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Bacteria Are Masters of Tai Chi - dnetesn http://nautil.us/issue/37/currents/bacteria-are-masters-of-tai-chi ====== masonic Dude. This is the _fourth_ time you alone have posted this in the last 2+ days.

From Zen Buddhism to Preying on Vulnerable Women (2013) - jimsojim http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/11/from-zen-buddhism-to-preying-on-vulnerable-women/281475/?single_page=true ====== justnot4me I guess this is a case of desire causing suffering. ------ bonobo3000 Shimano may not have been a good guy, but its kind of weird how its framed as the evil man exploiting the poor, vulnerable women, rather than a consensual act between 2 people. ~~~ a_puppy I agree if a man sleeps with a consenting woman but later chooses not to enter a romantic relationship even though she wants to, that's not evil by itself. Some people would say that he's "using her for sex" or a "womanizer" or whatever, as if sex includes an implicit promise to enter a relationship; I would disagree. But that's not what's going on in the case of Eido Shimano. He was a teacher sleeping with his students, which is generally considered unethical. He appears to have led his sexual partners to believe that they were in a monogamous relationship, then cheated on them. He repeatedly harassed a woman who refused his advances. And at least one woman accused him of groping her, which is just plain illegal. I think it's fair to call that behavior "evil" and "exploitative", and I don't see anything weird about the article framing it that way.

EFF: Tell Us Your DRM Horror Stories about Ebooks, Games, Music, Movies and IoT - g1n016399 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/ebooks-games-music-movies-and-internet-things-tell-us-your-drm-horror-stories ====== wodenokoto I don't know if it is a horror story, but I bought a kindle edition of a reference work to use on my iPad (it was a kindle-fire book, apparently optimised for tablets) and the app is so slow that searching or flipping pages is useless. There are cracked PDF's version of the book, which I can search in seconds and flip pages fast, copy content into a google search and use my build-in dictionary to look up words. The PDF version is everything the kindle version is not: Free and useful. ~~~ g1n016399 Please tell the EFF about that. ------ dm_i386 I recently wanted to show my wife a video game I enjoyed when I was younger. The game used SecuROM DRM which I was unable to work around in Wine. Apparently, it requires an insecure driver in Windows, which has since been removed. I really wanted to play this game, so I was forced to manually enable the disabled driver in Windows 7 by following this guide: [http://www.howtogeek.com/230773/how-to-play-pc-games-that- re...](http://www.howtogeek.com/230773/how-to-play-pc-games-that-require- safedisc-or-securom-drm-on-windows-10-8.1-8-7-and-vista/). The SecuROM driver has apparently been removed completely in Windows 10.

TDD brings little business value and isn’t worth it - agnieszkaczapla https://www.thedroidsonroids.com/blog/tdd-part-1 ====== ColinWright The title here is clickbait, pure and simple. It's neither the original title, nor the conclusion. The wrapup at the end says: > _Now you see why developers insist on TDD. This isn’t only a “cool tool” > from a technical point of view. It is more like a way to make the project > more robust, and your business more profitable._

White House looks to robotics for economic future - robotlaunch https://medium.com/silicon-valley-robotics/white-house-economic-report-looks-to-robotics-for-the-future-429d66a6593#.sc1xco8vg ====== robotlaunch Focus is on two technologies - robotics and the internet - to drive future productivity, innovation and labor growth.

Off the Grid - decasteve http://www.stephenfry.com/2016/04/off-the-grid/ ====== uhtred It's interesting that I was at an itunes free gig in London back in 2010 at the Camden Roundhouse (band was Bombay Bicycle Club and they were very good), and Stephen Fry made a pre gig speech (obviously paid by Apple) to say how marvellous the iphone was and how although some people criticise social media , it is a marvellous thing that helps people feel less lonely, amongst other things (and the iphone helps people stay connected to this social media when on the go). I wonder if he truly believed that then, or was just saying so for Apple's sake. Either way, let's assume he believed it; and so I guess in 2010 it was all still rather new. Now he, like many of us, have grown very tired and cynical of it all. I agree with a lot he is saying in this post. The internet has been hijacked by big money and corporations. I personally am utterly fed up with waiting for web pages to load, unable to read the content because it keeps shifting around the page while another shitty targeted ad gets inserted. And then I realise the content was trash anyway; just more shallow, "read this in 2 minutes" bullshit that gets churned out because the authors know we have lost our ability to stay focused on one thing long enough to read anything substantial and genuinely informative. ~~~ DanBC Stephen Fry has been an early adopter of technology for many years. He and Douglas Adams were the first people in the UK to get Apple Macs, for example. He was the first person to apply for a .uk domain name ~~~ mattl > He was the first person to apply for a .uk domain name Is a little misleading. He was the first person to use the modern, nonprefixed uk domain but not the first person to apply for a .uk domain back in the day. ------ darkclarity I have gone through a similar phase. Got rid of social media, switched back to a feature phone, am reading real books, listening to music on physical media, using cash where possible and whatever else. The Internet has gone from a place with a high barrier of entry (and the interesting characters that self selected for that barrier), to an all encompassing entity with a load of moralisers, businesses and governments fighting over the ability to call the shots. In its current state, I think it's better to take a step back. View the Internet as an occasional tool for getting things done, rather than a place to live within and rely upon. Let the masses have their addictions fulfilled, while technology enthusiasts move on and enjoy real life. ~~~ debacle What feature phone are you using? For the life of me I can't find one these days that isn't a cheap piece of crap. ~~~ arximboldi I recently got a Nokia 130 because I lost my old phone. Dunno if it goes above your "piece of crap" line but it serves very well my needs. ~~~ sanoli I use a Samsung flip phone. I still prefer the flip ergonomics to a touch- screen one (for ordinary voice call use obviously). Someone calls me, I pick up the phone, flip it open to answer if I want to, talk, close it to end the call, all with one hand, without having to even look at the thing (I can check the outside lcd to see who it is before answering it also). When I want to call someone (I only call about 5 people regularly (wife, mom, dad, sister, closest friends), I just flip it open and press the corresponding speed dial button. For this kind of use, a touch screen doesn't come close. ------ nadam As someone who uses the internet in a healthy way and healthy dose, i think this article is like when an (former?) alcoholic suggests to all the people to not even drink one beer occasionally. Seriously why should I not use email to communicate with people far away from me on interesting topics? Why would I not look up things in Wikipedia? Why would I not look at Fecebook once a day for 2 minutes to see whether there is something extra with my IRL friends and relatives? ~~~ lkozma you can of course use it as much as you want -- but I thing the broader point of the author holds: for a generation that is supposed to be rebellious, there is a surprising amount of conformism in accepting these tools as something that need to be used all the time. ~~~ clock_tower It's best to think neither in terms of rebelliousness nor conformism, but in terms of right and wrong -- the standards by which we determine whether rebellion, or conformism, or withdrawal, or some other act are appropriate. Aging hippies and aging squares are both stopped clocks, wrong at least as often as they're right... That said, I'm with the author in one respect: I don't have a Facebook account and never will. Constant connectedness is the enemy of deep understanding of the world -- although drugs, pinball machines, and basking in one's alleged superiority to the squares are also its enemies. ------ return0 Why do people feel like FB and messengers are the entire "Grid"? You can go off social networks and still enjoy the marvel that is the internet (it works for me). My guess is that people develop a genuine addiction to FB and need to avoid all temptation for a while. Going offline for a longer than that is not a good idea though. ~~~ k-mcgrady >> "My guess is that people develop a genuine addiction to FB and need to avoid all temptation for a while. Going offline for a longer than that is not a good idea though." Maybe it is. Look at it like any other addiction. If you're addicted to alcohol you don't stop for a while that start and hope you can drink in moderation. I guess a better analogy might be an alcoholic who can go into a bar and not drink. I guess there are a lot of people who can do that but for others the temptation can be too much. I know personally I've purged social media accounts several times only to start them up again 6 months later. ~~~ Joof I haven't used Facebook or similar for several years. I still use HN though, but it at least FEELS healthier. ------ stcredzero _These days, while there may be much talk of digital connection being a civil right, that doesn’t make it a civic duty, or a legal compulsion._ Social media tries to use it as a "civic compulsion." They say: Hew to our ideology, or you're not allowed to have an online presence. We will shame and destroy your online persona. So much of our culture and commerce is online and digital, this may well feel like banishment to many. The same progressive movements that railed against the thought control, coercive pressure, and shaming methods of the church and the old cultural establishment have sprouted online movements of predominantly young people who use silencing tactics, banishment from civic organizations, and coercive shaming to further their agenda. I find this a damn shame, because I count myself as a progressive and across the long arc of history, this only delays substantive progress. It's like trying to invade and occupy a country by holding land with troops. It's expensive, causes great collateral damage, and it turns many potential allies against you. It can "work," but only when you utterly rout the opposition, and even then, it often just plants the seeds for the next set of conflicts. True activism can't just stop at demonstrations and resignations. It doesn't stop with committees or legislation or court cases. The end goal is to win hearts and minds. Beware of those who say they're winning hearts and minds, but backing it up with coercion. Beware of power, even limited contextual power. Power that lacks self awareness can be locally perilous. (Really, is that stuff really about justice, or is it about the pleasure of watching someone get their comeuppance? And has our culture degraded to the point where a large fraction of intellectuals are unaware of the difference?) ------ jgrahamc The other day I suddenly remembered the door of my college room. Since I was at university pre-Internet, pre-mobile phones there was a piece of paper and a pencil on the door so that people who came round to find me could leave a message... by writing on the door. ~~~ ant6n Great idea for a social network. Just write on someone's door. ~~~ StavrosK Too skeuomorphic. ~~~ ant6n Skeuomorphism is coming back. Like Vinyl. ~~~ ak39 Baudrillard would have had fun with that comment! ------ phillipamann This article speaks to me and what I've been preaching to others for a while now. I got high speed internet in 1999. I was 13 years old. I am now 29 on the cusp of 30 and I think that this experiment has been detrimental to me rather than beneficial. I am currently in the process of doing what Fry talks about. While I can not be absolute and still want to visit some sites and some communities, I am trying to treat each website as if it were a magazine subscription or something I have to buy and own. I like to live a minimalist lifestyle at home and prefer owning as few things as possible. I know many others feel this way too. However, with the internet and computing, ownership is abstract. I become overwhelmed and anxious under the deluge of files, apps, notifications, settings, and upkeep required for it all. I know I am not alone in this. Below is a quotation I loved from Deep Work by Cal Newport: "These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they’re a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper. Or maybe social media tools are at the core of your existence. You won’t know either way until you sample life without them." Newport, Cal (2016-01-05). