own add ons. That's what I meant with signed Javascript. Anyway, this wasn't my main point. It's why you load and execute Javascript from the network in the first place in the content process. It feels to me that banning JS loading would have helped here a great deal and would make exploitation of similar bugs much harder. ------ toyg What’s so special about this old vulnerability targeting the few people who turn on bigInt support (it’s disabled by default, I believe)...? ------ mr_woozy Is it fixed as of what version? ~~~ est31 CVE-2019-11708 is fixed in Firefox 67.0.4 and CVE-2019-9810 is fixed in Firefox 66.0.1. [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/security/advisories/mfsa2019-1...](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/security/advisories/mfsa2019-19/) [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/security/advisories/mfsa2019-0...](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/security/advisories/mfsa2019-09/) ~~~ mr_woozy danka danka ------ hu3 I get permission denied when trying to view the bug: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1559858](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1559858) ~~~ saagarjha Access to security bugs is usually restricted. ~~~ qxnqd Even to bugs that have already been fixed? ~~~ jfk13 There's generally (and sensibly) some delay between fixing the bug and opening up the report. ~~~ tedunangst It's been six months.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: 3D Face Reconstruction from image - mrburton https://github.com/AaronJackson/vrn ====== billconan I have a question, your method is volume based, right? so the recovered 3d face mesh is generated by marching cubes on the 3d volume? So the topology of the 3d mesh isn't necessarily aligned to the face features? like this, for example, [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AnfVrP6L89M/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AnfVrP6L89M/maxresdefault.jpg)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Today Show hosts think gamers over 30 are "weird" - seagaia http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/07/today_show_gamers_over_30_are_.php ====== Alex3917 I think there is good reason to be skeptical of hardcore gamers who are above a certain age. These games all use the same basic tricks to trigger to pleasure mechanisms of the brain. As such, anyone who is sufficiently intelligent should be able to figure out that they're all basically the same, and thus to be avoided after a certain point if one wants to keep growing as a person. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy playing genuinely novel games when they come out like Katamari Damacy or Braid, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that gaming can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits. But at it's root most serious games today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain. That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation. ~~~ rhygar I think there is good reason to be skeptical of hardcore sports fans who are above a certain age. Sports all use the same basic tricks to trigger to pleasure mechanisms of the brain. As such, anyone who is sufficiently intelligent should be able to figure out that they're all basically the same, and thus to be avoided after a certain point if one wants to keep growing as a person. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy watching genuinely novel sports when they come out like Foosball or Ultimate Frisbee, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that sports can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits. But at it's root most serious sports today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain. That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation. ~~~ esrauch I think your comment is actually a convincing argument that we should be skeptical of hardcore sports fans rather than a convincing argument that we shouldn't be skeptical of hardcore gamers. ------ Cyranix I am a gamer, and I will be a gamer in a couple years when I'm over 30. But one mistake that I've seen a lot of gamers make when getting riled up over this issue of perception, including the author of the linked article, is making a faulty jump in logic -- from "The average gamer is over 30 years old [according to a variety of sources]" to "People over 30 years old are more likely to be gamers than not". I have yet to see a credible source come out and directly say this. Take a look at the ESA stats in the article comments from Lea Hill -- they're given in a way that tries to imply it. In this regard and many others, the rhetoric around social acceptance, identity (including age, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, political belief, and ethnicity or nationality), and maturity is really twisted. Most people are defending opinions instead of examining realities... I've been a lot happier since I stopped following the discussion in any serious way. ~~~ krschultz I'd also like to see a median age rather than an average. It's one of those times when one direction of the average has a limit (how young you can be and still be a gamer) while the other side of the average (maximum age) is far less limited. Lets say the average starting age for a gamer is 7, that means they can only be 23 years younger than the 'average' game, while someone who is 70 years old is 40 years older than the 'average' gamer. I bet the median is lower than 30. Not to mention if you time weight it. When I was 15 I spent a heck of a lot more hours playing games than I do now. I'm probably still a 'gamer' because I have Starcraft 2 installed on my PC, but I havent played it in 5 weeks. When Starcraft 1 came out, I was lucky if I saw the sun in 5 weeks because I was playing Starcraft. ------ mechanical_fish The headline refers to celebrities on the _Today_ show, not "people". It is sometimes hard to wrap one's head around the fact that generational change happens at the speed of... _generations_. One year per year, on average. Tune in ten years from now, when the average age of gamers may well be 47, yet gamers over 40 will be considered "weird" by people significantly older than 40. ~~~ atomicdog I think it's more of a "you should have kids/be spending all your time with your kids in your thirties!" thing more than a "you shouldn't be playing games in your thirties" thing. So if, ten years from now, the average age for childbirth has not increased, we may still be seeing this kind of prejudice. ~~~ mechanical_fish Good point. Time does march on, and human activity is not age-invariant, especially after age 120. This is also a better hypothesis because it has better explanatory power: The _Today_ show is predominantly watched by people who are not scrambling to get to work in the morning, and that group is going to contain a high percentage of people with kids, and such people think like... people with kids. ------ ilamont I think many people in the Today show's late morning audience, were they to be mapped to the technology adoption curve, would be classified as late mainstream or even "laggards". Calling adult gamers "weird" plays into preconceived or outdated notions of gaming that many of them have. ------ seagaia I for one think this kind of mindset is ridiculous, only led by stereotypes of gamers and a general ignorance towards the video gaming community. First of all, the question being posed is sexist, it only asks about "men over 30", which tells me there must be a stereotype about "girls not being able to game" or something ridiculous. Their laughs disgust me, and I'm a bit scared at how many people their opinions influence per day. ~~~ stcredzero _...this kind of mindset is ridiculous, only led by stereotypes of [] and a general ignorance towards the [] community._ Fill in the blank and welcome to the mainstream US mindset, where Taco Bell resembles Mexican food, Dick van Dyke can sound like someone from England, and all folk dancers stick out their elbows and move like Popeye. ------ haldean For what it's worth, I think people who watch the Today Show are weird, independent of age. ------ systemtrigger I bet they judge men who watch television more favorably. ~~~ bct Anyone who thinks of "TV-watcher" as a significant part of their identity is a bit weird, too. ~~~ Symmetry The things we do that are considered weird by other have a way of forming part of our identity, whether they otherwise would have or not. Nobody thinks its weird to watch a lot of TV, so even those people who spend way too much time watching TV consider themselves "TV-watchers". ------ walru “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” -John Lennon ------ gamble I believe the inflection point when video games became mainstream was the release of the original Playstation in 1995. Prior to that point, at least in my experience, video games were strictly a pass-time for nerds. The Playstation was very successful at marketing video games to a wider, if not older audience. People who were in their early teens when they got their Playstation are just now reaching their thirties. Anyone older than that is likely to have acquired a contempt for video games before they became mainstream, and hasn't seen fit to update their opinions in the intervening decades. ------ kleiba Who cares?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Be a Man and Stand Up for Gender Equality - Tzunamitom http://thomasbell.co.uk/2013/12/09/be-a-man-and-stand-up-for-gender-equality/ ====== sliverstorm _How any company can expect to build a sustainable long-term business when not one of their 14 Partners /Advisors is female is beyond me._ This piece seems... I don't know the right word for it. It's not reverse sexism. But anyway, even if the world was completely un-sexist and genders were perfectly equal, would we not expect simply due to chance to see _some_ boards with 14 members of only one gender? So while it is conspicuous this particular board is all-male, how can we say a business cannot possibly be viable with only one gender on the board? ~~~ dangerlibrary 14/14 company partners were male. They claimed to support diversity within their organization. The probability that the "supportive of diversity" claim is true and that the make up of the board is all male by random chance is quite small (naively, 1/(2^14) ). ~~~ sliverstorm I clearly made my point extremely poorly. I am not, in any way whatsoever, making ANY POINT about the board of the company the author applied to. I am SPECIFICALLY addressing his assertion that a board must have women for the company to be successful. ------ philwelch > This is especially surprising considering that many of their partners are > ex-Accenture, a company that in my experience placed a strong emphasis on > recruiting and promoting female talent at the highest levels. The minute someone throws out Accenture as a positive example of how to run a business is the minute they lose their own credibility. It turns out it's easy to hire whoever you want if competence is not a requirement. Otherwise, if you hire in a field where most qualified candidiates are men, your employees will be predominantly men. ~~~ Tzunamitom Ignoring your unfair generalisations about Accenture employees, I made no assertion that Accenture as a whole was a good way to run a business. In the 3 years I worked there, there was a lot that I disagreed with, but one thing they did well was their effort to drive towards greater gender equality. [edit typo] ~~~ philwelch That's not too surprising, as that's the kind of thing that impresses politicians and MBA's. In the real world, where delivering results is more important than checking off political boxes, tech companies have to work extremely hard just to hire the best people, so that's not a luxury they have. ------ Jemaclus While I agree that it would be awesome to see more women represented in companies, particularly at higher levels of management, I'm not sure this post makes sense to me. If one of those top management executives were female, what makes them different from the "TOKEN FEMALE" on the other associate-level pages? Is it different if there are two women in C-level positions? Where do you draw the line between women being powerful in their own right vs simply TOKEN FEMALES on a team? (Note: I'm all for hiring women, and I encourage my friends (male and female) to take up programming, and I do my best to help them get jobs in the industry. But this guy's argument just strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of feminism and what that means.) ------ gadders Based on my corporate experience, there is normaly at least one department that is the opposite of IT in terms of gender balance - Human Resources. I wonder if people women in Human Resources are running campaigns to recruit more men into their departments? ~~~ philwelch Of course not. Feminists will tell you this with a straight face: it's only sexism if it disadvantages women. That's why feminists only started caring about STEM when it became high- status. Feminists are glad to let men do all the low-status shit jobs, like garbage collection or construction or working in oil fields, as long as such work remains low-status. 20 years ago, programming was low status and women were obsessed with becoming doctors and lawyers because medicine and law were very high status. 20 years from now there will be lots of women programmers just like there are lots of women doctors and lawyers today. ------ devonbarrett By the title I expected a piece of satire. Titling an article about sexism with 'Be a Man' probably is not the best way to go about advocating equality. ~~~ Tzunamitom One might even suggest that the title is at once playful, satirical, arresting, and a little ironic. ------ lukasm This is extremely dangerous and often gives the opposite effect. An example is situation with universities in Sweden. There was a parity for all degrees. As a result, lots of women didn't get to uni because 50% was reserved for male, even though they had higher grades. They filled a law suit and won (European Court of Human Rights). ------ knodi Don't tell me what to do. Tell me why I should. ~~~ dangerlibrary There are plenty of reasons why you should care about gender diversity - many of them linked in the article/letter, if you had bothered to read it. The most obvious being: because you said you care about diversity. CompanyX claimed to support diversity and integration, but didn't make it a priority. If one can't trust the management to hold itself accountable on something so visible, why trust them about anything else? ------ samolang There are laws against outright discrimination. The economic benefits will cause the market to sort it out eventually. ------ voidr This is a sexist article, because it tells a company that they should hire people just because they are women, it's also racist because it remarked that the team was white as a problem. ------ altero Have sex-change operation and paint your skin! Be a man! ------ rfnslyr What if I started a company, and all good candidates were male, and the women weren't on par? What if no women applied at all? I don't get this whole gender thing. If statistically less women apply to a STEM degree, or tech related job, how is it the fault of "white males"? White male guilt at it's finest if you ask me. If you actively see discrimination, do something about it. I actually work with a team that is 90% women, it just happened that way. The male applicants sucked, the women were great. My friends teams however, are only male, because they had no female applicants. Why try to force equality? Am I missing something? What if the person doing the hiring silently disregards all female applicants? How would you tackle that problem? OP if you had a company would you hire a less qualified woman than a more qualified man in the name of equality? This movement seems counter-intuitive. If the applicant is good, hire them, male or female, young or old. Our team consists of elder women, young fresh grads, interns, and working class middle aged women as well, all across the spectrum. We all mingle just fine and still shoot the shit. Hiring GOOD people is the only thing that should matter. Throw out all this ideology and affirmative action nonsense. ~~~ rayiner Your viewpoint is predicated on an assumption: that equality is the equilibrium state of human society. In such a world where this equilibrium exists, there is no need for "ideology and affirmative action" because any _affirmative_ actions to create inequality will be erased through the passage of time as the world returns to the equilibrium of equality. The problem with this attitude is that it is utterly unwarranted, unsubstantiated, and totally Panglossian. It is irrefutable that for generations American society took "affirmative action" to suppress women, to pigeonhole them into an impoverished gender role concerned only with housekeeping and child rearing. You don't even have to go back that far to see this "affirmative action" ([http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage- ads](http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage-ads)). Even if you believe that there is no continuing discrimination,[1] what on earth makes you believe that past discrimination will simply be erased through the history of time? The solution to gender inequality issues is to simply hire women. Hire women and promote women. Once your organization and industry isn't perceived as male-dominated, once qualified and ambitious women don't turn away from the field to pursue others where being a woman is less likely to be a career liability,[2] the qualified applications will materialize. One of the greatest success stories of gender equality is, in my opinion, are professional services firms, law in particular but also accounting and consulting. The legal industry went from 95%+ male in the 1950's and 1960's to almost even today, even at large corporate law firms. While tech companies are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get _any_ women in the door, law firms are under fire because "only" 1/3 of new partners each year are women. "Only" 15% of Big 4 accounting firm partners are women and its a source of constant consternation for women.[3] While any discussion of trying to get women into tech is clouded by the specter of "affirmative action" law firms, at least at the lower levels, no longer even need to take explicit steps to recruit equal numbers of women. Professional services firms are proof that when you hire women and promote women, equalized gender ratios become self-perpetuating. There are still major challenges faced by women today in the professional services industry, but these firms are operating in a whole different century than the tech sector. [1] Which is itself a ridiculous belief in the face of studies proving that older men are, say, less likely to mentor younger women than younger men, and that employers tend to treat similar resumes with male versus female names differently. [2] Who wants to, as a woman, invest themselves in a career in tech when there is a decent chance your boss will be this guy: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875311) ("there are differences in the way men and women think, with men more naturally drawn to STEM fields...") [3] At what tech company are the most senior engineering roles even 15% women? Marissa Mayer estimated about 15-17% for women engineers in Silicon Valley across the board. For comparison, Big 4 accounting firms are 45-50% women across the board, with 15-20% at the partner level. ~~~ philwelch Law is a high status profession so of course feminists were interested in training more women lawyers. Now there are a lot of qualified women graduating from law school, and an overall oversupply of people with law degrees anyway, so it's easy to make gender equality a priority. Look at the gender ratios getting CS degrees, consider how extremely competitive the hiring situation for programmers is, and then tell me it makes sense to put an emphasis on hiring women in particular when you can hardly hire anyone qualified at all. ~~~ rayiner The gender equalization in law happened through the 1980's and 1990's, at a time when salaries at large law firms were dramatically increasing due to the limited supply of graduates from which large law firms source their entry- level hires. The key difference is that law schools, being generally very progressive places, took aggressive steps to fill their classes with approximately equal numbers of men and women. And the field, being very progressive itself, embraced that trend. It's also interesting to note that when it comes to LSAT scores, men outnumber women 2:1 in the top percentile. This is very similar to the gender gap in the top percentile of the Math SAT. Law schools tend to simply ignore that slight distinction, relying on the fact that women tend to have higher GPAs, so an index combining GPA and LSAT tends to result in roughly equal numbers of men and women. And in practice, it's a theoretical difference that has basically zero impact in the real world. Yet, people repeatedly hold up differentials in the Math SAT to justify gender gaps in STEM more extreme than the differentials in the Math SAT itself, as evidence that men are somehow more suited for STEM jobs. ~~~ philwelch And if CS programs set aside 50% of their slots for women as well, you might see similar results. There remains very little that employers can do about it though. ~~~ rayiner Law schools would not make a change like that without buy-in from the employers that allow them to justify their tuition. If tech companies bought in the same way, I think you'd quickly see a change in how schools fill their classes.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What Oil at $100 a Barrel Would Mean - jonbaer https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-29/what-oil-at-100-a-barrel-would-mean-for-the-world-economy ====== gshdg This could be the sort of thing that’s intensely painful in the short term but pushes us to adopt strategies that are better choices for the long term. The last time oil prices surged like that (2007-8), political will to develop and improve transit also surged. Additionally, high oil prices mean a more competitive market for the renewable and low-emissions energy sources that we’ll need to switch to if we want to have any chance at mitigating climate change. The article says China will be hit particularly hard by this price increase; but they’ve also got the political will to respond by investing more in developing renewables, as they have been the last 10-15 years already.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google will shut down Google+ four months early after second data leak - bhauer https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134541/google-plus-privacy-api-data-leak-developers ====== jdp23 Yikes. A release in November introduced an API bug that was active for about 6 days, impacting 52.5 million users. * With respect to this API, apps that requested permission to view profile information that a user had added to their Google+ profile—like their name, email address, occupation, age (full list here)—were granted permission to view profile information about that user even when set to not-public. * In addition, apps with access to a user's Google+ profile data also had access to the profile data that had been shared with the consenting user by another Google+ user but that was not shared publicly. ~~~ morley FWIW, also from the blog post: > We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing > procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced. No third party > compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers > that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused > it in any way. ~~~ kerng Yeah, testing in production. I wish the tech industry would stop this madness and do QA before releasing. It's all about code velocity and shipping things, we need to hold ourselves to higher standards. I'm afraid unless there will be legal pressure and a framework it will continue this way. ~~~ scrollaway There's nothing that says there's no QA/testing _before_ releasing. "Testing in production" doesn't _remove_ the ability to do testing _before_ production. You should be testing your software at every step of its lifecycle, _especially_ in production. Production is where it matters if there's bugs. ------ tptacek Again, this is poor reporting. It's newsworthy that Google+ found and disclosed a vulnerability in its own code, but there is no norm for reporting internally-discovered vulnerabilities and few companies reliably do it, especially in SAAS platforms where there's no end-user patching activity that needs to be motivated. There's a colorable argument that you don't even want this to be a norm, because of the incentive problems it creates: [http://flaked.sockpuppet.org/2018/10/09/internal- disclosure-...](http://flaked.sockpuppet.org/2018/10/09/internal-disclosure- boring.html) Regardless: bear in mind that you haven't even heard about a fraction of the horrible vulnerabilities internal teams at tech companies have discovered over the years. ~~~ dredmorbius As someone in the heart of trying to help people get off G+, what's particularly newsworthy is that after two full months (and two days) of radio silence on the Google+ sunset, the first substantive comment from Google is ... that the sunset has been advanced by four months. We'd be recommending people be _starting_ their migrations by Feb - May, and now they've got to _complete_ them by April. That's something of a PITA. [https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Exodus_Planning_a...](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Exodus_Planning_and_Scheduling#Phases) There are 7.9 million Google+ Communities. Sure, 3.9 million of those are 1 (or fewer) users, but that leaves tens of thousands of 1,000 or more members. Even at only a few percent of those as active, that's a lot of communities and people involved. And Google+ has no effective community migration process. Source on communities: I counted them myself, well, via sampling: [https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9zx67d/google_com...](https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9zx67d/google_communities_membership_analysis_preview/) ------ fotbr I haven't followed the Google+ saga, so forgive me if this has already been answered: Does the shutdown of Google+ mean that Google Search users will get the + operator back? ~~~ pas put the term(s) in double quotes, it does the same thing, no? ~~~ onedognight “term” is require_exact_match(term) and +term was require(term), so the latter would, for example, allow spell checking, IIRC. ~~~ ergothus It's not really "term" \- at least, it can't handle multiple words. "foo bar" is actually treated like "foo" "bar", which is far less useful than it once was. ~~~ gniv > "foo bar" is actually treated like "foo" "bar" No it isn't. Compare "internal engine" with "internal" "engine": [https://www.google.com/search?q=%22internal+engine%22](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22internal+engine%22) [https://www.google.com/search?q=%22internal%22+%22engine%22](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22internal%22+%22engine%22) ~~~ ergothus You're correct, it does not work as I describe. My description of the problem was just wrong, so thanks for pointing that out. However, it doesn't work the way it used to either. I get frustrated once or twice a year about this, and every time I fight with the many (old) tutorial examples, but eventually end here: [https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/6gH...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/6gHVUEl8y1k/discussion) Where we see that "foo bar" only says that "foo" will appear in the text before "bar" (but anything can be between them), and that's assuming the bug is actually fixed. That status of "we think it's fixed and users don't agree" is the last I've ever seen. ~~~ Izkata Under "search tools", you can change "all results" to "verbatim" to fix that. Really not obvious, though. ------ svat There's a lot of great content on Google+. Is anyone working on a script to archive some of it before it all goes away? Perhaps the fine folks at the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)? Specifically, I'm wondering if someone's working on a script that does the following: \- Ideally for each post URL given, it would preserve the post, and the comments (including the first few ones, not just the last few ones that are shown by default). It would be nice if it also preserves the +1s (including who +1d them), but that's optional. \- And given a user, it would do the above for each (public) post of the user, or (optionally) use your account to save (just for yourself) the posts that you can see. There were a lot of people posting great stuff on G+ and resulting in wonderful thoughtful conversations (especially a couple of years ago), it would be shame to lose all that permanently. (If someone doubts this: see e.g. (if you're interested in mathematics) the posts by [https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27](https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27) [https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0](https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0) [https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999](https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999) etc, or [https://plus.google.com/+DanPiponi](https://plus.google.com/+DanPiponi) for more CS-y stuff, or for more "general" stuff [https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger](https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger) etc -- and for all these people, especially in 2015-2016 or so.) _Edit:_ You can download your _own_ content using Google Takeout [https://takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com). Just learnt of these other places where this question has been asked / is being asked: this G+ community ([https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772](https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772)) and this wiki ([https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page)) -- if you have any answers those may be good places to post too :-) ~~~ pmlnr > Is anyone working on a script to archive some of it before it all goes away? > Perhaps the fine folks at the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)? The archivist in me is screaming that yes, of course it should be archived. The web-old-timer in me just shakes his head that people never learn to keep a copy of their content on the actual free - as in freedom - web, on their own website. Let it be a mere text file, uploaded by ftp, or a WordPress, or anything, just do it. Nobody should expect others to archive it for them. (For more on the topic, see [http://indieweb.org/why](http://indieweb.org/why) ). Back on topic: talk to [https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page) . ------ jacquesm So, how does Google, which we all trust with our precious data end up messing up like this several times in a row? If this is the company with the best security team in the world does that mean we should simply abandon all hope? ~~~ coliveira My opinion is that, given the infrastructure and practices we have, anything that is in digital form will be eventually hacked in one way or another. It is just a matter of time. Unfortunately the best security team can't do anything about it. ~~~ jacquesm It's depressing. ~~~ conanbatt Its liberating. There is no information immortality. ~~~ jacquesm Hacked data is more, not less immortal. ~~~ conanbatt Let me rephrase that: there is no information privilege immortality. ------ cosmotron From Google: [https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/expeditin...](https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/expediting-changes-google-plus/) ------ jcoffland Does anyone know how or if this will affect OAuth2 logins? Several of the sites I run rely on Google OAuth2 and get the user's avatar using Google APIs. It's a simple thing that does not require Google+ but it's unclear to me how it will be affected. What is this the 3rd or 4th social network Google has failed at? ~~~ toyg It won't be affected. Google spent the last few years decoupling every useful G+ feature into standalone services, the account feature to me looks completely separate nowadays. Besides, without the OAuth provider, tons of integrations (that Google actively want on their products) would break. G+ was such a silly play, when you consider that Google already had the key to centralized identity all along: the ubiquitous GMail account. They will continue to push that for sure. ------ Cheyana It amazes me that a company with all the resources that Google has repeatedly coming up with ideas and doing absolutely nothing effective with them. They've had some winners, like Chrome, and their acquisition of Youtube eventually paid off, but something as simple as a social media site and the best they can come up with from scratch is Google+. ~~~ skybrian I don't know what you mean? The G+ UI is pretty good, certainly a lot better than Facebook was at the time when G+ launched. For a while, a lot of people were happy there, particularly in certain niches like photography. It's a shame the implementation was so complex (apparently) that now it can't be easily maintained. This does seem to happen to Google a lot. It probably has more to do with too many resources, rather than not enough. But maybe it's not simple to compete with Facebook. Maybe this has little to do with technology. ~~~ Daniel_sk I don't know, but the whole Circles things was overcomplicated and average users didn't bother to put their followers into different circles, I am not sure how they thought this would work. ~~~ ocdtrekkie Circles was fantastic, and continues to be what I wish for in a lot of other networks. Mainly because there are people I follow loosely (don't mind seeing the occasional update from), and people I follow religiously (because I know them personally or care about every single thing they say). I used to maintain really primarily two feeds. One I cared to always read all the time, and one I'd browse when I was bored. G+ mostly mitigated the frustration of it for people who didn't care years ago: You can just click follow and it puts them in a default following circle. ~~~ jacquesm Circles is great for geeks who like to have such fine-grained control over their lives, both online and offline. For the rest of the world it doesn't really matter, and even if it does it is too difficult to set up and maintain. A company called Hyves in the Netherlands did much the same thing (but with a fairly crappy UI) long before Google+ came along. That fell to FB as well. ------ nullsmack Can we have Google Reader back now? ~~~ hdpq this is what i was looking for when i saw this headline. ------ garysahota93 They could have done soo much more with Google+ ... The hype was real up until launch. Really wish they had done things a little differently. Oh well... With all these leaks, I'm actually really glad they weren't successful with this. ~~~ toyg Even after launch. But the Real Names policy and lack of write api killed any momentum. ------ shemnon42 So is this four months per new leak found or "half the distance to the goal line?" ------ afniljl I admit I actually rather liked Google+, for certain communities it was really active and well suited. However now that Google is decoupled and free from G+ shackles, it has really room to take off and grow in new areas, which is exciting to see. eg G+ logins will now be returned to G or Gmail branding, probably dramatically increases consumer confidence and mindshare, and other stuff. Developer teams can be fully redeployed to other products etc. Building of "micro" communities within Maps, YouTube, etc will accelerate, and that's really where it should be, rather than forced to accede to G+ product area. ------ qwerty456127 How do I download all the discussions (posts with comments) I have participated in? ~~~ mikewhy Google Takeout has two different Google+ entries that may have what you're looking for. ------ qwerty456127 What are some good alternatives to Google+? I mean microblogs with subscribers/followers instead of friends, without a strict message length limit, with first-class comments, letting you to edit your posts and comments after you submit them and to limit access to particular post to a specific group of people? ~~~ r721 Dreamwidth (Livejournal fork)? A recent Wired article: [https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-bloggers- dreamwidth-...](https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-bloggers-dreamwidth- pillowfort/) ------ ccnafr Actual announcement: [https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/expeditin...](https://www.blog.google/technology/safety- security/expediting-changes-google-plus/) ------ harbie Is it accurate to call this a leak if no one actually took advantage of the vulnerability? ------ pmarreck Did they ever unfuck the merging of Google+ comments with YouTube comments? ~~~ dredmorbius Mostly. ------ newman314 I suppose I’ll ask this here. Does anyone know of a good way to archive a Google+ group. There is a bunch of good info about hacking the Kankun smart plug that I would like to preserve. ~~~ dredmorbius No. There are some tools. [https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Data_Migration_Pr...](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Data_Migration_Process_and_Considerations#Third_Party_Tools) ------ mc32 I really don't care what they do with the consumer version (who uses it?), but I'd like to see mapping and wayfinding features added to the paid GSuite version. ------ DSingularity Data really has become radioactive. ~~~ dana321 That is so true. Its like most of us live behind this wall of our behavior online, like it isn't shared unless there is a hack. But its sold, shared and traded without us knowing it, and used to display a reality tailored to us with the unintended consequence of us living in a bubble and not seeing much outside the edge of the bubble. This site is a great example of bubble breaking. ------ FreeInFlorida Wait... Google+ had 52 million users? That should be the headline. ~~~ InclinedPlane Everyone with a gmail address or youtube account was strong armed into having a google+ account, which counts as their "userbase" regardless of whether or not any of those people actually made use of any google+ specific features. ~~~ hdpq then it should be more than 52,000,000 people. ~~~ what_ever The vulnerability did not affect all of the users.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Can you explain your research using only the ten hundred most common words? - jmnicholson http://authorea.com/upgoerfive ====== schoen I will explain one part of my work here. (This is just my story about what our trusted group does, and the other people who work on it might not agree with how I said everything.) We give people letters from a trusted group to show that their keys are the keys that they should be. A person who gets one of these letters can put it on his or her computer. That computer can show it to other people's computers when they talk to the first computer. The other people's computers read the letters and check that the key that the computer is showing them is the same one that the letter says should be used. If so, they know they have a safe way of sending things in both directions. Then no one else can read or change those things. Why is this needed? Because a state or another party (like the people who let your computer talk to the world) can say "I am the computer you wanted to talk to; use this key when you talk to me". Here, each key is a big number. Since a key is very hard to remember (and it's hard for a person to tell quickly by looking whether two keys are the same or not), a person couldn't know whether the key is the actual key from the real computer he or she wanted to talk to, or a made-up key from someone who wants to listen in. If you believe in the made-up key sent by such a person, you do have a "safe" way to talk, but the problem is that you're talking with the bad guy, not the real computer you meant to talk to. The bad guy could decide to talk to the real computer and show you what it says, so everything feels normal to you, but now what the real computer says isn't hidden from the bad guy, as it was supposed to be. But, although people can make up their own keys when they want, people can't pretend to know a key that they don't actually know. And knowing what key someone wants you to use doesn't allow you to take that key for yourself. So, it's really important to have a way to know whether a key that you think you see is really used by the computer that you think it is. (Your computer can check this for you because of the letters written by trusted groups like ours. The computer will only tell you if what's in the letter doesn't match up.) Our trusted group is different from many older ones because we don't try to make money by writing these letters. (Businesses give us money instead just because they want us to do this for everyone.) We also have computers write all the letters without help from people, so they can do it very quickly and write a lot of them—and writing each letter is almost free for us. The computers can check for themselves whether what's in the letter (about what key to use) is right, because other computers show us that they control names and are allowed to have one of our letters. This way of doing things is not perfect because a state (or someone else) could still take away someone's computer's name because it doesn't like what that person is doing, or try to confuse us by changing things that are supposed to show who controls which name. We think we are doing things as well as other trusted groups do, though. Our trusted group has been around for about two years and we think we have written more letters by now than any other trusted group. It makes people safer when they use computers because not as many other people have ways to know, control, or change what people are reading and writing with their computers. ------ j7ake Could somebody explain the original 8 or so equations of maxwell using only the ten hundred common words?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Heroic IT folks in NYC hauling fuel to keep servers alive shut down by unions - tjic https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/264005839415803904 ====== lmm Good for the unions. Expecting workers to haul diesel up a slippery stairwell is dangerous and exploitative; even if they're supposedly volunteers it's very easy for bosses to pressurize underlings into feeling like they have to do such a thing. You can live without your internet cool stuff for a few days.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Uncovering the security issues of shared scooter services - Edward9 https://www.imperva.com/blog/i-know-where-you-rode-last-summer-uncovering-the-security-issues-of-shared-scooter-services/ ====== thereyougo Besides security issues, scooter services have another big issue. They don't care about their customers. I drove few times on a bird, and enjoyed the experience. Few months ago (right before the winter) they've changed the wheels to plastic wheels since many birds had a flat tire which cost the company a lot I believe. The plastic wheel is likely to slide when you try to brake when the ground is wet. Doing a move like this right before the winter starts showed me how money oriented bird is	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Sagify - Train and deploy ML/DL models on AWS SageMaker made simple - pm3310 https://github.com/Kenza-AI/sagify ====== pm3310 Hi HN! I' m Pavlos, an ML engineer at HomeAway, building things on the side and just launched a new open source project. Sagify is a command-line utility to train and deploy Machine Learning and Deep Learning models on AWS SageMaker in a few simple steps. Why you should give it a try? \- Minimise the time and effort to train and deploy models on AWS SageMaker \- Automate training and deployment of Machine Learning and Deep Learning projects \- It's open source! Questions/feedback? I'd love to hear it. ------ jojomaniakos Great job! A well documented CLI that will save me a lot of time training my ML models on AWS	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
