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A site that generates regexs based off examples given - maraschino http://regex.inginf.units.it/index.html ====== ftarlao This Regex Generator site works as follows, you provide text examples by highlighting the strings to extract; the strings to not extract are the surrounding text. The Regex Generator finds out a regular expression that complies with provided examples and performs the desired text extraction task. This is a research project of the Machine Learning Lab [http://machinelearning.inginf.units.it/](http://machinelearning.inginf.units.it/) The engine has also been released opensource here: [https://github.com/MaLeLabTs/RegexGenerator](https://github.com/MaLeLabTs/RegexGenerator) ------ chavo-b There is an interesting discussion about here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9946681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9946681) ------ Zekio I've used this almost everytime I make a regex, simply because it is easier than learning regex all over again.. Edit: actually I also use Regex101.com, but not as often as regex gen ++ ~~~ rubinho I've obtained a regex like this: \d\w\w\w\d++(?=\w)\|(?<=\d[^\d]\w)\d++\|(?<=\w\w\w\d\w\w\w\w\w\w\w\w)\w for me this regex is bullshit! totally useless! ~~~ ftarlao In order to obtain a good solution, it is important to provide representative examples; it is also important that such examples provide surrounding text that has not to be extracted. We have observed that poor solutions often appear when users provide little variety in examples and no negative examples at all. I suggest to improve the provided examples ad re-execute the solution search. ------ changli The website authors recently published the details behind their tool: [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7374717&newsearch=true&queryText=inference%20of%20regular%20expression)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What would you do if you get a basic income of $2500 every month for 1 year - user-on1 How you would plan each hour of that one year and each dollar? ====== DamnYuppie I would keep working and just save most of the money. 15% would go for new toys and gear. ------ wsc981 I would work full-time on my own projects / ideas. Might work a little bit on the side as well, if I need some extra help (hire designers, etc...), cause in that case I don't believe this money would be sufficient for me, even when working from a cheap country. ------ dragonwriter If it's known to be to be time linked, it's clearly not a basic income, just a one-time $30,000 windfall. And, I'd pay off debt (or if I ha already done that, invest it), and it wouldn't have any meaningful effect on my use of time. ~~~ OrwellianChild This. $30K is the size of a not-unreasonable annual bonus for a high- performing profession. This money would be pocketed for debt pay-down or invested into future passive income (e.g. real estate). My employment status would not change - just my tax bill (more income = more taxes). ------ Khelavaster Pay my rent, bills, student loan, and car insurance and gas. Which would be all of that money.Keep working for money for groceries and other things and health insurance. ------ user-on1 The ultimate goal of UBI doesn't seem like giving free money, it is freeing an individual's time which one used to spend in making up for basic needs and giving freedom to do more useful stuff which will have a greater impact beyond one's family. What if one doesn't have the job one has at present? ------ baystep If it's only one year I would keep working. But spend much more time on my own projects to start a business with. If it's indefinite, like basic universal income, I would release more open source projects since money would be less of an issue. ------ gtvwill I would dedicate the whole year to trying to find employment in I.T...currently I work in construction. If I found work, I'd put any remaining income into courses/certificates that could help me with work in I.T, those things are expensive. ------ Davidbrcz If I knew beforehand it would only be for 1 year, I would keep working, maybe a little less (80% of a full time position for instance). I would save/invest a certain amount, give a fair amount to charities and go out more to restaurants... ------ Dryken I would keep working full time and invest all of it ~~~ user-on1 Where would you invest? ------ kruhft Is 'What would you do with UBI?' the new 'What would you do if you won the lottery?'? ~~~ jetrois same if i won the lottery I wouldnt just sit around I'd be board. I'd take my time get my masters and start a company. I'd also donate some of that cash to some non-profits I used to work for. ------ jetrois I would finish school. Start my masters. ------ billconan full-time on my projects and maybe go back to school	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
When You Startup with UX - callmeed http://uxmagazine.com/strategy/when-you-startup-with-ux ====== uzish Great post. In our strategy, UX is the most important ingredient for success. We live by the broader term of UX. In sjobs words: "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What Are Active-Shooter Drills Doing to Kids? - dsr12 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/effects-of-active-shooter/554150/?single_page=true ====== aethertap Slightly off-topic, but I have a friend who does training for active shooter response (he goes around to schools and large businesses and teaches people what seems to work best for saving lives in these situations). When I see things like "they huddle under their desks in the dark" I cringe. His training is very different, and focused on evacuating the students and disrupting the shooter. First, barricade the doors, then seek immediate escape and RUN. If that's not possible, everyone picks up whatever they can throw and gets ready to pelt the shooter with it if the door is breached. While this is happening, people escape around the edges and others attempt to subdue the shooter (taking advantage of the fact that it's very hard to shoot accurately when you're being pelted with hard, heavy objects). He has researched a number of these events, and he has some chilling stories. In one case, the shooter walked up and down the rows of desks where people were cowering in the dark and executed each person. I think he said there were only a couple of survivors, and even those were critically injured. In the same shooter incident (sorry I can't recall where he said this one happened), another classroom used the disrupt and escape method, and almost all of them survived. Bringing it back to topic, I wonder how the psychological effect would change if the students and teachers were trained with active responses that have been shown to greatly improve their odds of survival, instead of being told to wait passively in the dark and hope they get skipped. Would the fear be reduced? I honestly don't know how it would be for kids, but in my own case I feel better when I'm prepared to act instead of having to wait around for something to happen to me. ~~~ JBlue42 >I honestly don't know how it would be for kids, but in my own case I feel better when I'm prepared to act instead of having to wait around for something to happen to me. You mean similar to how any sort of hostage / terrorist event on planes tend to get stopped by passengers now after 9/11 because folks would rather go down fighting? Also, thanks for sharing the anecdote. ------ wambotron The drills don't make sense to me. If it's a drill to protect the students against one of their own, that student has also been in the drills and knows that quiet rooms still likely have people in them. If I remember correctly, the last school shooting had the kid shooting through a door's window into a classroom and killing people who were hiding in the corner. Obviously he knew they were in there already. The drilling he was in would've showed him that. So what is the point of it? You are giving away any and all secrets to the potential assailant. It's nothing like a fire drill or a "mother nature" type of drill. They should really just stop doing it. ~~~ rhcom2 I don't think it is about actually hiding or being secret. It's just about stalling. Getting through a locked door takes time that responding officers can use to get to the school. Most school shootings stop as soon as the first responding officer engages with the shooter. ~~~ AstralStorm Locked door will not stall a person with a gun willing to shoot through said door. And as they know about the drill they will not be fooled into thinking nobody is there. Plus they can just shoot the lock off. And building a real barricade takes a long time, strength plus skill. It will prevent any solid response from you though, other than jumping out the window (if possible). This is why people are trained to evacuate not stay putt during danger. Or stall it actively if they can. Same principle as in fires, earthquakes, floods, bombings or other terror. ------ InitialLastName If you raise children in fear, they're easy to manipulate into fear as adults. I wonder if there's any connection between the Booomers' upbringing in the duck-and-cover era and their later full-throated support of security theater in the name of "anti-terrorism". ~~~ jamesrcole > _If you raise children in fear, they 're easy to manipulate into fear as > adults._ An implicit claim in the quoted text is that one of the reasons people want to implement such drills is to produce adults that will be easier to manipulate. I think a claim like that requires some attempt at justification. (And before anyone jumps to conclusions, the point I'm making is completely independent of whether I think the drills are a good or bad thing). ~~~ AstralStorm The justification is hard - you would have to run serious longitudinal studies. By that point the damage (or not) is done. In fact this could be considered an unsanctioned social experiment, doubly unethical because it is ran on children and bypasses parental oversight. Just consider what happens in quite heavily militarized countries such as South Korea. They get large numbers of people who are obedient and respect authority - this on top of the general Asian proclivity to do so. Or perhaps see what happens in Israel and Palestine with all the missile drills. ------ oldcynic Wow. Talk about solving the wrong problem. ------ maxehmookau America is strange. ------ abrown28 I remember drills that had us huddling under our desks because Russia was going to nuke us. Those desks are magical. ------ matte_black I think this is good. Kids go into these drills with eyes wide open, and are forced to confront the reality of their own mortality, and how easily their life could just come to a gruesome end even in a safe setting. The sooner one realizes this in life, the sooner one starts to live with _intent_ , and discerns the difference between things that truly matter in life and that which is fleeting and vain. ~~~ AstralStorm Some will instead break faced with this reality or... even worse. Since this is not personalized, it is extremely irresponsible to run such drills. If they really want to do this, they could choose a hand picked group to actually train in civil response instead of this dumb. Enough trained people should be able to stop an active shooter as opposed to scared bunch of kids.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Fnordserver – A bunch of geeks with a faible for simple, no-bullshit VPS hosting - silsha http://server.fnord.pro ====== tobyhede What is a 'faible'? ~~~ silsha Faible n (genitive Faibles, plural Faibles) soft spot, weakness (for something or someone) [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Faible](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Faible)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Discussion: The Developer Crunch in South Africa - tylerreed http://www.bandwidthblog.com/2012/01/23/the-developer-crunch-in-south-africa/ ====== tosseraccount Capital always complains about labor supply. Not big news, really. Raise wages and supply of labor will increase. Economists noted long ago that people respond rationally to price incentives. ------ moocow01 " many of these skilled developers don’t adopt open source languages simply because they don’t know any better, are stuck in their ways or earn enough not to care" Or maybe they don't want to learn skills that will help them get a job at a startup that will pay a lower rate. Believe me if you raise your pay, developers will take note. "If you are a competent developer, you have no need to worry about job security because you are in such high demand it’s actually quite scary. And it won’t change any time soon" Possibly, possibly not. We've seen more and more extreme shifts in economic cycles over the past few decades even in technology. "Go ahead and take the risk to join a bunch of people trying to achieve something extraordinary instead of wasting your brilliant talent on building crummy software that nobody appreciates" I work for a startup but I would say that just as few startups fall into the 'achieving something extraordinary' with non-crummy software as mid-size and large businesses do. "What about the money? I recommend negotiating with a startup to earn what you need to be comfortable (along with stock options)" I would rather recommend you negotiate as hard as possible with a startup to ensure you get what you are worth.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Breakthrough Starshot successfully launch world's smallest spacecraft - based2 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jul/28/breakthrough-starshot-successfully-launch-worlds-smallest-spacecraft ====== Boothroid I hope I live long enough to see the results of this. Proxima Centauri indeed!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why don't iPad-type tablet screen edges have a ratio of 1 : 0.70710678118?? - hackaflocka If they did, then dividing the screen in half would yield 2 rectangles with exactly the same proportions as the larger rectangle (i.e. the entire screen).<p>It would make it so much easier to put apps side by side, etc.<p>Any thoughts on this? ====== cylinder714 It's a fine idea, and it's also the idea behind ISO/metric paper sizes, as Markus Kuhn explores in this article: [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso- paper.html](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html) ------ SamReidHughes It's not ideal to zoom an app and all its GUI components to half its size. It would want to scale UI elements differently. So there's no strong reason to keep the proportions the same. Also there's all the reasons to choose other screen ratios. ~~~ hackaflocka Agree that half-sized UI elements would be undesirable. ------ gus_massa I like the idea. Is it posible to make a "prototype"? I.E. modify Android to place two black strips on the borders, so the free screen has this ratio. ~~~ hackaflocka It surprises me that nobody on the Android side is advertising they've done this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: I Was Unlucky – DuckDuckGo to Google Fallback Firefox Extension - lkiss I think a lot of people from our community has the same experience as me. I tried using DuckDuckGo as my primary search platform a few times due to privacy concerns, but I always went back to Google because I wasn't satisfied with the results sometimes.<p>To solve this issue, I created a tiny Firefox addon which adds a new button to my DDG search page called "I was unlucky" and if you click on that button, it redirects you to Google with the same search query. I found it very useful.<p>I know you can do the same with appending "!g" to the query, but that's much more effort. :) ====== lkiss Addon: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-was- unlucky...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-was-unlucky/) Source code: [https://github.com/KLaci/i-was- unlucky](https://github.com/KLaci/i-was-unlucky)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The vgo proposal is accepted. Now what? - stablemap https://research.swtch.com/vgo-accepted ====== eberkund I wish they had just copied Rust/Cargo. I remember reading a comment on GitHub somewhere from one of the Go maintainers who responded to someone expressing a similar sentiment and his reply was basically that Go is somehow different than every other language and they need to explore and find a unique custom solution for their particular use case. Has it ever been addressed anywhere why the tried and true "list of packages" \+ "lock file" paradigm is not good enough for Go? ~~~ amasad There are a lot of suboptimal design decisions that's shared across the state of the art in package management (cargo, pipenv, npm, yarn, etc) that the Go team is not taking for granted. One is reproducible builds. The standard answer is lock files which is extra bloat and leads to merge conflicts. vgo is trying to avoid it with the "minimal versions" strategy ([https://research.swtch.com/vgo- repro](https://research.swtch.com/vgo-repro)). Another is shared (or recursive) dependencies. The semver answer to this is that if the versions match then they should be shared if not then they should be duplicated. But what do you do if it's a singleton, listens on a port, or exposes a port. Right now, with npm for example, good luck with that, you're in for a world of pain. On the other hand with vgo's "semantic import versioning" they're trying to make version interop more explicit. Just because 90% of the time mainstream package mangers work doesn't mean it's a solved problem. Kudos for the Go team for trying to advance the state of the art. ~~~ kibwen _> The standard answer is lock files which is extra bloat and leads to merge conflicts._ Bloat how? A lockfile is a handful of bytes. A thousand lockfiles could fit in the space of a single Go hello world binary. And I've never heard of a merge conflict from a lockfile. What are the actual arguments against lockfiles? ~~~ blaisio It's pretty easy to get a merge conflict from a lock file. If two developers add a dependency and then try to merge their changes together, it can happen easily. ~~~ kibwen In that scenario, you're going to get a merge conflict anyway in your manifest (e.g. in go.mod). ~~~ grahamedgecombe It's probably easier to manually merge the manifest (as they're much more human-readable) than a lock file though. ~~~ steveklabnik Lock files are easy enough to resolve that npm, in newer versions, will do it for you automatically, if you ask it to. ------ adwhit For those who missed it, Sam Boyer (maintainer of dep) wrote a detailed post about why he thinks vgo (or rather Minimum Version Selection) is inadequate[0]. The key argument is _With dep, it’s usually easy to point to failures - they’re explicit, verbose (and, currently, often difficult to understand, and printed out at the end of a dep ensure run. The primary failure mode in vgo, however, is silent false positives - a vgo {get,test,run,build} command changes your dependency graph, and exits 0. Maybe everything’s fine, maybe it isn’t, but it’s incumbent upon you to take additional steps to understand that your build is broken._ I haven't been following this debate very closely, and this post doesn't make it clear - have these points been addressed? Is there still room to maneuver, or is the design mostly settled now? I know the post states that any design flaws will be fixed, but it sounds very much like the more typical lock-file + solver solution has been definitively decided against. [0] [https://sdboyer.io/vgo/failure-modes/](https://sdboyer.io/vgo/failure- modes/) ~~~ tmpz22 I just hope they figure out a solution which satisfies the community for the long run. Maybe they have already with vgo, but this is starting to feel vary Javascript-y the way people have been pushed from $OLD_PACKAGE_MANAGER -> dep -> vgo. ~~~ ljm Quite the contrary: NPM's reputation in these circles is less than stellar and it's been incumbent in the JS ecosystem ever since Node became a thing. Well, with a few attempts at competition along the way before those working with the browser jumped on board, but nobody is pushing anybody to use anything but NPM and that attitude hasn't changed for years. This story isn't unique to Go: both Python and Ruby have had their own ordeals with dependency management, there was an article about CMake just the other day... Maybe Go's mistake is searching for the one-true dependency resolution system and deprecating everything along the way until something good-enough turns up. Maybe it'd be better that developers are encouraged to use dep while vgo is still in proposal stage so that there is an easy migration path from one standard to another, as opposed to immediately rendering obsolete. I don't really know, neither do I know why Javascript is the scapegoat for this kind of shit, it's practically a rite of passage for a language gaining increasing mind-share. ~~~ weberc2 > Maybe Go's mistake is searching for the one-true dependency resolution > system and deprecating everything along the way until something good-enough > turns up. Maybe it'd be better that developers are encouraged to use dep > while vgo is still in proposal stage so that there is an easy migration path > from one standard to another, as opposed to immediately rendering obsolete. The odd thing is I get the feeling that their search for the one-true system is causing them to repeat every other package manager's mistakes. I'm likely misinformed, but I get the feeling that they think they can do the same thing other package managers have considered or tried, but it will work for them somehow. I don't get the feeling that they seriously considered the criticism of VGo's approach. It smells like hubris. Also, there's Cargo, which is lauded by all, but the proposal doesn't seem to consider that perhaps the Cargo folks had a reason to make their dependency resolution scheme complicated. Again, this smacks of hubris. I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise, and it would really only take a link to a thread in which some VGo proponent thoughtfully addresses Sam's criticism and the "why not copy Cargo?" criticism (and no, the "Cargo's dep resolution scheme is overly complicated" rationale from the proposal doesn't constitute). ~~~ ljm Feels like Go is trying to carve its own path, for better or worse, against conventional wisdom. Plan9 was pretty much the same in a lot of ways and it came up with some really interesting concepts (that sadly haven't panned out that well - I'd love to see a modern OS attempt at Acme, I found that incredibly intriguing and I actually wonder if it could be revived in VR.) If they come up with something innovative with vgo then great. It's just a shame that the community is opting for a monopoly on the system before it even physically exists. They should be encouraging dep to thrive while doing this experimentation on vgo behind the scenes, because then at least they've got community alignment on dep and not dep, glide, godep, `git clone some-repo vendor/some-repo`, `go get` and whatever else you can do to pull in external code. ~~~ weberc2 > If they come up with something innovative with vgo then great. For sure, but I actually like Go and I'm unnerved that none of the concerns raised by folks like Sam (read "folks with experience in package management") are being addressed. This approach doesn't inspire confidence in vgo. ------ throwaway243425 To an outsider this may sound like there is some sort of process that resulted in this solution, there actually isn't any. The committee is nothing more than a simple bureaucracy to the point that it is almost a joke how Russ makes a proposal, community is against it, then it gets accepted by the Committee. It is all just a funny joke. ~~~ jimmy1 > To an outsider > Russ > throwaway Something tells me you aren't really an outsider. Anyways, > community is against it, then it gets accepted by the Committee Is this your primary gripe? Because this has happened pretty consistently in the history of almost all open source languages. Think of how many JSRs were hotly contested, only to be accepted. Open source does not mean democratic development, and thankfully so because you might have ended up with this [https://i.redd.it/7t1p88ct13ez.jpg](https://i.redd.it/7t1p88ct13ez.jpg) ~~~ dikaiosune FWIW, I read "To an outsider..." to mean "if you are reading this on HN and aren't involved in the community, this might seem like" as opposed to "I am pretending to be an outsider, let me tell you what about my perspective." ------ dstroot I first used $GOPATH and “go get”. Was amazed at how simple and easy it was and it “just worked”. Then you start to run into issues... so I started using Glide. Which worked pretty darn well. Then I switched to Dep because “it was the future” and it didn’t cause me to break out in hives. Now vgo... but Dep works for me so at the moment I don’t plan to switch until vgo is good and baked. Given Boyer’s concerns I hope he maintains Dep for a while as vgo is polished. Too bad this was not part of the vision at the start. Not sure where JS would be without NPM, etc. ~~~ kodablah > Not sure where JS would be without NPM Where it was before NPM, i.e. where Go is today. No real versioning or discovery (granted Go has qualified URLs for discovery). ------ gkya I still wonder why solving a solved problem took so long to solve for the Go community, given they already solved it anyways? That is, in more proper words, first of all, language specific package management is mostly a solved problem. There are possible improvements, and maybe vgo realises some of them, but that's mostly a bikeshedding problem. What users need is to be able to declare what packages they need, in what version range. And their search for an alternative to fetching source repos is like searching for the cure to ilnesses that already have proven vaccines: you just put up a server and fetch from there. Decentralisation? Put up mirrors. Then the way this vgo thing happened is the opposite of nice. Tools already existed, and they had to conform to the restrictions of the project (like the, excuse me but, idiotic idea of a $GOPATH); but then one of the Go deities come around and goes, um, I deprecate all of you, break the rules that you had to comply, and because I-am-who-I-am, this is the way to go. Now Cox's solution might indeed be better (though I think it's an overkill, and do agree to Boyer's articles I read), but this is not the way to run a community. From my PoW, this would not preclude me from using the language if it came up, but I'd definitely be reluctant to send patches to them. Communities with deities and dogmas are always unhealthy. Those that also, additionally, are deep down in yak shaving and bikeshedding are even more so. ~~~ lobster_johnson > Now Cox's solution might indeed be better (though I think it's an overkill > ... vgo is actually much, much _simpler_ than dep. The sheer number of words in Russ Cox's series of blog posts belies its simplicity. vgo doesn't need a SAT solver. If you look at many of the issues dep is struggling with, they're related to solving N libraries with transitive dependencies up the wazoo. Cox's long treatise reflects the complexity of the problem space. Developers tend to brush off package management as being simple. But once you include range-based version constraints and transitive dependencies, it gets a bit messier. Look at NPM and Yarn; they're _still_ struggling to get all the details right. On the other hand, there's Ruby's Bundler. It came out in 2009, RubyGems in 2004, and I've never had a single issue with the toolchain (other than messing up my own constraints). I don't know what kind of magic elixir they were drinking, but somehow those guys managed to nail it from day one. ~~~ Lazare > Look at NPM and Yarn; they're still struggling to get all the details right. I think that's a bit unfair. NPM has been a horrible package manager in a multitude of ways since day 1. My default assumption if it gets something wrong it isn't because it's hard, but because npm gets a _lot_ of things wrong. Yes, RubyGems got it right, but so did Composer. And Cargo. And every other language specific dependency manager I've used in over a decade. The lesson I'm drawing isn't that dependency management is uniquely hard, it's that npm is uniquely bad. :) ~~~ gkya Comparison to NPM is also unfair because of the rather unique community around it. ------ ospider Besides the technical details between vgo and dep. The go team just announced and accepted its own proposal, completely ignoring the community's solutions, dep was even called the official experiment, which is sad. ------ jrs95 > Now what? I keep using dep for as long as it's reasonable for me to do so, because I don't like MVS and I don't like how MVS has been basically forced upon us. ~~~ wuliwong What is MVS? ~~~ mali9 Minimal Version Selection [https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs](https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs) ------ rahenri There is a lot of criticism on the proposal with a lot of good reason. But, I'm honestly very excited about the deprecation of GOPATH, that was one of the most annoying features of go for me. ------ matte_black What does this mean for someone who is starting out with Go? ~~~ eosrei Nothing. Use dep now. In fact, since you are just starting out, see how far you can get using only the standard library. Later, there will be a seamless upgrade to vgo. ~~~ marcus_holmes Seconded. Unlike Node/Ruby/most other modern languages, Go devs actively avoid including dependencies if at all possible. And contrary to rumour, this is not because Go's dependency management sucks. It's more about the pursuit of simplicity, and avoidance of magic. You can write pretty much anything using just the standard library (and some of the official packages, like the crypto ones). As the parent said, it's good practice to go as far as possible with just the stdlib. ~~~ oceanswave So go is about recreating the wheel, over and over again ~~~ sethammons Not really. Generally, the wheel you need and the wheel I need are a bit different. Instead of using some bloated "all-wheel," developers choose their custom wheel. Simple example, SyncMap. This is a general purpose all-wheel, and as such, due to Go's type system, you have to use runtime type assertions against it. If I need a lockable map, I just make one and it is of the type I need, say map[string]*Foo. I just wrap it in a struct with a lock and I'm done. For more complicated things, most everyone will pull in a package. I'm not going to waste some time making a Redis or Kafka package. For a web server, I may pull in a different muxer, but only if needed. ~~~ matte_black What is the Go alternative to generics? ~~~ marcus_holmes specifics? Joking aside, that's pretty much it. The usual method for go devs is to solve the specific problem in front of you (and accepting a certain amount of duplication) rather than creating generic solutions that have a wider scope than they need. Once it's all working, refactoring can often remove the duplication and provide a better solution than the generic one would have provided (because by then you know the problem domain better). I've been coding in Go for a few years, and only a couple of times run into the "shit, I need generics here" problem. And yes, I get that this means that the Go answer to generics is "you don't need generics" ;) Which sounds like such bullshit of course. ------ Avi-D-coder How does Haskell's cabal compare to vgo? ~~~ danharaj Cabal uses a SAT solver. It's in the middle of a beta for replacing it's global package management with per-project package management by default (so- called new-style builds). There were some warts in the past when it couldn't manage different versions of the same package, I think because of a ghc issue but that is in the past. Most industrial users use stack or nix on top which reduce the use of Cabal's version solver. ------ anonfunction I really do not like the “semver-like” versioning string requirement. My packages are already tagged with valid semver releases and now I need to change them by adding a “v” prefix. If you don’t know what I’m talking about vgo requires the release to be tagged like “v1.0.3” which is not standard semver. ~~~ cesarb > vgo requires the release to be tagged like “v1.0.3” which is not standard > semver Are you talking about git tags? Tagging a release with a "v" followed by the version number has been done since the very first git repository. I don't think semver has any official standard; the closest I can find is [https://semver.org/spec/v1.0.0.html](https://semver.org/spec/v1.0.0.html), which does say "When tagging releases in a version control system, the tag for a version MUST be “vX.Y.Z” e.g. “v3.1.0”." ~~~ anonfunction Yes I am talking about git tags. I purposely followed semver 2.0.0 which doesn't mention anything about a "v" prefix. Thanks for finding an old mention of version control tagging! At the end of the day it's not a big deal. I will just duplicate the tags so it won't break any dep configurations. ------ markrages This article is about the Go programming language (and environment). ------ gyrgtyn As someone who just recently started using go, this seems really dumb. ~~~ reificator The churn in dependency management is one of the worst issues with go. The other is not having a canonical GUI option, instead mostly just bindings to other toolkits with varying completeness and quality. That said, I think it's worth sticking with go for the quality of the language itself. If you don't need a GUI _(or plan to use a web GUI)_ it's a really nice balance of design decisions that let you actually get things done.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The cause of the Zune leap year bug has been isolated to a Freescale date routine - divia http://www.zuneboards.com/forums/zune-news/38143-cause-zune-30-leapyear-problem-isolated.html ====== aston The thing that _kills_ me about this bug is that it's such an easy bug to find in a code-review. Some person totally unfamiliar with the code asks "What happens when that inner _if_ condition is false?" and MSFT is saved from yet another embarassing gadget glitch. ~~~ demallien What kills me is the fact that they have a while loop on the main thread of the Zune, which wasn't tested for all possible values of input. I don't know about anyone else here, but as an embedded software developer, that sort of thing automatically sets off alarm bells for me. Such a situation would definately be code-reviewed, _and_ heavily unit tested in a sane development environment. ~~~ thras If stories are true, Microsoft has some the most code-reviewed software in the world. The levels of bureaucracy they have got to go through are tremendous. First-generation Zune software was so bad that it made iTunes look good. On the other hand, there was a seismic rift between first-gen Zune software and second-gen. The new Zune client software has got one of the nicest, prettiest UIs on my system. I think that in order to generate the second-gen Zune software, a lot of the bureaucracy must have been chucked. Apparently too much. It's really too bad. I suppose that we have will have to make hard choices between stability, features, and beauty forever. ------ mixmax Bet there's a developer somewhere having a really shitty New Years eve right now... ------ DenisM Bugs happen. The root cause of this disaster is an incomplete test plan. ~~~ gruseom There is no such thing as a complete test plan. ~~~ lionheart But isn't this exactly the kind of thing that _should_ be in a test plan? Run through all the possibly dates? I mean, didn't we learn our lesson from Y2K? ~~~ jerf Sure thing. We'll run it through all possible dates. Well, you know, some actions may only have problems on certain dates, so make that all possible actions on all possible dates. Well, you know, maybe the meridian counts. So, make that all possible actions on all possible dates in both the morning and the afternoon. Well, we better test that with all the pathological media files we've built up. So, make that all possible actions on all possible dates in the morning and the afternoon with every one of our three hundred test music files. Well... what if... In hindsight it's always easy to identify the test that would have revealed the problem. Given the ability of bugs to only manifest when five particularly tricky conditions occur (and let's not even TALK about race conditions!), it simply isn't possible to test them all exhaustively. Unit testing helps, sort of, because it can run through a matrix faster than a human can, but it's also dumber, and even unit testing can't exhaustively search a twelve-dimensional space in any reasonable period of time if it's anything more than binary values in those twelve dimensions. That said, for date processing code, this is definitely something I would have unit tested; that style of date processing is OK if you get it perfect, but definitely inherently problematic. One case where I did write a fairly exhaustive unit test was for billing code with a variable bill-on date; getting every single case exactly correct took me a long time. I was up to about three thousand permutations when I was done, and yeah, I'd see bugs that only struck if you signed up on the 31st of a month followed by a month of 30 days, for instance. Easy to miss if you're writing on a 15th. (And that code was probably thrown away... :( ) ------ zitterbewegung This sounds like a daily wtf posting in the making. ------ zhyder The correct way to do this is to define a quadyear=365*4+1, and then just use mods & divides (quadyear -> year-within-quad -> day) with no loop, right? ~~~ marcus Not exactly its a bit more difficult, leap years occur once every four years unless the year is divisible by 100 and not by 400 so 1900 wasn't a leap year 2000 was one 2100 won't be. Although in most places I saw the code just ignored it as something that's valid between 1901-2099 is considered good enough in most places. Edit: sorry shouldn't post this early in the morning, its 400 not 1000 ~~~ dwarry No, century years are leap years if they are divisible by 400, so 2400 will be the next such, not 3000! ~~~ marcus Sorry, you're right. Changed the original comment. ------ tocomment Why do they have access to the source code? Since when is Zune open source? ------ redorb on zune.net it says this bug will work itself out noon tomorrow... still a bad taste.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google to developers: We're sick of ugly design - RougeFemme http://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-developers-were-sick-of-ugly-design/ ====== JeremyMorgan If there's one thing that will push people to design better, it's the promise of better Google results. I know Google isn't exactly saying that here, but take page load time for instance. Once the rumor started that faster pages rank higher in Google, suddenly everyone was trying to make their pages faster. Its one of the ways Google can bring even more change to the web.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Umano team has joined Dropbox - xm https://umano.me/resources/thankyou ====== koyao Bummer that they'll be shutting down a pretty useful service... "Umano will continue running for the next 30 days until June 12, 2015. All annual Premium subscribers have those 30 days to request a refund for the remainder of their subscriptions here."	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How the failed deal with Waymo left Ford in the lurch - Fricken http://www.autonews.com/article/20170529/OEM/170529795/google-ford-deal-mark-fields ====== csours Disclaimer: I work for a Ford competitor, but have no first-hand knowledge of this deal. I'm thinking about the concept of 'frenemies' and jumping to some unsupported conclusions. In tech you may have a turnaround of weeks or months for some products. In automotive, you may plan a new vehicle for 5 years and then in some cases produce it for up to 10 years after that, and then continue to support that vehicle for 10 more years. Also, automotive customers do not support the idea of moving quickly and breaking things (excepting some Tesla customers). This leads to relationships like 'frenemies' not making much sense in auto manufacturing. If you can't trust the other party to be there for years, you don't start a relationship. Now the mostly baseless speculation: It seems that Mark Fields felt that Ford brought a lot of value to a potential Ford-Google partnership. I assume Fields though Google would understand and value that as well, and it seems that Google did not value that, leading to misunderstanding and frustration. ~~~ wavefunction I don't know any serious business that embraces 'breaking things' when a bit more effort and time ensures that nothing gets broken. ~~~ ams6110 It goes along with CEOs who wear T-shirts to work. ~~~ michaelvoz What's the word for this kind of phrase? One where the author of the sentence has some kind of skewed world view, and we get to see a glimpse of it? ~~~ tyingq Parapraxis, or Freudian slip maybe? ------ rmason What is revealing is that a former office furniture CEO from sleepy West Michigan is apparently much more hip on Silicon Valley technology than the whole of Ford. This is how entire industries get disintermediated. ~~~ primrosepath The auto companies everywhere except Tesla are so far behind. Lived in Detroit most of my life. When discussed, the big 3's problems get brushed away irrationally. But it's worse than the future catching up with the auto companies. I feel like the execs don't even know how to market to their customers. Comparing Mary Barbra's unveiling of the Bolt to Elon's Model 3 was night and day. Elon had a teleprompter but he spoke like a normal guy about things he and I am interested in. On the other hand Mary's speech was stiff and read word for word. They used early 90's cutting edge graphics in the background at one point. They talked about the history of GM which no one cares about. It felt like it was directed at share holders not customers. A lot of ideas about how to run a car company will change. I'm not sure the big 3 will make it. ~~~ Judgmentality Well, the big 3 are all currently profitable, so they have that going for them. I'm not sure how Tesla is going to make it as they continue to overpromise, underdeliver, and hemorrhage money. I do agree with you though that Tesla is far better at marketing. ~~~ greglindahl Tesla has had repeated success raising money by going to the financial markets, so, it appears that enough fools are willing to invest to sustain them until now and for a while longer. ~~~ cinquemb And the Big 3 have had big success in getting large near zero interest rate loans and liens of liquidity provided by tax payers directly and the issuance/sales of t-backs on behalf of tax payers. Financially speaking, the shenanigans of Tesla and the Big 3 aren't too dissimilar… ~~~ slededit Ford didn't get a bailout, nor did they need the cash for clunkers assistance. ~~~ Judgmentality This isn't true. Ford actually took out a bigger loan than GM. In fact, Ford still owes the government over $6 billion when the other automakers have repaid their debts. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2011/09/19/ford- loo...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2011/09/19/ford-looks- hypocritical-in-new-anti-bailout-commercial/#5dbec21a1efc) ------ dboreham Reading this article my conclusion is that "autonomous self-driving vehicles don't work at present". Ford management had the belief that they do work and therefore wanted to press ahead with a go-to-market plan. Google management knows they don't work and so back-pedaled. Deal fell apart as a result. ~~~ true_tuna That conclusion is almost certainly incorrect. Internal communications at Google indicate strong confidence in the approach and viability of the cars. There was constant crowing about hundreds of thousands of miles driven autonomously (with the only at fault accident being the car committing the egregious sin of expecting an overtaking public bus to yield for an indicated merge). A recurring internal criticism is that they have been ready to go to market for a while, but are proceeding with extraordinarily caution. Google probably wants a repeat of the Personal Computer market: open, agile, competative. There's a hint of this in the way they structure deals (quietly helpful, non-exclusive). "You want the technology? Sure. You want exclusivity? Nope." If Uber had asked for a technical partnership instead of straight up stealing the tech they'd probably have gotten what they stole and more with a smile and a high five. ------ pirocks Interesting this website is "not secure". I remember that chrome was going to start doing this, but the first time I actually saw it happen. ~~~ dc_gregory We had this issue on our sites for a short time; all in all, it was very effective at forcing a much higher business priority for the fix. ------ SA500 Hopeless on the part of Ford. ------ dosgonlogs This article makes Google look really bad. ~~~ Eridrus Does it? The article made it sound like Ford's main goal was to appease Wall St, whereas Google was focused on actually building the damn thing. ~~~ true_tuna That's my take on the situation too. ------ skywhopper "At the time, none of the major automakers had spelled out a serious plan for getting fully self-driving cars on the road." Even if it had worked out, a deal with Waymo would not have been a "serious plan". This deal only amounted to throwing money at a hype factory in order to gain credibility in an imaginary market. Waymo hasn't proven it's even on track to create a workable product in the next decade. Google in particular has a proven track record of having a very short attention span. They won't make a good partner in the long run, no matter what. Carmakers like Ford would be a lot better off playing the long game on this, focusing on building out practical semi-automated safety features in the proven iterative manner they know, and growing their own expertise in self-driving engineering in-house. ~~~ SA500 Google have been doing this for longer than anyone else and have logged an order of magnitude more miles (cf. all their competitors combined). They also have by far and away the most accurate/reliable technology as evidenced by their dis/engagement stats. They are years ahead of everyone else. As a separate company they would be valued at ~$70 billion- with huge upside ~~~ LoSboccacc I don't see how people could be tricked to buy a google car with the expectation of the controlling software being obsolete in a couple year and left unupdated as the sensor technology improves. That alone makes google a risky partner for any serious automaker - they're better of as a partner to a leasing agency than a seller. ~~~ true_tuna Ha! You have a point there.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google's bottleneck is the internet - peterstuifzand http://peterstuifzand.nl/2010/11/03/google-s-problem.html ====== cavilling_elite I don't know if this is what you were eluding to but maybe this is why mod_pagespeed was just released. Making the "internet" faster would make google faster.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tech fail: Gruesome video still on social media hours after attack - rwx------ https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/15/tech/new-zealand-shooting-video-facebook-youtube/index.html ====== sschueller Please change the title to what the article has. Why should they censor? We the people need to see these things to understand how horrible they are. If you censor this and things like children getting hit by shelling, war becomes OK. And war is never ok. ~~~ scarmig 1) People have the right not to have their corpses, and their spouses' and children's corpses, rubbernecked by a billion people, a significant minority of which will take the opportunity to make jokes about the video. 2) The videos themselves can be seen as a kind of propaganda, both for the violence a person might be capable of and the attention they might get for it. This I'm less sure of: I'd be curious to see if there's a contagion effect. ~~~ ralusek Why do people have that right? I don't feel that right on behalf of my corpse, and I'm not aware of any legislation indicating as much. What I DO think people have a right to is to not see that content, if they so choose. As far as being right wing propaganda, the video could be seen as propaganda for all kinds of agendas, but that doesn't automatically call for censorship. Jussie Smollet case is a good example of how right wing violence is jumped on by left wing activists as a means to demonize their opposition, in much the same way an uninformed "Social Justice Warrior" screaming that "all heterosexual intercourse is rape" is more likely to bolster right wing opposition than encourage other leftists to follow suit. ~~~ dragontamer The corpses of adults is probably fine to show. But corpses of minors is almost certainly against the law to show. I know there are a bunch of American laws regarding privacy protection of minors that don't apply to adults (but IANAL so...). That's something I remember from my journalism class: you can almost do any reporting you like on adults, but if children are involved its way, way more legally difficult to stay in the clear. For example: if a minor commits a crime and is charged as a child, you are NOT allowed to publish the name of the child. This is to protect their permanent record, so that they have a better chance of reform as they grow up. If they're charged as an adult, I think the rules are different. This also happened outside of the USA. The US has its own laws, while other countries have their laws. I'm sure details are different.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
If the world's population lived like American's do - morpheous http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33133712 ====== dang Please don't rewrite titles.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why post titles are created as a question? - soheil I'm aware I just did the same thing, but this is an example of what I'm about to explain. I would like to argue the reason articles have titles usually in the form of a question is mainly because of the laziness of the author. I want HN's feedback on this hence me posting this here.<p>If you think about it there is no reason for a title of an article to be a question. A question is typically directed toward a person who can answer that question. If a question is asked without the expectation of an answer why is it in the form of a question? (I just did that here by the way.) To raise curiosity could be one reason, but there is no one having a dialog so it seems wrong to me that a question is asked when in fact an assertion should be made.<p>Part of the reason I believe for why this is happening is because it may be fashionable to pose a question instead of making an assertion because it's indicative of not making assumptions and having an open mind. However, articles do make assumptions constantly and are in fact loaded with biases both unintentionally and on purpose. They try to persuade us by highlighting the information that is supportive of their final conclusion and omitting others that are not so much.<p>Finally the reasons may not be so nefarious as the picture I painted above, but perhaps at best just laziness.<p>Please let me know if this is what you think too or why I'm making a mistake. ====== ParameterOne Your post title is not a question, it is a title with a question mark at the end. Just because you are not expecting an answer doesn't mean you don't deserve one....you did ask a question. Questions also change brain chemistry. The person asking the questions is in control of direction of the conversation. I think the questions that you are speaking of are the type meant to lure you in like "Is DDR4 really faster than DDR3?" and then you read a content marketing article from a DDR4 manufacturer. ------ teddyuk To help people find the content. They go to google “how do I fix blah” then a post titled “how do I fix blah” appears and they click it and their blah is sorted	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use - Libertatea http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/fastest-wi-fi-ever-is-almost-ready-for-real-world-use/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29 ====== hayksaakian "...with the downside of using frequencies that are easily blocked by walls. Even thin cubicle walls may block signals, Wilocity acknowledged. " ~~~ dnu Not good for a house, but very useful for apartments in large buildings. You can have one wireless AP in each room (connected to eachother with wires), and almost no interference from the neighbours. ~~~ hayksaakian Is there no developing, competing standard that improves on current WiFi without these drawbacks? ~~~ kbuck 802.11n on the 5GHz band (most implementations use 2.4GHz) already does this. The real problem is the 2.4GHz band, which is simply over-saturated. 2.4GHz also penetrates walls really well, which is a drawback in apartment situations because it introduces more interference from neighboring access points (and many other devices operating on or near the 2.4GHz frequency - wireless phones, microwaves, etc.). I've used a 5GHz 802.11n AP in my last two apartments; it's worked great every time. Most of the time I don't even see any other access points in range. Even if there are other APs, 5GHz has many more frequency bands available, so avoiding interference is simple. The only drawback is that so many devices don't support 5GHz. My smartphone didn't until I upgraded to the SGS III, and my Nook still doesn't. Also, 5GHz is faster because the spec allows 40MHz channels. ~~~ hayksaakian So would pushing for 5ghz N be better than 60ghz? ~~~ joenathan AC is 5GHz @ 1Gbs and it is already available. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac> [http://www.amazon.com/RT-AC66U-Dual-Band-Wireless- AC1750-Gig...](http://www.amazon.com/RT-AC66U-Dual-Band-Wireless- AC1750-Gigabit-Router/dp/B008ABOJKS/) ~~~ dnu Yes, but it can also use several channels. This plus the AC standard becoming more popular will lead to overcrowding in 5 GHz also. 2.4 GHz has 3 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels. 5 GHz has about 23 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels. Both go through walls, so you will get interference from neighbouring apartments no matter what technology you implement. The only solutions are to use a much higher frequency, or shield your apartment walls. ------ FollowSteph3 As nice as the speed is, I think the real application is docking stations for mobile devices - think iPhone, android, etc. I take my mobile device with me, put it near a wigi router and all of a sudden I have a wireless keyboard mouse monitors etc all hooked up. No wires required. No setup, nothing!! Very cool for portability!! My friend comes over and they just bring their devices to the table and were using another mobile device fully integrated. The mobile device is a portable brain. Very cool!! ~~~ FollowSteph3 You could even automtically hook up your phone to your tv, etc. no wires needed. As long as your phone carries everything, it can be hooked up to anything automatically when you step into a room! ------ SoftwareMaven I'm looking forward to this. I have two great rooms that may have a dozen active devices at any moment. I'm ok with the single-room applications for both of these common areas. I can imagine a lot of similar places in offices. Cubicles could have antanae attached or be made of a material that is more willing to reflect the beams; much easier than pulling wires. ~~~ jseliger >I have two great rooms that may have a dozen active devices at any moment. If any of them are stationary, or mostly stationary, you might just want to run an ethernet cable. Even long ones are dirt cheap from Monoprice. For instance, I wired my iMac, my girlfriend's iMac, and leave a wire at our kitchen table, where laptops are most likely to be used, for about $12 shipped. Transferring video files between machines is now fast, and we don't have interference from neighboring networks (or vice-versa). Ethernet also makes using distributed processing using Compressor ([http://documentation.apple.com/en/compressor/usermanual/inde...](http://documentation.apple.com/en/compressor/usermanual/index.html#chapter=8%26section=6%26tasks=true)) easy. ~~~ elithrar > If any of them are stationary, or mostly stationary, you might just want to > run an ethernet cable. Even long ones are dirt cheap from Monoprice. For > instance, I wired my iMac, my girlfriend's iMac, and leave a wire at our > kitchen table, where laptops are most likely to be used, for about $12 > shipped. I think the issue for most is not the cost of the cables, but the inconvenience (and safety hazard!) of having cables running around the house. They also typically tend to look untidy. For me it'a a decision between a wireless router (which I would need anyway) for $180-odd or an additional $200-$300 to get CAT6 wired up to two (2) rooms in the house w/ 2 sockets per faceplate (and a cheap switch to aggregate it all). ~~~ jseliger >w/ 2 sockets per faceplate (and a cheap switch to aggregate it all). Oh—we just run it along baseboards and tape the cords in place. ------ notatoad This isn't 'wifi'. 60GHz is not practical for general purpose wireless data connections. It's a 7Gbit wireless link, which will be great for beaming something to your TV, or for a wireless bridge link between two buildings, or any of myriad other specific use cases. We don't need that much bandwidth on our wifi, and we certainly don't need the tradeoffs.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Apple Extends Deadline for Sandboxing of Mac App Store Apps to June 1 - natesm http://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/21/apple-extends-deadline-for-sandboxing-of-mac-app-store-apps-to-june-1/ ====== kennywinker Ah, this lends credo to my strategy of ignoring Sandboxing in the hopes that it goes away. 10.7.3 introduced a few new entitlements, but the situation is still pretty dire for most apps. Sandboxing is not ready for prime time yet. As evidenced by the fact that almost all of Apple's own apps are still un-sandboxed. ------ thought_alarm What are these new entitlements and APIs, and how well do they address the concerns some developers had? ~~~ kennywinker In short, 10.7.3 introduced "bookmarks". Basically your app can ask for permission to read/write to a file/folder, and keep that permission indefinitely. Prior to that, if you wanted to write somewhere on the disc (say the Downloads folder) you'd have to use the sandbox save dialog every time. Now you ask once for permission, and keep a bookmark of that permission. There is also a document-scoped version of bookmarks. Not clear on the use case for that. ~~~ Xuzz One use case would be something with "projects", like Xcode, that need to have project files with implicit access to the files around them. IIRC, it's currently limited to files (rather than directories), though, so I'm not sure how useful it really is.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