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (p. 209). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition. ~~~ vasilipupkin by what algorithm have you determined that it has been detrimental? how do you know that algorithm is accurate? ~~~ phillipamann I did this by reflecting on my own life. I reflected on my habits and behaviors. I thought about how my life was before and after this. I thought about this even more compared to when I became a smartphone owner and when I was not a smart phone owner. There is no algorithm for this. There is no correct answer and that's the point. Some people love being connected to 10 social networks and constantly checking them. Some people don't. I am of the later group. ~~~ vasilipupkin being connected to 10 networks and constantly checking on them is one extreme. Another extreme is claiming you would have been better off without broadband. I can't speak for you, of course, but most people would probably be better off without extremes ------ squeaky-clean I agree that most of us should be "off the grid" more than we are, but not for any of the reasons he suggests. There's no real reasoning to this argument, just "It used to be like X before the internet, so the internet is bad." But with no reasons why X is good, as if it's obvious, but the modern ways seem better to me. > Well maybe they should consider this for a moment. Who most wants you to > stay on the grid? The advertisers. Your boss. Human Resources. The > advertisers. Your parents (irony of ironies – once they distrusted it, now > they need to tag you electronically, share your Facebook photos and message > you to death). The advertisers. The government. Your local authority. Your > school. Advertisers. Really? "The man wants you on the internet, so you should stop!" If you avoid the internet just because of this, you're still letting the advertisers, your boss, "the man" make your decisions for you, rather than coming to your own conclusions.. > Remembering what I was like at fifteen, I wriggle pleasurably at the thought > of how it would feel in 2016 to tell a teacher that, no, I couldn’t possibly > ‘e-mail’ my homework, because I don’t have e-mail: > ‘I’m not on your email, miss/sir.’ > ‘Don’t be absurd, Stephen. Email me the essay as soon as possible.’ A bit of a strawman here, isn't it? In what situation would a teacher ever demand you send an assignment ASAP instead of on the assigned due date? And if it's because you've missed the due date, what right do you have to act difficult and decide the medium over which you turn it in? Either accept the failed grade, or play by the rules of the person who is accommodating you. Self control when it comes to technology is great and all, and if you feel you need or want less than the average person, that's fine. But thinking you're better than everyone else because you refuse to use a tool some people use incorrectly? ~~~ pharke The article seems to be about what he imagines a young person of today would do if they wanted to affect a counter cultural lifestyle. Sticking it to the man (advertisers, your boss, parents, etc.) and throwing common mediums and traditions out the window to freak out the normies. He's not saying the old way was better, he goes to lengths to point that out when he says: >This is just maudlin, nostalgic mush. You can’t go back. But all my imagination can do when picturing a life off the grid is summon up the life I had before the grid existed, so I cannot help being retrospective. He's using the past way of life as a framework to build his vision on, not as the desired outcome. The imagined exchange with a teacher is equally fanciful but serves the point of illustrating a conflict between a young person and an establishment figure. A failed grade would be of no consequence here since it is certainly an expected response from someone in a position of power attempting to force you into conformity... missing this point is telling of your misunderstanding of the article so I think I'll leave it at that. ------ grillvogel "Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride—you can have all of them, but none is true." \- PKD edit: this is from [http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm](http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm) ~~~ stuartaxelowen And what is true? ~~~ clock_tower Well, it's true that if you don't eat you'll die of starvation. (Or, if you happen to be in a computer simulation at the moment, that if you don't run through the acts which the simulation reckons as simulating eating, you'll end up in the state which the simulation reckons as dead, after having been in the state that the simulation reckons as starving -- which is the same thing from your perspective.) Perhaps something larger can be built out from there. I think that what RKD is saying (whoever he is) is that large-scale manufacturing, plus a healthy dose of cheap plastics, have cut us off from physical construction and from the constrained but rather satisfying (at least when contemplated in hindsight) way of how we used to live. That, and he read enough _Dune_ that he's now talking like a Bene Gesserit... ~~~ grillvogel >RKD is saying (whoever he is) Philip K Dick. He wrote this essay back in the 70s and was talking about what you mention as well as the impact of things like TV but I think it is even more relevant in the internet age. Based on the rest of your comment I think you'd enjoy his work. ~~~ clock_tower Interesting. I keep hearing that name, and probably will look him up... ------ scotchmi_st "Those very politicians, advertisers, media moguls, corporates and journalists who thought the internet a passing fad have moved in and grabbed the land. They have all the reach, scope, power and ‘social bandwidth’ there is. Everyone else is squeezed out — given little hutches, plastic megaphones and a pretence of autonomy and connectivity. No wonder so many have become so rude, resentful, threatening and unkind. The radical alternative now must be to jack out of the matrix, to go off the grid." This is awfully regressive, but not only that; it's also foolish. If his point is that by going 'Off The Grid' you can escape these people, he's out of luck- these people are AFK __as well as __online. Try walking through a major city without seeing a single advert. If you want to get away from all the shit on the internet, the only way is forwards, not backwards. ------ yarou When I was a youngin' browsing BBSes in the 90s, I remember distinctly encountering a text guide to "the art of disappearing", essentially getting off the grid as Stephen Fry mentions. It involved a whole bunch of seemingly paranoid steps, like burning your passport, and booking your flight (one-way) with cash. I also remember thinking to myself how silly the whole concept was - why would I ever want to do something like that? These days, I'm realizing more and more that it doesn't sound that crazy in this increasingly dystopian world. ~~~ lkozma It might have been this one, the text you are referring to: [http://www.skeptictank.org/hs/vanish.htm](http://www.skeptictank.org/hs/vanish.htm) ------ 0xffff2 >They couldn’t force me to have an online presence after all. I don't know where he gets this idea. Both the Comp. Sci. and Engineering schools at my university require that all students have a laptop capable of running software related to the coursework (financial aid is available specifically to help meet this requirement). The university also supplies plenty of computer labs. If I insisted on turning in all assignments on paper, I would be laughed at and given failing grades until I was kicked out of school. The modern world absolutely can and will force you to have an online presence. ~~~ ChrisLTD University itself is elective, no? ------ unwind Meta: I think the "Stephen Fry" in the title is very redundant, considering the domain. If it really has to be there, it would (to my eye) look better to lead with it, i.e. "Stephen Fry: Off the Grid". ------ stuartmalcolm Am I the only one struck by the irony of an advert for his book in the middle of this post? ~~~ sk8ingdom I've started to give a pass on this sort of thing. A lot of time the author doesn't have direct control over the publishing medium. The text is Stephen Fry's, but the site design, ads, system administration, url, etc. are likely all managed by someone else. Journalists similarly shouldn't be held accountable for the ads that appear next to their articles in magazines or the local paper no matter how ironic. The fact that there IS an ad in the middle of his tirade probably illustrates his point that "the corporation" has infiltrated every facet of our lives. ~~~ hundchenkatze Well, in this case the publishing medium is presumably owned/controlled by him since it's posted on [http://www.stephenfry.com](http://www.stephenfry.com) While he may not have the knowledge to modify the site himself, he could tell the people he's paying to remove the ad. It's most likely the case that he wants the ad. ------ patcon I noticed myself being just a tiny bit less interested in labouring through the full article knowing that nothing I or anyone else expressed about it after the fact would ever make it to Stephen's attention. The tantalizing idea of a comment affecting an author (no matter how small that chance) definitely plays into my consumption. It makes me wonder whether a better approach to disconnecting is to set quotas, essentially saying something like "I would like 2 tweets and 1 blog comment to make it to my attention daily -- hide everything else from me for my own sanity." ------ coldtea > _They have been given, willy nilly, demographic tags like ‘millennial’, > ‘post-millennial’, ‘Generation Z’, ‘i-Gen’ — not out of anybody’s acute > cultural observation, sympathy or understanding but either to bulk up a > HuffPo article or to delineate convenient advertising categories, within > which many sub-categories can be established. You are not a person, you are > an algorithmic assumption, a mould into which hot selling-jelly may be > poured._ Well, obviously, and for every generalization concerning a whole generation, you're not, and you're not supposed to be, a person. There's a time to talk of people individually and as persons (e.g. in personal relationships, workplace, etc.) and times to generalize and talk about their collective patterns of behavior. And those names are not always coming from journalist hacks without "acute cultural observation, sympathy or understanding" either. E.g. "Generation X" came from a member of said generation itself, Douglas Copland, trying to describe how it is for him and his friends. In any case, "Generation ___" is just a convenient handle to talk about many people together -- its usefulness comes from whether it describes something statistically useful, not from whether it caters to the individuality of each unique snowflake person (and of course most just delude themselves that they are that, while following very similar paths with their generation for most things). > _my proudest boast would be: ‘My friends and I, we disappeared ourselves. No > social media, no email, no chat, no