GPU Programming in Rust - dagw http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~eholk/papers/hips2013.pdf ====== dagw Github repo: [https://github.com/eholk/RustGPU](https://github.com/eholk/RustGPU)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Coronavirus mutations affect deadliness of strains - walterbell https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3080771/coronavirus-mutations-affect-deadliness-strains-chinese-study ====== tomohawk > The most aggressive strains of Sars-CoV-2 could generate 270 times as much > viral load as the least potent type > New York may have a deadlier strain imported from Europe, compared to less > deadly viruses elsewhere in the United States	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Would you pay for a Super Bowl commercial out of your own pocket? Steve Jobs did - a4agarwal http://sachin.posterous.com/art-and-copy ====== mcos It says in the video that he paid for half of it, and Woz paid for the other half.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Otherworldly worms with three sexes discovered in Mono Lake - laurex https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190926141715.htm ====== bediger4000 The sciencedaily.com article is ultra weird, in that it has a scandalous, clickbaity title, but it doesn't say what those 3 sexes are or what they do. The actual paper downplays that aspect of the newly discovered nematodes, but does say what the 3 sexes are: "such as possessing three sexes: hermaphrodite, male, and female"	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
One-Atom-Thin Silicon Transistors Hold Promise for Super-Fast Computing - shill http://www.utexas.edu/news/2015/02/03/silicon-silicene-transistors/ ====== jwise0 The Ars Technica article is a little less rosy, and goes into a little more detail in the challenges in silicene FETs: [http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/first-transistor- buil...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/first-transistor-built-using- two-dimensional-silicon/) ------ swish41 We're better off trying to make Silicene-enhanced transistors rather than artificially engineering a band-gap in Graphene. Hook Em	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Do you have loads of browser tabs open at once? - Ramario Hi, I am considering building a browser extension/website that saves your browser tabs for you. I have a problem of having lots of browser tabs and not wanting to close any of them when I want to shut down my mac. Are you having this problem too? Would you use a browser extension/website that allows you to save your browser session and recover it on any computer/browser anytime?<p>Thanks in advance for the feedback. ====== mhd Plenty. Which is why I'm back to Firefox after a longer stint with Chrome, due to the Tree Style Tabs add-on, which makes managing them pretty easy. Quite often I've got a bunch of related tabs under one node at the very tob, as some sort of "read later" deal (e.g. several sites about vim customization, extensions etc.). With recent Firefoxes, this takes none to little memory, and is definitely save from restarts - I use the dev channel build (Aurora), so I often restart the browser at least daily. Syncing between several computers would probably be nice, but I don't need and want a total sync between e.g. work and home, so I would need to pick the tabs I'm loading in the other browser. And the only option of me using a given extension like that is if it would support the aforementioned tree extension, i.e. wouldn't just give me a flat batch of tabs. ~~~ Ramario Thanks for your response ------ co_pl_te I also tend to have over a dozen tabs open at any one time, and sometimes keep multiple windows open, each with tabs that are (loosely) centered around a given task. I think a lot of people have the problem of having too many tabs open, but for me, I've never used a browser in recent memory that couldn't restore my previous session even after quitting unexpectedly. Being a Safari user on a host of Apple devices, I also don't have too much of a problem with syncing tabs, though the solution is far from perfect. It would be interesting to access your current session on any device using any browser seamlessly, though. I'd really be interested in an alternative to tabbed browsing that intelligently categorizes the web pages I have open according to the task or activity to which they relate. Like most people, I have multiple things I'm working on on my Mac that have corresponding tabs open all in the same browser window. The issue is that it becomes increasingly difficult to access the relevant information the more tabs I have open. It would be cool to just be able to ask 'Siri, show only those tabs I have open that correspond to the article I'm researching.' I'd also be interested in a dead simple way to 'flick' the web page I'm currently viewing on my iPhone to my Mac or iPad. For example, I'd love to be able to flick this comment from my iPhone to my Mac and finish typing it there. In any case, I think you've definitely hit on a problem that could use a better solution. ~~~ Ramario Thanks for your response. I'm definitely having the same problem, If I do built this, you will be able to have tab categories and more advanced features. ~~~ co_pl_te Go for it. Tabbed browsing is like the sliced bread of the Internet. It's hard to imagine surfing the web before it, but it's become such an integral part of the browser that it suffers from "it's good enough" syndrome. Hope you look into it further. Sounds like it could solve a problem most people might not realize they have. ~~~ Ramario Sweet, I'll send you a link when it is finished. ~~~ co_pl_te Cool. Much obliged. ------ logn Not sure this extension is necessary. Chrome and Safari have this built in, so I suspect you're using Firefox, in which case I'd expect them to clone this functionality soon. ~~~ Ramario Thanks for your response. Yeah, I'm using firefox, that's why. Just tried out Chrome, seems they have already solved this problem. ------ benaiah I'll have any from 20-200 at any given time, depending on what I'm doing. I've been using Chrome lately, and it's quite frustrating that tabs are only saved in the last closed window. Some sort of way to save an entire session (i.e., window), would be quite nice. ~~~ tusker42 Session Buddy. The best tool I have used so far! ------ toomuchcoffee Something that auto-retires tabs after some egregiously long delay, with some kind of latent tagging functionality (based on tags for similar pages I've bookmarked) might be useful. Then again, it will probably just encourage me to open more and more tabs... ~~~ Ramario Hi, thanks for your response. The goal of this would not be to stop you opening more tabs but, to help you manage those tabs. Kind of like Dropbox for tabs, I think. Would you be interested in using something like this? ~~~ toomuchcoffee Yesss but there's lots of apps like that do similar / overlapping things that you'll sort of have to steal/borrow from. In particular, some form of social bookmarking/tagging would seem to be a necessary component of a service of this kind. The trick then is to pull this off without drowning in your own web of complexity. ~~~ Ramario Thanks for your response. Some people have tried to tackle this problem but, I feel it can be done much better and as you said, incorporate some kind of social elements. ------ celeb Usually 30+ and use the built in functionality within chrome to save all tabs to a folder labeled by date. ~~~ godbolev That sounds really cool! Sorry but could you please send me the link to the extension? Or if its an inbuilt thing a page of instructions? I Googled it and I got back your post as the first result..... ~~~ Ramario Hi, thanks for the feedback. I haven't fully completed it yet, I wanted to actually find out if people would use something like this before I wrote any more code. I could send you an email when it's complete. By the way, which browser do you use? ~~~ godbolev I use chrome	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Instagram's UX Problems - jakeculp http://jakeculp.me/blog/2012/12/8/instagrams-ux-problems ====== idan While these are certainly improvements that Instagram could make to improve their app, this article is more attitude than helpful critique. Absent the cruft, there is little substance here. Unworthy of HN, IMO. ~~~ jakeculp Well, its on here, I guess you can just choose to ignore it then. ------ omonra I actually don't get one point that I hear often and that's made in this article. Namely that Instagram used to have higher quality of photos. And now that it's more popular, the quality has gone down. But what does it matter to YOU, what the average user is putting up? I have a list of people that I follow - who I consider good or am interested in. The fact that there is a million or billion other users snapping ugly photographs is irrelevant. Would you judge a photo-lab based on the service they offer or how good the photos of their other users are? ~~~ jakeculp My criticism of their user base was not suppose to be a given point in my argument and so most of that statement dealt with personal details instead of things that would effect others as well. ~~~ omonra Right - I understand that this was a tangential point. But I just see it brought up consistently (that Instagram is getting worse because of decreasing average photo quality) - which I don't get. ------ currysausage Right now, the UX problem I am faced with is the sheer non-readability of your blog. First, I trust the fonts look beautiful on a Mac, and it certainly is not your fault that font rendering on Windows sucks big time, but unless you want to lock out a rather large share of potential visitors, you should really test your design on a Windows machine. Your fonts are simply unreadable on Win7/Chrome. Second, light gray text on salmon background? Seriously? That is virtually zero contrast! ~~~ jakeculp I just recently converted from Windows to Mac and when on Windows the fonts looked fine. ------ kzasada Another one: if I know someone's user name I can't add them through the "Find & Invite Friends" page under options, I can only do it through the explore page. Also, the forced cropping of pictures taken outside of the app is by far the most annoying UX thing from my perspective. ------ newobj "people taking pictures of their weed and their 18 children with their baby daddies" ... ~~~ jakeculp It's a joke, take it or leave it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
NetBSD Kernel Drivers Compiled to Javascript and Run in Browser - self http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/kernel_drivers_compiled_to_javascript ====== jfaucett this is extemely cool :) I didn't know about emscripten, I just found many nice projects on that link so here it is again: <https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Incoming mail service for domains? - nolite Does anyone know of any services out there where you can add a DNS mail record for your domain, and the service will configure an incoming email system for you? Pretty much like what Google Apps does, but non-Google (I'd like something with better customer service)<p>Thanks ====== jolan <http://fastmail.fm/> <http://www.dnamail.com/> ~~~ saintamh I heartily recommend FastMail. I've been using them for a couple years now for all my mail, and they've been great. They have so many features it's almost comical (it's all in the small details, e.g., you can download your list of last login times as a CSV file; they can SMS you a one-time password if you're in an Internet cafe; etc.). Once I had a problem with incoming mail from a certain domain not reaching my inbox, and they were extremely helpful. it felt like the guy had nothing else to do but help me. (Oh, and it turned out the problem was on another network, not their end). In two years I've never experienced any outage. Really, overall an awesome service (they're not paying me to write this, promise!)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Attack Directories, Not Caches: Side-Channel Attacks in a Non-Inclusive World [pdf] - mettamage http://iacoma.cs.uiuc.edu/iacoma-papers/ssp19.pdf ====== mettamage The part on how they reverse engineered the cache directory is especially interesting. Consider this, they build an eviction algorithm [1] that just worked. And by varying it on different threads you basically get to understand (a) it is inclusive for private and shared cache lines and (b) the cache replacement policies (private gets kicked out first). I find it quite cool since eviction algorithms are normally used for evict + reload attacks, but no! They can also be used for reverse engineering cache behaviors in CPUs :D [1] an eviction algorithm is an algorithm designed to kick out all the other entries in the cache (of a particular cache set that is). ------ mettamage I also had some funny shower thoughts about this. I think reverse engineering in general plays an interesting part in the philosophy of science. To what extent is something science when only one private company knows about it and the public (i.e. security researchers) need to reverse engineer it? One could say that it is like a 'simulated nature' that needs to yet reveal its secrets. In that sense I feel that reverse engineering stuff like this is a more high fidelity type of form than simulation since there are some real world stakes/incentives on the line. At least, as far as the philosophy of science is confirmed. Another thing was that I was quite surprised _how much_ the reverse engineering effort just looked like a standard experiment that psychologists/medicine would use as well. I mean it almost literally is: control group, experimental group, hypothesis pans out, let's go on to experiment 2, and it's the same song over again. I wanted to point these things out still because I like interdisciplinary comments and have the hope they could achieve something interesting. ~~~ DoctorOetker I have often thought exactly what you describe, even more I think in an alternate history this would actually be close to the "intellectual property" policy: it is not the governments role to enforce intellectual policy, while it is the role of science to try and understand all phenomena natural or man- made. It would be legal for private entities (individuals or companies) to _try_ to keep a business secret, but it would not be illegal for others to investigate, reverse-engineer and reproduce (even commercially) what others have done. Since scientific discovery into the public domain would be rewarded by the public, it would still be feasible for private _individuals_ to maintain a business secret for as long as no one reverse engineers it. But it would de facto result in organizations being unable to profit from business secrets (since any member of the organization could publish the company secret to the public for a reward without facing consequences). This should prevent monopolies from arising, and encourages smaller companies and open collaboration. ------ karavelov "We found that the above conditions do not hold in some AMD processors. Consequently, our attack does not work on these AMD processors." ~~~ mettamage Yea, the generalization section leads a lot left to be desired. I feel the constraints of the attack make it hard to generalize it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bubblewrap: Unprivileged sandboxing tool - groks https://github.com/projectatomic/bubblewrap ====== cyphar For those interested in OCI-compatible runtimes, I'm currently implementing rootless containers for runC[1]. This would allow you to get the same sort of unprivileged sandboxing but with a popular container runtime. [1]: [https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/pull/774](https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/pull/774) ------ icefox Looks neat, but just like the firejail guys they really need to work on their tutorial/readme/docs/manpage. Many users including myself who want to play around with it get stuck trying to do basic stuff. My first try was using bwrap (not bubblewrap!) to wrap true provides this not very helpful error. $ bwrap true execvp true: No such file or directory Looking in the webpage I see that this is what I want works ~$ bwrap --ro-bind / / true Is this what I want to do? I am not sure, maybe I want to expose just /bin/true, but I couldn't figure that out. It may be using --symlink, but the docs give no hint as to what symlink actually does. Where does it make a symlink? And when would I use it? --symlink SRC DEST Create a symlink at DEST with target SRC Getting the default behavior right is important as is helping the user, especially for a security tool. bwrap is a tool that wraps other tools so you would expect that if I did '$bwrap true' than it would create an empty fs, expose the one binary it is going to try to run and then run it. Otherwise it is tempting to insert the following alias which may or may not be a bad security practice. bubblewrap=`bwrap --ro-bind / /` firejail gets this somewhat right where you can do 'firejail --quiet -- true' and it just works (although the fact that I have to use --quiet and it still spits out a \n is both sad and embarrassing) Both projects should want to provide tools to help users accomplish the most common cases in a secure manor such as: access to 1 file, 1 directory, network access. As a user my goal isn't to use firejail it is to accomplish something else so the fact that firejail wants to spit out a bunch on stdout is a really weird design choice. As a user I would want to do the following: bwrap --rofile foo.txt -- file bwrap --rodir foo/ -- ls bwrap --net -- curl ~~~ groks I agree, the tool is (currently) poorly documented. I would have appreciated something like this: bwrap --ro-bind / / id bwrap --ro-bind /usr /usr \ --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \ id bwrap --ro-bind /usr/bin/ps /usr/bin/ps \ --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \ --proc /proc \ ps -x bwrap --ro-bind /usr/bin/ps /usr/bin/ps \ --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \ --proc /proc \ --unshare-pid \ ps -x bwrap --ro-bind /usr/bin/echo /usr/bin/echo \ --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \ echo "to a file outside the container" > /tmp/a-file bwrap --ro-bind /usr/bin/sh /usr/bin/sh \ --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \ --bind /tmp/a-file /tmp/a-file \ sh -c 'echo "editing inside, available outside" > /tmp/a-file' But it's never going to be easy. For example: \- The above works on my 64bit, combined /usr system, but maybe not yours. The more complicated the example, the more likely differences between systems are to show up. \- You may want to run a program with different privileges in different scenarios, so it is hard to guess what the right thing to do is in the general case. Both bubblewrap and firejail need to be setuid. People commented on the firejail thread that it has a lot of code to be audited. Bubblewrap addresses that by stripping down to the essentials. It's going to have to compensate for that with great documentation and error messages. ------ zmanian I've been wanting something like this to sandbox build systems like npm, cargo etc so you can be sure your dependency resolution can't exfiltrate your keys. ------ otoburb The term "bubble wrap" looks like it is still trademarked[1], even though it's commonly used as a generic term. Hopefully this flies under Sealed Air's radar. I often wonder how far organizations will go to protect physical brands as the world rapidly digitizes. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks#List_of_protected_trademarks_frequently_used_as_generic_terms) ~~~ ashitlerferad Trademarks on inflated cushioning do not apply to software. ~~~ icefox They should take the opportunity to change the project name to bwrap to match the fact that the application is not called bubblewrap, but bwrap.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tech Friends, Let's Get Rid of Workplace Bullies - VuongN http://www.vuongnguyen.com/tech-friends-lets-get-rid-of-workplace-bullies/ ====== kwillets There seems to be a real push towards homogeneity in teams, and I've seen it lead to bullying of people with different skills. At one point I was working with a guy who had a prototype of a complex clustering algorithm. He did a great job prototyping it in MatLab, but the company decided to have him implement a distributed version of it in C, and they pushed him unreasonably hard. I tried to convince them to leave him alone, since I and others had the skillset to get that part done, but they kept after him, and eventually killed the project and fired both of us. This was at Autonomy; we all had a "now I get it" moment when the fraud news came out. ~~~ VuongN Doing tech, especially tech startups for a while and some day you wake up thinking to yourself: if we pool all our skills together, we could build the world we ought to have by the end of next 'sprint'\--But why are we all stuck building sand castles after sand castles? Yeah, when the hivemind takes over and everyone is afraid to speak up, that's when we can no longer innovate. It's great to find like-minded team mates, it's not so great when people are afraid to speak their minds due to fear of being an outcast. ------ palsumitpal Excellent - Like the author, I was a victim of Bullying too at the same place - but, I retaliated when the bully was directed to me and the line was crossed - spoke up defended myself from the bully In the workplace - lets have a conversation not a confrontation ~~~ VuongN Absolutely agree with you on starting conversation. Both you, me and a lot of our tech friends can use our skills as armors and shields. Unfortunately, many of our colleagues are a little more vulnerable especially since most startups often do not have a full-fledge and empowered HR department. I hope that we can start speaking up more and coming into defense of these colleagues sooner to prevent workplace bullying from taking shape in the organizations we're a part of. Thank you again for speaking up, my friend!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What's up with the state of pathetic business-class broadband in the US? - whalesalad I work at a web agency in LA. We build lots of apps and hack on Django all the time. We just moved offices into a real sweet spot. Everything about this place is rad, but right now we're using horrible 4G wimax internet because there is no fiber or coax running into this building, and the CO for DSL is something like 12,000 feet away. The best thing we can get is something like 5mbps.<p>Why can I pay $40 a month and get 20mbit at home, when I have to pay $999 a month to get a symmetrical 5/5 or 10/10 line? I understand you pay more for a higher level of service... but when the bandwidth you're getting is barely enough for 1-2 people, it's not very useful?<p>I'd love to hear some of your stories, comments, and info from everyone. If you're close to the inside of the telcom/cable/internet world we'd all love to hear what you have to say about this too.<p>I'm a firm believer that there are certain expenses that you just have to cough up. There are certain things that you just <i>need</i> in certain professions, and for whatever the reasons, it means you need to also pay more than expected. In the web/dev/startup world... high-bandwidth and low-latency is something I can't personally live without. ====== blakdawg My office is in San Jose, which likes to call itself the capital of Silicon Valley. The best connectivity I can get is either a consumer-grade DSL connection for approx $60/month, or a symmetric T1 for approx $500/month. I can't get Comcast "business class" unless I want to spend tens of thousands of dollars trenching someone else's parking lot for the installation. The same was true at my 2 previous office locations, so it's not like the current setup is an anomaly. If I wanted to be right in the middle of downtown San Jose, I could be in the same building as MAE-West and could probably get sweet connectivity - but that location would make my clients sad (parking is tough and not free) so I'm not gonna do it. I shared office space for awhile with a guy who had a fixed wireless install - it was OK (the connection was fast but sometimes flaky) but it still amazes me how tough it is to get meaningful connectivity in a major metropolitan area on the West Coast. DSL in that building was nigh-impossible because the copper wiring in the building was damaged in some way that the landlord and the phone company collectively refused to fix.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Travel + Hackernews = Art Sumo - volandovengo After 4 years working for the man and reading hackernews religiously, I decided to quit my cushy day job and create Art Sumo while working from the road. I am happy to announce that I am launching ArtSumo.com today.<p>I would be glad to answer any questions from fellow hackers over email - naysawn@artsumo.com.<p>www.artsumo.com ====== tjsnyder I can't find anything about the purpose of the site or what it is for outside of "hacker news and travel." If you want people to sign up, you should be a bit more convincing. ~~~ kcros I'm thinking Naysawn might be trying to pull a "hipster" here--the site that got 10,000+ signups without people really knowing what it was about. Curiosity can be a powerful motivator. ~~~ vertr The site is daily deals for art. Screenshot: [https://img.skitch.com/20110504-qapc7hwhpyaf2gapbg67bd375e.j...](https://img.skitch.com/20110504-qapc7hwhpyaf2gapbg67bd375e.jpg) ~~~ nametoremember Ah, I thought it was a travel site. ------ sktrdie This is just some pictures and a login form, you gotta be kidding me with all the points! I've posted interesting things on open-source software I've implemented, and barely got a couple of points. I'm jealous! ------ JonLim Signed up, looking forward to trying it out. However, once you sign up for the waiting list, you seem to be locked out of the About page, which would have been nice to see again. Just making sure you knew! Thanks. ~~~ volandovengo Thanks for the heads up Jon. ------ sebkomianos Maybe you should give us HN folks a few codes to get in earlier? I shared on fb and twitter nevertheless, sounds and looks interesting. ~~~ volandovengo Hey Seb - you should now have access. Thanks for tweeting it out :). ------ aaronbrethorst Looks interesting. Can you say more about it? What made you build this? How did you build this? What's your revenue model? ~~~ volandovengo Thanks! I can't say much right now but will do a full disclosure tomorrow. ------ brianbreslin clickable <http://www.artsumo.com> ------ jasonmkey Would like to learn more. Is this a daily deal site? ------ tutu awesome, good for you. Where were you working before, and why'd you decide to leave? ~~~ volandovengo I was at good old MS (please don't hate me for it). I wanted to travel more and have my own business so, I made the jump. ------ brianbreslin question, what made you decide on the name? ~~~ volandovengo getting a good and cheap domain name is a real pain! I liked ArtSumo but also consider painthut, dailypaint, and theworldpaints. what do you prefer? ~~~ brianbreslin i think i like dailypaint better. artsumo reminds me of appsumo ------ v0ter rad, great idea ~~~ volandovengo thanks! ------ vertr After getting into the site, and seeing that's basically App Sumo for Art, I'm a bit torn. The name seems really off considering there is already a company with a very similar name in the daily deals space. Also, I feel like by using such a similar name you set my expectations for design and functionality much higher (and they were let down). Seeing as you are running a daily deals site, why do you need the invites system? I would think that you would want to reap the HN traffic and launch traffic instead of coercing people to invite their friends. ------ vertr How about passing some invites out to HN users? ~~~ volandovengo Good idea! I don't have anything set up right now but if you email me, I'll give you an account. ------ Jd Paintings and photographs are not the same.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Oh My God! Apple Killed ThinkSecret! Those Bastards! - terpua http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/20/oh-my-god-apple-killed-thinksecret-those-bastards/ ====== pg Though I'm an Apple fan, it bothers me the way they seem to skate just along the border of evil. Can you imagine Google shutting down a Google rumors site? Theory: Steve Jobs is overreaching to the point of evil, but he's also smart enough to hire hackers who are more than yes-men, and they push back when he wants to do something too bad. I suppose this is ultimately what keeps Google honest too. If so, then being good and hiring smart hackers are inseparable; and that means as companies increasingly can't win without smart hackers, they'll have to become increasingly good. (By "become" here I mean in the sense that populations become a certain way through evolution. I'm not proposing any given company will get nicer. Just that good companies will increasingly triumph over evil ones.) ~~~ ecuzzillo Most accounts I've heard say that Microsoft was the place to be in the early 90's, and many smart people wanted to work there, particularly ones coming out of college, and Microsoft software was crap because executive decisions and backward compatibility made it crap, not because their hackers were crap. People who read the Windows 2000 source leak said that it was fairly uniformly well-written code, whose comments indicated that its authors knew they were making everything ugly and klugey, but couldn't do much about it and preserve compatibility. So I somewhat doubt that good employee hackers can steer a fundamentally really evil main guy away from being evil. ------ henning I don't like Apple's secrecy fetish. It reminds me of Dick Cheney. I hate it when Robert Scoble is right, but Apple really needs to open up with respect to things like blogging. Channel 9 made Microsoft, of all companies, feel a lot more human and a lot less evil. I realize this is incompatible with the Mac cult and "one more thing" Stevenote surprises. ~~~ staunch I think it's going a bit far to compare Cheney and Jobs. One is an elected official subject to the transparency of a democracy and who costs lives and billions of dollars when he lies. The other is the CEO of a commercial enterprise who's a control freak and occasionally gets a little nasty with people who leak news about his gadgets. ------ mattmaroon They sure seem to be floundering in the good will department these days. ------ inovica I think that if Apple wants to keep its products secret then they should be allowed to do whatever they can to do this. I must admit to wondering if they have 'used' this system in the past to pre-test market reaction to potential products as well as to provide them within another avenue of publicity. The problem is that false rumors surface and I think this can damage Apple. Just my own thoughts of course, but I don't think that this is a bad thing ------ shayan I am happy that apple wasn't able to or didn't try hard enough to find the informer	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Generate a painting based on artist and style - aliabd https://360.gradiohub.com/ ====== aliabd I created this interface using the Gradio[1] library and Peter Bailey's fork[2] of NVIDIA's StyleGAN2[3]. Try the examples in the bottom. [1]: [https://github.com/gradio-app/gradio](https://github.com/gradio- app/gradio) [2]: [https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan2](https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan2) [3]: [https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2](https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is it weird to ask users to pay via CC through a desktop app? - superic I'm working on something that would take payments (via credit card) from within a desktop application. Is that weird? The purchase is for something physical that would be received via real mail (which the application helped make).<p>It's not that it wouldn't be secure or anything like that. I'm not going to store the payment information -- just keep a record that it happened successfully.<p>I suppose I could make it so users would have to buy credits on the website and those credits would show up in the desktop app version as well as online. But that seems like an extra step for some users. I also don't want to hide the real cost of the service from users by saying "$10 is 382 credits and one use of the service is 342 credits" or anything like that. Associating cash cost with the product is fine.<p>Thoughts? Am I over-thinking this? ====== mahmud You're not over thinking it, the web has trained people to trust it with their credit cards, while your application has to establish itself a new. The best thing you can do is mimick the visual cues of browser security and put a big fat golden lock somewhere on the screen, and show other cues of encryption in use (say, show a certificate verification dialog.) Of course, use OpenSSL! This goes without saying. Don't fake security if you're sending sensitive stuff in plain text. Just to be sure your users don't have a keylogger (specially on Win32) provide an on-screen keyboard/keypad and accept input only through that, or encourage it over the actual keyboard. The more security hoops people jump through the better they like it, at least I do. ~~~ wmblaettler I have noticed an on-screen keyboard/keypad with ING Direct. They use it for PIN entry. I presume that it is to defeat keyloggers as you have mentioned. ------ dkersten If you're going the credits route.. why not just say "Your account has $10"? No need to rename it to credits or anything like that. Also, desktop online casino apps seem to open a browser on the payment page. Maybe you could do something like this? ~~~ superic Oh, no, what I was saying is I _don't_ want to do that. I would simply state that "Your account has $10" rather than masking it with credits. ~~~ dkersten Ah, I think I misunderstood what you were saying then. ------ wmblaettler iTunes allows for in-application purchases with an online account. I suggest examining their payment model. ------ eli_s I suppose it comes down to human psychology. People are more used to entering CC info on a secure site (https padlock icon all that) rather than their desktop apps. Maybe the easiest solution would be to send users to a secure URL?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Sparsity Programming: Automated Sparsity-Aware Differentiable Programming - ChrisRackauckas https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rJlPdcY38B ====== nabla9 [https://openreview.net/forum?id=rJlPdcY38B](https://openreview.net/forum?id=rJlPdcY38B)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