‘Tesla killer’ Mercedes EQC flops with 55 units sold in Germany - jgotti92 https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-killer-mercedes-benz-eqc-flops-germany/ ====== turtlebits What I don't get about the luxury companies making electric is that their range is crap. Range matters for an electric vehicle, and I would expect a luxury (non sports) car to have better range than a Leaf/Tesla 3/Bolt etc. ------ pathartl I don't think it's hard to see why. It's a $67k base price with only a 200 mile range. ------ esotericn Because it's a worse car. The absolute minimum bar to hit for a car that's even roughly the same price (say within 30% or so) is the range of the equivalent Tesla. Bear in mind also, that this car would not give you access to Tesla superchargers. I'm currently on a road trip across Europe and if I had to use only the standard chargers it would have been far more logistically challenging. So to make up for that it should have significantly _more_ range than a Tesla, because otherwise it's an inferior product in practice. That isn't happening, and everything they make without that problem solved is literally a waste of energy. A little Nissan Micra type car can have a 100 mile range and that's fine, it's a city car. A big sedan should be able to drive anywhere - if it can't, it's basically a stocking filler, it's going to be scrapped in 5-10 years. ~~~ clouddrover > _The absolute minimum bar to hit for a car that 's even roughly the same > price (say within 30% or so) is the range of the equivalent Tesla._ It's not that simple. The Audi e-tron outsells both the Model X and the Model S in Europe: [http://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/europe-november-2019.ht...](http://ev- sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/europe-november-2019.html) > _Bear in mind also, that this car would not give you access to Tesla > superchargers._ I always find this mindset strange. A closed charging network is not in your best interest as a driver. The question you should be asking is why can't you charge any EV on Tesla's chargers. Here is a Volkswagen ID.3 charging side by side with a Tesla Model 3 on Ionity chargers, exactly as it should be: [https://imgur.com/a/Giue5hW](https://imgur.com/a/Giue5hW) Other charging networks allow Teslas to charge on them, so when will Tesla reciprocate and open their network to other EVs? ~~~ esotericn > I always find this mindset strange. A closed charging network is not in your > best interest as a driver. The question you should be asking is why can't > you charge any EV on Tesla's chargers. I mean, if you're buying a car today, what matters is the charging network that exists, not the one you theoretically might like to exist. I take real trips, not dream ones.... :P ~~~ clouddrover > _what matters is the charging network that exists, not the one you > theoretically might like to exist._ No, you're still trapped in this closed network mindset. What matters is that multiple, interoperable networks exist, which they do. The Internet is better than AOL. Tesla's just not a team player. It's profoundly lame. It's fascinating that people defend it. ------ SloopJon Strangely absent from the blog post, or the article on which it is based, is the price of the vehicle. It mentions "numerous Tesla Model 3s", but I suspect that this thing costs more than a Model X. The other factor, of course, is infrastructure. What is the availability of Mercedes-compatible chargers, compared to Tesla? Edit: I stand corrected on the price. I don't know about Germany, but pathartl's quoted US price, while quite a bit more than a Model 3, would be less than a Model X. ~~~ aguyfromnb This blog is a Tesla mouthpiece. I'm surprised their articles get voted-up. It's embarrassing. Is the goal to be green, or is it to root for Silicon Valley? ~~~ woodandsteel Can you point to some general ideas or specific claims the website promotes that are simply false? ------ steelframe I cannot imagine the product teams that designed the Audi e-tron or the Mercedes EQC having sat down and said, "Let's build a car to compete with Tesla." What they created did not attempt to meet Tesla's strengths. Tesla understands that the thing that new EV owners really want is to feel secure (read: range and chargers so they're not stranded) and to have their newfangled electric cars feel "futuristic" (read: spartan interior, big touchscreen, autopilot, OTA software updates). Audi, Jaguar, Mercedes, et. al think that new EV owners want the same driving experience they had in their gas cars, only with an electric drivetrain. So they made their cars heavier in their pursuit of making the cars quiet, which they accomplished quite well. They preserved much of the body styling at the expense of drag because they assumed customers would want that brand identity. They targeted the "non power users," in that they held back a significant chunk of the battery from the consumer (~20% for the e-tron) so that consumers in hot climates couldn't wreck the battery by habitually charging all the way to 100% and letting the pack sit like that, which destroys lithium ion battery chemistry. Tesla on the other hand spent their complexity budget for the Model 3 on extracting as much range as possible with as little expense as they could. As a result, the car is significantly lighter, and anyone who owns a Model 3 can attest to the fact that there's a lot of road noise. This is immediately solvable with heavier materials, but Tesla understands that the first batch of Model 3 owners strongly prefer the range over the creature comfort. And that the first batch of Model 3 owners are less likely to wreck their battery packs by habitually letting them sit overcharged for long periods of time. So they can expose the full battery packs to the consumer and get that 20% range boost over competitors who hold that back from the consumer. 2020/2021 is starting to get interesting with the Ford Mach E, the Volvo Polestar 2, the LEAF Plus, the second-year Hyundai Kona Electric and Kia Niro Electric, and the updated Bolt, together with the very rapidly expanding Electrify America rapid charging network. Tesla will continue to optimize for range and will likely keep a "stats lead" on the competition, but as range anxiety starts to be alleviated the second generation of EV converts may shift their demands away from range and toward other characteristics of the vehicle such as the interior and road noise isolation. It will be interesting to see where that goes. ~~~ pathartl I want to take a ride in a Model 3 just because of the reported road noise. I bet it's half as loud as my Mini Cooper S. Whenever I get into another car it seems like it's completely dead in comparison. Also I wonder if road noise could be combated by active noise canceling. ~~~ dv_dt If you're going from maybe a high-mileage high-volume hybrid, or other gas efficient compact to a Model 3, the driver is going to think the Model 3 is quieter. If you're going from a conventional Mercedes/BMW to a Model 3, you'll think the Model 3 is louder and a rougher ride. ------ toyg I think Mercedes is the wrong manufacturer to try to compete with Tesla. Merc buyers are older folks and flashy people with more money than sense. They don’t care one bit about going green. ~~~ brumm As a German, I'm a bit curious why is this being downvoted. I had the exact same thought (two anecdotes don't make anecdata, I know, but), let me tell you why: I just don't think there's a market for this here. No one in my age range (mid thirties) or income level (SWE, comfy living in large German tech focused city) would think of buying a Mercedes Benz, let alone an electric one. For one, these things are expensive especially new, which the electric one would be. If you're looking at it from the young-environmentally-conscious angle, I don't think there's any trust towards Mercedes Benz to be doing this for the right 'reasons,' i.e. not actually caring about the environment, or going about it in a bad way. They are scramblin' to keep up after sleeping through the electrical car revolution and have nothing new to offer. Their approach and entire business model is deeply entrenched in traditional gas cars. Even if someone like me could afford the car (due to good job and income matched to levels in expensive city), by living in said city, they wouldn't need a car to go anywhere! I just don't see people who could afford an electric Mercedes buying one because people like that think global warming is a hoax, hate Greta, and buy diesel cars out of protest. I'm almost surprised they sold that many cars, actually. ~~~ netsharc Merc is actually targeting younger buyers with their newer models, like the A class, which is competing against BMW 1 series, and are in the VW Golf segment (pricier than the Golf obviously). Probably more for trust fund kids... ~~~ toyg The A class debuted in the late '90s, and has always been an utterly- overpriced "hot hatch". ~~~ netsharc But the 90's A-class were boring looking and surely not targeting young guys... ------ Nasrudith Really that highlights another trend I noticed with rivalry and paradigms and "being on the attack". If they have to bill themselves as the foo-Killer they aren't and will almost certainly fail as they don't establish their own niche even, let alone a good reason to choose them. I wonder why it is failing /that/ hard though. Failure to deliver value for their money? SUV + Electric not a good fit for the local market? ~~~ aguyfromnb > _If they have to bill themselves as the foo-Killer_ Who labelled it a Tesla killer? I don't see a source in this article. It's simply a Tesla fan being self-congratulatory. ~~~ solean Why so bothered TSLAQ? ~~~ aguyfromnb Why are these baseless accusations allowed on this forum? Is this not against the rules? 1\. I'm long TSLA, through a couple ETFs. 2\. This is projection. There's a constant parade of accusations of "Big oil FUD" whenever someone says anything remotely negative. Meanwhile, it is known that Tesla, and Elon personally, pay PR firms, private investigators and astroturfers (sorry, "social media influencers") to control narrative. Read the lawsuit depositions and financial disclosures. ------ vardump Electricity is very expensive in Germany, driving electric can actually be more expensive than gasoline cars. ~~~ throwaway4220 0.30 euro / kwh * 80 kwh = 24 euros to drive 220 miles 220 mi / 16 mpg for GLS 550 (similar size?) = 13 gallons * 5.25 euro/gallon = 72 euro [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes- Benz_EQC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_EQC) [https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/40761.shtml](https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/40761.shtml) [https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/gasoline_prices](https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/gasoline_prices) ~~~ gambiting I mean, that's not really a fair comparison. EQC is more like the GLC, perhaps GLE at a stretch, and in Germany you'd usually get it with a 220d diesel, those get 40-50mpg easily. ~~~ Barracoon The Model X uses 22.93 kWh/100 km. Electricity is € .31 / KWH. 22.93 * .31 = € 7.1083 / 100 km The GLC 200d uses 5.2 L/100 km (best efficiency). Diesel is € 1.266/L. 5.2 * 1.266 = € 6.5832 / 100 km So yea in DE it may be more cost beneficial to drive diesel than electric. If you get a GLC 300 using gasoline it goes up to € 9.798 / 100 km. ~~~ gambiting I guess it also relies on whether you can get any deal for electricity or not. Here in UK I pay £0.15/kWh, but during the night it goes down to £0.07/kWh. So as long as I can limit charging the car to nighttime, it's actually very very cheap.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
VMware vs. bhyve Performance Comparison – b3n.org - rodrigo975 https://b3n.org/vmware-vs-bhyve-performance-comparison/ ====== gigatexal For whatever reason the images aren’t loading.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Oracle Acquires Eloqua for $810M - kitcar http://www.eloqua.com/oracle/ ====== lanstein Odd... I'm contributing code to Oracle. <http://code.google.com/p/eloqua-php-sdk/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Coming Tech Backlash - RachelF https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/coming-tech-backlash-ross-mayfield ====== finid _Fifty percent of the jobs will be gone in ~20 years._ How many new jobs will be created?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Lenticrypt: A Provably Plausibly Deniable Cryptosystem - volker48 http://www.sultanik.com/blog/lenticrypt ====== ikeboy _In fact, Lenticrypt has the theoretical property that, under reasonable assumptions, there is always a near 100% probability that there exists an key in the public domain that will decrypt a given ciphertext to any desired plaintext, even if that key is not known._ This can't be true; there are more possible plaintexts than there are keys in the public domain. ------ ChuckMcM Interesting miss here. This system provides a way for someone to "comply" with a request to decrypt an encrypted file, without giving up the encrypted file. So if you had the 'books' from the drug cartel on your laptop as an encrypted spreadsheet you could also encrypt an innocent (but private) business ledger into the same file. If the border guards say "Give us the password to decrypt this file." You comply, and they see your private business ledger which you would have every reason to protect while traveling. They don't see the Cartel's ledger, which would incriminate you. ~~~ clusterfoo Minor pet-peeve. But we should probably refrain from immediately jumping to "drug cartel" examples. It only further perpetuates the meme that privacy is only something criminals and perverts should be concerned with. Why not "Erotic messages with my wife", "My medical records", "My business plan", "My home videos", or any other number of things most regular people probably don't want anyone snooping around. ~~~ ChuckMcM Fair enough. But you did understand that this tool is a way to decrypt something, _under duress_ , which provides a credible plaintext rather than the actual plaintext right? And if someone asked you decrypt your "home videos" under duress and you used the alternate key to decrypt the "cat videos", the people forcing you to do the decryption might be suspicious that you're encrypting cat videos at all. ------ JasonFruit Can anyone who's knowledgeable about cryptography and cryptographic programming chime in on whether this is uses decent algorithms and is reasonably well-implemented? I've kicked a similar idea around in my mind, but had the good sense to know I'm not the guy to build it. ------ jacobkg This appears to be an implementation of a 'One-time pad': [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One- time_pad). The difference is that we are using publicly available streams of data (book text, encoded youtube video bytes, etc) instead of truly random data as the key. This scheme takes advantage of the fact that with a one-time pad you can provide a key that will decode it to any possible plaintext (of the proper length). As for the security, using non randomly generated keys makes it harder to make any security claims about this technique. One-time pads are also subject to numerous side channel attacks, including arbitrary message modification. ~~~ jsnell It's not at all an implementation of a one time pad. Though I'm not getting what extra level of plausible deniability this is supposed to add over the absurd "I can decrypt anything to anything with a one time pad, so nothing is copyright infringement" argument. Edit: IIUC, it works like this. Let's say plaintext1[1] == 'a', and plaintext2[1] =='b'. Then ciphertext[1] = i, with i chosen such that key1[i] == 'a' and key2[i] == 'b'. Of course this means that you'll be repeatedly using the same key material which is very much not how an OTP works, and will most likely be blowing up the data by a factor of 4 on encryption (each byte becomes a word). ~~~ Buge It seems like it doesn't work that way >Unlike alternative plausibly deniable cryptosystems like the recently discontinued TrueCrypt—whose ciphertext size grows in proportion to the number of plaintexts (i.e., hidden volumes) it encrypts—Lenticrypt's ciphertext size is proportional to the largest plaintext it encrypts. ~~~ jsnell I'm pretty sure it works that way. Which part of what you quote conflicts with what I wrote? If you're objecting to the claim that the ciphertext will be blown up, please note the word 'proportional' in there. Producing a word of output for every input byte of the largest input file is still proportional. All that's saying is that the bloat factor is the same whether you're encrypting 2 files or 10. (The claim they're making here seems pretty worthless anyway, since the required key size will grow absurdly quickly as the number if input files is increased). ~~~ fryguy I don't feel that the claim is even correct, that the size of the output is proportional to the largest size. I mean, assume that the largest size is 1024 bytes. Then take two files that are gigabyte each into 1024 byte chunks. Make a function that encrypts each chunk into the appropriate chunk in the second file. I don't think this is possible to do without being on the order of a gigabyte (the number of documents being encrypted). If it behaves like a one-time pad, where f(d1, k) = d2, and you can find a d' such that f(d', k) = d3, then it means that d' is likely to be gibberish and I don't understand what this is doing. ------ thyrsus I'm going to play with this to observe the behavior of the ciphertext, but I'm a priori skeptical that the ciphertext size will not approach the summed (compressed) size of the original cleartexts. Otherwise, you'd achieve theoretically impossible compression (e.g., a million 1k texts compressed into n<<1Gbyte). I probably don't understand the requirements for the keys; do they need to be at least as long as the cleartext? Otherwise, there's a bug: With copies of keys and cleartexts from /usr/bin, I tried ./lenticrypt.py -e eqn shotwell -e grep php -o f1 php was the largest cleartext at 4388Kb. Memory use by lenticrypt stopped growing at 474Mb. The eqn and grep keys were both about 148k. After 15 minutes (on an admittedly rather old laptop, though very high end six years ago) and 57% encrypted, the program suddenly exited with no error and status 0, and f1 at a size of 6468K. Regrettably, bash-4.2$ ./lenticrypt.py -d eqn f1 > shotwell.d Found length header. File format version is 3 Traceback (most recent call last): File "./lenticrypt.py", line 773, in <module> for byte in decrypt(args.decrypt[1], args.decrypt[0]): File "./lenticrypt.py", line 630, in decrypt file_length = struct.unpack("<Q", raw_length)[0] struct.error: unpack requires a string argument of length 8 [Edit] the 15 minutes were spent with one core at about 100% CPU use. L1 cache 32k, L2 cache 4Mb, no L3 cache. DDR2-667 memory. ------ ESultanik Hi, I'm Evan Sultanik, author of this toy cryptosystem. (Emphasis on "toy.") My intention was never for this to be a commercial grade cryptosystem, nor was the focus ever on truly securing the ciphertext. I suggest you read the PoC\|\|GFTO article from issue 0x04, as it goes into more detail about the motivations than my short blog post. My claims about the probability of a key existing in the public domain that decrypts a given ciphertext to any desired plaintext makes the assumption that the ciphertexts and plaintexts are all English language books. This was glazed over in my blog post (once again, cf. PoC\|\|GTFO 0x04). The math behind that claim was first developed in an older blog post: [http://www.sultanik.com/blog/copyright- quandry](http://www.sultanik.com/blog/copyright-quandry) which itself was motivated by a much more abstract thought experiment in what it means to infringe upon a copyright. ------ howeyc Based on reading POC Issue #4, this looks more like "compression" with a dictionary shared "out-of-band". For an extremely contrived example: Intended Plaintext for Alice: HI Intended Plaintext for Bob: BY Communicate to Alice that the key is : HITIME Communicate to Bob that the key is : BODYME "Cyphertext": Index 1, Index 4 Tell the government that the key is : NOHOME ------ rosser FTFA: _In fact, Lenticrypt has the theoretical property that, under reasonable assumptions, there is always a near 100% probability that there exists an key in the public domain that will decrypt a given ciphertext to any desired plaintext, even if that key is not known._ Isn't that true of _any_ cryptosystem? EDIT: follow-up is correct; this is only true of OTP. Sorry for the noise. ~~~ foxhill no, not at all. even with a keyspace of 2^256, the number of possible plaintexts that _make sense_ is an infinitely small portion of all plaintexts - you can say with reasonable certainty then, that only one plaintext, combined with the the key could produce that ciphertext. the only system that has this same property (as far as i know) would be the one-time-pad. my crypto is a bit rusty, so i may be wrong.. ~~~ ikeboy This system _can 't_ have that property for the same reason. #desired plaintexts > #public domain keys	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Demand Media wants to produce 1 million pieces of content a month - js3309 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1 ====== russell What boggles my mind is that people will work for $20/video, $15/article, or 8 cents to proof a headline. OTOH the video guy has shot 40,000 videos. I would like to think that, even with all this crap at the bottom, there will still be room for good, creative sites that deliver meaningful content. ~~~ johnl Yeh, the problem will be how to find them. If the saying "crisis equals opportunity" is true then it sounds like the internet is ready for a ycombinator type ranking system that's independent of a Google ranking system.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
An airport-inspired puzzle from Terence Tao - nsrivast http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/an-airport-inspired-puzzle/ ====== AlexeyMK 1\. its better to rest on the walkway - not seeing any disagreement about this one. 2\. its better to run off the walkway. Why? Walking normally is more expensive (in terms of time required to cover N distance) than walking on the walkway. The question can be rephrased as, all things considered, "would you rather spend less time on the walkway or the ground?" You would rather spend less time on the ground, because it takes you more time to cross it. Naive proof: your normal speed is 1m/s, run speed is 2m/s (can be done for 1s), walkway moves at 1m/s. Track is: 2m of ground, 6m of walkway. Running on walkway: 2s to cover ground, 1s to cover first 3 meters of walkway running, 1.5s to cover last three meters = 4.5s. Running on ground: 1s to cover ground, 3s to cover walkway = 4s. Look at it this way: the normal (no-run) time is 5s. Running on the ground chops off an entire second; running off the walkway chops off only half a second. ~~~ Darmani For #2, running off the walkway gives a greater boost to speed percentage- wise; since travel time is inversely proportional to speed, it is thus reduced greater. (For positive u and v`>v>1, v`/v<(v`+u)/(v+u)) ------ cousin_it The comment by Harald Hanche-Olsen has the best explanation. ------ ars As far as the non-relativistic version of the question, I'm pretty sure it makes no different if you pause while on or off. Both for question #1 and #2 - it makes not difference. Relativistically I'm not sure, but I think it's best to pause while on the walkway, since while running on the walkway most of your energy goes to increasing your mass rather than your speed. ~~~ fizx > As far as the non-relativistic version of the question, I'm pretty sure it > makes no different if you pause while on or off. Nope. ~~~ ars Is this going to become like that thing about airplanes on treadmills that move backward at the same speed as the plane, where everyone is 100% sure they have it right? I see the reasoning that if you walk on the treadmill you enjoy it's speed for less time - but that's not what you care about. You care about how long it takes you to get from the start of the treadmill to the end, and if you walk you get to the end faster. So if you can walk 100 meters in 1 minute, and that's what you do on the treadmill, you will have covered an extra 100 meters in 1 minute. Or you could cover that 100 meters on the ground, and it will also take you 1 minute. The speed of the conveyor makes no difference - that is totally fixed, the only difference is do you cover that 100 meters on the conveyor or off of it. I typed and rejected many examples to give you, but none were intuitive. So if it's this hard to explain then I'm 100% sure this is going to become like that airplane on a conveyor belt. People are going to argue about this forever. What is it about conveyor belts that makes it hard for people? ~~~ ars OK, the post below made it easier to me to explain: You can NOT add miles per hour to miles per hour. So you can not add the speed to walking to the speed of the belt. You need to do hours per mile + hours per mile. So the conveyor takes a certain number of hours for each mile, and you walking takes a certain number of hours for each mile. The length of the conveyor is fixed. So the number of hours the conveyor supplies is fixed - nothing you can do will change that. You can add in your hours per mile on it or off of it, it doesn't matter - it's exactly the same in total. ~~~ greendestiny Well like the airplane on the conveyor belt thing, there really is a right answer to this and you don't have it. This is a similar explanation to one of the comments on the blog: imagine one section of ground followed by one section of conveyor belt. Two people going exactly the same speed walk along the ground section and one stops just before the conveyor belt and one stops on the conveyor belt. They both stop for the same time. When they resume walking the one who stopped on the conveyor belt is ahead. No matter how many section of belt and ground follow this, the one behind will never catch up. ~~~ ars No, that's not correct. You forgot that they both have to get off the conveyor belt at some point. The guy who got on first will then walk slowly, and the guy who got on second meanwhile will be both walking and being pulled forward by the conveyor belt, while the first guy is walking slowly. This will catch him up to the first guy. And if you tell me that the first guy is already walking so of course he's ahead, then you forgot that, for both of them to stop at the same time, and yet one be on the belt and one on the ground, the first guy must have had a head start. Better have two belts, one placed one meter ahead of the other. So, one guy will be walking for that meter, while the other will be riding the belt and walking, and both will reach the end at exactly the same time. ~~~ greendestiny It's confusing alright. When the guy in the lead gets off the conveyor belt the distance between them will close. But the second guy won't catch up. The distance between them will vary according to speed but the time between them will stay the same. ~~~ ars I concede. You are right, it's better to pause on the belt. I thought about it all night, using edge cases, like a really slow walker, fast belt, etc. ------ markessien In the first case, you go faster when you pause on the treadmill, and the time required does not change if you run on or off the treadmill. Those seem like the intuitive solutions to me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Yelp Works - edw519 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/why-yelp-works/ ====== anonym "It didn’t try to pay for reviews, as some sites have." It certainly did, as someone points out in the comments at the Times. Craigslist was littered with ads for Yelp reviewers a few years ago when I was last looking for a job. ------ kschrader Everytime I look something up on Yelp, if it has more than, say, 5 reviews, the rating always seems to be between 3.5 and 4.5. That's not useful, other than to find the address of a place that I already know about. A vote of 4 seems to be the safe vote on Yelp. ~~~ soundsop I wonder if a Reddit-style upvote/downvote system might be a better voting system for Yelp. You are forced to choose whether you are recommending a place or not. No wishy-washy in-between score like 3 is available. ------ menloparkbum One thing not mentioned: if you write funny reviews, Yelp is a much better dating site than actual dating sites. ------ pchristensen Interesting that as of the time I'm writing this, there are 25 votes but no comments. Neat quote from the article about fostering community: 'Responding to criticism from business owners that some user reviews are unfair, Yelp also recently introduced a way for the business owner to send a message back to a reviewer. If the reviewer doesn’t choose to write back, the business owner can’t send a second message. But Mr. Stoppelman said that the site deliberately tilts its rules to support the reviewers. “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third,” he said.' ~~~ pchristensen To the two people who downvoted me, thanks a bunch for the constructive feedback.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Death rates from energy production per TWh - peter_retief https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh ====== craigc What would be interesting would be to have a poll of which forms of energy people _think_ lead to the most deaths and put it next to this. I have a feeling nuclear would be the top. The New York Times published an article that touched on this fairly recently too: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate- ch...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change- nuclear-power.html) ~~~ kuro68k Would be more interesting to know what the actual damage from these different sources are, rather than just is one cherry-picked statistic. And where are wind and solar? ~~~ crdoconnor Nuclear industry is notoriously shy about making comparisons to wind and solar. ~~~ acidburnNSA No we aren't. I compare carbon emissions to wind and solar all the time. Nuclear's on par with wind, 4x lower carbon than solar PV, 40x lower than natural gas, 80x lower than coal. Wind has a 35% capacity factor in the US, nuclear has 90%. Solar has 25% Wind and solar capital cost is 4x lower than nuclear right now, thanks to the fact that they're at low generation fractions and have lots of fracked gas and hydro to integrate their variability. As generation fraction goes up, their cost goes up non-linearly. Nuclear cost is terrible right now. Some people are trying to bring it down, but no great progress yet. In 10-20 years when 20 countries have 20% or more variable renewables, nuclear will probably start looking really good again for deeply decarbonizing. And nuclear roughly as few (and probably a little bit fewer) people than wind and solar per kWh generated, all of which are orders of magnitude safer than fossil. People fall off roofs installing solar panels and wind turbines catch fire and sometimes do ice-throw. ------ seren I think when talking about nuclear accidents, there is too much a focus on the actual death rate, but not on the impact of the evacuation area. For example, if you look at Cattenom Nuclear Power Plant location on a map and create a 80 km radius exclusion zone, Luxembourg, as a country probably ceases to exist. This is not something that could happen with a catastrophic failure of wind turbines or solar panel. By definition, nuclear plants are near coastal areas or a river, so prone to ocean rising water (or tsunamis), floods or droughts. This is something that is harder to evaluate than simply a death count. I believe this is less relevant for the US, where I assume there is enough space left in sparsely populated areas, but in denser areas like in Europe or South East Asia, it seems to be a bigger factor. ~~~ petre An 80 km exclusion zone is a gross exageration. There hasn't been such a huge exclusion zone, not even in the cases of Chernobyl and Fukushima. ~~~ seren Fair enough, 80 km is some kind of absurd extreme value, but Luxembourg city centre is about 25 km from Cattenom, so you can at least expect some real estate upheaval at the very least. ~~~ roenxi At the tiny, tiny scale of risk we are talking about I'm not certain it makes sense to worry. Statistically, the inhabitants of Luxembourg are more at risk of being driven out by hostile forces (they were invaded in WWII, for example) than threatened by a nuclear disaster. Not to mention that of the 2 major nuclear disasters we've had, half were caused by a less-than-once-in-a-generation tsunami. If something that disastrous hits Luxembourg ... I dunno, the situation would already be pretty grim. And all this is assuming they actually need to be evacuated, which is debatable in itself. Fun fact, it is possible to build a world-class city in 40 years [0]. [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen) ------ 317070 Is uranium mining included in these numbers? Edit: it seems to be what mainly contributed to the nuclear numbers: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067360...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673607612537?via%3Dihub) > The sources of the effects and indeed the effects themselves for the nuclear > fuel cycle are very different from those for the fossil fuel cycles. They > can arise from occupational effects (especially from mining), routine > radiation during generation, decommissioning, reprocessing, low-level waste > disposal, high-level waste disposal, and accidents. ~~~ acidburnNSA Recall that because it's getting energy from the nucleus rather than from electron shells, there is 2,000,000x more energy in the mined raw material when you're using nuclear. That's why a train car of nuclear fuel per year can power a city, where a coal plant needs a mile-long train car per day. Nuclear energy density is crazy high. So you don't have to mine a lot, you don't have a lot of waste, you don't need lots of land, and you don't emit any carbon dioxide. See: [https://www.xkcd.com/1162/](https://www.xkcd.com/1162/) ~~~ mimixco The uranium cycle requires heavy equipment (dozers, loaders, trains, trucks, etc), all of which run on fossil fuels, so it's not "carbon free." ~~~ acidburnNSA That's included in the number of 11 gCO2-eq/kWh. Please refer to this comment where you were lightly reprimanded for saying that. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905223) I say carbon-free for anything that's under 40 gCO2-eq/kWh (so I can include solar), which is 10x less than natural gas, 20x less than coal. Nuclear is 40x less natural gas! It's the lowest carbon energy source we know, tied with wind. ~~~ mimixco Thanks but you've said elsewhere that you work in the nuclear industry. HN is not a place where we need to "reprimand" each other. ~~~ acidburnNSA We do need to provide meaningful feedback to things that are incorrect, such as the suggestion that nuclear is not tied with wind as the lowest-carbon full-lifecycle energy source we know. I chose to work in the nuclear industry specifically to help avert climate change. I was like: "I want to help reduce climate change. Aha, nuclear is interesting because it's low-carbon and also not perfected. That's a good challenging problem to work on!" This doesn't invalidate anything I've said. In fact, it bolsters things I say because it means I know what I'm talking about. ~~~ mimixco That's fine and you're free to do that, but it doesn't make what I said "incorrect." The uranium cycle uses carbon and, what's worse, produces vast amount of tailings (radioactive waste) which contaminate land and water. This is in addition to the spent fuel rods which most people think of as "nuclear waste." I hope that you could agree that those are true statements. ~~~ DuskStar By that standard, there are no carbon-free energy sources. ~~~ mimixco So people should stop claiming that nuclear is one. It's an advertising term used by the industry, nothing more. ~~~ acidburnNSA Nuclear fission is neutron + uranium = fission products and energy. This process is literally carbon-free. Solar PV is photons + semiconductors = electric current. This is directly carbon-free. Wind is wind + blades = mechanical motion. This is directly carbon-free. Coal, natural gas, oil, and biomass are Carbon + heat in the presence of oxygen is CO2 + energy. These are not carbon-free. This is the purpose of the term carbon-free. Now, literally everything has non-zero carbon lifecycle costs as long as we are using carbon-derived energy in our infrastructure. It is impossible to be fully carbon-free with coal, natural gas, oil even if all your infrastructure is electric. With solar, nuclear, wind, etc., you can get to a truly carbon- free lifecycle if you work hard to electrify or otherwise clean up your trucks. Meanwhile, today, nuclear lifecycle is the most carbon-free overall, tied with wind. The term carbon-free is used colloquially to mean anything that doesn't directly make carbon alongside energy. It is right and proper to point out lifecycle carbon costs too, and again nuclear is tied for lowest lifecycle. Nuclear is the most carbon-free thing we have. You bet it is advertising. It's truthful advertising of the positive characteristics of nuclear energy. People have a right to know how carbon free various energy sources are. ------ gtirloni "Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds" [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts- dont...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change- our-minds) ------ strainer This kind of chart should have its workings and data readily available. It appears the only deaths included for nuclear are from some cancer estimate which is not readily accessible. It is not clear what the others death count includes. Here is the entire data download that is actually included for this chart: Entity,Code,Year, (deaths per TWh) Biomass,,2014,4.63 Brown coal,,2014,32.72 Coal,,2014,24.62 Gas,,2014,2.821 Nuclear,,2014,0.074 Oil,,2014,18.43 With it lacking any discussion of what these quite mysterious counts mean - this is often taken as proof of safety. Yet Nuclears exceptional score could be transformed by the kind of catastrophic accident which nuclear is capable of and which by great expense and some luck has avoided to date. For example if weather during Fukushimas accident had blown fallout over Tokyo, or if a reactor anywhere releases similar or greater amounts of fallout anywhere in the world where a large population center is downwind, many thousands of cancers are possible, with children disproportionately affected by radiation exposure. Large areas of land can be made uninhabitable to civilization for decades or more, and depending on future civilizations standards. ~~~ petre It blew the fallout northwest. An aproximate 50x20 km eliptic strip was contaminated. Tokyo is too far away. Uninhabited by people, yes, mainly due to fear if radiation. For other animals and plants that aren't aware of radiation, not really. ~~~ _ph_ The problem with radiation for humans is, that humans live far longer than most species - at least common to the two regions with a reactor blowup. An e.g. 10 year loss of projected lifespan would be considered unacceptable for a human population, but most animals don't live long enough to get significantly impacted. ~~~ petre Ever heard the word _samosely_? That the name given to the people that live in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt- sh/moving_to_Cherno...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt- sh/moving_to_Chernobyl) ~~~ _ph_ What about them? By the way the article is about people living outside the exclusion zone, though at its borders. Only about 150 humans are currently living illegally inside the zone, according to the article. And of course, they are not dying immediately, but certainly have a larger risk for cancers. Though, if they don't smoke and as they are not exposed to many other contaminants, it might not be too bad. ------ kozak Where would solar and wind be in this chart? It's definitely not zero (falls from height, etc). ~~~ trothamel Rooftop Solar is 0.44 deaths/TWh, wind is 0.15 deaths/TWh, Hydro is 1.4 or 0.1, depending on if you count the biggest accident or not. [https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for- all...](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy- sources.html) I don't think that would count natural gas emissions for backing renewables. ~~~ pcl The referenced hydro accident is the Banqiao Dam failure, which Wikipedia says resulted in between 171,000 and 230,000 deaths. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam) ------ resters Does this include deaths from oil wars? ~~~ dotancohen Though initially I was inclined to treat this as a troll, this is actually a good point. Major power consumers can acquire solar and wind energy without causing widespread destruction to other countries. Not so for oil, and to a much lesser extent that I think has not been realized since the 1940's, uranium. ~~~ resters It certainly wasn't intended as a troll, fwiw. ------ calebegg The associated article has more discussion and context: [https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of- energy](https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy) ~~~ Tepix I really dislike their headline "It goes completely against what most believe, but out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest" because it ignores solar, water and wind energy which is likely to be the safest and far from insignificant today and in the future. ~~~ toong 1\. I think hydro doesn't score so good after [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam) 2\. Wind is not without issues either: [http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm](http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm) 3\. And even more moralities with people falling down their rooftop installing solar panels. ~~~ mcv The problem with these kind of statistics is that mere numbers mean very little, because the sources of the deaths are very different. Do you count roof work? Do you count mining? Do you count the creation of construction materials and _their_ mining? How do you count cancer from slightly increased nuclear radiation? Especially when it's hard to prove whether it really comes from nuclear waste, but it certainly could be? And are birth defects deaths? Are miscarriages? These are things that need to be addressed for these kind of statistics, or you end up comparing apples to oranges. Still, I think everybody can agree that the death rates for coal and oil are insane. However you compare nuclear vs solar, coal and oil need to go. ------ westurner Apparently the deaths are justified because energy. Are the subsidies and taxes (incentives and penalties) rational in light of the relative harms of each form of energy? "Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending" [https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics- news/fossil-f...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil- fuel-subsidies-pentagon-spending-imf-report-833035/amp/) > _The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in > the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was > $599 billion._ > _The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It > accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how > much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the > taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including > premature deaths from air pollution._ IDK whether they've included the costs of responding to requests for help with natural disasters that are more probable due to climate change caused by these "externalties" / "external costs" of fossil fuels. ~~~ leereeves Energy saves lives so some risk probably is justified. ~~~ westurner Why isn't the market choosing the least harmful, least lethal energy sources? Energy is for the most part entirely substitutable: switching costs for consumers like hospitals are basically zero. (Everyone is free to invest in clean energy at any time) ~~~ leereeves Switching costs for the entire society are far from zero. ~~~ westurner 100% Renewable Energy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy) > _The main barriers to the widespread implementation of large-scale renewable > energy and low-carbon energy strategies are political rather than > technological. According to the 2013 Post Carbon Pathways report, which > reviewed many international studies, the key roadblocks are: climate change > denial, the fossil fuels lobby, political inaction, unsustainable energy > consumption, outdated energy infrastructure, and financial constraints._ We need to make the external costs of energy production internal in order to create incentives to prevent these fossil fuel deaths and other costs. ------ codingdave I've worked in oil & gas, and the deaths come primarily from human error, which increases as operations scale up, as you end up hiring people who are not already experienced at running plants, and have to train them up -- mistakes happen. So what we need to ask to be sure nuclear is really as safe as the number makes it appear is... what happens when we scale up and introduce more new employees, and more errors? What is the worst thing that can happen if a new worker makes a bone-headed move and causes an incident? I honestly don't know the answer, and would be interested in hearing more. But I'm not going to be sold on nuclear safety by a chart, not when I've seen how crazy hard it is to keep a large operations staff in energy plants safety- conscious enough to prevent accidents, injury, and deaths. These are human issues that need to be addressed to be sure safety levels stay on track. ~~~ Ettvatre > I've worked in oil & gas, and the deaths come primarily from human error The article says: > Deaths related to air pollution are dominant, typically accounting for > greater than 99% of the total. I understand that you are talking about a subset of the data the article are talking about. But if 99% is due to pollution then it sounds like your subset is not so relevant. ~~~ codingdave Thank you, I had missed that. While that does strengthen the point of the chart, it doesn't invalidate my concerns. It was almost 10 years ago now, but I recall an incident that made national news, when a gas hub in Texas exploded, and there were impressive, but sobering, photos of flames shooting 500 feet into the air from the resulting fire. That is one worst-cases for oil & gas. Some of the spills we've had from tankers are other worst-cases. And they do happen. So again, I need to know what the worst-case for nuclear is before I'm going to be sold on it. Because if it scales to the capacity of our gas industry... something will happen. And we need to know what it will be and be ready to handle it. ~~~ solveit That's nowhere near a worst case for oil&gas. It's the most visible spectacular case. The worst case is mass extinction events due to climate change. The worst case that's actually happened is a million deaths/yr due to air pollution. Accidents are barely a blip in the calculus, the bulk of the damage happens even when everything is working as intended. ~~~ codingdave You don't have to sell me on the poisonous nature of oil & gas. It is a given that those are bad ideas and need to go away. The real debate is wind/solar/geothermal/hydro. Once pollution and climate change is removed from the equation, accidents absolutely come into the calculus. ------ KirinDave So, it's fairly obvious this was written with a pro-Nucelar bent, which is disappointing for something branded with YC. Even if we ignore that when nuclear power plants DO fail, they're cataclysmic in consequences. Simply put, there are only so many 500-year-no-go-zones we can create in our environment before the problems presented by them start to scale upwards into places we don't understand. What I think is most interesting is that very few entrepreneurs are talking about the exciting world of a more distributed grid. Distributed Grids running on renewables with backup from a larger centralized grid is a really interesting idea, and it's one where long term servicing costs will be pretty big. It'd be a good time for folks in SV to think about swinging at the big formerly-state-subsidized behemoth power company. Because the alternative is that they make their case that they need state subsidization while still maintaining autonomy. I don't really understand why so many folks like to think it's a clever take to say, "Actually Nuclear is quite safe." Even if that's the case, it is dependent on having a centralized power grid (which is very hard to maintain and occasionally causes wildfires), it depends on fuel mining and manufacture (also not a very safe proposition for those involved, uranium mining has similar risks to coal mining), and the proliferation of these fuels also proliferates an important component of the means by which weapons that turn a city to ash in mere moments are manufactured. Compare this to the plunging cost of solar and wind. It just... doesn't seem very smart except for the most densely stacked industrial regions. ~~~ scrumper It isn’t written from a pro-nuclear perspective: it’s just data, with attributed sources. And the majority of those nuclear deaths are from uranium mining. ~~~ KirinDave There is an associated article with an obvious bias. ~~~ leereeves It's pretty clear you're starting with an anti-nuclear bias. Are you sure you're not just seeing a neutral article through the lens of your own bias? ~~~ KirinDave Can you clarify which of the following you mean: "It is biased to point out bias in the writing accompanying this chart?" Or "It is biased to point out the facts regarding the realities of nuclear cleanup" or "It is biased to point out that other rather significant forms of energy generation were left out of this comparison without any justification?" For the record, I am biased against centralized power grids. I'd rather see decentralized power grids and as a strategy for those I think RTG piles are a safe and well-understood technology for backstopping other forms of small scale renewable power. Fission is just... it's too expensive for what it is. It centralized too much power with states. It's very dangerous when its safety is inevitably bypassed by industry that could never be held accountable for the tens of thousands of years of human no-go zones that it can produce. ~~~ scrumper So your decentralized grid involves large-scale deployment of RTGs? Have you thought about the security implications of that? It makes it massively easier for bad actors to obtain fissile materials. At least it's feasible to provide high security for centralized nuclear facilities. (In the UK there's even a special police force for this.) ------ VikingCoder I'd love to see "Clean Coal" on here. And solar, wind, hydro-electric, thermo-electric, etc. ~~~ hannob "Clean Coal" is a meaningless marketing term. Unless you specify what that means. (It used to mean CCS - which doesn't exist at scale - or more efficient coal plants - which probably only makes a very minor difference, because they're still terribly inefficient.) ~~~ VikingCoder I know. I want it called out on the graph. ------ batisteo I'm pretty sure uranium extraction in Africa is killing. Doen't seems to be taken in account in this 12yo study. ------ base698 . ~~~ Causality1 No, one couldn't. Chernobyl was a perfect storm of negligence and incompetence and still killed less than 60 people, including fallout cancer deaths. Nuclear reactors are not bombs. ~~~ lm28469 I'm all for nuclear but let's be honest here, many more people died prematurely because of Chernobyl, the nuclear cloud were all over Europe, the thousands of people who were on site to contain the disaster got very high doses of radiation too. [https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from- cher...](https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl- and-fukushima) ~~~ roenxi > In the published estimates below, studies have utilised a methodology termed > the 'linear no-threshold model' The numbers already round to 0 when compared to pretty much any other industrial process we undertake. Then on top of that the model used is the LNT. That model needs extraordinary evidence to support its wild assumptions. I haven't been able to find a source for that evidence yet. LNT is a paranoid model. Under the LNT, building with granite is killing people through increased radiation. The airplane industry has probably killed more people with radiation under the LNT model than Chernobyl has. We have yet to picket airports for their radiation risk. The unproovable deaths from Chernobyl may as well be ignored. We don't count that sort of statistical hypothesizing for _any_ other _anything_ that is comparable to building a power plant. ------ Tepix I don't believe in the numbers the nuclear industry publishes. As long as you don't drop dead inside one of their reactors, they don't count nuclear energy as the reason (not surprising, if i were in their shoes I'd probably do the same). By the way, why are solar panels and wind turbines missing in the list? It's awfully misleading. \-- Edit due to downvotes: As an example, here's a study that came to the conclusion that leucemia is twice as common as normal among small children growing up near nuclear plants in Germany: [http://doris.bfs.de/jspui/handle/urn:nbn:de:0221-20100317939](http://doris.bfs.de/jspui/handle/urn:nbn:de:0221-20100317939) Why is noone counting the resulting deaths in these statistics for nuclear energy? ~~~ lm28469 Even if you take the most pessimistic estimate of the worst nuclear accident we experienced (Chernobyl) you top at <100k related death [0]. A far cry from the annual 4+ million death due to outdoor air quality [1]. Outside of direct exposure to radioactive material there isn't much going to kill you. The very big difference is that a functioning nuclear plant doesn't kill people whereas the oil/gas industry kills by default even in the best case scenario. [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster) [1] [https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/](https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/) ~~~ dsfyu404ed If you're gonna talk air quality and radiaton you need to use YPLL (or some other metric that considers age). Wheezing into the grave at 70 or getting cancer at 65 is very different in terms of impact than a 25yo that falls off a roof installing solar or gets run over by heavy equipment in a mine. Of course nobody uses age adjusted metrics because you can't make grandiose "bazillions of lives lost" claims using them. ~~~ lm28469 The vast majority of people will never encounter any radiation caused by a radioactive plant in their life, so this line of thought doesn't even make sense. > 91% of the world population live in area where air quality exceeds WHO > guideline [0] If I had the choice I'd go for a < 0.01% chance of dying of radiation related death over a 100% chance of slowly but surely destroying my respiratory system. And let's be real, accident related deaths are a drop in the bucket. [0] [https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/](https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How can a disease with 1% mortality shut down the United States? - enraged_camel https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-disease-with-1-mortality-shut-down-the-United-States/answer/Franklin-Veaux?share=1 ====== ggm A well written overview. I think what is sometimes not read well by 'why don't we..' type comments is that the non-deterministic quality of this is quite strong. We can say your predicted risk as an 80 yo is higher than an 8 yo but we can't say much else. So, the 1% mortality and how it distributes over a cohort by age, sex, (ok more men) co-morbidities (ok so overweight, type-2 and pre-diabetic) .. but then we can't really say "oh, you're the high risk for subsequent heart attack" or "yep: you'll face life crippling mental acuity hits" or "we have to amputate now" Ask anyone if they will take 1 in 100 risk and they will casually say yes. Ask again, if you present them with real risks of life changing outcome at shorter odds, they may reflect. I wouldn't stand in front of a 1-in-100 russian-roulette machine personally. ~~~ ImaCake Agreed. The penalty associated with the risk is important too. Probability theory and statistics can get us the risk fairly easily. But putting a number on the penalty associated with failure is a different problem altogether. If getting sick meant a 1:10 chance of getting a really bad headache for a week, I would take that chance. But if it was a 1:1000 chance of death I would probably not take the chance. ------ austincheney The problem is not the virus itself but instead it’s impact on the availability of medical care. If you wish to talk about statistics the death rate associated with the virus is declining in the US even though the numbers of infection are surging. That is because medical services are better learning what treatments are effective. The death rate will continue to decline inversely to the growth of infection rate only so long as medical treatment is available. The real problems occur when medicine is over whelmed by the case volume, particularly when hospital beds fill up. When hospitals lack the space to provide appropriate care and triage is when the associated death rate shoots up from declining below 0.1% to over 10% (greater than 100x). Quality and availability of care impacts all medicine. For example appendicitis is an easily treatable and relatively common medical problem in the US, but without available care the patient will die of a blood infection. If that example is not properly triaged due to lost medical capacity then it shifts from a minor concern to a potentially fatal problem. ~~~ TheBlight >That is because medical services are better learning what treatments are effective. Not sure that's true. The average age of infected is much lower than it was a couple months ago. It's likely that more people who aren't at risk of serious complications are being infected now and we're testing much more than we had been -- including people w/o symptoms. A couple months ago most people who weren't considered at-risk couldn't get a test even if they had symptoms. ~~~ therealdrag0 Anyone have a source for cases over time by age? I’ve heard it hypothesized but never supported. I agree it’s plausible but we need evidence before confidence. ~~~ TheBlight [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/why- covid-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/why-covid-death- rate-down/613945/) >In Florida, the median age of new COVID-19 cases fell from 65 in March to 35 in June. ~~~ therealdrag0 Perfect thanks! ------ hedora Before you panic, note that this post is full of incorrectly computed conditional probabilities. It claims 19% of the whole population will be hospitalized at 100% infection rate. This seems high, but let’s go with it. It then cites a study saying 18% of hospitalized patients’ hearts showed evidence of scarring. Later, it computes: > _62,358,000 hospitalized. 