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Kill the settings, build opinionated software | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": " Some people argue software should be agnostic. They say\n it's arrogant for developers to limit features or ignore \n feature requests. They say software should always be as \n flexible as possible.\n\n\n We think that's bullshit. The best software has a vision. \n The best software takes sides. When someone uses \n software, they're not just looking for features, they're \n looking for an approach. They're looking for a vision. \n Decide what your vision is and run with it.\n\nWell, I, in turn, think that's bullshit. IMO, the best software conforms to the way the user works, rather than trying to force the user to work in a way that's unnatural to them.The arguments against a confusing preferences pane and the arguments for sensible defaults in no way contradict the notion of making software than is flexible enough for power users. Poor UI design (3 different places to set prefs?) is orthogonal to the issue of whether or not something should be configurable.Power Users don't matter? Maybe for certain classes of consumer applications that don't face a steep barrier to adoption in the first place. But for some apps, it's the power users who are the early adopters, who first begin using and evangelizing for the software and without whom it would never catch on in the first place. Do you really want to piss those folks off?Make the damn \"advanced preferences\" pane more or less hidden (ala, about:config) but document the shit out of it and make sure it's at least there for the people who do care."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Here's a little anecdote: Years and years ago, in a moment of free time, I added a bunch of silly settings to my software (EasyBCD, now with 7-10MM+ users). It had almost no users then, and I just added these options to \"fill up\" the empty preferences dialog. A year or two later, I removed a couple, and the complaints could be heard around the world.The features, you ask? They really are ridiculous: Save the window size on exit. Set the default size of the UI text. Set the default font of the UI text. Open in \"advanced mode\" by default. Open to a particular page.None of these features really saves a user more than a click. Some of them are purely aesthetic. But their popularity - which I greatly underestimated - was incredible. Till now, people file bugs when their favorite \"silly preference\" ends up resulting in odd behavior. And they always catch on immediately when I change something there.Sure, it's hard work (read: boring, time-consuming, donkey work) to maintain these options. But I think they're part of the reason EasyBCD has succeeded.(Note: EasyBCD is a software most people install once and never use again. It's definitely not something you would use on a daily basis. But people LOVE power and control, even if it's just an illusion.)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This article is little more than a generic rehash of popular memes. Let's break it down:- 37Signals is great, they do simple!\n- anecdote\n- Apple is great, they do simple!I hope whatever software this guy does has less opinion and more substance."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't think it's black and white; you can have an opinionated, simplified front end, and a back end that is wide open. The back-end makes some things easier, such as testing, and helping admins deploy to 100+ users.A flexible back-end can even be used to create an opinionated front-end. Consider a \"factory defaults\" file; preset any behavior, whether or not it has a checkbox. Try every combination, and convince yourself that one is better. Even with these decisions made up front, the interface is there to let other people disagree with you.Mac OS X has a nice balance, because the built-in \"defaults\" command line program can tweak any setting that would also be available in the application's code. Just because a program is a GUI, doesn't mean that it should rely exclusively on GUI elements for configuration."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "At the farthest reaches of powerful software, you will always end up with a programming language and libraries.At the other extreme, you have one thing that does exactly one task and as such can have a nearly \"invisible\" interface.My suspicion is that it's actually kind of rare to need the areas in between - that apps like spreadsheets and photo editing are unusual, and if you _suspect_ that you have an app that could be developed in such a broad, deep, configurable way, your best bet is to start building in a library form and construct prototype one-shots - possibly even making them your MVP - attacking various different problems to see if you're right, before you try to make a unified monster UI for the perceived need."
}
] | en | 0.960556 | 9 | 0.052977 | 1 |
Copyright Holders Punish Themselves With Crazy DMCA Takedowns | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There really needs to be an immediate financial cost associated with incorrect DMCA takedowns.For instance, the entity the requests are made of (in this case Google) should be able to claim money for every false take down request."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "So basically, this is a way for movie/music studios to remove bad reviews from the public eye?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I hope Google did take down the official content, just like their owner asked! That might push the industry to take a harder look at their DMCA takedown automation."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Aren't DMCA takedowns notices made under penalty of perjury? Why are they being sent out in what seems to be an automated fashion without any proper review?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is another instance of those 'clbuttic' mistakes someone can make when they learn regular expressions and think they can easily censor things they don't like."
}
] | en | 0.956979 | 1 | 0.122703 | 0 |
Ask HN: .net vs .com | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "First register the .net name while you are thinking. It's only $7 or so..com is better than .net because .net is below the radar for most people. Have you thought of .org It doesnt mean nonprofit. It was set up for everyone else not in the military/industrial complex. Most people are aware of .org.The going price for parked or low volume domains is around $15K Maybe an offer in that range will get his attention.Someone in another thread made the point that most people will come to your site via search and your real name is not important. I dont really subscribe to that argument because people tell their friends without giving a proper link, say on the phone.I thing you will regret the conflict if you go the .net route. Find another catchy name or add another word to the name you are already considering. TheCatchyName vs CatchyName. Remember catchy names are rarely as good as you think they are.Final piece of advice. Do a trademark search for your name. (tm) is weak but (R) is very strong and you should avoid the conflict."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Am I going to regret pushing forward with the .net address, or should I try to think of some different names that end in .com?Yes. Since 1996 it has always seemed that all the good names were taken, and yet it has always been possible to find ones that weren't. All your name has to be is acceptable. Google.com is not a great name; the reason it seems good now is the associations we have with it."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Choose a different name. There are still tons available. Let the domain whores hold on to their \"Premium four letter .com!!\" names.Just look harder and you'll find the gem.(I spent about a day and found mibbit.(com|net|org) and I'm still pleased enough with the name)."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "There are some good sources out there to try and find a domain name. http://www.domainpigeon.com/ is a good if you're looking for a random name.To answer you're question, you should absolutely get a .com. In my experience, the .net name eventually becomes a pain in the butt for branding and user acquisition, especially with the .com having only a blank directory (a user will just think your site is dead).It's also one of the first questions you'll get when pitching to investors. Why couldn't you get the .com? You're answer so far has been that you couldn't negotiate it. That sends the wrong message.Cut your losses and just find a .com."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Regarding the guy holding the .com - Just because there's no website there doesn't mean it isn't being used. Think email."
}
] | en | 0.967288 | 6 | 0.187372 | 0 |
Ask HN: How to think on the spot and persuade? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I have no idea what I'm talking about, but if you get lost, you can frame your argument in an analogy and build your way up from there. As long as your argument is rational, you can find parallel examples in almost any topic (especially topics you're deeply familiar with!). This kind of arguing doesn't rely on fact, but broad general concepts, which should give you a lot of leeway for where you want to take your discussion."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Practice should help; there are debate clubs for that. Or try debating politics - it's mostly useless, but you'll never lack willing opponents. Knowing your subject very well helps, too. Staying calm is always useful; I have no recommendation on how to achieve that, though (I never really had to work for that.)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I have seen many people have this issue. Being very smart and not being able to construct and argument on the feet.\nI always advise them to join Toastmasters. I'm a member and it has greatly improved my persuasive abilities."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The trick to speaking well is practice. Talk through your arguments in a safe calm environment, speak freeform without stopping, record and watch your practice sessions. If that sounds like too much work, try Toastmasters."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Expect to be challenged when conversing. When speaking, prepare your next point. Appear calmer and more confident than the other person. Relax."
}
] | en | 0.965608 | 0 | 0.156106 | 0 |
Komanda: IRC Client For Developers | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Is this an IRC client or an IRC server?Looking at the code, it appears to be a client, but in that case why does the site talk about it providing support for "Channels, Users, Permission, Private, Public and much more", why does it claim it makes my channel contents more secure (under "Secure Your Logs"), and why does it talk about setting up an IRCd (" With a ZNC bounce, a simple ircd server and 5 minutes you can avoid paying for communication and keep your company chat logs secure and on your own infrastructure.").If it's a server, why is how to set it up not described?Not sure if OP is actually part of the dev team, or just somebody who found the site, but a word to the devs: your website should clarify which of the above you are providing. If it's a client, the site shouldn't talk about the benefits I'd get running my own IRCd (security of communication, IRCd features like channel modes and permissions, or lower cost). If you are intending for folks to run their own IRCd, the site needs to have information on where that software lives and how to set it up, and why I'd want to do that instead of just making a channel on OFTC or Freenode or similar."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It's beyond me why anyone would write a desktop application in JS, CSS, and HTML, and require node as a dependency. These technologies are already bastard children of the 'just make it work' mentality. Using them for an environment they were never designed for, when there is decades of existing infrastructure purpose-built (and far easier to use), makes no sense. The only reason that I can come up with for why someone would build a desktop app with these technologies is that they cbf to learn to use the correct tools for the job.As for "the best client for developers" -- I'll stick with irssi, thanks."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> With a ZNC bounce, a simple ircd server and 5 minutes you can avoid paying for communication and keep your company chat logs secure and on your own infrastructure.Having watched a coworker spend a solid week getting our company's ircd setup (and this was our VP of Engineering, mind you), I've gotta call BS here. Also, until I started using irccloud[1] a few months ago, I was using ZNC, and that's no walk in the park either.[1] https://www.irccloud.com/"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The reason irccloud is popular is that it is simple to set up and there is a really great mobile client. No one really needs another web based client, even if it is free; there are plenty of alternatives for that such as ircanywhere[1] or Convos[2].\nI'm really not sure who this is for.[1] http://ircanywhere.com/[2] https://github.com/Nordaaker/convos"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I keep an IRC client (Colloquy for OSX) open everyday when I get home from work. However, it crashes a few times a day and I think it's about time to switch. Is this a suitable replacement for Colloquy? Any recommendations on a better IRC client to use, web-based or OSX, are much appreciated. Thanks!"
}
] | en | 0.926026 | 2 | 0.059356 | 0 |
Ask HN: Founders: Interested in earning extra cash? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'd be super interested in this. Been working on a startup full-time but might have to look for contract work soon. I think the value add of something like this is having you curate the job listings for entrepreneurs and you being able to convince companies the value of our unique skill set. Might be best done manually at first but I'd pay for a service like that."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "What I really want is an agent. I'd be willing to give up a small percentage if my hourly every month to an agent who brought me contracts I was really, really interested in. I've thought many times about how to pull this off, and I just don't know if the dynamic is right in the industry."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "FWIW, I know of at least one member of the billion-plus exit club who was a core founder & did sidework during the early days...."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "You have my attention. Now, what's the pitch?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Is this of interest?Oh yeah, definitely.Thoughts?Want. Now.Seriously, I could see this being really useful if it works. I'd be very interested in giving it a try."
}
] | en | 0.95293 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Speaking of anecdotes, I have always found Windows more responsive than OS X to the point where I have completely switched to Win 7 - mouse handling and screen drawing is definitely superior on Windows.However it is easier on Windows to mess up the experience - install some crappy antivirus or other messy program and it is a piece of cake to make Windows feel laggy."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I don't really have an opinion on Windows vs. OS X, but I have been extremely impressed with iOS's graphical performance.It's not just that they have good framerate - even Android can get good average framerate. The amazing thing about iOS that it gets amazing maximum frame delay, i.e. the space between frames is almost never more than 33ms (~30fps). On Android you frequently run into tiny little hiccups in frame delay that might not impact its measured FPS, but are certainly noticeable to the human eye. The result is that it just doesn't feel as smooth.I don't know how Apple achieved this. It's certainly not perfect - you can occasionally get an iDevice to freeze for a few hundred milliseconds, but those are very rare occurrences. It's as if they have a real-time guarantee built into the system, but I don't think they actually have one. Which is a pretty amazing accomplishment."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I love OSX, but objectively speaking, \"The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that.\" http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mous..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "There's many reasons to prefer OSX over Windows (and vice-versa)But OSX UI certainly never has been reacting faster than Windows UI. Things like opening dirs, menu navigation, window resizing, etc is much faster in Window and its been that way since OSX started (OS9 and prior had a fast UI)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Unless people can back this up with hard facts they simply shouldn't post these kinds of stuff."
}
] | en | 0.974356 | 13 | 0.143159 | 1 |
Kickstarter: Shorter project durations lead to higher funding rates | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Also interesting in the graph, 30, 45, 60, and 90 day durations are quite popular and significantly poorer at getting funded than other durations.Is the kind of person that picks a number like that less able to write a convincing story? Is there something about seeing those unthoughtful numbers that turns off donors?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've had a lot of friends try Kickstarter for various projects, most have chosen to start longer campaigns under the assumption that more time will increase the chance of funding the project.Personally, I agree with Kickstarter's assessment that longer campaigns create less urgency. This seems to make sense. Often times, If I see a friend has a longer running campaign, I'll procrastinate and put off donating until later in the game. I'm sure other people do this too, and not all of them remember.In the campaigns my friends have run, it's usually that first push out to their social network that gets the biggest response, after that the donations start slowing down. A few more people will kick in some extra dough at the end (like me), but by that time most people have moved on."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I disagree with limiting to 60 days instead. Educate your users, but some may very well have a good reason to choose 90... Like they expect a TV appearance in 75 days.That person would have to wait 30 days to list the project in order to bank on the buzz from the tv appearance.That example is just off the top of my head, but the point is that some of the world doesn't work at the pace of the web."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> With those things in mind, today we’re lowering the maximum amount of time a creator can choose for their project from 90 days to 60 days.Wet sidewalks cause rain. Film at 11.In other news, banning anonymous article creation on Wikipedia has increased the acceptance rate of anonymous articles to 100%, a stunning increase in average quality."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What if they picked longer durations because they already knew their goal would be hard to reach?"
}
] | en | 0.964866 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
Ant colony simulator | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "A more piecemeal simulation released by Maxis back in 1991. Possibly some inspirations (red ants vs black ants, food represented in green circles/spheres):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"- Magnifier:zoom in and zoom out.\"Aw, I was hoping the magnifier did something else."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This reminds me of Rich Hickey's Clojure Concurrency talk[1], where he uses a simulation of an ant colony to explain Clojure's concurrency features. Hickey's version[2] is a lot simpler, but remains an interesting starting point if you want to hack on something similar.[1] http://blip.tv/file/812787[2] http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/ants.clj?gda=T0C_CjoAAAD..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "We've created a basic ant simulation as a Python library for NodeBox. NodeBox runs on Mac but the library is cross-platform.http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Ants"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Anyone want to write a HTML5 version? Where the ants are each Erlang processes?"
}
] | en | 0.910234 | 5 | 0.082727 | 1 |
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's a pleasant surprise to see my old power supply article on the front page of HN today. I'd never given much thought to power supplies before researching that article and there's a lot more to their history than I expected. In particular, Robert Boschert seems like he should be a HN hero for running a startup from his kitchen table that had a huge (disruptive?) impact on the power supply industry.There are a bunch of comments below about wall chargers. I investigated wall chargers too - see http://righto.com/charger - and there's a lot more inside them than you'd expect.Let me know if you have any questions."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Devil's advocate:Jobs: "Instead of a conventional linear power supply, Holt built one _like_those_used_in_oscilloscopes_."TFA: "It turns out that Apple's power supply was not revolutionary"Indeed. If we believe Jobs, it was used in oscilloscopes before.Jobs probably exaggerated/boasted/lied when he spoke of "ripping off", but this article isn't 100% honest with the facts, either."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Funny how the first comment of that article links to an older HN submission:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636047"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I have never had the impression that Apple had revolutionized power supplies. Honestly, I am happy if I am not forced to use a three-pin plug and the power supply works reliably."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is what I called a well researched article."
}
] | en | 0.968375 | 13 | 0.405074 | 1 |
Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is a false dichotomy. It's quite possible - and indeed, probably much more likely - that aspects of both are becoming bigger parts of our lives at the same time.\nThese two aspects of human culture - authoritarianism and dissipation have always been with us, this isn't new; 'dictatorship' & 'bread and circuses' would both be familiar concepts to citizens of ancient Rome."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "People seem to assume it's a choice between Huxley, Orwell, or the combination of the two. They miss a very big option, which is that humanity is in fact better off than it used to be. Marx was dead wrong about the future(remember, he thought that global communist revolution was inevitable) but he was dead right about the time that he lived in. Up until the 1950s or 60s or so, a good half of the population wasn't able to hold any but a rare few jobs. During the early days of the Industrial Revolution up until about the decade of the 1900s, you would be considered lucky if you were paid in money rather than company scrip that would be useless outside of the company town you lived in, meaning that if you wanted to change jobs you pretty much lost all your money. In the Middle Ages, ...if I have to explain to you why the Middle Ages sucked compared to today, you're already a lost cause. I could go on.Want a real dystopia? Read a history book."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Orwell was specifically warning about the dangers of a communist totalitarian state. He was one of the few left-leaning writers that spoke out against Stalinism. North Korea has become, in every sense, a '1984' state. China and the former Soviet Union seem to be in transition from '1984' to 'Brave New World'."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Blog spam, the original is here: http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...And the original discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627476Edit: (article link was changed by moderator)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Yap, Brave New World is much more interesting to those who want to understand what might be our future than 1984. I believe that's common sense to those who read both novels.Also interesting is Brave New World Revisited, a book written 30 years after he's other book where he compares it with 1984 by Orwell. He also makes some guesses about the future[1].I love dystopias and Brave New World is the best.spoiler[1] The most important one being about soma and how it's so similar to lsd."