wifi, no selfies, no SMS, no > smartphones. We did it. We did this thing. We Got Off The Grid._ I'd say this again underestimates how many people are "off the grid" (even if they have internet at home) and don't participate in the whole social media/chat/selfies/etc thing. ------ ablation Goodness me, that's a lot of bloviation. I think there's a point buried in there somewhere that has been made far more succinctly by a lot of other people. ~~~ RivieraKid I usually think the same for vast majority of stuff on HN, i.e. most articles could be cut down to one or two paragraphs with little value lost, but... There are generally two reasons why I read - to extract information and for the experience of reading. Stephen Fry's blog is one of the rare cases where I just enjoy the writing and the information value doesn't really matter. ~~~ coldtea > _I usually think the same for vast majority of stuff on HN, i.e. most > articles could be cut down to one or two paragraphs with little value lost,_ Maybe life too. Instead of going through this whole redundant process of living through it, we could just be given some 10 word summary, like e.g.: "There was some fun, some sadness, a few regrets, a couple profound experiences, a lot of boredom, quite some pain, mostly ok, and then you died". ~~~ RivieraKid That analogy doesn't make much sense... ~~~ coldtea Here's another way to put it: "I have heard many People say, 'Give me the Ideas. It is no matter what Words you put them into.' To this I reply, Ideas cannot be Given but in their minutely Appropriate Words." \- William Blake ~~~ RivieraKid Oh ok, I get the point... But for a lot of articles it seems that 90% of the value can be conveyed with 10% of the length, so I usually just quickly skim it - unless it's the type of text where the value is in the experience of reading and not information (stories, poems, ...). ~~~ coldtea I guess that can be true for technical articles the most (e.g. just get to the instructions, numbers, results etc), but probably not as easily for things like this Fry post. ~~~ RivieraKid Yeah, that was my point, that this desn't apply for Fry's writing. ------ alva "The internet, as opposed to AOL and the others, was like a great city. It certainly had slums and red-light districts and places you wouldn’t want to visit after night, but the museums, ... streets were packed with excitement. " This memory of the internet still lives. There are many nooks and crannies that are hard to find as they do not show up on facebook, reddit etc. Lots of independent, wacky, controversial, illegal and subversive sites are alive and kicking. In the earlier days, I suppose due to lack of volume, it was a lot easier to find these places. ------ SpeakMouthWords The good folks of tumblr have a succinct counter-argument to suggestions like this. It is, and I quote: "durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch" ~~~ raverbashing I kind of agree "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub" or "refusing to talk to people as a principle - isn't that so 'awesome'?" It's fine, you don't need to be on every silly new 2.0 dot com, no issue there. But you're shutting yourself out of a means of communication with other people. The fact that it involved technology is a _detail_ You can go to the pub and not drink, you can use FB with a fake name and not do anything with it and you can choose an email provider that suits you, but shutting yourself out does not make sense ~~~ trentmb > "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a > presence at the pub" Not quite- if I don't make it to the pub one night, people just brush it off and think "I'll talk to him next time." People seem much more vitriolic if I don't respond to whatever internet/text message they sent with near immediacy- because it's always available. It seems like there's a shut-off valve with the pub, or a land-line and answering machine- not so with facebook, texting, what have you. ~~~ raverbashing > if I don't respond to whatever internet/text message they sent with near > immediacy- because it's always available I have to agree with you on this one. But I believe it suffices to say that no, you're not looking at email/fb/whatsapp/whatever all the time (and acting like that) ------ ascorbic It's not surprising he'd want to turn his back on social media after the (justifiable) kicking he took over this: [http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/14/stephen- fry-s...](http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/14/stephen-fry-sorry- for-telling-pitying-abuse-victims-to-grow-up) ~~~ coldtea Justifiable? Based on what he actually said? -- there's an accurate transcription down in the link. ~~~ ascorbic “It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy – but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity.” The 58-year-old went on to say: “Grow up.” So, yes. ~~~ pharke Let's take an ounce of effort to post the whole quote shall we? Speaking to the US TV show The Rubin Report about campus free speech, safe spaces and trigger warnings on literature. "In terms of how they think, they can’t bear complexity. The idea that things aren’t easy to understand, they want to be told, or they want to be able to decide and say, ‘This is good and this is bad,’ and anything that conflicts with that is not to be borne. There are many great plays which contain rapes, and the word rape now is even considered a rape, if you say: ‘you can’t watch this play, you can’t watch Titus Andronicus, or you can’t read it in a Shakespeare class, or you can’t read Macbeth because it’s got children being killed in it, it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once, because uncle touched you in a nasty place’, well I’m sorry. It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place, you get some of my sympathy, but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity. Get rid of it, because no one’s going to like you if you feel sorry for yourself. The irony is we’ll feel sorry for you, if you stop feeling sorry for yourself. Just grow up.” Context matters, you can dice up anyone's words to make them say what you like but it doesn't prove a point, it's still a deception, and you're still doing everyone the disservice of assuming that you know better than they do to make up their minds for them. Grow up. ~~~ zwischenzug This from a man who described in great detail his near-suicide experience following the 'Cell Mates' breakdown? What was that if not self-pity? Should we have felt no sympathy for him? Or is that too complex? I wouldn't take any so-called wisdom from this man. ~~~ coldtea > _This from a man who described in great detail his near-suicide experience > following the 'Cell Mates' breakdown? What was that if not self-pity?_ So? That would only prove he can wallow in self-pity too. Which he has admitted already anyway, and condemned even in himself. It certainly doesn't prove that self-pity is not as bad as he says. So he is right. As for him doing it, it doesn't even make him a hypocrite (since he admits it) -- just fallible. Like an ex (or even current) drug addict sincerely warning people that drugs are bad and that they shouldn't do them. Not only are they right -- but they also speak from personal experience. ~~~ zwischenzug It behooves him to be more empathetic, especially if he's suffered from the same difficulties and he's speaking out in public about it. ------ boznz Agree with a lot of this, however it is all about balance and moderation I'm not sure going all the way makes you a better person or gives you a better lifestyle. email is fine once you have filtered out all the spam and dicks who put everyone on cc. I love music, but I wont be going back to vinal anytime soon, my mp3 collection is fine and much more convenient. Yes MP3 may have cheapened music and there maybe something about removing it from the sleeve, putting it on the turntable and turning it over after 20 minutes but that person is not me. Same with books, I love reading books, but I am as happy (if not more happy) to do it on a kindle as a 'real' book from the library. A cell phone is convenient if left on silent or turned off when in company and not continuously checked I would still want google and wikipedia to do my job and I would still want hackernews to ensure I can see and click on articles like Mr Frys if I so desire, again these should be on-demand not continuous. I have some beautiful countryside outside my door and I am very happy to step away from all this and into it as often as I can. ------ pdkl95 > I would feel that it had connected far more and with far greater purpose and > meaning. One of the better discussions of this topic is Vi Hart's explanation[1] of Edmund Snow Carpenter's[2] "They Became What They Beheld". [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm- Jjvqu3U4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4) [2] almost certainly written with Marshall McLuhan ------ jasonkostempski I've been trying to do this and as of this week, HN and stackexchage are the last social accounts I have but only because I can't find a way to delete them. I could just log out and walk away but it feels like there's no closure that way. Anyone know of a way to close an HN account? ~~~ coldpie Does HN count as "social"? It feels more like an Internet forum to me. I guess you're using your real name here, but you don't have to. I don't know anyone socially who I would expect to find on here. ~~~ jasonkostempski I guess I wouldn't count it as "social" either but it's definitely "jacked in", maybe a little more so for me since I use my real name. ------ llamataboot I think we'll look back on maybe the 10 years previous to this and the 10 years after this as the years where we didn't really know how to handle all the information and connectivity we were barraged with because our brains simply didn't evolve for such a thing (and it's about to get a lot more interesting with VR/AR) -- the dopamine hit of MORE INFO MORE INFO MORE INFO makes sense in an information-scarce world. No longer. I suspect our brains will adapt rather quickly, for those of us born into it. For those of us over age 25 or so, I suspect we'll always have twitches of addiction and nostalgia for being off grid. ------ betteryeti Longtime listener, first-time caller here. Okay, maybe this is just a naive idea, but in Fry's spirit of going-backward-to-go-forward, I think that a very subversive, Internet-thwarting tech would be a device that did point-to-point communication (ie., like ham-radio packet broadcast). Like, go to place X, tune into your point-to-point USB dongle and tune in to the chatter -- constrained by the broadcast range of the device's power and antenna. You'd have the efficiencies of a social networking system paired with the place-ness of a particular physical location. This would tend, I imagine, to link people up IRL after they "sniffed" each other electronically to determine whether they were same tribe/interest/affinity/perversion/whatever. From there, they could pursue the more authentic/place-based/dreamy/serendipitous youth more resonant with what Fry experienced in his youth. And since the communication is point-to-point with no IP address or Internet implied, no advertiser/analytics authority could interpose itself in those conversations. Is that an insane idea? ------ ogdoad >It is not about the numbers. It is _never_ about the numbers. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. The ad midway probably has something to do with numbers, where 10,000 is better than 100. ------ vinceguidry What in the world would be the point of really going off the nets? I honestly can't see the point. It's so easy to pick and choose how you want to interact with the online world. A few years ago, not having a Facebook was like living in a cave in the woods. Now? All my friends are on Facebook, but very few of them participate. It's been relegated to mere entertainment. I can go days without checking it. A reporter asked a Girl Scout whether the cookies they were selling were healthy. She just said, "Don't eat the whole box." Technology is like relationships, they get better after you develop good boundaries. If you can't trust yourself with cookies, don't keep cookies in the house. But really, you should just work on not being a slave to food. Or Facebook. Nothing about technology actually keeps you from interacting more deeply with others. You do that to yourself. You can't blame food for making you fat. ------ RivieraKid He's such an amazingly good writer. ~~~ noufalibrahim I like his "Ode less travelled" a lot but his other works of fiction not so much. And his blog posts (including this one) seem to be a few straightforward points blown up into an essay. I realise that he enjoys language for it's own sake. I do too in a much lesser way but his style simply doesn't resonate with me. ------ dajohnson89 That's cute, he thinks a student in today's world can be successful without the Internet. ~~~ Jtsummers Why not? Assuming access to books (library, bookstores) and journals via a library (should be present in most schools or within a school district, decent libraries in my rather small town), a student would be in the same situation as most pre-2000 students, many of whom succeeded just fine. ~~~ tomrod Pre-2000 students had access to card catalogs within the library. Most libraries nowadays use the Internet to support their many locations' cataglogs. ~~~ nazgob Never seen a library without a computer onsite. Most of the time you can use it only to search for books etc. ~~~ tomrod Agreed. Most library systems I've come across have their catalog servers located elsewhere, except for very small community libraries. (Granted, this is the worst type of data: anecdata). ------ JaggerFoo So Mr. Fry is assuming that 15 year old boys would be willing to give up the treasure trove of Porn that is available to them via the technology he suggest they spurn. A very unrealistic assumption. ------ patcon > I live in a world without Facebook, and now without Twitter. I manage to > survive too without Kiki, Snapchat, Viber, Telegram, _Signal_ and the rest > of them. _I haven’t yet learned to cope without iMessage and SMS._ I respect what he's getting at, but this is all sorts of backwards for someone who wrote an earlier paragraph about escaping the eye of advertisers (and presumably surveillance) ------ tmaly I like his spin on it. The internet has become a ton of noise and walled gardens. I initially dropped off the social media platforms, but then I re- joined under anonymous names. During my off-grid time, I found I was more productive in terms of thinking and getting my side projects done. I was able to read more paper books as well as just enjoy life and nature. ------ Freak_NL Logan’s Run, Zardoz, Soylent Green, Fahrenheit 451 Lovely films. Something about the pacing or the cinematography of the films from that era appeals to me. Ah… Zardoz… Nothing beats Sean Connery running around in weird sci-fi shorts. Also, Beethoven. ------ Falcon9 "They couldn’t force me to have an online presence after all." Read your terms of enlistment, soldier. They can and they do. ------ kbart Rants away (though I agree with some points), it's a nice summary of Internet history. ------ sanoli email is awesome, but I do miss receiving long letters from friends far away. Man, do I miss that. I only have two friends left who still write letters. I would give many parts of the internet to have that back. ------ chriswarbo I think this makes some very good points, but conflates too many things as being "the grid" or "the internet [sic]". Yes, advertisers, HR departments, parents, etc. like people to use Web sites to look at ads, provide a work history/CV/photographic evidence of pasttimes, update a beacon with their current whereabouts, etc. but those are societal things which have basically nothing to do with the technology. Paper and ink are just as tainted with advertising, corporate homogenisation, familial pings, etc. How does handing in an essay on paper 'fight the power'? Paper is just as corrupted as the Web. Anecdote: a couple of years ago, before a long coach journey, I decided to buy a pen and paper so I could pass the time writing, drawing, mathematical playing, etc. In the centre of a large city (Birmingham, UK) it took me about half an hour to find anywhere which sold blank paper rather than pre-printed magazines/newspapers/books/etc. (I eventually found some in Poundland; an underrated shop IMHO). I nearly missed the coach. Rejecting technologies, like email, is self-flagellation. Whether a teacher can or can't force a student to have an email address is irrelevant; all that's needed is to SMTP the server with a syntactically-valid FROM address, like "thisisnotarealaddress@example.com". There is no requirement for that address to even resolve, let alone for it to accept mail and make it available to you. So what if you get marked as spam, that's always a hazard even from established providers. Likewise, if someone wants to make something available _to_ you via email, there's nothing stopping the use of a one-time-only address, e.g. mailinator.com or something similar with a password, that disappears after 24 hours. To refuse email in such a way is like refusing to write English in left-to- right order; or using a fountain pen full of invisible ink: it's petty and silly, which is fine if that's your intention, but as a serious statement it achieves nothing. In contrast, refusing control by "The Corporation" is definitely a Good Thing (TM). It's why I've never used Facebook, Bebo, or any of those other register- to-view silos and never will. It's why I deleted my Twitter account after their chilling meeting with the UK government after the 2011 riots. It's why I host my own blog, Git repos and anything else I would miss if it were deleted. It's why I use only FOSS software, on machines which require no driver blobs or proprietary BIOS (except for the GSM driver on my OpenMoko; I'd be glad to hear of any alternatives). It's why I download videos from YouTube, iPlayer, etc. to watch in the ways that I want to (which may be several decades after those services collapse). It's why I use ad blockers, NoScript, hosts file blacklists, etc. It's why I only turn on my smartphone (OpenMoko running Debian) occasionally, when someone asks me to expect a message from them. And so on. It's often said that technology is neither good nor bad, only its uses are. Ignoring the "bad" uses of technology doesn't require abandoning the technology itself. The article decries "digging up Wikipedia and planting cabbages over it", but there are also many other areas of the Web which aren't "bullying and wheedling and neediness.. invisible selling... loveless flirting and cowardly mocking... unbearable long silences and the ceaseless screaming chatter... vengeful rivalries... frenzied desperation and ...wrenching loneliness.". Does "jacking out" make those things stop? No, it's just ignoring them. So why not just ignore them _without_ "jacking out"? Did the youth of the 1950s rebel against authority by hammering on harsichords in their stagecoaches? No, they blared the sound of electric guitars, transmitted via radio, from cars. Refusing to conform to the new normal by staying with the old normal isn't being rebellious; being rebellious is using the new to create some unfathomable anithesis of normal. That's what I love about Open Source, on top of the fundamental rights provided by Free Software: the bazaars surrounding the cathedrals. Yes, FOSS gives us LibreOffice to file our tax returns; but it also lets us connect a GPU-backed deep learning library to a 3D-printed robots, via software-defined radio running on openly- programmed FPGAs, so we can.... I don't know, because it's so new! When studying Physics as an undergraduate, our lab sessions gave training on how to analyse experimental results using Microsoft Excel. I refused to participate, claiming that the scientific process should not be beholden to the unknown inner workings of a proprietary, black-box application with an exclusionary EULA and known bugs. I performed all of the required analysis on the course using Gnumeric and Python instead. Whilst still quite petty, I still believe that was still a far stronger message than not using email from a residence with broadband-connected computers. ------ anticitizen For some reason it delights me that Stephen Fry has read William Gibson. ------ awinter-py hadn't heard of savonarola. there are no github matches for this so if someone's looking for a cool project name, now's your chance ------ rayascott Well isn't it ironic, don't you think? ------ swang Complains about advertisements... shows an advertisement half way down the page... ------ iammew Relevant to the discussion: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3fgkK1J3Cs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3fgkK1J3Cs) ~~~ iammew Why is people down-voting this?! ~~~ takno If you shared why it was relevant to the discussion and what it was people would likely be more positive ~~~ gus_massa [Spanish speaker here.] This is a video of "La Cosquillita" by Juan Luis Guerra. I didn't know this song, so I listened to all of it. I'm completely clueless about why this may be related to the discussion. Bad autotranslation of the lyric: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musica.com%2Fletras.asp%3Fletra%3D59417) (It's difficult to translate because it uses a local variations of the spelling/pronunciation of the words. tl;dl: Someone fell in love and is "ticklish".) ~~~ iammew renaissance ------ djschnei 'It's now very common to hear people say, "I'm rather offended by that", as if that gives them certain rights. It's no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. "I'm offended by that." Well, so fucking what?' —Stephen Fry ------ erjjones Wow. Another self imposing post making its way to #hn (sigh)... On to other news ... How about #Microsoft releasing and open sourcing .NET Core [http://docs.asp.net/en/latest/conceptual- overview/dotnetcore...](http://docs.asp.net/en/latest/conceptual- overview/dotnetcore.html) and [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2014/11/12/net- core-...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open- source/) (?) Where has our community gone :/

The brilliance of All Gas No Brakes - Balgair https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/the-brilliance-of-all-gas-no-brakes ====== erulabs All Gas No Brakes is fantastic - strongly recommend to anyone remotely interested in journalism. This article sort of suggests he’s not a journalist - which I have to take issue with... He asks as few questions as possible and intentionally doesn’t steer the conversation - which is maybe not the kind of investigative drilling were used to in modern times - but is exactly what journalism needs. Every video provides enough context that you don’t feel silly commenting on it - you aren’t nagged by that “what did they say right after that clever edit back to the studio...” feeling. Extremely happy AGNB got signed to AbsoLutley. I want Tim & Eric to do to news what they did to comedy. ~~~ Taek I was at Area 51, which he covered. And while his video was very entertaining, it did not represent at all what it was like to be there. AGNB is exceptional at finding the crazy people and encouraging them to be themselves on camera. 