59,076,000 people with permanent heart damage._ Multiplying the hospitalized count by 18% gives 11,224,440, or 3.7% of the population. I’m assuming that no people that avoid the hospital will have heart damage. The post assumes there is no correlation between disease severity and hospitalization. The true rate is probably somewhere in between, and probably closer to 4% than 18%. ~~~ ImaCake 4% of patients having heart permanent damage is still 13,128,000 people. Qualitatively, those numbers are equally hard to grasp, so why would it be any less terrifying? ~~~ hedora Heart scarring (what the study looked for) is extremely common. For instance, flossing your teeth commonly leads to an opportunistic infection that leads to heart tissue scarring. If most of the 13M are expected to be impacted in some way by the heart damage, then the number is terrifying, but the evidence doesn’t back that up. Also, there’s a huge difference between 1/5 people need heart surgery, and the more realistic 60% * 18% * 19%, which is closer to 1/50. To help put that in perspective: ~1/2 of Americans suffer from heart disease. ~~~ aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA Can you provide a link for the claim that “flossing your teeth commonly leads to [...] heart tissue scarring”? After some googling, it appears that the opposite is true. If you don’t brush and floss your teeth, you increase your chances of gingivitis, which can become a systemic infection. ------ TwoNineFive I just realized that this has similarities to the September 11th 2001 (9/11) terrorist attack. A relatively small investment resulted in the USA invading Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with it, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, indebting the US population for a few trillion dollars, and generally causing a ridiculous over-reaction in just about every way possible. Has anyone seen any comparisons yet? If not I can't imagine it won't last. Both are astonishing failures of civil leadership and governance. ------ forgotmypw17 [http://archive.is/JvTzm](http://archive.is/JvTzm) ------ aaron695 Sweden hasn't even been worse than the 2000 Flu season yet. The flu also does long term damage. [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- sweden...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden- mortality/sweden-records-first-week-with-no-excess-mortality-since-pandemic- struck-idUSKBN23F1WK) And I don't recall the 2000 Flu season shutting down Sweden/USA/World Quora might be a good jumping point when doing research, but like 4chan and other hive minds you still have to think. ~~~ DanBC > Sweden hasn't even been worse than the 2000 Flu season yet. Can you post the link to the Swedish statistics? I think you're counting flu and covid death differently. For flu I think you're using a mix of all cause mortality and statistical modelling. For covid I think you're using either "died after being tested positive for covid" or "covid was mentioned as a cause on the death certificate". ~~~ aaron695 Ok, the article actually is in Sweden's worst month for covid (April) it was better than 2000 and 1994. This also talks about May - [https://emanuelkarlsten.se/swedens-two-corona-months-are- not...](https://emanuelkarlsten.se/swedens-two-corona-months-are-not-more- deadly-than-the-flu-of-the-90s-but-that-does-not-mean-that-everything-is- normal/) ~~~ panpanna What people are trying hard to ignore is that we are seeing these numbers _despite_ shutting down the country and everyone using masks and washing hands and avoiding contact. With a business as usual attitude we would see death rates 100 times higher. ~~~ umanwizard There's no solid evidence of that. ------ sunstone From the statistics I've been seeing, _of the people who get it_ , the mortality rate is closer to 10%. And the virus is so damned contagious that with no counter measures taken everyone would get it with say 18 months. And that would literally decimate the population. Not to mention all the devastating follow on covid-19 side effects some of which, it appears, never go away. ~~~ HenryKissinger A breakdown of mortality by age group and prior health conditions shows that not everyone is equally at risk. ~~~ ggm Do you have good insight into the effect on the economy of randomly killing a high percentage of type-2 diabetes? I know we like to ideate the poor into this state, but have you considered the effect on the economy, if the supersize-me generation at large in the economy at all levels suddenly took a king-hit? ~~~ logicchains We can roughly estimate this from the effects of the 1918 flu, which killed way more people, and killed healthy, working age people. The overall effect on GDP was tiny compared to the effect we're seeing from the lockdowns. ~~~ loopz Two totally different economies. People will self-lockdown much more extensively today. Economies were much more local 100 years ago. GDP is also a meaningless metric when measured in currency, and is anyway antithesis of lockdown/war times. Sweden didn't lockdown but is still hit hard economically, and is more isolated today than surrounding countries.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Identity proof in six handshakes – proving the solution - takeshi_w https://medium.com/six-degrees-of-separation/identity-proof-in-six-handshakes-proving-the-solution-d5584fde03e7 ====== takeshi_w Hey, Hacker News! I'm developing a new blockchain project. It is an identity proof system based on the idea of six degrees of separation. As I already mentioned in hackernews ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988497)) I'm writing a series of posts, which I'll then transform into whitepaper. This is the second post. It proves the six degrees of separation idea. It turns out Microsoft, Facebook and Neil deGrasse Tyson all agree that the world is connected in less than 7 handshakes. There is also some simple math, confirming that the idea works, and my further plan. The post is for non-technical readers. Will be happy to hear your thoughts and critique!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: It's 2019. Why start a new project in anything other than Rust? - 80211 The only reasons I can think of is petty fanboy reasons. Rust solves most problems and will make the world a lot safer. There's no reason to start new projects in Go, C++. C#, etc, is there? ====== Chazprime It's a little unclear... is this actually a question or are you here to make inflammatory statements? ------ oldandtired Different langauges have their uses. For most of my programming I use Unicon. It gives me most of what I want - there are things that are not available in it, but I can live with that. The fact that "failure" is an option makes many of my projects simpler. Not having to concern myself with booleans for coding purposes is often refreshing. But that's just my take on it. ------ catacombs Use the language that best fits the job and you're most productive in.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Be careful what you put in an email - kunle https://om.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/be-careful-what-you-put-in-an-email/ ====== code_duck This seems to be more about Groovesharks' business model than emails. They appear to be respectable businesses, and have mounted a successful propaganda campaign regarding paying them for music, but let's not shed a tear for the major labels. They steal far, far more from musicians than 'piracy' ever has. Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts. Every major label has failed to pay up to hundreds of millions owed for radio plays and licensing, from all levels of musicians. All in all, they're about as respectable and deserving as your average street pimp. Good for Grooveshark. Someone needs to shake up that industry. ~~~ paulhauggis "Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts." VC firms do the same thing. So why are they so respected on HN? ~~~ billpatrianakos They're respected for the same reason bands respect labels. It's because often times the only way to make it big, really big, is to be a sellout and get in bed with a label/VC. Businesses need funding like bands and supporting yourself is a bitch so why not sell out and get a free ride? So we read up on business news and learn how the VCs think so that one day a few of us will get "signed" and hopefully make it big. We all know it can be a kind of predatory relationship but at the same time entrepreneurs are all about taking that one big risk that pays off in the end. So startups, like bands, try to get VC backing in the hope that they won't become yet another company that was chewed up and spit by the VCs and instead becomes the next Google/Facebook/CoolestCompanyEverCo. So are they really respected? Kinda. Depends who you are. Much of that perceived respect is akin to research so we can get in bed with them. Kind of like books on how to easily bed women except we read it right from the horse's mouth. ~~~ gcr Y Combinator is to VCs as _____ is to record labels. The people who can fill in that blank will be very rich someday. ~~~ klbarry Not that rich. The music industry is very small by gross profits. It's mentioned often here that Apple, Goog, and Microsoft have enough cash hand to each buy a majority of it. ~~~ gcr Sure sounds like an interesting project, though. There's tons of room for bands to grow beyond just iTunes et al. ------ drivingmenuts Seems to me that behaving ethically would solve a lot of problems (or at least not cause them in the first place). This guy pretty much just wrote the lawsuit for his opposition. ------ nathanb I would argue "be careful whom you send emails to" as well. While drivingmenuts' comment about behaving ethically might apply in this case, sometimes you might think you're behaving ethically and it's only later than you realize that, while operating in good faith, you inadvertently broke some law (patents and copyrights are a minefield). I prefer not to correspond with the type of person who would take advantage of this by releasing or publishing my emails. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but less often than you might think. ~~~ aidenn0 Do you delete all your e-mails or do you leave your work e-mails on your work machine? If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used against your company. An e-mail that goes out to more than one person is virtually guaranteed to be around years later where it might haunt you. ~~~ ams6110 I worked at an investment banking company in the 1990s. They did not have email when I started, but when they adopted Exchange and everyone got a Windows PC and MS Office, the CIO set a policy that emails would be retained for 6 months, then purged. I don't know if this would fly today, but I think the fact that it was a blanket policy and not based on the content of the messages made it OK at least at that time. ~~~ anamax > I think the fact that it was a blanket policy and not based on the content > of the messages made it OK at least at that time. Nope. If discovery has started, you have to retain even if you otherwise would have discarded. That's in addition to any specific statutory requirements wrt the document's content. ~~~ adgar I think the implication was that the policy was in place for when they _weren't_ being sued, so that if they _were_ sued, they could be completely reasonable in saying they only had 6 months worth of e-mails to provide for discovery. ------ tompagenet2 Off topic, but why does the text on this website look so awful in Chrome 15 in Win7 64? There are actually gaps in the letters. It looks awful in a different way in Firefox 8 - clumpy letters with awkwardly variable line width. _Update to clarify that it's the text that looks weird_ ~~~ benhoyt Yeah, those are terrible letter shapes. It happens in IE8 on Windows XP for me too. ------ feralchimp "Rude reminder that one needs to be very careful when sending emails"...when one is a shady-ass character up to some shady-ass shit. This is less of a business plan than it is a hedge fund betting on one side of a race condition. The bet is that user growth will outpace successful litigation against the investment. It would be less ethically problematic if they were doing the piracy themselves instead of croudsourcing it. ------ nohat That seems almost intentionally damning. Why would he put that in writing? This is disappointing because I really like grooveshark's service. ~~~ a3camero Things tend to look like that when you take the most damning possible statement out of tens of thousands of documents that you received in discovery! ~~~ refurb That's the problem. When these statements come up in court documents, they are never put in context. You're just left up on the stand mumbling about how everyone else is misinterpreting your words. ~~~ adgar What context do you think might explain this away, given the content? ~~~ ChrisLTD What if, right before he wrote that, he said "here's me pretending to be the evil guy the music execs think I am." :-) ------ DrJokepu This wasn't really a secret, many people in the phonographic industry (including some at the record labels themselves) knew or suspected for quite a while that Grooveshark's business plan was something like this. ------ huckfinnaafb Can anyone explain exactly why this is sinister? If the label is aware of the price they're selling the license at and buying the data, where is the unfair deception? ~~~ hapless They weren't licensing anything. They were relying on DMCA safe harbor provisions to protect them from infringement suits. The problem is that the executive e-mail indicates plain as day that they were ineligible for that safe harbor in at least two ways: they knew of and were profiting from infringement. Who could have guessed that basing a business on copyright infringement might get you sued for copyright infringement? ~~~ tantalor The email says "we use the label’s songs", "the data we got from them", "we pay them". This suggests they were getting the label's data from the label and paying the label. That seems like a license to me. ~~~ hapless The e-mail implies that their plan was to knowingly infringe for months/years _before_ negotiating a license. They could then use the data gained from (infringing) streaming/uploads as a bargaining chip while negotiating the license. ~~~ tantalor I think the email is ambiguously worded. I read it as, "we license their songs, and then we license the usage data back to them at a higher rate once it reaches some threshold." You apparently read it as, "we infringe until we have enough usage data, and then we negotiate a contract where they pay us." The few ambiguous parts are, 1\. Whether "we use the label’s songs" means to license or to infringe. 2\. Whether "the data we got from them" is licensed or infringement. 3\. Whether "what we pay them" means what they had paid in license fees up to that point, or the terms of the negotiated license. ~~~ pyre You're missing: > we are achieving all this growth without paying > a dime to any of the labels and > In our case, we use the label’s songs till > we get a 100 (million) uniques Combined these statements make it less ambiguous. ~~~ tantalor I read "not paying a dime" as referring to their net with the labels In their business plan, they take a loss for licensing up front, but eventually net positive by licensing the data back to the labels. Contrast with, e.g., Spotify, who nets a loss with the labels. ~~~ andylei if that were the case, why would they then say: "Let’s keep this quite for as long as we can." also, > they take a loss for licensing up front doesn't seem like the correct interpretation, because they say "we are achieving all this growth without paying a dime to any of the labels" ~~~ ricardobeat That's exactly what he meant, they don't pay a dime because they offset it by selling data. ~~~ scott_s To me, the phrase "let's keep this quite [sic] as long as we can" implies you know you're doing something wrong. ~~~ ricardobeat I don't know about that, but I guess we'll find out soon enough. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt since this is all on Universal's words, they provide an amazing service, have license agreements with EMI and lots of smaller labels. ~~~ res0nat0r Is there a list somewhere of all of the actual artists Grooveshark has legal agreements with? I'd love to see the percentage of streams of unlicensed artists vs. licensed artists and how much each contributes to their total stream output per month. ------ shill The 'e' in email is short for 'evidence'. Little known fact. ------ RyanMcGreal > Let’s keep this quite for as long as we can. Clearly the lesson here is that you need to spellcheck carefully before sending out your emails. ------ DevX101 How did Universal get GrooveShark's internal emails? ~~~ jamesaguilar Presumably they were given access to them during discovery for the lawsuit, per standard practice. ------ __abc Beware what you put in any medium that can be retransmitted without your permissions :) ------ billpatrianakos What a dumb move. I'm really interested to know who the recipient was. This isn't about watching what you write more so than just being judicious about what information you choose to share and with _whom_ you share it. That segment of email made the email's author sound condescending and made the business itself look shady. I personally don't see any problem with that business model at all but there will be people who read it in a condescending tone. One last thing, the spelling. How in the world does anyone who wants to be taken seriously get away with that sort of spelling? Especially if you're running a business. Slang and shorthand are for teenage texts, not emails from high level execs. I'm a high level executive myself. I'm the CEO/Founder/President of my $20k/yr business that has its office based in my living room and even _I_ wouldn't let that happen in an email from me or anyone representing the work I do. The way you speak and write reflects on you in more ways than people realize. It can make a Nobel Prize winner look like a hillbilly. ~~~ darklajid Spelling: I for one couldn't parse it. I stumbled a handful of times and just stopped reading, looked at the comments here instead. Looked like a kid texting to me. ~~~ billpatrianakos Thank you. I think people are dissecting my comment a bit much like they have an axe to grind. Someone mentioned getting things done over checking spelling. Please. Does it take that long to type an extra character or two. That's a bullshit argument. Then dyslexia? Well that's fine but dyslexia doesn't cause you to spell "because" as "cuz" so while I feel for dyslexics, that too is just not good enough. The remark about "oh what if the Nobel Prize winner was a Russiin chemist?"... Oh, come on with that. It's obvious what I mean. The point is that this type of spelling can make the smartest of us and those of us worthy of a lot of respect look like fools. People will write you off for it. Suppose this were written by Steve Forbes or Bill Gates or PG himself but we didn't know it. I'm willing to bet that if the recipient wasn't a close friend and didn't recognize the sender's address that they wouldn't be taken seriously. That's my point. I think you get it darklajid. When someone writes this way it just reflects poorly on the person. My point was that people don't take you seriously even if you really are a genius that can help them if you write and speak in a manner like we see in this email. It it's a close friend then maybe it's fine but my overall point still stands despite the nit picking. ------ maeon3 Just a reminder that emails are public, everyone you dont want reading them will see it. Unless you are the government with the torture emails which were accidentally deleted. ------ goodspeller what a disgrase! can't even spell "quiet"!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
At least now we know why Color really got that funding - ChrisArchitect http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/25/color-digging ====== flyt Don't worry, if Apple acquires them (like they did their last company, Lala) then Gruber will suddenly realize how revolutionary the idea is. ~~~ raganwald Do you have a refutation for the articles's words? Or is this simply an _Ad Hominem_? Compare and contrast to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370547>, which is just as scornful but also logical. ~~~ danilocampos I'm with you, but stand by my claim that if Adam Lisagor had shot an ad for Color, Gruber's tone would be entirely different. Here's another post about a photo-taking application earlier this week: <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/22/everyday> ~~~ raganwald Interesting, however I would point out that Gruber isn't reviewing the app, he's reviewing the founder's quoted claim that the app is a data collection play. Personally, I disagree with Gruber: Facebook and Foursquare seem to be evidence that people will gladly give up their personal data in exchange for a "social" experience. But whether Gruber is right or wrong is not the point I was responding to, it's whether Gruber would hypothetically like the app if it was hypothetically bought by Apple. This is irrelevant to what he's saying now. Even if he does like everything Apple does and does hate everything Apple doesn't do, appealing to his bias is the textbook definition of an Ad Hominem: An ad hominem, short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to link the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the opponent advocating the premise. If he's wrong, we can attack his argument directly. How can we have a meaningful discussion about what he _might_ say if some hypothetical future acquisition takes place? Worse, what if he's _right_ now and would be wrong if he did change his mind after some hypothetical future acquisition? In that case, dismissing him because of his bias might rob us of a valuable insight. ~~~ baddox flyt's comment is not an _ad hominem_ argument, because flyt is not trying to link the validity of the premise (that Color's funding was the result of their data mining potential) to a characteristic of its advocate (Gruber's pattern of Apple apologetics). In fact, the way I read flyt's comment is that flyt actually agrees with Gruber, but is predicting that if Apple were to have something to do with Color, Gruber's cynicism would disappear. Unless I'm misunderstanding flyt, this was in no way an _ad hominem_ argument. ~~~ ellyagg Ah, these "that's not ad hominem" comments you read in every single thread that points out ad hominem get so tiresome. It most certainly is ad hominem. The premise of Gruber's post is approximately that, based on the latest information we're learning about it, there's something distasteful about Color or its value proposition to consumers. The original commenter seeks to discredit Gruber's implied argument by suggesting he's an Apple apologist, that his industry analysis is not based on facts at hand but by inherent biases. This is right in the sweet spot of ad hominem. Just read the first few paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry on ad hominem to confirm. Regardless, it's certainly poor form and disappointing to see so highly upvoted. ~~~ metellus Except he's not trying to discredit Gruber. He's pointing out that Gruber is able to be unbiased because the product isn't owned by Apple. ~~~ ThomPete Huh? So when the product is owned by Apple he is unbiased? ~~~ lotharbot No. The opposite of this. ~~~ shasta Converse ~~~ marshray I love you guys. (You really should do "Who's on first?" sometime. :-) ------ mrshoe I remember attending a Startup School talk wherein Max Levchin explained that Slide wasn't a "pimp my MySpace" company, but rather a data mining company using MySpace widgets as the trojan horse. So, Nguyen isn't the first serial entrepreneur to receive loads of funding based on his reputation and attempt to exploit the trend du jour to mine data from the masses. We all saw how well that worked out for Slide. My guess is that Color will see a similar fate. It's unlikely you'll build a great social photo sharing application if that's not your primary focus. ~~~ cft Max still made about $40M personally on Slide. The real loser in that acquisition is Google. I think the VC scene in the Silicon Valley is becoming more and more screwed up (becoming more resume/track record, rather than innovative product focused), and the Silicon Valley will pay dearly for this. ~~~ nir That's what happens in a hype-driven market - when startups aren't expected to make real money (eg Twitter's evaluations vs income) decisions are made based on hype, which is influenced by track record, celebrity status, media attention etc. All publicity is good publicity for Color right now and following Slide's lead is exactly what it's meant to do. ------ Batsu Although Gruber is summing it up based on a developer's words, they do state this ridiculous data collection in their privacy policy (which is an implied agreement, based on your downloading of the app). <http://color.com/privacy> \-- We also collect pictures, videos, comments, and actions you take through the App (“Content”), and information on your location. When our App is active, your Device provides periodic updates to our server of your location, which allows us to show you fresh Content based upon where you are at that moment. We share your Content with others. Sharing Content publicly with others from different locations is what this App is about. If you find this objectionable, please consider not using our App or Site. ~~~ pclark That seems like a remarkably clear and fair privacy policy. ------ thezilch How long before Color becomes Chat Roulette? What protections are children afforded where the content is not "personally identifiable?" And how long after that before Apple drops Color from their App Store? ~~~ sorbus I've been wondering about that for a while. The application is vulnerable to GPS spoofing (you can get your phone to tell it that you are somewhere you aren't), and while all the stuff it does to identify location (amount of light, listening to sound) is nifty, it can surely be defeated. How long will it be until hardcore pornography fills the feed at some major event? Or spam images, asking the reader to visit a site? ~~~ endergen There are some good PGP type filtersnyouncould do. The more pictures of yourself you take the more likely you are who you claim. You can't reuse an visual identity very well because you can't be in two places at once. If strangers are constantly taking pictures with you then that adds to the validity of your identity. So GPS spoofing would allow you to flood some area with a feed but for how long, you need to fake so many things. And you won't get connected to someone unless they mutually take a photo. It's very clever in it's ability to naturally prevent cheating. Which brings us back to why it's so creepy. I'm not gonna lie. I'm too much of a futurist to not think the data it collects isn't gonna be freaking powerful/cool. ~~~ lurker14 Why don't you try that last sentence again without so many negatives, and see if you don't like it less? ~~~ endergen Ha, thanks for the tips. ------ anigbrowl I feel so prescient now: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366765> Seriously, I think people are seriously overthinking the photo sharing aspect. That's just the first thing they could think of that seemed like it would have mass appeal, but I imagine the company has little to no interest in private photos or in tracking individual users. Here's how I see the possible future applications. You go somewhere and use your phone en route. Your phone knows approximately where you are and have been recently with a fair degree of detail. Rather than uploading that information to a server and scaring people away from using it, it listens to a stream of numbers from a server, which represent various different location and/or environmental criteria. The phone matches these with what it knows about itself based on where you've taken it, as if it were playing bingo. Every so often it gets a good match, and then uses that as a hash to look up a particular commercial message - one that has a high probability of being relevant to the owner of the phone based on where they are, where they're going, or where they have an established trail. So you're traveling up the escalator in a shopping mall, when suddenly your phone shrugs (tm). What is it? That obscure thing you like and searched for last week is in a store 2 minutes walk away. Hardly anyone buys those, so if you go there in the next hour they'll give you 20% off; otherwise it goes back to the wholesaler. ~~~ tenaciousJk Agreed 100% <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370501> ------ d_r Not to bring pop culture to HN, but this "photo data mining" reminds me of the ultrasound/sonic contraption in "The Dark Knight" that collected visuals on everyone in the city. What I find fascinating about Color, though, is that I can open the app in downtown Palo Alto and actually see photos of startups nearby, peoples' lunches, offices, whiteboards, window views, and so on. Mobile/GPS-based photography is an idea that has been tried in the past, but seemed to have never taken off due to lack of traction. Surely too early to tell, but perhaps the high publicity attracted here will actually make it possible for this one? ~~~ calloc As a company owner I'd be afraid that people are taking pictures with product ideas and information on whiteboards which is leaking internal information and documentation... ~~~ cydonian_monk That was exactly my first thought. I was just ready to go home when the $41MM! news made the rounds and decided to check out the app before the commute. When it asked me to take a profile picture I had trouble finding an angle that didn't include a shot or reflection of my whiteboard (among other things), so I took a picture of my nose. If Color takes off, and is used carelessly, it could become the single greatest social engineering weapon ever made. Who needs to sneak into your competition's office when you can just get within 150 meters and fire up an app. I would expect more secure organizations to outright ban it. ~~~ alexqgb There's another possibility: simply using Color becomes a out-and-out dick move, like smoking indoors. The investment turns to ash because the product is (rightly) viewed as toxic. The thing about FB is that it was useful and nice. It brought a circle of people who you knew but had lost sight of back into the realm of visibility, which - as it turned out - was something a lot of people really liked. Only after it had reached critical mass did the privacy aspect start becoming a concern. Color, on the other hand, doesn't seem to do anything truly new AND beneficial. At the same time, the privacy issue (read: creep factor) is immediately obvious. Also, unlike FB - which relied on Ivy league students to be early adopters - Color seems to be going after a very different group of people for initial validation. And those people are rapidly concluding that this thing is an odious turd of the very first order. ------ FirstHopSystems Wow. Is anyone still surprised that social networks do this? Really? "Oh! so that's what they are really doing?, Aha!' I would think that's has been established as the status quo for a awhile now. a 42$ million investment, I would be curious about any thoughts on how a company would make a profit from that investment. Other than selling information about it's users. I think the gotcha would be "Oh the company is NOT selling customer information!" So that's how they are doing it. This article seems like they just uncovered some new revelation. ------ neutronicus Just what I've been saying... And if the data mining stuff is good, they don't even need you to download their trojan horse. They can just license the tech to Facebook and leverage their installed base. EDIT: Perhaps Twitter is the best fit as a licensee - huge installed base on smart phones, and apparently can't data mine their way out of a wet paper bag, if the #dickbar fiasco is any indication. ------ lowglow One shouldn't forget about exif data on images. ~~~ eps Are EXIF tags added by the iOS when taking a picture? Or by the app calling the camera API after the photo is taken? I would guess it's latter. ~~~ aaronbrethorst UIImagePickerController, which is used to take photos, does not return EXIF data. Apparently, it is possible to hack around this limitation, but Apple doesn't take too kindly to this sort of behavior. ~~~ vegashacker Does it matter though? The iOS app already asks to get your location information. It's that same location info that would go into the putative EXIF tag, so Color already has the info. Or is there something else in EXIF that would be relevant in this case? ~~~ aaronbrethorst The user may have agreed to let the Camera app access their GPS data, but refused to let your app access their GPS data. For the case of Color, no it's not relevant. For the question posed by the (G?)GP, I think it is. ------ tenaciousJk Actually, I think it will be much worse than that. Think: location based advertising. In order to use color you have to allow GPS for the app and, optionally, push-notifications. A perfect combo for pushing ads when you're within X range, etc. I sent a tweet to them yesterday, but got no response. <https://twitter.com/#!/tenaciousJk/status/51033367050846208> edit: _group response to the below_ No geo-ad platform has this low barrier to entry with this high of an incentive. Simply snap a pic and it's recorded and you're "checked in" _if you will_. You're doing something you _want_ to be doing: recording your event, people you're with, etc. With 4S and Gowalla you have to want to check-in. _Checking in_ is the app - not recording your memory by way of a picture/video. Sharing pictures is _the biggest_ social app on the web. ~~~ minalecs um foursquare already sort of does this, go to the places tab, and it shows you how many specials are nearby. ~~~ pbhjpbhj Presumably Color inc. are doing some visual processing to read brands from images too and to possibly establish demographics? ------ bch What a lame commentary. He's surprised why? What about google search, gmail, facebook and twitter? When the "product" is free, _YOU_ are the product. ~~~ KSS42 Gruber's point is that the CEO should not have tried to justify the value of their product by pointing out the data mining aspect. It is not good PR. (BTW, Gruber blogged the "you are the product" last Sept.) <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/09/11/reece-iad> ~~~ alphabeat "Gruber did it" is the new "Simpsons did it"? ------ sequalia How much time we need to understand, that the big business is surveillance of human resources (google, facebook). There always be a ton of cash for data mining and selling it to governments, political parties, advertising companies etc. If governments try to do it, its a privacy problem. But when corporations put a cool, color(ful), free app, you will give them your data, they can sell it. And its perfectly legal. Thats why they have all the money. But you are decision maker. And only by conscious action and wise choice you can make difference. Big elites(politicians,corporations,big investors) listen only in two cases, when they loose money, and when they are afraid for their life. ------ danberger No one has mentioned their business model (page 3 of the interview). Basically they expect venues to pay for the ability to know the names of their frequent customers so that they could be greeted... but I thought they don't collect personal info. ~~~ alexqgb And what color is bullshit? ------ konop To actually get the data they are going to mine, people have to actually use the thing. This is where I think color will fail... plus they spell colour wrong! (sent from Canada) ~~~ ghshephard shephard-mba13:~ shephard$ for x in color.com colour.com; do echo $x; dig +short $x; done color.com 50.17.223.168 50.17.223.164 colour.com 50.17.223.168 50.17.223.164 ~~~ wulczer Or even: ~$ for x in colo{,u}r.com; do echo $x; dig +short $x; done ~~~ nikcub or just: $ host color.com; host colour.com ------ Apocryphon I rewatched The Social Network. I just realized that Timberlake's final rant as Sean Parker in that film was essentially the premise of Color.com- to wit: "The next transformative development, a picture-sharing application. A place where you view pictures that coincide with your social life. It is the true digitalization of real life. You don't just go to a party anymore. You go to a party with a digital camera, and then your friends relive the party online. And tagging." ~~~ joshu Did he really mention tagging? Woot. ~~~ rudiger I think he meant tagging people's photos (with their names), not del.icio.us- style tagging. ------ alexqgb Odious creep factor aside, they deserve credit for securing both color.com and colour.com. It's just amazing what you can do with $41mm, right? ~~~ mryall It's interesting that they don't have their company name anywhere on the page except in small text in the footer. Also, even on colour.com the page title is still 'Color'. If it were my site, I'd be redirecting colour.com to color.com. (And swimming in pools of money.) ------ toddmorey The tech explains the funding, but I still question whether Color will be widely used. I'm thinking Segway: amazing technology that didn't translate into an experience people enjoyed / wanted enough for mass adoption. This is why Apple does so well: they get both the technology and the experience right. ------ twidlit Color is not the sonic scanning mobile device in Dark Knight, it was the multi-lens visual scanner Lucius Fox threatened to quit over and self- destructed when they found Joker. Bruce Wayne is Nguyen and we are Lucius Fox, but in this case there is no Joker to catch. ~~~ oldstrangers Money is the joker in this case. ------ Splines (from the linked article): > _Then it will select the best picture_ and put it to the top of the photo > feeds of people most interested in that image (like fans at the ballpark) Great idea, but I don't think I've ever seen a description be so hand-wavey. You might as well put "Then some magic happens" there. Some details on how this happens (face recognition? social voting? views?) would be nice. edit: I guess I should RTFA. It's still really high level, but later in the article Nguyen explains that they use views to measure photo quality. ------ gumbo What kind of a shock. The color app is unsuable, the user experience is the worst i ever had with an app. That's beein said, if data mining is there "goal", then i suspect they fail because when your goal is expressed in this way not in a way that match "user's" goal then you're going to fail. Google never said: "Hey our project i about collecting as much informations on people as we can". There goal is to satisfy some needs of their users. On the other hand i need to say i was shocked to read what Color was about because it was so close to my start-up gold "idea" (don't ask what? :-) ). But more the time pass more i feel their project is so far of what we'd be doing. I whish they understand that they can't succeed in this way, they can collect user's data like all those social networks does, but in exchange they need to provide something in exchange. ------ allanchao It's interesting that in a different article, I think it's Sequoia that said something along the lines of "something as revolutionary as this comes around once a decade. It's the next Google". Seems like the goal of color is to aggregate vast amounts of real world data, like the Google of physical life. ~~~ joebananas They really said that? That's just utterly delusional in a Wired on push as the future stylee. Anyways, to get at that real world data they crave, they're gonna need tons of users, and if they ever get even one tenth of a percent of what Google has I'd be shocked. ~~~ jimboyoungblood The hyperbole around Color sorta reminds me of another revolutionary product from a decade ago: <http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001/12/03/here-it-is.htm> ~~~ sandstrom Segaway Tycoon dies driving of a cliff on his Segway: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315518/Segway- tycoo...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315518/Segway-tycoon-Jimi- Heselden-dies-cliff-plunge-scooters.html) ~~~ balbaugh Not the actual inventor, but man who purchased Segway therefrom. ------ MarinaMartin If you ignore the photo-sharing capability for a moment, it sounds like they're trying to create a more accurate alternative to GPS. In the 1700s Britain awarded about £100,000 in "Longitude prize" money to people who contributed to the development of [accurate] longitude. I tried to figure out what that is in today's pounds and found a calculator that said it's £147,000,000.00 today. So if Color really can create an alternative to GPS for $41 million, it would be cheaper than what it cost to develop longitude :) No idea if they can actually pull this off, but thought the Longitude Prize story is cool (thank you, "Stuff You Should Know" podcast, for mentioning it earlier this year). ------ felix0702 There will always be people who will post pictures publicly at different places. (similar to Youtube) There will always be people who will check out who are the crowds in different places. (similar to Youtube) With almost every phone being equipped with camera in the future, there will be even more pictures than video stored in Youtube. They probably will let you find people who have similar interests in each location. When they have a huge stored pictures and people's location preferences, I am sure they'll have ways to generate revenues. If college kids love and often use this application, they should have a chance (I think). Otherwise, ... ------ ngsayjoe I uninstalled it the moment I realized i can't remove my photo from the app. I guess it will be stored permanently public in Color. (Yes, you can slide the photo left to remove it, but it'd still show up in my stream!) ~~~ rbarooah It did eventually disappear from the stream for me, and for me, it look as though there was nobody else around to see it! ~~~ ngsayjoe Hmmm, maybe the removed photo doesn't reflect in the stream real-time (but will eventually) ... i may give it another try. ------ Jabbles They got the funding because the investors think there's a small but non-zero chance that Color will become "the next twitter/facebook". The ROI could be 100 fold. This is _almost_ the opposite strategy to Yuri Milner, who is spreading his bets out over many companies. However, this strategy is no less valid. I say _almost_ because the investors can make many (tens of) bets this size and still succeed in making money. ~~~ jallmann Yes. It's possible that Color could see a 100x return. It's also possible Mitt Romney will be president of the US in 2016. I think the odds are about the same for both. Yuri Milner's strategy makes far more sense. Where is the hedging of risk by putting $40 million in a single company that's still seed stage at best? ~~~ Jabbles Your comment isn't helpful if you don't provide a value. I'm not interested enough in the politics of the American Republican party to gauge whether you think it is < or > 1%. As for one strategy making more sense, you cannot simply assert that when you have no numbers to back that up. You cannot hedge a single bet by definition. Clearly the hedging of risk takes place in the other investments of the companies Bain Capital, Sequoia, and Silicon Valley Bank. I have no inside knowledge of what Color is doing, nor do I think it's particularly likely that they'll succeed in becoming a multi-billion-dollar industry. But it doesn't have to be likely, when your ROI is potentially so high. ~~~ jallmann > As for one strategy making more sense, you cannot simply assert that when > you have no numbers to back that up. I can't give numbers, because they are simply impossible to quantify at this stage. (Note I said 2016, which is about the same time it'd take for Color to ramp up to its full potential.) My point is, Color is a long shot. > nor do I think it's particularly likely that they'll succeed in becoming a > multi-billion-dollar industry. But it doesn't have to be likely, when your > ROI is potentially so high. "potential" is the weasel word here. You can't possibly begin to anticipate ROI numbers for a particular investment at the stage Color is in. And you most certainly don't pump $40 million in a company if you think it's unlikely they'll succeed in becoming a multi-billion dollar industry. This is all just a bit WTF-ish. ~~~ rmrm in the bubble years of the late 90's there was a startup that received $500 million in seed funding. I only bring them up because even with all the discussion around color I haven't seen them referenced (there might be others like them as well, I just don't remember any). In similarity to color, their initial valuation and largess of funding was due to the history of their founders, and the perceived "hotness" of their target market. Still around, but have never managed to do much of anything. [http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=zhne&ql=1](http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=zhne&ql=1) ------ Tycho relax, it's just so they can send Groupon-style offers to people more likely to want them (Groupon would be great... if I ever actually wanted spa treatment, highlights, or weekend breaks) on the other hand, suprised I haven't seen the obvious 'paedo/stalker threat' brought up yet. it's not data mining you'd need to worry about, it's individual predatory users ~~~ jerf There's already relevant laws about such things. If I had to guess Color will not be offered for minors to use right away, precisely because of those laws. (At least, that's not something I'd implement before shipping out the MVP.) And when it is, there will be controls for this sort of thing that have been gone over with a fine-tooth comb by some expensive lawyers. I understand what you're getting at, but I would submit this isn't the secret thing that only a few people can see that will sink the product, it's a pretty blindingly obvious thing that everybody including the Color team plainly sees. If they do ship something that makes the "paedo/stalker threat" easy to implement they'll deserve the resulting PR conflagration. ------ trickjarrett How does one profit off of this data. Are there agencies which sell it, or is it marketed to companies in some sort of package? ------ apedley I was wondering why it received such a huge investment. That`s brilliant :) Great post john. ------ ebaysucks color & image recognition = decentralized police state ~~~ puredemo Everyone else is big brother. Which is how it has always been, actually. ------ jasongullickson I think if nothing else this is proof that if you have a clear way to generate value (evil or not), there is large investment to be had for tech start-ups. ~~~ cosmicray how exactly will they be able to get trademark exclusivity on this name ? isn't this much more common than windows ever was ? ~~~ Rariel Apparently it's already trademarked--they have the TM right next to the name when you search it in the app store. I am really surprised by this... ~~~ yakto "TM" means nothing in the U.S - anyone can slap "TM" on any product and claim a "common law" trademark, and it'll be up to them to defend against complaints and suits. A "circle R", on the other hand, means that you have a federally-registered trademark. Which, after a bit of research at USPTO.gov, it appears they have (no surprise): Word Mark COLOR, Goods and Services, IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer application software for social networking services; computer application software to facilitate social networking services by use of camera firmware in mobile devices; computer application software for sending, receiving, storing and organizing audiovisual, videographic and written data by use of camera firmware in mobile devices; computer application software to facilitate social networking services by use of location based data IC 045. US 100 101. G & S: online social networking services; providing a web site to facilitate social networking services by use of camera firmware and geolocation software in the mobile devices of others Serial Number 85222392, Filing Date January 20, 2011, Owner (APPLICANT) Jackson Labs, Inc. CORPORATION DELAWARE 201 Hamilton Avenue Palo Alto CALIFORNIA 94301, Attorney of Record Julia Spoor Gard There are 3 other live trademarks for "Color," in the categories of Hair Color, printed goods, and plastic display racks. ~~~ yakto On March 4, they also registered "MULTI-LENS", Goods and Services, IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer application software for social networking services; computer application software to facilitate social networking services and access to news and media outlets by use of camera firmware in mobile devices; computer application software for sending, receiving, storing and organizing audiovisual, videographic and written data by use of camera firmware in mobile devices; computer application software to facilitate social networking services by use of location based data. IC 045. US 100 101. G & S: online social networking services; providing a web site to facilitate social networking services by use of camera firmware and geolocation software in the mobile devices of others. That's it for their trademarks, at least under the company name Jackson Labs, Inc. Which leads me to believe that's the only product they've currently got cooking. ------ marcamillion Not to mention that most 'mobile' photos are 'geotagged' with the GPS coordinates. I think this 'data mining' revelation could just well be the 'death knell' ? ------ TheSwede75 "or filenames, meta-data, facial recognition dataming data, geo-data etc' Yeah there sure is nothing there that 'marketers' could use right?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Webflow vs Macaw thread in Linkedin Groups - dougcorrea http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Has-anyone-used-Macaw-beta-770857.S.5825726094937980931 ====== dougcorrea Anybody here tried one of them?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Microsoft's Edge browser is in serious trouble - mabynogy https://www.computerworld.com/article/3242165/microsoft-windows/microsofts-edge-browser-is-in-serious-trouble.html ====== prepend I tried to like Edge. I gave it a try because work pushes it. But it is so bizarre. I’m not sure who their customer is. There’s no save as, no view source, no home button, favorites are screwed up. These are basic functions. Chrome and Firefox have it figured out. Who is Microsoft building this for? Even IE plain is better. ~~~ neilalexander Without exception, everything that Microsoft has transformed into UWP has been worse. I don't quite know what the UWP dream is, but it's horrible. ------ PhilWright I like Edge in general but it is very buggy. Dragging a tab away to create a separate window only works 2/3 of the time. It often just freezes without obvious reason. And this is where I only visit a few simple standard websites whilst at work. Very disappointing. Oh, and sometimes it will not work correctly when ordering from the Microsoft Store and so I have to use Chrome to place an order for Microsoft hardware! Nice. ~~~ smashingfiasco I second that. Edge is fast and efficient, in my experience. But when I use it, it crashes just a little too often. I've never been a Chrome or Google kind of a guy, so I was actually using Edge instead until FF57 was released. I think they could also improve Edge by making the browser frame and controls a little less plain and blocky in terms of design. ------ jpmlc I use it on my small weak 8 inch Windows 10 Dell tablet because it works much faster than Chrome on the weaker hardware. I like how it now has all the same extensions I use on Chrome. I also like how you can just double tap, like Safari IOS, to zoom to a frame. I still use Chrome on desktop as I am just used to it. ------ rando444 This makes sense, but for me the question becomes.. why would bot creators choose Edge/IE and not some other browser? Random chance? As a sidebar, I really enjoy when authors throw interesting colloquialisms that I've never heard before. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village) ~~~ slededit Because its pretty much guaranteed to already be on their target machine. ------ londons_explore If Edge dies, the web will be left with only Gecko and Webkit rendering engines... :-( ~~~ indemnity And nothing of value was lost. ------ cuchoi Was forced to use it for work, it was hell.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Burning Man Comes Out Against Instagram Influencers and Coachella-Ification - skilled https://www.wmagazine.com/story/burning-man-instagram-influencers-sponcon-marian-goodell-letter ====== justboxing dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144069)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nintendo launches 5000 WiFi hotspots for your 3DS - mjurek http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/08/10/nintendo-launches-5000-wifi-hotspots-for-your-3ds/ ====== seagaia Are sales higher in the UK or something? If not, I'm not sure why they would only launch them in the UK.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Text your mom you're home with a physical button - imkevinxu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIAXx83ogyw ====== TheAppGuy This may look like a novelty product, but a Swedish entrepreneur has raised a lot of money for a similiar idea (although not as focussed as texting your mum). [http://www.theappguy.co/the-app-guy- podcast/2014/11/24/tagp1...](http://www.theappguy.co/the-app-guy- podcast/2014/11/24/tagp185-joacim-westlund-digital-internet-of-things- business-ideas-sweden-indiegogo) ~~~ towelguy There's also bttn, posted here a couple of months ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263007) ------ fredrivett This is quality! I nearly always forget to text my mum when I've got home from a long journey. One slap of this button when walking through the door, done! ------ LukaszH Nice video :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