}
] | en | 0.986906 | 3 | 0.834577 | 0 |
Bitmessage - a P2P communications protocol to send encrypted messages | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Why does nobody use URIs? At least bittorrent magnet links got this right.We have standards for a reason, guys.Furthermore, any system in which all nodes receive all messages will not scale. Additionally, without proof-of-work, it is trivial to disable the network through flooding."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "And we're back to Waste again. ;)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE for those who don't know)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I feel like bitcoin is the leading edge of a wave of peer to peer encrypted technologies. Namecoin is also interesting.http://www.reddit.com/r/bitmessagehttp://www.reddit.com/r/namecoin"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": ">Bitmessage is in need of an independent audit to verify its security.Just saying."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Someone has set up an image board: BM-BbbuVnYuaSY6yjyhfQm5KVrJLqjiyetB\n\nSubscribe to (and share) base64-encoded[1] images. Just send the base64 encoded image to the above Bitmessage address and it will be auto-relayed to subscribers. Don't forget putting the file name and extensions as the subject!BEWARE! Medium/big images (>1Mb) may take hours to be work-proven before being sent.[1] Convenient online encoding/decoding (even from/to binaries) http://www.motobit.com/util/base64-decoder-encoder.asp"
}
] | en | 0.949014 | 12 | 0.052205 | 1 |
The man behind FAKEGRIMLOCK | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Can someone explain the downvoting of FAKEGRIMLOCK's comments? I find them insightful, substantive, and hilarious, but is some HN norm being stepped on?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I really appreciated the candidness on getting out of the midwest. I love home. Born and raised near Kansas City, Missouri and went to school at Missouri and Iowa.But the resources and mindset aren't there yet to build a consumer-web startup. Zaarly is the best example and yet a large chunk of its team is on the coasts. Hard to tell the truth when you're a \"nobody\" as FAKEGRIMLOCK mentioned. But at the mythical FAKEGRIMLOCK is become easier to say what's on your mind."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "FAKEGRIMLOCK seems very relevant to this site as he created a brand out of nothing and I find most of his short comments insightful. So the interview is a nice read on his tactics even if it's a bit shallow. \nI just hope we don't have tons of clones of his persona. It works only once or twice."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It's really a shame that FG's comments were downvoted here... Can anyone shed some light on what happened?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "@fakegrimlock is as genuine as can be. His advice is golden and right on. Just accept him and his persona as they are."
}
] | en | 0.979088 | 3 | 0.122402 | 1 |
ORNL invention unravels mystery of protein folding | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "URL of their paper in PLoS ONE: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Short URL to the patent at USPTO: http://1.usa.gov/plfTg3I am not a specialist in protein folding, so take it with a grain of salt, but from the figures it does not look like method predicts actual configurations decoded from experiments. Patent itself acknowledges that (5.50): \"the lack of computational prediction [...] can be attributed to problems arising form calculating molecular mechanics potentials (force-fields)\".Could anybody knowledgeable make an assessment how important this invention is?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Pretty low on detail, such as how dies this differ from the old method and what makes it so much more efficient exactly."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Why is there a patent on an algorithm that was developed using tax-payer money? Or maybe more importantly, why is it \"available for licensing\". Technically, I already own a small portion of the technique!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "talk about deceptive titles. \ni know this much: protein folding is to many the holy grail of biotech. because most(?) of the most successful biologics have been large proteins. because protein folding is so obscure, manufacturing large, complex proteins is non-trivial, difficult to scale up and to troubleshoot. (using computer buzzwords since this is hn.) there are a limited number of facilities in the world that can do it right. a delicate process to say the least.a more accurate headline might be: patent granted to ornl for work on protein folding."
}
] | en | 0.839174 | 4 | 0.081588 | 1 |
America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\"Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are now paying the price for their pride.\"Pure schadenfreude, most of it. Kind of sad, really, given that Der Spiegel has a reputation for serious content. Most of the criticism of US policy is valid, as far as it goes. And, yes, those policies have produced a ton of bad blood among trading partners.But this article just drips with glee at the plight of the poor, dumb 'mericans. That's just beneath them. Terrible journalism."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "America is still a dominant economic force right now, but the writing is on the wall. Unless careful action is taken, I think all the signs point towards a decline in America's ability to project its power. As an American in my 20's, I grew up listening to hearing about how we were such a good country with a good government, ruled by the people. Everyone preached how we were so free, how our freedom defined us.America's decline won't just be caused by the current financial crisis. You cannot separate this phenomenon from our decreased standing in the world's eyes as a shining beacon on a hill. We were supposed to be a model democracy.The events in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, and Guantanamo Bay have lead to world to look away from us when it comes to morality. We no longer occupy the moral high ground. We no longer serve as a guideline for how to run a democracy. Now, with the financial crisis in full swing, we no longer serve as a guideline for how to manage an economy either.Granted, we are still a large nation with many wealthy consumers. It will probably take a generation for the full effects of our fall from grace to come to fruition. But, when it comes down to it, we simply cannot maintain our place in the world when the confidence in our country has been shaken so much, both in terms of our government and our economic systems."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "America contains 5% of the world's population yet remains a leader with 20& of the world's economic output. Watch the markets. The American markets dictate what overseas markets due on a daily basis, not the other way around. Sure, things aren't rosy, but to suggest that the American economy is anything less than a clear cut economic leader is silly."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Perhaps America should check behind its Couch. These sorts of articles are reddit-bait."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "2007 GPD in millions of USD:\n(1) United States \t13,843,825\n(2) Japan \t4,383,762\n(3) Germany \t3,322,147\n(4) China (PRC) \t3,250,827\n(5) United Kingdom \t2,772,570\n(6) France \t2,560,255\n(7) Italy \t2,104,666Hey Spiegel, why don't you come back when Germany's GDP hits double-digit trillions."
}
] | en | 0.96574 | 3 | 0.083829 | 1 |
Not Sharing Is Caring | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm going to drag out another cstross quote (from Accelerando[1]):\"[...] his suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it will probably be pithed and resurrected in the service of some African cyber-Fagin. That's okay by Manfred — it only contains a statistically normal mixture of second hand clothes and toiletries, and he only carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling expert systems that he isn't some sort of deviant or terrorist\"At what point is it going to be statistically abnormal to not be sharing the minutiae of your life in this way, and what are the consequences to anyone who wants to retain some level of privacy? Will they be required to maintain some sort of statistically-average social network profile, occasionally updating it with something plausible?[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The author is completely missing the point. Implicit sharing allows for everything to go into the graph in a structured way. This is the most important aspect of implicit sharing and the new Open Graph.This doesn't mean that you're going to get inundated with meaningless shares. That would be a horrible user experience. In fact, Facebook put a lot of time and effort into making sure that is exactly what didn't happen. It's the very reason why timeline was built. It's why ticker was built. They did this because they want a place for the increased sharing to go, without degrading user experience.But here's the really exciting part. Once all this data is in the graph, timeline and ticker will pale in comparison to what developers can do with all of this new, structured data. That is the really important thing here.Implicit sharing is not so that you can get a notification every time someone listens to a song. It's so that a talented young developer can come along and create a beautiful application that visualizes all of your song listens, how it makes you similar or different from your friends.Don't worry Farhad. Explicit sharing and taste isn't going away. I will still pay more attention to the link you posted of that song you love than the song that blips by in my ticker. I wouldn't criticize the new graph until its matured and we've seen the next generation of amazing apps that are going to be enabled."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I agree with a lot of what this article is saying. Sharing everything by default is pointless and misses the point of sharing.I want to share something with my friends because I think it might inspire them or make them happy. Or, in the case of news, let them know about important stuff that's happening in the world. They do the same thing when they share with me.So to blindly share everything just creates a lot of noise. If everything is shared by default, you'll need to start sifting out the signal from the noise. Which is annoying because I trust my friends to only share stuff that's relevant.We all love lolcats but know how to find them on our own."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't agree with everything the author says but I think I agree with the sentiment. I think frictionless sharing is a departure from how people express themselves in real life. During real world interactions we present our carefully tailored selves to the rest of the world. We don't tell everyone everything we are doing for a reason.One positive with reducing friction is that it might be easier to find common ground with someone. But overall im not sure I like it- social grooming is a good thing"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Google wants to keep real names (just like Facebook) and they get scolded for it, because some people say they really care about their privacy, and they want to be able to use a different name than their real one.Now Facebook wants to automatically share everything about you, essentially killing whatever privacy you had left on Facebook, and people applaud it.Maybe not related (yet), but it does remind me of this quote:\"Freedom is lost to the sound of thunderous applause.\"This is a great opportunity for Google put a spin on what Facebook is doing with all this, and say they are going the opposite direction, and instead of auto-sharing everything about you like Facebook does, Google+ allows you to choose exactly what you share and to who.Facebook's features may seem cool today, but they have the potential to turn into the biggest PR disaster for Facebook, bigger than their \"privacy settings\" issue from last year."
}
] | en | 0.957424 | 3 | 0.060923 | 1 |
South African province spends $15.4M (140M ZAR) on WordPress site | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The causes behind this are truly more systemic than mere corruption, and actually pull at the very root of problems in Africa and many developing economies in the current tech environment.In USA/Europe/increasing in China and India, basic tech and internet projects are fairly well understood by the general public. The idea of wordpress, blogs, and even a basic understanding of the internet and modern technology are fairly prevalent. Even with corruption in a small Texan town, something like pushing through a Wordpress site for $15m would be impossible - there is an understanding of how a website is created and what constitutes a million dollar vs a thousand dollar technology project.I live in South Africa, so I see this every day: there is zero understanding by the majority of the population into any internet related projects. Our major new tech companies tend to boost up the Johannesburg Stock Exchange into incredible valuations before suddenly realizing that their business models are terrible. Most entrepreneurship in the country is focused on targeting townships - people who can barely afford to eat, let alone think about technology, and unsurprisingly, these companies turn to government grants or dissolve.These are all systemic problems from countries simply not being able to keep up with the rapidly accelerating technological developments - and I think it's going to be a massive problem in the future for any country not focusing on getting into the 'internet rush'. It should be clear to most of us on HN just how important these kind of tech innovations are going to be on the future of humanity."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It does seem totally ridiculous, but I think in many cases governments bring these things on themselves with highly complicated tender processes and red-tape (many time in the name of due-process, fairness and transparency)Imagine putting a bid for this work. Do you think most of the effort is in building the website itself, or dealing with so many bureaucrats, forms, approvals and so on? Making sure your developers have X certification and your office is compliant with Y regulation, and that all your processes are ISO certified and so on... This stuff costs money, and quite a lot.So any sane company who wishes to enter into business with any government organization usually take these substantial extra costs into account, which ends up inflating the price. The sad thing of course is that it's the citizens who end up footing the bill.EDIT to clarify: I am not trying to say that the price makes sense in this particular case. I'm talking more about the general problem with govt-related contracts."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm from South Africa and this simply demonstrates the extent of corruption within our government departments. It is not uncommon for government departments to inflate tender budgets so as to benefit from kickbacks. I'm appalled by such such acts, firstly as a South African citizen and secondly as a hard working web developer."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"Ntsele told the newspaper opposition parties had an agenda against black businessmen and that the website’s cost was fair.\"Yeah, right..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is exactly the kind of corruption which goes on in my country (Hungary). I hereby want to ask every HNer if he wants to team up with me and create a nonprofit startup which lets people document corruption in their country/city etc, things which are too small for wikileaks, or publicity like this."
}
] | en | 0.930581 | 3 | 0.070891 | 1 |
Don't Blame Jim Cramer | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think this writer is missing the point just like Cramer did on Stewart.The New York Times doesn't have subpoena power, but there are still a non-zero number of people in power who limit their shenanigans because they're terrified of ending up on the front page.The government has a regulatory and investigative role, but it can't go out on a hunch or a rumor, a good journalist can (Which is not to say we need witch hunts).One good journalistic organization can help keep a whole industry honest just by the threat of really investigating things that don't add up. WSJ is good at reporting, but I can't recall the last time they cracked a scandal in the financial world. Feel free to correct me.Would a diligent, news-y CNBC have prevented the financial crisis? I doubt it. But perhaps they could've prevented or exposed some of the most ridiculous excess. It seems every person 'in the know' I've read has said that in hindsight they thought that Madoff was on the take, they just assumed he was an insider trader.Would this stuff sell in comparison to Jim Cramer throwing pies? I don't know. But I have a hunch that a financial dateline style report exposing Madoff as a scam would've garnered a few viewers..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The web interview where Cramer admitted to manipulating stock values with his hedge fund seems pretty damning to me. It betrays a mindset focused on manipulation, rather than providing any kind of real economic value. While Cramer might be only one small cracked cog in the broken machine of banking, he had the opportunity to investigate and expose the inherent instability in the financial system but instead rode the wave like everyone else.What happened to real journalism? With Uncle Rupert's claws sunk into the Wall Street Journal the future of quality investigative reporting seems dim."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The Washington Post is right. We shouldn't blame Jim Cramer or other financial pundits (most people will try get away with whatever they can if they are allowed to). Instead we should blame the Washington Post itself and other news organizations for not publicizing how bad the corruption actually is in the financial sector. We (the people) are also to blame, but that's a whole different discussion."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The author is saying that no one at a high level knew the risks that were being taken off the books. Fair enough, that's something we need to fix. Apparently Sarbanes-Oxley didn't work.But then the author tries to give Cramer a pass (\"just an entertainer\") by skipping Stewart's point: CNBC touts its talent as experts in financial news. Even the author goes back to calling Cramer a \"financial journalist\" a paragraph later. You don't get to quick-change between the suit of expertise and the fig-leaf of opinion.If the CEO doesn't know when his own company is in trouble... that's news, right?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The logic here is nonsensical. \"(a) Dick Fuld lost 9 figures on LEH. (b) If he knew about LEH's exposure to toxic MBS's, he would have avoided losing that money. (c) Therefore, he must not have known. (d) And if Dick Fuld didn't know, how could Jim Cramer?\"Not one of these points follows from any of the previous points."
}
] | en | 0.978826 | 10 | 0.25614 | 1 |
April Fools Day jQuery plugin | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Note: hiddenVideos has a number of mildly nsfw videos. Turn off your speakers before clicking!The first one I got just kept repeating \"surprise mother f*er\".The full list of YouTube ids for the curious: videos = ['Prhzzqc0aFQ', 'UwB9m4FslO4', 'LH5ay10RTGY', 'DkQ83yLqpJE', 'T6j4f8cHBIM', 'kffacxfA7G4', 'RFzyYYZsxGc', 'v20jRHL492Y', 'Z8bpeeuHDOA', 'KHy7DGLTt8g', '_6-KspZegsE', 'l12Csc_lW0Q']"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I don't enjoy April Fools. At one point people would come up with well-thought out and entertaining tricks. Now it's 99% annoying stuff that's not funny and not creative.Sorry to be a kill-joy but this plugin looks like it would be used by the 99%. An example of a good \"fool\" would be unixkcd."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Well, that was highly inappropriate and I should have known better that to follow through on this link. I'm in a family-friendly cafe with my speakers wide open. Never have I received such glares from parents with young children. April fools on me, indeed. Well done."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't see ponies. April 1 on the internet just isn't complete without them now.Some funny stuff there though."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I tried running $.fool('rick') on fooljs.com and got an error:> TypeError: Object #<Object> has no method 'append'The other ones I tried worked, though! I really like this project."