98% of the people at area 51 (admittedly a lower percentage than most events) were completely normal, non-conspiracy individuals, mostly from the midwest. ~~~ ethanbond But... they were at Area 51... It seems that alone would indicate that they are not non-conspiracy individuals. ~~~ Apocryphon The Area 51 thing was a viral meme on social media. It hit the mainstream. It was a little like a flash mob. Even its origin was comedic. ~~~ chrisseaton > It hit the mainstream. Mainstream people are not travelling to Area 51 to be part of a flash mob due to an internet meme. Re-set your expectations of what normal people are doing, because it's a million miles off. ~~~ Apocryphon People get bored and take road trips. Prior to this year, it was a common American pastime. Another unlikely example: [https://www.ijpr.org/2017-05-09/solar-eclipse-or-bust- small-...](https://www.ijpr.org/2017-05-09/solar-eclipse-or-bust-small-oregon- towns-grapple-with-how-to-prepare-for-thousands) ~~~ ethanbond A once in a lifetime (incredible) celestial event == going to the gates of a military installation and, depending on who you ask, throwing a party or attempting a raid. Totally normal. ~~~ Apocryphon It's not for everyone, but it's within the boundaries of normality. My other response has already pointed out your apparent lack of getting the joke, but it should be noted that if your primary hangup is the fact that people were partying at a military installation, you should probably know that specific base is one important to UFO mythos and thus public imagination. There is precedence for that at multiple locations: [https://www.newmexico.org/events/summer-events/roswell- ufo-f...](https://www.newmexico.org/events/summer-events/roswell-ufo- festival/) [https://www.travelportland.com/events/ufo-festival- mcminnvil...](https://www.travelportland.com/events/ufo-festival-mcminnville/) Area 51, of course, is of higher security than these locations, but there's no crime to be outside of the restricted zone. Personally, I had no interest in the Storm Area 51 event but Groom Lake would make one hell of a hiking expedition. It'd be quite cool to take pictures at the gate, and try to spot black project aircraft along Route 375. [https://travelnevada.com/road-trip/extraterrestrial- highway](https://travelnevada.com/road-trip/extraterrestrial-highway) ------ frakkingcylons Honestly, I think this is taking AGNB too seriously. It’s a hilarious channel where a guy finds the weirdest people possible and lets them spew insane stuff on camera. I love it, but I don’t get the sense that he’s doing it for journalistic purposes (which is obviously fine!). ~~~ 1propionyl He said himself in an interview that up until the Minneapolis and Portland videos, he was doing it purely for entertainment value, and didn't consider it any form of journalism. His strategy was just to get the weirdest weirdos on camera and let them talk. With the Minneapolis/Portland videos you can see a significant shift towards a more journalistic disposition. ~~~ frakkingcylons Sure, I give him kudos for showing real activists in the protest videos alongside the usual AGNB characters. ------ briga The brilliance is how Andrew never mocks or judges his interview subjects, no matter how outwardly insane or ridiculous they might be. Obviously the videos are edited for comic effect, but I don't think he could have gotten half his material if he didn't just allow people be their raw unfiltered selves. The results are pretty fascinating and funny, you could probably write whole anthropological dissertations on some of these videos. ~~~ UncleOxidant I just found out about AGNB here. Watched a couple. It's clear from his facial expressions that he's reacting to some of the crazy. ------ solarkraft I'm not sure about that reading. Andrew clearly lets people be themselves, but the people themselves and the format obviously select for the crazier ones. I found the h3h3 interview quite interesting: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=lxt6virxkio](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lxt6virxkio) ------ m3kw9 I have a feeling that AGNB has a biased towards more sensational content. But people saying normal things aren’t that entertaining, just imagine all 10 min of a episode with people making sense and what you already sort of know. ~~~ GaryNumanVevo He definitely “growth hacked” his channel to grow his audience. I’m glad to see him make the pivot to serious content after his Patreon could support him and his crew full time. ------ JMTQp8lwXL I wouldn't characterize the protestors in Portland as a fringe community, as the author refers to the topics of 'All Gas No Breaks' reporting. Ideas like racial justice and economic justice aren't fringe ideas. There is absolutely nothing fringe about treating all people equal, regardless of the color of their skin. ~~~ jariel "There is absolutely nothing fringe about treating all people equal, regardless of the color of their skin." Probably most people support the notion, fewer people would protest (I wouldn't say 'fringe' but nevertheless if you tally up the % of Washington state that 'did a protest' it's a very, very small number). And then of course, the burning of police stations, and the eviction of security forces towards taking over a chunk of the city by violent force ... this is absolutely 'fringe' and should be not be compared to the nominal ideals they are supposed to represented. From the Area 51 video, it seems a lot of these 'crazy folk' are not 'really crazy', they almost seem like attention seekers, hamming come crazy up for the camera. ~~~ WarOnPrivacy > if you tally up the % of Washington state that 'did a protest' it's a very, > very small number That seems to describe every non-local protest - or gathering, for that matter. ------ forinti It is like low budget Louis Theroux. Very entertaining though. ------ nraynaud There was this incredible TV show in the French speaking world called “Strip- tease” it was like a documentary, but with no narrator nor journalist. You would just see the people live and talk. It was a lot of rural and small town stuff. ~~~ pedrogpimenta Of course, the act of being filmed is already a transformation on people's "real life". You're affecting it somehow, even without a person, there's a microphone and a camera, they're the "journalist". ~~~ nraynaud The trick is staying a very long time to re-normalize somewhat the behaviors. They stayed 8 days in a laundraumat to film people there. ------ anticsapp Jeff Krulik pioneered this approach in the 80s. Not to diminish what AGNB is doing, but it's almost like The Office to his Spinal Tap. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Metal_Parking_Lot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Metal_Parking_Lot) ~~~ sukilot I doubt it was invented in the 1980s PT Barnum was doing it 100 years ago. ~~~ WarOnPrivacy I'd totally watch PT Barnum's live videos from 1920. ~~~ anticsapp Shoot me the YouTube link. ------ bobthechef Reminds me of a quote from Chesterton: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” The quote is deeper than it might appear and presupposes that you understand that institutions are not the _sources_ of meaning as the article suggests, but, when legitimate, guard some of the things that _are_ meaningful. Not a projection of fiction on a dead existence, but actually meaningful and intelligibly so (i.e., not some kind of mere passing feeling). Ideologies have attempted to create simulated meaning time and again, silly beliefs that drive people into madness, great and small. They have always failed because the "meaning" they provided was bogus, a deception that might animate people for some time, but is ultimately a fiction that ceases to maintain a lasting grip precisely because it is false. Only someone crippled by nihilism, stupidity, or opportunistic vice could latch onto something like that. The trouble is that we have been sliding into nihilism for some time. Nietzsche observed this slide during his era. He did not believe in God himself, but he saw atheism as a dreadful, horrible thing. In his parable of the madman, the madman frantically asks the people in town where God is. They are amused at the spectacle, suggesting in jest that perhaps God is hiding beneath something over here, or other there. The townsfolk represent the people of his day, the atheists of the 19th century. The madman, of course, realizes the consequences of God's "death" the horror of which the townsfolk have not yet come to understand. They are still dwelling in that twilight of the idols, fragmented and perverted pieces of the whole that was once held together by God before the earth was unchained from the sun and lost its orientation (Nietzsche gave the cult of Science some noteworthy attention as an example of one of these idols). The twilight does, sooner or later, come to an end, of course, and that's when even the idols can no longer pacify our fears. I think most people are like those townsfolk. True nihilism is unbearable. Anyone who claims otherwise is like the foolish teenager who is merely spiting his parents in an act of rebellion. Some of us sense the nihilism festering in our souls and begin to attach ourselves to various causes, fads, fashions, distractions. Anything to avert our gaze from the horrific void within us and before us. And America has always been a land of heretics (to borrow a characterization from Douthat), so perhaps the diversity of bizarre superstitions should be greater in the US than elsewhere. At the same time The "mainstream" pop culture is also vacuous, commercial, ideological, and stupid, itself dripping with hedonistic escapism from nihilism as much as any fringe movement (you should also expect a ascetic reaction for every hedonistic indulgence; each excess breeds its corresponding deficiency). Actually, we are in the throes of a kind of new gnosticism, a new Albigensian movement wherein the "true meaning" of the world, the "true self", is beyond the world of facts and can in fact contradict the facts. The facts are an illusion, not the "really real". They're "socially constructed" much like the material world is the deceptive construction of the evil creator god of the Old Testament, at least according to the gnostics. It is a dangerous, noxious amalgamation of pride and delusion, a slide into self-destruction, something Man has always excelled at. It is not unreasonable to think that gnosticism is, for many, an attempt to escape their nihilism into a world of pure imagination, giving their perverted appetites an inviolable infallibility and sanctity. We don't need AI and robots to create the Matrix. Many of us are in it now. ~~~ 0134340 >When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” That quote is deceptive though and and it's sometimes used, as in your case, to push religious propaganda. For every secular view you'll likely find a theistic view with many commonalities. Theism doesn't stop people from justifying or believing in many of the things agnostics do because out of thousands of denominations of thousands of theistic religions of thousands of gods and thousands of years, theistic belief is just as varied as non-theistic belief. And often they're just as vague and meaningless while virtue- signalling as something more meaningful and sometimes the love they espouse is something committed only for that tribe or out of fear of gods rather secular motives which may often be for the tribe but not because they feel they have to. Sorry if I seem course but I'm tired of this meaningless 'life has no meaning without belief in gods' trope pervade my favorite forum for which I'd rather view tech news and not be denigrated for not having found any believable gods yet. Nihilism isn't defined by lack of belief in gods. ~~~ jariel " and it's sometimes used, as in your case, to push religious propaganda." A comment is not 'propaganda'. Unless your comment is 'Atheist Propaganda'. Seriously. "Nihilism isn't defined by lack of belief in gods." Fine, but that doesn't take away anything about what he said about Nihlism. There is something more mundane about the quote, and that is the psychology of people who are willing to believe truly crazy stuff, and there is a lot going on there, probably worth study. ~~~ 0134340 >A comment is not 'propaganda'. If you're going for intellectual honesty, "a comment can be propaganda." But in this case it has been as propaganda if going by the typical definition of "the systematic propagation of a doctrine". Of which atheism or agnosticism have none and more often than not, in the west it's atheistic ideologies that were more systemically pushed by establishment as propaganda than atheistic by a large margin. So it's fair to say it's often used as propaganda, this specific quote I've personally witnessed used as such many times and it reeks of self-righteousness. >Fine, but that doesn't take away anything about what he said about Nihlism. And so what did he say about nihilism? Your criticism of AGNB's interviewees seems to be that they're nihilistic. If they were truly nihilistic, you