LikeALittle's Ridiculous Hacker House - thankuz http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/tc-cribs-likealittle-lal/ ====== jmtame It all looks pretty easy when you see a TC write-up on them and VC business cards sprawled out on the floor, but some interesting back-story from Evan on how LAL got started (from the _Startups Open Sourced_ interview): "As soon as I graduated from business school I started a company called ProFounder with two cofounders, Jessica Jackley who had started Kiva before, and Dan Mauriello. While doing that, I met my current cofounders for LikeaLittle, Shubham and Prasanna. They had left Microsoft, came to Stanford, and used to hang out there because they were trying to start a company. A mutual friend introduced us and after a month or two we decided to join forces. So we started ProFounder. I worked there for about six months and then it moved on to L.A and I didn’t want to go to L.A; I decided I wanted to stay in Silicon Valley and do some consumer Internet things. So, Shubham, Prasanna and I came back to Palo Alto, lived together in a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture, slept on the floor, subsisted off of rice, and tried a bunch of stuff until we caught something that worked. This was January 2010. For several months we just brainstormed; it wasn’t until October that we actually came up with LikeaLittle. We had probably tried 10 ideas before that and they all failed miserably. So, in October 2010, we created a first edition of LikeaLittle. We’ve been working together for almost a year, but before YC we had not done any fundraising. We were bootstrapping the entire time; we were living in a one-bedroom apartment our entire time together and then for a two month period, [my cofounders] lost their visas, so we had to go and live in India together. So we lived with my cofounder’s family in India and were doing the startup from there. It was interesting, the power would go out all the time and our users were in America so we had to be on U.S. time; all kinds of crazy stuff was happening. But, in India there were no expenses. The family would make us food and we’d stay with them; we literally had a zero dollar burn rate in India. So that was pretty fantastic; we kind of had an infinite runway. We’ve basically spent the entire year living off of rice and beans and sleeping on the floor, together." ~~~ guynamedloren Wow, just wow. This is why I read Hacker News. Three guys living in a single bedroom apartment, sleeping on floors, being forced to move around the world, failing 10 times, and still pushing forward. That's dedication if I've ever heard it, and these guys have just earned my respect a hundred times over. Often times, especially when TC is involved, the startup life seems like fun and games, with a hackathon thrown into the mix here and there. It's obviously not the case, but the media likes to portray it that way. I wish there were more firsthand accounts like this. Keep up the great work, LAL team! ~~~ jmtame The media's portrayal of startups is something I have a split opinion on right now. On one hand, I feel bad criticizing the media because several founders have cited jealousy as their reason for starting a new company. "Kevin Rose was on the cover of BusinessWeek, why the heck couldn't that be me?" So on one hand, it's a somewhat healthy amount of jealousy. On the other hand, I think it hurts people because there's a shock they experience when they do their first startup. "Wait a minute, startups aren't supposed to be like this. The magazines and newspapers had guys on the cover smiling, holding a thumbs up. This isn't what I signed up for!" It's like digital crack. You get a sensational story, and it's kind of cool because it makes the startup world seem more attractive and now you have this overconfidence that you can do it, because well it's just easy and it looks like fun. It's probably better to read the full stories and get the full context. The founders aren't usually in the media to talk about themselves anyway; they're out there promoting their startup, so you're mostly walking away with a sales pitch (although startups do this to varying degrees, Indinero comes to mind when I think of startups who are most intent on using media coverage to grow, just an example). This video was definitely cool though, it's fun to see how they all work. They have one of the best pitches for hiring: "we have some of the smartest engineers" is an easy sell. Check out the book if you want all the back-stories. It's pretty sobering; a nice break from the koolaid, so to speak. ~~~ physcab > They have one of the best pitches for hiring: "we have some of the smartest > engineers" is an easy sell. I actually didn't get that impression when I read (and heard) their hiring pitch. To me, their pitch was "the people who work here are geniuses and you have to beat them to be recognized. Oh did we mention they are the best in <insert continent>?" Not exactly as humble as saying "come and work with brilliant people. you too can have a massive impact." ------ dstein This was a lot more entertaining than the typical Techcrunch blog spam. They should maybe try to do more things like this "boots on the ground" sort of stuff. I'm so tired of hearing about so-and-so getting funded by so-and-so, that stuff was never interesting. But here we're getting some actual honest content. We get to see a startup doing tech stuff, where and how they work, in their natural habitat. That aside, these guys kinda look like they're following the Social Network playbook to the T. I wonder how long it'll be until they hire Sean Parker and dilute one of the founders' stake in the company. ------ pnathan I am so glad these guys are happy. I would not be okay working in that environment. I already have had (and left) a dorm room. My perfect coding environment is a quiet office, alone, with an awesome view of mountains. High speed internet. Silent computer. Company IM. Garguntuan monitors. On the walls, whiteboard, and a bookshelf somewhere. So, totally not LAL! ~~~ tuhin Exactly my thoughts. Dorm rooms is like so 2 years old. I want a decent setup, a good view, high speed internet and a vision to win the world. ------ esmevane This is interesting to me. How can I put this as diplomatically as possible? I'm glad that there is a culture like this out there. It espouses productivity and gives a real view as to what folks will do in order to try their hand at a serious venture. Clearly the guys here are aware of exactly what they're doing by putting this whole thing on film. They're happy, they believe in their projects, and they're not ashamed to put this on the record. Having said that, I remember my early 20s, too. ------ 3dFlatLander I'm older than these guys--late 20's, married, no kids (yet). I just don't see this lifestyle bring very practical for married/family folks. But then again, I've never heard any stories of people other than young singles doing stuff like this. Anyone know of any outliers like this in the valley? ~~~ nostrademons I'm the same age but single, and I applied to LaL but realized that I just don't have the energy anymore to sustain the pace they want. I could've done it at 19, I probably could even have done it at 24, but now that I'm 29, I just can't code for 14 hours a day, let alone 20. (Actually, that's not entirely true - I've pulled 14 hour days for 4-5 day stretches working on a Google doodle or coming up to a launch, but I need like 2 weeks of recovery time afterwards.) Alas, I wasted my twenties on college and 3 failed startups. It's certainly _possible_ to start a company in your 30s - PG did it, founding ViaWeb at 31 and selling it at 34 - but it does seem like a bit of an uncanny valley without many founders. My theory is that people who are the type of person that's going to found a startup probably would've founded it by 26, and then if their first couple attempts failed, they're licking their wounds at 30 and trying to figure out how to give it another go. Those same people often end up starting follow-up ventures much later, after the kids are self-sufficient. I have one friend from elementary school whose dad is working on his second startup at the age of 70. His first venture - founded at around age 60 - ended up IPOing at a market cap of several billion before crashing and burning. ------ flynnwynn Any shot at hiring female engineers is out the window... ~~~ msredmond Actually, I think the "inspiring" (his words) Aston Kutcher poster makes it so the shot at hiring anyone with actual taste is out the window. ~~~ jacobolus It's pretty clearly a joke... ------ physcab lal is a curious site. I've known about it since december when my sister told me about it. She used to spend hours on it reading to me funny little flirts that people wrote. The initial users had a great sense of humor and it was really lightweight and fun. Now though, it is so heavy and serious! It seems like half the people who post are depressed by a breakup and are looking for an outlet. Also, since the site is less popular now than it used to be the posts stay up for a while and the content is rather stale. ------ myprasanna If you guys want to join the mess, we're hiring :) <http://lal.com/about/the_game> ~~~ wyclif "We are hiring the best _in_ the world." EDIT: I wish I was experienced enough to work with you guys. ~~~ angusgr _I wish I was experienced enough_ I'm pretty sure in the video the CEO says they're much more interested in aptitude than experience, after all they hired a college freshman. ~~~ wyclif Thanks, that gives me hope. I was thinking about raw coding experience, not years though. ------ edw519 My favorite bit: Evan: This is one of our recruiting strategies. We literally go to recruiting events...and we just tell them, "Hey, I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can beat my co-founder, Prasanna here, in a coding challenge." Jason: Do you usually win? Prasanna: Ah, I mean, if we lose... Jason: Then you're going to hire the guy... Prasanna: Yea. ------ cemregr The story is impressive... And I hope they're on to building something big and serious. Am I getting this right, 5 ACM finalists working on a nicer version of craigslist's missed connections? ------ juiceandjuice When I was looking for an room 6 months ago in Palo Alto I thought it would be cool to live with hacker/programmers/whatever. I quickly changed my mind when _every_ house I saw with self-proclaimed hackers ended up looking like this. ------ codelion Nothing against LikeALittle, but I really wish people with such kind of raw talent and dedication were doing something better than solving the problem of anonymous flirting. ~~~ emreas stay tuned ;) ------ Smirnoff I love LAL team. I was one of the active admins at my school. I flew to Cali for a week and Evan let me stay at their place for a week. These guys sleep like for 3 or 4 hours and code for the rest of the time. Amazing company :) ------ corin_ Startups may need to live on a budget, but good to see that they didn't overlook the importance of nice whisky with the Johnnie Walker Blue. No office should go without a good scotch. ------ MatthewB This is why I'm moving to Silicon Valley. I want this. ------ mattberg is it just me or does it remind you of the house from the Facebook movie? ~~~ fungi allot more partying and girls in the myface movie... that looked pretty smelly and claustrophobic to me, but going by the comments i'm in the minority. e: just to clarify, you guys are awesome and i admire your work and attitude... just each to their own and when in rome yada yada ------ sandropadin How much coding can there be that these guys need to live like this? ~~~ d0m What do you mean _need to live_? I'd pay to live their and work on lal. The only thing I didn't see what the coffee machine, hope it's a good one. ~~~ sandropadin A slip of the keyboard. Obviously if they received $1 million in funding, the team is smart enough to choose how they live. I'm just saying, it probably wouldn't burn through their funding if they hired a maid to come in occasionally. :) ------ guynamedloren Loved this episode.. Now this is what I picture when I think about a startup! Kinda makes me wanna move out west... ------ sonoffett I'm so glad they mentioned Philz, some of the best coffee I can find in the bay area and filled with hackers. ~~~ phodo When I saw that Philz, I recalled all the long hours I spent at that table outside working on my at-the-time first iPhone app... the valley is a very special place. ------ etherael This to me is one more link in the chain of evidence that this is not just the 2000 bubble rehashed. Not just different people but different _kinds_ of people are in charge this time, different methods are being employed. The focus is less on sheen and who has the biggest flagpole or best in house sushi chef and more on results and methods. I like that a little, even on the chance that it does fail again at least this time it will be on our terms. ~~~ jrockway I think this just means that software and software development is cheaper this time around. Back in the day, your CRUD app needed a proprietary compiler using proprietary libraries running on a proprietary operating system talking to a proprietary database. This cost mucho money, and was super buggy. So you needed a lot of smart programmers and a lot of time to get anything that worked. These days, you just use Ruby or Perl or something and its 100x faster to develop and probably runs faster than 1999 C++ on a mainframe did. So there goes your main cost. (Netscape is a good example from that era. Not that great a piece of software -- it ran super slow and needed a lot of people to write it.) Also, good startups are pretty easy to do with just one person. So when you only have one or two people, you don't need flashy offices or sushi chefs... you just rent a nice apartment and order out. Expensive, but much cheaper than what people did in 1999. ~~~ hncommenter13 Just for the record, as someone who worked on web apps in 1999, we used Perl + MySql. No, they were nowhere near as effective as those tools and others are today, but I didn't know anyone using a mainframe. We did use expensive Sun gear instead of cheap linux boxes, though. ------ mcxx The LAL designer posts some stories and photos here <http://musho.posterous.com/> (unfortunately, it's in Slovak only). ------ jmtame Speaking of Hacker Houses--if anyone is looking to join one in SF with a few other hackers (one YC founder, one Facebook coder, and myself) let me know jmtame at gmail ------ astrange <http://lal.com/gatech> is more or less a horrible wasteland… it's certainly no <http://onlyattech.net/>. Is there supposed to be something entertaining about this, besides reading the submissions from creepy people in the CS building? ------ crocowhile I don't understand one thing: if they raised already millions and believe so much in their future, why do they eat $1.5 red beans and why they don't hire a cleaning lady? It looks to me they are way past the ramen profitable phase, aren't they? ~~~ olalonde Doesn't seem to make them too miserable either... ~~~ crocowhile You don't know this, do you? Also, I happen to be sleep researcher. There is TONS of literature that says that people, when sleep deprived, make all sort of mistakes. I don't care what they say: I would not trust a line of code from someone who claim to sleep 3 hours a night no matter how smart they are (and they surely are smart). ~~~ olalonde I was referring to the place. Did they really say something about sleep in the video? ------ knodi Damn, I can't believe I turned down there job offer. ~~~ chegra If they want you then, they want you now; give them a shout. ------ sebastianhoitz I love this startups attitude. Awesome! ------ namank I like the bit about the free projector..."yeah so old startups just give us stuff" ------ Aarvay I just love it ------ tkahn6 This looks so much fun. Wow. ------ jacobbijani Buy a fucking vacuum. ~~~ danilocampos > Buy a fucking vacuum. <http://i.imgur.com/CuFuD.png> ~~~ fungi my god man... that's impressive	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Cyber Security Awareness Week - dguido http://isis.poly.edu/csaw If you're in high-school or college, this is a great opportunity to test your infosec skills against your peers, and hopefully earn a little prize money in the process.<p>"ISIS Lab is organizing NYU-Poly's 5th annual Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) where students can compete and win prizes in a variety of information security challenges. There will be door prizes, raffles for participating, and bonus prizes for undergrad and high school participants. Qualified finalists will receive a travel scholarship to attend the awards ceremony in New York City."<p>There are a number of events, including an application security "capture the flag" challenge, a security quiz which covers everything from cryptography to risk management, and a 5-day forensics puzzle.<p>This looks like a lot of fun. Some of the contest materials become available at the beginning of September, so sign up soon if you're interested in participating.<p>Ref: http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2008/07/cyber_security_awareness_week.html ====== dguido If you're in high-school or college, this is a great opportunity to test your infosec skills against your peers, and hopefully earn a little prize money in the process. "ISIS Lab is organizing NYU-Poly's 5th annual Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) where students can compete and win prizes in a variety of information security challenges. There will be door prizes, raffles for participating, and bonus prizes for undergrad and high school participants. Qualified finalists will receive a travel scholarship to attend the awards ceremony in New York City." There are a number of events, including an application security "capture the flag" challenge, a security quiz which covers everything from cryptography to risk management, and a 5-day forensics puzzle. This looks like a lot of fun. Some of the contest materials become available at the beginning of September, so sign up soon if you're interested in participating. Ref: [http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2008/07/cyber_security...](http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2008/07/cyber_security_awareness_week.html) ------ yan disclaimer: I was involved with this event a few years ago, but it's still a great opportunity to meet other people in security, get involved with interesting events and contribute.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Pytorch Text Recognition Tool - s3nh_ https://github.com/s3nh/pytorch-text-recognition ====== abeppu In the example on the readme, why does it reverse the order of "casteli" (3) and "castle" (4)? It's a bit surprising that it understand the rest of the ordering (including the "and" in the center), but flips those two. Also, if I were a developer trying to use this, I'd be constantly annoyed at receiving a dict with keys like "0", "1", "2" rather than just getting a list. ~~~ s3nh_ In the example, text is not sorted by it's corrdinates but by appearence of boxes in first network. It is visible in more complex documents, that crnn network did not create boxes in descending order (word-by-word). also, good point about the list. dictionary keys has no logical usage in this one. ------ jkaufmann_ This is awesome, definitely a ton of use cases for this. It would be interesting if you put some background into why you made this project in your README. Some inspiration always helps. Also some examples of where else you've seen it applied could spark peoples imagination to help people get some more usage out of your work. ~~~ s3nh_ Hi, thanks for feedback! I'll add more general information. In my opinion theres a lot to do in complex document classification, I'll try to add some demo to make things more intuitive. thanks! ------ dpaluy How to train this model in other languages? ~~~ s3nh_ the hardest part in training model in foreign languages is to get correctly labeled dataset. I worked with pretrain model on Polish language documents and based on this experience it is relatively good if you are using some text similarity measures. There are some examples/pretrain models with Korean/English/French language ------ boromi And CRAFT stands for what? ~~~ piceas The topic list gives the answer [https://github.com/topics/craft](https://github.com/topics/craft) Fist repo: Character Region Awareness for Text Detection (CRAFT) [https://github.com/clovaai/CRAFT-pytorch](https://github.com/clovaai/CRAFT- pytorch) Which has a nice video demo. [https://youtu.be/HI8MzpY8KMI](https://youtu.be/HI8MzpY8KMI)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It - chrbutler http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/06/bbcs-hi-tech-failure ====== handelaar Was wondering if anybody here would notice that the "CMS" being described here was a project to handle every single second of radio and TV footage from ingestion through recoding through editing to broadcast, and then beyond that to transcoding everything for whatever devices want to watch or hear it once it's finished. People here hear "CMS" and think we're talking about text. Incidentally the parts of this boondoggle which actually exist are being used as components in the BBC. The headline last week was about the decision to terminate that particular project because it had got far, far out of its depth. Also to put the highly-charming person responsible for it on gardening leave indefinitely pending the investigation. It's a massive cockup, but it has had some useable outcomes, and it is a product class that doesn't exist outside the world of the Beeb, or other national/international broadcasters. There's nothing off the shelf to buy here. In the 90s this sort of thing wouldn't have got cancelled, so I'm seeing this as a sort of progress. ------ JamisonM Real headline: Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way. It seems to me that months or years of auditing and hearings and cries for heads to roll are probably wasted. Just like a private company a few mangers should probably get tossed or reassigned and the second version of the same project should get started to address the businesses needs the first one was supposed to. ~~~ macspoofing >Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way. Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake. This is a typical big government project. Software development is hard. Building large, complex, poorly defined software systems is hard. //EDIT I should clarify that. I don't think a private enterprise would engage in a project that would have it build an _internal_ system, at that scale ($100 million), having so little impact on it's primary revenue driver, over so many years! Big enterprises fail with big software, that's a fact. But they wouldn't fail in this specific way. This is a quintessential big government software project failure. ~~~ andyjohnson0 There's nothing special about private enterprises that makes them immune to risk. As others have said, many IT projects fail [1]. In the private sector this is just seen as a business risk, but when a public sector project fails then its "wasting taxpayers money". For some reason the Economist article doesn't mention that the project was originally awarded to Siemens and Deloitte [2], but technical failures and cost overruns by these private companies caused the BBC to bring the project in-house. It could be argued that the BBC lacked the capability to deliver the project on its own, but thats also a mistake found in the private sector. [1] [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9116470/IT_s_biggest_...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9116470/IT_s_biggest_project_failures_and_what_we_can_learn_from_them) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Media_Initiative#Initia...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Media_Initiative#Initial_impetus_and_relaunch) ~~~ _yosefk There's something special about private enterprises making them reconsider their approaches, though - the fact that they lose their own money (which is often combined with having a smaller pool of money to begin with). Few enterprises can spend $150M and fewer will keep spending upon signs of things not working out. As to private contractors doing a poor job when paid with taxpayer money - makes some sense, as long as said money keeps flowing. In a different setting the flow would stop more quickly. ~~~ leejoramo I know of a private newspaper with a circulation of around 30,000 that spent $3M on a failed Print software system. How does that compare to the BBC's viewer & listenership numbers for $150M for a Audio/Video production system? ~~~ takluyver According to barb.co.uk, BBC 1 (the flagship TV channel) had some 45M viewers over a recent week. We could consider other channels, radio stations and the website, but that's already well over half the UK population. By cost per customer, that's more than an order of magnitude better than your newspaper example. ------ Finster I've personally worked at 3 large organizations that have tried to formulate and develop an all-encompassing content management system. One of those organizations is a broadcaster that was also trying to build a digital content management system. Every single one of those projects has been a total boondoggle. Always over budget. Always changing scope. Always missing every single milestone and deadline. Now, I know that this is not a statistically significant sample size, but this sort of thing seems to be more common that I initially thought. It's like the worst-case scenario of design-by-committee. ------ astrodust The same organization that couldn't be arsed to host some of their historical web properties due to "high costs": [http://853blog.com/2011/01/25/pulling- the-plug-on-the-bbcs-i...](http://853blog.com/2011/01/25/pulling-the-plug-on- the-bbcs-internet-history/) ~~~ MrDOS It strikes me that the BBC is hilariously bad at archival. They scrapped dozens of Doctor Who episodes in the name of saving space ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes)). ~~~ objclxt The BBC is, today, very good at archiving programming material. All output is kept for at least five years, and the overwhelming majority is kept permanently (exceptions are things like long-running quiz shows, where samples of material are kept post five years, although any disposed material is offered to the BFI and other third parties before being junked). Doctor Who wasn't scrapped in the name of saving space, it was scrapped because nobody thought it was worth keeping. The shows couldn't be repeated (because at the time, Equity had negotiated limits on repeat rights), and quad tape was very expensive and easily re-used. More importantly, nobody really thought that Quad was an appropriate archiving format. Programs would be tele-recorded onto 16mm for overseas sale and archive. This is not, in of itself, a crazy idea - try finding a quad tape player today vs a 16mm projector. The problem at the time was there was no mandate for archival, so the engineering department were junking the tapes, and the commercial department (who were selling Doctor Who on to other broadcasters) weren't retaining the 16mm reels. Even in the 1970s, many people were still not convinced of the value of archiving TV output. It's not totally dissimilar to the early days of the web - it was seen as ephemeral. This was happening at pretty much _every_ broadcaster around the world - Wikipedia has a pretty big list of lost TV programs, most of which were wiped for space. ------ tehwalrus Nowhere near as much as the £12Bn the NHS spent on an impossible moving-spec IT system that they also scrapped(1). Oh wait, it's a tenth of the amount. (1) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health) ~~~ thisone Saying the program was scrapped is a bit off. It makes it sound like nothing has come out of the project at all. Choose and Book is widely in use, the Spine exists, as well as the N3 network. Data format and transfer standards are coming into play now. So instead of one system to rule them all, it's working towards interop. Which probably should have been the overall goal to begin with. People like to think of the NHS as a monolith, but it's really hundreds of tiny fiefdoms. ~~~ hahainternet Tiny fiefdoms all on 172.16 They could easily have picked ipv6 and done it the smart way. Oh how things could have been. ------ _pmf_ I vaguely remember reading uplifting, grandiose articles and presentations about domain driven design at the BBC; search for "BBC domain driven design". From this article, I cannot deduce whether this failed CMS is the same system that has been glorified in these presentations or something else; maybe someone can shed some light on this. ~~~ kryten It probably is. I've experienced the fact that DDD scales up only until the consultants have gone :) Same as NserviceBus only works until you've paid for the training. ------ squidi Previous discussion, including info from someone close to the project, here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5762116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5762116) ------ pero Related further reading for trainwreck geeks: EDS (now HP) infamously botched a 1-year ~50million-turned-4 year-multi- hundred million dollar CRM project for BskyB a decade ago, and eventually lost a years-long lawsuit. [http://www.linklaters.com/Publications/Publication1403Newsle...](http://www.linklaters.com/Publications/Publication1403Newsletter/20100317/Pages/BSkyBvEDSTimetoReassess.aspx) ------ DrinkWater I had the chance to see some of the work Adobe is planning to do with their CMS (some actual demos from the "Adobe Labs"), and i cant deny the resemblance to BBCs case. I am wondering whether Adobe was involved... ------ rplacd A side matter, but handing the BBC's governance over to Ofcom? They haven't held the Independent Television programme contractors to their remits since 2001 under the threat of any sanction - or, for that matter, put their contracts up to tender (not that it worked or ever will work if we want a One Nation Tory-style public broadcasting system again - and not that I remain suspicious of their inconsistent singling out of Thames Television) since 1993. The BBC Trust, at the very least, has an image to mantain. ~~~ arethuza I did a quick check to see how Wikipedia defined a "One Nation Tory" \- after all they have been pretty thin on the ground this last 30 years (especially here in Scotland!). I'm somewhat amused to see that "One nation conservatism" appears to now be the policy of the Labour Party: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One- nation_conservatism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-nation_conservatism) ------ JonnieCache Note that the content in this CMS is hours and hours of raw video footage rather than the usual snippets of text. ~~~ true_religion Duely noted, but I don't think it ought to make a difference in the price tag unless the CMS was doing conversion and distribution. ~~~ archivator IIRC, their CMS was supposed to be the Holy Grail of video management. Centralized and decentralized storage, processing farms, search-by-image, advanced tagging, etc. Sounded quite impressive but from what I understand, there are now commercial solutions that have some of those feature sets. The way they explain it, when they started no one had these features. ------ bifrost I'd say "well this is what happens when government runs something technical" but I also watched similar stuff happen at MSN when I was there. Not to say that the Beeb is like MSN, but I do know that there were a lot of dim bulbs to go around... ------ nslocum As a big fan of the Economist, I'm surprised they didn't catch the typo in the name of the project they're reporting on. "Digitial Media Initiative (DMI)" Especially since a rudimentary spell-checker would have caught it. ~~~ shitgoose I guess Economist's CMS is not as sophisticated, as one at BBC ------ justinph From what I understand (and I work in the public media sphere), this was a monster CMS project. A way to integrate audio, video, web content, reporters notes, etc. Is it any wonder a project like that failed? ------ podperson The only reason failed content management system isn't an oxymoron is that content management system is three words. ------ amalag In the US I think noone even blinks an eye at $150 million anymore ~~~ dopamean It's funny you mention that. My first thought was, "wow, that's a lot of money." But then I thought, "but how much is it really?" I actually have no idea how much it should cost for them to do what they were trying to do though I suspect it is probably a fraction of that $150MM. ~~~ mikeash For a more concrete perspective, if you assume that a good developer costs about $150,000/year, then this is one hundred years of development time for a team of 10 good developers, which is quite a lot. I don't know just what this thing was supposed to do, so I don't know what the scope is. ~~~ realtalker no one working for the BBC in the UK would make that sort of money as a developer ~~~ matthewmacleod I don't know about that. I've seen a few tech jobs around the £70-80k mark at the BBC, which is about $120k. Throw in the additional benefits and it's probably not far off. ~~~ IanCal Hah, I wish. I was a senior engineer there and earned less than half that. ------ kailuowang $150 million roughly equals to 1000 developer years. ------ jamespo When I was at BBC Online ~10 years back they wasted a couple of million on a content management system through a "leading" consultancy that never made it to production. ------ dmragone I'm surprised more public projects don't run as bounty-style "build x and get $1 million" type systems. Rather than picking who's going to do what (or worse, building all in-house), having many different small times competing for one pot seems like it might be a better way to get a good starting foundation. Or perhaps that's a crazy idea for something as big as this. ~~~ Finster That's spec work. ~~~ tomjen3 Yes, that seems quite obvious, which is why it puzzles me that you took the time to post it. ------ Aqueous Article doesn't actually tell us what it is, beyond a traditional CMS. ~~~ taylorbuley More important, _what is in it_. A large difficulty with content management systems are the data types; pairing down or normalizing metadata while trying to map old to new. ------ clientbiller They were trying to build netflix? ------ caycep Sounds like a typical hospital EMR/EPIC/Cerner/Meditech deployment! ------ ttrreeww Now they didn't. They "transfered" $152 million of public money into private hands. It's a success. Plus, they get to do it again.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Haste – Search the Web Faster (Mac App) - ononoma https://www.plastic-software.com/haste/ ====== nyantaro Hi, I'm a developer of Haste. There are two predefined Custom Searches to search within Hacker News on our Custom Search examples page: [https://www.plastic-software.com/haste/searches.html](https://www.plastic- software.com/haste/searches.html) (In the "Others" section) * Stories, by popularity * Stories, by Date It would be awesome if you would play with them and create your own. Thanks :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust - adamnemecek https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy ====== 5trokerac3 One suggestion: if you want the federated crowd to jump on board, then choose another font provider than Google, which uses their font links for tracking. ~~~ goodells Thanks for pointing this out. I guess this is something I had assumed Google does by serving the fonts for free, but I never really bothered to look into it. Going to remove all Google Fonts references from my projects now. ~~~ drivebycomment Google claims they don't track with fonts: [https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...](https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users) Whether you believe them or not is up to you of course. ~~~ sanbor Where does it claims that it does not track? From your link: Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure. Aggregate usage numbers track how popular font families are, and are published on our analytics page. We use data from Google’s web crawler to detect which websites use Google fonts. This data is published and accessible in the Google Fonts BigQuery database. To learn more about the information Google collects and how it is used and secured, see Google's Privacy Policy. ~~~ drivebycomment Just before the part you quoted has this: "Use of Google Fonts is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Google Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail." That's basically saying Font download is not being associated with any individual. And the part you quoted says they keep the aggregate stats, which is reasonable, especially given that the aggregated stats are available publicly. ~~~ sanbor Thanks for the clarification. However I'm not sure that means they don't track. They specify some of the things that they do with the data, but the last sentence "To learn more about the information Google collects and how it is used and secured, see Google's Privacy Policy" means that they could also use any piece of data to improve their products. ------ onlyrealcuzzo Serious question: from a user perspective, isn't spam going to be insanely bad in the Fediverse? How do you stop spam without a central authority? ~~~ kitotik Similar to an email service. You rely on the node operators to manage it. ~~~ theamk So delegate this all to a few large blacklists (spamhaus)? And block all residential users by default? ~~~ StudentStuff Generally not, proactive blocking or silencing is reserved for instances that host illicit content like child porn or hate speech. Inter-moderator communication happens between your instance admin/democracy (or whatever structure your instance uses) and other instances. Traditional tools like muting a user, silencing an instance (if they're spamming up the Federated Timeline on other instances, like Humblr.social does) and blocking (if the mods are total shit) can still be used. Small instances are the bulk of the content, so you aren't about to block them. Large instances like Mastodon.social are generally blocked tho (if your admin/democracy cares about a vibrant Fediverse). ~~~ pjc50 > Large instances like Mastodon.social are generally blocked tho (if your > admin/democracy cares about a vibrant Fediverse). Ah, so you achieve vibrancy by .. blocking a large number of the users? ~~~ MrEldritch Honestly, I think this is the wrong way of looking at things. The Fediverse isn't really like a single social network that's shattered amongst many instances ... it's more like a bunch of _individual, separate_ hangouts, in the vein of classic forums and IRC chatrooms and fandom websites, which have the ability to talk to each other and share stuff if they want. It's not so much about "blocking" mastodon.social as _not choosing_ to link up with it - because your instance is a specific community, and actual human social relations thrive when they can choose who they're hanging out with. So you choose to talk to other smaller, more diverse communities that you can actually _get to know_ a good chunk of the people in them, instead of just drinking straight from the firehose that is a big instance. Federating with another instance is basically two groups of people deciding to hang out together, effectively merging. Federating with mastodon.social means, effectively, merging your community with mastodon.social ... which means _submerging_ it beneath the mass of mastodon.social's much greater activity. A vibrant Mastodon isn't a more-obtuse recreation of the Twitter experience. Twitter is _already_ Twitter. It's about fostering all the things that Twitter _isn 't_ \- personal and Dunbar-scaled and locally moderated and _diverse_. ~~~ koheripbal I think it's sad that we cannot figure out a way to have LARGE federated communities that remain functional. ~~~ lasagnaphil I think this is inherently a sociological problem than a technological one. When there are enough people in an organically grown group, the community will become unsustainable and then 1) it disintegrates into multiple groups until it becomes stable again or 2) it transforms into a hierarchial, authoritative society where a small group of people makes most of the decisions. Also, I think Mastodon’s design deliberately steers instances away from becoming large ones; it rather tries to be a nurturer for various small communities and subcultures. It doesn’t view size as a good thing, and that’s totally okay. Nowadays, I think we need less monoculture and more diversity/creativity in our society. ------ ummonk Looks like it uses ActivityPub - [https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy/blob/master/docs/API.md](https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy/blob/master/docs/API.md) Nice. ------ Communitivity Mastodon has been responsible for helping drive a lot of growth in the federated app space. PeerTube for videos, and perhaps a dozen other services (see [https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/why-activitypub-is- the...](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/why-activitypub-is-the-future/) for some of them). I also recently found the early but promising Plume project for operating a federated blog ( [https://joinplu.me/](https://joinplu.me/) ). Icing on the cake? Quite a few of the federated projects are written in Rust. ~~~ 0xb100db1ade Federated blog? Is that any different from a regular website? ~~~ bisby I would assume it is just a regular website with some backend for federated discovery. I don't read many blogs but I would assume having tags or a "more like this" that search across the fediverse could be useful? Are those things that people have in blogs? ~~~ rakoo Also the whole commenting/liking thing ------ Deimorz It doesn't look like there's any federation right now, the test site ([https://dev.lemmy.ml/](https://dev.lemmy.ml/)) says "Federation into the ActivityPub network is on the roadmap." ~~~ thejohnconway Oh. Activity pub is complex and difficult to implement. The test suite is down. Leaving it to last makes me worry that it won’t happen. ~~~ muvek Check out [https://gitlab.com/mbajur/prismo/](https://gitlab.com/mbajur/prismo/). ~~~ vpzom also doesn't really federate ~~~ 0lpbm Follows work at least. Commenting directly on stories works, as far as I remember, but I think the main issue is that it doesn't properly create a list of inboxes that a comment is addressed to to push the messages to them. ------ olah_1 sharing some others in case it helps \- [https://github.com/mariusor/littr.go](https://github.com/mariusor/littr.go) \- [https://gitlab.com/tuxether/anancus](https://gitlab.com/tuxether/anancus) ~~~ mpnordland Another, decentralized, project [https://getaether.net/](https://getaether.net/) ~~~ rolleiflex Yup, creator of Aether here. Small difference, this is federated, Aether is decentralised. Far as I understand this is more like Mastodon where some people host servers that talk to each other. Aether is more like a decentralised Usenet, every user is a server. ~~~ muvek Can you explain the 6 month thing to me? If I understand correctly, posts/comments older than 6 months get deleted, unless you decide to save it locally? Even if someone saves a post older than 6 months locally, others cannot see it, right? That does not seem like a feature to me, and completely breaks geteather imo, sadly. Most of the good content on reddit is older than 6 months. Imagine if reddit decided to delete posts older than 6 months, jesus, every 6 months there would be a flood of the very same questions/posts/comments... ~~~ bovermyer It's in keeping with the project's philosophy of being ephemeral. There are other tools for recording information for posterity. ~~~ SmellyGeekBoy Excellent answer. ------ microcolonel The quality of this seems high, from the frontend on the dev instance. All actions are effectively instantaneous. Good work! ------ fsiefken Very nice! I am curious how this would compare to Discourse feature and usability wise. It would also nice to have a NNTP gateway to these webforums. VBulletin had one. ------ aerique So... Usenet? ------ muststopmyths off topic but ~20 years ago Lemmy was a beautiful,native vi clone for Windows. I wish the author had kept it going or made it open source. Vim has such an ugly GUI. ------ bartimus I think a project like Diaspora failed because they chose to write it in Ruby on Rails. Ruby is nice from a purist point of view. But you'd want to build something like this on top of a language which is popular, accessible, has a low learning curve and can be easily deployed anywhere. ------ cabalamat Nice project! (I'm also doing a Fediverse project -- MeowCat [https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2](https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2)) ~~~ muvek Do you have a public instance? Does it federate yet? ~~~ cabalamat No to either question yet. ------ nine_k Nice! What I haven't found in the docs is how federation would work. ~~~ smacktoward Via ActivityPub — see [https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy/blob/master/docs/API.md](https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy/blob/master/docs/API.md). For more general info on ActivityPub itself, see [https://activitypub.rocks](https://activitypub.rocks). ------ FraaJad Is there a rust implementation of mastodon? The dependencies for the current implementations are too brittle IMHO. ~~~ swills Perhaps rustodon: [https://github.com/rustodon/rustodon](https://github.com/rustodon/rustodon) ------ zmlzm Cool, written in actix! ~~~ twic Cool, or not cool, depending on whether you ever got over the unsafety scandal around Actix. ------ pojntfx Wow, this is awesome. ------ rum3 It works really well and looks great. Very nice work! ------ forgotmypw3 Your site is blank without JS... ------ mattchew Nice! I hope this gets traction. ------ sureaboutthis I don't understand what this is. At first, I thought it was a scraper for links which is the only reason I go to reddit at all. Such a thing would help stop me from getting sucked into the 80% of reddit which is nothing but a smelly pile of poo. So what does this do? ~~~ nicoburns This is a reimplementation of a reddit-like site. But open source, and with ambitions to work in a federated (as opposed to centralised) way. You could use this code to host your own Reddit (or you will be able to once they project is more developed). ------ s_y_n_t_a_x The code quality is amazing. Good job. ~~~ saberience On the contrary, I thought the code was terrible quality. If someone wrote this code at my company they would be fired, or more likely not hired in the first place. ~~~ nvssj What makes you say so? Can you give examples? ~~~ saberience Well, for a start... having a single file called "server.rs" which is 2256 lines long is already disqualifying. This file, code structure would be incredibly poor for developer efficiency. It just grows and grows and does all the things while having a vague sounding name like "server.rs" Why is server.rs doing "EditSite." What does the name EditSite mean anyway? Poor code reuse, same bits of code copy and pasted all over instead of being refactored out into their own methods. Methods which are doing too much different crap. The single responsibility principle is broken everywhere. Imagine trying to write unit tests for "Perform for EditPost", this method is doing far too much and would be a pain in the ass to fully test. If you're making a method called "EditPost" it should only be doing the actual post editing, not making connections, or user validation or checking for a ban. These should happen in a method which only handles connections, or a method which is called "ValidateUser" which is properly re-used. Generally speaking, the structure as a whole isn't very readable, poor names, methods and files which are doing too much. The project wouldn't scale well with a bigger team or if it grew in terms of codebase size. ~~~ A2017U1 What is the max lines in a single file for a developer "to get fired" at your company? ~~~ Zhyl The company has a shell script running in Cron. If it finds a source file with more than 1000 lines it deletes the author from the payroll. ~~~ fmoralesc No, it is written in APL for extra conciseness. When they wrote it in shell it deleted the authors from the payroll.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Intercooler.js v0.4.0 released – Declarative AJAX - carsongross http://localhost:4000/release/CHANGES-0.4.0.html ====== Pfiffer > [http://localhost:4000/](http://localhost:4000/) Might want to fix that. ~~~ carsongross Ha! Resubmitted...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: RedCall – call multiple people at once - RizkSaade http://www.redcallapp.com/ ====== RizkSaade __* Winner of the London Entrepreneurship Forum 2015 First Prize! __* redCall allows you to share moments by making a phone call to many people at once. You will hear from your friends, community and celebrities live and more personally than ever! Simply put: record a voice message and press send. Instantaneously, your audience phones would ring as if you are personally calling them. They would then pick up and listen to what you have to say. Whether you are redCalling your friends and family: "She said yes!" or you are receiving a redCall from your favourite singer releasing her latest hit, redCall is a great way to share the moment and be the first to know!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Anthony Thyssen's Homepage (1994) - adnanh https://antofthy.gitlab.io/ ====== AnonyMouse2020 What a blast from the past! Anthony was the head sysadmin during my undergrad (circa. the last update of this page) and this page was pretty famous. I was part of a research group and built a bit of a rapport with Anthony since I was bugging him to install/configure random things like Perl::FastCGI. On the odd chance you're reading this, Anthony, I'll never forget you granting my request of the now-defunct $firstname@cit.griffith email address when I joined "staff" as part of the research group. I doubt you would remember that, but I thought it was cool as fuck so thanks once more. ------ Yhippa > What I really am is a hacker (original meaning, not the cracker meaning of > the media) and as such, live on COKE and often work into the wee hours of > the mornings (or at least I used to). A sign which once appeared on my door > says "Real Programmers do their best work between 1 and 5 am", about which I > totally agree. Though my boss, and wife don't! That definitely resonates with me. I know why web pages have to be why the way they are today but I really miss fast-loading and information-dense pages like this these days. ------ waterside81 Countless imagemagick users are probably in debt to Anthony thanks to his imagemagick documentation & samples. [https://imagemagick.org/Usage/](https://imagemagick.org/Usage/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How time is a made-up mental construct - jonnytran http://plpatterns.com/post/1619025894/do-you-remember-the-time ====== julius_geezer Gosh, what a concept. Wonder if anybody's pondered this before...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