WE USED TO SLEEP TWICE EACH NIGHT – 6/30/15 - delanceyplace http://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=2828 ====== dalke While it's dated "6/30/15", it's an "encore selection -- from Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep", published in 2012. The topic has hit the pages of HN before. From a bit over two years ago are the 107 comments at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542453) . One of the commenters there pointed to the 2009 paper "In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic", at [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2869.1992....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2869.1992.tb00019.x/abstract) . More background on Wehr's argument for biphasic sleep is at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep) and [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783) .	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Energy Ball: Wind turbine for home use - gasull http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/03/energy-ball-by-home-energy/ ====== Protophore It would be nice to have the option to buy a small wind turbine for your house. I wonder if this would help drive residential solar prices down. Another interesting wind power solution: <http://www.magenn.com/> ~~~ DabAsteroid _It would be nice to have the option to buy a small wind turbine for your house._ There are small wind turbines available. One has the option. However, why would one choose to excercise it? _I wonder if this would help drive residential solar prices down._ How could it do that? ~~~ Protophore How would wind turbines for the home or office drive down solar prices? Competition in the market place for alternative sources of energy perhaps? ------ DabAsteroid <http://www.wind-works.org/articles/RoofTopMounting.html> _Mounting wind turbines--of any kind--on a building is a very bad idea. I've yet to see an application where this has worked or will likely work. In short, rooftop turbines will not do what their promoters claim and often will cause their owners no end of grief._ [http://www.wind- works.org/articles/VentilatorsandSquirrelsin...](http://www.wind- works.org/articles/VentilatorsandSquirrelsinaCage%20.html) _Like ducted turbines, a perennial favorite of hucksters and charlatans is, for lack of a better word, squirrel cage rotors. Many are nothing more than roof-top ventilators repackaged as "wind turbines". As ventilators, they work fine. It's when someone tries to couple them to a generator that they quickly learn why wind turbines use two or three slender, airfoil-shaped blades. Most hucksters, however, never progress that far. They never build actual wind turbines, and perchance that they do, they never measure the "wind turbine's" performance. Of course, they wildly exaggerate the potential of these breathtaking new inventions. Doug Selsam, himself an inventor, has tried to understand why consumers--and the news media--are so gullible. His explanation: ventilators and squirrel- cage rotors are easy to understand, modern wind turbines much less so. After all, a roof-top ventilator with its entire swept area covered with blades looks like it will capture more wind than a modern wind turbine with only a few blades, some with--unbelievably--only one. In a 2002 internet scam, a company peddling ventilators as "wind turbines" claimed their product would produce nearly five times more electricity than a conventional wind turbine of the same size. Naturally, for this "superior" performance they would charge 2-3 times more than for a real wind turbine. The company asserted that they were "thinking outside the box," a catchphrase of 1990s management gurus. They certainly were. They were not even close to the box. They were on another planet where the laws of physics don't apply._	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: html-vault – create self-contained HTML for password protected content - dividuum https://github.com/dividuum/html-vault ====== aurorabbit On the topic of toy web crypto projects, here's mine: [https://emojicrypt.com/](https://emojicrypt.com/) It offers scrypt + aes-gcm, encoded into 256 emoji; all the crypto is in [https://github.com/aurorabbit/libemojicrypt/blob/master/prot...](https://github.com/aurorabbit/libemojicrypt/blob/master/protocol.1.js) (I could have went without a subrepo, but in theory it makes non-web integration or alternate interfaces simple.) It's based off of ricmoo's scrypt.js, pfrazee's base-emoji, and WebCrypto. Output contains a header (with N/r parameters), salt, IV, and HMAC. Room for a dozen more protocol versions as well. It's abandoned, looking for a loving home! Work for some new (and some unimplemented) features is laid out here: [https://github.com/aurorabbit/emojicrypt.com/issues](https://github.com/aurorabbit/emojicrypt.com/issues) ~~~ dividuum Nice. Did you measure the performance of scrypt.js? The PBKDF2 implementation in Python and both Chrome/Firefox are similar for me and the Python documentation states something like 3x slower that the OpenSSL implementation [1]. So it sounds pretty usable to strengthen the password while still being usable. [1] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/hashlib.html#hashlib.pbkdf...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/hashlib.html#hashlib.pbkdf2_hmac) ~~~ aurorabbit Thanks! I didn't, but maybe I should have. I thought the API of scrypt.js would work well and don't think I came across anything better. I also figure scrypt is plainly better than PBKDF2; being designed from ground up for key lengthening and offering memory hardness. I figure bitcoin ASICs might be repurpose-able to attack PBKDF2; though I'm not sure if that's a threat, and I imagine it mostly somewhat applies to scrypt anyway because of litecoin and friends. If I were more worried I would have researched the default parameters more, I think this is 128- vs 256-bit territory. ------ camsjams Nice! I made something similar to this: [https://github.com/camsjams/mr- roboto](https://github.com/camsjams/mr-roboto) With a slight difference, it works 100% in the browser, you can use it here: [https://camsjams.github.io/mr-roboto/](https://camsjams.github.io/mr-roboto/) But you need to store the output somewhere safe. ~~~ dividuum Nice. I guess the big difference is the key used for the symmetric encryption. I'm using PBKDF2 to derive the final key to make it harder to brute force in case you get the HTML file. ------ maxlaumeister Hey! I also made something similar to this (uses a password-derived key to create protected, self-contained HTML). [https://www.maxlaumeister.com/pagecrypt/](https://www.maxlaumeister.com/pagecrypt/) Mine was originally in-browser, but thanks to some contributors (Zoltán Gálli and Nial Francis) it has Python and PowerShell CLIs now. I like your use of async to make sure the work stays off the main thread. ~~~ Tepix I like it! Works well. Do you see a way to reduce the required code? ~~~ maxlaumeister I just glanced through it again, and it seems to me that aside from styling, every section of code fulfills an important purpose. But it could definitely benefit from being more broken out into components and library-like, so that the only code surfaced in index.html is the UI code. ~~~ Tepix Looks like your code predates the Web Crypto API, so switching over to that should get rid of more than half the code. Right? ------ Tepix It took way too long on my laptop (i5-6200U). With a decent random password (say, 14 letters), the search space will be very large. If a determined attacker (with a couple of GPUs) can attempt 100.000 passwords per second it will still be impossible to crack in an acceptable time. If we assume that this determined attacker is calculating these hashes 100.000 faster than the average browser, it should be enough if the user has to wait for one second, not one minute. On the other hand everyone has different security requirements so perhaps making it configurable is the best way to go proceed (with some recommendations). PS according to [https://github.com/analsec/hashcatbenchmark/blob/master/Nvid...](https://github.com/analsec/hashcatbenchmark/blob/master/Nvidia/rtx_2080ti.txt) a RTX 2080Ti can crack 750k WPA-EAPOL-PBKDF2 with 4096 rounds per second. ------ sowbug Similar: [https://github.com/sowbug/quaid](https://github.com/sowbug/quaid) ~~~ dividuum Indeed. The project motivation is even similar to mine (bootstrap yourself in case everything gets lost). I guess the main difference between the two is that I tried to make the generated HTML minimal so it's easier to verify before entering a password. ------ eitland This might take a moment it said but I think I waited two minutes with no result in sight. ~~~ dividuum If there's no error message in the browser console, I guess the 20 million PBKDF2 might be a bit much. Which browser are you using? ~~~ eitland Recent release of Firefox, on a developer laptop. Edit: add more details. ------ bmsleight_ Works, but takes a little while. Nice -useful ~~~ dividuum That's very much by design. The idea is that even if the file is stolen, a good password should still protect against a lot of bruteforcing. ~~~ mc3 By design? Or running code in the browser is inefficient? (not your fault, that's the way it is) Keepass (Desktop app) for example doesn't take ages to open. ~~~ dividuum Yes: By design. This helps make brute forcing the password harder by forcing each attempt to take a while. The crypto implementation in the browser itself is pretty fast. You can easily make it faster or instantaneous by lowering the number of PBKDF2 rounds in the html-vault script. The default of 20 million seems a bit excessive based on the feedback so far.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Samsung Galaxy Note9 Teardown - bdcravens https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Note9+Teardown/112412 ====== towndrunk Off topic. I do like the design of ifixit's website. It's nice and clean.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Microsoft Wanted LinkedIn - t23 http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-microsoft-wanted-linkedin ====== zihotki tl;dr - For rich and detailed user and companies data, and user base.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Platformer Enemy Design - DDR0 http://www.frogatto.com/?p=1253 ====== GotAnyMegadeth Wow, this came at exactly the right time, I am planning to start designing enemies for my current game this week. Quite insightful.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Fast domain auction checking tool - webstartupper http://www.domainsafrica.com/ ====== webstartupper Hey guys, I built this as a test app to consume the DomCop API. I managed to make it fast enough and with a (hopefully) useful interface for searching for domains that are on auction across various sites or have expired and can be back ordered. Hope you guys like it. Let me know how I can make it better Disclaimer/Warning: this webapp is deemed dangerous for anyone with a propensity to purchase domains they don't need :) ~~~ domaniac Nice clean design. What do the different colors for the boxes mean? ~~~ webstartupper The different colors are to represent the different page ranks of the domains. You can check the FAQ for what each color stands for. Basically grey = PR0, blue = PR1 or PR2, orange = PR3, Green = PR4 and Red = PR5+	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
If correlation doesn’t imply causality, then what does? (2012) - eliangcs http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-imply-causation-then-what-does/ ====== dang Url changed from [https://speakerdeck.com/eliang/if-correlation-doesnt- imply-c...](https://speakerdeck.com/eliang/if-correlation-doesnt-imply- causality-then-what-does), which points to this. HN prefers original sources.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Our prototype: People real-time news. Would you use it? - mprovo1 Our application would allow you to follow someone, say Barack Obama, and get all that is being said about him on the net, in real-time (mixing twitter & traditional news outlets). We have NLP algorithms that figure out the 2-3 most important people/organizations in any given article (we track both individuals and organizations such as sports teams and companies). A popular entity -- say Lindsay Lohan or Justin Bieber -- will get dozens of articles matched every day. We are currently tracking around 15,000 people and in addition to articles we also attach useful meta-data using freebase (picture, twitter & facebook account).<p>Our current vision is a place where you can follow both what people say and what others say about them. There would also be an automatically generated "profile" page for each individual and we are thinking of adding social features such as badges (yeah, I know everybody is doing it :), but for instance you could get badges as you read more news about someone, slowly becoming his or hers <i>uber</i> fan). Such badges could be displayed on the profile badge, rewarding people for being awesome fans. It could also be a place where you interact with the person, post messages, send tweets, rate up or down, etc.<p>Here's the link to our internal alpha prototype: journal.factyle.com. It's not ready for public consumption! Just to give you an idea!<p>We also released a few iphone apps to experiment with mobile -- check out our sports app for example: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sports-stalker/id382283655?mt=8.<p>Do you think it can work as a consumer product? Would you use it? Is it doomed?<p>Thank you so much! ====== scrrr I think this could be very useful. If not for the general public (except perhaps fans of celebrities) then at least for people that professionally need to keep track of them. Reporters, showbiz-professionals etc. Also: I don't care (at all) about the badges but would be interested in it as a research tool. Furthermore I'd like to have a software like this that is not limited to people but also to concepts, ideas and topics in general. For example I'd like to be kept up to date on subjects like "Life on Mars" or "A.I.". Better than Google alerts and websites like HN already help me be it. ~~~ mprovo1 Thanks, I really like your idea of a product for professionals. It would definitely be useful for them. And tracking subjects is something we _really_ want to do! Our first product was a "speedreader" bookmarklet that extracted the most important concepts of a webpage and generated a navigation tool that allowed you to scroll to them. Unfortunately, identifying important concepts in a document is a much harder problem than named-entities/organizations (but doable I think). ------ riffer You need a differentiator. You've done a lot of work to get to this point, but why would somebody use this when they are used to going to Google News or TMZ or whatever? You have to create something that is extremely compelling in some dimension or another, otherwise it will be tough to rise above the noise. Best of luck. ~~~ mprovo1 Thanks, you're right that is the biggest problem we are currently facing. We seem to have good "retention" rate with our iphone apps (people who come back often to use the app), but our downloads are low. I must admit I'm not sure what we propose is compelling enough for people to change their news reading habits. Will people really come to us to consume news or will they simply google the people instead -- that we do not know yet. I currently use the app to track my favorite hockey team and it works pretty well. I get all the signings / analysis / articles in almost real-time. I think it's definitely useful for sports -- but then again I could probably get such news through team-specific rss feeds.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Time to move to C11 atomics? (2016) - based2 https://lwn.net/Articles/691128/ ====== RossBencina I think the ISO C and C++ definition of memory_order_consume will need to be fixed first. Perhaps recent progress has been made, but see for example "C++ P0371R1: Temporarily discourage memory_order_consume" and references therein: [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p037...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p0371r1.html) ------ amelius Maybe the best thing to do is to write a really, really, really good test suite for the C11 compiler first. ~~~ GSGSGS I think u can propose it for C22 ------ saas_co_de From reading the article it seems they present many negatives and no benefits. ------ based2 src [http://linuxfr.org/news/de-la-necessite-d-adopter-les- operat...](http://linuxfr.org/news/de-la-necessite-d-adopter-les-operations- atomiques-c11) ------ phkahler From June 15, 2016. They reference GCC 7.1 as being a year away... ~~~ noobermin Is this a thing now? ~~~ noobermin Downvotes? I merely meant to ask if linux implemented C11 atomics or not...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Apple's responsibility as a superpower - ph0rque http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2638-apples-responsibility-as-a-superpower ====== cletus I don't like this post for several reasons. 1\. The author worries about Apple crowning a successor. What they're advocating is HTML5, which is essentially an open standard, where Flash is of course proprietary. 2\. The premise of the article is that Apple has the power to kill anything they set their mind to. It uses the lazy argument of the slippery slope or thin end of the wedge ("What's next?"). It's simply fearmongering; 3\. It mistakes cause and effect. A classic example of this was Intel's original Centrino platform, which became the basis of Intel's success (after the Pentium 4 debacle) for years. At the time it launched Intel spent $150m+ on marketing it. Sadly, many observers attributed its success to that marketing campaign when in fact the lesson is: _Good products sell themselves._ Centrino succeeded because it was a good product. Flash came about at a time to solve a problem of creating "rich" Internet applications ("RIAs") when it wasn't possible any other way. That's no longer the case with a plethroa of Javascript frameworks and browsers with fast Javascript engines in them. The use case for Flash was going away anyway. Apple just hastened its inevitable demise. They haven't killed it. They just threw some oil on the fire that was already burning down the house. 4\. Apple is on the outs with a bunch of other companies? Large companies are complex creatures. You will find them competing savagely on one level while cooperating on another. But the real reason they don't like Apple? Nothing breeds contempt like success. 5\. Blu-ray. Optical storage, like Flash, is dying. Apple didn't pick a side in the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray "war". Some might call this realpolitik. Personally, I think they took a long term view that the winner was irrelevant. The well is drying up. Who controls it doesn't matter anymore. 6\. Apple is by far the company that has demonstrated an utter devotion to the paramount importance of the user experience. Now you can disagree with some of the decisions they've made but, on the whole, no company has engendered quite the same loyalty and fervour that Apple has _for good reason_. They're still at the mercy of the market as a whole. ~~~ Supermighty Point 2: Apple has a great deal of influence to kill a great deal. Recently they depreciated Java on the Mac. How many $30 desktop apps will you sell if users also have to download a 200MB Java runtime? Don't fool yourself, Apple has to power to drive adoption (USB) or kill it (Flash, Jave, et al). ~~~ Aykroyd Maybe, I'm mistaken but when I think of desktop Java apps pretty much the only significant ones that I come up with are IntelliJ (which I use) and Eclipse. And I'd much prefer something native to the resource hogging of IntelliJ. I don't think they're killing off a big industry by ditching java on the mac. It's just potentially going to make things more of a pain for those of us who write server-side java code on our Macs. Do you think their move will have an effect on that industry? ~~~ chc Cyberduck is a very popular FTP client for the Mac, and Vuze is a fairly popular Bittorrent client on all platforms. ------ arjunnarayan The problem with Apple is that they try and project some moral superiority while actually having a troubled record when it comes to moral actions. They claim to be champions of open standards, open architectures, etc. And oftentimes, they do exceedingly well: The early adoption of USB, a beautiful working integrated Java platform, HTML5 and web standards are all examples where Apple championed openness and followed through. However, there is this other side: where Apple seizes a chunk of territory that they mark out as "ours to play with" and this is roped off and defended at all costs. When Google decided that cellphones needed an open option to keep carriers and developers honest, Apple reacted vociferously against this perceived incursion into their territory. And this is, I believe, what dhh is articulating unease about. Today Goliath Apple is fighting the good fight, taking down the monolithic clunky developer-terrorizing nonsense that is Flash in the name of open standards and on behalf of Davidesque HTML5. But tomorrow, there's no telling if Apple is suddenly going to decide that this is "their territory" and they are going to defend it against all incursions (open or not) at all costs. And that is worrying. Apple's moral standards seem arbitrary, adopted post-hoc to conveniently justify a pre-ordained course of action. And that makes everyone fearful of their next move. ~~~ ceejayoz > When Google decided that cellphones needed an open option to keep carriers > and developers honest... Google hasn't kept the carriers honest, and I've yet to hear of an iOS app that quietly copies all your SMS messages off to some server in Russia. ~~~ recoiledsnake [http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/15YearOld-Sneaks- iPhone-T...](http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/15YearOld-Sneaks-iPhone- Tethering-App-Past-Apple-109491) If someone was able to sneak something like tethering, I don't think it's a far stretch for text messages. ~~~ ceejayoz Tethering is possible because it doesn't require accessing any other app's data. SMSes are walled off. That does not appear to be the case with Android, which allows apps to send/read SMSes. ------ mattmaroon I think Apple's not going to "win" the battle with Flash. They're simply going to drive a portion of their customers to Android in the interim due to fighting it. Like many actual wars, everyone involved will lose. When I use my iPad, the #1 reason I put it down and pick up my laptop is that I want to watch a video (quite frequently one I found here in fact) or play a game that I can't. It's to the point where I now just dig out the laptop if I want to read Hacker News as a result. I made the mistake of taking the iPad on a trip without my laptop, only to find I couldn't view the website of any good restaurant. (Granted there's no reason those websites should be one giant SWF, but they are.) You don't realize how much Flash stuff is on the web until you use an iPad. ~~~ moxiemk1 Counter-anecdote: you don't know how much on the web _isn't_ flash until you pick up an iPad. We must use very different subsets of the Internet, because the videos I run into (on random, lower profile sites, no less) don't require flash. Honestly, the thing that drives me from my iPad to pick up a laptop (which doesn't happen very often) is iPad-specific websites that don't let me opt-out and use their normal website. This has (unfortunately) been happening more and more lately. ~~~ mattmaroon We appear to use at least some of the same subsets since we're both here. Just last week there were two videos on the front page the one time I looked that wouldn't play. This happens in my Google Reader on a daily basis as well. As a Facebook Game developer I probably see more Flash than normal people, though the number of people who play Flash games on Facebook alone numbers in the hundreds of millions. ~~~ smackfu Facebook games are also really bad in my experience at just not working on the iPad. No error message, no suggestion to try their standalone app, no nothing. ------ bbuffone I have no worries about this, I can throw out my $199 iPhone and buy a new phone. The same apps I use (Planets vs Zombies, actually that is about it) will be available on the new phone shortly. Phones and its OS are dispensable. that is the great thing about them. As long as it can make a call and receive data the real utility of the phone will always be available. The rest of it is just entertainment. ~~~ tav And what about the time and money spent by people developing skills for the Apple ecosystem — Objective-C, XCode, iTunes partnerships, etc? There's a network effect in play here and the more territories that Apple dominates, the easier it becomes to parlay with inertia... ~~~ ceejayoz Most of those developers hadn't heard of Objective-C just a few years ago. If something compelling enough comes around, they'll switch again. ------ credo Companies compete with each other and there are winners and losers. When Google rolled out free Google Maps and navigation apps, they were directly attacking companies like Garmin and TomTom Now frankly, it is reasonable to sympathize with many companies whose paid offerings are under attack by "free" products, but would you ask Google to recognize itself as a "superpower" and stop killing GPS navigation companies ? ~~~ davidw > Companies compete with each other and there are winners and losers. The unnerving thing about this industry, though, is that _sometimes_ this "winning and losing" is fast and close to total, whereas in other industries, many players can continue to compete in the same field. Think about Microsoft's share of desktop operating systems at their peak vs car companies. ~~~ glhaynes What examples of that can you think of other than Windows? Edit: and things that were extensions of the Windows monopoly such as IE. ~~~ davidw VHS standard, eBay, Microsoft Office probably merits its own entry. x86 in terms of desktop hardware. ------ shadowsun7 This is a rather paranoid argument of what Apple _may_ do, instead of what it's actually done. Even David admits that a) he's happy to see Flash go b) we're making a move towards open standards and c) Adobe deserves the walloping that they're getting. Apple's done things like this before - getting rid of floppy drives, for instance, before anyone else did. (And they're very quick to remind us of this). But whether the move to 'attack' Flash is a bad thing isn't clear. Apple seems to be more obsessed with delivering the perfect user experience - and they don't give me the impression that they're picking battles for the sake of picking battles. Whether Flash (or any other technology, for that matter) gets excluded is a direct result of this obsession. Which is the right way of going about it, of course. ------ kloc I don't think that Apple is a superpower when it comes to promoting or killing technologies, be it on desktop or mobile. It is surely important in the whole scheme of things but certainly not the king maker. With the rise Android and Windows mobile 7 , apple and its iOS will matter even less. Here in India one can get an Android phone(1.6) for 7000rs( 120 $) which is a very competitive price, where iphone 3gs costs around 32000rs ( 650 $). I don't see apple getting a decisive share of mobile market anywhere outside of US in the foreseeable future. ~~~ ceejayoz > Here in India one can get an Android phone(1.6) for 7000rs( 120 $) which is > a very competitive price, where iphone 3gs costs around 32000rs ( 650 $). Are they comparable phones? If nothing else, there've been two major Android OS revisions since 1.6. ~~~ ZeroGravitas I think his point is they don't need to be comparable. Apple "over-delivers" because of its core demographic and commitment to a small product range. This naturally limits adoption outside that demographic. Though Apple perhaps doesn't care because they're targeting the richest consumers in the richest nations. ------ steveklabnik In discussions with friends, they've asked me why I tend to defend Apple and dislike Microsoft, when it seems that they both do the same things. Why is FairPlay okay, but PlaysForSure wrong? For me, it primarily comes down to the fact that Apple has tended to impose restrictions within its own little empire, and not outside of it; for the large part, Apple seems to follow the Principle of Least Aggression. Even with the latest Flash shenanigans, Apple isn't making deals with partners to kill Flash. They're not trying to ruin support on Android or anything. They're just not including it by default on the new Airs anymore, and sort of publicly saying that they think it sucks. I agree with David, though: Apple's cultural position of power means that if they want to keep our hearts and minds, they have some responsibility to play nice. ~~~ kenjackson Apple's never really had power outside of its empire before. This is a pretty new position they're in now. With that said, the difference between MS and Apple is that Apple builds the full stack. Apple blocking Psystar from creating clones effectively blocks anyone else from creating Apple products, thus Apple has a lot fewer people to have to bully. The just keep everyone off their block. With that said, within the industry, Apple's bullying of Intel is rather legendary, given their small market position. Where Apple does dominate they certainly don't mind pushing people around. MS works with a lot more partners therefore there is a lot more opportunity for bullying. My concern with Apple is that while Steve Jobs is brilliant, he also rules with what seems to be a larger degree of malice. With MS its obvious where they're going -- where the money is. With Apple that's usually the case, but sometimes its where Steve is just really mad. There's no single person, including Bill, at MS who wields that type of power. ~~~ steveklabnik I dunno, maybe I'm being naive. It seem pretty obvious where Apple is going, too: whatever makes computers easier to use. Flash on mobile is total trash, from what I've read (I have yet to try it on my Nexus One, I don't visit sites with Flash). They've been working on making the music industry a nicer entity to interact with for years. They've been relentlessly simplifying product lines. The Mac App store is obviously geared toward making it even easier for people to install applications. They basically invented the modern smartphone market, and haven't let AT&T call the shots, to the benefit of consumers. Is my fanboy showing? :/ ~~~ kenjackson It's showing a little bit :-) There are plenty of things that would make their computers/products easier to use, but they don't do them. For example, their rental policy for video is horrible. I have just stopped renting because I never finish anything. How is it that Amazon can have a strictly superior policy, but Apple's sucks? I think this is actually an example where Steve plays the role of Apple CEO and Disney shareholder at the same time. When Apple lets me run iOS/OSX in a VM on my Windows box then I'll believe their main mission is to make computers easier to use. Until then the bottomline seems to be the thing the thing that cuts across most items at Apple, like most other companies. ~~~ matwood _For example, their rental policy for video is horrible. I have just stopped renting because I never finish anything. How is it that Amazon can have a strictly superior policy, but Apple's sucks?_ Is this 100% on Apple though? I know there was some hoopla awhile back before variable pricing came into play where the RIAA allowed Amazon to set lower prices than Apple with their goal being to get Apple to bend to their demands on pricing. Apple wanted to keep everything at 99c, but the RIAA wanted tiers and finally got what they wanted. ~~~ kenjackson I'm talking about video, not audio (unless the RIAA also plays in the video space too). I've completely moved off of iTunes for music as I prefer streaming services like Grooveshark and subscription, like Zune Pass. ~~~ matwood I used audio as a known example of content producers playing Apple and Amazon against each other. Do you think the MPAA is any less ruthless than the RIAA when it comes to controlling and pricing their content? ~~~ kenjackson But I haven't heard Apple say a peep in this case. And Apple is not shy about saying their being bent over. Also if anything Apple seems enthusiastic about what they're doing. When they announced the new Apple TV Jobs had no reservations that they were making this their only streaming model. Apple could fix this easy... support Amazon VOD. That would be the best thing for the customer. It would be super easy. Heck, if you're reading Steve, I'll implement it for you, for 1/2 my standard consulting fee. ------ clawrencewenham Presumably Apple is obligated to support everything on everything, simply so it isn't seen as "demonstrating its might". Apple has said no to technologies like Flash, USB3 and Blu-Ray for their own reasons and only for their own devices, which is part of how they make those products good. If they begin supporting every feasible technology just for the sake of not being a bully, then their products will start to suck, they will lose their customers and the power they've been giving them, and then a new kingmaker will arise. The cycle will continue. This is an argument for making technology independent of the products that embody them, which is not realistic. ------ joshuacc I find this a bit ironic coming from 37signals. Isn't this the sort of "opinionated" behavior that they champion in Getting Real? Maybe DHH has a good reason for thinking it's different, but I'd like to see it spelled out. ~~~ dhh When you have the might to dictate an entire industry, you have a different set of responsibilities. ~~~ dailyrorschach I agree with the basis of this article, re: their responsibility. But, as of late, I'm not sure we have anything to go on to say that they are acting poorly. Pushing web standards seems like a good position for an industry leader to take. Seems like any large corporate power, like Google, we just have to expect the worse and hope for the best. ~~~ danieldk To give one example: for compatibility, it would be tremendously useful if they released specifications for AirPlay. Eg. Rogue Amoeba had to reverse engineer it for their AirFoil product. ------ S_A_P I don't think it was at all irresponsible of them for accepting a half hearted port of a 10 year old technology that really isn't intended for a touch screen. HTML 5, CSS3 and other standards saw wider adoption more quickly(thanks also in part to google) What is happening here is Apple is streamlining its products in what they hope will make for a better user experience. It may or may not work out for them, but there is plenty of choice out there. Further, this isn't the same situation as the 1990s when Microsoft would gun for other companies by releasing same-ish products for free to squash others out of the market. They are just not supporting them if they dont meet their standards. ~~~ smackfu Heh. A 10 year old technology like HTML? ~~~ chc HTML5 is not 10-year-old tech. ------ tav Empires rise and fall. The same could have been said of Microsoft only 10 years ago. Every platform provider faces this issue of responsibility and power — whether it be Facebook, Google, Apple or even Twitter. The really interesting, and perhaps more fundamental, issue is that the various independent domains of the past (entertainment, communications, enterprise, gaming, mobile, etc.) are no longer so cleanly segregated and have been converging quite rapidly in the last few years. This inevitably results in the emergence of superpowers like Apple. If we take this to be true, then the question becomes — what do we do about it? As entrepreneurs/developers/consumers, we fundamentally decide on the winners in these platform wars. But how do we counter superpower decisions? Lobby groups? Strategic pacts? Alternative, open, decentralised, systems? ------ richardhenry Do Apple ship every other item of Mac software on their platform? They don’t? Then why are they obligated to ship with Flash preinstalled? It’s up to Adobe to make their own future, not Apple. Perhaps that’s why Adobe recently unveiled Adobe Edge, and a Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool. ------ smackfu What comes to mind: How is what Adobe does with Flash different from what Apple tried to do with Quicktime? If Apple had its way a few years back, all the video on the net would be Quicktime Sorenson encoded. Would they be pushing for open standards then? ~~~ chc One is a proprietary Web platform that can completely shut people out of a site and the other is a video codec. Apples and oranges if ever anything was. ~~~ smackfu Apple has always wanted to make Quicktime a proprietary interactive platform with a scripting language, UI elements, etc. It used to be used heavily to make CD-ROMs, where Flash would be used today. Apple just lost that battle. ~~~ chc At the point in time you're talking about, the _was_ no standard technology to use. It is, again, not comparable to the proprietary Flash plugin today. ------ brudgers > _"Blu-Ray, USB3, Java"_ They are all about minimizing Apple's investment in the Mac platform. Each shows where Apple is heading with the Mac, toward streaming content as what differentiates platform, away from cutting edge technology as what differentiates the platform, and away from enterprise sales - not that enterprise sales are a high priority for Apple beyond getting a continuous stream of articles written about "recent enterprise adoption." The same cost reductions criteria could be seen to apply to Flash, but it's more about sparking development for iOS and the future MacApp store. ------ nanijoe From the article: (Think what happened or didn’t to Blue-ray, USB3, Java). \--------- I'm not sure I knew that anything happened to Java and Blu-ray, can someone help? ~~~ ceejayoz Apple has stated that they don't see a need to support Blu-ray on Macs, that USB3 isn't ready for prime-time, and that they're stopping their releases of their version of Java. ------ davewiner Great piece, right to the point. What technology is Apple going to declare illegal next. And what if we depend on it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Let's talk about sex ... with robots - fjabre http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/16/sex-robots-david-levy-loebner ====== roc I honestly don't see sex robots taking off until after general purpose robots roll out. Having a glorified sex doll that does nothing but help one get off is a rather steep investment of time, money, social cache, etc. Particularly when other masturbatory aids are so much more inexpensive, convenient, discrete, etc. But a maid robot that can cook, clean, mow the lawn and just so happens to have a couple more discrete functions would be a much easier sell to the wider audience. ------ yannis > I think that will be a terrific service to mankind It will be a sad day when this becomes reality.