could argue, they'd be at home sulking that there's no point in doing those things but they all seem truly motivated to do various things. I don't get this offense at nihilism when it's one of the most benign ideologies to ever exist. How many people have died from people who had no motive or saw no point in action? Nihilism is void of motive. It's when you have both motive and ideologies is when many people get killed. In that case you could just as easily rail against ideologues. >and that is the psychology of people who are willing to believe truly crazy stuff Maybe they see all the craziness in the world and only become a reflection or amplification of it. We can't also forget all the craziness in the theistic religions which cause people to do worse things than coordinating over silly ideas. I wouldn't condone all the "craziness" but I can't generalize and denigrate it either. This craziness, as you may see, represents a lot of creativeness and originality that you can find in man and many good things come from it, both productive and what you might see as non-productive. And if it's the "meaningless" fun they're having at harmless conventions, it isn't meaningless if it's fun. Fun has meaning in giving people reprieve from stressors, which ultimately helps us be more productive. And if not, oh well. You wind up with people who've just enjoyed themselves for apparently nothing. We could get deep into existential philosophy if you like but I think you get the point. You can look at many things as shallow but often, like with everything in the world, there is more to it than what's on the surface and more meaning in it than you may see. Because you don't see meaning in something doesn't mean it's not there. ~~~ jariel The intellectual hoops you're leaping through to try and justify a normal comment as 'propaganda' not only don't help your case - they only serve to possibly validate that your very own response is is a form of propaganda itself. "We can't also forget all the craziness in the theistic religions which cause people to do worse things than coordinating over silly ideas." Spirituality is not a 'silly idea', more importantly it doesn't cause us to do crazy-bad things in general. 'Silly ideas' are things like Imperialism, Communism and Fascism - all of which are secular ideals and have caused massive, worldwide violence to the tune of many massive wars (most wars in fact) to the tune of 100's of millions dead in the last century alone, and continue to hang the existential nuclear threat over our heads. ~~~ 0134340 Maybe I was a bit hyperbolic in calling it propaganda but I'm sometimes reminded that my state constitution says I can't run for legal office for lack of belief in a deity nor witness in court. The chances that I'd have big government sponsoring my view are much less than yours, hence why I used it. >Spirituality is not a 'silly idea', more importantly it doesn't cause us to do crazy-bad things in general. The "silly ideas" I referred to colloquially as those which are the subject of AGNB's videos, not to spirituality. And the "ideas" you pointed out as silly, two of which, were and are driven as much by religious motive as secular. ------ anm89 I think the narrative of people using these subcultures as a way or fill the void left by the lack of traditional societal structures that people used to find meaning in life is spot on. It's interesting how half of the people in these subcultures seem to be in on the absurdity of it and the other half aren't but it doesn't really seem to matter to a lot of them. ~~~ 0134340 >fill the void left by the lack of traditional societal structures that people used to find meaning in life Or maybe they're finding meaning in the void that traditional structures couldn't fill. ------ trynewideas Most of AGNB is great, but I wish the protest videos at least included resources from local jouranlists alongside it for context. Especially the Minneapolis and Portland protest ones recently put up — they showed a narrow slice of what was happening to drive home some really salient points, but if you watch them and think "THAT'S what's it's like in there", it's off base by quite a bit compared to the less entertaining local journalists (or even just streamers with a camera on a pole) who've been out there livestreaming, interviewing, and documenting for months instead of weeks or days. Context is important; I can't speak for Minneapolis, but the Portland protests weren't just (and aren't just, and for most of the nearly 70 straight days of them haven't ever been) about the federal courthouse or the federal officers. The BLM-led Justice Center protests weren't the chaotic courthouse protests, and the 2-3k who came out for a week of feds has been less than 500 for most of the other 2 months and change. The west-side downtown protests in a 4-block zone around the center and courthouse aren't the east-side precinct and police union HQ marches with local police chasing protesters and beating media into residential neighborhoods. Or maybe I'm still just pissed about AGNB showing mayor Ted Wheeler in a sympathetic context, complete with his theatric tear gassing the one time he came out to a protest, without the other context of how the PPB he runs as police commissioner beats and gasses media and protesters as soon as cameras like AGNB's left the fed protest stage - literally, PPB went out threatening to gas the same crowd he stood with within 45 minutes of Wheeler leaving the protest. I guess my feeling is, some things aren't simple or clear enough to be accurately served by pithy but entertaining 5- or 10-minute videos. It's one lens, and a good one, but I get real nervous when people say AGNB is the model for news. Very few links of people on the ground: [https://twitter.com/MrOlmos](https://twitter.com/MrOlmos) [https://twitter.com/TheRealCoryElia](https://twitter.com/TheRealCoryElia) [https://twitter.com/PDocumentarians](https://twitter.com/PDocumentarians) [https://twitter.com/Clypian](https://twitter.com/Clypian) [https://twitter.com/IwriteOK](https://twitter.com/IwriteOK) [https://twitter.com/hungrybowtie](https://twitter.com/hungrybowtie) ------ d33lio I absolutely love All Gas No Brakes (no pun intended) however I was a bit troubled by some of Andrew's comments speaking with Ethan and Hila on the H3H3 podcast. We need to remember that this is entertainment, plain and simple. This is meant to be raw, groundbreaking and "fresh" which is why myself and many others love the cut and dry nature of his content - however his comments regarding the protests in Portland and Minneapolis were troubling. Specifically, how he articulated looting, destruction of businesses (including immigrant and minority owned businesses) as a "logical response to the death of George Floyd". AGNB will have a great future, but I think it's critical to remember that this IS ENTERTAINMENT and not in the slightest form meant to be informative. That said, godspeed Andrew lets take AGNB to the next level! ~~~ sukilot Why is it troubling for Andrew to give his opinion? Is it troubling when you post your opinion on HN? Or only troubling when people you disagree with share their opinion? ------ rllin AGNB is the spiritual successor to Louis Theroux it's what Vice tried to capture but failed. parachute journalism works, only if you inject very little of yourself into it and have minimal framework. ~~~ daveleebbc Oh please, AGNB isn't in the same league as Louis Theroux. It's a great YouTube channel and they do a good job of making fools look foolish, but to compare it to Theroux's work is absurd. ~~~ rllin spiritual successor AGNB needs some time to grow into longer format they're literally 3 dudes in an RV without a working toilet if they had BBC money they would live up to Theroux 100% ------ pouta His patreon exclusive content is definitely worth the $5. Sausage castle videos are insane. He also has a porn video as an extra on pornhub. ------ GhostOfLelandJr Better than hitting the pookie ------ KKKKkkkk1 _In a visit to the Portland protests, for instance, Callaghan shows that the attendees don 't neatly fit into the narrative you see on TV. Fox News' Tucker Carlson, for example, calls the protestors "Biden voters," yet many on the streets disdain Biden. There's something to what he's doing._ I don't know if Tucker Carlson is the gold standard of journalism that you want to exceed. ~~~ tjr225 That’s exactly the point of what he is doing. I would guess most people who watch Fox News consider Tucker Carlson to be a reliable source. That’s a problem because he obviously isn’t. ~~~ sukilot You don't need AGNB to tell you Ticket Carlsen is a lying demagogue. Everyone who isn't a fan sees that when they watch Tucker Carlsen himself -- his lies aren't exactly subtle.

Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B - sgloutnikov https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/21/splunk-acquires-cloud-monitoring-service-signalfx-for-1-05b/ ====== deanmoriarty Does anybody know if employees will end up actually making any money from this massive acquisition, or if yet again board and investors found a way through some shenanigans to distribute all the wealth just to themselves? EDIT: I'm being downvoted, but I've been increasingly hearing a shady Silicon Valley practice where, upon successful acquisition, the board will vote to emit a large number of new shares (think 5-10X the total pool), which will be redistributed just among execs and investors. So, if you are an employee who held on to your 0.1% (which, on 1B, might be worth 1M), you might find out that after the acquisition you are going to be diluted maybe to 0.01%. And this is after all the other "healthy" dilutions that have happened to the company over the years, as part of their financing rounds. ~~~ windexh8er I was part of a smaller acquisition Splunk made. My existing options at the original company were worthless at the time the deal closed. Instead Splunk and our management agreed to pay us out in cash that was lower than the value of what Splunk paid. In turn Splunk slapped on the golden handcuffs for those they wanted to keep and bumped up our salaries and threw the standard four year vesting RSUs at us with everyone starting at day 0. The rumor was our founder took the lion's share of cash on acquisition. Once I was in Splunk it was, unfortunately, what I feared. Beyond a lot of mediocre mid-level management and everyone calling themselves rockstars I asked about how a specific prior acquisition had gone. Most Splunkers were pretty candid about how poorly that had gone (it was their UBA acquisition, I was part of the SOAR acquisition). I saw the writing on the wall within a few months and left money on the table. It just wasn't worth it to me to stick around as I had been in a similar size Valley security company that was equally as bad. It's unfortunate this is what the landscape has become. On one hand I'm happy for the SignalFX founders to have made it and hit pay dirt. But everyone else... Yeah, they're all going to get swindled on the deal. Sure you'll make some money but not nearly as much as a select few and even then there's a good chance anyone who tries out Splunk internally runs into the same wall myself and a bunch of my peers did. Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, IBM... They're all are done innovating. These companies buy relevancy and then are proud of their accompliments in changing the world. Or that's what they tell their prospects, customers and themselves. So much great technology and brain power are getting locked up in these non-R&D companies who are at a stage of run rate revenue but still think they're a startup that will continue to pull 50% growth YoY. It's absurd. Splunk isn't good at acquisitions. I've seen it first hand. I'd never go back there willingly. I hope the SignalFX crew ends up better. But at the end of the day you're working at Splunk. ~~~ Trias11 Well you got RSUs at Splunk + salary bump which is like ok deal? Granted - your payout at acquisition didn’t work to your expectations - and it’s typical in SV - but after dust settled you been offered something not that bad in a company that is really not a lagger after all... ~~~ truncate Umm, I've never worked in a startup, but if I do, a huge motivation would be make money. Risk is startup failing, not it getting acquired for good money. In the end, if all I'm getting is standard RSUs and salary bump, I might as well will join the established company at first place. I understand some people really do love to work for startups, but I think many don't and regardless potential to make money much more than standard job in future is always a motivation. ~~~ repomies691 On average, the problem with being an employee in a startup is that actually it is easy to over-value your shares/options. However, there are still lots of cash-out stories as well, where the employee has made nice bonus on top. But to me it seems that for each cash-out story, there is like 9 or 10 stories where the options/shares have turned out to be worthless. ------ jedberg Good for them! I've been a huge fan of SignalFX since they launched. It was the closest commercial product I could find to Netflix's internal monitoring system. I mention it often when people ask for a recommendation of a monitoring system. ~~~ cwp Yeah. SignalFX is great! I'm happy for them. But also, dammit. Splunk will destroy it. ~~~ occamsrazorwit Why do you think Splunk will kill it? ~~~ cwp Cause that's how acquisitions always work out. It might not be as obvious as "We are shutting down SignalFX." But they'll want to turn it into a feature of another product which is aimed at a different market, or move it to Splunk's infrastructure, which was designed for something else. Or maybe it's about adopting a common UX, which ends up being worse than what SignalFX has now. Think of Microsoft buying Skype. It's still around, but it's not good anymore. ------ blawson Seems like a really impressive number, based on the 170% compounded annual growth rate referenced in their last funding round[1]. Huge assumption but if they started at 1,000,000 ARR in 2015 (which seems generous if sales just started then), 170% yearly growth over 4 years is ~$8.5 million ARR today. Over a 100x multiple! 1\. [https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2019/06/12/186761...](https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2019/06/12/1867619/0/en/SignalFx-Raises-75-Million-to-Fuel-Demand-for- its-Cloud-Monitoring-Platform.html) ------ brunoTbear I didn't see the terms on that Tiger capital round anywhere online (very cursory search tho, so I'm open to being wrong!), but they raised $75 just 2 months ago. I wonder what the terms on that round were and what this acquisition means for the older shareholders. Seems unlikely to be a bad deal, given that they _just_ raised, so I'm curious why a sale happened so soon after closing a round. ~~~ allana Perhaps the addressable market on their own was too small (or so the team at SignalFx felt), thus now is a good time to sell. Splunk already has Enterprise and B2B sales down cold, adding a supporting product is an easy in-sell. ------ jujube888 Splunk's existing cloud service is a disaster they are desperate to make it work but due to lack of experience in the cloud field they think they can buy credibility by acquiring a SaaS company to make it work and it will only get worse. Splunk is forcing customers to sign on to it's cloud service by ending all perpetual licensing by November 2019 and forcing subscription cloud and term licensing to make it affordable to customers. It will take them an extra 5 or more years to break even as their cloud service has been in existence for 6 years. There is no guarantee of success as they haven't been known for their execution with poor leadership everywhere in the company. The SignalFX exec management team will make money but no one else will. They will only be there for one year as they realize they've been put into subservient roles reporting to incompetent SVP and VP Splunk managers. The regular employees will soon find out that Splunk is a chaotic and terrible environment and that no one is held accountable for their mistakes or lack of competence. Their stocks will be reset to what splunk will dole out for new employees and they have to vest for 4 years all over again. There is no joy to this it's a brutal reality and Splunk will eventually be purchased by a legacy tech company like Cisco or a private equity like Thoma Bravo. ------ bpicolo Congrats to the team. I used Signalfx at Yelp years back. It was a fantastic product - I miss it to this day. (Same with Splunk). Both products set a ridiculously high UX bar, but they definitely charge accordingly for it. ------ chirau I wonder what this means for Datadog's soon to be IPO ~~~ AznHisoka I also wonder if New Relic is an acquisition target as well. ~~~ ryanSrich New Relic’s stock is down 42% on the year so I don’t see them doing very well. An acquisition would make sense. ~~~ apple4ever Really... is there a reason for that? ~~~ liveoneggs they missed targets and told everyone that a new dashboard with existing features (newrelic one) was a new sale-able product? ~~~ apple4ever I was wondering how NR1 worked out. Seems not great to me... ------ paulyacoubian Tiger Global led the Series E round in June at a $500m post-money valuation. That means they get a 2x in a few months. This looks like it will be a fantastic exit for employees too! ------ majestik So the days of “Splunk for logs and X for monitoring” will change to “Splunk for logs and monitoring” ------ rattray Curious to see what comes of this from a product perspective... any speculation as to what they might be able to pull off in practice as a joint entity? ------ codesushi42 Proof that the cyber security industry is an overlooked dark horse, full of opportunities. Too bad it gets overshadowed by AI, cryptocurrency, VR/AR. I guess it's unsexy and not necessarily new. But there's a lot of money in it. ~~~ munchbunny From the inside of the cyber security industry, it certainly doesn't feel that dark horse-like. It feels quite crowded actually. There are two big things going for it though: 1\. There's an adversarial relationship that drives up demand for products. 2\. It's stupidly complex, so there's a lot of potential value add in anything that can simplify the problem. The main thing going against the cyber security industry is that while it's sexy to subject matter experts, it's not really sexy to boardrooms, Silicon Valley tech startups included, many who see it as a cost center and something that slows down product development and thus do the minimum necessary to _look_ secure. Speaking from anecdotal evidence. In the context of big companies, Krebs on Security had a great article in the wake of the Equifax breach which pointed out that there are very few CISO's (or equivalent) who report to the CTO or CEO. For the most part they report to the CFO, to the head of IT, or to the head of legal. ~~~ cik Concur, also from inside the industry. The reality is that almost every C-Suite executive I talk to sees security as a cost center, and rolls it (and IT even) into the CFO, or the COO. We focus on helping an organization make security an enabler. Yet even those customers who get it - really only care when there's a breach, or if someone's bacon has seriously been saved. Suffice it to say, I find the industry troubling, to say the least. ~~~ staticassertion Lots of things are cost centers. SRE is a cost center. OPS is a cost center. Companies still pay a fortune for services that optimize these areas. Hell, why do you think Splunk has 1 billion dollars to burn? ~~~ SamuelAdams >Lots of things are cost centers. Agreed. If you boil it all down, the only things that are "profit centers" are either Marketing or Sales. Everything else is a cost. When a company I work for begins putting its employees into boxes like that, I look for a quick exit. It's only a matter of time before the C-level staff start reducing those "cost-centers" to a few overworked, underpaid staff. ------ Trias11 Oops, Just found 2yr old email from SignalFx asking if I interested in a Director position :)

Sierra On-Line Documentary - D_Guidi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_1TZoNiW6U&feature=youtu.be ====== rococosbasilisk Pharaoh was developed by Impressions Games which was bought by Sierra On-Line in 1995. It remains one of the best historical strategy games ever made. Its cinematics were extraordinary for a game turning 21 this year ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u0js7at9uc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u0js7at9uc))

How coding boot camps are filling the talent gap - dean http://www.macleans.ca/work/jobs/how-coding-boot-camps-are-filling-the-talent-gap/ ====== acconrad I have this theory that coding boot camps are an attempt at further increasing the wage gap. Globalization has brought down developer prices, but the quality dropped too far below what was needed. How can we reduce costs without having to pay market rates? We'll hire someone with less experience than a college graduate in the field of web development! Since most websites are nothing that difficult to implement, we can offer courses on teaching people basically how to build these apps, and then hire them at these companies! The employee is happy to be making more than they were (which was either nothing because their previous job has become irrelevant or less because the floor for software development is so high), and the employer is happy to be employing cheap labor. My guess is the net effect can only be negative. If the business scales, it will need more talented engineers to help with that scale, and either keep these boot camp engineers to do the simple tasks or fire them for failing to continue to provide value. Or the business can't scale because the developers aren't talented enough to scale these apps, and they can't hire talented engineers because they refuse to pay market rates for quality workers. The third scenario I see is that it becomes a Mythical Man-month problem, where companies just decide that high quality engineers at these types of businesses simply aren't worth it, and would rather have a cadre of low cost boot campers, making the demand for quality software engineers drop, save for a few specialized roles. ~~~ lordCarbonFiber I think the demand for quality software devs is honestly an illusion born out of the mysticism that surrounds tech for much of the older generation. When all systems involving tech map to ~magic~ you end up with highly educated people being highly paid to do work that honestly could be done by nearly any layperson with enough practice. There will likely be some turmoil as ratios of full engineer to effective technician get sorted out but I feel like the end result is not necessarily negative. Odds are that those people with technically fulfilling jobs have little to worry about. The rest of us probably should polish those resumes because the days of six figures to do simple dev work are coming to an end. ------ lordCarbonFiber With the caveat that I don't have any person experience with the situation in Canada, I get immediately suspicious of any article that talks to a "talent gap". At least in the states, it's not hard to find a developer. What is hard however, is finding a developer that wants to code your uninspired CRUD app at below market rates and I that's the issue these bootcamps tend to address. ~~~ chaghan in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king How much time can a man invest in learning a really complex stuff so he can work on compilers, creating programming languages or implementing extraordinary search algorithms. And who will pay for that ? That is the downside of capitalism. Just take a look at what happened to Oracle when the most brilliant engineers left after they acquired Sun Microsystems. They literally could not find anyone for ages to replace these people just because there is not enough talent out there. And that's Oracle. Who else is there that can afford to pay these people ? Google ? Maybe. Netflix ? aye IBM ? likely And maybe few dozens of other corporations. But these people do not want to work for corporations instead they need to be treated as special unicorns.