SQLite3 bindings for React Native - almost https://github.com/almost/react-native-sqlite ====== j_m_b Is there a database server which can sync with raw SQLite database files with some kind of smart load balancing?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MicroReact - ash https://github.com/witheve/Eve/tree/master/design#microreactts ====== ash MircoReact source code, just 343 lines of code: [https://github.com/witheve/Eve/blob/master/ui/src/microReact...](https://github.com/witheve/Eve/blob/master/ui/src/microReact.ts)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The homeless man who became a multi-millionaire investor - wslh http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38144980 ====== Neliquat Homeless, but already with a job in finance/trading. Not quite what people think of as homeless. Still a good story, but a bit forced.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mathematics teacher accused of inciting mass riots once again detained - mondoshawan https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/04/10/mathematics-teacher-accused-of-inciting-mass-riots-now-also-accused-of-supporting-terrorism-and-once-again-detained ====== mondoshawan Actual title is: Mathematics teacher accused of inciting mass riots now also accused of supporting terrorism and once again detained. Had to truncate it to fit HN's title limit. The math professor is Dmitry Bogatov, a Debian and Tor developer.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Samsung: Exynos 4 processors are vulnerable to serious attack - sixdimensional http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/smartphones/samsung-exynos-4-processors-are-vulnerable-to-serious-attack/6134?tag=nl.e019&s_cid=e019 ====== georgemcbay This was already discussed on HN in various threads, eg: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931944> Also the headline is misleading, suggesting the processor has a hardware security flaw when it is really an OS file permission problem in the Android distribution that devices using this chip run.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Learn Perl - AbyCodes http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2011/09/how-to-learn-perl.html ====== gatlin I use Perl almost exclusively. CPAN is my one word argument. Aside from that, though, Perl can become whatever you make it. Want Ruby-like method calls on literals? Use autobox. Want list comprehensions? Map/grep. Want to rip apart language built-ins at runtime, tie data sources to filehandles, or just use it for one-liner awk replacement? Done. Python and Ruby are sexy but they both feel like subsets of Perl to me. ------ vtail An honest question: are there any reasons to learn Perl these days (as opposed to Ruby/Python/name your favorite scripting language)? Some people need to maintain existing Perl codebases for sure, but they should know Perl already? ~~~ jbert It's an interesting question. I would hazard a guess (with nothing really to back me up other than a quick google search and my memory of the data I have seen presented on this subject in the past) that perl has a slight performance edge (cpu and memory) over python and more so over ruby. That isn't a great argument though, since they are all in roughly the same performance class. I think the main difference between those three languages is cultural, rather than technical. So to answer your question I guess I'd say: "Because you find the perl culture and community (and it's technical mores - such as it's approach to testing, documentation) more to your taste than the other languages". Basically if you prefer "TIMTOWTDI" to "pythonic". But practically speaking, given the similarity between them, I'd guess you're likely to stick with the first of those you learn thoroughly, unless you change job or are swayed by "Perl is dead!/Perl is ugly!", "Ruby is slow!/Monkey patching is evil!" or "Whitespace-sensitivity is bad!/Broken lexical scoping is broken!" or whatever other clarion call washes through various blogs. Personally, I really like the partial static checking perl does with strict mode on and I feel a little horrified that python doesn't provide that safety net (I don't know if Ruby does). ~~~ danssig I'm not sure there's even a slight edge in performance these days and even if there were, you have more options with Ruby/Python (e.g. IronRuby/IronPython for the JVM, etc.). ~~~ jbert One data pt - micro benchmark on the default versions of perl/python/ruby on ubuntu 11.04. Sum the numbers up to 10,000,000 using a straight while loop. Run several times on idle system, took representative value. Runtime includes startup time. I _know_ this is a dumb benchmark, but I think it backs up my general pt about performance above. (JVM/CLR implementations are interesting - are they widely used?) python2.7.1: 2.0s perl5.10.1: 1.3s ruby1.8.7: 4.3s python code below (perl+ruby are direct transliterations. Yes, there may be a more idiomatic way to write it in all languages, I'm trying to do a very simple apples-to-apples comparison of each languages dominant production VM implementation): total = 0 i = 10000000 while (i > 0): total += i i -= 1 print "total is ", total ~~~ danssig I meant to say "in _general_ performance", i.e. of a complete application. Micro benchmarks mean less than nothing in that case. Python is obviously plenty fast: Blender (3D modeling application) is written in it. There is also Twisted and all that other stuff. >are they widely used? My impression is that they are. The JVM is everywhere these days. ~~~ jbert > I meant to say "in general performance", i.e. of a complete application. > Micro benchmarks mean less than nothing in that case. Could you give me some info on why you think there isn't a performance edge "these days"? Or are you making the point that all these languages are "fast enough" and so a perf difference between them isn't important for real-world use? > Blender (3D modeling application) is written in it. I'm surprised that the performance-critical parts are in python. Do you know if the rendering etc is in python or is it at python UI on a C core? ~~~ danssig >Or are you making the point that all these languages are "fast enough" and so a perf difference between them isn't important for real-world use? I'm saying perl might be faster at some loop that adds 1s together, but ruby might be faster at networking and python might be faster at method calls, etc. When you weight it all together it equals out. In other words, if you wrote a big enterprise trading application in all 3 languages (i.e. write it 3 times with the best practices of each language) and then only looked at charts showing various performance benchmarking results of the application I think you'd find all 3 very close in performance. >Do you know if the rendering etc is in python or is it at python UI on a C core? I thought it was last time I looked but I'm not certain.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Net.wars (1997) - dedalus https://nyupress.org/netwars/contents/contents.html ====== tjr225 The thing that strikes me the most about the writings here is that even at their most snarky they are not cruel or unkind... I'm not totally free of guilt in this respect but I wish we could find some way to not default to "vitriol" in our internet communications. ~~~ dddw this is probably the first step ------ swinnipeg Seeing the 1997 in the link made visiting so tempting as I knew there would be a fast easy to navigate design. Of course it also has the nostalgic appeal.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The joke may be on Zuckerberg - eplanit http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/17/opinion/rushkoff-facebook-app/ ====== cbhl "Unlike computer chips, human beings can only process one thing at a time." Many computer chips can also only process one thing at a time; they just do so fast enough that it is nearly imperceptible to the human operator. I feel like this particular remark takes away from the author's "authority" to talk about technology as a media theorist, as it illustrates a superficial-at- best understanding of technology.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Graceful exit for employees of failed startup - vaibhav228 I am working on simple app to create employee profile board of shutting down startups, so their founders can share that board with network, VC to help employee get job at other startups.<p>Recruiters from other companies can also find people with immediate need of job which fits jobs openings.<p>Is is something startups can use? ====== mstaoru It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea, and I would be happy if it actually works out! However, I must admit that HR portals are rabbit holes that looks good on paper, but then fall into one of two problems: chicken and egg, or garbage data. You need to have very clear strategy of how both sides of the job market are encouraged to adopt a new "empty" platform, while making sure that job listings are actually clean, truthful, and relevant. Are you saying that founders will input the resumes? It sounds like a lot of work, and not something I'd expect a person with a failing project on hand be able to do. ~~~ vaibhav228 Thanks for your input. I completely agree that both sides have to be reached in a proper way. In MVP, I was thinking someone, may be a founder or person who can help, will fill simple details. Later stage, they can send invitation links to employees to fill in the details. ------ was_boring I know this already happens informally, so there is probably a niche there. ~~~ vaibhav228 ohh, that's nice. What is the informal process?Is it the same? Probably there is niche, but m not able to validate this idea. ~~~ was_boring Generally it's a personal connection. Someone will here a startup went out of business and they know they were good at there jobs and get reached out to. Sometimes the entire team gets hired all at once.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Second Life affair leads to real life divorce - razorburn http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/13/second-life-divorce ====== ksvs "He set himself up in a winter chalet with a Cobra helicopter gunship parked next to it." ------ ram1024 i'm so confused after reading that. i don't even take my real life as seriously as they take their virtual lives... ~~~ davidw It almost seems like a publicity stunt to get people interested... sex, betrayal, prostitutes... ~~~ unalone Have you ever heard of the EVE assassination? Gamers on EVE infiltrated a huge organization, rose to positions of power, then killed the CEO, destroyed her preserved body, and removed billions of credits in-game. The out-of-game cost was something like $16,500 according to inside traders, and the assassination took those players a _year_ to set up perfectly. Of course, EVE was flooded with new users after this. PC Gamer article about it here: <http://eve.klaki.net/heist/> The online world is fascinating. You can do so much nowadays. ------ 13ren I don't see how this is hacker news. flagged.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Tips for Speed Networking? - proexploit I'm going to be attending my first "speed networking" event tomorrow. I've done some research on tips but most of it seems generic and not a lot of help. Does anyone who's attended this or any networking event in the past have tips on what specifically local business owners may want to hear about website creation? ====== jeffepp I would find some stats about how people now use Google opposed to the phone book, a little about SEO and bring some screen shots. I assume they are at least open to the idea so it should not be a hard sell.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Let's All Shed Tears For The Crappy Startups That Can't Raise Any More Money - neya http://readwrite.com/2012/12/03/lets-all-shed-tears-for-the-crappy-startups-that-cant-raise-any-more-money ====== potatolicious Seems like a touch _too much_ schadenfreude. I've seen some genuinely awful ideas in startupland, but one has to remember that predicting success is _really hard_ , especially the _big_ types of success like Facebook or Google. Google itself started as a product with no revenue stream, only a highly ephemeral "well we could sell ads?" one that _almost didn't pan out_. Facebook in its early form seemed like a website for Ivy Leaguers to fawn over each other. Both were companies created by green entrepreneurs who also similarly had little to no job experience, nor business leadership experience. The last page has yet to be written on either of those companies, but I don't think it's a stretch to say they've been two of the greater successes to come out of the "startup system". So sure, we can celebrate the fact that "we're like Groupon, except we sell trips to space!" (seriously, a founder tried to recruit me for this) isn't getting any more funding. But how many Facebooks and Googles are we going to miss out on also? And this won't be the end of the "startup crowd" - the sycophantic faux- journalists, the startup-groupies that don't ever seem to be building anything but are always present at meetups and parties, the guy at the event whose description of his company is consisted of 100% buzzword... those guys will remain. This isn't a return to sanity, it's just a plain old slowdown. ~~~ rexreed Selecting the outliers as exemplars of what is typical doesn't make much sense. What about the 100,000+ non-Googles and non-Facebooks that very much fit into what the author is stating here? Poor businesses funded by poor investors supported by a poor media is the problem here and all that the "Series A Crunch" will do is "expose those who were swimming naked" as so eloquently stated by Warren Buffet [1]. Companies with good business models or great technology or great ability to persevere or the ability to iterate will always survive. The point of this article is that the clock has already run out for the ones that don't. [1] [http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/warrenbuff383933....](http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/warrenbuff383933.html) ~~~ potatolicious The entirety of the startup "industry" is about exemplars and outliers. If we went by the typical outcome of a startup (or any new business, tech or otherwise) we'd never start anything. Everyone is in it to try and become an outlier. The theory is that we would be willing to invest in 1000 non-Googles and non- Facebooks if it means we can have a shot at having a single Google or Facebook. The "crunch", as it were, seems to be arising from the fact that there seem to be a lot _more_ than 1000 non-Googles for every Google, and even the successful don't seem to be _as_ successful as tech companies in previous generations - which leads to an adjustment in the ratio of failures/successes that you're willing to accept. That in and of itself is unsurprising, but the natural concern is whether or not we've figured out, even roughly, what predicts success, and if the "crunch" correctly targets clearly bullshit companies, or if it's a general contraction that will eliminate good companies as well as bad. I don't think anyone is lamenting the loss of bullshit businesses with no plan. The more concerning question is: are we any better at determining future success, on day 1, than we used to be? ------ tptacek This piece is unbelievably lazy. It is the easiest thing in the world to have written --- Lyons is, what, the 93rd person to hop on board this trend story? --- and yet the analysis in it crumbles to dust and floats away the moment you try to pick it up to look at it more closely. Go to medical school? Make real tech products? Don't build apps in a weekend? Avoid bus rides with Scoble? Not one person in the universe is going to make a better business decision for having read this article. All it's does is confirm a trend story, snarkily. Congratulations, Dan Lyons, you made the train before it left the station. Can we get on with our lives now? ~~~ lmm There is value in a succinct, eloquent expression of what many people are saying. If nothing else this gives me a single page to point to in six months' time that captures the attitude we had now. ------ btilly If we're going to make it look like a train wreck, let's not forget that even the fabled YCombinator is cutting back. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4861867> for verification. Meanwhile, back in the real world, history is full of examples showing that one of the best ways to come up with great ideas is to try a lot of different ideas out. This process sucks for all of the people who had hope and will lose their businesses. But in the long run it is better for all of us that they exist. Sure, historically Silicon Valley has created 10 great companies per year. And many more successful but not widely known real ones. With the frothiness we might get 10 still. But hopefully they are better great companies. With all of the information being shared on how to be an entrepreneur, maybe we'll get half again as many moderate successes. (And the moderate successes are better off without venture capital. Really.) And established companies will get more entrepreneurial employees. Believe it or not, this is actually a good outcome. It means more startups. More dashed hopes. And on the whole a better economic outcome. ------ wheaties This is great. When I was once looking to join a start-up I met with people who wanted to build a "social fitness food" website, a "social ebay where people shared the things they bid on," a ton of "new way to share music," a social "t-shirt based on Twitter" business, a ton of "new way to share images," a "music video" business, a "new way of producing music in the music" business, etc... I met a few companies solving real problems. I joined one. Never looked back. Real problem, real solution, real money being paid for it. ~~~ joshbert I think that's pretty much the gist of it. Only solving real problems can bring in real revenue. ------ ryanisinallofus I really don't understand the hate with which Dan Lyons is speaking. Startups are crazy, sometimes hugely profitable companies that sometimes start up with the same money it takes to start a restaurant or less. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, sometimes they are a complete joke. It's intense and awesome and that's why we are all drawn to it: huge potential. VCs are a part of it and without them this market wouldn't exist. Not every startup needs VC money but some do and all the investment they have poured into the economy has had a positive impact. Again, I don't get the hate. Dan Lyons's article is completely absurd (maybe that was the point) but I see no reason to help him or anyone else by posting this ridiculous ant-startup link bait. They all the say the same thing in different ways and they all have this weird, bitter, almost-jealous resentment to them. I don't know if journalists are mad because they don't get into startups themselves, only cover them. Or because journalism has been fairly marginalized (sad but true) and is undergoing some major transitions... I don't know. ~~~ untog _I don't know if journalists are mad because they don't get into startups themselves, only cover them. Or because journalism has been fairly marginalized (sad but true) and is undergoing some major transitions... I don't know._ Not to defend the article (which I agree a little _too_ snarky, but will get pageviews) but I imagine that working as a journalist covering startups is a thoroughly depressing existence. If it's anything like my (non-journalistic) interactions with the industry then every interesting, earnest startup founder you meet will be matched by five other over-confident blowhards selling bad ideas with bad polish on top. I know that I would never have the patience to actually _interview_ people like that, so sometimes I give credit to tech journalists just for not spontaneous combusting at conferences. ~~~ DannyBee I can't upvote this comment enough. Your explanation reminds me of why people hate lawyers so much. For every 1 good lawyer I meet, I meet 5 truly horrible ones. The same is true of startup founders i've met. The responses you usually see to pointing out someone's idea is horrible is "well, it's hard to predict what ideas will be big, so you don't really know it's horrible. You may be wrong". Given _most_ ideas are horrible, and most startups fail, the onus is on the guy telling you how "rottenfood.com: Rotten food shipped same-day to your door!" will be the next big thing to provide evidence his idea is not horrible. Usually this "evidence" is in the form of talking points: "Rotten Food is a 500 million dollar industry just ripe for disruption". Then when it fails "the idea was good, but the time wasn't right, but it was a valuable learning experience". No! The idea was not good. It was horrible. The fact that you think otherwise tells me it was _not_ a valuable learning experience, because you didn't learn the most important thing. I can't even write up this comment without it turning into all snark, so i'm just going to leave it to the tech journalists :) ------ bksenior This is the journalism equivalent of the problem he is espousing. An article about nothing, a writer with a self-entitled attitude shamelessly riding something topical. No thanks. I will add that starting anything is difficult and companies like a food delivery service for dogs can easily pivot into an efficient way to get senior citizens their medication, cheaper faster and more efficiently. Many things start small, uninformed and experimentally. ~~~ Apocryphon I find it to be a good riposte to this fluffy NYT article: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/fashion/saying-no-to- colle...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/fashion/saying-no-to- college.html?hp&_r=1&pagewanted=all&); "Saying No to College" ------ bdcravens I think people are missing the biggest takeaway: everyone wants to get rich writing Rails apps in a weekend that really don't contribute, that our brightest minds are being wasted. Rather than creating things that are truly innovative, we're barely iterating on things that were barely iterations to being with. ~~~ tptacek The world is full of weekend-hard Rails apps that can both contribute and make loads of money. The problem has nothing at all to do with engineering, and everything to do with echo-chamber marketing. The apps don't need to be harder to write; they just need to solve problems for nurses or attorneys or auto mechanics instead of early-adopter tech consumers and advertisers. David Heinemeier Hansson put this as succinctly as anyone in the world could, and at YC startup school! - "build something useful and charge money for it; it's not rocket surgery." But despite that advice instantly getting pegged to the top of HN, a huge number of would-be entrepreneurs have ignored it for years. Dan Lyons has correctly spotted the symptoms but wildly missed the mark on the diagnosis. ~~~ peacemaker While I agree with the quote "build something useful and charge money for it; it's not rocket surgery." I think it over simplifies things. What exactly is "useful" anyway? How do I find a useful idea? Who do I charge for it? How much should I charge? I think the real trick is finding that idea. ~~~ tptacek A good way to find out if an idea is useful is to charge money for it. People come up with elaborate schemes to avoid doing that because asking for money and being turned down is a form of rejection, and rejection stings. I'll tell you from 15 years in startups, including long stints in companies I didn't run that weren't even part of my identity with customer prospects I didn't even care about: rejection always stings, will probably always sting, and you will subconsciously (to your great detriment) always avoid situations with potential reject even though you know you need to not do that. The result is a system that converges on stories that can pick up 6-18 months of funding runway without ever demonstrating value from real customers. There are businesses that need to boot up without asking for money from customers, but they're not common, and when you find one, it will be very clear why you'd defer revenue, and the answer won't have anything to do with monetizing eyeballs. ------ swalsh Was the article crude, and maybe more harsh then is needed? of course. Still, the general point is correct. The thing that is great about start-ups is the ability to solve real problems using innovative approaches. Large companies have processes in place to stay steady, to minimize risk. Start-ups thrive on risk. The problem though, is the glamour of the concept has made people more excited about the status of the start-up... and not the problem the start-up is solving. In fact the "problem" has almost been ignored. Look at PG's essay from a few weeks ago. The concept of using a start-up to solve A REAL PROBLEM was revolutionary to some, and debatable to others. Think about that for a moment. Looking for real problems to build a start-up around was revolutionary, and debatable. To me that says a lot. So my question... can anyone name one great entrepreneur who did it for their love of doing a start-up, and not for the passion of "The problem"? ~~~ tptacek The "general point" that is "correct" in this article is someone everyone commenting on this thread already knew; it's a point almost every credible technology has been making for years. A well-known Google engineer made news simply by moving from "cat picture" projects to "meaningful" projects. Anybody in the world could have made that "correct" point. The problem is that the specific points Lyons builds on "don't sell cat pictures" are either useless, false, or both. Getting a real job and learning engineering aren't a solution to the problem of selling cat pictures. When you take someone whose first instinct is to build a cat picture app and train him on type theory, the CAP theorem, quorum commits, compiler backends, and linear algebra, guess what you get? Thermonuclear cat pictures. In the end, the only actionable advice Lyons has that you should consider taking is "avoid long bus rides with Scoble". To answer your question: which person at 37signals do you think built Basecamp for the love of project management? And how many entrepreneurs can we name who are passionate about dumb problems? ------ bovik "Ok, may I humbly ask..." "with great respect, may I ask you.." "With all due respect PG..." "While I don't want to second-guess your judgement..." And these are the comments _disagreeing_ with pg ! Wow. Either internet ain't what it used to be or there's a lot of hero worship going on here. Come on my fearless conquerors of the Internet. Stand up for yourselves. Show some spine. You're not going to create the next billion dollar business with that sort of genuflecting attitude. ------ jacoblyles The bombastic tone of this article obscures some nuggets of truth. The most promising startup founders I know have 5-10 years of experience in an industry, enough to have some domain expertise and insight into the needs of that industry. This contrasts with people who move here to "do a startup" - largely producing clones of the latest consumer success story (in my time in the valley, the cycle of clones has been Foursquare, Groupon, Zynga, and Instagram, respectively). I was in that second group when I moved here, embarrassingly working on a SoLoMo consumer app in an industry where I had zero competitive advantage. (SoLoMoPho = social local mobile photo) A little shakeout is a good thing. It will free up talent and make the valley feel less trivial. ~~~ antr I personally think you hit the nail on the head when you say _" The most promising startup founders I know have 5-10 years of experience in an industry"_. Yes, there are exceptions, like any other thing in life, but experience in a sector is underrated by many of the recent graduates I meet who want to start a company. The problem I think is that youngsters only read TechCrunch and other similar blogs, which to me is like Warren Buffet trying to read insurance/risk management news on Seventeen magazine - flashy headlines with irrelevant information, in a world fuelled by cotton candy and hairstyles. ------ pg I'm going to kill this article as a dupe. It's just other articles rewritten in more colorful language. But it's giving this thing too much credit even to call it a dupe, because in the process of making the language more colorful, he's now describing something that is definitely not the case. The other articles are talking about a trend that's happening as slowly as global warming. No door has suddenly crashed down, cutting off series As. It's just gradually getting harder to raise later rounds. But the tightening up is so slow that even I, who am arguably among the best positioned to see it of anyone, can barely notice it. Which means for sure Dan Lyons has no evidence of it himself. ~~~ ryanx435 note: typing on a smart.phone sucks balls. ha ha! I knew you would have commented on this article and tried to debase it even before I opened the comment section! it seems to me that the entire business of YC relies on there being a market for the exact type of start ups that this article describes as a waste of human talent. It is in your (pg's) best interest to kill this article because if there is a bubble, and it pops, YC will be a major loser. Your credibility would be destroyed because YC would be seen as a primary finder of companies.that.have no long term.value. . YC needs a liquid market of shitty start ups to get vc funding in order to function. I'm sure you are aware that even the tinyest hint of.trouble.can pop bubbles, which is.why you purged this.article. I laughed at your decision to kill the article for a couple of reasons. first, this means that you are aware of the bubble and also aware that in order to prevent new companies from being discouraged from applying to YC you need a zero tolerance policy on even the hint of it showing its ugly head. by banning this article you have confirmed to me that there is a bubble and it is about ready to pop. second, this says a lot about your character and your priorities as a person. you are ok with draconian anti free flow of information banning if an idea goes against your personal interests. for.someone who funds tech start ups, you seem.to.have forgotten.how.the internet works. the Truth will get out. supposedly the voting system.of.hackernews should have prevented a false idea from.getting.to.the front page. if this idea was truly as false as you say it is in your reasons to ban it, it never would have been upvoted. and yet you had to ban it. third, this means that you truly don't give a shit about the.companies or the people that you fund. you know that it the.bubble.is.close.to.popping and.that.it may not be in their best long term interests to apply to YC, but you want their talent anyways so you can profit, so you continue.to cultivate the idea that their stupid business idea is not a problem as.long.as.they pivot.enough.times to.find a similiar, slightly less stupid idea to try to sell to Google or.whoever. I've been thinking about it for a while, but your response to this.article has confirmed.to.me that I will.never apply to YC. You are not a person who I would want to take advice.from, let alone have any say over.my.life. or how I run my business. I wish you luck, though, and I hope.you can continue to find enough chumps.to.apply to.YC so you can continue.to.fund hackernews.and I can read interesting articles.for.free... so thanks.for.that, anyways. edit: I know you (pg) won't respond, and I know you will probably shadow ban my account, and I know this comment will be downvoted into oblivion. I also know that you, pg, will read.it and know that I see through your bullshit. and if I can see it, so can others. ~~~ pg When formulating this elaborate theory, did you stop to ask yourself why it would be in our interest to fund shitty startups when all the returns are concentrated in the most successful ones? ~~~ bovik If you're actually willing to engage in this discussion, then here's your answer. YC and (other "incubators" like it) are basically opportunistically exploiting cheap/free labor of thousands of naive (mostly) young developers to play the lotto on the cheap. You throw in a laughably small amount of money for a good chunk of equity, encourage your young charges to go forth on a steady diet of ramen noodles and ketchup -- burning through 100 hour weeks to experiment with 100's of different(mostly bullshit) trendy catchwords of the day.You only need to get lucky to be able to flip a few of these companies to the next level of VC's or acquirers to make back your money multiple times over. Rest of the blood, sweat, lost sleep and trashed health of the thousand of other fools that failed is no sweat off your back. Care to publish aggregate statistics on the percentage of yc backed startups became profitable businesses compared to rest of the industry? EDIT: Apparently I was mistaken. He's not actually looking to engage in a real discussion of yc's business model. ~~~ pg When you talk about flipping a company to VCs, it tells me you know nothing about this business. VCs don't acquire the stock of earlier investors; they just come in later and dilute you. But for the sake of completeness I'll address your point about acquirers. Stock in a company like Dropbox or Airbnb is worth literally a thousand times more than stock in a company that gets acquired early. If there is one type of company that generates 1000x higher returns than another, why would we spend our time focusing on the latter? ~~~ bovik PG, I'm glad to see you're at least willing to engage in the discussion. The main point was not what end-point you're aiming (large exits, which btw, are yet to be realized for either airbnb or dropbox) or merely progressively higher valuations in further rounds of funding (let's not argue over how those are beneficial to earlier investors, shall we.) The point was that hordes of fresh graduates are working their asses off for peanuts with minuscule probability of making up for lost time and income. (That's not even including possible losses to health and any conception of what the real world looks like). Mass incubators like yc and it's ilk are rolling the dice and the invested amounts are so tiny that the only substantial losses are those incurred by the founders. The counter-argument of course is that the founders are adults and are entering into these agreements of their own volition. That's where the whole issue of cult-like mentality and the callow youth of most of these founders comes into play. The asymmetry in knowledge and power between these founders and investors is vast. That's why I cheer the writer of the original post for bringing the ridiculousness of the whole situation into the open. Lord knows techcrunch and other tabloids like it are not going to publish anything like that. And that's why you personally applying the kill switch on that post is so distasteful. ~~~ zaidf What are the so-called "substantial losses" that you are talking about? May be you have some insider info that I don't but in my intimate conversations with dozens of fellow YC founders, I haven't run into anyone who wished they didn't do YC. I don't think you are being evil here but rather just have a belief that isn't based in reality. Same thing for suggesting YC is all about freshly minted grads. A significant percentage of founders are in their late 20s and older making that assumption of yours inaccurate. Frankly your post is offensive for painting founders as brainwashed dudes making terrible life decisions as they go about joining this imaginary cult. Do you really believe this? ------ mburshteyn So can we expect lower rents in SF and less congestion on the 101/280? The last stat I saw indicated that Northern California's unemployment rate is shrinking fast; it doesn't seem like this is the same situation we saw back in the dot.com bubble from that perspective. Or is it? Can somebody explain the discrepancy? ~~~ trotsky i have no idea if anything resembling the last crash is going on (it doesn't look like it to me, last time it was really obvious) but if you're looking for leading indicators i would suggest commercial occupancy rates and not employment. that is what dropped sharply first in sf a decade or so ago. ------ jonny_eh Sure, Silicon Valley might produce only 10 great companies a year, but where I'm from (Ottawa, Canada), we'd produce only 1 great company every 10 years. (I'm referring to tech companies) ~~~ ytadesse You got my up vote just for being from Ottawa. ------ realrocker Maybe if the focus shifted to low cost-low yield start-ups we would see more successes. We don't have to all create Taj-Mahal's you know,a few ant-hills will do it too. ------ jameszol I don't understand this ranty article... Aren't startups called startups for a reason? Some aren't going to thrive, some really suck, others can't pivot their talent and drive toward something grandiose and earth shattering for their next round of investment but all should be better because of the experience, investors and entrepreneurs alike. The failure rate of startups has always been high, especially over time, right? "There are also different definitions of failure. If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing all their money, an estimated 30% to 40% of high potential U.S. start-ups fail, he says. If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghosh's research." via Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044372020457800...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443720204578004980476429190.html) ------ hack_edu Has this post been moderated away? I'm not seeing it anywhere, even 5+ pages deep. If so... is that really necessary; is someone threatened or offended? This is a real article with just as valuable a point as all the self-posted 300-word blogspam that occupies the front page daily. ------ trotsky How do you report on business for a decade and yet hold such a visceral and character flaw type thesis about behavior that's nothing more than the intended, text-book result of specific monetary policy decisions? ~~~ tptacek What's the monetary policy that's influencing startups? ~~~ astine He's referencing the Austrian Business Cycle theory: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory> The argument is that inflationary spending is what causes the boom bust cycle. Inflation creates an initial perspective of prosperity and causes an increase and shift in investment from capital goods to consumer goods. This leads to a self reinforcing bubble which eventually drains the economy and leads to a bust. Trotsky is effectively saying that the bubble was due to interest rates and Dan Lyons is wrong to attribute it primarily to a character flaw of the persons involved. I don't wholly agree with that, but I think the ABCT does have merit. ~~~ trotsky Note that while it's understandable to think that this is an austrian theory given all of the argument on the internet about whether or not it's a good idea, the idea that easy credit drives business expansion is absolutely agreed upon by both schools and pretty much every working economist. You can think of it a bit like amphetamines. No doctor would disagree with the idea that amphetamines produce energy in the patient. The debate would only center around how productive or destructive that energy is. ------ bovik I have no doubt that pg doesn't like the article Here's a quote "...smart young people have been conned into thinking that starting a company is akin to buying a lottery ticket or rolling dice at Las Vegas -- the odds are long but you never know, you might get lucky and strike it rich. So make something up, throw it out there, and see what hapens." That's describing 99% of bullshit yc stratups. The 1% (or less) which succeed would have done so with or without yc. And they mostly actually involve real business models of charging for a product/service. ------ bjhoops1 One of the things I love about HN is that a scathing article criticizing startups and tech entrepreneurs can make the front page. ~~~ vyrotek Until PG kills it ------ equalarrow I can't help but think about Peter Thiel encouraging people to drop out and start companies. But then I saw that it was Dan Lyons that wrote it. Two people's opinions, in my mind, not to heed.. So, somewhere in the middle should be about right. ------ drupeek I wish I could upvote this post a dozen times. ------ lifeguard They may be crappy, but likely they would have been customers of several quality startups as well. ------ carsongross Goood, gooood. Let the hate flow through you! (I'm an business/enterprise kinda guy, and it's been an ugly decade.) ------ vergilis This article was designed simply to inflame Rush Limbaugh style ------ wahdeh What if I told you there was no Series A funding: <http://bit.ly/QCZCoD> ------ indiecore I've been thinking we're on the cusp of what I'm just going to call "Web 3.0" even though that term looks stupid to me _now_ so I apologize to me browsing my history in a couple of months (sorry). The big social media darlings _have_ gone bust and the cycle looks a lot like (but obviously not as bad as) the web 1.0 crash. People look up, realize that they're doing some really silly shit and then work on "serious" enterprise stuff for awhile as the market sorts itself out and as the market is sorting itself something weird and new bubbles up on the consumer side, last cycle it was social connections, cycle before it was the existence of the consumer itself. I personally think it's going to come with google glass-likes and powerful mobile computers(read: phones) and have to do with blurring the lines between the internet and real life but that's just a guess.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
8chan: Ex-users of far-right site flock to new homes across internet - frereubu https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/08/8chan-shutdown-users-social-media ====== salawat It is rather disingenuous to label 8chan as a "Far-right" website. It's a glorified bulletin board; and is in that sense an ideologically neutral tool. Leftypol/far-left is just as present as the notorious far-right the media has been harping on in the past couple weeks. Frankly, I'm saddened that everyone seems to want to focus on the tool instead of the people once again. It's an infuriating tendency that more than anything I'd like to see stop. If we demonized every tool that can be used to cause mischief, we wouldn't have any able to be freely owned. ~~~ krapp No one is focusing exclusively on the tool here except for you. When someone refers to 8chan as "far-right", they are not characterizing the software itself as having a far-right ideology, as opposed to the people using it, and the characterization remains correct in the general sense, even if not every member and not every board fits the description. Colloquial language is not required to have the precision of a legal document. And the existence of far-left boards has no bearing on arguments regarding the nature of /pol/ or its effects. Claiming that 8chan is ideologically neutral simply because software cannot possess an ideology is a disingenuous argument to make, as the site's deplatforming was not focused on the software per se, but the userbase of /pol./ ------ Fjolsvith 8chan will be back, and it will be hardened against DDOS and not reliant on SV good will.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Venice Organizes Online Vote to Become Independent From Italy - agopaul http://mashable.com/2014/03/17/venice-independence-referendum/ ====== eibrahim That's crazy talk!!!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word - ben-morris https://www.simuldocs.com/blog/ben-morris/version-control-for-microsoft-word ====== runako Congratulations on your launch! Other folks have provided a bunch of commentary on the validity of your idea, so I won't address that. BUT: if this is a good idea, your pricing is far too low for a niche product like this. $10 (or 10 quid) is too low a monthly fee for pretty much any product marketed as a business product. 10 per seat per month is probably also too low, but would be a better starting point. Likely objection: "But Spotify is only $10/mo!!!" Spotify has the much larger addressable market of people with hearing and an Internet connection. Even Dropbox has a higher price point for business users, and it also has a far larger addressable market. If you're building something that's useful for people, charge more. Good luck! ~~~ rockmeamedee Plugging these patio11 posts because a)they might be helpful if OP hasn't read them and b)even if OP has, somebody else here might not and they're pretty much evergreen: The Black Art of SaaS Pricing: [https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pricing) Doubling Saas Revenue by Changing the Pricing Model: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas- revenue/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/) Selling To The Fortune 500, Government, And Other Lovecraftian Horrors: [https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales) Patrick's default pricing model: [https://twitter.com/patio11/status/479095257284345857](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/479095257284345857) ~~~ Beltiras Just to echo Patrick's default pricing model. If it's too cheap (and you currently are), I would not trust the developer having resources to make the product stable enough for me to trust it with my data. Also, it costs money to go through certification (without which you will not penetrate the market where this pain point is clearest). ------ bambax Many others have said it already, but I'll say it again: 1\. You have a fantastic product 2\. Many potential users won't accept to have their documents stored "in the cloud" (even though those same users share those same documents by email with zero security, all the time) 3\. Offer a stand alone version and sell a licence (or a rent, think the former Google Search Appliance) 4\. Charge an arm and a leg for it -- think Oracle pricing 5\. Get rich! ~~~ flamtap Agreed on all points. This has law firms written all over it. ~~~ kobeya Law firms that will happily pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat. OP, you're selling yourself short. ------ tmaly If you had a version that companies could install on a private internal network, you could easily charge between $100 and $1000 a month for this. I work in legal and compliance technology, and it is very important to keep documents secured internally if the have confidential information. ~~~ wraithm112 Legal/compliance work is probably where this sort of service would be most useful. ~~~ brockvond 1000% agree. ------ emodendroket Cool! Here's my unsolicited opinion: you preemptively answer "why wouldn't I just use git?" but I think "why is this better than track changes?" is the question prospective users are more likely to have. Comparisons to SharePoint versioning might also be helpful. ~~~ jessaustin I hope OP helps lots of people, because if they've been so abused by their computers as to think "Track Changes" is anything other than a torture device, they really need help. ~~~ emodendroket It'd probably work better if more people used the "accept/reject" functionality. But yeah it can be awful. ------ Beltiras This fills a niche I need but I can't use a service where I upload the documents to your server (unless you can show certification of at least ISO 27001). I would also be willing to pay more for it. Version controlling Word documents is a need for anyone doing a lot of QC. You have a superb product to sell. ------ aplaice Slight aside (since LibreOffice != Word, and XML diffs are still horribly messy): If you save your LibreOffice documents in flat XML format, (e.g. fods, fodt instead of ods, odt), placing them under version control becomes slightly less annoying — the diffs become at least _potentially_ human readable. See also: [http://blog.riemann.cc/2013/04/23/versioning-of- openoffice-l...](http://blog.riemann.cc/2013/04/23/versioning-of-openoffice- libreoffice-documents-using-git/) [https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/msg48067.h...](https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/msg48067.html) ~~~ kairuku Word can also save in flat XML format, but it's really verbose (really just a listing of all the document parts). ~~~ rubidium And I can "build a car". But I wouldn't want to drive it. ------ gigelu This is interesting, but what's wrong with "Track Changes"? (a feature Word had for at least 10+ years now). I believe for most people that is more than enough for version control purposes. For tech people that actually know what Git is and how to use it, I bet they'd want real Git integration, or they'd choose to store the document in a different (more easily managed by Git) format such as .md or .html. ~~~ rayiner It doesn't scale. _E.g._ a common operation in a law firm is to send a draft of a Word document,[1] to several people for revisions and comments. You get back several redlines against a common version that some junior associate then has to integrate manually. [1] It has to be a word document for integration with tooling that does stuff like generating tables of authorities and whatnot. ~~~ TickleSteve the built-in 3-way merge tool will do that... just set it up to be called from your favourite VCS. ------ nvlr This is very cool, and I wish we had something like this, but I don't see many law firms going for it. Most law firms (and I would guess all major ones) will not allow uploading of client documents or work-product to any cloud provider, let alone an unproven start up. This risk is frankly way too high. The only way I see this happening in the legal context is if it can be run from the firm's servers with all data hosted locally. ~~~ mark212 This isn't as absolute as you'd think, at least in the firms I've seen here in the US. Nearly all have shifted to cloud solutions for some documents at least in the litigation world where I dwell, especially in doc production and discovery. In a recent class action, my team was sent opposing counsel's link to the Box folder with their 4gb+ docs sent over from their client. Which shows that the clients are demanding that their outside counsel use some of the tools that they've embraced. You're right with respect to internal memos, notes, drafts of pleadings, etc. But I suspect this is changing too as more lawyers want to be able to work on docs from their phones and iPads and remote laptops. ------ btown If all you need is to diff documents (Word, Excel, PPT, or arbitrary PDFs) then I can't recommend [https://draftable.com/compare](https://draftable.com/compare) enough. It's an amazing tool. Granted, you need to do merges manually with just a diff tool, but that's not usually the bottleneck. ~~~ emodendroket Office comes with a spreadsheet diff tool since 2013 and I think there might be something like that for Word too. ~~~ TickleSteve There is. There is also 'diff' integration with the Tortoise range of tools also (i.e. TortoiseSVN, etc). ------ Sander_Marechal I tried doing something like this a couple of years ago by embedding an actual git repository inside a docx or ODF file. Unfortunately, most popular word processing suites back then trashed the git directory instead of leaving it alone (as they should, according to the standards) ~~~ WorldMaker I did something similar: I built a tool in Python called musdex to use in git (or any other VCS) hooks to extract the zip file that a docx/odf file is before commits and recombine them on pull/merge (essentially treating the docx/odf as something of the build product of the repo). Run an xml lint tool on the XML in them and you get decent diffs. ------ nickstefan12 let me guess: \- unzip the .docx file into xml files \- parse the xml into something organizable by line (csv? etc) \- commit this other file format \- in the GUI of your app, when someone selects a snapshot in time, go from the by line (csv? etc) format back to .docx \- open in word \- profit (way back when we did this with excel, but ultimately gave up [https://github.com/decisive-wizard/GridHub](https://github.com/decisive- wizard/GridHub)) ------ irl_ Took me a while of reading here to realise, there's no git here. This is a seperate thing that cannot be integrated with your existing stuff, if you're already using Git. I'd like to have the option of Word documents in Git but I don't want a whole other system just for the special snowflake that is Word as I'm already using Git for managing LaTeX documents and doing that entirely on my own infra. ~~~ bonniemuffin I don't think people who already use git and latex are the target audience for this. ~~~ microcolonel Then they shouldn't market based on it. ~~~ Cthulhu_ I agree. Git / version control is too complicated for most people. Doesn't Microsoft have its own collaborative editing / version control system in Office365 yet? ~~~ microcolonel Office365 does have versioning. I'm not going to say this is better or worse, but it does exist. ------ torrent-of-ions How big do you think the intersection is of people who can use git and people who want to use Microsoft Word? ~~~ titanix2 It includes at least me :) I switched to Latex for writing my second master thesis because I wanted to use version control but Word is far more easier to deal with when the document include unicode character outside the BMP. So I really wanted Word + git from that time. Also when collaborating for writing a paper with Word, version control can be a huge help. ~~~ TrickyRick Why not use something like Google docs or office 365 then? ~~~ emodendroket Word has way more features than GDocs. Haven't spent time with O365 but as far as I know half the draw is you can use it with Office. ------ koolba I've used git for word docs for years now. Using pandoc to convert them to markdown allows sensible diffs to be displayed as well. Works great for redlining. ------ micah_chatt This is actually a great idea, but not a new one. See this TED talk from 2012 [1]. I hope this kind of thing is integrated into more products and services [1] [https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government) ------ bArray Firstly, great job in getting that mess to play well with Git! The main limitation with Git is that it only works with plain text (think Windows Notepad). I have seen authors resort to plain text or markdown in order to take advantage of Git, but this means losing all of your rich formatting such as images and fonts. This is usually too much of a sacrifice for companies as formatting needs to be reapplied with each publication, which is very time-consuming and prone to errors. "but this means losing all of your rich formatting such as images" For plain text, sure, for markdown, nope. "...and fonts" Sure, but formatting can be applied after. With markdown, it supports HTML so you could event apply custom formatting inline, if you _really_ wanted to do something so dirty. "This is usually too much of a sacrifice for companies as formatting needs to be reapplied with each publication, which is very time-consuming and prone to errors." Why not solve this problem? Why not make markdown