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PHP, Python and Google Go Fail to Detect Revoked TLS Certificates - kwesidev https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/01/0121226/php-python-and-google-go-fail-to-detect-revoked-tls-certificates ====== kafkaesq Of interest, for sure, but that should be " _default libraries_ used by X, Y, Z" fail to detect revoked certificates, right? Being that's not something a generic programming language should take an interest in.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MarketCo - entromivanova https://marketco.me ====== entromivanova A new marketing tool that connects brands for more successful collaborations and partnerships. The platform will match you with other like-minded companies to accomplish much more than you might be able to do on your own Join the new partner networking platform. It`s no longer a long- winded process. Exchange value and grow with MarketCo platform.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Where are we in the Python 3 transition? - joeyespo http://www.snarky.ca/the-stages-of-the-python-3-transition ====== jacquesm The python 2.x to 3.x change will be studied for many years. How to completely rob an ecosystem of its momentum in one fell swoop. I still don't understand why 3 couldn't have had a mode switch defaulting to 2.x behavior. The whole debacle would have been avoided and all the ugly details would have been hidden behind the language implementation. It would have definitely been more work and you might even call it an ugly hack (and Ed DeCastro would likely have thrown a fit if one had asked his opinion) but it would have at least made the transition instant and seamless. The present mess will - if not resolved in a much more drastic fashion - cause more and more teams to switch away from python. It's a real waste of the potential that python had (and still has). I never even bothered porting my code, I'm 'stuck' on 2.7 and anything new gets written in another language. Even bloody PHP, the language everybody loves to hate on, gets deprecation and backwards compatibility better than python. ~~~ nostrademons That's the same approach that IE took for many years - IE7 embedded the IE6 rendering engine, IE8 embedded both the IE7 & IE6 rendering engines, etc. You could switch between them with a meta tag, or with developer tools. It didn't stop IE from being robbed of momentum. I think this is more a case study of what happens when fundamental assumptions that a technology ecosystem is based upon change. Things like string & collection types, async mechanisms, interface/protocol definitions, package managers, programming paradigms, developer preferences, and hardware performance characteristics are foundational to a language's definition. After all, the network effect that binds a language ecosystem together is all based upon being able to share code between multiple unrelated developers. In Python's case, unicode happened. A lot of old Python code was written on the assumption that everything was a sequence of ASCII bytes; it was just plain broken in the presence of unicode characters. There's little you can do here other than accept that much of your ecosystem's strength is gone anyway and build for the future. I suspect we'll see similar problems crop up in other languages in the near future; in particular, promisification in ES7 is a big threat to the existing Node ecosystem, which is all based upon callbacks. A language that jumps on the promise bandwagon early (Rust? Go? Elixir?) could rob Node of much of its momentum. Similarly, if Android & iOS win out over the web, that could lead to a big resurgence in Java or rise of Swift over server-side technologies like Node or Go. ~~~ choosername so python is the IE of programming languages? yikes ;) ~~~ nostrademons Python 2 is, yep. And Java, and C++, and PHP, and all those other languages that were super popular at the turn of the millenium but now feel really dated. Actually, C++ has an even bigger claim to the title, because it now has "modern" versions that are much better, more standards-compliant, and have language features borrowed from newer languages...but a number of enterprises are stuck with no-exceptions, no-STL, no-move-semantics subsets because that's how all the existing code is written. ~~~ blub The IE metaphor is terrible for programming languages :) I don't know about PHP, but C++ (and I suspect Java too) is backwards compatible and doesn't belong in the same class with Python. One can still compile older code and start using new features as they see fit, there is no hard break. ------ sitkack I moved last month and I have been using Python since 1.5.2 What prevents me from recommending it to everyone I pass on the street is that the PyPy 3.x line is back on 3.2.5 which makes it not compatible with many libs which have a 3.3 minimum, which is most. Yes, I give to pypy.org [http://pypy.org/py3donate.html](http://pypy.org/py3donate.html) Recommendations to folks * switch your daily interpreter to Python3 * use tox, https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tox * use six, https://pypi.python.org/pypi/six * when you go native, go cffi, https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cffi ~~~ eiopa This kills it for me too. I rely on pypy, and I just can't see myself sacrificing my productivity by using Six. Also, Python 3 neglected to fix one of the most annoying things about the language - default arg value def foo(x=[]): x.append(1) print x foo() # 1 foo() # 1 1 Why is this still busted?? ~~~ throwaway91919 Can you (or someone) clarify what problem you're talking about? This seems to work as expected for me: def foo(x=[]): sum = 0 for a in x: sum += a return sum print foo([3,5]) # 8 print foo(x=[3]) # 3 print foo([]) # 0 print foo() # 0 Is it the fact that kwargs are required to have defaults? Or what? ~~~ saltylicorice The problem is that the default argument is mutable. def f(a=[]): a.append('v') print a f(['ok']) # ['ok', 'v'] f() # ['v'] f() # ['v', 'v'] ~~~ throwaway91919 Ah, thanks. ------ rdtsc > While some people feel stuck in Python 2 at work and are "depressed" over > it, others have reached the point of having transitioned their projects and > accepted Python 3, both at work and in personal projects. It is not as simple. I would be simpler if it was 2006 again. Python would have less competition on being an easy to use language, batteries included, with good enough performance (SMP wasn't as popular then). Java had a bad perception -- too bloated, enterprise-y, Javascript on the server wasn't happening much. Go wasn't there. Scala not as popular. In that context, people would eventually have switched to Python 3 even if it took some pain (security maintenance, some newer features etc), because GIL wasn't a big deal and it sure wasn't going to be Perl again (maybe Ruby for webdev?). The situation is more difficult today -- Python has more serious competition. Once a team has found the time/money/excitement to switch to Python 3, it is a high chance they'll start looking and evaluating other languages/platforms/libraries (and I speak as a person who loves Python and used it professionally for 12+ years). It is now competing with Go, Elixir, Javascript, Scala, Julia, Clojure, even Rust, Java, and C++14. No matter how cool Python 3 is and what new features it brings, it will have a harder battle to fight just because of the current environment. ~~~ criddell > It is now competing with Go, Elixir, Javascript, Scala, Julia, Clojure, even > Rust, Java, and C++14. That would have happened no matter what. It's not really a bad thing, is it? I can't see how something better coming along is anything but great news. ------ captainmuon If someone would make a Python 2.8 (or call it Python 5=2+3 if you like), I would pay for it. It must run basically every python 2.7 (or 2.6) program without changes. It should backport as many features as possible. The meaning of "str" and string literals (bytes or unicode) should be configurable on a per-file basis. It should have a print statement. Finally, it should be able to use all the binary modules from 2.7 (maybe after recompilation). Currently at our work (in physics research), I have the feeling that people are giving up on Python. It's not worth the trouble to port to python 3 - especially because we can't switch all code at once; we'd have to support both versions for years. C++ which is also heavily used here is getting much nicer, with proper tooling it is even more pleasant to work in (code completion etc). We are mostly using Python for a) configuration files and b) quick and dirty scripts. For these cases, Python 2.7 will be good enough forever. If someone does something more complex, they'd probably use Python 3 - but they treat it like it's a completely different language rather than a new version of Python 2. ~~~ jamesdutc You'd have to pay a lot. Jokes of mine like [https://github.com/dutc/rwatch](https://github.com/dutc/rwatch) and [https://github.com/dutc/didyoumean](https://github.com/dutc/didyoumean) and [https://bitbucket.org/dutc/astexpr](https://bitbucket.org/dutc/astexpr) are examples of adding major features to the CPython interpreter at run-time. It works fairly well in practice. It ends up looking like a `__future__`-import pragma that has interpreter lifetime scope rather than file scope. `__future__` imports cannot be undone within the same file -- after all, they're pragmas scoped at the file level, not actual imports -- and it would make sense for these backported features to behave similarly, though at the scope of the interpreter's lifetime. That might not do what you want. As you'd expect, the most superficial of Python 3's new features (syntax changes, `raise from`, &c.) would be easiest to backport. The bulk of the difficulty would be in merging those changes into Python 2.7. Making the result hot-loadable would be just as easy as in `dutc-rwatch`, though being able to toggle features on-and-off independently would require combinatoric effort with the naïve approach. You'd need to do something smarter. All in all, it's wholly possible to do what you want, and you probably have the skill to even do it yourself. I'd happily do the work myself, but only for lots of money. Unfortunately, the burden of both certifying the resulting interpreter as correct and of maintaining this fork would be large. And then when you're on-boarding some fresh new post-grad you've just hired into your research group: "Oh, we use Python 2.8 here. That's what we call Python 2.7 with an unsupported collection of modules that mutate the currently running interpreter to backport features from Python 3. Don't worry; it only breaks in ways that no one outside of this office will ever have a chance of ever understanding or helping you debug." ~~~ jamesdutc Oh, I should also mention that I found a way to embed Python interpreters within themselves. I have a couple of different ways to do it. Here's one: [https://gist.github.com/dutc/eba9b2f7980f400f6287](https://gist.github.com/dutc/eba9b2f7980f400f6287) Here's another: [https://gist.github.com/dutc/2866d969d5e9209d501a](https://gist.github.com/dutc/2866d969d5e9209d501a) I've given, like, a million conference talks about this. Better than creating some horrible Python 2.8 hybrid would be funding (or convincing me to volunteer to do) the work of completing this bridge. This involves writing 2/3 and 3/2 PyObject shims and figuring out some GIL and GC issues. Then, within a given host interpreter, you'd be able to execute modules within a guest interpreter of whatever Python version you want. With the shims and the bridge work, you'd be able to interact with these objects seamlessly from host-to-guest and guest-to-host. ------ wh-uws As much flak as ruby has gotten for its performance issues and "magic" (read: heavy preference for use of meta programming) ... One thing I think the ruby core team has done a great job of in my opinion is always having some awesome new features in the next major release that make you say "hey thats awesome" and make you want to upgrade despite any headache it might cause and the headaches are generally minimal. Its been interesting to see python so publicly and painfully fail at that. A whole new language version release that as far as I can tell only changed internal plumbing and went so far as to make you have rewrite print statements? I just don't understand how they could think people would want to move to that. ~~~ lyschoening Maybe Python 2 to Python 3.0 didn't introduce many "awesome" features, but 3.4 and 3.5 have been great. ~~~ AnkhMorporkian asyncio and pathlib are absolutely killer features for me. I never much cared about Python 3 until asyncio came on the field. As soon as I saw some example code Guido had written, I started using tulip, and have been a willing participant on the wild ride it has taken. ~~~ rspeer Pathlib lets me down a bit -- I find myself having to str() the Path objects and lose their benefits, because the rest of the standard library doesn't use pathlib. But asyncio is great. It shows how much better asynchronous programming can be when you have support from the language itself. I can't imagine going back to a byzantine system like Twisted even if they did manage to finish their Python 3 port. ------ AstroChimpHam I'm a long time Python user and I still tend to go for 2.7 over 3. When writing packages, I'll add support for 3 as an afterthought, but that's it. The main reason for this and the main reason I prefer Python to other languages is the excellent and complete ecosystem of libraries. I've never seen a single Python library I wanted to use in the last 8 years that didn't have support for Python 2.7. I still run into those that don't support Python 3 well. So, using Python 3 means being terrified that I run into a case later on where I need to use some package that only supports 2.7 and I get stuck. With all of the other potential problems to run into while coding, why would I want to add that extra one, especially for something work-related? I imagine this will continue being an issue until some major packages stop supporting Python 2.7 entirely and force people to make a choice. ------ joseph8th I was in denial stage until we picked Python 3 for a project at work. Then I went into anger and bargaining with the other dev on the project. Heh. _blush_ Being forced to come to terms with Python 3 has made me see the light, though. I still have a host of personal projects in Python 2, but anything new I write is in 3. For me, it was concurrent.futures that pushed me into acceptance stage. ~~~ macavity23 My experience was similar. An even bigger push in my case was the async stuff in 3.5. It's going to be a little while before pypy supports 3.5, but once that happens, Python will be very well placed. Something like Tornado + pypy + py3.5 looks a lot like the app server stack of the future IMHO. It has been a massive PITA, and probably could have been better handled, but hindsight is easy. The future looks bright. ------ foobar2357 The Python team is blind to the huge number of users that will never switch to Python 3. My industry (a large one) is currently standardized on RHEL 6 (and the CentOS equivalent), which uses Python 2.6! I'm not generally able to install arbitrary software or demand upgrades without a lot of beurocracy. I was looking forward to the day when we move to RHEL 7 with Python 2.7. I've started to view the lack of changes in 2.7 as a feature. I would value the stability and lack of breaking changes. Knowing that Python 2.7 is on a limited timeline, and that the Python 3 folks (users and developers) are trying to kill off 2.7, I can't think of any reason not to switch to another language. In short, my field is nowhere near "acceptance" of Python 3, and the "anger" stage will just make us (me at least) leave Python behind. I will never want Python 3.x, and I don't even want Python 2.8. I wish people would recognize that stability is a virtue for some of us... ~~~ mkesper The investment in porting your code from Python2 to Python3 should be many times smaller than porting to an entirely new language ecosystem. ~~~ dimva Yea, but what's to stop Python 4 from doing the same thing as Python 3? It's clear from the tone of this article that the python core devs haven't learned the value of backwards compatibility even after their huge python 3 failure. The author makes it seem like the problem preventing python 3 adoption was python users' unwillingness to accept the inevitable, rather than the poor migration path provided (especially initially). In a massive, old production codebase, upgrading your platform is incredibly risky, even if no code changes are necessary. But when you have to make code changes in a dynamic language... The thing is, not all systems have tests. Not all systems even have known, defined behavior. Upgrading these things can be a multi-month, very risky project. Given that python 3's backwards incompatible changes were made for purely cosmetic reasons and there are few compelling reasons to upgrade, I totally get the anger people feel. I work in startups with relatively new codebases and good test coverage, but I can empathize with other types of organizations. I'm shocked that python devs don't, even after 7 years. ~~~ msellout That is an incorrect characterization of the core development team. [https://opensource.com/life/14/9/why-python-4-wont-be- python...](https://opensource.com/life/14/9/why-python-4-wont-be-python-3) ------ 51109 From LearnPythonTheHardWay.org: > A programmer may try to get you to install Python 3 and learn that. Say, > "When all of the Python code on your computer is Python 3, then I'll try to > learn it." That should keep them busy for about 10 years. I repeat, do not > use Python 3. Python 3 is not used very much, and if you learn Python 2 you > can easily learn Python 3 when you need it. If you learn Python 3 then > you'll still have to learn Python 2 to get anything done. Just learn Python > 2 and ignore people saying Python 3 is the future. Besides, judging from the number of DARPA-sponsored projects that require Python 2.7, the future is not going anywhere soon. ~~~ swozey I'm so tired of seeing people act like LPTHW is some gospel. I tried using it to learn Python and absolutely hated it. It scared me away from Python. Especially the "don't ever use 3, use 2" thing. And if you're going to assume that government entities use of a language is what is going to drive our market than you better stop using Python and hop back on to the ColdFusion and Fortran train. ~~~ 51109 It's not an act. LPTHW is my Bible. I retake the courses every Sunday. Saying that I should hop on the Fortran train for stating that even advanced fearless Python users opt for 2.7 is heretics! ------ craigds Personally, I can't wait to switch to python 3. I'm glad most of the community is finally getting behind it. The cogs move slowly. We've only just upgraded our huge codebase to 2.7, but I expect we'll be on some release of 3.x in about two years. Almost all of our big list of dependencies now support 3.3+, so there is little reason to not upgrade. ------ TheCowboy One frustrating part of attempting to transition is that not all libraries make it clear which Python versions are supported. Usually it's Python 2-only code that isn't clearly labeled as such, but it happens with Python 3 code as well. Sometimes a library doesn't work under specific versions of Python 3. The result is that library research takes longer than it would. Please include this in the README for any project, even if it seems obvious. ------ Walkman > I have yet to hear from someone who has used Python 3 that they think it is > a worse language than Python 2 the maker of the most succesful Python projects: Armin Ronacher ~~~ mianos Just ask him about unicode for LOLs. ------ JustSomeNobody Use 3. Unless you have a good reason to use 2, then use 2. The world doesn't have to be perfect. Go make something. ------ cdnsteve Can someone explain aiohttp server vs wsgi? It seems wsgi is the old standard but now you can run a server right in python, kind of like node. Are people running aiohttp instead of wsgi? It seems like aiohttp can do everything that Flask can do. Are more people using this? ~~~ RodericDay I want to know too. I did a little toy project with websockets in aiohttp and it was extremely enjoyable. It'd be reassuring to know that other people see it as "the future" too, so I could invest into it more heavily. ------ jeffdavis I think one fundamental miscalculation went like this: early adopters will start writing new code in python3, and it will gradually become more normal for new code to be python3, and eventually it will snowball and python2 will become legacy. The problem is that early adopters have a choice: python3, or a completely different language. And there are a lot of good languages to choose from, and early adopters are a more radical by nature. That's why breaking backwards compatibility is almost always worse than it looks like on paper: the early adopters you are counting on to get you through the transition are also the most likely to leave your platform completely. ------ BuckRogers What I think people figured out is you can port Python2 code to PyPy4. Then for all the testing involved, you remove any potential CPU performance worries and the GIL in one fell swoop. Those two perks are worth more than any piddly features of Python3, which were already resolved in the ecosystem. I ported to PyPy instead of Python3 and gained those advantages, but can always port to Python3 when/if it ever gains traction. But I'm just as likely to migrate new projects to something else than Python3. I view this blog as a long-form denial letter to himself. ------ someguydave I like the fact that the 'python core' devs have moved on to doing something other than pointlessly fiddling with something that's reasonably good, ie python 2.7 As for 'lack of support', what are folks expecting support for? If there's a known security issue, somebody will write a patch. ------ beej71 Those of us running Arch Linux have to check the rearview mirror to see the transition... back in 2010 when "python" started defaulting to Python3. It wasn't the smoothest thing, but the world didn't end, either. Lots can be learned from it if you're thinking of making the move. ------ tonetheman I am on CentOS and honestly for most of our applications there is just no compelling reason to change. We can do everything with 2 that we need. I have seen some async stuff that looks interesting in 3 but not enough to make me change. ------ mrfusion I've always wondered why they couldn't package 2 and 3 in the same binary and let the user have a switch for which to use? ~~~ takeda They don't need to. You can install all versions (at least tested 2.4 - 3.5) side by side without any conflicts, which makes the whole dispute which language version to use so silly. ------ upofadown >With five years left until people will need to pay for Python 2 support, ... Is this some sort of thing? ~~~ kemayo It's just the author pointing out that the EOL for official support for Python 2 is 2020. After then, the Python dev team won't be providing any (free) support, so people who want to keep using it will have to pay for it in some way -- whether by investing time in maintaining a fork, or by paying someone else to do so. The absence of a "Python 2.8" fork suggests that the idea of forking hasn't been popular enough to happen organically without someone putting money in, after all. ~~~ someguydave >The absence of a "Python 2.8" fork suggests that the idea of forking hasn't been popular enough to happen organically without someone putting money in, after all. Or it's evidence that python 2.7 works just fine for many people. ------ x1024 Wait, Python 3 has existed since 2008 and the transition is at 20%? How is that any form of success? ~~~ craigds He said that 20% have reached "Acceptance", the last of the 5 stages, and said that most people are in stage 4 (Depression). That'd put overall progress at more like 80%. This article also wasn't actually talking about _adoption_ of python 3, just applying the stages of grief to how people _feel_ about it. IOW, adoption of python 3 might still be worse than 20%, but 20% have accepted that they will need to adopt it soon. Anecdotally as a full time python guy, I'd agree with the OP. The number of people interested in Python 3 has been growing a bit every year, and it seems opposition to adopting it at all has finally mostly dwindled :) ~~~ claystu According to the python community survey of 2014, 80% of users are still using Python 2. Of course, that was two years ago, but 2014 was still six years after Python 3 was released. ([https://wiki.python.org/moin/2.x-vs-3.x-survey](https://wiki.python.org/moin/2.x-vs-3.x-survey)) If the python developers were any normal business, they would have abandoned Python 3 and returned back to developing what their customers obviously prefer; the problem here is that the python developers essentially concluded that because users get python for free, they aren't customers at all and the python developers can do whatever they want and their users will eventually be forced to fall into line. Except they won't... Python users are refusing to migrate to Python 3 as a community. It's a shame that the python developers have decided to try to show their customers who is boss because it won't work--the developers will lose. Many people will continue with 2.7 forever and fork the language in 2020 like Perl 5 day. The rest, like me, have dumped python and moved on to greener pastures. ~~~ x1024 Yep, it's true. My company started a major python2.7 project in 2015. ~~~ BuckRogers Pretty smart bet. You have production-ready PyPy to migrate to, and can always port to 3.x if it ever takes over (looks like never). ------ Walkman Extended the maintenance timeline from 5 to 10 years is not helping the transition at all. ~~~ someguydave The extended maintenance timeline is an implicit admission that nobody wants to hop on their wagon. ------ PhantomGremlin There was a Simpsons episode[1] back in 1991 in which Homer, after eating a poisonous fugu fish, must deal with the five stages. It's an all time classic: Dr. Julius Hibbert: Now, a little death anxiety is normal. You can expect to go through five stages. The first is denial. Homer Simpson: No way, because I'm not dying! Dr. Julius Hibbert: Second is anger. Homer Simpson: [furiously] Why you little... ! Dr. Julius Hibbert: After that comes fear. Homer Simpson: [worried] What's after fear? What's after fear? Dr. Julius Hibbert: Bargaining. Homer Simpson: Doc, you gotta get me outta this. I'll make it worth your while. Dr. Julius Hibbert: Finally acceptance. Homer Simpson: Well, we all gotta go sometime. Dr. Julius Hibbert: Mr. Simpson, your progress astounds me. If only this Python transition were so simple. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fish,_Two_Fish,_Blowfish,_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fish,_Two_Fish,_Blowfish,_Blue_Fish)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Famous Perl One-Liners Explained, Part II: Line Numbering - Anon84 http://www.catonmat.net/blog/perl-one-liners-explained-part-two/ ====== ccc123ccc For command line, I prefer awk and sed. Yes, I know they don't have the power of Perl or Python for big projects, but this is an excellent example of using a shotgun to kill flies. Edit: And of course, since this same site has awesome examples of sed and awk one-liners in action, the comparison has never been easier to make. ~~~ salvadors For these sorts of examples, I tend to use awk and sed too, but sometimes the shotgun is useful. One major advantage of using Perl in this context is that you also have -M, with all of CPAN at your disposal. ------ 321abc One liners like this is why Perl has a reputation of being like line noise. I'm a big fan of Perl, but if any of my employees wrote this kind of write- only code, I'd fire them. ~~~ salvadors If they do any amount of command line wrangling, you should hope that your employees are writing code like this every day. The whole point of these one- liners is that once you get the hang of it they're very powerful additions to your *nix pipeline. They could write highly maintainable, well tested, peer reviewed etc code to do the same things, but in this context that would be hugely wasteful, as the utilities already exist. This is Perl as a replacement for Awk, not for Java. ~~~ salvadors See also "Area Number Three" in [http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five- essential-phone-scre...](http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential- phone-screen-questions) Being able to create that line-noise is, in most cases, significantly more useful than taking 3 months to create a perfectly engineered recursive phone- number finding program.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Certifications in email sig - good or bad? - washingtondc http://www.convertyourcds.com/blogs/district-media-works/1630752-on-putting-your-certifications-in-your-signature ====== kls I am a firm believer in not putting any certs, books you wrote, or conferences you have spoke at in your sig. IT can be read in two ways, one you are being pompous or secondly your a fresh out of school. Conversely the absence of them leave no impression. Anyone who would be making a decision on your employment will receive your resume which is the place for such information.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is the Tipping Point Toast? (Duncan Watts thinks Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about tipping points) - toffer http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html ====== ekanes The article isn't bad, but his counter-experiments aren't very persuasive. I would still argue that influencers are more influential than the average Joe, but I'd agree that hanging your marketing results on reaching them is so important. imho these "how to get the word out there" concepts all circle back to "just build a good product." Provide real value and you win. Most interesting paragraph I found: ""If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood." ------ colortone Umair Haque has some good insights here that dovetail with Watts... (Here he is critiquing the assumed "90/10" nature of "user-generated content": that only 10% [or 1% or whatever] of people on a given web service will be active contributers [i.e. "prosumers"]: "The point is simple: assuming only x% of people will become active prosumers blinds us to a stark reality. "That reality is this: almost everyone is a prosumer of something. "Everyone has just a handful of things they really love. In the very near future,everyone will prosume the things they love. "In this world, worrying about 1% or 10% audience/prosumer ratio is to utterly miss the deeper strategic lesson. "That lesson is to build a deep enough, powerful enough, durable enough connection - an economic relationship driven by emotion, and nurtured by trust - to ignite the latent spark of prosumption, that as recent evidence tells us, lives within every consumer - whether they're a CEO or a C-grade Myspace chav." ------ gojomo Only skimmed the Fast Company article, but seems like Watts' research mostly calls into question only the idea of key "super-influencers". Though Gladwell emphasized "influencer" types in his book, the more general "tipping point" idea is that of "critical mass" -- a threshold beyond which a trend becomes self-sustaining. Think of the original context of "critical mass": nuclear reactions. No one fissible atom need be a "super-influencer" -- just getting enough identical atoms in the same space results in the desired chain reaction.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: PumpkinDB, an event sourcing database engine - yrashk http://pumpkindb.org ====== yrashk It's a lower-level "database engine" that allows you to build different types of higher level databases based on a very simple foundation: 1) BTree-based K/V engine (which gives you an ability to iterate over lexicographically sorted keys) 2) Strong immutability guarantees (data can not be overwritten) 3) ACID transactions 4) Server-side executable imperative language that gives you a control over querying costs In a sense, it's as much of a database constructor as different MUMPS systems (GT.M, for example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GT.M](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GT.M)) PumpkinDB also aims to provide a good set of standard primitives that help building more sophisticated databases, ranging from hashing to JSON support, and more to come. ~~~ ams6110 Thanks. I read the entire "Documentation" page and still didn't feel confident that I understood what this really was. "Event sourcing" to me implies that it's generating events. ~~~ makmanalp Event Sourcing is a technical term, it's the idea that instead of mutating your database, you should instead have a log and insert a new log entry saying that you changed this value to that, etc. The idea is that this helps you do cool stuff like temporal queries (i.e. make a query "as the entire database looked like a month ago") or look at historical values and changes of things. This matters a lot in some fields. Of course then there's the matter of how to do this efficiently. You can build event sourcing on top of a regular RDBMS but if there is database-level support (as in PumpkinDB), then maybe some things are more efficient. Read more: [https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html](https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html) ~~~ gritzko Virtually every db works like that under the hood. They expose it differently, though. Kafka has nothing but log, for example. ~~~ solidsnack9000 They do but it's usually not exposed in a useful way. Postgres once had this feature... [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/6.3/static/c0503.htm](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/6.3/static/c0503.htm) ~~~ anarazel We actually expose something to support event sourcing: [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/logicaldecodi...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/logicaldecoding.html) \- although that's very different from the old time travel feature. Edit: missing word ------ simonw I like how every commit message is formatted as a problem and a solution: [https://github.com/PumpkinDB/PumpkinDB/commits/master](https://github.com/PumpkinDB/PumpkinDB/commits/master) ~~~ jdiez17 Indeed, it's a neat "hack" to force yourself to write better commit messages. I think this style of commit messages originated from the zeromq community: [https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/commits/master](https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/commits/master) [https://github.com/zeromq/zproto/commits/master](https://github.com/zeromq/zproto/commits/master) ~~~ yrashk Yes, I picked this style up form Pieter Hintjens ------ makmanalp Very interesting! I think one thing that this would benefit from is a lot of usage examples, especially around pumpkinscript. I was reading recently about MUMPS and Caché and it's interesting to see a modern implementation of similar ideas. One question - what is the storage layout like? Do you have plans to support efficient range queries at all? ~~~ yrashk We definitely need better documentation! That's for sure. We only did a basic one just to get the basics out. As for the layout -- everything is built around btree k/v, and the original idea behind PumpkinDB is to give primitives that are useful in building databases, indices in particular. The expectation is that, over time, we will grow our library to have more sophisticated primitives, including ready-made indices of different kind. Does this help? ------ playing_colours Written in Rust :) Inspiring, I am learning Rust now to try implementing HDFS- like storage. ------ nik736 What's an actual use-case for this? I am reading the documentation but still don't see why I should use it and what the actual advantages compared to current solutions are. ~~~ yrashk It was built as a kind of a database constructor for event sourced / journalled systems. It's design inspiration is largely stemming from MUMPS which provided a great ("oddly productive") combination of a database and a programming language. Being a constructor it's also a great tool for building applications with a better control over querying mechanics (since everything is actually described in PumpkinScript) ------ fiatjaf I don't get this whole "never overwrite data" thing, including Datomic, for example. Isn't the disk space needed for these schemes enormous? ~~~ solidsnack9000 I have reservations, too: it's important to be able to remove data even though disk is cheap. * Removing very old data is a reasonable hedge for user privacy. * Sometimes confidential data makes its way into the data set and needs to be removed. * Old event data is often not useful but can impact performance or cost just the same. For example, one needs to allocate an EBS volume on AWS volume with a certain level of performance; but the cost of that is `IOPs * GBs`, not `IOPs * useful GBs`. * Replicating and backing up the dataset takes longer and longer as the application grows. ~~~ yrashk I agree, this is an importabt aspect. Our plan in PumpkinDB is to add key value association retirement, subject to defined retirement policies. ------ digitalzombie Holy cow it's in Rust. I'm doing a thesis in Classification Trees, doing R and hoping to do the backend of the R package in Rust (it looking to be C++). I'll look through the source code of this to see it's tree implementation. Probably used the rust standard library's implementation of BTree? ~~~ elcritch Documentation says they use LMDB for the backend. Looking over the documentation, it looks like you could readily use pumpkin be directly to implement the database/datacaching scheme and interface with it from R. Unless your thesis is on implementation of B-trees, definitely try bootstrapping on something like this first. BTW, lmdb provides memory mapping which can be very fast for computations. ------ cestith Where would I use this in place of, say, Kafka and Samza? ------ stonewhite Looks very interesting. I'd love to use it once it supports Akka persistence. Is this on the roadmap? ------ JoelSanchez What an interesting commit message format.