}
] | en | 0.937971 | 2 | 0.497969 | 0 |
US judge orders hundreds of sites "de-indexed" from Google, Facebook | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Sigh, don't panic, the system will work, just legislative time is not internet time. As far as I can tell by reading the order [1] the order is temporary, and as its from a district judge [2] really only holds for Nevada at the moment. If it gets to the appeals process and the circuit court upholds it, it will apply more broadly, up to the supreme court where it will apply to the US as a whole. However what that means with regard to Chanel I'm not sure as it really only means that from within the US are these things outlawed.But having such cases is useful because it gives the system something on which to chew, and then publish opinions (not all cases get published opinions) which set case law. So the good news might be that it gets to the circuit court which then has a chance to publish an opinion that our courts can't make these kinds of claims, and that gets upheld in the Supreme court and life is better because all the judges have to follow along.The system is cranky, and obtuse at times, but its remarkably resilient in the face of unexpected challenges.That being said, for the folks who are complaining about the institutions in the US being subverted, I point out that nearly all the elections in this country are won or lost by at most a 10% difference in votes. Further, in general more than 20% of the registered voters don't even bother to vote. So one could argue that if 20% of the 99% really cared about stuff they could actully vote in whomever they chose to vote in and no amount of money, croniesim, or stupidity on the part of the voters who are being lead around by their noses could stop them. The math says it is impossible (short of fraud) but fraud on that scale is really really hard to cover up.[1] http://servingnotice.com/sdv/038%20-%20Order%20Granting%20Se...[2] Federal courts have 89 districts, feeding into 13 circut courts, feeding into the supreme court. http://www.uscourts.gov/Common/FAQS.aspx"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It's very unlikely that this article is correct. Here is the legal ruling:http://servingnotice.com/sdv/038%20-%20Order%20Granting%20Se...This is a temporary restraining order. Chanel is posting a bond for any damages to the defendants, should the trial prove them innocent.Regarding de-indexing, there is only one paragraph (10) which says the domains \"shall immediately be de-indexed and/or removed\", without specifying who will do this action. This is vague, but I don't think it can be interpreted as an order to Google / FB because:- the list of search engines / social sites is open ended- the previous paragraphs require actions by the plaintiff or by the defendants (e.g. preserve computer files). Among others, paragraph (8) states that the plaintiff can use Google Webmaster Tools on these domains.- the (temporary) transfer of DNS records is specified in small technical details (including multiple technical solutions for the redirection involved) in multiple paragraphs, while this arguably much more complex requirement receives minimum treatment.While the language is indeed a bit vague in paragraph (10), I think consideration of all these factors seems to indicate it is the plaintiff and the defendants who are to take action to see the sites de-indexed (using, e.g., Google Webmaster Tools) and not the indexing companies."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It's counterintuitive, but things like this are actually good. We need more of them to happen, and for it to affect more people more often.Right now the core of the internet is broken from a security perspective. DNS[1], BGP[2], and SSL[3], despite being key to daily internet function, are all completely inadequate for the important role the internet now plays in the world and society. The thing is: right now they all work, almost all of the time. Any change will be really painful. Even incremental changes like DNSSEC see scant adoption[4] and obviously needed changes like IPv6 are put off until the last possible second[5].We need things to break before we'll see real change. And by break I mean really break. When enough money is lost because of meddlesome, malicious, or ignorant government and other intervention, we'll finally see real change. But not one second before. After all, if it works, don't fix it[6].If you really want to see change, exploit these laws to take down legitimate and government websites. Post infringing links, ideas, etc, in the most visible places you can. Try to get major news and other sites that allow user generated content taken down. In the process you'll hopefully break things for enough people that we see change, or you'll at least demonstrate how blatantly inequitable most of these laws are. Both are good steps toward real change.[1] http://www.dnssec.net/dns-threats[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4272.txt[3] http://www.darkreading.com/taxonomy/index/printarticle/id/23...[4] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110330006919/en/IID-...[5] http://ripe59.ripe.net/presentations/botterman-v6-survey.pdf[6] Yes, I know it doesn't technically work in all cases right now, but did you notice when any of these sites went offline? I didn't. I see an increasing frequency of these types of reports, but have yet to be personally affected."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Reading this order: http://www.scribd.com/doc/73773870/Chanel-Inc-v-Does-11-Cv-0... I wonder who is responsible for de-indexing and/or removing the domain names?Other points begin with \"Plaintiffs shall...\", \"Defendants shall...\", but in this point there's no party stated that must do the action:\"The Group II Subject Domain Names shall immediately be de-indexed and/or removed from any search results pages of all Internet search engines including, but not limited to, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and all social media websites including, but not limited to, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter until otherwise instructed by this Court or Plaintiff that any such domain name is authorized to be reinstated, at which time it shall be reinstated to its former status within each search engine index from which it was removed.\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Sigh. This is pretty much a classic case of \"THE INTERNET IS NEW AND SCARY\".Assuming that Charnel's claims are accurate(that counterfeit goods were being sold), then the standard procedure 20 years ago would have been to work with law enforcement and the courts. If the defendants were found guilty, the counterfeit goods would be seized and profits off of them would be awarded to Charnel. With the invention of the Internet, the exact same thing should have happened. Charnel should have worked with law enforcement and the courts, and if the defendants were found guilty, the goods should have been seized, and the story should have ended. In either case, it would take a while(especially if the shops were in countries that had very lax copyright laws), but there should not have been really any difference between now and 20 years ago.Only in this case, the judge, in his infinite wisdom, went the \"OMG INTERNET IS NEW AND SCARY\" route, and decided to just remove the sites from indexes. Aside from the fact that this doesn't actually fix the problem(hello, eBay), this is a pretty new(and dumb) \"solution\" to a pretty settled problem."
}
] | en | 0.988107 | 9 | 0.751461 | 1 |
Apple's CPU lead Jim Keller heads back to AMD | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "A few points of interest here which Venture Beat have skipped:1. Keller's company, PA, was bought by Apple mainly for its engineering talent. Getting Keller was a huge deal for Apple.2. Keller has been hired away by Mark Papermaster, who was a disaster at Apple (all of Bob Mansfield's reservations about him from the internal email discussed in IBM v. Papermaster came true: cultural, pace of development, etc.).I would anticipate an outside hire from Apple to fill his shoes in the next 6-9 months."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The early days of the K8 were awesome, the FX would kill whatever Intel threw at AMD, it was brutal. Even cheap Athlons were better than highend Pentiums, and prescott? a disaster, plain and simple.Is ironic that AMD hired Keller since Intel too found it's way out of the Netburst fiasco by going back to Tualatin, which at the same time had more in common with the good old Pentium Pro than it did with coppermine and katmai."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "In less than a week, we've had those 'genius' ads on TV that seem to insult consumers' intelligence [1], and now the person who led CPU design for iOS devices is leaving the company. These are not encouraging signs for Apple.[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/07/30/viewers-giv..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think this is good news, for both companies and for Jim Keller himself.- Apple's strength is not in its chips. It's in its software and tightly integrated stack- It seems, from the outside, AMD needs an inspiring leader to give its design teams a clearer goal.- I know first hand what it feels like when your work no longer lines up with where your company is going. I wish him the best of luck on his new challenges."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "With the anticipated \"the downfall of Apple begins!\" comments that will accompany this story, I'm trying to fathom what the comments will be when Jony Ive eventually leaves..."
}
] | en | 0.988216 | 13 | 0.495356 | 0 |
Cappuccino (YC Winter 08) Brings Cocoa-Like Programming To The Web | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "So, in order to layout an interface you programmatically create it? And so a designer has to learn yet another language for layout?We made the mistake of adopting GWT a while back and it's been nothing but headaches.Now instead of the designers being able to directly design in HTML (which they all have a familiarity of), they're required to download our entire project, edit the layout classes, recompile, just to see their work.We've tried to have the developers take the designers mockups and translate them into working code, but the app seems to lose that designer \"touch\" in the process.Designers need to be able to work with a familiar canvas."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Honestly I need to dig more but I'm not sold on this route. Creating a new abstraction layer (Objective-J) on top of Javascript seems like some Architecture Astronautics to me. Why not just write this on top of JS (maybe with something like jquery?) Sites down right now or I'd try to make a more reasoned statement but sproutcore seems a better alternative.I also wouldn't rule out Google rolling out something similar as well as they unify the widgets and windowing type stuff they've got from docs and spreadsheets (and Zenter for that matter)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm still amazed that they pulled it off. I loved Objective-C when I first learned it a few years ago and loved it even more when I wrote a few apps with it. I'm glad that its essence (in Objective-J) is gaining more traction.Random notice/question: Since V8 is increasing the efficiency of property references for JS objects via hidden class objects, does that mean that Cappuccino's message routing will gain a huge speed increase?Man, I just love the circular nature of this: ex-Smalltalk developers wrote the JavaScript implementation which in turn, will run Smalltalk-like message passing."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "With Safari (especially with the offline features in Snow Leopard) and now Google Chrome, we have the browser technology to make rich, desktop-like webapps built with Cappuccino and Sproutcore shine.I think this marks an evolution of web interfaces. I'm exited to see what people build using Cappuccino."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm looking forward to spending my weekend with Cappuccino. My main desktop product is developed in Cocoa, but I'd like to expand it onto the web and the iPhone. Cappuccino looks like it might handle the web side of that quite well.I tried Sproutcore, and while I'm impressed with what's been done so far it takes me several days of working on it to shift into Javascript/HTML/CSS mode from Obj-C. Hopefully with Cappuccino it'll be more like porting the app than rewriting the app.[Edit to clarify]"
}
] | en | 0.952619 | 2 | 0.137984 | 0 |
Surprises | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\"Now, when coding, I try to think: 'how can I write this such that if people saw my code, they’d be amazed at how little there is and how little it does'.\"golden. i've been trying to pound this concept into my head lately, and this is a very well-stated version of it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The first point hit home big time. When you're doing a startup you feel like every day is precious and the tide of change is racing along impossibly fast. It's healthy to remember that the world doesn't reinvent itself every month. The problem you're working on now will probably still be relevant in 1-2 years."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "How slowly things change.depends on the context. for huge macro level projects e.g. iPhone reshaping cell phone industry or FB having Google size revenue, ebay's network effects being broken, that all takes time.but in the same time period (past 2.5 years) a lot of things have completely changed. FB platform has gone from launch to supporting companies that could IPO (and made a whole load of single developers v rich). social gaming has gone from scrabulous to now posing a credible threat to the entire console gaming industry. the wii destroyed the xbox and ps3 within its first year of launch and now sells more than both of them combined.i'd argue that it's the faster moving trends that impact startups and startup opportunities more than the slower moving macro trends."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "+1 for paying attention to international customersFor our ecommerce startup, we did nothing as far as internationalization goes other then offering to ship our product outside of the US and Canada. We were amazed at the response we got and it was one of the factors that helped us get cash flow positive very quickly"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I have a lot of concepts, I'm still narrowing down and going through in terms of what I'm working on next. Time and getting going is a big source of anxiety. This post helped calm that down a bit. Worth the read."
}
] | en | 0.974346 | 3 | 0.84254 | 0 |
Comparison of DVCS hosting - Github, Bitbucket, Assembla, Unfuddle, Kiln & more | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I know that the author says this is a high level overview... but the extra features that DVCS hosting companies add on top of repository hosting is practically the entire value-add of using a repository hosting site vs. setting up your own server or just dropboxing your git projects.I know I'm biased, but for me I could care less about features like price per GB. Features like GitHub's Branch List page, Compare View, Commit Comments, and Web UI are the entire reason I push private repositories."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've used RepositoryHosting.com for a bit over a year, and its one of the best deals I've ever gotten. We have a repo for each client project, so like the author we require unlimited repositories although our disk space needs are low.We don't need the project management offerings that are included with Unfuddle and others, so its a good fit for us. I've worked with Unfuddle as well, and its a great deal if you'd benefit from some Basecampish features."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I only knew of about half of those, so the list alone is valuable to me. I'll have to try a few myself, thanks!To those interested, I've been using Unfuddle for a while, and a super-basic review:Pretty quick, clean, and most importantly loads of very helpful (?) documentation popups for n00bs (myself included). Someone who's never used Git can jump on Unfuddle and be functional very quickly. I believe they use Trac for a ticketing system, but I'm not familiar enough with it to say for sure."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Nice post.\nYou forgot about codaset.com that has an interesting pricing model explained here: http://codaset.com/codaset/codaset/blog/official-launch-day-..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I went through this exact process a few weeks ago, when I started using Mercurial as my main source control. This article would have helped a lot.I settled on Codebasehq, btw, and I'm extremely happy so far."
}
] | en | 0.904074 | 7 | 0.40406 | 1 |
An American doctor experiences an NHS emergency room | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I actually have directly relevant experience to the question of "What happens if you get something in your eye in the US and need to see a doctor urgently?" Don't read the following if you're squeamish.About a year and a half ago, I dropped my iPad while on a flight from Japan to the US. The screen cracked in the top corner. I tentatively touched the screen, to see if the crack was dangerous. I did not cut my finger, but did succeed in transferring a very small piece of glass to my finger.People touch their eyes frequently, often unconsciously.Six hours later, after attempting self-irrigation on the plane and at the airport, I was at a hospital in Chicago seeing an eye doctor. Time from arrival at proper floor to being taken to room: three minutes ("glass in eye" cuts down on paperwork quite a bit). Time to arrival of doctor: approximately four minutes after that.They successfully treated me for, possible misquote, "non-traumatic introduction of a foreign body to the eye." (The attending physician's first words, after reading the chart, were "How in God's name does an iPad screen end up in your eye?")Treatment was approximately 15 minutes of a resident's time and 5 minutes of the attending physician's time plus one cotton swap and some iodine.Total cost: approximately $300, plus twenty minutes of dealing with the billing clerk (after approximately 30 minutes of waiting for the billing clerk to be ready).Most of the time with the billing clerk was a result of the clerk getting the run-around from a Japanese commercial travel insurance company. I customarily travel with private insurance which, among other things, covers me for medical emergencies while traveling. (Normally I'm covered by Japanese national insurance, which doesn't normally cover treatment of Americans in America for all the obvious reasons.) The insurance company denied reimbursement for elective medical treatment. Direct quote: You could have elected to leave it in your eye."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "As a Canadian, this doesn't surprise too much: People complain about wait times all the time, but the only wait times I've ever seen are for relatively stable situations that do not put the person at increased risk, e.g., corrective surgeries for non-threatening conditions, etc. (We can - and should - debate whether surgeries to correct intense chronic pain should be delayed as much as they often are, but current medico-political thinking appears to be that pain ain't so bad, contrary to current psychological thinking).I've had a couple of exposures to emergency rooms and clinics over the last few years. The most telling was when I sliced open the back of my hand with an industrial fan. We cleaned and bandaged it, then applied ice, and I sat until the pain subsided and felt good enough to go the nearest clinic.By the time I arrived, the pain and nausea had returned, but no biggie. I presented my healthcard and described the situation, which caused the three people behind the counter to pause and eye me as one asked "But you didn't break the skin, right?"I did not get a chance to complete my reply, which started with "Yes, of course...". "Drop your card, come with me now".The waiting room was more than half full, but I was priority number 1 for the next 15 minutes. A nurse carefully, delicately removed the dressing, then used a thin metal instrument to ever so carefully widen the cut and examine the tissue underneath. When satisfied, she sent me back to the waiting room where I sat for an hour and half.I learned the full story when I returned for an x-ray the next day (I hurt myself on a Sunday, the basement x-ray lab was closed): Had I severed - or even cut - any of the tendons leading to my fingers, I would have rushed to the hospital to save my hand before the tendons shrank and dried into uselessness.I didn't mind the 1.5 hour wait on the Sunday, or the combined 1.5 hours on the Monday, because when it came to what really mattered, there was no wait at all.They only took my healthcard once the initial careful inspection was over. Billing and bean counting were irrelevant.Note: I expect that billing for treatment of visiting foreign nationals will vary widely by province (anyone in the know care to chime in?), but that the overall triage process will be similar."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Well, he got into one of the better hospitals by the looks of it, I am sure there are many.\nI'm surprised he was not billed, from what I read on wall posters in hospitals non-residents (or non-EU?) are charged for medical services.Unfortunately had my share of landings in E&A and I was less than impressed. \nGenerally bad/old looking buildings and rooms, not the most skilled staff - some of them were struggling to speak English, long waiting times (my record is 5h).On the other hand many of the people working in the NHS are literally life saving heroes, so they deserve our respect. Any country on this planet that does not have a similar system can't call itself civilised. Luckily most of Europe has this in some form or another.This is not to say that things can't be improved.NHS could probably run 2 times better on half the money it currently spends; I think efficiency is FAR from being their strong point. At this size it takes a special kind of management to do stuff without huge waste - perhaps Toyota can lend a hand here.[1] :-)[1] - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-26/work-efficie... etc"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> It makes you wonder exactly what frightens Americans about the NHS?I'm less frightened of the NHS than of a hypothetical American version of the NHS, which would be run by the US government and have (mostly) Americans using it."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I've seen posters up in the local A&E that say something like "If you're a foreigner please be aware that we'll send you an invoice". And there's certainly been statements recently from politicians talking about doing this for the dreaded "immigrants".I suspect that the total income from this would be tiny though, and perhaps not even enough to justify the administration costs. And my impression from staff at NHS hospitals is that they're just interested in helping you and really don't care if you didn't pay."
}
] | en | 0.935648 | 14 | 0.087397 | 1 |
Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Here's the paper.http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...They would like to charge you $32 to look at it, nature-ally.The fusion yield is (?) 14 kilojoules (inferring this from physicist Mark Herrman's "5 million billion fusions" [WaPo], at 18 MeV per fusion), which is a moderate improvement over the 8 kilojoule achivement from last fall:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459289[WaPo] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fusion...The "1%" energy efficiency figure [a] is misleading: 14 kJ is about 1% of 1.5 MJ of ultraviolet light hitting the fuel capsule. But creating that UV pulse consumed 3 MJ of infrared light, which in turn took 400 MJ from the flash bulbs driving the IR laser. So the system efficiency is more like 0.003% (and throwing in hypothetical turbines to generate electricity, 0.001%).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF...[a] I'm referring to this: "while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel."(update: from yosyp's link, the fusion figures were 14.4 kJ, and 17.3 kJ, on two different runs:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7227950"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars> government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weaponsI think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the world's military spending on these big, as Google likes to put it, moonshot projects we could probably solve some really fundamental world problems (i.e. energy, climate change) in the near future vs. waiting many, many decades (if not centuries)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This sentiment is interesting "Over the past few years, NIF has been getting a fat 'F.'" Perhaps now that 'grade' will change.Actually, I think framing it as a grade is beyond silly; it is irresponsible. Giving a letter grade to long-term scientific project makes little sense. It is not a one-shot thing with a predefined notion of correctness. What can we compare such a grade to?Instead, we should be asking what we've learned and how the project has advanced science."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is newsworthy despite "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser"?After decades of work they are orders of magnitude away from break-even. Makes me wonder if the goal is actually break-even and/or power generation. Not really; but it's a revealing question.I'm no great fan of the budgets these huge projects pull down; I think the bang-for-the-buck is greater elsewhere. But modelling nuclear weapons is an even greater waste of time. It's all kind of a sad epigraph about national science and technology initiatives.Assuming the modest proposition that fusion energy is possible, why not make fusion energy a 'man on the moon' kind of national goal? It's hardly in doubt that we need a large source of clean energy. Is it a failure of imagination? Is it a failure of the political system - Can't get Bubba to vote for no fusion thing. Is the status quo energy system resistant to change? Whatever, the NIF thing just makes me depressed."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": ""Strictly speaking, while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel. Useful levels of fusion are still a long way off."The rest was lost to energy conversion losses. Yeah, not the best breakthrough I've heard today. Their best breakthrough was this CAD-flythrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sp1sDpn_M0"
}
] | en | 0.67551 | 1 | 0.574215 | 1 |
Dropbox Hires Rasmus Andersson, Facebook’s Mobile Design Guru | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It seems like they are scoring a lot of really big power players from other great companies. Does it seem like everyone is going there until it goes public for the payout?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Facebook has mobile design? Maybe he did the decent bits, and feel free to correct me, but by the evidence of my Android facebook app I'd be glad to be shot of anyone in that department."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "So a great programmer, a great designer and all round nice kinda guy. I already hate him :/"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Rasmus is also behind the original design of Spotify interaction design, branding and more. He is one of the most talented designers I know about, this is really good news for Dropbox!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "He's a developer as well."