more accessible to those wanting to use Word? Make something that looks like word, but in reality takes markdown and renders it using some flexible settings file? I personally quite like markdown, to me it represents a minimal, future proof language. I would actually change a few things about markdown to make it more useful in an academic setting. Issues for me are referencing structure, diagrams, embedding content (at the position) and plots. Those things fixed, I would never look back at LaTeX or Word again. One thing I would like to see remain, is the plain-text readability and being able to process it line-by-line without having to remember anything about the previous line. Good luck with this venture, but if you're wanting to take a pivot, let me know :) ~~~ mark212 I'll answer some of these questions for the developer, because I'm smack in the middle of their target market: litigation attorney. Anything other than Word is a non-starter for 99% of law firms (and the other 1% is still on WordPerfect). Markdown is awesome and I use it for my notes files and all kinds of things but contracts, settlement docs, pleadings, motions, etc etc all exist strictly and only in Word. And probably 50% of those are still .doc format, which was left behind more than a decade ago in Word 2007. This product, if it works, will be a God-send for firms like mine (small to medium litigation shops that don't use full document assembly software with built-in version control like the AmLaw 100 firms. And it looks like even those firms might profit from this solution if it plays well with their customer style sheets and macros. I wish it were different, but sadly the state of legal tech is mired in the late '90s. ~~~ nylnd Another lawyer here (tax, UK) - there are similar products available and they're pretty commonly-used over here (such as Worksite for DKMS/version control and Workshare for comparisons between docs). But the VC tends to be centralised, rather than distributed. I've often hankered after a more git-like experience when working remotely or offline, and I will follow this project with interest. One area that is underserved at the moment is diffing .ppt files. Since a lot of the tax industry in particular uses PowerPoint for step plans and structure papers (because it is generally easier to build structure charts). Whilst it isn't the right tool for the job, for as long as people continue to use it, getting this working on your app would be huge. ~~~ asr I'm pretty sure the latest version of worksite/workshare (never was sure which is which or what all the names are) can diff PPT files; apologies if I'm misremembering but that is my recollection from my firm. I agree the developer needs to take a look at these if he/she has not already but there's plenty of room to improve on those products; I don't think the existence of some mediocre solutions should put the developer off. ------ rsp1984 Finally someone is doing this! I've been toying with the idea myself but haven't been able to dedicate time to it, mostly I was deterred by the MS Word format mess. I'm sure it wasn't fun making this work with a 21st century versioning system. I'm sure lots of people will happily throw money at you for this! ~~~ TickleSteve it already exists... version control tools can start Word to compare and merge .doc files. ------ Nomentatus Decades ago I had started a company to do this, for all but executable files (that was for later) and finished a working prototype that was very fast, no known issues. The prototype was limited re file size because of extended/expanded memory issues with that Borland compiler, but the new compiler to solve that had already been published. Then Microsoft announced they were bringing out a similar product. My backer pulled out immediately thereafter, and that was the end of my company. But the Microsoft product never came out, after all... good old FUD. Most of the damage done by not enforcing anti-monoploy laws is entirely invisible, the dogs that don't ever get a chance to bark. ------ thebiglebrewski I think if you can get people to use this and try it, you're going to make a ton of cash. This has been needed for years and doing it within Word sounds to me like the absolute best solution. Get in touch if I can help at all or you're raising! ~~~ TickleSteve Word has a diff tool built in. There is also integration with version control (i.e. double click in TortoiseSVN for example brings up a correct diff view of the word doc for 3-way merging). ------ yazan94 Hey OP, this looks like an awesome tool, good job! Just a quick question, would the primary alternative to your product be Microsoft Sharepoint? If so, how would you market your service as better? ------ therealmarv THIS is how Sharepoint should have worked from day 1. But I guess Microsoft thinks normal office workers won't get version history in their mind. ~~~ emodendroket I've had multiple frustrating conversations where I tried to get people to stop using the strategy of copying entire folders in SharePoint to get some kind of versioning, so they might be right. ------ makecheck To me, one of the biggest problems with weird file formats is that _every single problem has to be solved again, just for that_. Not only that but once a solution has been created, it is probably the _only_ option (instead of one of a dozen) because it is so much harder to do the combination of both $DESIRED_FEATURE _and_ $PARSE_FILE, not to mention $DEBUG_QUIRKS. ------ jk2323 I worked for a company that did studies to get FDA approval for a medical device. The company was very professional and well managed. But THIS is what they were lacking. I always thought they need something like github and Version control for the constantly changing documents. ------ wgx Nice to see this happening! I wrote about "Git for everyone" in Idea Dump 6 in 2012. [http://willgrant.org/post/idea-dump-6/](http://willgrant.org/post/idea- dump-6/) ------ forkLding I think this is a good product, once worked in strategy as an intern at a bank and we basically used manual versioning where we would version using date and time or even content, this is definitely a step up ------ jister What's wrong with using a document management system instead of this? ~~~ dbot Most DMSes utilize a "check-in/check-out" process, meaning that only one person can work the document. Others can work on "copies," but there is no way to sync their changes back into the main document stored in the DMS. ~~~ scblock Exactly. It means incompatible changes have to be merged manually later. It causes problems with large reports where, for example, an electrical engineer may be editing one section and a civil engineer another, but only one can have the document checked out at a time. It's possible to break large reports up into many small section reports, but that's a workaround to the real issue. It also means that when someone checks a file out and then goes home for the weekend without checking it back in no one can update the file in the DMS without administrator support. ------ davidpelayo This is a great addition for such a used tool as Microsoft Word is. It could also help to stablish a better mindset of what version control means for non techie people. Congratus on the release! ------ ythn Is there any way to delete documents? I uploaded a trash document just to try it out, but now I can never delete it - only "archive it" which is bugging the OCD side of me ------ ZenoArrow Good idea in general, but with one major flaw: no self-hosting option. I can't imagine lawyers will be queuing up to host their sensitive legal documents on someone else's server. ------ pmarreck The group of people who still do their day-to-day by passing around Word docs via email or LAN likely does not intersect well with the people who fully understand (or have much less heard of) Git. Thus, I'd remove pretty much all mention of Git from your project landing page (except perhaps to say that it was inspired by its success in the programming world to manage a similar need) so as not to scare off your likely target market (lawyers... who are ALSO notoriously Luddite!) ------ mtgx So Google Docs? It seems close enough. What's the main advantage over Google Docs? ~~~ IanWhalen The addition of tags/versions is something that I would kill for in Google Docs. It would make life so much easier in my current role if we had the ability to tag a version so that you can easily see a diff between that _specific, tagged_ version and the current version (rather than just seeing diffs over time as it is currently implemented). ~~~ brazzledazzle There's an add-on you can get in whatever marketplace they have. But I hate using those because it's not clear to me what these third parties can or can't see. I found it when I realized that despite Google storing extensive change history they hardly do anything with it. ~~~ IanWhalen I feel like I've searched pretty extensively but not found such an add-on. If you can remember the name and link it here that would be awesome. ------ mholmes680 nice work! at my last company we hooked up word docs with SVN. Its very useful to have a workable format for lawyers to update, and then be able to process everything in the back end. ------ user5994461 SVN does version control for word documents just fine. ~~~ TickleSteve it absolutely does... with word integration also... ...but people here irrationally hate svn, so you're getting unfairly downvoted. ------ fleurdelotus Why do you need admin rights to install? ------ brockvond this is great! congrats on this! ------ moontear Unfortunately can't check it out because I get "We are checking what's changed in this version. Won't be long..." for any test docx I upload / blank docx. Maybe server overloaded? My two cents: Congratulations on launching your product! There simply is no real good versioning system for Office files, so this is a step in a good direction. I agree with others that ditching all the "Git" references would be beneficial, because your target market most likely doesn't care about Git. What is missing in the versioning market is exactly what you may provide: A clear way to see what has changed where and an easy way to merge things together. I do believe that you are missing a valid comparison / valid take on what Office 365 / SharePoint Online / OneDrive versioning can give you. Your main argument against it is "necessarily want the real-time coauthoring experience offered by Microsoft SharePoint or Google Docs., this can inhibit your ability to determine who is responsible for specific changes to content". Comparing Co-Authoring to versioning is comparing apples and oranges. The co-authoring experience in Microsoft products is great! I can work on a document with multiple people at the same time and I can even see in real-time what part of the document they are working on and what they are changing. We're working with multiple people on important documents simultaneously very often and this is a life saver. Versioning of course could be better: SharePoint only offers you a main branch and no tags. That means I can go back to a different version, also compare that version to my current version or any other version (!) - but I don't have tags or a method to know that "version 12.0 from 07:02" was the version I was looking for. However the versioning system is very robust and proven. With products such as OneDrive / OneDrive for Business or Office 365 I have said versioning out of the box plus 100 other features. I don't know whether your versioning would make me want to switch just for the additions you show. What I can't see in your demo (and can't test myself) is how you handle complex changes and this is where the meat is. Changing fox to wolf... yeah... I have documents where all heading format changes from Arial to Times New Roman and the bullet points are arrows now instead of bullets. Also my colleague has added three images and right aligned two of my images, oh yeah and applied some pretty image borders around some images. Would all of that show in the "what has changed" view of Simul? It would show when using SharePoint versioning together with Word. Granted: I can't see all these changes in SharePoint - but Word does show everything perfectly. Again: Love the way you are going with this. The existing versioning could be made better, but besides branches and tagging I don't see any benefit compared to regular versioning using Microsoft products. ------ tandav Future of education is plain text	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Prisons Are Banning Books That Teach Prisoners How to Code - arkadiyt https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwnkj3/prisons-are-banning-books-that-teach-prisoners-how-to-code ====== dang [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20240090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20240090) ------ kennywinker It’s almost like there are multiple industries built on prison labour that might feel threatened by prisoners learning employable skills and never coming back... strange. ------ marcoperaza This is a disgrace. The idea that someone is going to be a menace to prison computer systems because they read a few books is really laughable and betrays such a thorough ignorance of how these things work. No one cares about prisons because it’s not an issue that affects most of us in any way and prisoners aren’t a powerful interest group. The absurdities of bureaucracy are allowed to fester without checks. What does the person in charge of approving books, who is probably ignorant of technology themselves, gain from allowing a book? Nothing. What do they lose if allowing a particular book leads to problems? Potentially a lot. So they’ll only allow only the safest material for which their judgment could never possibly get questioned. I don’t think there’s a conspiracy to keep prisoners uneducated and likely to come back to prison. There’s just no reason to for the people in charge to do better. I don’t know how feasible it is, but if we’re going to have private prisons, maybe they should be rewarded when prisoners successfully reintegrate after their release. ------ HillaryBriss the US job market for coders is kind of saturated anyway, and given the extreme selectivity tech companies apply to job applicants, avoiding coding might be a good thing for people in that particular sub-population. i mean it will probably save ex-cons a lot of heartache. our beloved tech employers are likely to discriminate against ex-cons just like they do other minorities and protected classes. what is the point of raising an ex-con's hopes of getting a coding job? the tech companies are going to find some reason or other to reject them anyway. just sayin' ~~~ rutierut As a freelancer billing triple digits an hour I've never been asked if I had a criminal past, just sayin' ~~~ whamlastxmas I've never had a background check done that I know of at any of my dev jobs	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Independent Web Developer, Seeking to Establish Working Relationships - sev To give you guys a little background about me:<p>I'm an independent web developer, and I have a few clients, 2 of which are big and take up most of my time.<p>My work load ranges from simple landing page design projects, with basic ASP.net or PHP, to modifying existing ecommerce platforms to add new functionality or features, to creating an entire database driven site from the ground up.<p>My goal is to be able to handle more clients, especially big ones, and also to speed up the turn-around time of projects to my current clients.<p>Here are my questions to the community, and feel free to give further insight into areas that you think I <i>should</i> be concerned about, that may not be apparent that I am, based on my questions below:<p>1.) What and where is the best way to establish such relationships? I know about sites like getafreelancer, etc...but those seem to be one-time deals, with a bidding process, rather than a trusted, on-going working relationship with someone.<p>2.) Besides a portfolio of past work, what ways would you recommend to find out if a person interested in working with me really has what it takes to do the types of jobs, with the speed necessary?<p>3.) How do you deal with NDA issues, such as server passwords of my own clients, etc, that may be required to be passed on to do some of the work if there were to be some delegation?<p>4.) Would it be okay & decent to post my email address so that HN hackers/readers who are in related fields and are interested in such relationships to reply to me? ====== mixmax Regarding no. 4 the accepted thing to do is to put your e-mail (and homepage, blog, etc.) in your profile. That way people that want to contact you can do so. ------ zepolen Regarding 2. Hang out on the web dev channels on IRC, after a while you can tell who has the chops to handle the work you're looking for. ~~~ mahmud IRC usually proves technical competence. Business-sense is a whole different skill set. FWIW, my problem with very competent programmers has been that they told me what I should be doing, instead of what I want done: the former is a technical decision that the two of us could have made in a mutual agreement after a brief discussion, the second is something handed down to me by the people signing my paycheck. Do what you're asked to do, not what you _aught_ to do.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is this the End of the Sales Person? - s4s http://sales4startups.org/atlassians-cameron-deatsch-onno-sales-people-strategies/ ====== bcx Thanks a ton for doing this interview :-) This has been on my todo list for a long time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amazon hired private detectives to spy on injured worker - Jerry2 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/22/amaz-d22.html ====== tcarn Former Workers Comp claim examiner here. Every Workers' compensation insurance company hires private investigators to make sure the person is really injured and not working another job while collecting. Sounds like the private investigative company overstepped their bounds by physically assaulting the worker, but otherwise this is SOP. Worth noting - Amazon has nothing to do with this. They simply pay premiums for Sedgewick to administer the claims. The employer typically doesn't tell the insurer to go after the workers, since in this case it is Sedgewick who's footing the bill. ~~~ microcolonel > _Worth noting - Amazon has nothing to do with this. They simply pay premiums > for Sedgewick to administer the claims. The employer typically doesn 't tell > the insurer to go after the workers, since in this case it is Sedgewick > who's footing the bill._ The most anyone can really expect of them is that they consider other providers, or hold their existing providers to a higher standard; and that is almost certainly what they are going to do. ~~~ tcarn I mean with all this publicity they will probably be switching providers or sending in a complaint to Sedgewick, but they aren't micromanaging carpal tunnel workers comp claims that make up 1/100000th of their revenue. ~~~ shawnz When they were choosing a claims management provider, they surely took care to choose one that aligns with their values. So this at least reflects poorly on Amazon's choices at that time. ~~~ cperciva You expect Amazon to interview insurance companies and reject any which answer in the affirmative to "do you follow industry standards with regard to investigating claims"? ------ stickfigure While the optics aren't great, I think this is the kind of thing we just have to accept as a society without single-payer healthcare. There's a huge amount of worker's comp fraud. Without some pushback in the system, there would be a lot more. And worker's comp insurance is already very expensive (at least, here in CA). Also: We're getting just one side of the story here. ~~~ fzeroracer Can you cite your claim that there is a huge amount of worker's comp fraud? I'd like to see the data. Specifically the amount of claims that end up fradulent. ~~~ stickfigure Simply googling "workers comp fraud statistics", the first hit says 1-2% of all claims are fraudulent. You can detect the disease by looking for the antibodies. As the top commenter (former examiner) pointed out, it's common for insurers to hire private detectives to investigate claims. That's a large expense that they wouldn't undertake without a good economic reason. ~~~ fzeroracer First off, I am tired of people using the 'just Google it' argument. That is not a replacement for citations when someone asks you to see data and I insist that you and anyone using that argument stop. Google tailors searches based on the user, location etc and without actual citations it is incredibly difficult to assess the credibility of one's argument. If you had the time to Google your own claim, then you had the opportunity to actually cite them in your response. And second, 1-2% is such a low amount according to your claims that I absolutely do not believe it warrents invading someone's privacy and harassing them, full stop. ~~~ stickfigure I thought the general level of workers comp fraud was well understood, and it doesn't take much googling to find it. It sounds like the point of controversy is not sourcing, but the 1-2% figure. That 1-2% figure is the level of fraud _given the current amount of privacy invasion and harassment_ , including the story as posted. Less harassment, more fraud; more harassment, less fraud. "full stop" If you think 1-2% is insignificant, I don't know what to say. By comparison, 0.037% of card-present transactions were fraudulent in 2012. That number was alarming enough it inspired switching all of our (USA) infrastructure to a chip-based system, and even that is generally not thought adequate. 1-2% is a large amount of fraud. If you have that amount of fraud on your merchant account, banks will generally shut you down. ------ usaphp I don’t get this complains about amazon warehouse work. When I was a teenager I used to work in alaska fish factory, with much much much stricter and harder schedules and rules that the article describes. If you plan to work in a warehouse - why are you surprized that you are required to lift heavy boxes and work long hours. Maybe someone can enlighten me why is this so blown out of proportion ~~~ Waterluvian I don't get it either. In a past life I was sold to work in a factory in London for basically no pay at 80 hours a week. It's like human standards of living go up over time or something. Joking aside, it's probably a good sign that what once was normal isn't. Eventually robots will be doing all the lifting and we will look back and shake our heads at how much intellectual capacity we had tied up lifting boxes. ~~~ usaphp I agree with that, but I don't understand why such a big focus is on Amazon. It's not like they are the only ones with this type of working conditions. ------ crescentfresh > you are moving up and down the ladder picking 380 items per hour for 10 > hours A picker is expected to pick an item every 9-10 seconds for 10 hours? ~~~ new_guy Pretty much, one of the things about working at a place like that is you have ZERO value as a human, your prior experience, educational level, none of that matters. You're expected to be a literal human robot, a mindless cog in a machine and the picking rates reflect that. It's basically a living nightmare. ------ cperciva Why is it that every single article about abused Amazon warehouse workers includes a GoFundMe link? ~~~ HarryHirsch Because America. In some other countries it would be perceived as government failure that needs fixing when an individual has to go beg for charity. ------ mnm1 Another entire class of issues that would not exist if we had proper healthcare in this country. I bet Amazon loves its home state of Washington where the state does this dirty work for them at the expense of taxpayers, leaving workers with no care unless they are willing to spend thousands and years on worker's comp cases. That's despite being required by law to pay into a fund that cannot be used. These entities should be ashamed of themselves and we should be ashamed as a country for treating our hard working citizens this way. Just goes to show you, hard work for others is far from a virtue but only something to be done to keep from starving. In America anyway, hard work mostly does not pay off. ------ whoisjuan Not saying that this is not true, but "World Socialist Website" is a website with content created to promote socialist agenda on behalf of a group of socialist parties. Again, I'm not discrediting them, but it's good to know that there's an implicit bias and agenda on this type of content. Same goes for the majority of the mainstream media. I wish someone would build a Chrome Extension that could reveal potential biases based on political donations, affiliations, and known shareholders, in relation to the media website you're visiting. It would add a lot of context and allow people to have more criteria to evaluate the media they consume. ~~~ pizzazzaro Thats interesting. Most non-mainstream media makes you dive through the 501-C##'s papers, ICANN whois records, etc to find out whose voice you're hearing. And then you gotta dig like a shameless conspiracy theorist to find out what that means about what you're reading. Socialist media tells you who/what it is. Right there in the title. Why the distrust for Workers' Rights? ~~~ smsm42 > Why the distrust for Workers' Rights? As somebody who spent part of my life in a socialist country, there are millions of reasons to distrust socialists. The Party's (under socialism, you always know which one is The Party because all others are banned) press is usually a non-ending stream of lies. Of course, the fact that all socialist press I've had experience with were complete liars does not mean that this one, which I never read before, is, but at least there's a cause for caution. Especially as we didn't hear the other side at all - once, in the press, there was a rule to try and get opposite's site take on the matter, but of course the revolutionaries don't have much need for rules, do they? ------ stefan_ This article has mysteriously vanished from the front page in record time. Vouch for articles?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
EveryoneAPI – Convert Phone Numbers Into Business Intelligence - OpenCNAM https://www.everyoneapi.com ====== timbowhite Very interesting service. I'm surprised this hasn't been asked yet since it's not on the site - but where do you get your data? Also, this sentence in your TOU made me giggle a little: > 3\. Additional Restrictions. > ... You may not create a link to this website from another website or > document without telo’ prior written consent. ~~~ OpenCNAM We have a number of data sources including our own proprietary data, telecom sources, public records, graph data and user supplied data. That statement in our terms is something that we will revisit. ;) ~~~ Everhusk Very useful and easy to understand API. I am working on a project in fraud detection and this data could be very useful if it is reliably available. However, I tried with three different phone numbers and it gave an empty string for name, profile, gender, image, and address. Could you give a rough estimate of what percentage of phone numbers you able to provide this information for? ~~~ OpenCNAM Please reach out to us directly if you are working on fraud mitigation. We have extensive insight into fighting fraud and the data that can be used to that end. Additionally, there is a special permissible use-case endpoint we are working on for specific business applications such as fraud mitigation. You may reach us at support@telo.com. ------ OpenCNAM @minot I cannot reply to a reply of a reply apparently. To answer your question, the Try It area uses the endpoint directly. You are charged for any number it returns results for based on the data-points returned. (No hit, no charge) As for querying the same number twice, yes you are charged. We work to ensure that data is as accurate and up to date as possible and it may change depending on the line owner. ~~~ minot Thank you. So I'd probably want to cache the results or add the record into a database if I don't want the latest results every time? ------ huac site doesn't work for me at all? no content on any page ~~~ OpenCNAM This could be a result of Adblock or similar services. We use angular on the frontend and are troubleshooting this / working on a graceful failover. In the meantime, we recommend turning off Adblock or similar services to allow the site to load. ~~~ numberwhun Not that I don't trust your site, but I don't trust any site, no matter how reputable. There is too much malicious crap propagated through click ads, pop- ups, etc, for me to ever consider disabling my adblock extension. My recommendation is to stay away from any site recommending you disable your adblock software. ------ ultimape Seems to be down? From Chrome's console: "Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 503 (Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity)" ~~~ OpenCNAM We are back up. ~~~ dranes Can i sign up using an international number ? i just see a 502 Bad Gateway error. ~~~ OpenCNAM You shouldn't have encountered an issue with a 502 unless it was during the window of time where our front end deploy failed. Unfortunately, we only support NPA-NXX-XXXX numbers for sign up at this time. If you contact us directly at support@telo.com, we can provision you an account if you are still interested. We plan on offering international coverage outside of the NANPA / NPA-NXX-XXXX dial plan by the end of the year. ------ mikegreen Without being able to see the site, just a guess-question here - but how does this compare to FullContact or Refresh.io (recently sucked up by LinkedIn)? ~~~ bradmccarty Hi Mike. We're always happy to see more companies set up shop in this space. It helps to keep us on our toes. At first blush, it seems that EveryoneAPI is focused primarily on phone numbers. Conversely, our focus with FullContact is much more in line with social profile and public social data. Though you certainly can query the FullContact Person API via a phone number, that's never been our primary focus. With relation to the comment about speed, it's worth noting that greater than 95% of Person API queries are returned in 30ms or less. But to the end user, depending upon where they are hosted, network latency can play a large role in the actual response time, which is a factor for any http based API traffic. Like EveryoneAPI, we prefer to compete on merit rather than slinging mud. If you have a project that you're building, I'd love to see how we can help. Our APIs are always free to get started, so you can see your results before ever having to pay. ~~~ OpenCNAM Telo isn't new to this space. OpenCNAM has been around for nearly 5 years and EveryoneAPI was launched a year ago. We have just been doing some updates and now offer a free $0.50 trial. Record availability probably would have been a better way to phrase it rather than speed. While I am not familiar with the latency of the FullContact API, I have experience a sort of fulfillment period (come back later) for records that require more sourcing efforts. That is unless that has changed. We focus on real-time responses that span nearly the entire NANPA dialing plan (US, Canada, Caribbean and part of Central America). In terms of the data-points and focus you are correct that our focus is on the data associated with the phone number query. We do plan to expand our phone coverage to international dialing plans outside of NANPA (NPA-NXX-XXXX) by the end of the year and will be offering a forward append service for name and address as well. ------ MyNameIsMK Love it! Any plans to bundle price the requests vs per request? ~~~ OpenCNAM There are some data-points that will provide additional data-points for free. For example a current carrier dip will include the original carrier for free. We have made it a la carte so that developers can use it as needed without having to pay for data they may not want. ~~~ MyNameIsMK I tried to sign up, the phone verification fails. It is saying an application error has occurred. ~~~ OpenCNAM Would you mind sending over more information to support@telo.com? I would love to solve this issue for you. ------ nathanx Is there a way to do batches, such at 50k lookups at the same time? File upload? Or would you just use the API for that too? ~~~ OpenCNAM We do not currently offer a file upload feature. The API can handle mutlithreaded requests for quicker batch processing. A script using the API and whatever output you needed should do the trick. ------ andrewgjohnson I'm not signing up unless I can run my phone number and see what comes back first. Don't see any place to do that. ~~~ OpenCNAM That is the intent behind allowing a $.50 free test credit. So that you may test drive the service before paying. ------ klinquist Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 503 (Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity) ~~~ OpenCNAM Please standby. We attempted a hotfix for some user reported issues that did not deploy correctly. We will be back up in a minute or two. Sorry for the inconvenience. ------ philip1209 I'm getting 503 errors. ------ dabeeeenster Does this have data for the UK? ~~~ OpenCNAM Right now the coverage footprint is NPA-NXX-XXXX. This includes US, Canada, Caribbean and parts of Central America (excluding Mexico). We anticipate international coverage by the end of the year. ------ travelton Creepily accurate. ~~~ OpenCNAM Accuracy, along with being developer friendly, is our focus. Thank you.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Future of RSS Isn't Another NetNewsWire - carpeaqua http://carpeaqua.com/2013/03/18/the-future-of-rss-isnt-another-netnewswire/ ====== dorseymike Ah, Prismatic is a new one for me :) A quick glance shows that they have the most engaging team page I've ever seen - <http://getprismatic.com/people>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How did you become a hardcore back-end developer? - andywood In the course of reading lots of tech news, and occasionally hanging out with other hackers, I've come under the impression that there is some kind of intense, difficult black art to building large services that scale to 10^N number of users, for any impressive value of N.<p>I'm a dev of 20+ years who has worked on everything from games, to desktop apps, to web apps. I worked as a front-end web development lead at Microsoft on several <i>small</i> web apps, and as the back-end dev on a <i>small</i> web service.<p>I think I could get interviews at any number of interesting places, but if I was going for back-end work (the part that interests me), I feel like I would simply be out of my depth. How do I get there? I'm sure there are obvious answers like "read books", "learn on the job", or "try to build youtube/facebook/twitter, and succeed". So specifically, my question is for those who have already learned to build medium-to-large services: what was <i>your</i> path to acquiring these skills, and do you have any advice for people like me? ====== SpikeGronim I'll share my experience, which may differ from other people's. The largest system that I've worked on was Amazon S3. At the time that I worked there we were doing 100,000+ requests per second (peak), storing 100+ billion objects (aka files), and growing our stored object count by more than double every year. The most important skills for that job were distributed system theory, managing complexity, and operations. I can't explain all of these skills in depth, but I will try to give you enough pointers to learn on your own. For distributed systems there are two main things to learn from: good papers and good deployed systems. A researcher named Leslie Lamport invented a number of key ideas such as Lamport timestamps and Byzantine failure models. Some other basic ideas include quorums for replicated data storage and the linearizability consistency model. Google has published some good papers about their systems like MapReduce, BigTable, Dapper, and Percolator. Amazon's Dynamo paper was very influential. The Facebook engineering "notes" blog also has good content. Netflix has been blogging about their move to AWS. Every software engineer needs to manage complexity, but there are some kinds of complexity that only show up in big systems. First, your system's modules wil be running on many different machines. The most important advice I can give is to have your modules separated by very simple APIs. Joshua Bloch has written a great presentation on how to do that. Think about what happens when you do a rolling upgrade of a 1,000 node system. It might take days to complete. All the systems have to interoperate correctly during the upgrade. The fewer, simpler interactions between components the better. The best advice I know of about operating a big distributed system is this paper[1] by James Hamilton. I won't repeat its contents, but I can tell you that every time that we didn't follow its guidelines we ended up regretting it. The other important thing is to get really good with the Unix command line. You'll need to run ad-hoc commands on many machines, slice and dice log files, etc. How did I learn these skills? The usual mix of how people learn anything - independent study, school, and building both experimental and production systems. 1\. [http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton...](http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton/hamilton_html/) ~~~ tptacek Logical timestamps are an extremely simple idea that knocked me on my ass when I first worked them into a system. Also a great thing to look up to get a "flavor" of how distributed systems work. I feel like if you walk into a job interview knowing the corner-cases of a two-phase commit and being able to solve a problem using Lamport timestamps, you're probably in the top 90th percentile of dev applicants. ~~~ palish _90th_ percentile? Maybe ~99th. The author has been developing software for 20 years. He is likely a fine applicant for a significant number of software dev positions, since he can learn and apply many different technologies very quickly, from what he has said. And also, from what he has said... he doesn't come close to what you described. I've been developing software professionally for five years. I've been programming C/C++ for 10. (I'm 23; my passion has been for gamedev.) And I don't come close to what you described. If I devoted myself to learning what you just described, I could probably achieve a thorough understanding (deep knowledge, an important distinction from superficial knowledge) inside a month. But at the end of that, it seems doubtful I'd be much closer to accomplishing the author's stated goal... I would only know two essentially random cornercases. All of that said, thank you (and SpikeGronim) for mentioning Lamport timestamps; time to go a-wikipedia'n. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamps> ~~~ SpikeGronim Maybe tptacek just has a really great applicant pool ;). You also have to account for specialization. I have no clue how to do optimized gamedev. If you want more Lamport goodies: "Paxos Made Simple" (distributed transactions done right): [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.69....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.69.3093&rep=rep1&type=pdf) "The Byzantine Generals Problem" (harshest failure model known and how to cope with it): [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#byz) An interview where he talks about his approach to systems, particularly formal reasoning and specification: [http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an- interview-with-lesl...](http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an-interview- with-leslie-lamport/) His publication list - [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html) ------ jerf 1\. Find bottleneck. 2\. Remove bottleneck. 3\. Repeat. 4\. Every once in a while, make a bold move to throw something out that can no longer work that way and replace it with something more scalable. But while this is important, it comes up less often than you might think. The difference is that you spend a lot more time in that loop than a desktop dev, but if you understand programming it isn't a special black art until the very, very top end. The other thing to get is that it's always about _buying time_ rather than _solving the problem forever_. The goal is to have bought enough time that you don't have to be stuck in a local optima or make panicked decisions. ~~~ justin_vanw This is a good point, to which I would add: Architect your system so that you have visibility into where it is breaking, and that no piece has more than one simple job. Otherwise you will end up spending all your time trying to figure out where the bottlenecks are, and every bug will take a day or more to track down. Any part of your system that is complex will basically not be fixable, since nobody will know what the consequences of any change actually is until it breaks something else, which will then take another day to fix, and yes this logic does lead to an infinite chain of days fixing bugs caused the previous day. ~~~ petervandijck Small pieces, loosely connected. ------ ismarc Ride on others coat tails, stand on others' shoulders. It's not that it's any harder, it's that the skills used day to day are different. The single skill I picked up that served me best was being able to rationalize about what complex , highly concurrent code was doing and the performance implications of it. And I got this by reading code, and not just little programs, but things like the udp packet handling in the Linux kernel, or the storage and firewall rule insertion mechanisms for iptables. But, nothing beats working directly with geniuses. Earlier this year I made a change (at my last company) that increased the number of simultaneous users by well over an order of magnitude. The change was known and had been tried by others in the group, but was deemed infeasible. I didn't come up with the magic change needed, I found how to apply it. And what I learned in the process is applicable outside of that. Without working directly solving the problems, it's hard to learn how. ------ CyberFonic For me the path the heavy duty back-ends was Unix and C. Most of the work for large corporations, in addition to the mainframes, involves big systems; IBM: AIX, HP: HPUX, Sun: Solaris. Helps to know a bit about storage: EMC, Hitachi, NetApps, etc. And of course databases, DB2, Oracle. The best news is that these days, you can build up these skills using a $1k box with Linux or BSD. Years ago, you needed to get a job first because systems were in the order of $millions and they wouldn't fit in your average spare room. You'll also need to demonstrate so CS/SE chops, because mucking up a big back- end system is not like a web page that occasionally crashes, it can cost $10k's per hour while it's down. ------ davidhollander I would start by viewing it as tree structure optimization problem. Draw a tree where each node is a physical server and the root node is the domain name server. Now try to maximize throughput of random lookups while minimizing height (complexity). For each level of the tree, come up with a list of everything you can think of that might affect the traversal (processing\lookup) time when a node (server) in that level is entered. Also create a list of everything you can think of that might affect the lines (connections) between nodes. This exercise should give you a good idea of what you need to learn and help generate more specific questions. ------ justin_vanw There are maybe 20 people the world who 'know' how to scale a website up to millions of users. There are lots of teams of hundreds of people who actually do it. Don't get worried that you won't be able to go in and run the show on the first day. There isn't any secret sauce, and sites that scale to this level are so rare that they probably each have their own arcane and complex way of doing it that has evolved over years of people trying different approaches and failing. Anywhere that is worth working isn't looking for someone who knows how to scale a website to millions of users, they are looking for smart people who can contribute. Their development budget is probably in the millions of dollars per year, they will be more than happy if you can help. TLDR; Nobody is going to write a book on this, since only 500 people in the world would benefit from reading it. There is no single answer. To address the specifics of what you are asking, there is basically a balancing act of consistency vs performance. You need to find the exact balance that is 'good enough' for every problem. The oft quoted 'there are two hard problems in CS, cache invalidation and naming things' pretty much sums it up. ------ mathgladiator The simplest way is to just do it. You are fortunate that you live in the age of cloud computing. For instance, you can spend $10 for a day and get access to more compute resources than most people could hope for after months of budget proposals. Find a problem, solve it, launch it, test it, find bottleneck, kill it. Repeat this enough times and you can start to a feel for where bottlenecks will happen and how fail happens. ~~~ chintan I second this. I wrote a distributed crawler from scratch with 10 EC2 machines. It was one of the best learning experiences ever! ------ fingerprinter I've was mostly a web guy, riding the internet from '94 until about '06 when I started to get into more serious stuff...up until that point it was C, Perl, Java etc , but it was mostly pushing business data around, which is what I think 90% of all commercial programming is these days (so don't knock it...it pays the bills). In '06 I joined a startup and we needed to scale. I hadn't had experience with this stuff and neither did most people on my team...so here is what we did. * Try new things, but basically find out what most people are doing that have already gone down this path (stand on shoulders of giants, as someone mentioned) * Read, read, more reading...talking to other devs...network...DO NOT REINVENT SOMETHING (I also call this the Kiss of Death). Unless you are Google, Amazon or Facebook, use off the shelf if you can. * Use technologies that will work for your problem. We chose Erlang for ours b/c it of what we were doing. Something like Java would have worked, but would have made the job 10x harder. C would have been ideal, but we would have to reinvent nearly all of Erlang, so just choose Erlang. * LEARN about things like good architecture design, SOA and failure (when a system goes down, what happens...). *Invest in a good test suite or test infrastructure, but realize that it will be nearly impossible to test at scale. During that time I felt like I was constantly reading every paper I could find, blog on scaling and back-end systems and talking to every dev or had ever done it. It was work, but not the type normally associated w/ dev....but was 100% worth it. ------ diego I started writing my story but it became too long so I posted it here. [http://dbasch.posterous.com/how-did-you-become-a-hardcore- ba...](http://dbasch.posterous.com/how-did-you-become-a-hardcore-back-end- develo) Tl;dr: in 1998 I created an mp3 search engine that got significant traffic, had to learn on the fly, ended up going to Inktomi where I joined a team tackling much bigger problems. We all learned a lot over the next four years. ------ jsarch @andywood, Can you take a moment tomorrow and add an edit to your post giving a summary of whether you felt the comments answered your questions? I ask simply because my first read of your post focused on "How do I get there?" and not "what was your path?" As such, I was surprised to be reading life stories of fellow HN'ers. Since we all absorb info differently, I'm curious to know if the stories helped and what you gleaned from them. All the best in your endeavor. -- A fellow large-scale enthusiast. ~~~ andywood For some reason, I don't have an edit link for this post anymore, but I can answer this right now. All of these responses are exactly what I was looking for, and then some. As far as the phrasing, I'm equally interested in direct advice like "read this paper", and personal stories. I've always been able to intuit how to go about learning any given topic in computing, whether languages, game programming, HTTP, Win32, or what have you. I don't know exactly why this subject in particular seems more esoteric to me - probably a product of my background - but it does. I wanted to know how others learned. Before this thread, my best answer would have been "Get a job at Amazon or Google as a front-end dev, and try to work my way into the back end." Now I have papers to read, algorithms to learn, topics to explore, and ideas about setting up a toy environment for learning. So yes, all of the answers are definitely helping, and I hope a few more people will add their stories. A big thank you to everyone. ------ petervandijck To boost your resume, you could work on some of the large-scale open source systems (nosql etc.) That'll look good, and get you some good experience too. You can run 1000 servers for an hour on Amazon for fairly cheap. If you use that to do some testing/benchmarks etc. of popular nosql systems, for example, and then write about that, you can create some notoriety in the big-systems world fairly fast. Good luck! ------ Pahalial <Obvious answers here> When you discount "learn on the job" and "read books", i'm really not sure what's left, or what you expect the people who have achieved success by doing these things to tell you (while omitting those things.) ~~~ andywood My intention was not to discount them at all. In fact, I've learned everything I know about web development on the job. I just didn't want the existence of obvious answers to deter anybody from sharing the details of their individual experiences. And all of the responses so far have been _exactly_ the kinds of things I'm looking for. ------ known Try developing using [http://www.stoneridgetechnology.com/products/pci-e- developme...](http://www.stoneridgetechnology.com/products/pci-e-development- boards/hft-development-kit/) ------ ochekurishvili By mastering technologies I didn't know.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python - revyuh https://www.revyuh.com/2019/05/guido-blames-social-media-in-part-for-his-decision-to-abandon-the-supervision-of-python/ ====== cletus Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much strictly email and most things go through one of the "inner circle" who are largely responsible for areas like networking. As brash as he can be, you pretty much know what to expect and you have delegation. Honestly, I wonder how much of this goes back to GvR's handling of Python 3. This should go down as something to be studied for years on how not to do a breaking change. IIRC Python 3 was released in 2008. Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7. My favourite Python 3ism was the removal of the s and u string literal prefixes. In Python 2.0+, u'this is a string' was a Unicode literal prefix. It was removed in 3.0 for reasons that are beyond me (I know Unicode became the default for string literals) but then added back in 3.3 for backwards compatibility. Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense. But this just went to the perception that the Python powers-that-be were removed from reality in their hubris. Anyway, GvR... one can't help but respect his stewardship and contribution to Python. Please make no mistake about that. The weird thing about human nature is in situations like this, if the peanut gallery senses they're getting to you it only encourages them. Sad but true. ~~~ thanatos_dem > Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - [https://pythonclock.org/](https://pythonclock.org/) ~~~ StavrosK Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2. ~~~ Analemma_ I think they’re both true. People who are “extremely online” and up-to-date with technology developments are all done with Python 2.7 and can say the end is near, but they’re not the only people. There’s an entire dark matter world of businesses still on 2.7, maintained by people who don’t live in the Bay and don’t read Hacker News, and so they’re largely invisible. It will be a long time before they all switch. ~~~ Bahamut Even in the Bay Area there are companies still with Python 2.7 with no real migration strategy yet. I maintain several such packages at work myself. ~~~ StavrosK I don't know, we have a codebase of 100k loc of Python 2.7 and I migrated much of it in two or three weeks myself. I don't think the fact that companies don't spend some time drawing up a strategy is the language's problem. ------ dotdi > “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through > persistence.” ― Ovid It's not easy to take all the hate and ill-will day in day out. It's not even easy to ignore it, much less to deal with it. I respect Guido's decision even though I was quite sad to see him step down. It's not difficult to see that, with Pythons growing popularity, things would probably have become even worse for him in the future. ~~~ nabla9 Social media gives unfair advantage to a horde of ankle biters, influences and opinionated individuals to affect things that matter. Even completely harmful promotion can snowball into supporting harmful behaviour. CTO or senior developer in a small company may feel the need to promote stuff they do by writing technical articles and commenting ongoing debates in the social media. Attaching comments to anything that is trending is important if you want to promote stuff. Suddenly the person is committed with his own name to something he did not thing trough and unintentionally adding side support to some hate campaign. ~~~ DFHippie Not to bite any angles, but s/angle biter/ankle biter/. ------ linsomniac It is really hard on maintainers. I think a lot of it is that old adage "It takes 10 positive things to counteract one negative one." And, for some reason, people on the Internet can choose to have any alternate persona they want, and what do they choose? The shittiest person imaginable. There was a really good Keynote by Brett Cannon last year at PyCon about how hard, emotionally, maintaining OSS is: [https://youtu.be/tzFWz5fiVKU?t=3259](https://youtu.be/tzFWz5fiVKU?t=3259) \-- Unfortunately the official post is buried after 50 minutes of lightning talks. He gets very emotional on stage. I was sitting with him before he gave this talk, it was a very hard talk for him to give, and so very important. My own story like this: I took over maintenance of a module that had been abandoned, but after the better part of a decade I ran into a time in my life where I have little time for it. It had been languishing, but someone finally offered to help out on the maintenance. Great! I added them to the github project, they started triaging issues, and within a day this guy started spitting vitriol at the new maintainer. I called this guy out, but he doubled down. I just locked the issue and moved on with my life. But this guy tracked me down and sent me an e-mail to my personal e-mail full of expletives. Followed quickly by an apology: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to send that e-mail from my work e-mail address, please don't get me fired." Literally: No apology for being a jerk, just begging me not to share that exchange with their employer. All of the github comments he had made were removed or severely edited. And... That person who offered to maintain that module? That was the last time they touched it. ~~~ mixmastamyk Clowns must be held accountable for their actions, otherwise they don't learn. ------ mixmastamyk Believe the Python3 change is a bit of a red-herring, everyone learned from that. The breaking point was PEP 572 (ie :=) which was quite controversial. The lesson here: One shouldn't attempt to reverse 25-year old design decisions, not even GvR. Python is too big now. There was a compromise (and more congruent) alternative, reuse of the "as" keyword, that was thrown out immediately, and proponents rammed 572 thru despite significant objection. That's when things got ugly. Personally I disagreed with that decision, and tried to support the compromise design. In the end, didn't think 572 was the end of the world (will be occasionally useful, if ugly), and tried to stay polite, but sadly many didn't. Then he accepted 572 and stepped down, as if one last poke in the eye, unfortunately. ~~~ metalliqaz I think you're right about 572, although even that wouldn't have been enough without all the other stuff from the past, such as the unicode strings. I often have to write things like this: m = re.match() if m: do something So I'm looking forward to the feature. I'm not sure you were fair to the process about the alternative syntax, though. They did give a well-reasoned explanation for discounting it. ~~~ mixmastamyk It was discounted because it was less flexible, didn't handle as many use cases. True. However, during the process Victor Stinner rewrote one large module using the new syntax as an exercise. We learned that ~95% of the time, only the simplest case was used, the form you gave above. The extra flexibility turned out not very important in real code. We had a choice of ":=" syntax, duplicate but full functionality, and losing the BDFL, or ~95% functionality, language congruity, and keeping him. They chose the former. Maybe Guido stepping aside will be good in the long run however, it was bound to happen eventually. ------ mjw1007 Note that Guido has been elected to the new steering council, and the council has been delegating language-design questions to him. So I think (and hope) the effect of these changes will be that Guido will make more or less the same decisions as before, but both be under less stress when doing so (because he doesn't _have_ to be the final decision maker), and no longer have to be concerned about people questioning the source of his authority. ------ jsmeaton The governance model has already been decided, and the steering council elected. [https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj9...