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The secret of IKEA's success - cwan http://www.economist.com/node/18229400?story_id=18229400&fsrc=rss ====== ffumarola I can't remember how many case studies I've read about Ikea through my Supply Chain Management program, but it's a lot. After taking those courses, it's such a wonder walking through the store. They really do try their hardest to pack everything in long flat boxes to cut down on transit costs, which has saved them a ton of money as oil costs rise. This is an interesting article in regards to their structure and its financial implications. Thanks for the read!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Initial Coin Offering - jhabdas https://hackcabin.com/deal/initial-coin-offering/ ====== sharemywin Let me start off by saying I'm in the process of putting a mining rig together. So, I'm long term bullish on Cryto. But, there's nothing to say that prices won't go up or down or sideways. It's good to take calculated risks but also don't be the last guy holding the tulip. diversification is important in investing.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Introducing CoVim – Collaborative Editing for Vim - jamesbritt http://fredkschott.com/post/50510962864/introducing-covim-collaborative-editing-for-vim ====== MetaCosm This is really damn cool. It just comes too late for me. I have adapted to shared tmux sessions -- that allow me to work with _shiver_ the dirty emacs users. ~~~ gingerlime same here, and tmux lets you share more than just your vim session. We use it regularly for pair programming, some times even in the same office, each one at his own computer. I liked that coVim launches its own server, so you don't rely on having to ssh to the same box, but at the same time, I imagine ssh should be safer. ~~~ jamesbritt What seems to be the key feature is the text coloring, which I don't think you can get using screen or tmux. ~~~ legind tmux supports 256 colors with the -2 flag. I just add an alias in my .bashrc to make this the default. ~~~ gingerlime I think he meant having different cursors, each with a different colour assigned to a person, and being able to use each cursor independently. not just colours in general... ------ nlh Very very cool. I like their approach toward file management -- "we'll get the multi-user data into a buffer; you deal with it from there." And now, of course, I'm wishing I had this before I switched my primary editor to SublimeText ;) Anyone know of a similar project for that? ~~~ btipling Floobits works with Sublime Text 2 and 3, emacs and vim and a web editor and Google Hangouts and integrates with GitHub + a permission model and a shared terminal. ------ rchiniquy So it's like Floobits but for only one editor? <https://floobits.com/> ~~~ pekk So Floobits is like this but it's somehow associated with a startup and doesn't have first-class support for vim? ~~~ songgao Does "first-class" mean it has to be the only one that gets all features and imply all other editors are second-class? ------ ciupicri Too bad it doesn't use the Infinote protocol just like Gobby [1] and Gedit. That way, everyone could use their own editor while working on the same document. [1] <http://gobby.0x539.de/> ~~~ benatkin It's a bummer, but it isn't the CoVim authors' fault that the Gobby developers chose irrelevance. [http://git.0x539.de/?p=infinote.git;a=blob;f=COPYING;h=b124c...](http://git.0x539.de/?p=infinote.git;a=blob;f=COPYING;h=b124cf581250c210960185e8fbf6c967a0538721;hb=HEAD) ~~~ codys I don't understand. You've linked to a copy of the LGPLv2.1 in infininote's git repo. Are you saying that their choice of licence primarily caused their product to be less popular? ~~~ benatkin No, I'm saying that it precludes it from being an obvious choice for a standard, since implementing that type of protocol isn't simple and there are editor writers who don't want to integrate LGPL code. ~~~ qu4z-2 Surely if it's LGPL you can just link against it, no? ------ tel I was really hoping, based on the title, that this would be a coeditor which types code to you. ------ andyl With CoVim, do all the co-editors see the same screen, or can they view different buffers?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Clinton’s encryption remark makes Silicon Valley nervous - BillShakespeare http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/clinton-encryption-comments-silicon-valley/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialm&utm_campaign=dlvr.it ====== MrZongle2 "Privacy for me but not for thee," says the former Secretary of State who used a private (rather than government) mail server for correspondence, possibly in violation of the law.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What are you favorite tiny tools? - seanlinehan Everybody I know has a set of little software tools that they use that make their work either slightly easier or slightly more pleasant.<p>What are the tiny tools that you use for your work?<p>Some of mine:<p>Skitch -- Little Mac app that makes it easy to take screenshots and draw/write on them<p>Be Focused -- A simple Pomodoro timer for Mac<p>"Remove Stickies" -- A URL bookmarklet I wrote that removes all floating elements from a page ====== yesenadam bash, AWK, sips. A couple of bash commands I use daily: _cdf_ \- change directory to the folder open in (Mac) Finder cdf () { currFolderPath=$( /usr/bin/osascript <<EOT tell application "Finder" try set currFolder to (folder of the front window as alias) on error set currFolder to (path to desktop folder as alias) end try POSIX path of currFolder end tell EOT ) echo "cd to \"$currFolderPath\"" cd "$currFolderPath" } #dlm - "dlm filename" downloads filename.mp4 from URL in clipboard until its finished, resuming if interrupted fname=$(pbpaste) echo "Download $fname as $1.mp4 : " until curl -C - -kLo $1.mp4 "$fname" do sleep 5 done ~~~ cuchoi Where do you put this bash script? ~~~ JonathanMerklin ~/.bash_profile is the macOS equivalent of a .bashrc It's also possible that the author is source-ing it (spelled that way intentionally :\\) ) from another file in their .bash_profile Note also that the author of the comment above was fast and loose with their description of dlm, and if you copypaste it as-written, it'll bomb. (Perhaps obvious, but you did ask where to put it!) ~~~ yesenadam Ah thank u, yes, sorry. I have dlm saved as a shell script file. I didn't paste here the first-line bash shebang, which would have made that clearer. Maybe I use most: alias ..='cd ../' Then ".." moves up to the parent directory. ------ schappim I'm surprised no one has mentioned Alfred App [https://www.alfredapp.com/](https://www.alfredapp.com/) I cannot give it enough upvotes! ~~~ teknico You could have added a description, though, so that uninterested people don't have to click the link. Here it goes: "Alfred 3 for Mac Alfred is an award-winning app for Mac OS X which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac." ~~~ orcs Sounds like autohotkey. ------ LVB The ‘z’ directory switching bash script is usually the first thing I miss when away from my own environment: [https://github.com/rupa/z](https://github.com/rupa/z) ------ ivanmaeder Colour picker: [https://sipapp.io/](https://sipapp.io/) Download videos from YouTube and other sources: [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/) (was the only way I could get a video from the BBC site recently) Chrome extension for taking a screenshot of a full web page: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/full-page- screen-c...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/full-page-screen- capture/fdpohaocaechififmbbbbbknoalclacl?hl=en) Shameless plugs: Script for renaming multiple files at the same time: [https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv](https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv) Button in macOS Finder for creating a file in the current folder: [https://github.com/ivanmaeder/finder- touch](https://github.com/ivanmaeder/finder-touch) That last one written in AppleScript which is craaazy. ------ enjayz Avid fan of [https://htmlcolorcodes.com/](https://htmlcolorcodes.com/) However, since a while ago if you search "HTML color picker" google brings up a built-in color picker as the first result. ------ maio Caffeine - [http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/](http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/) Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu. ------ xelxebar Not precisely a tool, but YouTube channels actually have RSS feeds associated with them: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel-id> From your subscriptions page, you can even download an OPML with feeds for each channel. Most RSS will let you import this just fine. As I love the cli, my preferred reader is newsboat[0]. [0]: [https://newsboat.org/](https://newsboat.org/) ------ mbrock A little alias that rewrites clone foo/bar into git clone --recursive https://github.com/foo/bar is one of my favorites. ~~~ ioddly I like this one, here it is for Fish shell: [https://gist.github.com/upvalue/4f34df2397786535732a77676a72...](https://gist.github.com/upvalue/4f34df2397786535732a77676a726197) ------ tnolet Httpie - basically a nicer cUrl. Adding json and headers is super simple. [https://httpie.org](https://httpie.org) Puppeteer Recorder - tooting my own horn, but is a Chrome extension that records Puppeteer scripts. [https://github.com/checkly/puppeteer- recorder](https://github.com/checkly/puppeteer-recorder) ~~~ tarellel HTTPie is a great tool for testing API and stuff. I love it, I've also started using an Electron GUI app similar to HTTPie that works pretty well as well. \- [https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/) ------ superasn Video speed controller chrome extension. It lets you speed up videos on any site. I usually watch videos at 4x to 6x speed now (in addition to saving time I feel that I don't get distracted / daydream as much). Sadly it's like an addiction and now I even watch Netflix at 1.5X speed too (which makes it impossible to watch with family) ~~~ garyng I have this extension too, I usually watch videos at 2x (a way to be "productive" while watching youtube videos ). But I wonder how can one watch at 4x/6x... ~~~ Kagerjay The secret is captions. You speed read through videos. I still watch most dense tutorials at 2x speed though, and TV shows at 1x speed ------ beckler ngrok: [https://ngrok.com/](https://ngrok.com/) expose local servers to the public internet (super helpful for building webhooks) grpcurl: [https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl](https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl) awesome tools for testing gRPC services objective-see: [https://objective-see.com/products.html](https://objective- see.com/products.html) tons of awesome security tools for mac, for free! f.lux: [https://justgetflux.com/](https://justgetflux.com/) great tool to adjust the color of your screen depending on the time of day ------ mohitmun I extensively use [pngpaste]([https://github.com/jcsalterego/pngpaste](https://github.com/jcsalterego/pngpaste)) Now I can copy any images from browsers/screenshot into any location in terminal I want ------ dasmoth "paste" \-- an unexpectedly useful data-wrangling tool. I used a hand-rolled version for years before discovering it was available "as standard". ~~~ cuchoi link? ~~~ dasmoth [https://linux.die.net/man/1/paste](https://linux.die.net/man/1/paste) ------ jaclaz Generic resource (mac/OsX): [https://tinyapps.org/osx.html](https://tinyapps.org/osx.html) Cannot judge for Mac, but the selection of Windows little tools has traditionally been very good, the only Mac one I ever used (and it proved to work well) was WakeOnLan: [http://www.readpixel.com/wakeonlan/](http://www.readpixel.com/wakeonlan/) ------ msadowski For me it's tmuxp ([https://github.com/tmux- python/tmuxp/blob/master/README.rst](https://github.com/tmux- python/tmuxp/blob/master/README.rst)). It allows to create scripts for tmux sessions. It easily shaves off about 1 to 2 minutes of my time everyday. ------ amorphous Scapple - by far my favourite brainstorming / mind mapping / thought collecting tool. I use it every day. Features are just perfect, simple and useful. I combine this with monosnap screenshot tool so I can drag images into notes. (It's from the maker of Scrivener) ------ trevordixon I run [https://serveo.net](https://serveo.net). Lets you expose local services through a proxy server (a la ngrok), but uses SSH as the transport, so there's nothing to install. ------ txmjs BitBar ([https://github.com/matryer/bitbar](https://github.com/matryer/bitbar)) Allows you to create custom MacOS menubar items from the text output of any script. ------ mikebos Drafts 5 combined with workflow and Pythonista on IOS. For everything ranging from diary, personal crm, search adress/telephone number/e-mail in a given text, meeting notes and well almost anything. Very usefull combo ~~~ JHonaker What actions do you have set up? Would you mind describing it in a little more detail? (Particularly the Drafts stuff) ~~~ mikebos Sure. Diary: - Python script that fetches the diary template and fills it with information like location - With x-callback-url it is sent to drafts - in drafts I can edit the rest and have an action to upload it to working copy In drafts the action Call: With x-callback-url open pythonista and parse the text for a telephone number. Then that's sent to the call program Drafts Meeting notes: Launch python script. Scripts get the template from working copy and fills it with date and through a popup a Title. Want to change that so you can select the meeting from the calendar and have it filled in. Then sends it back to drafts. I have a vacation list drafts pulls from working copy. In drafts I have shortcuts to add that draft to due, Things or mail/whatsapp it. The drafts forums and resource directory are a good starting point. Once you add Pythonsita all bets are off it becomes the most versatile app on the phone. Working copy is nice to have so you don't have to deal with templates in java script code or with tags in draft itself. Apparantly a mac app is coming, currently a pc user, this would almost be enough to just get a mac :-) ------ Artemix I use kickstart to manage my templates, including projects ([https://github.com/Keats/kickstart/](https://github.com/Keats/kickstart/)) ------ filosofikode \- httpie -- command line HTTP client \- bat -- A cat(1) clone with wings ------ mstaoru smcFanControl - makes my old '14 MBP with replaced-almost-everything tolerably warm. menuBUS - for easy switching between built-in audio, Bluetooth, digital output + equalizing each of them in their own ways. Spectacle - for window management and easy fullscreen, half-screen and whatever-part-of-screen shortcuts. Karabiner - for complicated hotkey rebinding and controlling those Logitech presenter sticks where clever designer put a tiny "Close presentation and exit" key right next to "Next slide". LICEcap - for capturing screen to GIF files for easy sharing. ~~~ cortinaone +1 menuBUS is great. Too bad it's not being developed anymore. ------ designnomad Vanilla -- ‘hide Mac menu bar icons’ ([https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/](https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/)) Clocker -- ‘Menubar World Clock’ ~~~ designnomad CheatSheet -- ‘active short cuts of the current application’ ([https://www.cheatsheetapp.com/CheatSheet/](https://www.cheatsheetapp.com/CheatSheet/)) ------ albertgoeswoof [https://tab.bz](https://tab.bz) to share lists of links to other people as one link, or just across devices that aren’t synced ------ rusinov For Mac automation I use: Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Automator, AppleScript. Not a tiny ones, though. ------ jpincheira Jumpcut — macOS menubar clipboard manager with keyboard shortcuts Spectacle - macOS window resizer / manager ------ wingerlang Snappy - Let's you keep screenshot on-screen, annotate and so on.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
On failing: Crowdfunding an iPhone app - blacktar http://stopmebeforeiblogagain.com/on-failing-crowd-funding-an-iphone-app/ ====== gacba _Talking to people, the single most frequent first response is “I don’t get it”. Then we take the time to explain it and then they are like “Oh, I see. That’s cool”._ You said you failed to connect with people on an emotional level, but I would contend that you failed to solve a problem perceived by the customer. Only when you solve a customer's problem will you get that emotional connection. It's not something you need to work at, it's something you either succeed at doing, or fail. I would say that your application just didn't solve anything someone was looking for. Your questions led you down the wrong path. Your very first questions should have been: 1) What is the pain point that X have? 2) How can I solve that with an iPhone app? Where X is anybody you thought you were solving a problem for. ~~~ blacktar Thanks for the constructive feedback. We think we do have somewhat of a grip and significant feedback on what the pain point is that we were trying to solve: Shooting and sharing good videos with your mobile phone is hard and a lot of hassle and OneSec aimed to change all that. I do think we failed spectacularly to communicate that, though. ~~~ gacba I see, but the real question is this: "Do people wake up in the morning and say to themselves, 'Holy crap, how am I going to save and share videos today?'" I don't think they do, which is why this particular idea and implementation aren't going to gain any traction over what exists today. It's just not a strong enough pain point to be solved by an iPhone app. ~~~ blacktar Well, that's where we probably have to agree to disagree. I don't think the users of Instagram woke up and said "Holy crap, how am I going to save and share images today" either. ;) ------ sageikosa I like assumption 3: How efficient is spamming, mailing, tweeting, posting and otherwise contacting friends, fools, families, bloggers and journos? Result: Abysmal. If you stay in stealth mode for long periods of time prior to launch, the "amount of righteousness" in your vision/future-product and the conviction with which you believe this, will not help you overcome the impedance barrier of becoming part of the Internet zeitgeist. Sometimes, you do not appreciate how deep the water is (nor how fast it flows) until you step into it. ~~~ blacktar I think that we would have fared better if we had waited for some more traction (amount raised and already published in some places) before ramping up the spamming effort. But hindsight has perfect vision and the truth is we'll never know. ------ casca Thanks for publishing this, it's very instructive to see why people think things went wrong. My only question is why you feel that the answer to the most important question - "Is there any interest in this product in the market?" - is "Yes"? You've identified that they way you went about promoting and raising money could be improved, but assessing the biggest problem as one of promotion is not obvious. ~~~ blacktar The reason why I believe there's an interest in this product is 1. The amount of people who has contacted us because they want this product even after the campaign ended 2. The amount of private investors and potential partners that have contacted us after the campaign closed. If people want to pay for the creation of an iPhone app in a time were we're used to get them for free or next to nothing is another separate issue. ~~~ casca Thanks for the update. I hope that you didn't read that I was asserting that the interest wasn't there, just that it wasn't clear from the post. ~~~ blacktar No, not at all. No worries. :) I only wanted to be very clear about the reasons and sources of our assumption that there is indeed interest. ------ _lex I think half your problemwastgat you were selling something with a predictable market price of $0, and asking people to pay early. They woukd only pay if there's some huge, non- app based benefit for them, otherwise you'd wind up with tragedy of the commons (especially because normal people dont realize that apps take more than 2 weeks to make, and they see them as disposable). ~~~ blacktar Great insights! I think that's a very real problem. Do you think it is impossible to crowd fund a social / utility based app for the iPhone in general, or do you see a way to heighten the probability of a success? ------ blacktar Is it at all possible to crowd fund iPhone apps (that are not games)? I'd love to know more about your crowd funding experiences and your take on what we did wrong.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do you manage per-service emails with aliases? - lnalx With recent leak of Dropbox, I wake up upon the reality to have per-service emails along with aliases. My current email provider allow me only 3 aliases.<p>How do you manage your aliases? Which email provider providing a lot of aliases do you recommend? ====== detaro I have my own domain for that. Many providers offer wildcard aliases: all addresses not otherwise defined end up in one mailbox and then get sorted into folders (or blocked if the address has ended up on spam lists) ------ chrisked I love what the Fastmail guys are doing in beautiful Australia. I use their sub domain addressing instead of a + operator. [1] Example: somename@username.domain.tld. Just like with plus addressing, messages will be automatically filed into folders with a matching name. [1] [https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html) ~~~ tmaly very cool, thanks for sharing this. I was using the + method with Gmail, but for my own domain, this would be very useful. ------ celticninja The most convenient option is to use gmail and to preface the email address with service name and "+". So if your email is example@gmail.com, it becomes dropbox+example@gmail.com If you dont like gmail, just use it for signups, but as you can have 2FA on GMAIL it is reasonably safe for this sort of stuff. ~~~ lnalx Some forms does not allow "+" character and I do not think this is the best solution for privacy: Spammers can easily have your root address. ~~~ celticninja you can replace the "+" with "." for the same effect. Yes spammers can get your root address but they could get that anyway and you would not know where they got it, this way you can block all future messages to that address and avoid that particular service.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Serpico - ehwizard http://calacanis.com/2010/06/04/steve-jobs-mark-zuckerberg-and-serpico/ ====== sajid What's with all these random people posting open letters to Mark Zuckerberg? Delusions of grandeur seem to be running rampant...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Putting Apple’s iMac Pro Through the Paces - jseliger https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2018/01/06/putting-apples-imac-pro-through-the-paces/ ====== sudhirj It's interesting that development of the iMac Pro was already underway when Apple and pro users (mostly developers) had that big showdown after the touch bar came out. The touch bar seemed like the final slap in the face to the pro crowd, but this was already in the works then. Every pro review I've seen so far has been that's it's excellent - not because they're fawning over this or that, but just that's it's a solid option with a great screen at what's actually a reasonable price for the components inside. If you think the price is unreasonable, you're probably not the sales target for this machine - the ones who really need this, like in the case of this reviewer, are buying three at a time - just because. It's interesting because upgradability doesn't seem like a very big concern to anyone buying this - they're happy with that they're getting at the price they're paying. It almost seems like Apple needn't have promised everyone a new modular Mac Pro. If they'd just announced / launched this machine alongside the pointless MacBook Pro update, everyone would have been happy and with no accusations of taking the name of the Pro in vain. ~~~ DRW_ I'm not so sure the reviews would have been _quite_ so positive if they hadn't also announced they're releasing a 'modular' traditional Mac Pro. I think the knowledge that a new 'modular' Mac Pro is coming gives a different context to this machine. I think people are framing this on the idea that: if you want a quiet, good looking machine with a great screen and the other 'benefits' of an all in one (and don't mind the trade offs), then it's good to have this option. If the trade offs don't work for you, then wait for the more traditional Mac Pro. If it had been released without any mention of another option coming for pro users, then it would have been framed as "if you need workstation grade hardware running mac os, then your only choice is now an expensive, non- upgradeable all-in-one which has traded off performance for quietness and for other thermal constraints". ~~~ qubex I'm definitely in the category you describe: owing to ancient personal prejudices, I consider the idea of having one's computer integrated with the screen to be an utter abomination. I have trouble suffering the trend towards laptops and notebooks precisely for this reason, let alone the rise of the integrated all-in-one. Knowledge of the coming Mac Pro allows me to view this device with levity because I can view it as a herald of things to come in a more satisfying format; had I not known of the ‘imminent’ (end of 2018 or beginning of 2019) Mac Pro, I would have been utterly aghast at the idea of Apple pushing me towards the integrated solution. I tend to cram my computers with cards (not graphics cards, but things like SDRs and FPGAs) but what really does it for me is having the monitor built-in: I'm used to multiple monitor desktops, and I like both screens to be absolutely identical make and model. That clearly isn't possible when you have an all-in-one computer with no available ‘identical’ screen. Also, my computer belongs beneath my desk, and my monitors on top of it. It's just the preordained way. All else is heresy. ;) ~~~ lisper Also, computers and monitors have vastly different life cycles; the former become obsolete much faster than the latter. Binding them together physically forces you to replace one or the other either too soon or too late for absolutely no benefit. ~~~ madeofpalk At least the displays Apple ships are very _very_ good. Best in the industry. ~~~ lisper I agree. I was the very happy owner of an Apple Cinema Display that served me well for many, many years, and was still in perfect working order when I had to abandon it in favor of an ASUS display because I needed more resolution and Apple wasn't selling standalone displays any more :-( I want to be an Apple fan. I really do. But they are making it impossible for me nowadays. ~~~ lispm Apple has mentioned that the next Mac Pro will also have a matching display. I'm fine with a typical 4k display (or better). The panels of the better ones seem to come from LG anyway and are widely available on the market. I wonder if Apple would be selling a good quality 5k monitor with TB3, or if they go for a high-end 8k screen. Personally I'm not in the business for the highest end. LG has announced a bunch of TB3 screens, where the 4k 32" version would be sufficient for me. But LG lately has problems bringing their better screens in enough quantities to the market. Last years 32" 4k screen is still not widely available here in Germany. ------ poink > Secondly, you get a wireless mouse and extended keyboard. Both have to be > plugged in to charge. In the case of the mouse, the cable plugs in at the > bottom, rendering it useless during charging. Truly a bad design. The Magic Mouse 2 is one of the worst mice I've ever used, but the charging thing is a non-issue. The battery lasts like a month on one charge. Mine has never gone below 50%. ~~~ danieldk _The Magic Mouse 2 is one of the worst mice I 've ever used, but the charging thing is a non-issue. The battery lasts like a month on one charge. Mine has never gone below 50%._ This would be terrible for me, my battery always dies in the middle of the day, because I do not want to keep track of charging. Luckily, the Magic Trackpad 2 does not have this shortcoming and can be used with a lightning cable attached. (I absolutely love the Magic Trackpad 2. Not just because it is large, but some applications use haptic feedback. E.g. OmniGraffle uses a subtle vibration so that you feel when two objects are aligned.) ~~~ cmelbye You get nine hours of battery life from two minutes of charging for Magic Mouse 2. It's really not an issue. ~~~ chrisper Why does the magic mouse have fast charging but iPhones don't? ~~~ sitharus iPhones do have fast charging, see Power and Battery on [https://www.apple.com/iphone-8/specs/](https://www.apple.com/iphone-8/specs/) Also a magic mouse has much lower power drain, so the same amount of charge lasts much longer on the mouse. ------ duncan_bayne People wondering about the unit construction, lack of upgradability, etc. may be interested to know that the "sealed box appliance" mentality has been in Apple's DNA since the design of the _first_ Macintosh: [https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port....](https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.txt) "Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports." ------ bonestamp2 In defending their choice of macs, a decision that will likely come under fire no matter what, the author didn't even mention lower maintenance costs, which can mean more profit for the business if a machine would have been down otherwise. I suppose "solid and robust" would be the trait that leads to higher reliability. My boss personally hates macs, but he recently switched the entire office to macs because our IT service company's monthly maintenance fee is half price for macs. ~~~ jjoonathan Also, cheap parts and good youtube tutorials are more readily available for mac if you want to DIY. ~~~ walshemj I have looked at the diy tutorials for the later macs the ones that are made hard for end users to maintain - and they make installing custom cooling loops with hard tubing look simple. ~~~ jjoonathan There's no comparison to desktop PCs which, as you point out, are as simple as lego to build/fix and have part availability that puts lego itself to shame. I was really thinking more about laptops, where the need to peel/replace some glue is nothing next to the availability of parts. ~~~ jdietrich Most enterprise laptops are vastly easier to fix than Apple hardware. The manufacturers of these machines have thought carefully about repairability and designed it in from the start. For example, the Lenovo X270 opens with eight Philips screws. Once you're inside, you'll find an array of standard parts in standard sockets. Lenovo provide a detailed service manual and will sell you anything from a replacement fan to a new LCD from stock. The logic board isn't caked in BGA underfill and has a sensible level of density, so component-level repairs are vastly easier and less time-consuming. ~~~ jjoonathan It's good to hear that Lenovo treats you better than Dell treated me. Is this their policy in general or do you have to buy a megabuck enterprise service contract (i.e. the one bonestamp2 identified as not competitive)? ~~~ jdietrich Completely standard across the Think* line. Service manuals and diagnostic software is available to download directly - you don't even have to log in. You can buy all parts directly from Lenovo or from a distributor without a service contract and regardless of warranty status. Opening the chassis doesn't automatically void your warranty and the terms specifically state which parts you're allowed to replace yourself. The standard US warranty on ThinkPads is one year RTB, but you can upgrade to three years RTB for $99 or three years onsite for $159. International warranty coverage is an extra $10. The standard warranty in Europe is three years onsite. For minor faults, you can usually ask for replacement parts to be shipped for self-installation. ------ imagetic I'm happy to see something with professional specs coming from Apple. I have serious concerns with the iMac Pro in terms of heat while rendering for many days of the year. The Mac Pro trash can is notorious for overheating, so I'm not sad to see it go and I look forward to a new Mac Pro in 2018. The market for that unit will pay a premium for serviceability as well. I'm expecting a heavy price tag. It's nice to see a real world example of the iMac Pro in use. I do a lot of sustained renders for TV and feature length content. Our PCs run laps around our trash cans, but a mixed environment is far from ideal. We spend more time troubleshooting with editors than anything. I have more concerns about macOS High Sierra than anything at this point though. I've upgraded a few machines and we're seeing more crashes than ever. Sierra might have to be my staple for a long while. ------ phillco > At the distance that the editors sit from a 27” display, there is simply > little or no difference between the look of the 27” LED display and the 27” > iMac Retina screens. Eh? ~~~ GuiA The author seems to be well in his middle age, and wears glasses. His visual acuity might make his subjective experience irrelevant on that specific point. I can tell the difference between retina and non retina 27” on a desk (but I have 20/10 vision, which makes my subjective experience irrelevant for most people too) ~~~ matwood Yeah, I can also absolutely tell the difference and have a hard time using any non-retina monitor now. ------ mattbierner Even if you never upgrade the machine during its lifetime, you still have to pay Apple’s notoriously high ram and hard drive upgrade costs. Example: when I bought a new iMac last year, Apple was charging $1400 for 64GB of ram. That’s insane, so I went with the base and purchased my own. Took five minutes to install and saved around $800 if I recall ~~~ danieldk A large organization might not really care about dropping $1400 on 64GB of RAM if required when your employees cost $100,000 per year. ~~~ walshemj Never met a large organisation where purchasing cheaper OEM parts wasn't liked by the CFO ------ walshemj Would have been interesting to see the same benchmarks on similarly priced Threadripper workstation. ------ malchow I read in one review that, in addition to the non-upgradeability of the new iMac Pro, there is one real coup de grace: the beautiful integrated screen is not capable of being used as an external display for any future computer. If true, doesn't this strike you all as truly unnecessarily egregious? Why should an iMac Pro stuffed full of chemicals to show beautiful 5K images, never be capable of being used as just a display? Is there a good reason Apple customers have to buy brand new displays? This is worth asking because, unlike the components in the new machine, the display will probably be state of the art for a while. ~~~ prawn Isn't this already true of recent iMacs? I don't think you have been able to use them as dumb displays for at least 1-2 generations? ~~~ malchow I think you're right. But just as insane in that situation. Think of the work necessary to prevent that screen from ever being used to display a nasty video signal from –– gasp! –– another computer. It's just such an insult to customers. Am I crazy here? And isn't Apple supposed to be a company of environmentalists? ~~~ userbinator _Think of the work necessary to prevent that screen from ever being used to display a nasty video signal from –– gasp! –– another computer. It 's just such an insult to customers._ They just didn't bother adding the circuitry for "video in", due to cost; there is no active opposition here. For many years now, you can buy "LVDS converter" boards[1] which will let you use any display panel as a monitor. I'm sure demand will mean such boards appear for the iMac Pro displays soon, if the existing ones aren't already compatible. I haven't looked too closely at this but the display might even be eDP or similar, which means only a physical converter is necessary if you want to connect a DP output to it. That's been done with iPad displays before[2] [1] [http://www.ebay.com/bhp/lvds-hdmi](http://www.ebay.com/bhp/lvds-hdmi) [2] [https://hackaday.com/2013/04/22/connect-a-retina-display- to-...](https://hackaday.com/2013/04/22/connect-a-retina-display-to-a-regular- computer/) ------ revelation _In my next test, I took a 4½-minute-long 1080p ProRes file and rendered it to a 4K /UHD (3840×2160) H.264 (1-pass CBR 20Mbps) file._ So this is why those media pros need that computing power and resolution.. ~~~ burntwater For projection mapping, my large, well-known theater uses a 14,000x14,000 pixel canvas. Every frame is a little over 500MB. ~~~ pvdebbe Those sizes surely warrant a small render farm and not just beefed-up workstations? ------ walterbell Can iMac be used as an external monitor for a Macbook? ~~~ milankragujevic No, retina iMac models don't support target display mode anymore. You can get a pretty expensive Dell 5K display and use that with a Macbook... ~~~ JimDabell MacBooks don't support 5K resolutions, so it would be a bit wasteful to buy a 5K monitor for one. Are you sure you're not confusing it with the MacBook Pro? ~~~ milankragujevic I was using the term "MacBook" to mean a generic Apple laptop, not the 12" Retina MacBook with Core M processor. ------ nickpeterson I want to see an apple designed chip running full out (no real thermal restrictions like in iPads/iPhone/Apple TV). Those chips already compare pretty favorably to Intel, and running at 3+GHz would likely have great single threaded performance. I actually believe we're going to see MacOS for arm and a mac mini running an arm chip, it makes too much sense for Apple not to do it. ~~~ JohnBooty I know what you mean, but I'm not sure that's the way forward. My understanding is that when you start really cranking up CPU speed -- let's say, with an imaginary 3.5ghz version of whatever their latest iPad Pro CPU is -- now you're just spending all your time waiting for RAM. So you need fancier and fancier speculative execution hardware in order for the CPU to have something, anything to do. You get into that game, and you wind up with as many transistors on a chip as Intel and AMD, hitting the same performance walls as Intel and AMD have been hitting for a long time. What Apple _could_ do is just go super wide, of course. Instead of bumping up the clock speed, they could cram 16 of those iPad Pro cores into a Macbook or whatever. Which would be fun, but for most workloads, those cores will just be idle most of the time. ------ nottorp > The AME version kicked in the fans on the iMac. Interesting... so they're noticeable. Anyone around who has (access to) an iMac Pro and can comment on the fan noise? ~~~ macintux I noticed that too, but the author said iMac, not the iMac Pro. ~~~ nottorp Ah you're right. Wasn't the Pro. But my question still stands. ------ microcolonel > _But is this really an issue? I’m sure Apple has user research numbers to > justify their decisions._ They also have a direct incentive not to make user memory upgrades an option. It's a bit too charitable to think they're not supporting it because they somehow know nobody would want to do it anyway. ------ Apocryphon Ultimately, isn't the iMac Pro just a stopgap pro because the true upgraded desktop is coming out this year? ~~~ macintux Plenty of people will be happy with the iMac Pro. If the number of people who'll pay $5k for a computer that will be much less useful in 3 years is relatively constrained, the number who'll pay $5k for a computer they expect to treat as a stopgap for a few months is miniscule. There's no indication that Apple thinks it's a one-off: there's a lot of custom engineering in there. ------ amelius Does it have an Intel processor? ~~~ yoz-y Yes. Intel Xeon. All of the benchmarks use the os already updated for meltdown too. ------ mailslot "...there is simply little or no difference between the look of the 27” LED display and the 27” iMac Retina screens." I feel sorry for the author, because your eyes have to be shit to come to come to this conclusion. If I remove my contact lenses, then yes, there is no difference. I'm sure the difference in color gamut is no big deal to someone with colorblindness either. ~~~ sudhirj Think the author is just saying that editors sit past the Retina boundary on for the 27" LED. Have added another comment above with links.