}
] | en | 0.97743 | 9 | 0.064477 | 1 |
Ask HN: Require a sign-up or allow anonymous/guest users? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is an interesting question that I'd love to hear other opinions on.My idea that I haven't gotten to implement yet: Make it possible for the user to get started without logging in, then force them to create an account after they've started playing around.The particular application that I specifically want to try this on is going to be a document-oriented application. I'll let the user jump in and start creating something without creating an account, but then make the user create an account (or log into an existing account) to be able to save their work. If you've already spent even two minutes creating something, having to type in an email address and password seems trivial compared to having to start over again if they want to come back later. (That's the theory, at least.)The key in my mind is to get the customer invested in the application (even slightly) before forcing them to make an account."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Depends on the product I think, however I do enjoy apps that I can \"tour\" without signing up. Especially if the sign-up isn't quick.If you can build value in your product without forcing me to login, I'm more likely to want your product more because I've been sold on it. I think thats important, I should want to sign-up. This could be via a product tour, guest account, even a demo video. Ultimately I'm window shopping so give me a reason to come inside.No matter what though whether you allow anonymous users or require a sign-up, measure the funnel between guest-user and registration. Find out where your users are bouncing and where you could improve the onboarding. Is the homepage persuasive enough? Is the sign-up page itself losing users? Measure, iterate, and repeat. I'm sure there's quite a bit to learn."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "We do not require sign-up to use our form builder web app. You can access all of the pages without login. You can create a form, copy it to your web site and get submissions by email. (The email address can be entered on the form setup.)This gives people a chance to try the product without making a time investment. We are getting close to 1 million users (not including guest users) so it seems to be working pretty well for us.Our product is JotForm if you would like to see how it works.\nwww.jotform.com"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Not requiring signup makes development massively harder but I think it's worth it.All of the websites competing in my space require a signup except mine. Their products may be way better but I don't bother to check and neither do my users.In fact I think you can make a viable business just by taking popular websites and working out how to implement them without user accounts."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "You should provide a good reason for visitor to become a user. never block everything for guests(like many websites out there), you should provide a great demo or any strong reason for people to become a user.\nThat's clear nobody will fill forms and do activation process for just a sentence that you wrote on your home page.\n\"Find Friends\" - Signup\n\"Live Chat\" - Signup"
}
] | en | 0.969542 | 4 | 0.072038 | 1 |
Should Your Start Up Go Static or Dynamic? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The definition given for dynamic and static languages is not very good. The main difference is that a statically typed language has type checks preformed at compile time and a dynamically typed language has them preformed at runtime. My intro CS professor had a really good explanation for this: in a statically typed language, the variables have types where in a dynamically typed language, the values have types.Also, his graph of languages doesn't really make any sense at all. If he just kept it as a division into groups, it would make sense, but it really looks like he's trying to say that C++ has a \"weaker\" (whatever that means) type system than C or that Haskell has a \"weaker\" type system than Scala.Also, static typing is not always for robustness; it can also increase performance. C is a perfect example of this--it is one of the easiest languages to write bugs in but is also really fast.Overall, I was not terribly impressed with this article--it gave poor definitions and little new insight (as far as I could tell, it just reiterated the same old cliches about static vs dynamic types without any anecdotes, experience or advice)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"Now if you are raging to some serious dubstep, its easy enough to miss that small typo, you go screw it and do it live, and deploy to production. Python will simply create the new variable and not a single thing will be said.\"Erm... Did the author test this code before making this assertion? >>> def get_first_problem(problems):\n ... for problem in problems:\n ... return problam\n ... \n >>> get_first_problem([1,2,3])\n Traceback (most recent call last):\n File \"<stdin>\", line 1, in <module>\n File \"<stdin>\", line 3, in get_first_problem\n NameError: global name 'problam' is not defined"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> Dynamic languages are languages that don’t necessarily need variables to be declared before they are used.Not exactly true. You do need to declare variables in some dynamic languages (var in JavaScript, for example), but you don't need to declare their type.Anyhow, the whole question is a little irrelevant. The language you pick for your startup is among the factors least important to its success. Just pick a reasonable language that you are productive with, that has library support for the stuff you need, and that works well on the operating systems you care about, and that will be fine."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This discussion is missing two key things: Go and Dart. They both combine the best of static and dynamic languages. There is no need to choose, you can have the best of both worlds, without the disadvantages.I'm using Go right now, it is amazing, blowing both Python and C# out of the water, with speed of development, robustness and maintainability."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I am all for strong, static typing, but in fairness I don't see how C++ can be considered weaker than C?Or alternately how F# is less static than Haskell or weaker than Scala?Or am I just reading too much into the chart?"
}
] | en | 0.972878 | 0 | 0.766301 | 0 |
Actually I use Rdio, Not Spotify, Your Link Is No Good To Me | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is exactly the problem that http://toma.hk and http://www.tomahawk-player.org are trying to solve.Their approach: your library becomes (title, artist, album) tuples, and then songs are found at whatever provider you use when you want to listen.The devs are mostly ex-Amarok and everything is on GitHub: https://github.com/tomahawk-player."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "URL shortener for music links that then redirects to user's preferred music service (saved for future) anyone?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I thought MusicBrainz had great potential in this area, as a common and open database of artists/albums/tracks - and Spotify used to have support in their API to search based on some of those.http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=3463Ultimately unless someone uses MB and/or other data sources to create an aggregated 'music translation' service - whether it's entirely offline translation, translation-on-demand, or some kind of mix - I'm not sure how this is going to happen with so many proprietary platforms."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is a big part of the reason why I like Grooveshark. It's totally beyond me why nobody ever mentions it in discussions about music services, it's easily the best thing around."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Good point, I also like his idea at the end, though as a browser extension instead of a twitter client extension."
}
] | en | 0.907995 | 9 | 0.120648 | 1 |
How Bitcoins Involved in Crime Can Be Seized by the Feds | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Hypothetical: Suppose you owned a car, and this was stolen. If the car were sold intact, then presumably you could reclaim the car from the buyer because of the nemo dat rule.But now suppose the thief sold the car to a salvage yard. The salvage yard breaks the car down into scrap metal, which is melted down and recycled for use in other products.I'm not very familiar with this area of law, but presumably you would no longer have a claim to the car or the scrap because the original piece of property to which you had title, the car, was destroyed. You might have a claim against the scrap yard for not checking title on the car and could recover the fair market value of the vehicle.Same with bitcoin -- once someone comingles the stolen coins with other coins, the original balance of coins has been destroyed. There is no action against parties further down the blockchain. Your only remedy should be to recover the fair market value of the coins from the party that "destroyed" the coins.<standard "this is not legal advice" disclaimer goes here>"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The article seems to miss out a very key point: How do they seize them?Do you knock on your door and demand your private keys? How can they do that if you've broken no laws? How do they even know you have them in the first place?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I have US dollar bill B03542754F in my pocket right now. I wonder about its "blockchain" and how it has flowed into and through our economy. I wonder if it at anytime in its life has been a part of illegal activity."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> The FBI already owns 5 to 10 percent of [bitcoins], which are now out of circulation.Given that money laundering and drug transactions have become major parts of bitcoin's current use case, law enforcement's tendency to seize bitcoins puts yet another deflationary pressure on the system. The biggest obstacle to bitcoin becoming a currency rather than a speculator's darling is the stability of its value. Meanwhile, the system's incentives seem to promote hoarding in hopes of a price spike.Not that this is problem in and of itself. Bitcoin's decent anonymity creates very real value, and it looks poised to be a medium of exchange. It just puts a damper on the hopes that future transactions will be denominated in bitcoin rather than dollars."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Absurd. No one demands that you give cash back if it turns out to have been used in a crime. Imagine if your employer was accused of a crime, or sold something to a criminal, etc."
}
] | en | 0.985366 | 3 | 0.106517 | 1 |
Localtunnel.me | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Author of the project here.I want to clarify why this project exists (as many seem to point out that other projects or methods exist for doing this).TL;DR; If you think of localtunnel as just a shitty ngrok (or name your project here), you are missing the point and probably don't have the same use cases I do.1. It was made overnight at some hackathon because I was not satisfied with the other tunneling options I found. They required either an account or some stupid ssh setup. I got to thinking of ways to create a tunnel that simply had an CLI tool and instantly get a tunnel no setup. It worked, I kept it.2. It is written as a library first, CLI tool second. This means it can be used to create tunnels in a test suite if you want to use services like saucelabs to run browser tests (see https://github.com/defunctzombie/zuul). This is leveraged by projects like socket.io and engine.io (among others). This is perhaps the main reason I keep it around despite there being alternative CLI tools.3. Both the client and server code are availably and easy to install and use. Companies do this when they want to run their own tunnels for privacy (or whatever their reasons... I don't care).4. Yes, I know the name is identical to the old ruby?python? one. Whatever. That one seems defunct now anyway."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You can also use ngrok.com which has been around for quite a while. \nThe developer even responds very quickly to support requests.As a bonus, you also get:- Custom (sub) domains- TLS tunnels if you want, not mandatory- Other protocols than just HTTP/S"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm confused, there is an existing project called localtunnel that does exactly the same thing and dominates search results for "localtunnel". At the very least, pick a different name.http://progrium.com/localtunnel/"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This seems like a bad idea. localtunnel.me is redirecting non-tunnel'd subdomains to its main page, while inactive tunnel'd subdomains return "localtunnel error: no active client for 'adbc'". So, with a little poking, you find that tunnel'd subdomains seem to be [a-z0-9]{4}.localtunnel.me ... which isn't too terribly large of a search space to crawl. If it gets popular, it should be easy to find works-in-progress that might give up access to the user's computer, or keys to prod, or any of the other stuff that people are a little sloppy about on their work machines.edit: I was wrong, I should've been a little more thorough. Looks like it's [a-z0-9]{4,10}.localtunnel.me, which is significantly larger."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I suggest you don't use it until they have upgraded OpenSSL...WARNING: server returned more data than it should - server is vulnerable! (Heartbleed)"
}
] | en | 0.945956 | 6 | 0.929958 | 0 |
What I would like to see from Microsoft regarding OSS | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I was going to say stop using the Ms-PL[1] license but when I checked both ASP MVC[2] and TypeScript[3] are licensed under Apache. Good decision.[1]http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/licenses.aspx[2]http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/license[3]http://typescript.codeplex.com/license"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The problem isn't just the relationship that Microsoft has with OSS, but with developers in general. As developer in their \"ecosystem\" for years, I've come to the conclusion that the majority of the Redmond management is totally out of touch with the third party developers. Crap like Windows 8, \"flat\" interfaces, abandonment of APIs, NIH, reinventing the wheel, ignoring requests and feedback, etc, doesn't make it better."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "- License the complete .NET stack under an Apache license.- Disclose the patents they allege Linux infringes.- Apologize for what they did to ISO.- Make the ability to add personal keys to secure boot a requirement for having a Windows logo."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "One area they still have a stronghold is in Office and productivity software. There was an entry on HN about this :http://linuxaria.com/article/the-biggest-failure-in-open-sou...If any of those were to be made open source, MS would effectively corner the open source office market as well. I'm not holding my breath though.I'm actually shocked at how quickly the Microsoft stack in my daily work has now gone down in use from where it was only about 5 years ago. With the exception of Office as in above and Windows for Photoshop (almost daily use) and Visual Studio (some projects still need it), the rest is entirely Open Source from OS and on. Currently I'm using Mint and Debian with OpenBSD on the side.As much as people bash MS for all sorts of (well deserved) things, the bottom line is that they do get a lot of things right. It's not just political wrangling that allow them to stay in business, obviously, since if the products are really lacking too much, they'd be hurting too. I do think the culture in the company is changing, hopefully for the better.Edit: I think, by and large Windows 8 is a mistake, but not in the way it was designed. The way it was marketed. Win 8 makes sense on mobile/touch devices and no where else. And that's all I have to say about that. Hopefully, they don't plan on keeping the trend into the next version of Windows, but we'll see.Even though joysticks are arguably a better means of control, there's a reason cars still have steering wheels."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It would be lovely for MS to promote alternative open source frameworks and make it as easy as possible for .Net shops to use them.That way .Net programmers will get a nice cost saving when someone inevitably ports the whole lot over to Mono/Linux."
}
] | en | 0.952378 | 10 | 0.895048 | 0 |
Sunsets in Google Calendar using R | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I always miss meteor showers. I live in the city so I have to drive for about 30 minutes to see one BUT if the sky cover is over 10% covered it isn't worth it and the moon needs to be gone. I think I might try to figure out a way to let me know when the conditions of a meteor shower, the cloud cover are just right and the moon is not present in the sky and post to my Google Calendar.Thanks for inspiring me."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Great idea. There's a lot of calendar apps out there, but the data feeds powering them are the same old crap. The concept of an agent doing stuff with the app feels like 60's-ish virtual assistant futurism.I wonder how usable an "intelligent" autonomous agent putting things on a calendar would be. (That is, to extend the generation of a calendar feed with more clever bits.) Say there was a weather component that would only schedule sunsets when the weather would be conducive for photography."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Reading the title made me think that someone wrote a script that would create sub-calendars of various colors and then schedule events using those calendars so that it'd emulate a sunset across the Google Calendar interface."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Man, I totally forgot about my idea for a website until reading this post. I put this into evernote last week:> A service/website which lets you know when a beautiful sunset or sunrise is likely, and the best time / place to view them in your area. Includes a photo sharing feature where people can upload their sunsets, rainbows, etc. Would use weather forecasts to predict red skiesDoes anyone know if this already exists? If it does, I won't even be disappointed, I just want to use it"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Got it to work! Great writeup Hilary.For others like me who know nothing about R, I did a little writeup for doing this yourself: http://blog.samsandberg.com/2014/06/04/sunsets-in-google-cal...Hope this helps at least someone out there"
}
] | en | 0.965959 | 5 | 1 | 0 |
Don't Store Passwords, Generate Them When Needed | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "However, this IS a master password only with a salted hash added on top. From the FAQ it uses a phrase like \"Tubby loves tacos!facebook\" runs it through SHA1 and spits out Facebook's password. Someone who shoulder surfs your keyphrase can now use this technique to generate passwords for any site, whereas using something like Password Safe or the various other password storage methods would need to both shoulder surf your master password as well as obtain your encrypted password file."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've been using HMAC-SHA1 as a basis for my passwords for awhile. I call my algorithm \"Passy\". It works like this (pseudocode'ish). # generate our HMAC\n hash = generate HMAC-SHA1 (facebook.com, passphrase) (String)\n hash += SHA1(hash) # just need the extra length\n \n # transform hash into a Passy\n passy_chars = \"ABCDEFGHabcdefgh23456789#$%*+=@?\"\n passy = \"\"\n foreach octet in hash (starting with MSB)\n passy += passy_chars[octet % 32]\n\n # figure out the length of this passy\n for i in 16 to passy.length\n if passy.substr(0,i) is \"good\", return passy.substr(0,i)\n where good means includes at least one from each of [A-H], [a-h], [2-9], and [#$%*+=@?]\n\nI've implemented this in CoffeeScript, and have a minified version up here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11596/passy-tiny.htmlI have evolved this algorithm over the past decade. My requirements: 1. minimum of 80 bits of entropy (16*32=80)\n 2. must include at least one symbol, one uppercase, one lowercase, and one digit\n 3. base it on cryptographically secure hash algorithms\n 4. avoids confusing similar symbols O and 0, l and 1 and !, etc.\n\nI realize that requirement #2 does nothing to increase entropy. It's simply there to satisfy (idiotic!) password requirements.With any of these systems, your generates passwords are still only as good as a) the strength of your passphrase, and b) the secrecy of your passphrase. As well as the obvious (physical security, keyboard sniffers, etc.)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I use passwordcard (http://www.passwordcard.org/en) as my password manager,1) All my passwords are stored on a piece of paper, in plain text. There is no need to encrypt, because only I know how I use it.2) I don't need to back it up regularly. Just one backup, in case I lose the card, is enough.3) Because I have to type in the passwords from it, I actually remember the ones I use regularly, so even if I lose the cards, I can log in to most things.4) There is no \"master password\" to be exposed.5) If I'm stupid enough to read it out loud, or run my finger along it whilst someone is watching, I might expose the parameters of one password, but everything else is still secure.6) It is a piece of paper, the browser integration goes via my eyes and my fingers."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Here is what I do: require 'digest/sha1'\n puts \"doubly troubly\"\n thing = gets.chomp\n base = Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(thing))\n puts base\n puts base[0..3] + \"^!!^E\" + base[4..-1]\n puts base[0..3] + \"^!!^E\" + base[4..6]\n puts base[0..3] + \"^!!^E\"\n\nFor any site I input the domain (so \"zach.tumblr.com\" + my_salt would be inputed) then I copy one of the four outputs based on what security level I think the site deserves. THEN (and most critically) I add a password that rotates key characters based on factor X of the site. Think about this like a normal password, but it changes.I then expose this little piece of code on every one of my computers as well as on a protected server that lives only on an IP.I 100% agree with this article, but I have my own system and it works well."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "How is remembering the pass-sentences different from remembering passwords?"