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj9wfzQhIfiAhUbcCsKHR_eBwEQzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsnarky.ca%2Fan- update-on-pythons- governance%2F&psig=AOvVaw20lBJ5sZiwPycetdS3TOdm&ust=1557236626663837) ~~~ brittohalloran PEP-8016 [1] has the details of the steering council mechanism (5 person elected council, describes their powers), and PEP-8100 [2] has the results of the election and now shows vote totals. [1] [https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/) [2] [https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8100/#results](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8100/#results) ------ Demiurge This is not an accurate title. He is not blaming ths social media, he is blaming the developers who engaged in social politics instead of open and honest conversation. ------ misthop Many people here are referencing the 2 to 3 process as germane to the discussion, but it was really PEP 572 (the walrus operator := ) that was it for him. PEP 572 was _hugely_ contentious among the core devs, much more so than the 2 to 3 transition. Citation - Yesterday at Pycon during the Steering Council meeting he stated that he tendered his BDFL resignation the morning after approving that PEP ------ ravenstine Not that I think Guido's decision to leave his supervisory role is wrong, but couldn't he have simply not engaged with social media and just continue his role without all the negative garbage input? It's not like the things people say on Twitter without accountability is worth a damn. ------ MrGilbert For a "Benevolent Dictator", social media should be like the schoolyard for a teacher: Let the folks have their talks, their chit-chat. If there is a real issue, it's up to them to voice it. If they question your authority, so be it. Maybe this is something you have to get used to. ~~~ java_script It's 2019 and we're _all_ posters now. Even the leader of the free world is involved with the kind of online disputes that internet addicts were having in the 2000s on vBulletin sites. Congress has had hearing from people mad that their posts weren't getting enough traction. It's hilarious but I'm no longer surprised when I find out someone famous is as 'online' as me now. ------ amelius What I don't get is if you're tired of certain forms of social media, then why don't you quit using those? ------ gubbrora Sad to hear. I don't know what exactly he did for python project, but if we take the pudding as proof of the recipe he did a lot of things right Edit: I meant I don't know what he did as a bdfl day to day. ~~~ misthop He literally invented the language, and until stepping down last year (as described in this link) he was the python BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) I apologize if this came off snarky - I did not mean for it to, I just wanted to emphasize Guido's contributions. (edited) ------ uglycoyote Although the article was mostly about this social media issue, watching the attached video I found Guido's statements about diversity and unconscious bias in Open Source to be a much more interesting part of the interview. (around the 23 minute mark) Quote from Guido: If you say "our project is open, anybody can come and join us, anybody can contribute", you are really underestimating the issues. Because it is not just joining the project that's the problem, it is staying in the project. Which means you have to feel comfortable exchanging emails and code reviews and what-all with people that you don't know personally but you communicate frequently online. And that sort of communication requires that everybody has respect for each other, and that respect is often missing because of unconscious biases, where guys and sometimes even women, who believe that they have no bias, don't realize that there are small differences in communication styles between men and women, (sometimes they are large differences) that just make it harder for women to join a particular community. Because it's not just about writing the code, you have to sort of stand up for your code, defend your code, and there is a certain male attitude there that is endemic in many projects, where a woman for example would just not feel comfortable sort of claiming that she is right, that she has the correct insight to decide or to choose a solution, while a guy who knows less than that woman might honestly believe more in their own being right, and so they present a much more confident image. And so they have a much easier time even when they are not all that competent. As long as they present confidence they might get their inferior solution adopted. A woman will more likely feel that she has to have a perfect solution and a perfect understanding of the issues, why it is a perfect solution, before she will even submit a patch. I am doing a fair amount of mentoring of women specifically, and I found that sometimes women I am mentoring will ask for my approval on every step of the way. They will say "I want to file an issue on the bug tracker but I'm afraid of the negative backlash when I put the issue in, can I tell you what I want to write the issue about?" That is charming, but and I always tell them "just put it in the tracker already! your head is not going to be bitten off, you will got honest feedback, and whether the feedback is 'that is a good idea' or 'that is a bad idea' it will be fine". But I'm sure a guy of the same skill level would not hesitate to just put the issue in the tracker. It is a bit of an attitude and mentality difference which makes it much harder for competent women to get started and stay afloat in this community where the male attitude is the default attitude. Because if someone presents that uncertainty, they are much more likely to get ignored or rejected. ------ caymanjim Every leader throughout history has had to put up with the discontent of the governed. Being thick-skinned and ignoring the barbs is part of the job. Social media is a red herring here; this sort of thing has happened on all forms of social media since the dawn of computing. It used to be on mailing lists and Usenet. Now it's primarily on Twitter. After 30 years of leading a project, anyone is going to get worn down. ~~~ anc84 The psychological feedback loops and self-affirmation have been tweaked to perversion and addiction by social media. There are notifications, +1, heart, subreferences, everything, everywhere. It has become much more overwhelming. ~~~ user17843 yes, it's sickening. I do my best to filter out all the like and upvote stuff, but it doesn't really help because it changes the entire atmosphere of a platform and thus affects me too. ------ twerkmonsta No offense to Guido, and I love Python, but the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 is a reference point for me in terms of how NOT to update a programming language. Noone should ever be attacked, but surely someone deserves some criticism. ~~~ beambot What would you have done differently? Frankly, it seemed pretty principled to me -- enough to where I wouldn't be comfortable Monday quarterbacking. ~~~ devit Make the 2 vs 3 language decision be module-specific with a single Python executable supporting both languages, allowing you to freely mix Python 2 and 3 files and libraries and thus not splitting the ecosystem. ~~~ eesmith I believe that would have been much more expensive to develop, and the Python dev team didn't have the resources for it. The easiest things can be done by automatic translation, like 2to3. The remaining parts get increasingly difficult, because Python 2 objects have to know how they are interpreted in Python 3, and vice versa. A simper step would be to write an AST transformer to instrument Python 2 code and identify the non-Python 3-compatible uses of, for example, keys() and values(). That's almost as hard as writing a Python 3 implementation in Python 2, and I couldn't convince myself that it made financial sense given that it would still miss a lot of corner cases. ------ rodorgas A dictator that can’t stand to others questioning your decisions is a weak dictator. Python is mature enough to have the current governance model, but his exit could have been less noisy. ~~~ Insanity a "dictator" is still human. I think you might underestimate how annoying people can be online.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
On Geeks and Gays - bootload http://newstilt.com/notthatkindofdoctor/news/on-geeks-and-gays ====== caryme As a gay geek, I found myself drawn to Turing's story - a tragic story of (probably) unrequited love as a schoolboy, a heroic story of a great thinker and war hero, and a heart-wrenching story of humiliating rejection by the same country he served. I'm surprised JGC was assumed to be gay for standing up for Alan Turing, but proud that he handled the assumptions well. From our perspective, Turing's story is so much bigger than his sexuality. But to the common person, who likely knows little to nothing about Turing beyond what the news says - that he was convicted of homosexuality by his country - this advocacy appears to be one for gay people. Thank you, Mr. Graham-Cumming, not just for standing up for Turing, but for simply explaining you are not gay without getting defensive. Too often, straight men handle being assumed as gay as a terrible and dehumanizing accusation. ~~~ CWuestefeld Likewise. I think that JGC's campaign (a) shows us what it really means to be without prejudice; and (b) reveals that others in the business of civil rights persist in viewing the world through those same old goggles. That said, I think that JGC breaks from this in the essay. He says: _as a geek I empathized with the idea that being different from some societal norm brings enormous pain._ To me, that destroys, at least partially, the idea of a completely independent bystander fighting for truth. It brings us, at least partly, back to someone campaigning for a fellow in his own group -- it's just that the dimension JGC chose to sort by is different from the one that most of society would choose. I wish John had simply said _because Alan Turing’s treatment was wrong_ and left it at that. ------ tsally A thought: Alan Turing died when he was 41. Anything Turing would have invented between 41 and his natural death are things lost to society because of the persecution of homosexuals. What an incredible cost. ~~~ axod You make it sound like he was murdered because he was gay. I don't think it was quite that clear cut. I'm quite a believer in "if he hadn't done it, someone else would have" personally. I don't mean to belittle anyones contribution, but the idea that there's only one genius who can come up with something seems very unlikely to me. Most inventions are 'discovered' by many people at around the same time. ~~~ devinj Other people did do it, and even at nearly the exact same time. Turing just did it more convincingly. (See: Alonzo Church and the Lambda calculus). ~~~ eru And Turing helped a lot with the War effort, building hardware (i.e. stuff you can kick) as well as developing theories. ~~~ devinj +1. Yeah, I was only thinking of his work on computation (not even AI!). I should have been more clear. ------ mpk I'd say that geeks tend to think about their environment a lot more than other people because geeks tend to think about systems in general. I have never encountered a rational argument for homophobia. Gay people seem to me to be just as likely to be virtuous or decadent as straight people. Discriminating against people for having a different sexual orientation seems totally irrational to me. As far as I'm concerned, 'gay rights' generally equate to 'human rights' and you can sign me up for supporting those any day. ~~~ j-g-faustus I've always thought that [gay \| labor \| women's \| black's \| etc] rights all collapse to merely human rights, and find it curious that we see the need to carve it up in a whole bunch of special cases. ~~~ caryme That's just the thing. If we could realize that it's the same issue over and over again, perhaps it would become less of an issue. If only. In US-parlance, all men are created equal. We said that right off the bat. Once we decided that by _men_ , we meant _people_ , what further argument is there to have? All means all. ~~~ xenophanes Let me know when you realize that 4 year olds are people too, and should have full human rights. If you won't accept that case, then you're part of the problem that doesn't see it's the same issue over and over. ~~~ jacquesm Some of the human rights are conditional upon whether or not the person they are applied to is 'of age' or not. There are some inconsistencies but they've definitely managed to avoid most of them. ~~~ axod ... and sound mind. Which may rule out women. (JOKING). ------ sophacles This is just odd to me. It never even occurred to me that the sexuality of a person running a campaign like that would matter. I mean, its Turing -- a name most known for inventing the freaking computer. Sure there is the whole "gay angle" and it being the _reason_ for the treatment -- but I figured the campaign was more about, lets clear this _extremely important historical person's_ name, and for Britain to admit the world had been done an injustice. I guess I'm sadder that in the world I live in such a thing matters so much, than I was that bad things were done to Turing. So jgrahamc: FWIW I just figured you were some guy who was more annoyed than me over the Turing thing, and better positioned to make a fuss over it, and for that: good on you. Were I asked, I would have assumed your sexuality is straight, but thats just playing the odds, as I don't know or care who you screw. ~~~ ErrantX I'm only guessing but my thinking on how the thought process went was.. People wondered why he was sticking up for Turing in particular - a lot of people have been abused by the government (and society) in the past. They wondered if he had a certain interest in this specific case; and they falsely assumed it was an issue of sexuality, forgetting that Turing was a geek too :) ------ bootload _"... When I was a teenager at school I definitely did not fit in. I had glasses, was awkward, brainy, wore the school uniform because I had no idea what else to wear, and suffered insults from my classmates. One of these was the frequent and common slander “poof” (which is probably the closest thing to the American term “fag”). I was either ignored, or verbally abused, or physically assaulted. In one attack two boys pinned me down and asked me the incongruous question: “Do you prefer music or art?”. “Art” after all was something only a poof would like. ..."_ Cripes @JGC I feel for you mate. The self description as a student could fit any reader here. There but for the grace go I - except I was probably bigger & uglier than yourself. Anyone who wants a quick understanding of the mechanics of bullying and ways to circumvent it, take a peek at _"Hacking People"_ ~ <http://bootload.posterous.com/hacking-people> and some thoughts on identifying Cyber Bullies ~ <http://seldomlogical.com/2010/03/13/hacking- bullies> ~~~ elblanco Thanks for the links. While I _was_ part of an "out" group growing up, I managed not to get bullied much (it usually stopped quickly after a round of fisticuffs and my father being a boxing coach in his youth). But a great many of my friends were bullied, some horribly. I've never been able to understand the mechanics of it very well even after having seen it so many times. ~~~ bootload _"... I was part of an "out" group growing up, I managed not to get bullied much (it usually stopped quickly after a round of fisticuffs and my father being a boxing coach in his youth) ..."_ Excellent stuff, go boxing. There's a lot to say for standing up for yourself. _"... But a great many of my friends were bullied, some horribly. I've never been able to understand the mechanics of it very well even after having seen it so many times. ..."_ Observing body language should probably be a taught subject in school ~ [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201004/what-e...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201004/what- every-parent-should-teach-their-child-about-body-language) An understanding of body language might allow you to see peoples intentions before they give off overt intent. If you want to understand more about decoding & understanding behaviour, talk to <http://twitter.com/navarrotells> or get a copy _"Louder than words"_ or _"What Every Body is Saying"_ ~ <http://jnforensics.com/Books_%26_Videos.html> ~~~ elblanco I agree, most of the time when I got into a fight in school was because I wasn't paying attention to the aggressive body language of my challenger. When I did notice it, I found I was usually able to talk myself out of the fights by simply taking what the guy was saying and turning it back on him. It defused the immediate situation because it prevented the bully from amping himself up. One incident in middle school permanently ruined the reputation of a would-be bully since all he knew how to say to start a fight was "common man, let's go". To which I responded "okay, sounds great, where to?" He repeated his statement over and over while I repeated mine. Eventually, it defused the fight. I think he simply didn't know how to respond when I didn't back down and simply took what he was saying absolutely literally instead of as the slang he meant. It also happened in front of a crowd and all through middle and high school was ribbed as the guy who couldn't figure out where to go. He used to get a few compasses at the beginning of every year and offers to help him find his way to class. ------ merraksh No matter how natural and necessary this might be, it doesn't happen very often that someone fights for a group he/she doesn't belong to. Hats off once more to JGC for that. ------ dinde I love these things, as a gay coder I get to feel special and like I'm representing my kind with my views. ;) In my experience, it's not geeks specifically that are more accepting, but educated people in general. It seems obvious but I think that's all it is. ------ RyanMcGreal All in all, a great essay. But: >I’m conflicted about whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt. Why on earth shouldn't a gay couple be allowed to adopt? ~~~ natrius If the demand for adoption outstrips supply, and if (big if) a man and a woman parent substantially better than two people of the same gender, it might make sense to have a blanket preference for heterosexual couples when choosing parents. There could be something innate in each gender that contributes to a child's upbringing, and depending on the value of those traits, it could be responsible to maximize the number of children who benefit from both. ~~~ caryme I realize this is an explanation for the argument against same-sex couple adoption, but in the same vein I'd like to point out that where this argument falls apart is in the legality of single parent adoption. In the US, it is legal in every state for single parents to adopt. However, in some states it is illegal for same-sex couples to adopt children. For the real kicker, in Florida (where I am from), homosexual _people_ cannot adopt. So while a single straight woman can adopt a child, a single lesbian woman cannot. ~~~ natrius I was being excessively charitable in my framing of the argument. It makes zero sense for it to be _illegal_ for gay people to adopt. It could make sense to _prefer_ straight couples over gays _and_ singles, which would effectively exclude them if the demand for adoption outstrips supply as much as I presume. ~~~ joubert Why? What magical quality does a straight couple bring to the table? Are they innately less dysfunctional than a gay couple? ~~~ devinj Magical quality? Well, 2 genders instead of one. I don't find the idea that children take their cues depending on the gender of the parent at all unreasonable. It's certainly entered the common mind as an idea of what happens. Is it true? No idea, haven't seen any research on it. But there's at least a possible basis for the "magical" quality of gender being important. ~~~ joubert I'm skeptical. What cues? Are you thinking a girl learns how she should act by emulating a mom, and the same for a boy in relation to his dad? ~~~ tsally Here's the logic of a non-homophobic argument I have heard of. The majority of research on parenting and raising children has been done with heterosexual parents as a base assumption. Someone who is extremely supportive of gay rights who is also a rational thinker might be cautious when considering the issue of adoption by homosexuals. Why be cautious? Because it is necessary to take reasonable measures to guarantee the children will be raised appropriately. It is a human right of the children. In American society we place an especially high value on protecting the rights of people who cannot defend themselves, including children and the disenfranchised. Yes, homosexuals are a disenfranchised group as well, but there are homosexuals who serve openly in Congress. It's not quite on the same level as children, who do not yet have the ability to speak English. I'm not up to date on the literature regarding child development. It may be that there are studies that suggest that homosexual families are no different than heterosexual families in terms of impact on the child. I'm just throwing this argument out there because it is one of the few non-homophobic arguments against homosexual adoption that I know of. I don't personally have an opinion on this issue because I'm not qualified. ~~~ joubert So, if i get a surrogate and we have a child, and my gay partner wants to adopt the baby so that we are both legal parents, surely it make no sense to deny the adoption? ~~~ jacquesm I don't think that holds water. Gay rights are great, but childrens rights are greater. If there is any doubt about the rights of either group being infringed on by 'experimenting' then you have an immediate problem because nobody will sign off on experimenting on children to see if in the long term it will matter or not. If there would be large numbers of cases proving that it essentially makes no difference then that would help, but you're in a chicken-and-the-egg situation. I know of one gay couple in my circle of friends that would like to adopt a child and they've come to the conclusion that they themselves can't come to a 100% agreement _between the two of them_ about what that responsibility exactly entails. It was a very eye opening discussion, because I think I went away a changed person, essentially form going to saying 'I don't see why not' to 'maybe it really is better, who knows'. For me that's a weird thing because when I thought about this before I always thought that gay people would not 'overlap' with straight people on this issue but would be on the far side of a barrier that you can not cross because you can not imagine what it is exactly like to be gay when you are not. This is a very complex issue, societal pressures are such that simply being raised as the child of two gay parents puts undue pressure on a child (for instance peer pressure), and that can cause serious damage. That's the sort of argument that they went on about and I had never even thought of it from that angle. ~~~ joubert So you're saying my gay partner should not be allowed to adopt my biological kid to provide a stable legal environment? In another scenario, isn't it better for a gay child in foster care to be adopted by gay parents than by straight parents? When you say "peer pressure", is that just a euphemism for bullying? ~~~ jacquesm > So you're saying my gay partner should not be allowed to adopt my biological > kid to provide a stable legal environment? The situation I had in mind was two gay people without children adopting a child. > In another scenario, isn't it better for a gay child in foster care to be > adopted by gay parents than by straight parents? That would probably be a good thing. ------ johngalt Odd, I made no assumptions about jgc's sexuality. I guess I assumed he was straight if anything. Just one geek rising in defense of another. ------ seldo Would it be unbecoming of me to suggest that some readers of this thread might be interested in visiting <http://GayGeeks.org>? It is a not-for-profit side venture of mine. ~~~ caryme Thanks for that. Just joined with the same username. ------ jonpaul Kudos to this guy. It's sad that many people in society are myopic and think that this guy was gay. As stated, I think it's simply a case of one geek that was persecuted standing up for a fellow geek. The world needs more people like this guy. ------ kajecounterhack I feel similarly as a gay-affirming Christian. Standing up for equal treatment of people doesn't make a person gay. ~~~ lallysingh I donno about you, but I never thought the author was. I wonder how many people here did. ------ neodude It's nice to see so many gay geeks 'come out' on this thread. I had assumed I was the only one. Sexuality is such an infrequent topic on HN. ~~~ jacquesm > I had assumed I was the only one. That's strange then because there are plenty of people here that have stated openly and without reservation that they are gay or transgender. In a population of this size you should be _very_ surprised if you are the only gay person. ~~~ thingie While it would be very surprising to actually be the only one, it's not surprising to _feel_ as the only one. It's quite reasonable to believe that a randomly chosen person is not gay, so you can't just pick someone and think, he is too, fine, I'm not alone. Statistics are not enough, real concrete persons count. ~~~ jacquesm Given the size of the HN population you could expect 100's to 1000's of people to be gay. It's true that the distribution is such that the chance that someone is gay is low but if you approach 10 people your chances are better than even that at least one of them is gay. Quite a few of them are 'out' in public, google can help you out there. ------ DanielBMarkham John -- congratulations in your quest. I never understood it and even after reading your description don't understand it. Turing had a great mind, but there are a plethora of people with great minds who were killed by society in some fashion or another because of being different. The Holocaust comes to mind. We could take up reams of paper with people treated just like Turing. What real impact does this have aside from making people feel like they did something of value? I really do not understand -- but that's not important. Obviously this was great for both you and your supporters. I can respect the fact that everybody has different motivations and values, some of which are fathomless. So while I can't share your joy, I can be happy for you. Congratulations in accomplishing your goal! ------ drivebyacct Well I read two lines and stopped: "I’m not, so what was it that drove me to stand up for a gay man?" Is that a serious question? Who the hell wouldn't stand up for a man who was chemically castrated for being a homosexual. I mean, what reasonable non- crazy-fundie person would _support_ that? Wow, I kept reading: "Many of those people who wrongly assumed I was gay would probably be surprised to learn that I campaigned for Alan Turing despite having my own discomfort with homosexuality. I don’t have clear thoughts about whether gay marriage or civil partnerships are better; I’m conflicted about whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt." Seriously? This is worthy of being the top article on HN. _Shudder._ Not rhetoric I'm proud of in the least. ~~~ sophacles Honestly, I'm more impressed with someone campaigning for what is logically right (even tho they have emotional hangups) than I am with someone who follows their emotions for the "right thing" but can't explain why it is right. The latter is just a result of luck. I have had my own stupid emotional discomforts. None of them were logical, but all of them were easier to deal with when I was open about it. Get off your high horse. Edit: strike that "get off your high horse" bit, its too reactionary of me -- sorry about that. ~~~ drivebyacct I suppose. I just don't like the fact that the article _exists solely_ based on the premise that a nonhomosexual has to justify speaking up for a homosexual. It's that precise dichotomy and separation that we need to be moving away from, not framing entire blog posts about. ~~~ caryme I mean, I don't like it either, but it's not at all uncommon for straight men to avoid standing up for gay men for fear of being perceived as gay. I don't see the article as a defense of JGC's sexuality in any way, but as a challenge to stand up for justice even of those who are different from us.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What our home pages are really saying (a dialog) - tortilla http://bokardo.com/archives/what-our-home-pages-are-really-saying/ ====== dasht I like that post because it highlights a complaint I've quietly had when I look at a lot of sites (both start-ups and established). Here's a wish-list (vis a vis commercial web sites): Please... Always have an "about" link that tells me the name of the company, its corporate form, and who non-anonymously stands up to represent the owners. I want to to know, before we do business, that you are legitimate and not hiding behind a veil of anonymity. Please include a "contact" page that includes a regular ol' email link, a valid street address, and if at all practical, a phone number. I want to know, before we do business, how far I have to walk to knock on your door in case there's a problem. Please have a page that explains, concisely yet substantially, what the new site/service does. I _do not_ mean "Do you have problem X? We solve X!". I mean a non-salesy, short guide: "If you sign up you get Y. Y performs function Z." And as long as I'm wishing for candy and nuts: please have a page for technical types explaining in broad terms how the service functions. Now, I understand that this can be sensitive. You don't want to give away the recipe for your "secret sauce". Still, you can hopefully tell me enough technical info to give me a realistic model of what it is that you propose I use. For me, when I look at a new or new-to-me service, those are the questions I'm hoping to find answered in the first couple of minutes of looking. When a few of them aren't answered by the site, I tend to give up on the site after just a few minutes.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
QDirStat – Treemap Visualization of Directory Statistics - vinchuco https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat ====== vilya Gosh there are a lot of these programs, aren't there? For some reason I find it really hard to read these tree map visualisations. I know the theory and all that, but for me they just aren't an intuitive way of displaying that kind of information. For me a radial graph (i.e. pie chart like) is much easier to grok - I don't even have to think about it, I just get it. Seems like there must be plenty of people who don't think the same way though, given how many different tree map disk viewers there are out there! For what it's worth I use Diskitude ([http://madebyevan.com/diskitude/](http://madebyevan.com/diskitude/)) on Windows and Daisy Disk ([https://daisydiskapp.com/](https://daisydiskapp.com/)) on Mac. Both are great! ~~~ ComputerGuru The DaisyDisk website is surprisingly ugly and does not do their app justice. Here's what the app looks like: [http://www.creativeapplications.net/wp- content/uploads/2009/...](http://www.creativeapplications.net/wp- content/uploads/2009/07/DaisyDisk-4.png) Ever since I've ditched macOS I've been waiting to find a similarly designed app for Windows. EDIT: Just tried Diskitude, but it's unfortunately nothing like DaisyDisk. It doesn't do the same drill-down DD does. ~~~ blurspline You could try this Electron-based app SpaceRadar that should run on Windows, Mac, Linux [https://github.com/zz85/space- radar](https://github.com/zz85/space-radar) It has some support for sunburst graphs, flame charts, and treemaps (disclaimer, author here) ------ jpalomaki Similar tool for windows: [https://windirstat.net](https://windirstat.net) ~~~ mmozeiko Here's WizTree which is similar to WinDirStat but runs much faster: [http://antibody- software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-f...](http://antibody- software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-finds-the-files-and-folders-using- the-most-disk-space-on-your-hard-drive/) ~~~ arunc Is this open source? ~~~ jpalomaki Yes, on Source forget: [https://sourceforge.net/p/windirstat/code/ci/default/tree/](https://sourceforge.net/p/windirstat/code/ci/default/tree/) ------ JepZ For Linux/KDE: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filelight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filelight) I find it looks better and it has some dolphin (file manager) integration. ~~~ notyourwork Any other linux based options? Perhaps for gnome? ~~~ notatoad Baobab ships with gnome (in the menus as "disk usage analyzer") ------ 0x0 Similar tool for native macOS: [http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/](http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/) ~~~ dawnerd Another good one (paid) [https://daisydiskapp.com/](https://daisydiskapp.com/) Slightly prefer it over the other visualizers as you can easily stage files to be deleted. ~~~ ComputerGuru _and_ it doesn't look like it was designed in the late 80s. ------ tga Similar tool for Gnome, with a funky radial graph instead of a treemap: [https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/DiskUsageAnalyzer](https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/DiskUsageAnalyzer) ------ binaryman2 I agree that treemaps are confusing Thats why I prefer to use: Directory Report [http://www.file-utilities.com](http://www.file-utilities.com) It looks just like the MS-Explorer but always shows the folder size ------ j_s The only tool I've found to show usage in Dropbox folders (that still works) is an Android app: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cgollner.u...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cgollner.unclouded) ------ igitur Anything like this, but ncurses based? ~~~ makmanalp I use ncdu ([https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu](https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu)) all the time, no treemap though. ~~~ igravious Screenshots: [https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu/scr](https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu/scr) ~~~ platz ncdu works well and is pretty fast. ~~~ digi_owl Yeah i use it all the time and is one of the programs that makes me question my use of GUIs for anything beyond media players and web browsing. ~~~ igravious Terminal based music players: [https://opensource.com/life/16/8/3-command- line-music-player...](https://opensource.com/life/16/8/3-command-line-music- players-linux) cmus, MOC, and mpg123/ogg123 I know what you mean. I'm building a terminal-based semantic web app after having started out in Ruby on Rails because I was finding I couldn't think about the app itself because of all the web stuff getting in the way not to mention prevaricating about what front-end framework to use and to Webpack or not Webpack and on and on. I would use a console version of Rails in a flash.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A book about how to write an interpreter from scratch - mehmetcoskun Hello,<p>My name is Mehmet. I am the author of "Practical Interpreter Construction".<p>I am not writing for promoting my book.<p>It is a more story and a contra attitude than just announcing yet another book about compilers and interpreters.<p>There are some books teaching compilers. When I decide to write an interpreter from scratch, I first googled about compiler books.<p>I bought some of them but liked none of them because of the heavy theory they include. Also, I don't think that a practical programmer needs to read an even difficult to carry book.<p>After some struggle and seek and then cancel, I found out James Hague's blog post exactly about what books to read if one wants to write an interpreter or compiler, here it is:<p>http://prog21.dadgum.com/30.html<p>As he suggests, I have read Jack Crenshaw's famous "Let's Build a Compiler" text, http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw<p>It really is amazing text about compilers.<p>I have learned a lot by reading Mr. Crenshaw's text.<p>Despite it is a gem and it does teach a lot, there is something that puts off many in his text: it is target platform is Motorola 68K, besides, it does not teach much about writing an interpreter. It is more a compiler book.<p>Then afterwards, I decided to write a book about writing an interpreter from scratch.<p>There is parsing and interpreting expressions, strings, code comments, variables, arrays, while loops, if-else case and functions in the book.<p>It is heavy-theory free and a practical book. You don't have to be a computer science student to read it.<p>Any programmer can read it.<p>I hope I will help many programmers to write their own interpreters and learn how interpreters work.<p>It is a very useful mental process and it really is fun!<p>Here is the book link on Leanpub.com:<p>http://leanpub.com/pic<p>Greetings,<p>Mehmet Emin Coskun. --- ====== bbayer First of all congrats for your release. As a Turkish computer engineer my only suggestion is to release a Turkish version and talk to major publishers. Turkish computer science sources don't go beyond from application tutorials. We really need quality content to teach people real computer science. Even computer science students graduate from school without having single idea of what automata is. So please make it Turkish and get it released. ~~~ mehmetcoskun Sure, why not to make it in Turkish. Thank you for the feedback.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PlayCanvas goes open source - hartcw http://blog.playcanvas.com/playcanvas-goes-open-source/ ====== junkilo I analyzed their JS math library (2013) and was pleasantly surprised (optimized, lean object design). Love what PlayCanvas is doing. They seem committed to the community and their people. ------ pron Seems like another WebGL game engine was open sourced recently: [http://news.turbulenz.com/post/49430669886/turbulenz- engine-...](http://news.turbulenz.com/post/49430669886/turbulenz-engine-goes- open-source) ------ drhayes9 Anyone able to compare this with Phaser ([http://phaser.io/](http://phaser.io/))? ~~~ daredevildave Broadly speaking phaser is 2D, PlayCanvas is 3D. (Though you can always do 2D stuff in 3D) ------ ddod Does anyone have experience with using this versus THREE.js? ~~~ dtf I haven't used it, but I remember looking at the minified code a while back when it was first released. It looks very well done, by someone who has excellent game-engine design experience. ~~~ mrmoka Developers behind the engine are actually have major experience in such companies as Activision, Sony, EA, Rebelion, and few others, so yeah, they know their stuff :) ------ _random_ Any JavaScript engine is always open source. I mean, it is not illegal to view page sources? ~~~ adamman Just because you can view the source code does not mean that it is open source.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
I’ve used an app that detects % male vs. female voices speaking in meetings - DoreenMichele https://twitter.com/choo_ek/status/1099737652167729152 ====== belorn I would be happy to be wrong, but I will predict that in the average meeting of ten people with equal distribution, about 2/3 of the meeting will be from a single person talking which is male, and the person talking least in the meeting will also be male.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: My book on JavaScript Application Design (updated) - bevacqua http://www.manning.com/bevacqua ====== magentaplacenta This actually looks pretty interesting (from the table of contents). Since I'm the first commenter, how about throwing me a bone with a free ebook copy?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
If I was CEO of Posterous - Tawheed http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/06/if-i-was-ceo-of-posterous/ ====== idoh And that is why TK isn't the CEO. The whole campaign is really smart and well executed. On the PR front it is generating huge buzz. On the business side it makes perfect sense - expand the market from people who want to start a new blog to also include people who already have blogs. ~~~ Tawheed Just to be clear, I think the campaign is really smart as well. But, my article has nothing to do with that -- my article talks about what the bigger vision around Posterous is (i.e whether they should strive to be yet another blogging platform or try to take a different approach to revolutionize personal publishing) // I made this clearer in the post. ------ jasonlbaptiste Posterous is blogging that just f'n works. My mom uses it and it suits her great. Wordpress was just a bit much for her. The support is great too. I actually got a kick when she said: "That nice fella Gary helped me out". Wordpress rocks too, but they're different things. I feel like there are a lot of people out there using Wordpress that would love something simpler like what Posterous offers, but just don't know it's there. If I were CEO of Posterous, I would be doing the same exact thing. ~~~ edanm This agrees with the OP. As I understand it, he's basically saying "don't go after people who have blogs and convert them, go after people who would start a blog if it wasn't so complicated". ------ jamiequint I strongly disagree with this opinion. First, the reason that people make big money coming up with custom solutions for Wordpress is because its a lot of work to get things to the state of "exactly what the client wants". It would be a distraction and a waste of time to pursue the creation of many "starter" niches. I find it kind of ironic that the author suggests that they step back and take a look at the forest while suggesting they take a more myopic view of Posterous as a business. The reason Posterous isn't a blog consulting company is the same reason Facebook isn't a gaming company but is rather a platform for gaming companies (and many other things). Second, it doesn't fit into the goal of Posterous as a company which from my external perspective appears to be making blogging stupidly easy and accessible for anyone. Third, scale first. Its easy to attack verticals later once you already own the space (in this case blogging). ------ acl It's "If I _were_ the CEO of Posterous." Sorry to be the grammar pedant, but this one always bugs me. ~~~ itrekkie Although this bugs me too, it's not incorrect. It's perfectly understandable in American English, and "correct" in other varieties of English. ~~~ shasta They mean different things, no? If I were CEO, I'd do things differently. If I was CEO, I don't remember it. ~~~ mattmaroon I'd say you'd have a bright future as a copy editor waiting for you if you desired, but I don't think there are any bright futures left in publishing. ~~~ swombat What about that big furnace up ahead? Seems pretty bright from here. It's getting nearer/brighter all the time, too! ------ megamark16 Considering how often we hear about WordPress sites getting hacked, this campaign may really hit home for a large number of bloggers. ------ petervandijck I can't believe that _all_ these companies don't make it easier to import. A really (but really) great Wordpress importer must surely make your service attractive to the millions of WP'ers out there? Writing importers for similar services is a great idea if you want to grow. ~~~ mattmaroon Actually they do. Most every blog service has both an import and and export, and even though the resulting XML isn't formatted identically, usually an export from any major service will import successfully into any other major service. FWIW: I've done imports between blogspot, movable type, and wordpress a number of times with rarely a problem. I suppose it's sort of diabolically evil of Posterous here. They're really just releasing a feature every other blogging service has had for years, but doing it in a way that's great PR. ------ adrianwaj John Mayer's said that Twitter's out and Tumblr's in. <http://www.geekosystem.com/john-mayer-twitter-tumblr/> Ashton Kutcher's supposedly "directly responsible" for <http://nowmov.com> existing. (cross between Chatroulette interface and a Tweetmeme for YouTube videos.) [http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/07/yc-funded-nowmov-sit- back-r...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/07/yc-funded-nowmov-sit-back-relax- and-watch-an-endless-stream-of-youtube-videos/) If I were Posterous, I'd create a Nowmov for Posterous posts, and then go find some high-profile feedback. edit: the other thing I'd be interested in seeing on Posterous is an easy way to cross post to other people's group blogs, and some incentive to do so. For example, I created a group blog <http://hackerbra.in>, but there are no users to post to it. However, there are posts by hackers on Posterous that could be submitted to it; the question is how to make that worthwhile? Could it be automatically done, eg I choose some blogs and have the new blog fill up with posts automagically? ------ jholloway I have always felt like Posterous was a solution in search of a problem. I don't have anything against them, I just prefer other platforms better. Also, I'd love to see some numbers, but I would bet that a far larger number of people post via the web or other methods than do by email, despite that being its original purpose. ------ aik Funny - this post and these comments brought me to import my family wordpress blog into posterous and pitch it to my wife. We'll see what she says. ------ revorad I'm guessing they are not interested in selling to small businesses and professionals; they probably want to sell a high-priced "enterprise version" to corporates and keep it free for the masses. They may possibly make money off the free blogs with some ad network (perhaps they have something cooking there and that's why they don't allow google ads). </speculation> ------ samratjp What I find most useful about Posterous is how dead simple it is to share media from email for virtually painless hosting! The only way anyone could beat that is to use Dropbox!! <wishful thinking>Now, imagine if you could just post to your blog by putting something in your Dropbox folder. Hmmm, I hope you posterous guys are listening.</wishful thinking> ~~~ brlewis You can post photos to <http://ourdoings.com/> via dropbox. It's a blog-like photo sharing site. ------ rameshnid That's like sailing on 10 boats and one will sink :) 10 industries is a lot of work. The idiosyncrasies will kill you. Be as generic as possible. I say 'Go after Wordpress' ------ dnsworks Is this so different than say Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" advertisements? Posterous believes they have a system which has a lower barrier of entry for users of these other platforms. The only thing different is that they are taking a more direct advertising route than word of mouth, and are using tactics and advertising styles that you usually only see in much larger companies. Good on them for aiming high!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Plurk relaunches with Twitter/Facebook like service - pkrumins http://blog.plurk.com/2009/04/01/plurk-to-relaunch-as-bitter/ ====== froo I understand this is posted on April 1st, so that it could be classified as a prank - but shouldn't it at least be funny? This just sounds like a vilifying rant posted conveniently timed to look like an April Fool's	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Shared Emotional States in Ravens - pseudolus https://www.pnas.org/content/116/23/11547 ====== shishy Anyone have access to the full paper? ~~~ triangulum Also have a look at Sci-Hub.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Soon, California kids will have the right to delete things they said online - bitops http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/soon-california-kids-will-have-the-right-to-delete-things-they-said-online/ ====== sehugg Bill text (I think): [http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/sen/sb_0551-0600/sb_568...](http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/sen/sb_0551-0600/sb_568_bill_20130903_enrolled.htm)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