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Stackable Permanent Life Improvements - bro-kaizen http://bro-kaizen.github.io/blog/2014/11/19/stackable-permanent-life-improvements/ ====== mpbm That's a good start, but the framework needs development. For example, it doesn't explicitly account for the fact that SPLIs require exertion, and exertion requires recuperation. Nor for the fact that, like all investment, SPLIs require a subjective risk/reward calculation. Arguably there are "basic" SPLIs like "learn to say NO to yourself" that are prerequisites to "advanced" SPLIs. Even engaging with the concept of SPLIs is itself a SPLI. ------ k__ lol, I didn't know squatting is a meme. Started it 4 months ago after visiting /fit/ for about 3 years. But now I'm reading about it in totally unrelated places.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Java Fork/Join Framework - dedalus http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/papers/fj.pdf ====== ExpiredLink Doug Lea from 2000? [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.1...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.1918)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Avro: A Format for Big Data - jhammerb http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/11/02/avro-a-format-for-big-data/ ====== jhammerb Digg will be hosting an Avro hackathon on Thursday, November 19. Sign up if you'd like to hack! <http://avrohackathon.eventbrite.com/> ------ jbr Can someone with more experience with these formats compare Avro to BERT/BERT- RPC? Is that an inappropriate comparison?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: React Pattern Book – A low maintenance pattern library/style guide - holloway https://springload.github.io/pattern-book/# ====== noway421 So is this a package which builds a page showing a design system based on your existing CSS? Interesting, I think the landing page could explain this better. The demo link above helps a lot, I think it should be more prominent in your copy. Also name confused me to think it was an actual physical/digital book i can buy off amazon... Great work! ~~~ holloway Yes, that's right. It requires someone to wrap the HTML in '<Book>' tags but then it can autodetect the CSS Rules applied and display them. I'm working on a new version of the homepage -- it's a hard concept to describe. ------ Kuraj Sorry but I have a really hard time understanding what this does from the readme alone ------ zaidf Demo link shows a blank page in Safari iPhone ([https://springload.github.io/lic-pattern- library/](https://springload.github.io/lic-pattern-library/)) ~~~ hn_user2 Not just iPhone. Safari on MBP also just a blank page. ~~~ holloway This should be fixed now (sorry but it took a while to find an iOS device to test on) ------ cryptozeus Didn't realize book on the top is a demo and you can actually click on it. Just one suggestion, dont try to create tgis red color busy background...u have a good idea here, just keep the page simple. Rivht now its confusing and hard to read on mobile phone ------ uhuru Who really want to use any fb's products after this data privacy violation scandal ? ~~~ lowtolerance Facebook isn’t getting anything out of me using their open-source JavaScript library that they couldn’t get anyway.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
#Lighten Up – the colour of skin, in cartoons - hunglee2 https://thenib.com/lighten-up-4f7f96ca8a7e ====== Nadya Maybe this is common, part of a larger picture, but the story is presented as a more isolated incident and I will treat it as such. There was no racism in her words to "lighten the skin tone" \- only a misunderstanding of _who_ the character is. The editors own response: "I was told she was Latina and white." The author's believes: "Mexican father and African-American mother" Obviously the author would create a darker skin tone if the character is half- black. But why retain that same darker skin tone if the character is half- white? The author then cites 3 examples of "Latina skin tones" and ignores the "and white" part of the editor's statement about the character. He should have clarified with the editor "by Latina do you mean Mexican? Or Dominican? Brazilian? Latina is like saying "Asian". It's too broad." That's a failure on the editor's part for lack of specificity. I question his choice of darkness for Dominicans, they are not that toned unless they have also have African roots. I feel he only did that to try and stress "darker skin tones" to justify his usage of a "darker latina". The editor and author both have different viewpoints on this specific characters ethnicity. The author believes she is hispanic and black, the editor believes she is latina (probably hispanic) and white. Due to the "characters changing over the years". So now the issue of lightening up the skin comes down to who's view on the character is the "right" view. If the editor is _wrong_ and the character is hispanic+african - then don't lighten the character. If the editor is _right_ and the character is hispanic+caucasian then it might make sense to lighten the character. No racism. Simply a misunderstanding of "who" this character is.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tell HN: Touch typing on a touch screen - piano? - JBiserkov Yesterday a friend showed me his iPad. He said something like "You can't touch type, of course." That seemed wrong at the moment, but I didn't want to argue.<p>This morning I awoke with a thought: Assuming the device can't provide tactile feedback, what about auditory? What if the device acted like a piano?<p>Feel free to expand/implement this idea and/or tell me it's been tried before and why it won't work. ====== makecheck The iPad keyboard can make "click" sounds as you type (though this can be turned off, or the device may be muted). I do find the extra sound to be helpful.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Going hungry affects children for their whole lives - pseudolus https://mosaicscience.com/story/food-poverty-nutrition-health-austerity-child-development-diet-benefits/ ====== urbanslug > Hunger during childhood can have a ripple effect that we are only just > beginning to understand. I come from Africa and I attend talks at a medical research lab, many of which often end up involving malnutrition for obvious reasons. I have seen a lot of research talking about how malnutrition affects kids intellectual abilities, immunity and more. This is not a problem we are just begining to understand. [Edit] It's also fairly common knowledge that children who get malnourised never catch up in many facets of life. ------ joefourier I am struggling to understand how not having enough money for food is possible in a first world country. You can feed yourself for about $1 a day per person with careful budgeting, or $30/month. That is the equivalent of 3 hours of work at minimum wage in the UK, and if that is an amount an individual is unable to spare, then that person clearly qualifies for governmental assistance, especially one with three dependent children. EDIT: See below comment for satisfying the calorie requirements on $1 a day, or consider that you can get 1 kg of rice for £0.45 which contains 3,650 calories. ~~~ sethammons Rewind about, jeeze, nearly 20 years for me. A dollar a day is pretty much what I narrowly avoided starvation on. I got by on about $20/mo (in addition to free food). I would heat a solitary potato in a toaster oven for breakfast. Just the potato. After bumming a ride to high school, I would wait until lunch. I had Free Lunch (I was poor). That was usually a hamburger, a milk, and something resembling some kind of vegetable approximation. I would steal one additional hamburger and sell it for $0.50 or $0.75 (don't recall which) which was a deal to the other person. On the way home, I would stop by the store and turn that profit into a single can of Campbell's soup. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes, I could not get a hamburger to steal, so no dinner. Nothing on the weekend unless I could bum food at friend's houses (worked out more often than it probably should have). When I got to university, I could reliably get closer to $2/day and that meant that I could get a Jumbo Jack and two tacos for lunch. If I chose to not eat for a few days, I could get a Little Caesar's pizza. There were periods of more food or less. Things got better over time. By my second year at university, my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I (and our small kid) were eating regularly. I think our budget was $30/week. I put on like 60lbs in two or three months. I had folks I barely knew tell me I was looking better. But man, I can recall just wanting enough liquidity to be able to afford a dang pizza. That lasted until well after getting my degree. ~~~ oarabbus_ If you don't mind me asking or answering, what put you in such dire circumstances growing up? Low income family, or were there other factors? Totally understand if you prefer not to discuss. ~~~ sethammons Happy to talk about most of it. It was my normal then. I like me, and my history is part of that, so, yeah, no worries writing a bit about it. Low income for sure. At one point, my dad took off to go live with his girlfriend and that left me at the house. He eventually came back, but I was on my own for quite a while. I did not have a vehicle yet and we were 10 miles outside of town in a small mountain community. Kinda hard to get a job. I heated my water and cooked my food on a wood burning stove and took cold showers for a while. I would usually get rides to school from my buddy down the street. If he couldn't, then I'd ask a neighbor. The other part to understand is this did not feel "dire" \-- only in retrospect as a well-to-do software developer am I like "yeah, I guess that was abnormal." It is part of who I am. So, more crazy story time. When my dad took his hiatus, he left the house in a state of semi-construction. He had tore down a wall to do some addition (really, no clue how he was planning on affording that). That made heating kinda hard in the mountains in winter haha. Winters would get down into the 20s (f) at times. I mostly kept to the back bedroom at that point (where the wood stove was) and took some plastic sheeting and made a partial barrier to channel some heat into the restroom. I once came home to find that raccoons had tore up all my food stores. As I was cleaning up, they tried to come back to get "their" food. Stubborn things. I was throwing stuff and shouting at them and they were just like, "yo, bro, you done? we gots to eat." Finally ran them off. Learned to be better about how I stored any extra food I might scavenge up. To add some more color, this above was when I was about 17. Two years prior, I became a dad. So my then-girlfriend-now-wife (still together 20+ years later, and I'm paying for my oldest to go to college which feels nice) was living at a way different spot on the mountain. So I would get rides for the ~50 miles or so over to her place on weekends when I could. I did not live with her at the time for a couple of reasons. Most of which was I was determined to graduate high school and get into college, but also her situation was not much better than mine aside from some state aid. Eventually, graduated high school, got a (nearly) full academic scholarship to a nearby university. By the second year, an uncle had given me a small truck so I was mobile and able to do graphic design work for the university. My wife and I were able afford a (very) small wedding and move in together. Things have been hard, but they always are getting better. I've worked in photography and design during school, after in insurance, stocks and mutual funds, I've been a math teacher, did some construction, and most recently I am a software developer. I've really found my calling here and I have been blessed with a fantastic company to work for, great friends at work, a healthy family (now three kids), and a very supportive wife. We are living the dream and we are so very far removed from our humble beginnings. It really was a lifetime ago. I really don't regret a thing (though it would have been nice to have been as well off as we are now much earlier haha). I've known folks with really messed up history and I've heard real horror stories of how others have grown up. My story is really not all that bad. ------ mruts My wife is an evolutionary anthropologist and she says that you set your baseline for life under the age of 5. Things like metabolism, reproductive strategies, etc. There is this great study of Indian girls adopted from an orphanage into Western families. After being adopted, the girls reached menarche at the ages of 7 or 8. The evolutionary signals are clear: if you are starving and then get a huge influx of calories, your body interprets this as temporary so you better reproduce while the going is good. ~~~ maerF0x0 I didnt downvote, but a source/link would be interesting ~~~ mruts This one of them. Apparently it’s been replicated a couple times. [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a6eb/0fba1aa656d7f4f9617c7d...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a6eb/0fba1aa656d7f4f9617c7d35915807f58b94.pdf) ------ babyslothzoo Food addiction, overeating, and the resulting obesity also affect children (and adults) their whole lives, leading to immense increase in disease and a shortened lifespan, amongst other problems. What a strange situation we have where there are people simultaneously starving with insufficient food and nutrition, and also a massive population that is dramatically overfeeding their way into catastrophic health problems. ------ aszantu my guess would be that the protein will be too low and the quality of carbs are bad at poor households. my depression went away after switching to high fat/no carb with at least 20 gramms of protein per meal. So poor people prolly get more calories from refined sugar and cheap carbs. When younger, I was hungry in school and would sometimes be in pain from it. Never stopped worrying about food ever since. Most of my anxiety is gone now, but I keep cat food just in case and insects(mealworms) as a secondary food source should things ever go so bad that everything falls appart. ~~~ jandrewrogers The nature of "poor people food" varies widely depending on where you are and what is cheap locally. Rural poor, for example, often have game animals and garden vegetables as a significant part of their diet, which is pretty healthy as such things go. When I lived in the Palouse, lentils and peas figured prominently because those were local crops and therefore approximately free. The diets of the urban poor are admittedly worse in my experience. ~~~ maerF0x0 +1-ing on that to add also "poor" sometimes means access, not $ . For example some "food deserts" exist where the most available food is also the least healthy. ------ musicale Fortunately in the US we have largely replaced hunger with obesity. ;-( ------ irrational What about kids that choose not to eat? I served chicken cordon bleu last night and half the kids revolted and decided that going to bed hungry was better than eating. Seriously though, our middle child won't eat anything. He basically subsist on baby carrots and chicken nuggets. He's been like that since he was 3 years old. We thought he'd eventually outgrow it, but he is 14 now and is about 18" shorter than all his peers. We've taken him to doctors and psychologists and other people who specialize in this kind of stuff to no avail. I can't help wondering if he will be similarly affected as mentioned in the article. ~~~ RHSeeger My daughter won't each cheese. Except for mac-and-cheese, and cheese raviolis, and a dozen other things that have cheese. Basically, anything she liked before she decided she didn't like cheese, or that she didn't know had cheese before she decided she like it. How do you not like cheese?!? It took over year to convince her that pizza had the good type of cheese. ~~~ grawprog Sounds like my sister. She never got over it. Still hates cheese. Eats many things with cheese in it, unless the cheese is extremely prominent. She'll eat a pepperoni and cheese pizza, but not a straight up cheese pizza for example. ~~~ swsieber I'd be tempted to make her sausage pizza every time she came over and just slowly reduce the amount of sausage on it ever time... (or mini-pepperoni - the important thing is that it's small). ------ blancheneige TLDR for those of us who have a job? ~~~ BlackLotus89 > In one six-year study, McIntyre and colleagues found that young people who > had experienced hunger had a significantly higher risk of developing > depressive symptoms. And another large analysis showed that children who > went hungry were similarly at risk of developing some kind of health problem > within the next ten years. Hunger, the researchers wrote, had a “toxic” > effect: ~~~ blancheneige Thanks. I wonder if child hunger and subsequent depression are really just two symptomatic manifestations of the same underlying cause (e.g. socioeconomic issues increasing the likelihood of either) rather than being causally related.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Venezuela’s Supreme Court Consolidates President Nicolás Maduro’s Power - protomyth http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/world/americas/venezuela-nicolas-maduro.html ====== andrenth With the Supreme Court in the pocket of the dictatorship, there's very little hope for Venezuela. The totalitarian ascent to power was applauded by the armchair revolutionaries of the left wing intelligentsia in South America and elsewhere. There is a time when you have to stop being naive and believing this is "good intentions gone bad". What's happening in Venezuela and almost happened in Argentina and Brazil is exactly what the totalitarians want: to seize power and sustain the political elite. All, of course, in the name of the masses. ~~~ marcoperaza > _The totalitarian ascent to power was applauded by the armchair > revolutionaries of the left wing intelligentsia in South America and > elsewhere._ Don't forget former US President Jimmy Carter, who rubber stamped Chavez's rigged[1] elections and even wrote an obituary gushing with praise and admiration for the evil tyrant. [1] There's better ways to rig an election than stuffing ballot boxes. That's so primitive and risky. The modern way to rig an election is to control the media, force or entice them to say nothing but positive things about you, while burying your opponents with false or misleading claims. ------ jimmywanger The problem here is that the opposition is still trying to go through the proper channels specified by the constitution. They don't realize that the incumbent party already controls all the rules and the processes. It's like when Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown. The opposition still doesn't realize that when the time comes, Maduro and his cronies will simply yank the ball away again. There is very little chance for a constitutional, non-violent change in power. ~~~ scorpioxy I agree. I have family still living there so watching out for when it is going to start. When people start dying because of lack of food and medication, I can't imagine a transition happening without spilled blood. Also, the army and supreme court are still supporting him so what "democratic" means can you really resort to? ~~~ burfog Would you happen to know if the tribes in southern Venezuela are pretty much unaffected? Some of them seem to be living as people have been living for thousands of years, rather disconnected from the modern world. ~~~ jimmywanger I've read this book : [https://www.amazon.com/Noble-Savages-Dangerous- Yanomamo-Anth...](https://www.amazon.com/Noble-Savages-Dangerous-Yanomamo- Anthropologists-ebook/dp/B006VJN2FE/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital- text&ie=UTF8&qid=1477016082&sr=1-4&keywords=Yanomamo) It seems as though even those tribes have been prizing western technology, like fishhooks, shotguns, and machetes. Those are valuable trade goods. Maybe they've sort of forgotten in the past few generations how to get by without those tools? Living in a jungle is hard as hell, and a machete and a shotgun sure do make a big difference.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Deaths by horsekick in the Prussian army – and other ‘Never Events’ - DanBC https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anae.13261 ====== DanBC I suck at editing titles to fit the 80 character limit. This title was _Deaths by horsekick in the Prussian army – and other ‘Never Events’ in large organisations_ which is 10 characters too long. This article talks about NHS "Never Events". These are things that must never happen; there's never any excuse for them to happen, and NHS organisations should prevent them from happening. They are short and tightly focussed. Here's the NHS Improvement page that gives the list of never events, and talks about the policy: [https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/never-events-policy- and...](https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/never-events-policy-and- framework/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How To Choose A Good Mobile Ad Network - connochristou http://www.avocarrot.com/blog/choose-good-mobile-ad-network/ ====== markovbling The article speaks to the characteristics of good mobile networks but does not mention any actual networks - do you have any suggestions on say the top 3 mobile ad networks in the USA?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Should Disney World Have the Right to Build a Nuclear Power Plant? - cienega https://www.citylab.com/environment/2019/05/disney-build-nuclear-reactor-orlando-florida-legal-history/587950/ ====== munk-a I really wish nuclear power would stop getting all this unnecessary hate - apparently in the grand canyon there was a bucket of uranium[1] sitting in a storage closet, this wasn't particularly dangerous but far more dangerous than a well regulated power plant would be. We need to stop being irrational about the power source that may end up saving the planet. [1] [https://www.npr.org/2019/02/19/696001017/grand-canyon- museum...](https://www.npr.org/2019/02/19/696001017/grand-canyon-museum- reportedly-had-buckets-of-uranium-sitting-around-for-18-year) ~~~ tobib There is also the problem of nuclear waste being highly radioactive for thousands of years and us not knowing how to deal with it properly. ~~~ aeneasmackenzie 1\. Dig a hole 2\. Put a fence around the hole 3\. Put a sign on the fence saying "if you cross this fence you will die" 4\. Put radioactive waste in the hole 5\. Cover the hole It's not a complicated problem. ~~~ D_Alex "We cannot guarantee that any simple or complex message, even when recognized and correctly interpreted, will deter a human being from inappropriate action." From [https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access- control.cgi...](https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access- control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf) See also [https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place- of...](https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/) ~~~ mc32 Unless humanity reverts to a pre industrial state, future inhabitants should have tech to detect radioactive material —just as we can now. If we fall to a pre industrial state, it’s doubtful we’d be able to get to the buried waste material like Yucca mountain. ~~~ toper-centage Just add Geiger sensors to phones. If it goes beyond a certain level, you lose data connection. Then watch the people flock away. ------ mimixco The legal machinations Disney went through to secure the site for The Florida Project, as it was then called, are unprecedented and will never be repeated. Disney _is_ the government there. The rationale was that Disney knew more about safety and engineering than the cities that surrounded the property. And you know what? They were right. A drive through the area will make it obvious as soon as you hit Disney property (40 sq miles or larger than Manhattan, BTW). It's cleaner and safer with better roads, signs, and landscaping. There are no overhead power lines, for example. Even their parking lots are smarter with sensors that lead you to the nearest empty space. Having said that, I don't think they would ever attempt a nuke plant and I'm glad about that. ~~~ munk-a > Having said that, I don't think they would ever attempt a nuke plant and I'm > glad about that. I'm... not? If they did it well they could demystify and de-...demonize nuclear power and maybe return some of that "Magic of Science" feeling they were famous for before the 90s. Disney was a real innovator back in the day, I'd be quite happy to see them take on nuclear power and do it well - maybe with a Gen4 reactor like thorium MSR. ~~~ mimixco I'm not sure tritium-laced drinking fountains would go over well with Disney's safety team, nor their guests. ~~~ AnimalMuppet There _might_ be possibilities between "no nuclear power plant" and "tritium- laced drinking fountains". ~~~ mimixco That would be great! Let's get that tech for Turkey Point. ~~~ acct1771 Can you elaborate? Also, credit where credit is due: "Turkey Point has been a contributing force to the reclassification of the American crocodile from endangered to the less serious category of vulnerable." \- Wiki ~~~ mimixco Yes. It leaks radioactive tritium, like the vast majority of nuclear plants. ------ wizardforhire I mean yeah I get the immediate fear monger response to the contrary a headline like this is meant to illicit, but... nuclear power plants are already built but private companies. Disney clearly has the capitol and I can think of no better company to run a nuclear power plant than disney! Think of their proven track record and commitment to maintence, and the culture that inevitably has had to subsequintly evolve to maintain that commitment to maintenance. Seriously there’s not another company like them that’s even in the same ballpark as to the level to attention to detail that they’ve been able to pull off for over half a century! ------ FireBeyond > It created the Reedy Creek Improvement District, making Disney World its own > tightly controlled governmental entity with its own laws. Disney has the > power, for example, to create its own police force, even though it hasn’t so > far. It has, however, created its own Fire Department. ~~~ mimixco Actually, they do have their own police force and also an on-property jail. Nearly all Disney security personnel are undercover, dressed as tourists or other kinds of workers so as not to be off-putting to guests. The book _Vinyl Leaves_ is an incredible and comprehensive look at many of the secrets behind the Disney empire. ~~~ ceejayoz Security forces and police forces are not the same thing. Disney has both security - with no arrest powers - and contracts with Orange County Sheriff's Office to staff on-duty officers. "Jail" means a security office where they detain you while waiting for the cops to cart you off, just like a shoplifter at a store might sit for a few minutes in the manager's office awaiting the cops. [https://www.clickorlando.com/news/disney-world-law- enforceme...](https://www.clickorlando.com/news/disney-world-law-enforcement- spending-increases) ------ mjevans Yes, please, let them keep the option. In 20-50 years when we are actually willing to build these things the correct way again I want everyone to have that option. ------ Iv In Florida Walt Disney had a greater plan than another theme park. He wanted to try and provide a living experience, a prototype for the cities of the future. He died before this could happen but the original plans for EPCOT were epic: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_$concept$) That's why they wanted a power plant, to be independent from that externatlity. With Walt, that plan died. I am pretty pro-nuclear but that's probably not a bad idea to refresh an agreement made during the 60s and either revoke it or add some security constraints. The last thing you want if you are pro-nuclear is another scandal of a nuclear power plant being poorly handled. ------ taborj Youtuber Rob Plays did a video[1] about this as well [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEbqhJQKaVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEbqhJQKaVE) ~~~ mimixco Good one! Thanks. ------ ZhuanXia Disney was a great genius, and his charter city was extremely ambitious. It is amazing how far he got. I think he may have succeeded if he had lived. EPCOT is an insult to his vision. ~~~ mimixco His brother, Roy, and the other members of the Board _did_ want to do the full Epcot but they didn't think they could pull it off without him. ------ sunkenvicar There’s a surprising amount of FUDD in here regarding nuclear power. Nuclear power is the only serious option we have for clean, reliable, carbon-free power. A no-brainer if you believe in climate change. Generation 3 reactors have been in operation for decades, proving themselves perfectly safe. Bonus - they use nuclear waste as fuel. ~~~ thehappypm Realistically, hydro meets your three objectives (clean, reliable, carbon- free) with way less risk of irradiating a city or proliferating nuclear fuel generation. Advances in transmission line technology also enable hydro plants to be hundreds or even thousands of miles from power consumers. There's a project currently underway to connect a huge hydro plant in Quebec, where all the water from the Great Lakes drains to the Atlantic, to the New England market via a transmission line through Maine. ~~~ sunkenvicar Hydroelectricity is cheaper than nuclear, but relatively niche. It needs a lot of flowing water and a large change in elevation. In many places it is dead in the water. Compare this to nuclear, which only needs a large body of cooling water. Saltwater or fresh water, doesn’t matter. ~~~ thehappypm HVDC means you can literally be a thousand miles from the power plant. That's distance from the Hoover Dam to Kansas City. There's literally nowhere in America beyond the range of a viable hydro plant. ~~~ sunkenvicar Strange that America isn’t pure hydro. Also strange that so many startups ignore hydro and jump to nuclear. ------ bin0 The question is not "do they have the right", but rather should they be prevented via the government. Seeing as a coal plant (the other likely option) has impacts all its own, I think not. It is the lesser of two evils, if not a perfect good. ------ idlewords A forward-thinking Disney would buy the rights to the Simpsons and make a (mal)functioning nuclear plant the centerpiece of Springfield, FL. ~~~ FaisalAbid Disney owns Simpsons already! ~~~ laken Though, they don't own theme park rights! Fox previously sold theme park rights to Universal ------ valiant-comma From deep in the article: _Even Antone, who almost filed the bill that would nix the nuclear option, doubts that the step is necessary. His bill, he told CityLab, is aimed at making contract arbitration binding for Reedy Creek firefighters; the nuclear clause was likely added for leverage, he said._ ------ subcosmos Only if the fuel cooling ponds double as a "small world" boat ride. ------ ben1040 The fact that Disney controls their own governmental entity also means they have a cheaper cost of capital for (some) improvements. RCID can sell tax exempt bonds, which saves them money on interest. ------ poelzi You solve all the nuclear reactor bullshit by demanding full insurance coverage - nobody can effort this. Problem solved. ------ musicale No, it's just a cover for their missile program. ------ olivermarks No ~~~ olivermarks OK I'll expand on this since it was downvoted. Legislation, however old, allowing corporations to build nuclear power plants is a big no for me. Imagine Amazon or Apple building their own nuclear plants... ~~~ cookingrobot Letting them build sounds good to me. Nuclear power is safe when you want it to be, and we need more of it. ~~~ tobib There is still the problem of nuclear waste being highly radioactive for thousands of years and us not knowing how to deal with it properly. ~~~ admax88q Why do you think we don't know how to deal with it properly? What do you think we do with our current nuclear waste? What is "improper" about our current processes? ~~~ ionised > Why do you think we don't know how to deal with it properly? Is this a serious question? We bury it underground in vast bunkers with hundreds of warnings and ominous- looking signs inteded to warn people thousands of years into the future not to fucking open the thing. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository) Of course we don't know how to handle it. We basically dump nuclear waste in glorified landfills. Look how great that turned out for our regular waste that doesn't pose the grave threat of biological/ecological hazard. ~~~ admax88q Yes its a serious question. Why do you consider burying it in a vast underground bunker not a sufficient solution? You talk as if that's obviously a bad idea but to me it seems peefe fly reasonable. Yes there is some concern about people thousands of years from now not understanding the warnings, but the people during right now and in the near future due to coal and climate change seem like a bigger concern at the moment.