}
] | en | 0.955758 | 8 | 0.249786 | 1 |
Steve Wozniak gives jailbreaking the thumbs up, wishes iTunes supported Android | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "BREAKING: hacker nerd who has had nothing to do with Apple for 3 decades takes positions markedly different from Apple orthodoxy.Woz always takes very predictably pro-hacker positions; I'm not clear why we regard it as news when he does."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The itunes thing is actually pretty interesting. There may be the same case as there was before for an exception.I have a work mac, work pc, home mac, kobo, ipod & android. Sounds like a lot when I list it out. I'm not really a gadget person and some of those are pretty old. I use them all though and every one or two years I expect to add or replace a \"device\". Apple will be considered and sometimes chosen.That's not unusual. Most Apple customers are not monogamous. Realistically, Apple have never been the company with so many options you never need to go anywhere else. They have been the company that's reluctantly good at bringing devices together and connecting them with a marketplace.They don't like harmonizing elements they don't control. They would prefer the world divided nicely into Apple people and non Apple people. That's not realistic.To improve Apple users' experience they need to support foreign devices. Mac users use android and many avoid itunes altogether (they need to think in terms of 'files' anyway). Ipod users use android and their ipod never has the podcasts they've been listening to. iPad users can't read the book they are halfway through on sony reader.They wanted ipod users to just plug them into a mac, but that wasn't realistic so they released itunes for windows. I think its time for another compromise."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Does anyone really care what Woz says these days? Really?I know he accomplished some cool stuff 30-odd years ago, but why is his opinion still relevant? What technology is he actually working on now?He just seems to be a reliable semi-controversial rent-a-quote for busy journalists. He's not even that insightful.I realise this will cost me karma, but whatevs."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'll be honest, I'm so, so glad iTunes doesn't support anything but the iPod/iOS lines as it's already a headache of overdone and unneeded functionality.Quote! \"It’s better to think constructively about what can be done with our mobile platforms to improve our lives more, rather than trying to throw darts and insults\". And this is why Woz is still relevant. He understands that it's not about the iPhone or the Galaxy S3 or which ever device you have, but about what it does for you. They've all been drastically transformative in day to day life for a huge amount of the population of the Western world. Tech blogs and geek circles spend that much time sniping at each other that we seem to forget how quickly things have progressed. They're all great devices."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "iTunes supporting Android would be great for Apple. Unfortunately, it would also be good for Google, so it's never going to happen."
}
] | en | 0.97325 | 8 | 0.4268 | 0 |
On software communities, "Rock star" programmers, and... Linus | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is a low-quality essay that is not worth discussing directly. (Meta-note: see, it's possible to have firm opinions without being abusive).I just want to add that there are plenty of outstanding engineers with very high standards who lead projects without going on the kinds of abusive rants that Linus is known for. For example: Roberto Ierusalimschy (Lua), Matz (Ruby), Ian Lance Taylor (Binutils, GCC, Gold linker), Shawn Hargreaves (Allegro, works at Microsoft now), Jeff Dean & Sanjay Ghemawat (two of Google's most senior engineers), just to name a few.These guys don't compromise their opinions or let crap into the code-base just to be nice. But they're all really nice guys who don't rip into people for being wrong. When you see messages from them on a mailing list, you get a warm feeling because you know they are going to be insightful, accurate, terse, helpful, and friendly.Some people like the machismo that comes from people like Linus. It's like watching superhero movies and rooting for the guy who kicks ass against the bad guys. But I think ultimately this is not a healthy way to lead a community. If you speak in a way that triggers people's defense mechanisms, you make it harder to rationally evaluate the issues. If you ridicule people for their opinions, you aren't giving them an out that lets them change their mind later; a person is inclined to dig their heels in rather than look foolish."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This has nothing to do with Linus... feel free to ignore.A few years ago, oh hell looks like more than a decade ago, I was working with a brand new project manager. This guy was pretty fresh, saw the world \"manager\" and got all glossy eye'd. He walked around the office \"cracking the whip\" and liked to make statements such as \"I'm not here to make friends\" and \"I'm here to get these projects done\".Do you think, if this was ProjectManagerNews instead of HackerNews this person would be idolized? Would be held in high regard? Would other ProjectManagers stick up for him? What if he led a successful project or two? Would that validate his decision to act that way?...more importantly: Would you want to work for him? Is success a solid defense on being an asshole?I'm perfectly happy to sit down and discuss a problem but I've got not time for assholes, tempers, or rockstars for that matter."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is a false dichotomy. It is possible to have an opinion and not be an asshole. It just takes more work to do so.The real argument should be \"I'm glad <insert name here> is a jerk because it allows him to spend more time doing <insert cool thing here>.\"Personally, I think the extra work is worth it, but I'm also not the hub of a project like Linux, a movement like the FSF, or a company like Apple.Above and beyond everything else, the most interesting question is: Can you get into the hub position without being a prick?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I just think the arguments fall on two spectrums.On one end is that Linus is God and that he's untouchable. On the other end is that Linus is a asshole that tells everyone off.The more reasonable middle being that Linus is a pretty smart guy with an incredibly history of accomplishment. He's should be respected and his way of conversing with people is particular to personality. Like, we deal with people with personalities all the time. I don't think Linus has ever, despite all his cursing, personally attacked anyone. He just attacks stupid ideas. I find his comments refreshing. You just need to give him some trust to understand why he is saying whatever he is saying.I don't think that also implies that people should be unwelcoming or that people should have new ideas/opinions on what should be what. I think that Linus isn't some selfish jerk who doesn't want people to get involved with Linux. I think he just has reasonable expectations and isn't afraid to call you on your shit.Cool post though."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What frustrates me is you young bucks confusing Linus' personality with his technical prowess. He is not (only) his code.What if you found out Mozart ate little babies. Some of you would say that his music sucks. Some of you would say \"Well, Mozart had to eat babies, to fuel his creative genius!\" Few would accept that Mozart was a flipping musical genius who ate babies.From what I've read online, Linus can be a churlish little bitch, obviously ignoring the issue at hand when it suits him. Sometimes, he calls someone a moron, because they have done something he doesn't like, for some social reason.But he's a damn fine programmer, and can logic it up with the best of 'em. Often, when you get the the moron blessing from Linus, you have made a grave technical error, and you should be called on it. I wouldn't use the same style as Linus, but ey, to each his own.Just enjoy him for what he is, and leave the cult of personality stuff for others."
}
] | en | 0.919711 | 4 | 0.709214 | 1 |
The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Whenever I'm wondering if Moore's law is still prevailing as a trailing indicator, I check out: http://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/If that (logarithmic) chart starts to flatten - particularly for device #500 (more price sensitive than the first part of the list) on the list, then we're running into real obstacles.Let's check back in 2020 and see if Device #500 is running at 10 Petaflops."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Here's my impression of the future of CMOS:(1) Scaling will be technically feasible for many more years. (Intel's roadmap goes to 5 nm, and researchers have already made transistors as small as 3 nm.)(2) However, even if scaling is technically feasible, it may not be financially feasible. Quadruple patterning may get you smaller feature sizes, but at a very high cost. The alternative to quadruple patterning, x-ray lithography (called EUV), is also quite expensive, but at least there's some hope that its costs will drop.(3) Only if scaling is both technically feasible and financially feasible, we will continue to scale. But even then, the benefits of scaling will diminish (as they've been diminishing for years). Traditional scaling hasn't done much for silicon performance in years: recently most improvements in CMOS have come from straining the silicon with germanium. And the other beneficial side of scaling, cost, is also ending. Shrinking transistors gets you more chips per exposure/wafer, but at the same time it raises the costs of each exposure/wafer. We're finally reaching the point now where the increasing costs of each exposure/wafer are matching the savings of scaling.In light of all this, it's hard for me to see performace per dollar per year (which is not technically Moore's law I grant you) continue at the rapid pace of the past, even if technologies like x-ray lithography, III-V semiconductors, optical interconnects, and whatever end up panning out."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The end of Moore's law will probably come at about the same time true human-like AI appears. i.e. It seems like it will always be just a few decades in the future. e.g. Here's an economist article (sadly, paywalled) predicting that the end was nigh in 1995!http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-17272668.htmlIf you extrapolate current designs out then, yes, a size barrier is approaching. So, we should expect new designs to start appearing. For example, non-planar designs offer a lot of potential to reduce average trace-length, which could reduce power dissipation and increase speeds in turn. There are huge challenges to solve, but it is reasonable to expect that they will be met so long as the demand is there. In this light, Moore's law is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. The demand for computational resources grows exponentially, so a way to meet that demand is always found."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Hopefully the end of cost-effective process shrinks will mean programmers start cleaning up the mess of hugely inefficient everyday software.The party may be winding down for full x86-64 cores, but there's still some room for improvement by increasing efficiency of instructions on those cores and adding new instructions for common tasks (like hashing acceleration instructions, sse9000, etc). Intel already does that with each new processor family.There's a large one-time improvement available for computation-heavy workloads by integrating many simpler high-performance low-power cores into everyday machines (like the epiphany architecture: http://www.adapteva.com/). Intel seems to think only servers will go that route (Xeon Phi), but I don't know about that."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I like Kurzweil's backtrapolation over non-transistor computing hardware [jpg] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/PPTMoores... (IC, transistor, tube, relay, mechanical)His future predictions can be fanciful, but his data from the past is solid. He thinks it could be nanotubes next. But it seems fair to say it could be as surprising to us as vacuum tubes were to people using relays..."
}
] | en | 0.84296 | 13 | 0.420673 | 1 |
Into the Bitcoin Mines | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Whenever I see advances in mining rigs I just hope that someone invents a cryptocurrency where the mining actually does some useful work, like protein folding."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Couple weeks ago these photos from a Hong Kong based mining facility floated up, pretty crazy setup.https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346134.msg3709913#ms..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": ""Today, all of the machines dedicated to mining Bitcoin have a computing power about 4,500 times the capacity of the United States government’s mightiest supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia, according to calculations done by Michael B. Taylor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego."This is obviously wrong. Where did it come from?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Not a bad place for a Bitcoin miner. There's cold Arctic air for cooling and cheap geothermal energy for power."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Question: If BTC were to disappear overnight, could all these machines be retooled to do something else? Or are they so specifically made that their only possible purpose is coin mining?"
}
] | en | 0.918422 | 14 | 0.076879 | 1 |
Greenspan Says Bitcoin a Bubble Without Intrinsic Currency Value | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Who is Greenspan? Oh right, the fella who advocated for 1999 banking deregulation [1] and 2001/2003 tax cuts that encouraged a historic boom (and subsequent bust) -- cleverly calling the direct consequences of his own policies "Irrational Exuberance".[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1999/199911..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "1.1) A alternative to Paypal1.2) An alternative to Square / Venmo1.3) An alternative to Level Up1.4) A method of cheaply moving money between currencies without going through a financial institution.1.5) An alternative to buying Gold1.6) A way for libertarians / alternative currency advocates / people who are angry at wall street / The Fed to opt out of fiat currency, and lets remember, these are large movements with very little other outlets for popular expression.1.7) Provide non-reversible transactions1.8) Provide transactions that do not require trust on the part of either individual.1.9) Provide transactions that do not require any financial institutions."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'd say that the US Dollar also has "no intrinsic value." Should the military might which props up the USD suddenly be mitigated, and the world then decided to abandon trading in USD, then the true "intrinsic value" of that US Dollar will be realized."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Partial reactionary says something partial and reactionary, more news at 11."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "> There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the individual who is issuing the money, whether it's a government or an individual.I wonder how many people skip right over this in the article thinking that's just another pointless or no-substance sentence.It pretty much sums up everything that makes Bitcoin unsutable for any type of real world (at scale) transactions and trade."
}
] | en | 0.664255 | 14 | 0.075365 | 1 |
How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "No. I work for an OTA (not Kayak). First of all airlines file their fare rules and OTAs don't change the prices, and generally airlines pay around $10 to us to book a RT fare so there is little room to discount. Kayak is a meta which means all they do is present prices they are given from their partners (either via a feed or scrape) and then send them to the partner who shares the fee. Southwest (as others have mentioned) is not available in the US as a business choice. Kayak also heavily caches the fares (everyone does to make performance better) and inventory changes a lot especially in close by dates. Seeing cached prices of a cached price means the actual price can change a lot from searching to booking. Note the final price is only determined when you hit a booking page, everything before that is cached and might be fairly stale. Of course they can be errors in pricing since the fare rules are crazy complicated and often the difference in fares might be all the taxing entities. Each country, county, city, airport and cow pasture might affect the final price so it's possible that a country where you are booking might affect this (our customers are mostly in the US) but I doubt it.tldr - lucky "hacker""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Like someone else said, it’s because it’s a Southwest flight… Southwest isn't shown on the results of the big airfare search engines (kayak, expedia, orbitz) when searching from the United States because it refuses to pay those websites' fees.Looks like you’ve found out that they are shown on Canada based version of the Kayak site. Most likely because the fee arrangements are different or because Southwest is willing to pay them, probably to get exposure to markets that wouldn't otherwise know about them because they don't have a marketing presence there."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Looks like the cheap flights were on WN (Southwest) and the expensive flights were on DL (Delta).I just did an example flight search to fly later this week (Jan 24-30 round trip) from SLC to OAK, a route that both DL and WN fly direct. Kayak shows me fares from $492 on US and B6 changing planes in Phoenix or Long Beach (doubling distance and quintupling flight time) and direct flights from $532 on DL.Kayak doesn't show me any WN prices in the USA, but might have some sort of pilot program or contract to show them outside the USA. Iflyswa.com shows direct flights from $526.Meanwhile ITA Matrix (matrix.itasoftware.com, made with secret alien technology [0]) shows flights on US for $318 which violate the rules for domestic connection times and cannot be booked. It's strange that those flights are shown since Matrix is usually very reliable.Going directly to US's website reveals fares of $440 for flights with a connection in Phoenix.So what's the lesson here? Check the WN site directly instead of depending on search sites. Check both ITA Matrix and Kayak if you're depending on search sites; they don't have the same flights listed. Sometimes you need to check individual airline websites even though it's a pain because they have better flights and prices than search sites have; there's no reliable way to know when that's the case.[0] http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've been doing this for years. After I noticed most places are cheap to get to but flights are expensive back. I noticed the same business model was in place from the other direction. So just fake the country of origin and you get cheap to and back.The other one is clear your cookies before booking. Places create fake demand by disappearing the cheap flights on you if you shopping around. If you clear your cookies the cheap flights will return."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This has nothing to do with the VPN, unfortunately.The price difference comes from Southwest's price being different than Delta's. Southwest flights wont show up when searching Kayak's USA site, but they do show up on international Kayak pages. It sounds like that's because they don't want to pay the brokerage fees for flights booked through the USA versions of Kayak/Expedia/Travelocity -- but I'm not sure of that.Interesting experiment though!"
}
] | en | 0.967342 | 10 | 0.257062 | 1 |
How I Made Porn Video Streaming More Efficient with Python and C | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Agreed that RTMP is an abomination that needs to be exorcised from the Earth as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it is probably here to stay until something like WebRTC gains critical mass.It's not clear what the article means by \"repackaging\" a stream or \"pointers\" to tags (especially in the diagram that shows tag pointers being transported between users). While RTMP is cumbersome, shoving media data (tags) under a per-session protocol header is essentially the standard way of moving data from one session to another.So I'm not really following this. Is this cutting out the RTMP entirely for receiving clients, and instead sending the FLV down via another transport, like HTTP or whatever? Or is it more of, \"I wrote my own RTMP streaming server in C and Python\", along with some implementation details which I'm not understanding? (Not that there's anything wrong with doing so. Options are limited in the streaming-server space.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I love reading articles about technical issues and solutions in the Porn industry. It's like getting a peek inside a youtube scale company as they grow."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": ">The aggregated bandwidth of the clusters was around 50 Gbps, from which they used around 10 Gbps while at peak load.Now that is a lot a porn.Also, the illustrations look really good! How did you make them?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If anyone is interested in an alternative to the usual RTMP servers (FMS, Red5, and Wowza), I highly recommend EvoStream (http://www.evostream.com). Compared to the alternatives, EvoStream is much more efficient. I believe TinyChat published a whitepaper discussing their transition from Red5 to EvoStream, which resulted in a decline in the number of required servers.EvoStream is a highly scalable streaming media server written in C++ based off of the open source RTMPD (http://www.rtmpd.com). The commercial company, also called EvoStream, is a relatively new startup and they do great custom work for those not familiar with streaming media/RTMP."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's easy to underestimate the power of switching to a better language by just doing it - guess at the syntax until it works, then refactor as you start to understand the language and its culture more. In fact I've found I learn faster this way than any other."