I'm a linux noob, that thought he knew something, got destroyed in an interview. - bsdpunk http://bsdpunk.blogspot.com/2011/03/linux-job-interview-from-hell.html ====== X-Istence Honestly, from the sound of it you just hadn't been paying attention over the years as you were learning all of the commands, it seems like Google is your go to tool of choice. I've been there, and I had to stop myself. The fastest way to learn something is the hard way using the man pages, as looking up the same argument to a program over and over is going to get it stuck in your head much faster than anything else. At least for me, I will qualify the previous statement with that. I too have written countless of scripts to do meaningless tasks, it is one of the reasons why I became a computer programmer, I'd rather spend 2 hours writing a script that works in all corner and edge cases and never have to do the same menial task again than spend the 30 minutes it would normally take to just finish the problem (knowing that it would most likely come up again, and it would once again take me 30 minutes ...). The thing is that certain things should start to sink in even while using scripts. I have scripts to set up an entire FreeBSD system in under 30 minutes with custom software deployed, configured and running, but if it ever doesn't work right I know exactly how to fix it because I know all of the steps in that script. \-- It comes down to some rote memorisation and the rest becomes ingrained to the point that you can yell the commands across a cubicle to your colleague. I recently learned git inside and out, and now have no problem while standing next to a co-worker dictating exactly what they need to type to get it to do what needs to be done. I'm the same way with FreeBSD system administration (Linux not so much, but I can find my way around an Debian and Ubuntu box). I started playing with Linux and FreeBSD when FreeBSD 4.6.2 was released (I ran an open email relay on my home cable box at age 13 (I am now 22), by mistake). Some of the things you have mentioned in your blog post are some of the simplest concepts of Linux. ------ slashclee This post would be so much more useful if it had a list of the questions asked, what the wrong answers given were, and an explanation of why the answers were wrong, along with links to the information needed to come up with the right answer. ~~~ bsdpunk I tried to put as many of them up here: [http://bsdpunk.blogspot.com/2011/03/questions-and- aftermath....](http://bsdpunk.blogspot.com/2011/03/questions-and- aftermath.html) ~~~ calloc Here is some trivia for you, seeing as how your blog name is bsdpunk: "shutdown -r" on FreeBSD runs the rc.shutdown script{s}, whereas "reboot" does not. See this thread: [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- stable/2010-Decem...](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- stable/2010-December/060537.html) ------ delineal I dislike interview questions that sound like they were pulled from some industry certification test. What's the point in asking people questions that test their memory? Today the fact is that we DO have Google and other tools at our fingertips. If it means that we have fewer definitions and facts committed to memory, so be it. It's not a bad thing to look up information on an as-needed basis. The information will be fresher and likely accompanied by recent developments. Even doctors do this when they're about to perform an operation they haven't done in a while.... they'll look up the procedure beforehand and refresh their memory to ensure that they follow the current standard of care. Interview questions should focus on exposing problem-solving ability and getting to know the person to determine whether he/she is a good fit for your existing team. ~~~ th0ma5 Wanted to come here and say this! It seems to me a lot of this is to inflate the ego of the interviewer almost. ------ alexgartrell I've definitely been in that awesome "hopelessly incapable of answering an 'easy' interview question" situation before. The worst time was when I was interviewing with RethinkDB, and one of their guys asked me a dynamic programming question. Did I know that dynamic programming was fair game for any technical interview? Absolutely. Did I prepare for it at all? Nope (which is not to claim that I would have aced it with some amount of preparation -- I just know I couldn't have done worse). I remember thinking as I was leaving "Well it was cool of them to buy me lunch, and the weather's nice." Later that evening my doubts in my interviewing prowess were confirmed :) Still, awesome guys, hard problems, I encourage you to apply :) <http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/> ------ mfukar Start by 'man kill', dude. And let go of the damn attitude - even your 'I was crushed' post is full of it. ------ hacker-gene Actually, I was impressed how the OP handle his setback and how he took it as a learning experience. == Below was a supposedly reply of mine to the top commenter in Reddit, but keep getting an 504 error message == Not to disagree with you here since this seems to be the sentiment here, but the questions (ie. boot process/signals) he was asked was broad and would have shown if the candidate have a solid grasp of Linux fundamentals. Hypothetical situation, say he applied for sysad job in big Linux shop like Google. Describing the boot process would have given the interviewer an idea how well he would recover from a system crashed using a rescue disk. Understanding signals are important for making non-trivial Bash scripts. And describing a symmetric/asymmetric encryption is crucial if one of you job responsibilities is to administer certificates. Not saying the questions are easy, they're not. But if you're applying for something like a Linux sysadmin job, then these questions are good indicator how strong your skills are in this area. ------ Animus7 You've been a cloud admin for over five years and working with Linux for over 20, but you don't know the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption? I'm as arrogant as the worst of them, but this sounds borderline ridiculous. That said, I'm looking forward to see how you're looking to change this. ~~~ bsdpunk Well, I asked the interviewer if by asymmetric he meant something like PKI, and all I got was a frown. And I was like symmetric encryption is just normal. I think I was more caught off guard, as well as just not thinking much about it. I got all the PAM questions right if that helps. Probably doesn't. I feel genuinely humiliated by the whole situation. Seriously in the back of my head I heard my Father's voice: "You done fucked up good, boy" EDIT FOR FATHER QUOTE ~~~ X-Istence The difference is rather simple. (Although I have a feeling that tpatcek will tell me I am wrong on some count) Asymmetric encryption has two parts, a private key and a public key. One encrypts data with a public key and then the only key that can decrypt it is the private key. The private key, as the name suggests, has to stay private and is a secret, whereas your public key you can hand out as you please. In symmetric encryption you have a single key, it is used to both encrypt and decrypt the data, and thus if that single key were to fall into the wrong hands that person could then decrypt the data, whereas with a public key that is not the case. This is a very simplified overview of the differences. ------ asymptotic "In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him." --Ralph Waldo Emerson Humility my man, humility. Everyone's eaten humble pie before; if you don't eat it on a semi-regular basis you're not pushing yourself hard enough. ------ 16s Don't feel too bad about it. Many of those questions are arcane/trivia rather than practical day to day knowledge you must know. Don't get me wrong, it's important to understand concepts (like the encryption question they asked), but knowing off the top of your head how to rm a file named "-f" is not important, but knowing how to _figure out_ how to unlink it is. ~~~ ciupicri You have to run _rm -- -f_ or you can always cheat and use _mc_ (Midnight Commander). ------ bsdpunk Guys I put the questions and my dealing with the situation up here: [http://bsdpunk.blogspot.com/2011/03/questions-and- aftermath....](http://bsdpunk.blogspot.com/2011/03/questions-and- aftermath.html) If you want to check it out ------ IvarTJ I believe Ctrl+D should send end-of-file to console applications, ending the input stream to the program from the shell, while Ctrl+C kills the application. ~~~ personalcompute You're correct. Specifically, Ctrl+d sends EOF, and Ctrl+C sends a signal, SIGINT. ~~~ X-Istence And what does a Ctrl + Z send? ;-) ~~~ tedreed <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGTSTP>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Motocoin whitepaper – a cryptocurrency based on proof-of-play in a 2D game [pdf] - networked https://motocoin-dev.github.io/motocoin-site/Motocoin.pdf ====== tinco edit: I'm sorry I'm a bit tired, this post is needlessly critical. The idea of the paper is fun, and can serve as a source of inspiration for good thought, I myself have enjoyed thinking about proof-of-play for a long time and I still hope I'll think of a way to make it work some day. (/edit) This system is in no significant way distinguishable from proof-of-work systems. Unfortunately the only 'difficulty' introduced here is that the computer has to interact with a physics engine. There's a lot of claims made in the paper but no references to any scientific research. Some examples: The article claims playing the game is hard for a computer, but never says how hard precisely, what's the complexity? The article claims games exist that are easier to play for humans than they are for computers such as Go, obviously for Go this has been shown to likely be false the past week, but also in general. Are there really games that are hard for computers but easy for humans? I played with the idea of a game-based cryptocurrency, as the basis for a MTG like economy in a roguelike game, but failed to come up with any mechanism that would be easier for humans to play than computers in a fundamental way, but I didn't get so serious as to look up scientific work, and neither has the author of this paper. The article claims that should a bot arise that can beat this game like humans can, they can simply increase the difficulty. Can they? he didn't calculate what effects the variables of the game have on the complexity. Who says that if the game becomes more difficult for computers, it is still playable (let alone _fun_ ) for humans? ~~~ jchrisa I'm slowly progressing on Document Coin which is predicated on building value from human relationships rather than CPU time. [http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document- coin/](http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/) To do this we track public keys that have held each coin, and machine learn on the blockchain data. Latest update here [https://qconlondon.com/presentation/hash-histories-toy- block...](https://qconlondon.com/presentation/hash-histories-toy-blockchains- great-danger) ~~~ im3w1l That's a very interesting concept! My prediction is that it will turn into Celebrity Coin very quickly. Which may or may not be a bad thing. Giving incentives for celebrities to endorse his currency sounds like a powerful idea. ------ im3w1l > But in many games (for example Go) humans are still superior to computers. Was this submitted ironically? ------ jordanwallwork Quite frustrating that this currency seems to rely on a game yet the whitepaper never seems to specify what it is. Since the game is supposedly too difficult to write an AI for I'd be extremely curious to hear more about it. (also unfortunate timing mentioning games where humans are superior like 'go' given the current news!) ~~~ yorwba > Unlike other crypto-currencies, mining motocoins > is not a passive process. You will have to play > a 2D motorbike simulation game called Motogame, > which is inspired by ElastoMania. [http://motocoin-dev.github.io/motocoin-site/#mine](http://motocoin- dev.github.io/motocoin-site/#mine) ~~~ zero_iq Given how well games like Mario have been mastered by machine learning algorithms (to beyond expert human levels), I doubt a motocross-maniacs-style side scroller would present too much of a challenge. It would be interesting to see what, if anything, they've changed in the game to make it harder for a computer to play. ------ Animats "Proof of grinding"? This is really a CAPCHA scheme; a task that's easy for humans but hard for computers. But computers are too good at such tasks now. The result has been CAPCHA solving services, both automated [1] and manual.[2] Today's rate: $0.75 for 1000 CAPTCHAs. [1] [http://www.captchatronix.com/](http://www.captchatronix.com/) [2] [https://2captcha.com/](https://2captcha.com/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The App That Reminds You You're Going to Die - asethos https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/when-death-pings/546587/?single_page=true ====== bitadder I for one hope that Silicon Valley's immortality efforts succeed. Notifications induce enough anxiety as they are--I don't need more reminders that, as things stand, I am likely going to die. ~~~ nicolashahn Then again, you don't want to wake up 80 years old and realize you forgot to live. That might not be a problem for you personally but it is for a lot of people. I fear that more than actually dying. ------ pvsukale3 No. I don't want multiple anxiety attacks in a day. ------ ghostcluster Everything about this is just obnoxious posturing. ------ nehushtan This too shall pass	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Use Vagrant to launch AWS boxes - tswicegood http://www.hashicorp.com/blog/preview-vagrant-aws.html ====== malandrew Very cool. Out of curiosity, are there any plans to make it easy to provision/create AWS boxes securely via chroot via Eric Hammond's approaches at Alestic? Currently it is a very tedious process to make a secure image on Amazon so that no credentials leak into history and whatnot, it is a tedious process. Making this easy would go a long way to making it trivial to use vagrant to safely publish public boxes for EC2. More details on this problem here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4457336> Examples of Eric Hammond's process at Alestic: <http://alestic.com/alestic- git/> <https://github.com/alestic/alestic-git> ------ statik This is going to be very very useful! It's going to make setting up a staging environment much easier, since we are already using vagrant for dev environments. I wonder if there will be any support for assigning Elastic IPs. ------ sferik This looks awesome! I can hardly wait for Vagrant 1.1 to be released.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Deep cyberattacks cause millions in losses for US banks - thinkalone http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/082313-deep-cyberattacks-cause-millions-in-273121.html ====== glasz i feel sooo bad for those banks. they really do suffer. but hey, don't fix the bug. sue the attackers!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Comprehensive and biased comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD [pdf] - oherrala https://www.bsdfrog.org/pub/events/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf ====== jcranmer One of the nice things about this is the last section (if you can bear to read that long). Both people comment on the strengths of the opponent's BSD: OpenBSD is complemented on "tackling very important project [sic] which would probably have never happened otherwise" (e.g., OpenSSH), particularly also the fact that OpenBSD cares to see their projects ported to !BSD (e.g., Linux). Meanwhile, FreeBSD is complemented on "its [sic] a real “enterprise” oper- ating system and I think it is slowly filling the spot left by Solaris." At the end of the day, both OpenBSD and FreeBSD are niche systems. They don't have the popularity of Linux, and they probably never will. But that's not a problem. Both of them are major operating systems that do innovate, and hence they're worth paying attention to. That's where the compliment of FreeBSD as becoming Solaris's successor is really telling--Solaris was the operating system that brought us DTrace and ZFS, and it was FreeBSD who I believe had the first container system (jail). ~~~ _delirium I can see FreeBSD picking up a good part of the ex-Solaris marketshare in terms of users, but have they really taken over the role in terms of development? As far as I can tell, ZFS in particular has its canonical upstream development in the Illumos repository (Illumos is the successor to OpenSolaris), which FreeBSD pulls from, rather than development having really moved to FreeBSD as the new canonical home. FreeBSD developers are certainly involved in contributing code upstream, but then, so are a number of other developers, including from the major Illumos vendors (OmniTI and Joyent), and even some from ZFSonLinux. ~~~ RantyDave SmartOS also has working Linux compatible Zones. Last time I looked, FBSD was a way short of this... ~~~ _delirium Even without the Linux-compatible aspect, Illumos Zones are considerably ahead of FreeBSD jails these days imo. Better tooling, resource limiting infrastructure, etc., especially if you want to run multi-tenant with untrusted tenants. Jails did pioneer the concept, though. ------ Mark_B FYI - Abstract This paper will look at some of the differences between the FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems. It is not intended to be solely technical but will also show the different "visions" and design decisions that rule the way things are implemented. It is expected to be a subjective view from two BSD developers and does not pretend to represent these projects in any way. We don't want it to be a troll talk but rather a casual and friendly exchange while nicely making fun of each other like we would do over a drink. Of course, we shall try and hit where it hurts when that makes sense. Obviously, we both have our personal subjective preferences and we will explain why. Showing some of the weaknesses may encourage people to contribute in some areas. Most of the topics discussed here could warrant their own paper and talk and as such some may not get the deep analysis they deserve. This is a totally biased talk from two different perspectives. ------ tachion While you're here, have you donated[0][1] yet? :) You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation 4 and Nitendo Switch, your files on FreeNAS and ZFS, your friends on WhatsApp and OpenBSD runs everything else on OpenSSH. ;) So, you may or may not know that, but you need FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they also need you! Every cent counts and so does every contributor, that helps the foundations keep their non-profit status. [0] [https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/](https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/) [1] [https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html](https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html) ~~~ jhlgkhkhil > You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your > games on PlayStation 4 and Nitendo Switch Do Netflix, Nintendo and Sony contribute financially to the FreeBSD project? They are the ones making money off the project after all. ~~~ boomboomsubban Netflix a ton, as others have pointed out. Sony, not that I can see. There was talk of code going upstream, but I never heard more about it. Nintendo hasn't, but people are overselling the "Switch runs FreeBSD" line. A copy of the kernel license was included on the switch, which could mean just one line of code taken technically. From what I've heard, the sys calls don't look like FreeBSD. ~~~ mioelnir I can't recall where I read it, but it said that the Switch likely uses the FreeBSD networking stack running in userland. To me, this makes some sense, since if I remember correctly the 4G/5G/some-future-wireless-thing alliance uses a userland version of the FreeBSD network stack in their reference implementation. ~~~ boomboomsubban From what I've seen, it originated here,and it's only speculation. It does seem likely though. ------ ploek This appears to be a written down version of the talk they gave at FOSDEM: [https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/my_bsd_sucks_less/](https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/my_bsd_sucks_less/) ------ Esau When it comes to the BSDs, here is my impressions of them: NetBSD wants to run everywhere. OpenBSD wants to be secure. DragonFly BSD wants to advanced. FreeBSD wants to be Linux. TrueOS wants to be Ubuntu. (I don't list MacOS because I don't feel that it is a true BSD.) ~~~ JdeBP Beware that this sort of grouping is as superficial and wrong as categorizing people into blondes, brunettes, and redheads. In truth, they _all_ aim to be portable, advanced, and secure, with desktop and server support. And there is plenty of sharing from each to the others. The differences amongst them are, in reality, not so easily pigeonholed. ------ ploggingdev Very interesting read! As mentioned, the wireless and graphics areas are sorely lagging behind GNU/Linux os'. They only have support upto Haswell in the graphics department. Ouch. The priority of both BSDs is clearly not the regular desktop user where wireless and graphics support can be deal breakers. The FreeBSD based PC-BSD (now known as TrueOS) exists, but AFAIK it does not fix the wireless and graphics support situation. Given that GPU based computing is becoming more prevalent with the advent of ML/DL, I wonder if there are efforts to improve support for graphics. (It would have been interesting if a Linux guy also joined the conversation, along with a Windows guy and a MacOS guy.) ~~~ sverige The statement that wireless sucks on both is pretty accurate. I recently got an old ThinkPad specifically to run OpenBSD. I have run OpenBSD on a desktop since 4.8 and a home server since 5.1, but never on a laptop. I got the ThinkPad because I have often heard it is the best supported on OpenBSD. It worked fine on first install, including the Radeon graphics and old Intel WiFi (no -11n, just a/b/g). Used it for about a month. Traveled, tried to log onto a different WiFi, and it couldn't see the router. Got home, and now it couldn't see the home router that it used to work on, though it could see the neighbors' WiFi. Tried everything I could think of, with no luck. I decided to try FreeBSD on it. WiFi worked, graphics worked, but then I broke my su login when I used chsh to change from the stock csh shell to mksh. Since I was already annoyed with some other FreeBSD things, I decided to completely give up and load OpenSUSE (ha!!) on it. Linux makes me want to vomit, but I'll be damned if all the hardware doesn't work like a charm out of the box. It's made me seriously consider learning how to write drivers for the BSDs. ------ tannhaeuser What could be done in order to help the BSDs to become mainstream or more visible as server-side alternative to Linux? I've operated a small FBSD mail server until 2004 (FBSD 4, vinum RAID, sendmail, cyrus IMAP) and was extremely pleased with the performance, robustness and overall coherency of it (though I wouldn't use that stack today). While Linux certainly works well, I'm instinctively against monocultures of any kind or form. With Linux-only containers (Docker and co.) there's now the danger that we're loosing the BSDs terminally as a replacement for Linux. But is the isolation (or lack thereof) and interfacing to the host system provided by Docker/runC/whatever really worth it (compared to portable POSIX-based primitives eg. chroot jails, or modern capabilities-based generalizations of it such as FBSD's capsicum)? It's also odd that a GPL-licensed OS, of all things, is making it to the top in containerland. But then the nominal "default" host OS for Docker (Alpine Linux) uses musl (MIT-licenses libc) rather than glibc. I'm not complaining, and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it legally, but the commercial Docker image ecosystem, to me, has the smell of a GPL-circumvention device of sorts in that many images routinely install the Debian/GNU userland tools on first load. ~~~ eatonphil FreeBSD jails are on a different level in terms of stability (and simplicity, that contributes to stability) compared to Docker. Personally -- having run Docker containers for over a year in testing -- I would take jails over containers in a heartbeat. ~~~ AsyncAwait Yeah, I would take jails over Docker as well, but systemd is just so much better, (more so than jails over Docker in my opinion), than init, that I am hoping for a better tool to come about, the underlying LXC technology appears to be solid. ~~~ tannhaeuser For me, systemd is another reason to move _away_ from Linux actually (or at least not deepen the dependency on Linux-exclusive features). It's not that I think systemd is bad per se, it's just _way_ too monolithic and heavy for my taste (and binary logs and ini files are a no-go for me; if I wanted that, I'd be using Windows). Btw. the BSDs don't use SysV init but the somewhat saner/simpler BSD init (with full-blown service managers as optional add-ons in ports). ~~~ AsyncAwait systemd is not for everyone, but for me is way saner than any other init system, including BSDs init. Writing service files for systemd just makes sense in my mind. There are other aspects for why I do not recommend BSD to anyone who asks, most importantly their licensing and their general stance towards software freedoms, to the point where they are smug and happy when somebody violates the GPL, because "at least they get more users", as well as their relatively little upstream contribution to ZFS despite riding that train as fBSDs signature feature for years, but that's a different discussion altogether. ~~~ tannhaeuser I don't know about BSD being smug and the other things you say. This sounds to me like what could be perceived when reading clickbaity and polarizing articles of the "Linux vs BSD" variety. I'm seeing BSD as a welcome choice/alternative to Linux that I would hate to loose. ~~~ AsyncAwait Yeah, I don't want BSDs to disappear as well, (not likely), but watching this, (among other things) definitely left a bad taste[1]. 1 - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cofKxtIO3Is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cofKxtIO3Is) ------ mrstone I don't understand how this is a paper. It's just two dudes in a chatroom and the 'authors' felt it was necessary to format it with LaTEX? Also, the title has a spelling error in it. ~~~ brynet The authors of the paper are French, it's in the form of a loose transcript of a recent talk given at this years AsiaBSDCon. [https://2017.asiabsdcon.org/program.html.en](https://2017.asiabsdcon.org/program.html.en) "P10A: Comprehensive and biaised comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD" In was probably presented and formatted this way because of tradition, also.. [https://www.openbsd.org/events.html](https://www.openbsd.org/events.html) ~~~ tedunangst "Slides are useless. We want talk transcripts." Here's a transcript. "Take it away, take it away!" ~~~ sverige "Or at least clean up their funny pronunciation and grammar first!" ------ anw Warning: this takes you directly to a PDF which may automatically download (such as on Chrome for Android). — update: the title appears to now reflect that this is a PDF. It did not earlier. ~~~ eriknstr The title already has the pdf tag and I think that's automatic so it was there when you clicked the link also. The server does not send the Content-Disposition [1] header, so if your browser auto-downloads the PDF then either you've made poor choices about your browser config or you have a browser that can't itself show PDFs, in which case you may have made a poor choice of browser. [1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Disposition) ~~~ JadeNB > if your browser auto-downloads the PDF then … you have a browser that can't > itself show PDFs …. Surely a browser that shows PDFs itself downloads them in order to do so? (I don't know for sure what was bothering anw, but I'm often on a limited data connection, and, whether the PDF is displayed in my browser or dropped in the download folder, it hits my data allowance the same.) ~~~ tedunangst If a 100K download is of great concern, it's probably best not to click any link on HN. There are pages that have style sheets bigger than that. ------ donpdonp This paper appears to be an IRC session formatted in LaTEX. It'd be easier to read as text. ~~~ jlgaddis You can easily make your own plain text version [0]: $ wget https://www.bsdfrog.org/pub/events/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf $ pdftotext \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.txt Or, if you prefer HTML [1]: $ pdftohtml -i -nomerge -s \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.html _ETA_ : Surprisingly, the PDF is quite lightweight. File sizes, in bytes: PDF: 118,971 TXT: 90,912 HTML: 384,256 [0]: [http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours- Asia...](http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours- AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.txt) [1]: [http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours- Asia...](http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours- AsiaBSDCon2017-paper-html.html) ~~~ jakebasile I have my issues with HN, but this type of comment is one of parts I relish. Thanks! ~~~ jlgaddis Indeed, learning new little tricks like this is one of the great things about HN! Many times, I get more "value" from the comments than I do the submissions. ------ lacampbell Has anyone run both Linux and BSD on a server? What was your experience? ~~~ julie1 It depends. If you call linux: debian or ubuntu or centOS, even with unsafe defaults freeBSD is secured. Compared to untuntu/debian/centOS freeBSD has got bleeding edge softwares coming from upstream. That is the power of SOURCE distribution. Theses packages being compiled it may suit you. I must admit FLAVORED packages (make.conf templates) make sense. I remember being a linux sysadmins and building my openLDAP/python/php packages from source by hand that were 4 years old with envy wondering WHY?! Since systemd and my migration to BSD I have no regrets. PF, ipfw are way more powerful than any linux firewall tools. I have upstream stable software in the stable distribution. I don't have systemd. I have jails... And I have no religion switching to openBSD for core servers that need security knowing I have very few knowledge costs in doing so. And be it capsicum or privilege dropping I look at linux containers techno as a smoke screen for poor man's security through obfuscation. My advice is be smart: don't trust me, but if you are in between experiment. ------ r0brodz If I was on my rig right now I would definitely convert this PDF to text so everyone could access it. ~~~ jlgaddis Are there common platforms where PDFs are inaccessible? ~~~ r0brodz Not everyone runs GUI DESKTOP. Smartypants ~~~ jlgaddis It was an honest question. My interpretation of your comment was that there was some (not insignificant size) group of people who would be unable to view this document due to some inherent limitation of whatever platform they're using to access the Internet (e.g., some mobile phone OS that can't open PDFs or something similar). If I'm understanding correctly, however, your complaint is either that 1) nobody has provided you with an application to render PDFs on an 80x25 dumb terminal screen or 2) this document wasn't created in the format that you prefer. When you make a conscious decision to not utilize a "GUI DESKTOP" \-- like >99.9% of the rest of the world -- you must be prepared to accept such inconveniences and/or find alternatives that meet your needs. The rest of the world has no burden or obligation to cater to your preferences. (FWIW, in an earlier comment, I posted instructions for converting this PDF to both text and HTML as well as performing the conversion myself and making available those versions of this document. You're welcome.) ------ eriknstr Typo: >but the ports tree is a rolling release not tight to a FreeBSD release should be >but the ports tree is a rolling release not tied to a FreeBSD release ~~~ jlgaddis What is the point of mentioning this here as opposed to, say, e-mailing the authors? With -- at most -- a handful of exceptions (assuming maybe _ajacoutot_ or _bapt_ show up), no one here on HN has the ability to fix this so I really don't see the point. ~~~ aairey Also, I guess he gave up shortly after. There's way more than the single typo ... ~~~ jlgaddis Yeah, I noticed that and that's part of the reason I asked. If one pointed out every typo in this document (as well as all other HN submissions), the signal- to-noise ratio of the comments section would be intolerable.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Walmart Has Made a Genius Move to Beat Amazon - kkcorps https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenmcbride1/2020/01/08/walmart-has-made-a-genius-move-to-beat-amazon/ ====== mswehli I mean, they talk about Walmart like it's the underdog, but its revenue is twice as large as Amazon's (despite its market cap being much lower). While Walmart is much better at sales via physical stores and Amazon is better at online sales, and while Walmart is investing in heavily in it's online platforms, Amazon is investing heavily in in physical stores. So i don't think it's Walmart vs Amazon, it's Walmart and Amazon versuses everyone else. They're both building themselves up to be equal competitors in most ways, leaving everyone else behind. ~~~ brudgers The problem for Amazon is that physical retail comes with higher costs and lower returns than its traditional business. Essentially Amazon is chasing diminishing returns and Walmart is chasing increasing returns. I'd put it this way, online sales increase Walmart's revenue per square foot and retail stores decrease Amazon's revenue per square foot because prime retail space is expensive. Even if Amazon builds out a retail store network, Walmart's basis will generally be much lower because it bought its real-estate long ago. An anecdote to put Walmart's lead in perspective. In the early 1990's, I worked for a subcontractor on one of Walmart's distribution centers. More than a million square feet in a cow pasture strategically between Tampa, Orlando, and Ocala. Walmart probably acquired the land during the S&L crisis when _commercial_ real-estate prices cratered. If Walmart floated a thirty year note, the title would be just about clear now. In the interim, the markets the distribution center could serve have grown massively. But the way real-estate works means that there aren't any better physical addresses than there were back then. ------ mimixco This is truly brilliant and an example of using your core competency to compete better. Wal-Mart made it where they are today by vastly improving logistics. Headquarters knew when one tube of toothpaste left a store before Amazon even sold toothpaste. I think this idea could keep Wal-Mart in the game for a long time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Instagram API rate limits - nickfanilov I use some self developed script to get info about my posts and followers. Recently i discovered that Instagram changed rate limits for my app. I see following info in headers:<p>x-ratelimit-limit: 200<p>I learned Instagram blog and page with changes but found no mentions about any changes since Oct 1, 2017.<p>Is this new limit related only to my token or to entire platform? Could you check your token? ====== fjones11 The word around Twitter (some public, a lot more backchannel) is that this is a global change, an unannounced acceleration in the deprecation planned for later this year and next. Rate limits dropped from 5,000 to 200 per hour for everyone. ------ henrypray Crazy that Facebook would incorporate this change with no prior notice - on a holiday weekend no less. Surprised at the lack of outrage/news on this as I assume it impacts most 3rd party Instagram apps.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google's Dataproc Managed Spark and Hadoop Service Now GA - gw5815 http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/02/Google-Cloud-Dataproc-managed-Spark-and-Hadoop-service-now-GA.html ====== ceocoder I've been using Dataproc in production for past 3-4 months now. It is quite literally the quickest way I've found of building Hadoop clusters on the go. @gcp team - any plans on integrating Dataproc with Cloud Monitoring?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
With Friend Wekan - xet7 https://medium.com/friendupcloud/with-friend-wekan-707af8d04d9f ====== plassa3 looking forward to seeing this integrated with FriendUP APIs	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Government Tracking How People Move Around in Coronavirus Pandemic - t23 https://www.wsj.com/articles/government-tracking-how-people-move-around-in-coronavirus-pandemic-11585393202 ====== elbelcho Snowden warned against this recently. The government might not give up these new powers after we're done with the virus.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Writings of Leslie Lamport - Anon84 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html ====== jdf Lamport's description of his failures in introducing the Paxos algorithm is a highly amusing story: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#lamport-paxos) For those that don't know, Paxos is one of the most important algorithms in distributed systems, so it's amazing to see that it wasn't even published for 8 years due to the author's ... odd structuring of the problem. ~~~ chubot Whenever you have a good idea, you have to bash people over the head with it. I guess he tried that with the Indiana Jones thing and it failed. He says Butler Lampson was one of the few people who noticed its significance. But the problem is that when you have a BAD idea you also may find yourself bashing people over the head with it :) I wonder if he will win the Turing Award for Paxos. Awhile ago I thought it would be deserved, but I also feel like the full state machine is a bit awkward and heavy-handed for a lot of distributed systems problems (especially distributed systems over WAN, which I think is more interesting these days). I like the Bloom/CRDT work. And Raft is a simpler algorithm when you need strong consensus. ~~~ mjb The core of Raft appears isomorphic to Paxos, with the addition of clearly explained and well-specified details for extending it into a working consensus system. It's cool and useful work, and is likely to be influential in the long run, but doesn't reduce the significance of Paxos at all. Similarly, CRDTs are a useful and interesting area of research, very applicable to many real-world problems, but they aren't the same problems Paxos solves. You also can't ignore his other work in logical clocks, the bakery algorithm, the Chandy-Lamport algorithm, and TLA+. ------ cia_plant "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" is among the best papers I've ever read, many other great pieces here as well. ~~~ zzzcpan Yeah, it's kind of one of the first things to read on distributed systems too. ------ keithpeter _" I was a TeX user, so I would need a set of macros. I thought that, with a little extra effort, I could make my macros usable by others.[..]"_ Read the summary for paper number 69. Many here may recognise the syndrome, the punchline being the last sentence. As I use LaTeX a little, I'm grateful. ------ nullc All of my best ideas, Lamport invented them first. Lots of great and important ideas and the lucid writing required to convey them to others. ------ discreteevent "Computer scientists collectively suffer from what I call the Whorfian syndrome the confusion of language with reality. Since these devices are described in different languages, they must all be different. In fact, they (..all computation basically..)are all naturally described as state machines." ------ t1m I think it's a crime the editors failed to recognize the fundamental importance of Lamort's ground breaking paper "On Hair Color in France". [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/h...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/hair.pdf) ~~~ f137 A seminal study. It's a pity they did not publish a follow-up on the selection criteria (or did they?) ------ ecesena This should be made as a service ------ luckydude I'm surprised at how little traction this gotten here. You all like to think that you have it covered. This guy did a lot of the work that is the basis for what you do. Go read it. If you don't understand how to do time in a distributed system you suck. He figured it out before you were born. Edit: sorry, should have read the comments first.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Get Venture: Who You Should Submit You Executive Summary To - dawie http://getventure.typepad.com/markpeterdavis/2007/07/who-you-should-.html ====== donna thanks, good tips.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: 3 Artisan cheeses for 30 flat fee - collegeportalme If i told you, for a 30 dollar flat fee we will deliver 3 artisan cheeses you will never find in your supermarket to your door, how would you feel?<p>What if i throw in hand-baked crackers? ====== anigbrowl I would feel like walking the two blocks to my local cheese shop, although I have to say that my local supermarkets carry a surprisingly decent selection of specialty cheeses. Now, I'm in the bay Area which is one of the foodier parts of the country, so you might have a market in outside of major urban centers where the range of food choices is a lot narrower. However, there are quite a few vendors in this space already. Gilt Taste specializes in discount online shopping for foodies: <http://www.gilttaste.com/> ------ kaolinite I'd go for that, though I live in the UK so I would be wary of how they were to be transported. The hand-baked crackers would be a nice bonus too. Maybe have a few different prices though? Not everyone would pay $30 for cheese.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
5 Things an Apple TV Must Do - bretthellman http://mashable.com/2012/12/12/5-things-apple-tv-needs/ ====== headShrinker No I don't want a second screen seamlessly attached to my TV. No Apple does not have to play nice with providers. Apple is a behemoth and a bully. They likely make more money on content than any other company in the world. If one cable provider, plays hardball, Apple can go to another. This is the iPhone all over again. Verizon turned down Apple, ATT knew it had to or it would come back to bite them. It bit Verizon for Three years after. Verizon publicly said we would like to be selling iPhones only two years after launch. Now you have a larger playing field of cable operators, they all have antiquated systems, and Apple is going to revolutionize one of them. The rest will be begging to have a piece of the pie within three years. The only difference is the monopolistic practices of the cable operators coverage. This article seems to miss the point of innovation when approaching the current TV climate. Adding needless features is not innovation. Changing the way we viewed a problem by solving it in seemingly unheard of way is innovation. To paraphrase ford, 'If I ask people what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse"'. ------ DigitalSea To be quite honest I am not sold on the idea that home TV will be revolutionised any time soon. The television niche is corned heavily, some would argue the mobile phone market was cornered heavily when Apple introduced the iPhone, but I can't honestly see what Apple can do that connecting up an XBOX or media PC to a 55" LED flat screen can't already give you. Apple might be able to win with content, but they'd need to onboard a few notable networks like AMC and HBO to get decent content but even then the problem of networks already licencing content to sites like Hulu, Netflix and launching their own online distribution sites. If it were that simple, Apple would have already entered the market a long time ago. It was rumoured Steve was working on the problem, but the fact nothing has come to fruition might mean that they either don't have a solution or don't see any viable means of entering the market.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Kanban can not save you from the engineering death spiral - bdehaaff http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-engineering-death-spiral ====== lmm Huh? I'm pretty sure Kanban helps with all of these. Why are we building this feature? With a strict limit on work in progress, someone must have explicitly decided that it was more important than all the other features in your backlog. Sure, you can still disagree with their weighting, but at least it forces them to prioritize, rather than delaying the product with a kitchen sink of everyone's ideas. We can't release until quality is better? If you keep cards in progress until they're released (and you should), you very quickly reach a point where you _have_ to release, or it's simply impossible to do any more work. In fact this is pretty much the core problem Kanban was meant to solve. I'm blocked? A blocked card is filling up a valuable work-in-progress slot, and a manager should notice very quickly. If particular issues keep blocking several cards, that means the manager is seeing those same issues every day; sooner or later they should take notice. ~~~ acdha You can't solve social problems with dogma. Every single thing you mentioned above will work if it's done right but if you're in a toxic, poorly-managed environment each of those assumptions is wrong. It is absolutely the case that you will find managers who make everything priority 1, ignore problems for far too long, keep piling features into dreadnaught-sized releases, etc. The only thing which can change that is a different manager – either because the previous one is sacked or because the development team threatens to resign en masse unless they are given enough control to do their jobs responsibly. ~~~ lmm > It is absolutely the case that you will find managers who make everything > priority 1, ignore problems for far too long, keep piling features into > dreadnaught-sized releases, etc. The only thing which can change that is a > different manager But Kanban _doesn 't let them_. You are required to prioritize upcoming cards in a linear order, not equally. Limiting work in progress is literally the definition of Kanban. If your manager won't do that, it's not that Kanban isn't solving your problems, it's that your manager isn't adopting Kanban. ~~~ JimboOmega What happened for us is we tried to adopt it, but it was just so unworkably at odds with our current process, it got mostly ignored. The manager had no hope to prioritize and minimize work in progress. As a developer I spent more time managing tasks than coding, as it was. For instance - sending out an email explaining how this task needs requirements, that task needs database work, and X, Y, and Z are all done but QA can't test them because we can't get a deploy in because.... etc. The manager who tried to implement also struggled valiantly against these systemic issues, but he was powerless - a higher power than him had decided that QA (for instance) had to work on project Y _right now_ , and there would be no testing for a few weeks, and so things just fill up. "I have nothing to work on and I am forbidden from improving quality" was a _very_ common state to be in. One solution that was attempted was to create more queues that could be worked on for different parts of the app, or to create more buckets... The point is, he was very aware of our problems, but Kanban couldn't fix them. I don't know what could. When stories got blocked, I definitely made him aware... so the visibility was there with and without Kanban. ~~~ bdehaaff I would suggest the core issue was that you did not have the freedom to go get the important work down and be responsible for it. Too often work is subdivided so no one actually owns anything important -- because the bits are too small. ~~~ JimboOmega That's a very interesting observation. I've always been taught that breaking things down as small as possible is good - easier to estimate, easier to understand, easier to track. You don't want to give a developer a week long task - that turns into two weeks, for instance. There just isn't the visibility. I'd agree, there's a huge issue of none of the work feeling important, and an issue of Developers having no real power in the process (other than to unilaterally dictate how long we thought things would cost, strangely enough). But is it a result of subdividing tasks too small? I'm not sure; it's an interesting concept to explore. ~~~ derefr I find that the best thing that's ever happened to my task-delegation is Service-Oriented Architecture. You break a project down into a tree of tasks-- then find the nodes are the most weakly coupled, and call each such subtree a "service." Each service gets assigned to one developer to build and own. Each developer then publishes a protocol/API for their service, and other developers--instead of needing to talk to them to consume their service--just consume its API. This means each service can be developed, tested, mocked, gateway-ed, and made Highly Available in isolation from synchronous/blocking work by other developers. ------ ecesena A friend of mine, CTO at Elfo [1] (a 60-ppl Italian software basically-unknown company) is successfully using Kanban for software development since almost 2 years. Each team/project (6 to 10 developers) has it's own Kanban board, each person has no more than 1-2 tasks/phase and they focus on keeping the phases balanced, i.e. with the same amount of tasks. They're happy since its a light weight way to have a full picture of what's going on. His original notes (in Italian, sorry) [2]. [1] [http://www.elfo.net](http://www.elfo.net) [2] [http://www.robertocappelletti.com/2012/01/kanban/](http://www.robertocappelletti.com/2012/01/kanban/) ~~~ bdehaaff Great. Thanks for sharing this success story. It would be interesting to know if the engineering team is motivated and understands the why they are building what they are. ~~~ ecesena As far as I got a lot. The main reason is that, with limited effort, you see your progress (tasks move). Moreover the management is really enthusiastic of the approach, so they're often showing to guests (like I was) and promoting the activity as something unique of "their guys", so I guess this also makes people proud of what they're doing... ------ karlkfi The real silver bullet behind Kanban has nothing to do with Kanban. It's the desire for continual improvement and willingness to start where you are and improve from there. Anytime you attempt to make a huge process shift you are tempting fate and risking failure. The short term drawbacks to huge change can often stifle the process before it reaches maturity. The trick is to work through the rationalization with the team based on current observable problems and lead them towards self-realization and analysis of their own problems. Most people have ideas of how to make things better, but if you lead them towards the desire for slack, optimizing for the bottleneck, rather than maxing out everyone as if they're all the bottleneck, then you can easily get from there to Kanban-like WIP limits. From there you can adopt other solutions as the problems they tackle are realized. Smart people frequently arrive at similar approaches whenf aced with the same problems, but not always. Your team may find some novel approach that works better for your context, or they may go looking for options and find Kanban. But the goal should begin with being able to communicate process problems, ask how they can be improved, test the potential solutions, and adopt the best ones. Unfortunately, the biggest hinderance to gradual process improvement (once your team is on board) is that software tools tend to offer a "whole solution" and don't have the ability to grow with your team's maturity, unless they're writing it themselves. ~~~ bdehaaff Thanks for the detailed thoughts. I am not sure though that Kanban or an other agile tool can solve the problem when it is one of leadership or direction. Strategy and management do not rise out of the incremental planning bits. ~~~ karlkfi One of management's jobs is to enable and empower the workers. One of the principals that enables Kanban development is that management should not dictate worker process. If management doesn't know that they may be tempted to fix the development problems with more process, which actually disempowers the workers. Adding more dictated process may work in the short term, but it's a tactical fix, not a strategic one. A well run business keeps tactics and strategy in balance, and hopefully delegates the tactics as low as possible, to retain empowerment. Good management acts as a multiplier to worker productivity. Bad management cripples what it's trying to manage. So yes, you need good management, but good management alone does not guarantee success. Management cannot be the source of the solution to every problem. The other bit to take into account is that management can benefit just as much from its own cycle of metrics, feedback and retrospective action. All levels of an organization need to be able to improve, not just the developer teams. However, that's usually a completely different set of tools and skill sets. ~~~ bdehaaff Agreed. The point I am trying to make is the following: I think you need to do both and that's why building great products/software is hard. You need to see the big picture yet deliver against it in bite-sized chunks. Good PMs and Engs are capable of doing both at the same time. That's the key. Give folks responsibility for owning big ideas and allow them to get their work done in an agile, incremental way. Kanban really is about the incremental "getting there" part. ------ hacknat In people' experience(s) how likely is it that a company can salvage a situation like this? I'm starting to experience this at work and I've been thinking about leaving (for other reasons than just this), and I wonder if anyone has actually seen a turnaround in an engineering team's culture. ~~~ RogerL I have seen a turnaround, a dramatic one. I forget the number, but this was for something in the range of a $60MM contract. I will not identify the company or product for various reasons. How was the turnaround accomplished? By firing everyone in charge, and replacing them with people that could actually make reasonable decisions. Some lower level people were also let go; we had some people without the chops to do the job. But that was not the main problem. The problem was consistent management focused entirely on 'process' without regard to what we were trying to accomplish. In the form of "MIL-STD-1234 says we have to produce documentation in the form of X. Therefore, produce X". Documentation does not result in a great product. Documentation can only, wait for it, _document_ what was done. That was just one sliver of it, but entirely representative. Methodology X, process Y, 5 levels of sign offs all focused on what color ink you used or if your document's headers use the right capitalization. Just shuffling requirements along an endless document chain, without actually trying to figure out how to meet those requirements. A really smart systems engineer who had the bosses ear was able to say 'they will never make it', he eventually listened, she was put in charge, our best engineer was finally put in charge of the SW, and from there we recovered. In the interim we hired a bunch of outside consultants to come in. I don't see that they did anything of value. Lot's of interviewing, lots of 'do x, y, z'; meanwhile the people that had _successfully produced this sort of project before_ were still being ignored. That is one story. The problem was mid-level management, and only once they were all fired (actually, there were several rounds of getting rid of person A, and replacing them with an exact clone, and of course that person had identical results) did we recover. This probably doesn't apply to any place where the problem is not middle management (say, a team full of cowboys, or a PM that sends you off on wild goose chases, or whatever). ~~~ bdehaaff Exactly. Put the folks who can get the work done in charge of actually getting the work done. Give them the responsibility and allow their courage to flourish 9and remove barriers when needed). Celebrate their accomplishments. ~~~ zobzu yep - full management replacement is often the only thing that can help, and boards generally dont have that level understanding. plus the management wanna stay in place and advance personal careers/salary without effort and thys deflect issues and pressure the board. it even happens in non profits. ------ msaspence The key word (that is admittedly missed from the title) is "blindly": 'blindly applying "agile shock therapy" or introducing Kanban will only suck you further into the abyss'. Which is a bit of truism: do anything blindly and your chances of succeeding are based entirely on luck. Depending on the specific circumstances Kanban, or any other agile methodology, may or may not be part of the solution to the so called "death spiral". ------ bayesianhorse One problem with this article is the absence of any reasoning process. How do you know there is such a thing as a death spiral? How do you know these symptoms apply to the "death spiral" condition. How do you know your solutions actually alleviate the symptoms or abandon the condition? ~~~ seiji Death spiral: When you keep creating products with no demand in the real world [1]. You create things, release things, nobody uses it, but by then, you're working on the next version nobody wants either. Death spiral: Working on components of a larger project with no hope of ever integrating all pieces into a coherent final release. Everything gets incrementally improved in isolation, but nobody can figure out how to cut a product out of all the pieces. [1]: Plenty of demand exists in the delusional minds of executives, PMs, and clueless employees though. It just doesn't match the real world. ~~~ bdehaaff True. That's one of the ways that you end up in this engineering death spiral -- bad market / product fit and thrashing strategy. ------ pkananen The article has some good points, but I'm not really sure what it has to do with Kanban. ~~~ cjensen Kanban is the silver bullet of the day which sinking enterprises reach for. I've been a software engineer since 1989, and the entire time has been filled with process/method fads "which will fix everything." In 1989 it was Yourdon's institutionalized bureaucracy. Today it's Kanban. Doesn't make Kanban broken; it just means that it is the non-solution for today's desperate souls. ~~~ bdehaaff Very true. There is always some new "fix it." The problem is often that the engineering tools do not improve product management in the least and if the product strategy is bad and customer understanding is missing, no engineering team or tool can solve that. ~~~ RogerL But "Aha" does solve it? ------ jonathandart Can anyone here recommend some references for someone wanting to learn about Kanban? ~~~ karlkfi [http://www.amazon.com/Kanban- ebook/dp/B0057H2M70/](http://www.amazon.com/Kanban-ebook/dp/B0057H2M70/) Note the subtitle: Successful Evolutionary Change. Don't try to change everything all in one go. And if you already know Scrum, here's some differences: [http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/kniberg-kanban-v- scrum](http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/kniberg-kanban-v-scrum) ~~~ bdehaaff There is a good overview here for Kanban for development: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_%28development%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_%28development%29) ------ 3pt14159 The article's own link to the authors product is broken. ~~~ bdehaaff Thank you for pointing that out. Grateful for the call out. Best. ------ coryfklein Warning: title not reflective of content. ~~~ bdehaaff Thanks for the comment. The point is that using Kanban or implementing "agile" is not a savior from the engineering death spiral. The post includes that exact point in the first paragraph.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Biomedical research highlights from 2016 - sciadvance https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/01/04/happy-new-year-looking-back-at-2016-research-highlights/ ====== BabyByBlue Clearly not everything was so bad in 2016! Important breakthroughs that could help to build a better world. ------ BabyByBlue Not everything was so bad in 2016! Big breakthroughs.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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