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PLA Unit 61398 - wslh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Unit_61398 ====== bediger4000 Does anyone know where to buy Unit 61398 swag? You know: sticers, tee shirts, refrigerator magnets, tchotchkes like that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mr. Rogers vs. the Superheroes - axiomdata316 https://longreads.com/2018/09/19/mr-rogers-vs-the-superheroes/ ====== caro_douglos I've always been fascinated by how some children's book authors are able to bring up story lines which tap into feelings that arise at various ages (i.e death, divorce, etc). I watched Mr Roger's growing up but really had no idea everything seen was a smartly curated way to make children more empathetic and analytical. ~~~ JauntyHatAngle Honestly, I think most of society has a big blind spot on child education. I would wager most of society reckons child education - whether a book writer, media creator or a school teacher - is a pretty basic and run of the mill sort of job/thing to do. But more and more I'm seeing that it's a profession and an area that really requires a lot more thought and need for well trained professionals being given space to do their thing just like any other professions. Unfortunately, I really don't think people give them much respect, and/or funding for that matter. ~~~ pjc50 The great problem was the discovery of "pester power": children are particularly susceptible to advertising. That's why children's media tends to have selling toys as a primary objective, unless it's some sort of state- funded low-budget Reithian production. ~~~ kasey_junk Or if it’s books. ~~~ boomboomsubban I doubt that print would be immune from such advertising. Particularly kids books that often contain pictures. ~~~ emodendroket Print takes fewer people and less money to produce than a cartoon ~~~ boomboomsubban The incentive to make as much money as possible is still there. These ideas have been common in comic books for a century. ~~~ bunderbunder It definitely happens, and there are a lot of really bad children's books whose primary purpose is to fit into merchandising empires out there. But the ratio of quality work to crap is much higher in children's books than in other media. Especially if you stick to children's books that aren't attached to toys or other media. Compare, for example, anything Disney, where the books are often just a long series of nonsequiturs with barely any narrative structure, let alone emotional depth, to anything by Philip Stead. ------ lifeisstillgood This is especially true today. I have seen a critique of Marvels infinity war where (spoilers) Thanos needs to "sacrifice that he loves the most" to gain a special stone. So he throws his daughter off a cliff, and cries as he does. He "loved" her. People have pointed out that for an abused child sitting watching with her abuser, this reinforces the idea that the person who is harming her actually loves her ... a repulsive idea and perhaps as damaging as jumping off a roof with a towel. I guess "with great power comes great responsibility" PS not being American Mr Rogers is a mystery to me - can anyone recommend a documentary / example ? ~~~ kbenson > People have pointed out that for an abused child sitting watching with her > abuser, this reinforces the idea that the person who is harming her actually > loves her Maybe. But maybe the story that the abuser doesn't care about the victim isn't actually accurate, even if it is more useful for resolving the problem. I think it's entirely possible that a large class of abuse happens from abusers that do love and care about the victims, but are so screwed up in their own mind that they can't help themselves. That does lead to the interesting question, does continually asserting to the victim that the abuser doesn't care lead to helping the issue faster than asserting that they might care, but by allowing the situation to continue it harms both the victim and the abuser, and the best way to improve _both_ their lives is to be separated? Not that helping the abuser is the main goal, but if it helps to extricate the victim faster, that's a net win, and just because the abuser is not someone most people would find pity for doesn't mean they don't deserve _some_ help fighting their own demons too. Not that I think that's _necessarily_ true, but it would be interesting to know whether this is one more case where the common knowledge "best thing to do" is sub-optimal. ~~~ watwut > I think it's entirely possible that a large class of abuse happens from > abusers that do love and care about the victims, but are so screwed up in > their own mind that they can't help themselves. In that case, the abuse would be visible in public. If abuser is doing what he/she is doing in private only, then it reasonable to assume that abuser is in control. ~~~ francisofascii Not really. A person addicted to food, alcohol, porn, etc. is perfectly capable of keeping these addictions at bay in public, but lose control while in private. ------ juanuys The bit in the article about extending children's attention spans: > explains that Rogers deliberately lengthened scenes as the theme week > progressed, so that the children would get used to an environment that > extended their attention spans as they became more and more familiar with > the story line. I wish more content creators would do this. I'm amazed at how many jump-cuts there are in even the most innocent-looking children's programs (e.g. "Peppa Pig" here in the UK). ------ nikkiofearth This reminds me of Mr.Dressup ------ cjcole 'His feelings extended to programming of any kind, including advertising and entertainment watched by very young children. In a speech given at an academic conference at Yale University in 1972, Fred Rogers said, “The impact of television must be considered in the light of the possibility that children are exposed to experiences which may be far beyond what their egos can deal with effectively. Those of us who produce television must assume the responsibility for providing images of trustworthy available adults who will modulate these experiences and attempt to keep them within manageable limits.”' Seems quaint, if not positively prehistoric. ~~~ PostPost Children (by definition) are not fully developed human beings. It should be obvious that care should be taken in their development, and that there should be some burden of responsibility on those creating things specifically targeted at children. This is backed up by years of data. For instance, fast food ads aimed at children can have lifelong impacts on obesity and consumption habits: [http://www.apa.org/topics/kids- media/food.aspx](http://www.apa.org/topics/kids-media/food.aspx)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims as 'Entirely Willing' - bandrami https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing ====== nabla9 RMS has called himself "borderline autistic". I don't disagree. His socially clueless black and white thinking makes it look like he is far in the spectrum. On the other hand it's also his superpower. He does not care about social norms. RMS is anal about meanings of terms and their use. That's not working well in the current climate where words carry perceived intent. I find myself agreeing with RMS with most of the terminology and it's use in this case. On the other hand other discussions reveal that RMS has very bad understanding of developmental psychology, sexuality etc. and tries to to figure it out using reasoning which does not work when his model is broken. The lesson: If you are figurehead of some big cause, never talk aloud publicly about controversial subjects outside your field. Being a good figurehead means presenting a role to the public. All the stupid and loose talk paints the whole cause. ~~~ gaspoweredcat im very similar in that regard (i have ASD myself) socially inept, pedantic about terminology etc, but i learned to shut up and keep my opinions to myself as they often dont go down too well, challenging the social norms really does not sit right with a lot of people. ------ eesmith > RMS is anal about meanings of terms and their use. That's not working well > in the current climate where words carry perceived intent That would be well and good, except that he's talking about terms like "sexual assault" which have well-defined legal terms that fit the case at hand. Instead, he is re-defining legal terms in a way that don't fit the current actual intent of those terms. ~~~ rumanator > That would be well and good, except that he's talking about terms like > "sexual assault" which have well-defined legal terms that fit the case at > hand. You've got it entirely backwards. The whole point made by RMS is that the accusations do not fit the well-defined legal term, thus he pointed out which crime in fact does fit the accusation: statutory rape. ~~~ eesmith "Many states used the offense of sexual assault to replace conduct formerly defined as rape", ergo, Stallman is wrong. Here's my citation: [https://caselaw.findlaw.com/nm-court-of- appeals/1866619.html](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/nm-court-of- appeals/1866619.html) (italics added to show the source of the above quote) > 9\. The entry for “sexual assault” in Black's Law Dictionary provides two > definitions. First, “sexual assault” means “[s]exual intercourse with > another person who does not consent [,]” noting “[s]everal state statutes > have abolished the crime of rape and replaced it with the offense of sexual > assault. ”Black's Law Dictionary 138 (10th ed. 2014). Second, “sexual > assault”means “[o]ffensive sexual contact with another person, exclusive of > rape.” Id. > {22} The first entry in the dictionary narrowly defines sexual assault as > intercourse because, as noted, _many states used the offense of sexual > assault to replace conduct formerly defined as rape._ In New Mexico, the > crime of rape was not replaced with the offense of sexual assault. State v. > Keyonnie, 1977-NMSC-097, ¶ 5, 91 N.M. 146, 571 P.2d 413 (explaining that > “[t]he essential elements of the common law crime of rape, from which the > statutory offense of criminal sexual penetration was derived,” were carnal > knowledge or intercourse). Rather, the crime of rape was replaced with the > offense of criminal sexual penetration. Remember, Stallman argues that it is "absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation". Yet here we see that some jurisdictions use "sexual assault" as a replacement for the term "rape". And we see jurisdictions (like New Mexico) where "criminal sexual penetration" was used to replace the term "rape". Indeed, here's the law: [https://law.justia.com/codes/new- mexico/2013/chapter-30/arti...](https://law.justia.com/codes/new- mexico/2013/chapter-30/article-9/section-30-9-11/) . But are you seriously (outside of a technical and pointless argument) going to say that "rape" and "sexual assault" aren't illegal in New Mexico? So Stallman is wrong to say that "statutory rape" is the right legal term. At the very least he has to say that "it is not considered sexual assault in the US Virgin Islands" .. except the US V.I. laws _do_ use the term "sexual assault" so then he has to point to the US V.I. definition of "sexual assault" to show that it's the wrong definition. Which he did not. As another example, we can look at US military law, which distinguishes between "rape" and "sexual assault", at [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/920](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/920) . In that definition, "rape" involves force, or 'threatening or placing that other person in fear that any person will be subjected to death, grievous bodily harm, or kidnapping' or drugging a person. While "sexual assault" \- contrary to Stallman's "absolute" views - includes things which does not include force, like "inducing a belief by any artifice, pretense, or concealment that the person is another person" or " without the consent of the other person". Note that someone under the age of consent (17 in the US V.I., with exceptions for similarity in age and for sex with one's spouse) _cannot consent to sex_ under the law. In other words, Stallman's definition, which says that sexual assault "presumes that he applied force or violence" is much more aligned with the military's definition of "rape" than the military's definition of "sexual assault." Making Stallman, again, wrong in saying that "sexual assult" is an "absolutely wrong" term. ~~~ rumanator > Many states used the offense of sexual assault to replace conduct formerly > defined as rape", ergo, Stallman is wrong. The only jurisdiction which is relevant is that where the accusation was made, and in this case the crime that matches the accusation is statutory rape. That's the whole point. Please don't be disingenuous and cherry-pick jurisdictions that are entirely unrelated and irrelevant to the discussion just to fabricate substante for your baseless assertions. If you feel the need to persecute someone, do it based on what he actually said instead of making up excuses. ~~~ eesmith Stallman never made that point. If I am wrong, please quote how Stallman's writings support your statement. He wrote: > I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is > absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation. This is wrong because there are many jurisdictions where "sexual assault" is the correct accusation, as defined specifically by law. The best argument he could make is that "sexual assault" doesn't apply here, not that is it "absolutely wrong". (I think he's wrong, which I will get to in a moment.) That is my point. It is _not_ absolutely wrong. It has a legal definition which is about as well understood as "copyright." Remember, he specifically rejected your argument that we need to look to a specific jurisdiction: > “I think it is morally absurd to define “rape” in a way that depends on > minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 > years old or 17.” I have looked for, but failed, to find what "sexual assault" means in the context of US VI law. It is _used_ in the law but not _defined_. However, it is defined in US law as "any nonconsensual sexual act proscribed by Federal, tribal, or State law, including when the victim lacks capacity to consent." \- [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/34/12291#a_27](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/34/12291#a_27) (34 U.S. Code § 12291 (29)). Second degree rape with a minor who is under the age of consent is therefore correctly characterized as "sexual assault". I regard sex with a sex slave to also be sex with someone who cannot consent. However, I have not looked up that law. For your argument to be true - as I understand it, you mean that Stallman is specifically writing about US VI law - do you not assume that Stallman consulted those legal sources first, before writing his email? Because I don't believe he did, as what he wrote shows he has no clue about what "sexual assault" means, both in the general US context and specifically in the US VI context. I believe I have cited my sources, both with respect to Stallman and the relevant US law. Please do the same now and show how your interpretation of Stallman is backed up by his statements. On top of that, Stallman presumes the 17 year old was "entirely willing". However, the law prohibits willingness from being a consideration when determining some sorts of sexual assault, including second degree rape of a minor. For his argument to have merit, he must show that the woman was meaningfully able to grant consent, and could grant consent. He did not do that, which supports my belief that he does not understand the relevant law in the way he would have to be able to make the argument you seem to suggest he's making. ------ merricksb Earlier submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965319)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Interference: Open-source distributed database with complex event processing - interference http://github.biz/interference-project/interference ======	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What should I be expecting to pay a designer? - kmack Hey guys, I am just in the infant stages of a new start up and was hoping someone could give me some reference to work from in terms of hiring a designer. Currently, I am looking for someone to help come up with a logo and help with branding. Does anyone have any experience in this area?<p>Thanks ====== scottmagdalein If it's just logo and branding, you can do it cheap at 99designs or do it expensive by hiring a single person with a reputation. If you're going to hire a design employee, that's an entirely different discussion with lots and lots of variables. ~~~ visualidiot Don't do it cheap at 99designs. That's the equivalent of writing your site in ASP.net: it looks like a good idea now, but soon, you'll regret it. ~~~ manuscreationis I hate to hijack the comments with a response that doesn't address the OPs question at all, but I felt like that wasn't necessarily a fair comparison. ASP.NET Webforms? Yes, huge mistake you'll regret ASP.NET MVC? Fantastic choice, you will not regret it so long as you're a microsoft based shop You can't make a blanket statement like that about ASP.NET, since it's effectively a bifurcated ecosystem at this point (and we're all hoping the WebForms fork dies a quick death).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Jobs/careers that make the world better? - throwaway180909 Hi HN - apologies for the throwaway posting.<p>After over a decade working in various software engineering and management roles I'm looking for a change - and in particular, I'm looking for something where I can step back at the end of each day proud that I've done something that helps to improve the world, rather than just earned a paycheck.<p>What do you think is the most effective way a software engineer can spend their time to make the world a better place? ====== salawat Mishap reporting or civil service work gave me that. It was nice to know that statistically speaking, that system has ensured someone came home who wouldn't have otherwise. EHR systems could use some definite TLC for making them more Doc friendly, but insurance has so consumed that vertical it's hard to escape them in terms of them driving them business requirements. You could look at expanding your horizons. Software CAN get you anywhere as long as you have the computer science basics so you aren't constrained to making web apps or some stuff. Embedded systems can get you neat places. Heck, logistics may even present some interesting challenges. Though, basically gonna reaffirm an earlier poster. Go Small Biz. Dat Paycheck from the big boys may be nice, but it is the little people I've always gotten the biggest kick out of helping. Even if it's something as innocuous as helping a grandma set up a prayer request mailing pipeline. It gives you the warm fuzzies. ------ jppope Build a business. It doesn't have to be a social cause but per your question, that would be a nice addition. Small businesses do a lot of things that make the world better. As a whole they provide more jobs than large companies, they are able to be more flexible with their employees (more human), they can chase after projects and efficiencies that large companies cannot, and they can make different decisions (most importantly, they can make YOUR decisions on how to make things better). Over the last decade, fewer and fewer people have been starting businesses. Specifically, our most talented people are choosing to work for larger companies since compensation is better when comparing opportunity cost and risk. If starting a business is a little much, try to find a role where you can mentor. Specifically mentoring people that come from non-traditional backgrounds, people that are very different from yourself.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Benchmarking Hubspot's S-1: How Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up - kareemm http://tomtunguz.com/hubspot-ipo/ ====== JonLim Invested in growth, low but potentially growing average revenue per customer, and decreasing sales efficiency. I'm really not sure what to make of it, or if I've even pulled out the important points. Would love to hear some opinions on the numbers presented.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Deeper Than Deep: David Reich’s genetics lab unveils our prehistoric past - benbreen https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/deeper-deep ====== sjeohp _... the Zuckerberg couture of Harvard geniuses..._ _... from an extraordinarily gifted family of geniuses..._ The writer is some kind of sycophant. ------ skosuri I worked down the hall from the Reich lab as a postdoc and there was a weekly data club where students & postdocs would present. One of David's people was out or something, so David gave a 30 minute slideless talk about the work in their place. It was riveting. I was stunned at how he crafted the narrative and precisely explained the science. Since then I've taken the time to read his work and have always been super impressed. ------ shock _You don 't have permission to access /roundtable/deeper-deep on this server._ Is anyone able to access the site? Here's the most recent archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20170904030057/https://www.lapha...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170904030057/https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/deeper- deep) ~~~ abrowne It loaded for me without issue.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Designing the Packaging-Free Future - kintamanimatt http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/packages-without-packaging/ ====== jckt Was just thinking about this today, what a coincidence. I think the real question is how to deliver store-bought items more effectively to your home. For example, instead of teabags there's already loose-leaf tea, but most people can't be bothered to mess with getting the right volume of tea leaves and then steeping it etc. How do we make this easier, such that it would be actually welcomed? And how do we make such delivery systems work in general, for other products -- I already felt bad throwing away (recycled!) my milk jugs today. All that unnecessary energy used (wasted) in transporting waste products, even if it's recycled. Less packaging is welcome but it doesn't really solve the underlying problem of a better delivery system. ------ Centigonal Isn't this, in the case of the soap, detergent, and containers just shifting the burden of dealing with packaging from waste management companies to the water system? I hope I'm not being too much of a killjoy by bringing this concern in, because the products are, frankly, really beautifully designed, and eliminate a lot of packaging mass right off the bat.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers - danso http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/meet-17-year-old-saving-you-game-thrones-twitter-spoilers ====== danso That she's young and female is interesting...but I really love how her idea was thought up the night before and swiftly implemented...what a prime example of how fixing an itch that everyone else is too lazy to scratch can be more compelling than trying to come up with an elaborate, but contrived project	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Semantic Editing and Representation of Photos - techscouter http://blog.techscouter.net/seed-semantic-editing-encoding-and-decoding ====== techscouter Summary\ TL;DR: Editing and representing photos (and other media types) at a semantic level, not at the pixel level, has a lot of potential. For example: search, functional and physical object editing, compression, assistive technologies, augmented reality, 'moving in space' and 'moving in time'. This post discusses the approach and its strengths and weaknesses, while its realization depends on future basic research developments. ------ metageek > _It discusses the 'What' rather than the 'How'._ Yeah, because the "how" is AI-complete.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Going to Mars is (relatively) easy; coming back is where it gets tricky - tambourine_man http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/going-to-mars-is-relatively-easy-coming-back-is-where-it-gets-tricky/ ====== rbanffy I still think that making the bulk of the vehicle land and then take off is a bit odd. Sending the fuel/oxygen factory without take off capacity ahead of a smaller crewed vehicle able to return seems to be a winning solution. The crew wouldn't need to stay after setting up the factory and other automated facilities. I'd also be happier if a couple Dragons are sent ahead with supplies and landed around the colony site just in case the colonists need a plan B. Finally, we shouldn't dismiss the cycler vehicle idea. We could, btw, launch one to test the environmental conditions and validate what we'd need to shield the crew during the trip. As exposed, the transport vehicles would take much less time to do the trip, but that has a cost in infrastructure. ------ joss82 Relatively easy? Really? Going as a human to mars is fucking hard and coming back is even harder.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
State of the Site: Metafilter financial update and future directions - colinprince https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24814/State-of-the-Site-Metafilter-financial-update-and-future-directions ====== cimmanom Metafilter might be the internet community with the single highest quality of discourse on the internet. Yes, easily outdoing even HN. I really hope it comes through this intact. ~~~ AndrewKemendo I disagree with this, but not because MeFi users are wont to flame or bait or argue in bad faith by default. I paid for a membership almost a decade ago and haven't been on Metafilter in probably 6 years now. Even back around 2012 it was getting to the point where there was a clear ideological bent - namely a postmodernist, anti-capitalist, anarcho-socialist-lite, ideology. That would be all well and good except arguing from any other pov, if only for argument sake, would get piled on and not discussed in a way conducive to productive conversation. Seems to be happening everywhere on the web now - including HN. Just this week someone argued that this statement I posted was "almost racist": _I also don 't think this is desirable as a framework for AGI - as humans, despite our intelligent status, are quite unstable and sub-optimal in groups._ How someone gets "racist" from that statement is really mind boggling. Not exactly a great environment for discussion. ~~~ tptacek It looks like they just mis-read you as saying that there are particular sub- groups of humans that are sub-optimally intelligent, when what you charitably appear to be saying is that evidence of our intelligence as a species gets cloudy when we start working in groups as opposed to individuals. ~~~ AndrewKemendo _evidence of our intelligence as a species gets cloudy when we start working in groups as opposed to individuals._ Indeed. I strive for clarity above all things in my writing, but it seems increasingly impossible to navigate the minefield of offense-taking. I try to largely ignore it, but prevailing ideologies don't really care about arguments that are controversial, and immediately jump to labeling. ~~~ tptacek I don't know. In basically no other place in my adult life other than Hacker News am I ever seriously confronted, by people I'm actually talking to, with the idea that non-white people are inferior to white people (intellectually or otherwise). It basically only happens to me here. And the (bogus) argument that science conclusively shows certain racially-defined subgroups to be inferior is the most common form that sentiment takes. So I wouldn't be surprised if people here were hypervigilant about that. I'm not looking for people to be racist (I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when someone whose comments I've read before on HN says something that betrays a belief in racial superiority; it's not pleasant). But I am pretty regularly on the lookout for subtle or coded appeals to that logic. ~~~ AndrewKemendo And as we can see, simply stating your opinion here - which is effectively anti-racist and anti-fascist gets you grayed out. However I do encounter racists in my daily life and it's pretty unnerving - if only because I or my father have been on the receiving end of their racism (we're not white by the way). So I'm acutely aware of it, yet I'm hesitant to bring up any argument that is counter-narrative - irrespective of whether the argument is about race or not - for fear of being singled out. I think - based on what dang has commented to me personally and I've read elsewhere - HN has taken the approach that political/social controversy in and of itself is counterproductive to reasonable online dialog, so anything that has even a whiff of polarization needs to be very closely monitored. Obviously that's a matter of judgement and while I disagree, it's apparently the direction they want to go, so be it. ~~~ sctb I think the relevant guideline puts it well: > _Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets > more divisive._ ~~~ pvg The inadequacy of this guideline and couching most moderation along its lines is why the problem and 'dynamics' as tptacek puts it, exist in the first place. The site selects for and breeds civil, substantive racists and misogynists (along with the hyper-sensitized responses) like a hospital breeds antibiotic- resistant superbugs. ~~~ Anderkent I can see selects for, but breeds seems a stretch. Unless you mean breeds civility within racists and misogynists, which seems beneficial? ~~~ pvg Yes, mostly the second thing. It's the opposite of beneficial - because the guidelines say 'don't be a meanie/obvious blowhard' and most people who get called out for anything are called out for something along those lines, bigots who adapt to these can and sometimes do last on the site for _years_. HN's mods put in a great deal of effort in and are surprisingly successful at containing the far more basic and common human impulse to be a jerk to strangers online. They have rules, they enforce them, they publicly shame rulebreakers, etc. You are explicitly not allowed to be an asshat on HN and everyone knows it. The place would be better if 'don't be a bigot' got the same treatment. All caps users and transgressors against HN's fundamentalist quotation marks cult† are exposed to more public opprobrium than your typical "human biodiversity" sea lion. †This bit is a dumb[1] joke[2] [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke) ------ Grue3 I haven't heard of Metafilter in forever, it always seemed like a pretty obscure community. How come it takes $38000 a month to run this site? It can't be getting that much traffic. EDIT: ok, upon reading the TFA most of it goes to pay the wages of employees, but what do they all do is unclear. ~~~ DoreenMichele Last I checked: There are multiple moderators and one Tech guy. Historically, they prided themselves on providing "real jobs" with adequate pay and benefits. The numbers I'm seeing suggest the full time staff probably make better than $50k/year and the part-time staff likely make some pro-rated equivalent, so to speak.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
At Odds: Hackers at Harvard - evangastman http://evangastman.tumblr.com/ ====== hmpc >I don’t buy that as an excuse for why there aren’t any intensive courses on Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Objective-C, HTML/CSS and JavaScript. For the same reason why there aren't any intensive courses on Windows, ASP, or GNOME. Because technologies come and go --- nowhere more so than in software --- and those left standing are the ones who grasped the fundamentals of their field, not the ones who blitzed their way through a Node.js hackathon. The former are the innovators, the latter are the guns for hire. All the things you mention can be hacked in under a week by a motivated student. If your objective is to hack (and that is entirely fine for many purposes), you don't need a traditional college course to do so. In fact, I would argue that is entirely antithetical to the essence of hacking! If you're a Harvard student, you have an amazing opportunity to learn the truly difficult subjects with some of the best people in the world, the kind of stuff you won't learn in two hours in an online tutorial. Take advantage of that; for everything else there's the internet. ~~~ evangastman I appreciate this response a lot, especially the last sentence. My takeaway from it: Search out those things that you can't find on the Internet. Believe it or not, that sentiment really does offer a new way of thinking about things. ------ joelgrus Expecting Harvard to teach you how to be a hacker is about as far from the hacker mindset as you can get. ~~~ evangastman Clarify, please? ~~~ joelgrus In my mind the "hacker mindset" is something along the lines of "I want to do X, so I'm going to go off and do whatever it takes to figure out how to do X". Not "I'm going to complain that no one is teaching me how to do X". ------ sayangel As an undergrad I found myself thinking similarly. Looking back, I definitely think I rushed some things and agree with most people in this thread. The stuff you described won't and shouldn't be taught in schools. You're there to engage in thoughtful discourse that will help you come up with better solutions to the worlds problems. Node, RoR, etc. are just tools to make those ideas come to life. You can be a code monkey, but that doesn't make you a good software engineer. Find the right balance and I think you'll find the quality of your hacks will improve as well. ------ egl2000 If what you want is "intensive courses on Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Objective-C, HTML/CSS and JavaScript", save yourself four years and save your folks $200K. Drop out and get a public library card. ------ ajaymehta Schools like Harvard should have a major (or at least a concentration) in Web Development. Without that, they're missing out on setting up thousands of students for success. ~~~ asolove "Setting up thousands of students for success" is not the goal of a university. If it were, they should also offer majors in underwater welding, computer-aided machining, and other currently-understaffed specialist roles where a person with only one or two years' experience can earn good money. It's worth remembering that "web startup engineer" is to Computer Science what those vocations are to Physics. It is a craft, not a discipline and best learned through experience rather than theory. ~~~ deskglass I think they were being sarcastic. ------ lquist "there seems to be some sort of disdain for the inelegant style of cut and paste hacker programming ingrained in the startup community" Wait, what? ~~~ MAGZine I think that the author means is that Harvard places a high value on "perfect code," when "just ship it," is closer to the mantra of the startup community. Goes hand-in-hand with "do things that don't scale," which is another bit that follows the same ideal of "get it out the door." I don't think that there is any reason to rush in University though. Take time, learn the fundamentals. There is plenty of time to corner cut later. ------ billyjobob _I have delved into the theoretical side of computer science, learning about lower-level languages such as C, experiencing faint tastes of web programming, and more recently, an introduction to the beauty of recursion in functional programming languages like OCaml... but I know I haven’t experienced that “hacker” oriented style of programming that I was hoping for through Harvard._ You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. ~~~ evangastman I'd like to clarify some things that are not clear in the post. I am finding a lot of value in the CS courses I am taking in their rigor and the way they are changing how I think about problems. I also feel like I am in the company of some incredibly smart, talented, and driven people. I feel awfully fortunate to be in the position I am in. This all said, I also think that being able to build hackable and scalable projects is really powerful, and that the education I want meshes these areas together- instruction directed towards the theory as well as with the projects. ------ supersystem Please upvote when you comment if you find the post interesting, otherwise it will get "controversy banned".	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Emoji to Image - xudhinao https://emoji.aranja.com ====== billpg What license (if any) are these images under? ~~~ xudhinao The best resource for this I've found is here: [https://blog.emojipedia.org/who-owns-emoji/](https://blog.emojipedia.org/who- owns-emoji/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Interface magazine takes a look at 37signals' "paradoxical" approach to business - jmonegro http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2125-interface-magazine-takes-a-look-at-37signals-paradoxical-approach-to-business ====== gbookman I definitely agree that having "alone time" from your co-workers helps foster creativity because your mind wanders more when you're not engaged in a focused discussion. It reminds me of how Archimedes discovered the principles of buoyancy and density in the bathtub. ------ InclinedPlane 37signals' approach to business is not at all paradoxical. It represents little more than tried and true business sense applied to the web. It's only that we've long been brain washed into thinking that the web is so different from other forms of enterprise that we've come to think that old style business models won't work there. Work in a business you're passionate about, build something that you want and that people want, charge money for your products, keep your costs low, start simple, don't overwork yourself, etc. These bits of advice are nothing more than common sense in the brick and mortar mom and pop business world, yet somehow they sound like revolutionary, radical instructions when applied to the web. ~~~ jamesbritt Often it seems like the Web business world suffers economic autism. ------ wglb Paradoxical, no. Unconventional, yes. A good article that outlines a conventional marketeer's view of 37signals' approach.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: The Life Insurance "Income Replacement" Simulator - jawns http://lifeinsurance.pressbin.com/index.html?refer=hn ====== dmix What did you use to build it? ~~~ jawns Highcharts for the chart. Javascript for almost all the calculations.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Software Entrepreneur On The Madness Of Software Patents and Trolls - azakai http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2012/08/a-software-entrepreneur-on-the-madness-of-software-patents-and-trolls.html ====== noonespecial _One lawyer I consulted told me not to read the patents- they were irrelevant. And the troll agrees. He said he didn’t really understand my business and didn’t care. We just looked like other companies he has sued._ This is kind of important. We spend a lot of time worrying about the patent. Its the least important part of the equation. The important thing to understand is that you're being mugged, and the police aren't coming. They know its bad, but there are much bigger things on their plate than petty crime. The actual patent is just the gun/knife used in the mugging, a completely common and non-unique weapon. What the entrepreneurial community needs is a common sense guide to surviving a legal mugging just like the ones that address realworld muggings. There are simple things that a person can do as the victim of street crime that can greatly improve their chances of survival while minimizing loss. What might these best practices look like for startups facing trolls? ~~~ batgaijin Eh, all it takes is one random country with low taxes saying they don't respect IP laws. Cue US having a hissy fit, which in turn simply notifies other countries that it's a tactic that actually works. I look forward to that hydra rising. ~~~ honzzz Many countries do respect IP laws... they just do not have software patents. For example EU countries - huge, developed market, technologically advanced with well educated people. Their start-ups used to go to the Valley because that was the best place to be for start-ups... but now when Americans managed to create such toxic anti-innovative legal environment maybe this will change. ------ equity Couldn't you just ignore the lawsuit? Presumably they are after big bucks, and it is a pain and huge cost to continue with legal proceedings. And you are probably one of a thousand threats they send out. They are in-business too and don't want to waste their time on cases that don't pan out. Do you really think they will actually take you to court? I suspect they may just drop it if you ignore it, unless you are a big name startup with deep pockets. For the patent trolls, this is just a numbers game. If you send out a lot, a certain percentage will settle... Note: I am not a lawyer and this does not constitute legal advice. ~~~ brazzy For the troll, legal is their business, and the costs much lower because the ARE the lawyers. And they will not easily back off because that news would spread and suddenly everyone would ignore them, which would make their business much harder. It's not the same as frauds that send out tens of thousands of fake invoices for $50 in the hope that many will pay out of laziness and without spending time on research. Patent troll "license fees" are too high for that. ~~~ equity Although trolls are lawyers, there is still a "cost", and in this cost is time and the opportunity cost of spending time elsewhere. Going to court, getting a judgement and collecting fees is a huge time sink. Patent trolls are not dumb. They will litigate when you are a big fish. ~~~ brazzy Or when they want to keep the threat of litigation credible in order to extort out-of-court settlements. ------ brazzy Ultimately, what makes patent trolls so dangerous is that they're an asymmetric threat: one troll needs only the resources to fight one lawsuit to be able to make thousands of companies pay the extortion fee, and while only one of them would have to fight and win, it isn't rational for any one of them to do so Could that be sthe solution? Victims setting up shared defense funds to get the patents overturned, where each victim only has to pay a few thousand dollars? ~~~ smutticus It's even worse. The way things currently are incentivizes patent trolls to NOT create anything. Because then the companies they're suing might have a defensive patent they could use against the troll to exact a settlement. Patent trolls are incentivized to not create any value lest that value be used against them. ~~~ honzzz It seems to me that the US patent law is a system for transferring money from those who actually do stuff to those who don't. This is huge burden on business. Fear of getting sued to death is not the best motivation for creating new and exciting things - are you not afraid that start-ups will start to move out of US jurisdiction? I know that Silicon Valley is the best place for start-ups and whatnot... but is it still worth it? Seeing lawsuit after lawsuit... I would never incorporate in the US - would you? ~~~ luriel > It seems to me that the US patent law is a system for transferring money > from those who actually do stuff to those who don't. This is not surprising from an economic point of view once you realize that the patent system is basically a system of government granted monopolies. ~~~ honzzz But that "system of government granted monopolies" was supposed to channel money to those who create stuff, not from them. The problem with patent law is not that its government granted monopoly but that it's granted to those who do not bring anything to society and is used against those who do. ------ pervycreeper Here's the thing: this guy probably didn't care all that much about software patents before his company was sued and it became a personal issue for him. The public at large is unlikely to be moved by something as abstract and (ostensibly) abstruse as software patents unless a clear case can be made about what's really at stake. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the big companies can afford to license and defend if need be, so the stifling effects of software patents are even harder to see. How can we measure what might have been? ------ kenster07 Imagine if Pythagoras, Leibniz, and Newton were able to receive patents for their formulas. What if the quadratic formula was patented? In fact, why not? Actually, I retract that argument. The average software patent nowadays does not even begin to approach the caliber of the aforementioned discoveries. ~~~ anamax > What if the quadratic formula was patented? In fact, why not? Because it's math, and math isn't patentable. And no, software patents aren't patenting math. They're patenting specific mechanisms used to perform specific tasks. Here's another way to think of it. You can't patent physical phenomena. However, you can patent a process that uses heat to cure rubber. ~~~ darkestkhan And that is why there are no software patents in Poland - software is math. In fact every software ever created could be written as math formula in lambda calculus. ~~~ zvrba > software is math No, it's not. Math does not have side-effects. Software does have side-effects since it runs on physical devices connected to the physical world. ~~~ daliusd Here is problem. Patented algorithms/software usually don't have any physical world implementation. Thus it is math by your definition. ~~~ anamax < Patented algorithms/software usually don't have any physical world implementation. Huh? Take the "apple bounce" patent. I can see images move on a screen. How did that happen without a "physical world implementation"? Note that the "cure rubber with heat" patent mentioned abouve covered a process, a set of steps. It wasn't a patent on a rubber curing machine. ------ the-expert He says his company has zero revenue but is being sued by a patent troll. That doesn't make much sense without some more details. What does the troll want? Maybe it's not cash upfront? ------ cm127 It's a shame the courts can't revoke some of these patents that are completely full of shit. You'd think if a troll would just lose once, it'd be over. ~~~ brazzy The problem is that it takes someone fighting a lawsuit for hundreds of thoudsands of dollars to get a patent declared invalid (and it's never a sure thing) , but only a few hundred or thousand dollars to get a new patent.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Whither open source? - fcambus http://ptribble.blogspot.com/2015/08/whither-open-source.html ====== realharo I find that dependency managers used by those "new" languages make setting up a project for local development a lot easier than the alternative of manually hunting down and compiling a bunch of 3rd party libraries (sometimes specific versions too) with optional configuration flags.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