}
] | en | 0.954665 | 2 | 0.067806 | 1 |
Typewriters live on in New York police department | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There's one argument in there that's semi-sensible: in case of a power outage, it would seem important for the police to be able to continue processing data. Yes, aggregates help, but keeping everyone's desktop computer running isn't as effective as limiting it to critical systems (and extended power outages shouldn't be crippling either). The good old pen and paper will only take you so far, especially with the atrocious handwriting of people these days (accustomed as we are to mashing buttons of all shapes and sizes for communicating).To use them in the day-to-day business seems foolish, because most of it could be far better handled electronically. But considering the massive amount of paper and toner bureaucracies waste printing out information because the business processes don't evolve along, switching to such a system isn't necessarily an improvement in the short term. And of course there's a very significant initial cost that will be harder to justify to management than just maintaining the old system. Many and unsubtle are the stories of IT systems that are built to replace an existing \"analog\" process which end up delayed, inefficient, feature-crippled and way over budget. This is the sort of inglorious government-budgeted project that's especially prone to attract overpaid, unmotivated bunglers (no offense to the underpaid, highly-motivated geniuses out there working on such systems :-)Whether the $0.5-$1M budget is warranted is another matter. The argument that they have a $4B total budget will sooner make people question whether the $4B is entirely needed than reassure them that the typewriters only take up a minuscule fragment of said budget. This also doesn't factor in the very real but hidden cost in terms of time and frustration for the users -- imagine the police department using no computers or typewriters at all, but requiring that all information exchange go through hand-written forms. The ballpen budget might be very small, but personnel costs would balloon.Now, let me tell you about this voice recognition software I've been working on..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Doesn't really surprise me. I've worked at banks where typewriters were still in use, for filling out certain infrequently-used forms and preparing titles and deeds.It costs a significant amount of time and money to construct an electronic form and integrate it into the existing automated workflow; if the users only see a form a few times a year, and it changes every year, you might be talking about several thousand dollars per use to computerize that form. There's no way that's cost effective, and it's cheaper and more efficient just to keep a typewriter around.It's a basic diminishing-returns proposition. In a forms-heavy environment (which I'd imagine a police department is), you get great ROI automating the most commonly-used forms. Then you can breakeven or get some ROI on most of the rest of them. But in almost every situation there's always going to be one or two forms that just aren't worth automating. In some places that means just hand-filling them, but in others that means a typewriter.A typewriter is a totally acceptable solution to the problem in some cases. It's a bit silly that some people freak out so badly when they see them; if you see a typewriter in a workplace that also has a modern electronic-forms system with automated workflow and everything else, chances are somebody did the analysis and realized that it just doesn't make sense to get rid of the typewriter for the sake of getting rid of the typewriter."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Mind boggling. And I thought The Wire might have been exaggerating for dramatic effect.I wonder how these maintenance costs compare to the costs of a typical IT setup? If it's actually cheaper, then it looks like a classic case of being stuck in a local minimum."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"...mainly used for filling out property vouchers...\"It's a pain in the ass to fill out paper forms with a laser printer.Yeah, sure, they should probably have a new system that just prints the form filled out, but they don't."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Mark of the true policeman: if technology melts down, they'll still be able to do their paperwork."
}
] | en | 0.951445 | 14 | 0.09136 | 1 |
Prediction: This Statement Is Going To Come Back To Bite Microsoft In The Ass | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Comment in question“It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I’m okay with that.“ -Microsoft COO Kevin Turnerfor people who like me aren't fan of TCSource: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179164/Microsoft_exe..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "A more apt comparison would be Red Ring of Death on the Xbox 360. An annoyance but the product is compelling enough for people to put up with it. There are lots of other fun parallels like Microsoft's slow response to admit there was a problem and their suggestion to put the 360 into a vertical position for better cooling (your entertainment center is holding it wrong)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Apple has 25%, Microsoft has 15%, RIM has 43% of the smartphone platform market share.That comment will only ever \"bite microsoft in the ass\" on techcrunch where consumers gossip about the cool new gizmos, and nobody cares about market share.http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/3/c..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The real wtf in this article is the incredibly sexist comparison."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Hardly. People will mostly forget that statement, if they even heard it in the first place."
}
] | en | 0.917226 | 10 | 0.96545 | 0 |
Runa is hiring Clojure developers | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "What do people on HN think of the idea behind this startup? Do you think it has the potential to be huge and/or a good acquisition target? Would you apply/Are you applying for this job? Why or why not?It certainly sounds like they have everything (business case /tech etc) well laid out. If I were a potential employee I'd have liked some information on what kind of equity a new employee could expect - RethinkDB set the standard here (http://www.rethinkdb.com/jobs/), but other than that very very minor quibble i think this is as good a recruiting pitch as I have seen.(Due Disclosure: (a) Amit Rathore is a good friend of mine. (b) I have nothing to do with Runa or this ad. I am just curious as to how people here perceive the opportunity)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Cool, sounds like an interesting project and the perfect use case for Clojure.How do you intend to differentiate yourself from Direct Edge (my take is you're specifically looking to target CTRs rather than build a recommendation engine?) as well as a start-up in San Mateo the name of which escapes me which does something like this (but is well funded and more enterprise focused)?Best of luck!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Putting location on the hiring page would be helpful. Spoiler: http://runa.com/contact-us/"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm quite intrigued by the solicitation for FPS experience on the Clojure developer page."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "They need someone to optimise their landing page. In particular put the call to action -- i.e. the apply now link -- on the front page."
}
] | en | 0.970384 | 11 | 0.920469 | 1 |
Say “no” to import side‐effects in Python | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Would anyone like to share their experiences avoiding this sort of problem in the context of web frameworks and building the back end for larger web sites/apps?As an example for discussion, the first time I wrote a Flask-based back-end, I backed myself into a corner almost immediately in the following way.Firstly, the WSGI file that the web server uses to start the application followed the suggestion in the Flask docs by doing this: # webserverseesthis.wsgi\n from yourapplication import app as application\n\nThat’s not so bad, but then I started doing application configuration and loading various Flask plug-ins as side effects of that import: # yourapplication/__init__.py\n app = Flask("yourapplication")\n \n # Do some general application configuration.\n app.config.from_pyfile("/path/to/configuration/file")\n\n # Set up some overarching security things that modify application behaviour.\n from flaskext.securityplugin import SecurityPlugin\n sp = SecurityPlugin(app)\n\nThis seemed at the time like the obvious place to put such things, but of course, this is really just a variation on the mistake we’re discussing here.To compound the error, I then used Flask’s decorators to wire up routes from various URLs to the relevant parts of my code. Those decorators work on the application object (sticking with ideas common to many Python web frameworks and avoiding getting into anything more Flask-specific like blueprints) so I was effectively creating circular dependencies from almost everything to that top-level package: # yourapplication/pages/home.py\n from yourapplication import app\n\n @app.route('/')\n def home_page():\n # Render home page\n\nand then from the top-level package onto almost everything so all those decorators could take effect: # After setting up the application object in yourapplication/__init__.py\n import yourapplication.pages.home\n\nNow, as long as this kind of code only ever runs as a WSGI application behind a web server, you get away with these dependencies up to a point. In practice, your WSGI set-up imports the top-level application package, which in turn sets up the application object everything is going to depend on and only then imports all the supporting modules/packages, and everything “works”.However, as soon as you want to write tests or otherwise reuse any of the code in a different context, the entire system is a big bowl of spaghetti with all the usual problems. The moment you import any part of the system to run a unit test on something in it, you get much of the rest of the system as well, complete with the side effects of any imports therein.This was of course all horribly naïve on general programming principles, but the nature of these frameworks tends to push in this direction, and even Flask’s own documentation features various simple examples that follow a similar approach, so I’ll forgive myself for falling into the trap the first time. I’ve since experimented with various techniques to break the cycles and avoid the side effects on imports, with some success, but frankly I’ve never found a satisfying, general strategy for organising larger code bases built around a web framework.How is everyone else doing this?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "On one machine I tried, help('modules') actually worked successfully with no substantial delays or apparent side effects.On another, it apparently tried to set up an MPI cluster: *** The MPI_Init() function was called before MPI_INIT was invoked.\n *** This is disallowed by the MPI standard.\n *** Your MPI job will now abort.\n [hostname:14114] Abort before MPI_INIT completed successfully; not \n able to guarantee that all other processes were killed!\n\nOn a third, I get the following and then it just hangs: Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 15:40:47)\n [GCC 4.8.2] on linux2\n Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.\n >>> help('modules')\n \n Please wait a moment while I gather a list of all available modules...\n\n /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gobject/constants.py:24: Warning: g_boxed_type_register_static: assertion 'g_type_from_name (name) == 0' failed\n import gobject._gobject\n /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: cannot register existing type 'GtkWidget'\n g_type = info.get_g_type()\n /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: cannot add class private field to invalid type '<invalid>'\n g_type = info.get_g_type()\n /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: cannot add private field to invalid (non-instantiatable) type '<invalid>'\n g_type = info.get_g_type()\n /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: g_type_add_interface_static: assertion 'G_TYPE_IS_INSTANTIATABLE (instance_type)' failed\n g_type = info.get_g_type()\n /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: cannot register existing type 'GtkBuildable'\n g_type = info.get_g_type()\n /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: g_type_interface_add_prerequisite: assertion 'G_TYPE_IS_INTERFACE (interface_type)' failed\n g_type = info.get_g_type()\n /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: g_once_init_leave: assertion 'result != 0' failed\n g_type = info.get_g_type()"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I do most of my work with Perl, rather than Python, but in Perl there are several kinds of stock import-level side-effects which are actually quite helpful. These are pretty light-weight though. They boil down to:1. Global lexical changes to Perl. Sometimes this is the whole point of an import (for example Carp::Always, which typically turns any warning or exception string into a full stack dump). I can't imagine doing something like this in Python. However making soemthing like this work properly without breaking too many things requires a heck of a lot of forethought Yes, even Carp::Always may break something.2. Manipulation of the importing module's symbol table. This is important for lexical extensions to Perl that you don't want to be global (for example Moo, Moose, and PGObject::Util::DBMethod). Among other things this allows MOPs to be added with greater sophistication than the language typically allows. I am not a Python guru but I could imagine metaprogramming side effects to be useful in setting up a consistent and powerful environment.The problem the author describes is something which is different though, which not only is a side effect issue but also a violation of separation of concerns. There are certain problems you do not want to solve at import time, and connecting with/configuring external components is almost always one of them.Why? Because integration with external components is almost always something you want the fine-tuning and decision-making to reside with the application developer. That's very different than setting up a consistent lexical programming environment for use (which is what the acceptable side effects do)."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Of course you should do this in any language. I once used a Ruby library that, when loaded, would try to connect to a database on a remote machine. Programs which required this library would take several seconds to display their --help output.Because of that and similar incidents, I've learned to import argparse up front but nothing else unless necessary. Once argument parsing is done, then importing other modules begins."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This in no way invalidates the point of the post, but I can't imagine going back to installing everything globally instead of using virtualenv. If you do that, at least you won't have every package you every looked at in your path."
}
] | en | 0.934207 | 4 | 0.472433 | 1 |
How Twitter Killed My Fish | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Hi everyone. Author here. Gotta say I loved all the comments. My blog followers are all so nice. It feels good to get some real criticism for once :)Relying on Twitter was a truly bonehead move, to be sure. Truly a "bang head here" kind of moment.However, if trusting Twitter was the only "poor engineering decision" I had made I'd be a very happy man. It was just one of dozens of bonehead mistakes I made in building and operating my first aquaponics system.Aquaponics is one of those things where the path of least resistance is definitely following a set of plans that are known to work. You can find one of those on my site, and some other places too. But I've never one to follow the path of least resistance (eg. Screw the round wheel - I'm making mine with fractals).In case anyone's interested, I'm a former electrical engineer who used this as my first attempt at something with Arduino. More of a power-systems and lighting guy, software development was and still is a foreign land to me.I could have tested and researched the reliability of different notification platforms, but at the time I was building it I was already staying up late fixing plumbing problems and trying to get those d*&$ one-wire sensors to work consistently.Thankfully I eventually got my plumbing and sensors working, and bungled along into into Zapier which has been absolutely bulletproof.I think the truly useful lesson here is that if you ever meet anyone in aquaculture who can tell a good story at a party, plop yourself down and ask them if they've ever killed fish in any bizarre and interesting ways. Don't get up for drinks either because you won't want to miss anything. You'll be there all night."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "From the Twitter terms of service:"The Twitter Entities make no warranty and disclaim all responsibility and liability for: (i) the completeness, accuracy, availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Services or any Content; (ii) any harm to your computer system, loss of data, or other harm that results from your access to or use of the Services or any Content; (iii) the deletion of, or the failure to store or to transmit, any Content and other communications maintained by the Services; and (iv) whether the Services will meet your requirements or be available on an uninterrupted, secure, or error-free basis."Clearly it was never meant as a reliable communications channel for any sort of M2M application where failure could result in significant economic loss or a threat to human health or life."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is absolutely ridiculous. Why on earth would you rely on something like Twitter to get critical messages delivered?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "More accurate title would be: How I Killed My Fish By Mistaking Twitter For A Reliable Messaging Platform."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is just the beginning. Connecting things to the Internet is a whole new kettle of fish and there is lots for the novice developer to learn. There will be disasters of all scales. So we need a new school of thought."
}
] | en | 0.979268 | 9 | 0.256482 | 1 |
Ask HN: What language should I learn? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Asking which language you should learn is like walking into a wood shop and asking which tool you should learn to use. Screw the tools, just build something and grab whichever tools you feel are right for the job along the way.I never could learn a programming language for the sake of learning. I always had some idea of something I wanted to build and then used that project as my learning experience. Hopefully at the end I had something which could possible be useful for me.You should probably be doing the same. If you have no ideas of what to build, then you should probably change your thinking. NOW is the best time to start thinking about which direction you feel you would like to go and start working on something in that area.Games? Security? Mobile apps? Web apps? Systems administration? The list goes on. You need to get dirty so that you start to itch. Once you start itching, let that carry you. At that point, all other questions are answered."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "French. Or Arabic. Or whatever you don't already speak.Snark aside, the standard answer is something like \"Learn a language in each of the different kinds or programming (functional, procedural, etc)\". Really, though, programming is not about a particular syntax. It's about learning how to think and deconstruct problems.So that brings me back to the spoken languages. Learn new things that will challenge you (spoken languages are great), and learn how to deconstruct problems. And above all, have fun doing it."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "1. It ultimately depends on what you aim to do. A large part of HN will recommend Python (myself included).2. If you do a quick search, you'll realize this has been covered an endless amount of time with more in depth answers to help."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. Or something else, it's up to you :-)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "just build something yo'it will come to you eventually"
}
] | en | 0.984118 | 4 | 0.708635 | 1 |
Which web development framework has largest and active community? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "You might want to be aware of this too:\nhttp://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7...Interpreted language-based frameworks tends to be the slowest ones to perform"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Just going on community size is rarely a good yardstick for framework choice.Look at the team you have today, the team you want tomorrow, the scale your app is likely to grow (both in terms of traffic and code base size)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "You will never go wrong if you start your project with django(Python framework)...it has been so active in the recent years and promises to be the future because even the python language itself is so active."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think you shouldn't care so much about community, because in every case it is big enough.I thing question is which stack (PHP/Ruby/Python) is the best for your project."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Any of these will do just fine - they all have active communities, good docs and have proven themselves again and again - choose what your team is most comfortable with/efficient in."
}
] | en | 0.900761 | 7 | 0.342255 | 1 |
A Critique of “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture” | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I wonder if this is just a strong contrarian streak in me, but I've always been extremely suspicious of "company culture" anywhere I've worked. Almost any real culture is implicit; it's not designed. I think it's because growing up watching a lot of cable news, I've learned to be sensitive to narratives that don't have a lot to do with reality, and frequently "culture" and "values" are used to try to suggest a narrative to employees that also has very little to do with reality. I don't need a culture of "integrity" not to do evil things, I have a conscience. Nor do I need a cultural value of "innovation" to come up with new ideas -- a lot of times the pleasure of doing something well is more than enough.It makes me also think about how uncomfortable I felt during high school rallies. I mean, I didn't even particularly choose to be in that place, why should I have "pride" to be part of that institution? And why do I need to express that "pride" by yelling in a mob? I always found it somewhat creepy how easily people went along with all of that. I guess it's better than being lonely."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Pardon a silicon valley long-timer for this rant.With minor exceptions whenever a company goes on and on about its culture, it is time to leave.Culture has become a by-word for:\n1) Rejecting older applicants while hiring "He is not a Cultural fit"2) Making females uncomfortable in an all-male Bro-culture by cracking "anatomy" jokes3) Getting people with families to put in insane hours and justifying it by pointing to the younger crowd and its culture4) Fig leaf to cover up blatant exploitationRarely has company culture ever meant anything positive"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "We specifically talk about how nobody, even myself as the CEO, is "above the law" with regards to our values. We've had several instances where values were invoked as reasons why we shouldn't want to do something that was against what I wanted to do. It was a surprise when it happened, but I deeply appreciated it. It's part of teamwork as sometimes people can lose site of things or by omission or oversight make decisions which aren't the best or aligned with a company's true mission. We talk a lot about this and I really hope that it continues."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "A very long time ago, I worked for a company that was having growing pains. They tried a few things, one of which was codifying the 'culture' in a list of present-tense statements that management wished to be true. It was originally called "the 40 points" but by the time I left, it was up to 66 points.I asked my boss ('ask' is a euphemism, as I remember it) what was up with this list (given that the statements were almost entirely false in the moment), and he told me that there are two ways to guide people when an organization hits a certain size: with detailed and explicit rules like the military, or with concepts to guide smart people to make decisions roughly in line with the direction chosen by management.With experience, I have found that there are more than two options (that was my first 'real' job after working at a gas station as a teenager). The "N points" were deprecated after a few years, and amazingly (to me, anyway), the company still exists.As many people have said, culture usually comes from the leaders' actions, not from their wishes. Or their lists."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Also, "culture" (in the modern, anthropological sense of the world) is mostly ugly and bad, because people are mostly ugly and bad. Foot-binding was culture. Religious and racial bigotry are culture. Almost every social injustice that ever occurred came out of some cultural prejudice. People on Hacker News are quick to bash religion, but it's pre-baked thinking in general (which is much of what culture is) that is the cause of so much suffering.When "culture fit" is used to justify not hiring a capable, 43-year-old woman out of the fear that she'll justify the money-making machine that exists when 25-year-old, male, clueless commodity programmers are stapled together into an underpaid, overworked team, the word culture isn't being misused. That's exactly what culture is.Most companies that have a strong cultural identity have a negative one. It's also not necessary that a company have one. Banks don't trumpet "our culture" but (excluding analyst programs, which are hellish) are decent places to work in spite of the weak cultural identity.A corporate "culture" eventually realizes that it must defend itself against perceived enemies. And it inevitably ends up being the worst kinds of people-- passive-aggressive, malevolent sorts-- who acquire the position to decide who those enemies are going to be.Culture also tends toward arrogance, injustice, and hubris as it develops exceptionalism, which is what it will fight hardest to defend. I still have people from Google, three years after I left, going out of their way to fuck up my life because they perceive things I've said as being threats to their culture's exceptionalism. (Never mind that I've been gone for 3 years and have absolutely no power over anything that happens at Google.)A commercial enterprise like a business will never have a balanced, full-fledged culture. Culture is immersive, not something people participate in for 8 hours per day in order to make money. I would say that, as much as possible, you don't want a strong culture (or, more dangerously, a strong cultural identity) at your place of work. You want people to get in, do good work, be paid well, and be happy. But once you have people start talking about "culture fit" as if it were a real thing, you've hired too many passive-aggressive assholes, and you need to cool it with the "culture" nonsense."
}
] | en | 0.878528 | 3 | 0.976877 | 0 |
Ruby is faster than Python, PHP, and Perl | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Did anyone else find it strange that Ruby only beat Python and PHP in the median range? On both ends Python and PHP are both quite faster. I don't really know how to read this thing, but I feel like this title is probably misleading?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The author seems very excited to rub this in anyone's face he can. The data seems much more murky than he makes it out to be."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Not another one of these..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Doesn't matter... Dynamic languages are slow by design!Caching and JIT compilers to the rescue!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Does this really matter?I mean,seriously, if speed is what you want, you'd write it in C. These days, with virtually unlimited CPU, we choose our languages based on suitability for the task, readability and community support (at least I do).Other than assembler for games, I have never chosen a language based on speed of execution. Anyone else?Can't we also just compile Ruby (or PHP or Python) to C and then let the C compiler optimize it these days? I think we can.Additionally, the fact that Javascript kicks the crap out of the vast majority of languages is surprising to me."
}
] | en | 0.991651 | 12 | 0.739071 | 1 |
Portal as a required college text | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I appreciate the idea, but I have a major issue with it. I personally get motion sick from playing various kinds of first person games. (The problem first showed up for me with Doom.)Judging from videos I've seen, Portal would be exactly the kind of game that I can't comfortably play. Normally that is not an issue because I don't have to play games I don't like. But if they get a kid like me in the class, how will they deal with it?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Calling it a \"book\" is weird, but in the right context, culturally/technically/socially significant games aren't any weirder a required item than, say, films that also meet those criteria, and studying important films has been pretty well established for decades. Portal is a slightly strange choice, though, because of how new it is. I would imagine the course doesn't usually choose books or films from the past 5 years, but instead looks for things that are more classic?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Passage would be a much better option: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/It's very short (5 minutes,) free, and you don't have to worry about anyone in the class not having enough skill to complete it.It's also communicates in a way that only a game can. The rules of the game themselves are most of what gives it its expressive power, not the narrative or the visuals."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Hey, the world from Stallman's The Right to Read is finally here. Embrace a DRM'd video game that only runs on non-Free platforms, or fail out of University."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Don't get me wrong, Portal is an awesome game. But he considered Planescape: Torment too, and went with just Portal? Where's Fate/Stay Night or Tsukihime? I can't respect this college."
}
] | en | 0.986087 | 0 | 0.080712 | 1 |
Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\"It's good,\" said worker Jiang Yao. \"It's better for you because it's genetically modified.\"Flawless argument."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Apart from the usual \"Oh no, we're playing God\" kneejerk reactions, do we really know enough about genetic modifications to be making GM foods available?We barely know enough about why our own medicine works (frequently only having a hazy idea, really), should we really be messing with systems so much more complex than we currently understand?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "\"There are 1.5 billion people in the world who don't get enough to eat,\" the director of the research project, Professor Li Ning said.\"It's our duty to develop science and technology, not to hold it back. We need to feed people first, before we consider ideals and convictions.\""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Godwinned in 1st comment.(edit: apparently it wasn't actually the first comment)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Great. What could go wrong?"
}
] | en | 0.961049 | 14 | 0.225292 | 1 |
Ask HN: I need advice getting a junior Rails dev job | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "My advice for technical interviews as a non-CS major (I am making that assumption) would be:Don't be afraid to admit what you don't know, but stress that you are a quick learner and that you will constantly be improving.If they give you a technical question and you are unable to answer, research it later and email them your answer. It shows that you don't give up, and it shows you weren't lying about constantly learning.If you get a question like implementing a native function without using any native functionality, they are testing your ability to write efficient code. Read up on runtime complexity and even if you can't code it, be able to explain what is inefficient and what you might do to make it better.Even as a junior dev with little experience if you do those in a technical interview you show potential and you are worth training.Source: English major working as a software engineer after fumbling through many technical interviews."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You don't have to apply for a junior rails dev job. Apply for a developer job at any place that does or doesn't use rails.Based on the info here, your prior submissions, your history of delivering value through web stacks, and the fact that you're motivated enough to teach yourself new tech and post about it to HN, you're already a step above fresh CS grads, i.e. the only people who should settle for "junior" jobs.Don't sell yourself short, and don't give up!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I am in the same boat. I have been working as a Web Developer for 2 years doing full-stack but PHP as the backend. Switched over to Ruby 3 months ago and the positions I did find I never heard back after applying.I am now doing a Rails internship for free for a few weeks and then I am bumped to minimum wage while keeping my current Web dev job."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I am looking for someone to create a tutorial for Ruby on Rails that will be free for everyone to use for RubyRails.Com as part of my open source project OpenDomain. This will get exposure for the author plus I am willing to pay for original content for each video produced. Contact me HN AT RubyRails.Com"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Try going to some meetups. You might meet people that will offer you a job or hire you to do some contract work."
}
] | en | 0.967829 | 0 | 0.999926 | 0 |
Stored Hashcash | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Your post advocates a(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilanteapproach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it( ) Users of email will not put up with it( ) Microsoft will not put up with it( ) The police will not put up with it( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or businessSpecifically, your plan fails to account for( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email( ) Open relays in foreign countries( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses(X) Asshats( ) Jurisdictional problems(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack(X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches(X) Extreme profitability of spam( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft( ) Technically illiterate politicians( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering(X) Outlookand the following philosophical objections may also apply:(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever\nbeen shown practical( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation( ) Blacklists suck( ) Whitelists suck( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually(X) Sending email should be free( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome( ) I don't want the government reading my email(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enoughFurthermore, this is what I think about you:(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your\nhouse down!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It's worth mentioning that hashcash has never been widely deployed for email spam prevention, and never will be. (As far as I'm aware its widest success was getting a modest reduction in scores in the default SpamAssassin ruleset at one point, which -- AFAIK -- was eventually rolled back because, while people are attracted to the philosophy of hashcash, nobody actually uses it.)Why?1) The supermajority of spam is sent through systems which can be operated by an attacker but which are not actually owned by them. This includes, most prominently, botted-up residential PCs. Prior to wide availability of always-on high speed Internet it included email servers which were insufficiently locked-down. Hashcash does not meaningfully affected the economics of botnets.2) The most successful anti-spam measure in history makes direct use of a consequence of #1: since mail servers do not move in nature that much, and legitimate mail systems do not frequently mix outgoing spam and outgoing ham, you can make IP-based reputational systems. If a residential IP starts sending email in large amounts, assume spam. If a novel IP starts sending email, treat as suspiciously smelling ham until they've demonstrated sufficient history, but flip the spam bit if/when they get aggressive. If a new MSA springs up, ensure their industry veterans at the helm understand the importance of their anti-abuse team, and tell them explicitly that their IPs are dead if they don't.This worked fantastically well. It's the primary anti-spam measure which protects your inbox. (No. I know you think Bayesian filters are. They're more expensive to operate at scale, are virtually unusable by the common-denominator email user, and don't solve any problem better than IP reputation does.)3) Hashcash never caught on in part because the people who care most about spam also care most about sending billions of emails. "We make it economically unattractive to send billions of emails" is a non-starter for them. You can guess who I'm talking about by taking a look at any user database and observing what percentage of email addresses in it terminate with the top, oh, five domain names. (Interestingly, email is a P2P protocol at the server level which is best described as "All peers are equal, in that they will be equally squashed beneath the boots of our governing oligopoly if they misbehave.")Note that none of hashcash's problems are solved by "And now it can be stored for later."Source: My first engineering job was as an anti-spam researcher."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "In order to send an email, the sender first has to solve a math problem. Legitimate activities suffer an indiscernible delay, but illegitimate activities that require massive volume are hobbled.Illegitimate activities are often carried out in a parasitic manner using infected and hijacked equipment for which the spammer and attacker don't have to pay. This will do little to hinder those tactics."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "How valuable would stored Hashcash be?It depends on the rules of the system. If the system arbitrarily limits the creation of hashcash to 2.5 per minute and limits the total in circulation to 21 M then it could be worth a lot (although with high volatility). Without such limits each unit of hashcash would be worth almost nothing, but the overall system might be more efficient and thus worth more.Also, if the system limits itself to 7 transactions per second it may not be useful for anti-spam or bandwidth accounting."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "How is that not bitcoin?I've long been a fan of a "bounty" system -- you attach digital coins to a message, with the recipient specifying how many coins must be attached (maybe higher for voice, lower for email, mid level for SMS). If the message was unwanted (not merely spam, but even just a stupid request), the recipient collects the coins; otherwise, the sender gets them back.This nicely aligns incentives. If the recipient takes coins improperly, you stop sending him mail."
}
] | en | 0.885792 | 3 | 0.077599 | 1 |
Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is exactly why PC gaming isn't dead.What I don't understand is why online gaming is huge for the one American console maker, but lags so far behind with the two Japanese manufacturers when for years and years we are told how wired Asia is. The Wii is too casual and Sony just doesn't get it? Seems odd. Meanwhile, Microsoft is making $1 billion / year on their Live service."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Shouldn't this month be a wake-up call to drive the point that Cloud Services, SaS and all variations of \"Live\" content serve nobody else than the people selling us their projects? Amazon EC2, Sony PSN, Google's GMail outage last month and God knows who next should be made into poster children for this issue.We spent the last 30 years migrating away from mainframes towards decentralized PC computing; only to have the centralized version shoved back in our throats for no better reason than helping monetization.It's time people start realizing how much control they're giving away when they exchange a local product for a remote service, and for vendors to adapt to their user's well-being."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I wish Sony would at least push a patch that stops from trying to log me in before I can do anything. Netflix, for example, prompts me to login twice before I can play any videos. (Maybe it's Netflix that needs to push the patch?)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "In the meantime I can't play multiplayer games with anyone (even when I walk over to a friend's house for a LAN game) because I have to sign in to PSN first and since the game makers make single-player campaigns so short I've already completed those. Hulu Plus, MLB.tv and Netflix are also inaccessible.My PS3 is unplugged and unusable \"indefinitely\". Luckily I kept my Roku player..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Already posted 8 hours ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483970"
}
] | en | 0.9746 | 9 | 0.751461 | 1 |
Steve Jobs Doesn't Want Shit In His App Store, And Neither Do I | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I have collected screenshots of 39 apps from the App Store: http://nativegui.posterous.com/ It's just a small fraction of what you can find there. I think they are all written in Objective-C. Now, what's the argument again?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Are we really still having this discussion?http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255858I'd like to think that both sides are clear -Steve Jobs - \"We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.\"My point of view said well by the author of the article I linked - \"Crappy developers will make crappy apps regardless of how many layers there are, and it doesn’t make sense to limit source-to-source conversion tools like Unity3D and others. They’re all building apps through the iPhone developer tools in the end so the situation isn’t even comparable to the Mac where applications can completely avoid using Apple’s frameworks by replacing them with others.\"At this point I think we've reached the point of \"agree to disagree\", where neither side is going to change the other's mind."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Since I'm not sure the Blog owner is going to clear my comment there, I'll repost here as well.Your logic is flawed in that you assume that \"meta-platforms\" can only produce crappy non-Apple like applications. This is simply not true.The world is going cross platform and it's time to get on the bus. The risk Apple runs now is whether the iPhone becomes 'not worth it' to develop for anymore. Any developer knows that having to maintain X code bases for X platforms only hamstrings your productivity to your end users because of the overhead. I personally like to target more than one user set for my products.It's interesting how the crack down came well AFTER the platform was an established brand, not when it launched. Had Steve Jobs only cared about purity of the platform they would have established the rules up front. They didn't do this because that would have been a huge roadblock to platform adoption and iPhone app base would not have grown to anywhere near the size it is now. Instead they choose to implement new rules now that they have an attractive user base and a \"locked in\" developer base. This is not about purity, this is singularly about control."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Truth is nobody knows shit about what Steve Jobs wants or about what the directions Apple has taken.For all I care, this might be a maneuver to get rid of both the external competition (Android, WinMo, Symbian) and the internal one ... reducing developers on their platforms to mere contractors that are doing their bidding.And you can't prove that I'm wrong because neither you nor I know shit about it.So stop apologizing for them. If you believe their choices are for better quality, quality can speak by itself and nobody needs you rationalizations on the matter. It's as if you're defending your own choices and directions, which shows you have doubts.On the other hand the bitching and moaning of mistreated customers (yeah, we are also customers) might do some good."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "We keep hearing this argument, but it simply cannot survive the facts of the App store.After searching for 'fart', I stopped counting at 30 items. Are we supposed to believe that Objective C source code and Cocoa Touch style somehow turn this crapware into elegant masterpieces of 21st century design?"
}
] | en | 0.971996 | 8 | 0.332716 | 1 |
Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It would be funny if netflix just looked for one of their hubs/datacenters and moved in next door on purpose.ISPs are common carriers and must be regulated as such, because as soon as Comcast makes its own netflix-like service, you can forget getting netflix to stream smoothly."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It's anti-climactic that all it was going to take was a compelling business case. Netflix made it easy with their peering initiative [1].Now Comcast gets to count these bytes against their customers' quotas, and it costs them nearly nothing to deliver the traffic.This reminds me of NNTP, but Netflix is still running their own hardware.[1] Netflix's "Open Connect" https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've noticed that the 11greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net router(s) (Equinix SV1) are typically the ones that fail / have large latency issues. Hopefully if this has happened then they've increased overall capacity through this bottleneck."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I can confirm this:198.45.63.0/24 *[BGP/170] 2d 05:02:06, MED 150, localpref 100, from 68.86.80.82AS path: 7922 2906 I"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Perhaps it's Netflix Open Connect? (http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment-Guide.pd..., https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect)"
}
] | en | 0.985547 | 14 | 0.183443 | 1 |
Ask HN: Python for commercial desktop software? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Look at javascript heavy websites. True, they aren't (usually) giving away the source for their backend, but javascript, even obfuscated, is 'source', and relatively easy to reverse-engineer.py2exe and py2app do a reasonable job of packaging up your python program into .exe/.app for desktop software. With a toolkit such as QT, though PyQT is non-free, professional looking applications are achievable. PySide, Nokia's LGPL Python QT binding does not have Windows or OS X on their official roadmap, so unless you're willing/able to do the port yourself, I would not count on it. (http://www.pyside.org/roadmap/)For C++, Visual Studio comes in an Express edition that is free, which can (somewhat) be used with QT, and these days, QT is LGPL, which means no licensing costs.If there is really a need for this to be desktop software, and I don't know your product, so lets assume there is. Cross-platform desktop apps is a special niche, and assuming you lack the resources to do ports for each OS, I'd go with C++ and QT.Python is also not an all-or-nothing choice. There are some professional applications that use Python at some point in the process. Avid Media Composer (professional video editing suite) has a python2X.dll in their C:\\Program Files directory, though I don't know what it gets used for.Between the two larger platforms, OS X and Windows (assuming those are the 'cross' platforms you are talking about), QT does a fine job of working on both systems, but the two platforms DO have different idioms that I feel a platform specific port is the only way to do a good job on."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I would guess one reason there is little Python desktop software is that the user interface components available to Python are not that great (unless you call-out to something like QT http://qt.nokia.com/products ). For a real horror-story (that happened to be in Python, but Python was not the biggest cause) do read \"Dreaming in Code\" http://www.dreamingincode.com/ . Plus there are the usual set of cynics who say there is no longer a need for desktop software (I strongly disagree with that)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Python has a relatively heavy footprint for deployment, and cross-platform toolkits add to that - it could be somewhere between 5 and 20 megabytes depending on exactly how many dependencies you've got."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "In terms of desktop software, I know that the Dropbox client for OS X at least is a python application. There's a bunch of layers of platform specific wrapping, but python's definitely in there."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Ars Technica had an article a while ago on how to deploy standalone Python applications written using PyQt: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/guides/2009/03/how-to-dep...That's probably your best bet for cross-platform Python applications if you need a GUI."