H5P: Free online HTML5 content creation - geocrasher https://h5p.org ====== geocrasher Not mine. Just a neat tool that I ran across and thought I'd share.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Cheddar empire: Rise of a cheese superpower - vo2maxer https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/cheddar-cheese-history/index.html ====== PaulDavisThe1st Side note: one of the saddest-but-also-good aspects of the rise of artisanal cheese making in the US is how most US producers seem to be pricing their product at or above the cost of European imports. You'd sort of expect them to aim a bit below, but it seems they've decided to go for maximum revenue from a smaller market. There is a some crazy good US cheese being made these days, easily as good as anything from Europe, but it costs a fortune, without any import taxes or ocean-crossing transportation fees. ~~~ saiya-jin > easily as good as anything from Europe That's a strong statement. I've yet to come to anything even remotely close to the taste of aged (2-3 years minimum, when grains form inside) hard cheeses like Comte, Gruyere, Beaufort and probably dozen or two more, mostly french. Copies I've had, sometimes even more expensive than original, can't seriously compare (ie french versions of Gruyere vs original AOC variant, and one would expect that French would get this right). If you actually done that comparison in person, then I believe you, otherwise, buy a plane ticket after covid. What folks here can create from raw cow/goat/sheep/buffalo milk and some bacteria (and/or worms) is ridiculously good, an universe of tastes on its own. And I haven't even started into properly artisanal, often local-only cheeses. They are not exported even within their own country, forget to see it anywhere across the pond. ~~~ PaulDavisThe1st [ personal background: grew up in the UK, lived in the US for 31 years, lived for extended periods in Heidelberg and Berlin, and have travelled extensively in Europe over the last 40 years. Have visited the supposedly best cheese stores in France, Spain and Germany. I live on cheese :) ] Almost anything that goes through the the Jasper Hill Cellars in Vermont is going to give you incredible cheese (they don't make them all, but they do act as an aging facility). Hard cheese is more of long shot in the US, although amazingly the WI-based Bellavitano brand is trying hard (admittedly a lot of the time by adding flavorings, but still ...). Landaff is another hard cheese somewhat similar to some of the tangier UK hard cheeses, but quite unique. Cheddars in the US are nothing like UK cheddar (as the article noted). New England cheddars probably have the most complex flavor profile, as long as you stay on the "sharp" end of the scale. They are as strong as a good west country cheddar, but just different. For soft cheeses though, OMG, an embarrassment of riches. Winnimere - unctuous, stinky, incredible. Humboldt Fog - goat, with ash layer, delicious, midway between the really strong French ripened goats and mere chevre. Oma and Moses Sleeper (both ripened at Jasper Hill) are also deep and complex. There are a couple of blues too: Russian River (out of central CA) and Bayley Hazen are particularly interesting, though also quite unlike any of the great european blue cheeses (nobody seems to be trying this, sadly). And these are all nationally distributed varieties. If you live in the right parts of the US, there are typically local varieties (at least of soft types, less so for hard cheeses) that will be worth trying. None of this is to say that US cheese is "better". It's just amazing how far it has come in the last 20 years, and how good the best of it is compared to european options. Gruyere remains unmatched anywhere. But that doesn't excuse the northern european tier (Nederlands, Germany in particular) from producing "cheese" generally better suited to filling holes in walls than eating! :) ~~~ deeg I'm no cheese expert but I've toured parts of Europe sampling their cheeses and I completely agree: Vermont--Jasper Hill especially--has a lot of great cheeses. American cheeses are different, though, sometimes because of pasteurization laws. If one wants a great Brie then don't get an American cheese. But if someone wants a great bloomy-rind cheese that can rival the best European cheeses try Jasper Hill's Harbison (or any of the others mentioned above). ~~~ mauvehaus Actually, can I just highly recommend going into the Northeast Kingdom Tasting Center in Newport, VT for all of the Jasper Hill aficionados coming out of the woodwork in this thread? It's hilariously out of the way, but it seems that the Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont is cranking out some seriously good food and spirits. Caledonia Spirits makes two extremely solid gins, and the aperitif ciders from Eden Ciders have to be tasted to be believed. ~~~ owenversteeg I'll have to visit the Northeast Kingdom Tasting Center, thank you! Any other recommendations for foods to try (or things to visit) in that area? ~~~ deeg Define "that area". :) The Alchemist Brewery in Stowe is highly rated and there are a few other craft breweries around Burlington. If you're taking Hwy 91 through the state they might be a little out of the way. Willey's Store in Greensboro will have most of Jasper Hill cheeses for sale and maybe an experimental cheese or two. The HQ for Ben & Jerry's ice cream is in Waterbury and the tour is fun (with a free sample at the end). Depending on when you go there will likely be farmer's markets all through the area with local producers selling all sorts of great stuff. ~~~ mauvehaus Here's a few more if you're taking a broad interpretation of "that area". I haven't yet been to or tried Farnum Hill Ciders in the Lebanon, NH area, but I've heard it's worth a visit. They've been in business at least 20 years, so they must be doing something right. Hogwash Farm has pretty solid sausage (and other meats) and sells from a farm stand. I'm sure there are many other excellent similar farms. That's just one I've tried. Woodbelly Pizza is a mobile operation based in Montpelier does wood fired pizza that's highly worth catching. The oven is on a trailer. They might be at the Montpelier farmers' market. Cabot used to do tour of their creamery but apparently discontinued that in 2018. They still offer samples, according to their website. Their location in Quechee also offers samples. If you come during sugaring season, you can't throw a stone without hitting a sugar house. I haven't yet had bad maple syrup. Less Vermont-specific, the Inn at the Long Trail is home to an Irish pub with a pretty broad selection of Irish whiskey. And getting pretty far afield, the Euro Delli du Village in Mansonville, Quebec had some pretty damn good sandwiches when we were portaging through in 2016 or 2017. If you've made it as far as Newport VT, it's only a half hour drive (plus a border crossing, obviously). ------ ggm Cheddar refers to a place, a specific process in some kinds of hard cheese making, and to a non protected kind of cheese. You would hope all Cheddar has been through the cheddaring process. Many hard cheeses go though other processes. Whilst I personally wish some kind of domain d'origine had applied, it is worth pointing out that stilton cannot actually be made in the village of stilton due to DOC rules: it's outside the area. Wensleydale is basically dead now, in the same sense. (I mention it because Wensleydale and red Leicester are both cheddared. I am unsure if traditional stilton is, but it has 'crumb' so it's very likely) The boat has sailed. Cheddar is like aspirin or thermos, it's a generic. The American national cheese reserve probably is cheddared? Is pretty unlike Cheddar as I know it. If it helps preserve a milk surplus, feeds people on food stamps and helps farms, it has a role. Cheddar gorge is lovely. They did paper making there due to water power. ~~~ owenversteeg Wait, what's the problem with Wensleydale? I've been eating it for a while now and I just looked it up on Wikipedia and it seems that as long as it's labeled Yorkshire Wensleydale you're getting the real stuff. Or am I eating a modern bastardization? ~~~ ggm You're probably getting the real deal. Nobody else much is. the stuff in union-jack flagged plastic packs we get out here is pretty torrid, as is the red leicster, the 'golden delicious' of the cheese world. When I lived in York in the 1980s there was a cheese shop just outside the city walls on the south side near the fulford road which sold hand made/artisanal wensleydale, red and stilton, and blued varieties of the wenslydale and the red. they were fantastically good. The other thing you can't get for love nor money out here in OZ is a russet apple: you can't been wensleydale and a good crisp russet apple. ------ velox_io I grew up near Cheddar, If you were expecting an Empire of Cheese it's surprisingly modest. I recommend Wookey Hole and the area is a good place for bike rides (just not on the weekend). I seriously recommend Thatchers Gold [cider], that's probably Somerset's best export (and the Wurzels if you like cliches, only builders and farmers actually sound like that). I thought cheddar took off because it's easy to transport and store).[/success kid] PS: Cheddar is definitely nicer than creme fraiche (unless you enjoy soggy sandwiches, and a salad... no, just no). ;) ~~~ emmelaich Wookey hole doesn't compare to many other caves really. It's a bit hokey. That said, there are caves that you can explore with speleologists. Also, Cheddar gorge itself is really short. The geography is interesting though. Water from mendips result in a perpetual spring in the middle of Wells. (hence the name) And the spring in Glastonbury Tor. Probably. PS. Area is great for good cheap cider aka scrumpy. ~~~ onion2k Dorset is better for cider. Source: I grew up in Dorset and was a teenager. ------ deeg A shameless plug but this seems a good place for it: I created a PWA to keep track of the cheeses I've tried. You can use it for free at www.cheesewiz.app (There are no ads; this is just a personal project.) ------ angry_octet The strange part of this article is that it seems the author hasn't tasted any good English cheddar? Most of the cheese sold as cheddar bears absolutely no resemblance to cheddar, generally being flexible and springy with hardly more taste than the polyethylene wrapper. ~~~ dan-robertson In the postwar period this nearly became the case for all cheese in the U.K. It seemed the country was moving towards having a few varieties of highly processed, bland cheese (predominantly “cheddar”). I suppose non-bland cheeses were either to be thought of as unmodern or imported from France. Somehow a few farmhouse cheeses continued to be made and eventually became more popular. I think it is only in relatively recent decades that the variety of available cheese has shot up. I’m not really sure why things happened this way. Maybe it was cheaper or an effect of rationing. Unlike the US, I don’t think the U.K. ever banned making cheese with raw milk so perhaps it was a trend in consumer habits rather than one encouraged by the government or industry. ~~~ angry_octet Same terrible thing happened with bread. Makes me thing of the Goodies episode on industrial farming -- some pursuit of ultimate efficiency. ------ owenversteeg Very interesting article! I'd recommend actually reading it :) I'm a big cheddar fan and I had never heard of this: > Aged cheddar, like other hard, aged cheeses, is very low in lactose. Also, the snippet about cheddar growing in popularity due to its ease of transport (spoils slower due to less moisture content) is interesting. ------ peteretep > Protected Designation of Origin PDO and A(d')OC are such a scam. Cheddar refers to a style of cheese, Champagne refers to a style of wine. Bah humbug. ------ alkonaut Was surprised to see in England that “cheddar(s)” us almost synonymous with “cheese”, to the point where it could be the sign hanging over the cheese section in a grocery store. Is this similar to how “pudding” is used for “dessert”, or is it simply that almost all the cheese will be cheddar anyway? ~~~ evgen To be honest I think that this is a bit of hyperbole. Cheddar is certainly common, and as a simple example there will be at least three and usually four or five different varieties of house-brand cheddar (excluding different packaging and block vs. pre-grated) in any big market but there will be as much pan-European cheeses as well as other English cheese on display. This is London, so take it with an appropriate grain of salt for being both metropolitan and cosmopolitan, but no one I know of uses 'cheddar' to mean cheese in general or at least not in the same way someone from the southern US might refer to Coke as a generic for soda. ~~~ alkonaut > this is a bit of hyperbole I don't want to imply neither that this is still the case (it was 20 years ago), nor that it happened everywhere (I obviously didn't visit or live in every region of britain at the time, I lived in Glasgow and visited various other parts). What I'm 100% sure of is that it wasn't the sign for the specific cheddars _part_ of the cheese section in in the store. I made a double take on numerous occasions because the biggest "main" navigation store signs were saying "Bread",...,"Jams", "Cheddars" etc which was the surprising bit for me as a foreigner looking for non-cheddar cheese. In the cheddars section there were of course all sorts of cheese! Once I started noticing it I started looking for the phenomenon in stores, and it wasn't just one store. Sadly I can't remember if it was just one chain of stores (it's likely). ------ 29athrowaway For DIY sandwiches, salads, etc., crème fraîche is nicer than cheddar. ~~~ matthewowen This is such a strange opinion that I'm wondering if you're confused about what cheddar is or about what creme fraiche is. ------ ReactiveJelly "As many look for dairy alternatives for ethical or health reasons, vegan cheeses have been on the rise." And that's all they say about that. Nothing about animal rights, animal welfare, or government dairy subsidies. Legend has it that at one point the US government was paying 75% of the price of dairy. I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but if you took that out here, vegan soymilk and dairy milk would cost the same. That bugs me. It's a free market except for isolationism, cronyism, and the need for "small farmers" to act as PR fronts. Occasionally there is a good regulation that does something useful. ~~~ monadic2 What _is_ vegan cheese? Have folks reproduced milk proteins in the lab, or is it taste-and-texture replication? ~~~ bobbyi_settv It's typically made from seeds or nuts: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_cheese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_cheese) So it's taste-and-texture replication. I don't even think it is aiming to perfectly replicate dairy cheese, as much as to be something that can be reasonably substituted for dairy cheese in the typical cases where it is used. It's analogous to how soy milk isn't meant to be indistinguishable from dairy milk but instead to be usable in place of dairy milk in coffee, cereal, etc. ~~~ williamdclt > I don't even think it is aiming to perfectly replicate dairy cheese It isn't, indeed. I've tried a whole bunch of different vegan cheeses, and while they sometimes call them "mozzarella", "camembert" or other dairy cheese names, they do not try to match the taste. It would be an obviously losing battle as the best they could do is to be as good, most probably and understandably falling short of that. They instead create new kinds of cheese- like products, sometimes taking inspiration from dary cheeses sometimes not, and the results are actually pretty good espectially considered how recent the art of vegan cheese is! ~~~ guildan What I found out trying out more vegan food or vegan receipes is to stop looking at them as replacement of somehting and more like a novelty. Since I've done that everything taste much better to me because I'm trying the taste and not comparing it to anything.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Shippos USPS Time in Transit Data - bmahmood https://goshippo.com/usps-data-2020/ ====== chrisBob One thing this doesn't account for is fraudulent delivery reports. In my area a large percentage of my USPS deliveries are reported as delivered around 6pm on the scheduled delivery day, but I can't find the package anywhere. Then it suddenly turns up the next day. People on NextDoor also report seeing this regularly. ~~~ dboreham Hmm interesting. I had a package I mailed to a relative stolen off their porch and subsequently did a moderately deep dive with USPS staff to try to identify the thief. Those folks told me that there is GPS on the delivery vehicle/handheld scanner such that they have the time and location of the delivery event, and the location of the vehicle at the time. That story seems inconsistent with yours. ~~~ joncrane Is it really inconsistent? The technology is there to investigate if someone raises a stink, but if no complaint is made, no one investigates/correlates delivery reporting vs the data you mention. I honestly believe many delivery drivers (not just USPS, but Amazon, UPS, FedEx, etc) are brazen because they get away with it 99% of the time. ~~~ ganoushoreilly I agree, i've had not insignificant amount of _delivered_ then show up three days later packages with USPS over the past 5 or so years. Mostly business deliveries, but i've had a few I had to report as lost to the shipper. In a couple instances we've had things show up two months or so later _found_. Which I suppose happens, but I've only had one UPS package lost in the same time frame and none for fedex. At my house we have a communal mailbox bank (which seems to be normal now for most new construction). I would bet that 1/4 packages of mine are delivered to the wrong box / placed in the wrong box. So some of it now can at least be attributed to those mistakes. ------ dawnerd One key metric missing (unless I’m blind) is time to acceptance scan. I do a lot of shipping and don’t have time to have the packages scanned in every day so I use the drop box. Last few months it’s taken the post office an extra day or two to even scan them in. So while the packages must only be on average 5-10% late they’re also being delayed a day or more just sitting waiting to be accepted. It hurt my eBay rating too before I could catch it happening. I’ve resorted to using the scans form just to make sure they’re the ones taking blame, not me. ~~~ greendude29 Not being as familiar with shipping, how would one find the metrics for this? Is there some kind of an initial "scan" upon drop-in to the box and then a second scan when they pick it up? If not, then I imagine the metrics would only be discoverable from USPS themselves, which of course, they are going to muzzle. ~~~ moftz When you drop off a package at the post office, you can either wait in line for an agent at the counter to scan your package (only during business hours) and give you a receipt or you can place them in a drop box (open 24/7). The drop box usually has a last pickup time on the label (3pm, 5pm, etc) for when someone actually collects the contents and then scan in the packages to get them into the sorting/tracking system. The problem is that sometimes these bins of packages might sit for a while until someone scans them for the first time. There is a bin behind the wall for the drop box and if it gets full, they pull up a new bin for the drop box so there could be multiple bins of packages that need to be scanned. You would need to search the tracking number and see when the first scan occurs. Shippo is only looking at shipping label creation date which could be offset quite some time from when the package gets scanned. Large businesses might have enough employees to where they can pack, label, and ship out an order that day but small businesses might have someone hand delivering packages to the post office every other day. ------ athst This feels like a missed opportunity. There's a lot of data Shippo could share about USPS and that would help add more context to what's happening in the news. But it's difficult to understand anything concrete from this. It would be more helpful to see how this fits into long term trends and other context on how abnormal it is. ~~~ tomohawk Perhaps we should let Newman, our favorite fictional postman, represent? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22Fr- g-B0vs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22Fr-g-B0vs) Mail service dysfunction has been going on a long time, and has been a joke for a long time. ------ iamEAP Cool to have some “observability” on this, but it’s not the most relevant metric. I’ve heard of (and experienced myself), much, much longer delays on envelope/letter mail, but have heard of fewer delays with packages. Perhaps this is a proxy for measuring personnel/process changes, but totally misses the sorting machine dismantling going on throughout the nation. ~~~ dsamarin Fortunately the sorting machine dismantling has been stopped for the relevant future. ------ WrathOfJay Thank you for putting this together. Independent data sources are vital, since we know this administration does everything they can to hide reality. ~~~ Fezzik I wonder if business mail is being handled differently than civilian mail - I mail letters to my Mother 1-2 times a week and standard delivery times have gone from (always) 2-3 days between Medford, OR and Mount Vernon, WA to 8-12 days for the last 4 letters I sent that she has received. And the most recent 2 appear to be on the same trajectory. It is sort of wild, though just an anecdote. I have been sending her letters for decades from various parts of the Western states and this has never happened before. ~~~ sroussey First class letters are slow. Packages not so much (better revenue). ~~~ takeda There were reports of live animal dying because of delays or prescription being missed. I do see much less mail in mailbox than I had before. I also had informed delivery set up and now I'm told I'm not eligible (when it worked a month or two before). Frustrating, because this is time when the informed delivery would actually let me know if I'm actually missing some mail. ------ suchire It’s too bad some of these numbers are reported as averages. It would be nice to see something more percentile based, like p75 or p90, which are more effective ways of measuring quality of service ------ floatingatoll I'd like to see this data grouped by the population density of the origin zip code. ------ ohadpr I think this marketing site would perform better if it had a pretty version of the most interesting graph above the fold. ------ herf I think shippers like Amazon pay relatively high rates to USPS, so they are higher on the priority list. It's the heavily-discounted "slow" shipping like medicine that is having trouble right now. ------ ericcj Does anybody have this data about letters? We need a canary letter mailing service for analytics. ------ tzm Does USPS publish transit metrics directly? If not, they should. ------ justinzollars Most election mail will be sent zone 0 (Local) or 1. ------ TMWNN This analysis only covers USPS package delivery, which is different from flats. Ballots are flats. Magazines are flats. Letters are flats. Anything non-bendable isn't. This is what has been happening to USPS, folks: 1\. Because of COVID19, flats volume has collapsed, while package volume has skyrocketed. Flats sorting machines can do absolutely nothing for packages for reasons that are left up to the reader, so USPS has been shutting them down and moving them out of processing facilities in favor of package sorting. 2\. Because USPS is losing lots of money overall (higher package volume doesn't make up for the collapse in flats volume)[1], it has been cutting back on overtime, just like any other employer would. 3\. People hear about 1 and 2, hear about/experience packages being delivered more slowly, and think that this surely means that "the Trump administration is trying to sabotage the post office to suppress voting!!!!". They do this without thinking about it at all: 3a. As stated, flats volume has collapsed, so there is still a _lot_ of excess capacity. 3b. Even if every single voter were to vote by mail only, this would mean at most two additional flat pieces per voter (one ballot to the voter, and one ballot sent back). Think about how much mail (not packages, mail) you already receive daily on average. Do you really think two additional pieces would collapse the system? Of course not, any more than the USPS collapses every January when the IRS and every single employer, bank, and other financial institution sends out tax-related documents. (The USPS hires seasonal help in December for packages, not for Christmas cards.) 3c. If this really were a sinister Trump administration voter-suppression scheme, it's a pretty weak one that can be defeated by dropping ballots off in person, and/or voting in person. 4\. An actual serious issue is states and counties that aren't like Oregon (which has been 100% vote by mail for two decades) trying to convert to vote by mail without preparation. Think of how much mail your home receives for the previous tenant (and the one before that, and the one before that). Think of this all having to be done by early October, to give voters about a month to receive and return ballots. This is what the administration has been pointing out, something rarely heard amidst the nonsense about mail-vote suppression. [1] Congress mandating the USPS to prepay pensions is a _good_ thing. The postal service is an industry that is, by definition, in secular decline (barring unusual events like COVID19) because of the Internet. Congress recognized this in 2006 and thus required USPS to prepare over 10 years to get its pensions ready, because there's no reason to believe that future revenue (and future employee-count growth) is going to sustain pensions for retirees otherwise. ~~~ AaronFriel The DMV loses money. The FDA loses money. The FCC loses money. These are public institutions, not for profit enterprises. They're funded partially by fees and usually largely by congressional appropriations. You beg the question by beginning by comparing the USPS to other carriers. It's one of the few public institutions required by the constitution! Even the Defense Department doesn't get that privilege, and it loses hundreds of billions a year and doesn't have the same requirement to fund pensions for employees who haven't been born yet. Lastly, delaying flats and prioritizing packages during a situation when many, perhaps most people will vote by mail due to a public health crisis is if not malicious, dangerously ignorant of the societal implications. Yes, the USPS can handle the volume. But for the sake of our elections, and based on issues we may have with counting ballots, postmark and receipt date laws that vary by state, can we agree as a bipartisan issue that mail delivery now, of all times, shouldn't be compromised? ~~~ 9nGQluzmnq3M But _should_ the USPS be a public institution? Many countries have opted to privatize their postal services, admittedly with varying results, but with quite a few successes as well: you may have heard the package division of what was once Deutsche Bundespost, now known worldwide as DHL. I do agree that right now is not a great time for radical changes though! ~~~ jksmith [https://www.ups.com/media/en/terms_service_gnd_pr.pdf](https://www.ups.com/media/en/terms_service_gnd_pr.pdf) [https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/USPIS- FAQs....](https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/USPIS-FAQs.pdf) TLDR is, USPS needs a warrant to open first class mail. Private carriers may be able to open with impunity. Who do you want handling your mail-in ballot? ~~~ 9nGQluzmnq3M Tampering with ballots will still be illegal, even if the company is private. That's also a bit of weird argument, since we're right now seeing how the USPS can easily be bent by political pressure precisely because it _is_ a govt institution and presidents already get to appoint their cronies to run it. ------ 9nGQluzmnq3M TL;DR: DeJoy's changes appear to have made USPS slightly slower (0.1-0.5 days) in some places, but much less than the delta caused by a holiday like July 4th (see note buried at the very end). ~~~ 9nGQluzmnq3M Is my summary inaccurate? The article is very careful not to extend any political slant to its data and findings, please extend me the same courtesy. (I'm not even American.) ~~~ greendude29 It is inaccurate. You say "slightly slower". The metrics behind the delays are much longer and your numbers only seem to include time in transit. Second reason your summary is inaccurate: DeJoy's changes are rolled out in small pockets of the country thus far. The article seems to be indiscriminate from where those changes took place. The averages here are hence better than from those places where the changes have done the most damage.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
IOTA: A Cryptoplatform for the Internet of Things - Osiris30 https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/tangle-cryptocurrency-for-the-internet-of-things/ ====== Rhapso The "Tangle Approach" seems to do some awesome things: \- Seems to have similar robustness to bitcoin in terms of double-spend/attack defense. \- Handle high latency and network partitions gracefully \- Scales better and wastes less energy \- Gets rid of miners and makes the work to secure against double-spend just part of issuing transactions (security scales with transaction rate not mining rate!) ~~~ RichardHeart Well, I guess there'll be another ICO then? ~~~ sylvanarevalo Nope, all the coins have already been created (and I got some!!!). You will however be able to buy them on an exchange soon: [https://blog.iota.org/exchange- launch-2d38c654349a](https://blog.iota.org/exchange-launch-2d38c654349a) ~~~ sylvanarevalo [https://twitter.com/bitfinex/status/871457013993152514](https://twitter.com/bitfinex/status/871457013993152514) ------ Osiris30 Link to the IOTA White Paper (PDF) (1), and a presentation (42min) on the Tangle blockless ledger (2). (1) [https://www.iotatoken.com/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf](https://www.iotatoken.com/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf) (2) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYbRyVrrUDY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYbRyVrrUDY) ------ Geee There's also Byteball, which uses similar architecture, but is designed for payments. [https://byteball.org/](https://byteball.org/) ~~~ giyal Make sure to educate yourself on Byteball and IOTA. You'll see that they're very different from each other.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Isn't the 2010s tech bubble worse because it's slower? - untilHellbanned The 2010s seem different from the later 1990s in that the late 1990s bubble popped very fast whereas the 2010s version seems to be a slow trickle of bad news. I'd argue the 2010s tech bubble is significantly worse because people are spending many, many years now on their "startups" without tangible success. Look at Pebble or Dropbox. Is anyone other than the CEO going make any money off all these years of effort? It's kinda like Neil Young quote used by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note: "It's better to burn out than fade away". ====== debacle The current tech "bubble" is not really a tech bubble - the craziness of the last 10 years is more a symptom of the greater economy than it is the tech start-up industry, and the changing balance is a good thing for the global economy overall, and probably, in the long run, start-ups. Less money is flowing into tech because it's less appealing relative to the rest of the economy, not because tech is floundering, but because the rest of the economy is more stable. ------ aalbertson That may be one of the biggest annoyances of "Agile Methodologies". It's this idea that we can just keep micro-incrementing anything forever. While the principle works great, you end up with this model where you never actually stop/complete/etc... I'm not saying we should stop that, by any means, precisely the opposite actually, however what we DO need to do is be more focused on actually building sustainable products and services, that generate (gasp) REVENUE/PROFIT, and learn to "Fail Fast" when it becomes a drag. ------ bsvalley Why do you think the economy is either good or a bubble? That's why investors don't even listen to this stuff anymore... they understand the market more than we do	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Cloud Sharing of your Servers - SteveWise http://CloudSlice.io ====== SteveWise Hi, this is a variation of a previous product (still existing) that we built. It's a low cost, smart way to share server images that you store on our cloud. You can share servers with anyone, pretty much by emailing them a hyperlink. It would be great to hear thoughts and feedback from the HN crew!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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