}
] | en | 0.937769 | 7 | 0.119591 | 1 |
Basics of Neural Networks with example codes and illustrations | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Does anyone have any examples of areas where neural networks beat out statistical based methods, other than maybe image recognition? I can't even think of another major area where they dominate.- Search engines use algorithms, not neural nets.- The most popular algorithm on Kaggle (data analysis competitions) is random forests- Google's self-driving car uses statistical-based methodsI can't imagine commercial aircraft would use a neural net. What happened if one crashed? They would analyze the data and ask questions like, Q: "What happened?" A: "I don't know" Q: "Can we fix it so it doesn't happen again?" A: "I don't know"."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "brain.js library is a NN implementation in JavaScript. It's very easy to use.\nhttps://github.com/harthur/brainHere is a test with a model of a robotic arm: \nhttps://assemblino.com/show/public20123372.html"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This book is everything I've ever wanted in a programming text. I'm sorry that I don't have much of anything substantial to say except praise, but seriously, thank you for writing this."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The experience (specifically the careful choice of mediums + examples + presentation though which the concepts are conveyed) is pretty fantastic."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "An awesome book; I've now started reading from the beginning of the book :)One thing I've noticed though, is that img 10 of chapter 1 is missing.http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-1-vectors/imgs/chapter0..."
}
] | en | 0.907935 | 0 | 0.743011 | 1 |
Alarm clocks wake me angry, lightlywake.me | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Eh, I seriously wouldn't rely on a website to wake me up. Computer pukes. Power outage. Etc. I'll stick with my trusty cell phone which will stay powered up even through a power outage. BTW, my song is \"I got you babe\" by Sonny and Cher. +1 for anyone who get's the joke. ;)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Waking up angry is exactly what I want.. at least I'll wake up that way."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is a solution in search of a problem- Get an alarm clock that plays cds- Burn/insert cd- All set! Plus you aren't wasting power by leaving your computer on all nightPS: I recommend Massive Attack - Future Proof. The slow start is pretty much perfect."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Am I missing something, or does this just redirect you to your video when it's time for the alarm to go off?Some people may prefer it to an alarm sound, but it's hardly a new idea."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I've been using Awaken for OS X, similar... good idea to be web based thoughhttp://embraceware.com/awaken/"
}
] | en | 0.983335 | 0 | 0.051847 | 1 |
Five laws of human nature | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "How are these relevant to each-other? What's the purpose of this article? If we’re just making an arbitrary list, there are hundreds of similar phenomena we could include. These five certainly aren’t exhaustive, and they don’t strike me as representative either.This article seems more like: “We have x column inches to fill about human behavior. Here are n unrelated phenomena which we noticed some not-so-recent papers about before our deadline rolled around, and we managed to fill that space with them.”"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I guess 'five behaviors that people sometimes exhibit, some of the time' wasn't a punchy enough title."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Funniest line:\"First proposed by Bruce Salem on the discussion site Usenet...\""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think we can safely toss out Sayres Law (the \"intensity\" of academic squabbles [is] a function of the \"triviality\" of the issue at hand):http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/18/nyregion/education-lessons...\n\"In government, people know how to disagree gracefully, and you never scorch the earth because you know that today's opponent is someone with whom you may have to make common agreement tomorrow,\" said Donald Kennedy, the president of Stanford and a former Commmissioner of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. \"Academics find it difficult to have disagreement without alienation.\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Is the combination of Parkinson's Law with Maes-Garreau Law the reason we don't have AI yet?"
}
] | en | 0.961963 | 3 | 0.972434 | 0 |
The Care and Feeding of Entrepreneurs (Interview with Guy Kawasaki) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "From the interview:The more I meet with entrepreneurs the less I think I can pick them. Sure, there are stereotypes: bright, aggressive, enthusiastic, young, etc. But there are many successful entrepreneurs that don’t come off this way.The richest vein I have seen is two guys/gals who want to create a tool that they themselves want to use. This describes, for example, Google, Yahoo and Apple. I have come to believe that almost everyone has the entrepreneurial gene — it’s been necessary for survival for thousands of years."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "-\"Q. “Reality Check” includes a venture capital aptitude test in which you opine on the types of people who are best qualified for careers in venture capital. Your test awards points to those with backgrounds in sales or engineering and subtracts points for those with M.B.A. degrees or backgrounds in management consulting, investment banking or accounting. What’s behind this philosophy?\"-\"To close the interview, I asked Mr. Kawasaki to come up with a final question he’d like to answer:Q. What would you like people to say about you when you die?\"Seriously?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Any chance we can get nytimes articles posted as a comment so we don't have to bother with BugMeNot every time?Another option would be to use the RSS partner HTTP attribute, if it works on every article."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What was Guy Kawasaki's startup?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "i register for nothingthat's a load of crap."
}
] | en | 0.947149 | 0 | 0.667812 | 0 |
Boyfriend Required | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I can't even fathom how awful it would be to date with someone that has such stringent \"requirements\". What happened to falling for someone awesome who you meet and get on like fire with?Honestly, if she finds someone based on this, good on her, but she sounds extremely boring.\"Favorite Artists: Nickelback\"*Instant red flag.I mean, this sounds like something I would have done as a desperate 14 year old (and IIRC probably did), so I guess if she's at that level of relationship-development, then she has a long journey (and ideally should have begun it earlier) but hopefully she'll realise how catastrophic this is.It's not even the idea of putting a \"dating request\" on a website, but the way in which it's done. If you do go that way, you have to show people who you are not who you expect them to be.Thinking about it, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but I wonder if she's on the autistic spectrum. If you look at the post, \"personality\" is reduced to a single line which is shorter than the list of \"devices\" she owns. It could explain the whole nature of the post. Hmm. At the very least, she's an introvert."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I love how some people think they're entitled to an outstanding partner simply by virtue of being them. This woman makes no attempt whatsoever at demonstrating her value yet demands the world of potential suitors. I don't care for this attitude."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I don't think HN is the right place for this. Am I right in thinking that the only reason this is receiving attention here is because it is on github? Please correct me if I am wrong."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I had a list like this once, then I realized no one is perfect and now I'm happily married."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Github: It's not just for finding open source projects anymore"
}
] | en | 0.978806 | 10 | 0.253556 | 1 |
How AT&T Recognizes Unauthorized Tethering from Jailbroken iPhones | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Last week at a conference, I spoke briefly to an engineer from one of the large two US telcos on this issue. He indicated they utilized a variety of methods, including utilized fingerprinting of the IP/TCP headers, and protocol analysis to help identify traffic. Specifically, I heard TTL mentioned, as well. He might be a user here.There are more knowledgeable people than you working on the issue. That said, I haven't gotten an evil text from using PDAnet, yet. Then again, I don't tether that much and when I do it's not a lot of data."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Note: TetherMe (native tethering on jailbroken iPhones) sends all tethered data through the same APN as mobile data by default so users won't fall foul of the APN detection method mentioned here.Of course that wouldn't stop AT&T & Co sniffing browser strings of high data users, but that's a more complicated system to implement."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'd like to see a proper source of this (other than Android Police / iPhone Download Blog). I have used MyWi without having any special settings for tethering (my provider doesn't supply those), and it worked just fine; it would be a bit silly to go through the trouble of setting up a hotspot and making sure you're actively routing the data to the 'wrong' APN.(Note that iPhone Download Blog is the one calling MyWi by name)Also, if this is the case, wouldn't it be easier for AT&T to just disable the tethering APN for you if you don't have the tethering option? That would seem to be much more effective."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "A couple of years back, federal regulators (thanks to the efforts of EFF) declared that jailbreaking an IPhone is not illegal. Since then, Apple has stopped threatening users with jailbroken IPhones, and also, finding and patching new vulnerabilities that allow jailbreaking has become a moot point.In the same vein, has there ever been a verdict on the legality of unofficial (MyWi-like) tethering?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Does anyone know if tethering can be detected on Android phones? I'm curious what other provides do to try to detect tethering on Android phones."
}
] | en | 0.964708 | 8 | 0.124102 | 0 |
Twitter Ordered To Hand Over WikiLeaks Supporters’ Account Information | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I wonder if these types of legally-enforced privacy intrusions will bring about a new design goal for web-app builders: making retrieval of this information impossible for the service provider.It's one thing for Twitter to promise not to give your information to government entities until asked, but it's a whole other thing to engineer their application so it's impossible to comply with such a request."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I still do not understand on what grounds this is legally possible.\nWikileaks was not convicted or even accused of any crime."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The language used in this story is awful. If I had never heard of the group Wikileaks, I would assume they were a known criminal organisation. \"having ties to...\" \"allegedly support the group...\" replace Wikileaks with Al-Qaeda/Mafia/IRA and you get an everyday story about a bad group of people not a non-profit org who assist whistle-blowers. Fascinating how such everyday phrases can colour your perception, to such a degree."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What happens if Twitter refuses? It's probably going to take a tech giant like this, Google, etc. to stand up to the United States government. I just can't see Twitter getting their domains seized or their servers confiscated or anything extreme like that. It would be a huge story and I can't imagine that drawing attention to something so unconstitutional (IANAL, but it's gotta be, right?) is what the government wants."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "In this case, I can't imagine the Twitter details include much more than email and ip addresses. What I'd be worried about is what happens afterwards, when they order Google and Microsoft to hand over your emails and chat logs."
}
] | en | 0.933313 | 14 | 0.214035 | 1 |
Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News Meet Up in Austin? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm interested!Also consider the (physical) hacker community at http://www.atxhackerspace.org/ or one of the many co-working spaces. Sunday daytime will be easier for bars, less so for restaurants. Only a couple of coffee shops have space you can reserve; Genuine Joe has one I've used in the past."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Email me at brennen@qlobe.com and I can put together an invite for anyone who wants to come. I will shoot for this first Sunday in March, right before SXSW Interactive.Edit: I may need to repost the question with my email included at the beginning."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Not that I know of, but I bet we could pull enough people together to make this a regular thing. In fact, I wouldn't mind volunteering some time to get this started."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If you meet Sundays, I could drive over from Houston."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "There is a startup weekend on the 25th - 27th. I will be driving up from San Antonio for it. Check it out at austin.startupweekend.org"
}
] | en | 0.948797 | 3 | 0.051778 | 1 |
Cloudflare’s CDNJS vs. Google Hosted Libraries | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm not sure what using wget is supposed to show.\nUsing it 25 times in a row on a completely stable, completely idle 25mbps connection, I get speeds/times that vary by 100% consistently(IE min is 496k/s, max is 895k/s, average is about 600k/s)Using wget is a completely useless benchmark, from what I can tell.\nUsing apache's little benchmark tool I get about 255ms vs 180ms average for 100 requests to each.The interesting part is that for ajax.googleapis.com I get: Connection Times (ms)\n min mean[+/-sd] median max\n Connect: 175 228 28.2 227 306\n Processing: 0 12 15.1 8 90\n Waiting: 0 0 0.0 0 0\n Total: 189 240 29.8 235 350\n\nand for cloudflare I get: Connection Times (ms)\n min mean[+/-sd] median max\n Connect: 19 28 13.1 25 125\n Processing: 125 155 28.0 146 246\n Waiting: 21 28 6.5 27 65\n Total: 144 182 30.7 175 271\n\nIE for google, all the time is in actually getting a connection and getting the bits, whereas, for cloudflare, there is actually some time waiting for their servers.Using 5 concurrent requests actually gives me a massive advantage for google (cloudflare takes roughly the same time, google goes 4 times faster)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Interesting results, but let's think about a few things before we all switch to Cloudflare CDNJS.1) Time to first byte. In my experience the biggest lag is the connection, not actually downloading the file (for small js, images, etc...) I don't know how to test this.2) Caching, by using google for common libraries like jQuery your chance of the end client already having a local cached copy are much greater.3) Reliability. I know google has been recently killing off it's products, and even I tweeted how they could break the internet by shutting off their hosted library API, but it's probably not going to happen. Can you say the same about cloudflare?I'm not saying I like one more than the other, but these are some things I would like to address before switching my and my clients sites over.One thing I will give a +1 to Cloudflare is the ability to add js to the CDN via github. https://github.com/cdnjs/cdnjs"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Doesn't this have network effects? The CDN used by the most sites becomes the most valuable since a user visiting your site will have the library cached.I've always felt the benefit was that loading assets could be a networking no-op."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "That is impressive, but you've basically just checked whether cloudfare has a POP in Ontario, or atleast within 2-3ms of your datacenter.They both have POPs local to me: eggplant:~ tsl$ wget http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js\n --2013-03-22 19:29:21-- http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js\n Resolving cdnjs.cloudflare.com... 141.101.123.8, 190.93.240.8, 190.93.241.8, ...\n Connecting to cdnjs.cloudflare.com|141.101.123.8|:80... connected.\n HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK\n Length: unspecified [application/x-javascript]\n Saving to: ‘jquery.min.js’\n [ <=> ] 92,629 --.-K/s in 0.04s\n 2013-03-22 19:29:21 (2.03 MB/s) - ‘jquery.min.js’ saved [92629]\n\n eggplant:~ tsl$ wget http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js\n --2013-03-22 19:42:05-- http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js\n Resolving ajax.googleapis.com... 173.194.75.95, 2607:f8b0:400c:c01::5f\n Connecting to ajax.googleapis.com|173.194.75.95|:80... connected.\n HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK\n Length: unspecified [text/javascript]\n Saving to: ‘jquery.min.js.1’\n [ <=> ] 92,629 --.-K/s in 0.05s\n 2013-03-22 19:42:05 (1.62 MB/s) - ‘jquery.min.js.1’ saved [92629]\n\nJust to drive home how much locality matters: tsl@beast:/volumes/fast$ wget http://nas.***.com/jquery.min.js\n --20:00:05-- http://nas.***.com/jquery.min.js\n => `jquery.min.js'\n Resolving nas.***.com... 10.10.10.2, fd2b:2048:4633:10::2\n Connecting to nas.***.com|10.10.10.2|:80... connected.\n HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK\n Length: 92,629 (90K) [application/javascript]\n 100%[====================================>] 92,629 --.--K/s\n 20:00:05 (63.00 MB/s) - `jquery.min.js' saved [92629/92629]\n\nLooks like my single core ARM6 nas is the best in my neighborhood."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It probably varies enormously depending on your location.Here in Vancouver, I get 1.25MB/s for Google's CDN and 1.15MB/s for CloudFare. Unless we have a distributed tool to test that on a massive scale, it will only reflect the greatly-varying differences between people's connections, \"distance to CDN\", DNS metrics and whatnot which I guess greatly impact the speeds observed.Nevertheless I really like that this actually \"exercises\" the different services and provides some form of measuring and poking that improves the overall transparency and accountability."
}
] | en | 0.964331 | 4 | 0.276138 | 1 |
Ask HN: How many lines of code per day? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Dunno. SLOC just isn't an important enough metric to track. Here's an example of why that is:http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "When it comes to maintaining most software projects, the number I hope to achieve on every commit is negative. In fact, I take pride if I can add 700 lines but remove 1500 (C++).This is because writing code is relatively simple, whereas understanding it and ultimately maintaining it is very hard. So aiming to write more code is a very poor objective, you should be aiming to keep a project maintainable so that your costs are low (in terms of time, bug frequency, etc.).That doesn't mean new features won't require lots of code, but there should be some way to prune old code on the same schedule."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "As long as it's a negative number, it's a win. I feel like LoC as a measurement for anything is pretty outdated."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Just 2.But, they are each 10,000 characters on average. ;)It's kind of a difficult metric to extract any measurable data from."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Can write easily few thousands of lines of code in a day if I really want to do that, but SLOC is not good metric like others have already said. One reason for this is that you can write much code, but is it worth it when you could possibly do the same thing with way less code."
}
] | en | 0.913055 | 6 | 0.583002 | 1 |
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