GOTO considered helpful - jmount http://erehweb.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/goto-considered-helpful/ ====== CodeMage I can identify with this article. My own experience makes me agree with it completely. At the age of 7, I learned BASIC on Spectrum 48. At the age of 9, I wrote a program for my mom to use in her biology class. It's still the most awful spaghetti programming I can remember seeing in my life. It had some really toxic uses of GOTO, but I remember it also had a few uses of GOTO which were actually attempts at more structured programming (GOTO X simulating a switch/case). Fast forward to the age of 12 and Oxford Pascal on Commodore 64. Programming without line numbers (or even memory addresses like in assembler) seemed like a novel approach, but I didn't have much trouble getting used to repeat..until and while..do, especially when I realized that I _finally_ didn't have to worry about "renumbering". Fast forward to today. At work I use Java _and_ C _and_ C++ _and_ Python on a regular basis. As a hobby I use ActionScript 3 for game development. I've had fun writing an application in Common Lisp, fooling around in Haskell and messing around with Io. I once heard a university professor say "If you've programmed in BASIC once, you're scarred for the rest of your life." I don't feel scarred. Honestly, if someone tried to teach me programming without GOTO at the age of 7, I'm not sure I would've grokked it. Sure, I might have, but my point is that even though that's not the way it happened, even though I've been exposed to GOTO for 5 years of my life, I'm not a bad programmer because of it.

Don't take Investment Now: It's the Era of the Entrepreneur - ALee http://thenextweb.org/2008/11/01/the-era-of-the-entrepreneur/ ====== wheels I find a lot of these sort of articles a bit of an echo chamber. There's limited value in advice that claims to be in response to the times, but is exactly the same as it was before. ------ ScottWhigham I don't think the article is really about what the title is. Odd. ~~~ thenextweb The original title is not "Don't take investment" but just "The Era of the Entrepreneur". What I tried to point out is that this era marks great opportunities for entrepreneurs but that bloggers and VCs make it seem as a terrible time. Hope that was clear...

Ask HN: Tools you use for remote working? - d0m Hi, as remote working is becoming more and more common, I&#x27;m curious about tools&#x2F;services startups are using. (Features management, bug tracker, video conferences, chat, tasks, knowledge center, etc.) ====== WadeF We use a bunch of tools at Zapier but some of our favorite are: \- P2 WordPress theme from Automatic: [http://p2theme.com/](http://p2theme.com/) \- Sqwiggle: [https://www.sqwiggle.com/](https://www.sqwiggle.com/) \- Trello: [https://trello.com/](https://trello.com/) \- GitHub: [https://github.com/](https://github.com/) \- Campfire: [https://campfirenow.com/](https://campfirenow.com/) \- Zapier: [https://zapier.com/](https://zapier.com/) \- GTalk \- Dropbox/Box \- RelateIQ: [http://relateiq.com/](http://relateiq.com/) \- Help Scout: [https://www.helpscout.net/](https://www.helpscout.net/) \- HelloSign: [https://www.hellosign.com/](https://www.hellosign.com/) We wrote a lot more about how we use them here: [https://zapier.com/blog/how- manage-remote-team/](https://zapier.com/blog/how-manage-remote-team/) ~~~ interstitial I hope you are using Zapier to ties those APIs together ;) ------ hoop At Heroku, we are quite distributed and typically use the following. Some teams might have a slightly divergent set of tools or workflow, but engineering-wide this is more or less the baseline: * HipChat (sync and async chat with a variety of ChatOps functionality) * Documentation: Google Drive for non-technical documentaton that might need feedback and some dynamic spreadsheets backed with dataclips: [https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/1/31/simple_data_...](https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/1/31/simple_data_sharing_with_data_clips/) * Video conferencing: Every single meeting has a corresponding Google Hangout. For some meetings we might use Fuze * DCVS: git. Our repos are hosted on Github and we use all the usual stuff there: Pull Requests, Issues, in-line commenting, etc * Project/task management: Trello trello trello - If it's not in Trello, it doesn't exist. This works great when you're widely distributed across geography and timezones. With the right workflow, we can at-a-glance know the status of all of our work-in-progress. * Mailing lists! Every team has its mailing list and nearly every other thing of interest has its own mailing list. Interested in an upcoming project? There's a mailing list for that. Are you remote or based out of the SF bay area? There's a mailing list for that. Are you into Golang, functional programming, or want to chat about Linux? We have those covered too. Are you into biking or photography? Mailing lists! P.S. - If you're interested in remote work, we're hiring! [http://jobs.heroku.com/](http://jobs.heroku.com/) ~~~ ubercore Can you share any of your Trello workflow? We still have trouble sometimes making everyone happy with our current Trello workflow, I'd be really interested in hearing how you organize your cards! ~~~ hoop Sure! The basics are that each team has their own board and chooses a Trello board layout that most closely matches their workflow. Generally, we'll start with new work on the left side of the board and completed work at the right side of the board; this roughly resembles a kanban board. The standard columns are: Ready/Next (backlog) -> Doing -> Done * Ready/Next are the top items from the backlog (usually a separate Trello board just so only active items are on the primary board) that are next in the queue * Doing is work-in-progress * Done is completed work (of course :)) Some teams also use additional columns for: * Blocked - Work that is blocked on something else. In planning meetings and standups these are called out so we can unblock the items as quickly as possible * Shepherding - Work that is mostly coordinating cross-team efforts. These items generally don't take up alot of active cycles of the "Shepherd" but they are an additional context switch throughout their work * Interrupts - Usually this is called something else, but the gist is that some teams track operational items separately. For example, if support escalates a support ticket to an engineering team, the trello card referencing the ticket and any troubleshooting info will end up in one of these columns As for ensuring that the Trello boards are up-to-date, many teams have standups and walk through their Trello board and confirm that it's consistent with reality. ~~~ ubercore Thanks! I guess we're not too far off, I think it's the last step we've been doing poorly -- team-specific checkins to make sure the board is accurate. ------ semerda There is a tendency to slap together a suite of freebie tools form various providers and hope it all sticks. However this doesn't scale. Multiple logins. Different UIs. Flaky integration between the tools.. Nightmare. I went through this exercise myself and in the end decided to centralize it all with Atlassian’s OnDemand suite. Cheap and chips for small teams! We use Jira w/ Agile for tickets & project management, Confluence for knowledge base, HipChat for communication, Bitbucket for code repository et al. Wrote about this and how we use it here: [http://www.theroadtosiliconvalley.com/engineering/medlert- ca...](http://www.theroadtosiliconvalley.com/engineering/medlert-case-study- atlassian-ondemand-tools-gsdfaster/) Hope this helps! ------ cynusx I have been running a remote team for a year now. Communication: \- chat during the day (hipchat) \- skype for voice calls, usually to quickly discuss something \- Google hangout (highest bandwidth communication, I run my daily standups on google hangout and sporadically for "crisis" moments or "clarification" moments) Project management: \- trello Product management: \- prodpad So the trick is to have a daily scrum meetup on google hangout every morning so that you can explain tasks, check how far everybody got the previous day and update the trello board to reflect the new state. It's the only moment in the day that communication is cheap and high bandwidth. Knowledge center: Google docs and github wiki There are other auxiliaries like github, airbrake, circleCI and papertrail that report into hipchat so you can get a sense of the work being done. ~~~ blakesterz Interesting, why do you use hipchat AND Skype AND Hangouts? Those all seem to overlap quite a bit. Our team meets and chats in Skype, I didn't see the need for hipchat while we're all using Skype. Totally agree with the morning meetings though, plus we have one longer scheduled weekly. ~~~ aeden HipChat provides a couple things that I don't think you can get from Skype: 1\. Searchable backlog for _all_ discussions. 2\. API for connecting bots (which can be used for C&C). 3\. Web-based and native clients. 4\. Public and private rooms chat rooms. HipChat is more like IRC than like IM, which, for distributed teams, is often very useful. ------ KevinEldon I work in a very large distributed enterprise so this list is a little off topic, but maybe it'll be useful for someone and maybe it will awaken a few ideas for how incredibly rich an opportunity the enterprise space is. I write code and help the rest of the team write code. We use Windows. These tools have been helpful. \- Microsoft Lync (excellent product! Love it. Seriously it's only serious flaw is it needs Windows.) \- Microsoft Outlook \- Microsoft Sharepoint (meh, it's better than nothing) \- Trello (useful for ad-hoc teams) \- GitBlit ('cause outside the Firewall GitHub/BitBucket isn't allowed) \- HP's Agile Manager (expensive, but a very good Agile/Scrum product) \- Rally (before HP Agile Manager, a very good Scurm product) \- Adobe Captivate (decent for screencasts; save time sharing your ideas inside your firewall) \- TechSmith's Snagit (the best screen capture tool I've used; great for quick-and-dirty 'do this' email or doc) \- IntelliJ IDEA (great IDE, we don't use it collaboratively or anything but it got into our Enterprise because individual DEVs could buy it at a reasonable price for themselves, then other DEVs wanted it and mgmt started signing POs... smart tactic). Sum it up. Lync is awesome (friends in smaller/not-so-MS-focused shops use Skype w/ success). A good asynchronous communication tool like Captivate/Snagit is useful. Some shared space to manage the work is necessary (Trello, HP Agile Manager, Rally, numerous other good products). I wish I had Campfire or something like it. edit: formatting ~~~ altano (disclaimer: I'm a MS employee blah blah) You'd be surprised how good many MS tools make remote development/communication. I don't work at MS HQ in Redmond (I'm in Boston) so my whole team does tons of work with people remotely every single day. For example, Lync on the Windows Phone is really great: you can join a meeting from your calendar/meeting reminder and instantly get video or a PowerPoint slide deck. I am frequently running late to a meeting in the morning so I just dial-in on my phone while I walk to work. Remote desktop performance is good enough to actually code on, which I never found to be the case with VNC (even TightVNC which was darn good and I was happy to rely on for everything but coding). This is huge for me since all of my development machines can be headless (no kb/mouse), for use remotely or in my office. Outlook makes starting an online meeting/conference call one click. I don't think Roundtable devices are for sale anymore, and they don't always work which is really annoying, but they work most of the time and make conference calls with video and lots of people _really_ good. Screen sharing over Lync isn't super amazing (I don't even think you can go full screen) but it's so convenient I use it frequently. Presence is baked into everything really well, so if you're actually using MS for everything you will get presence everywhere. It's also pretty good about being more than just presence, so you get pictures/avatars, online status, location, out-of-office messages/status, quick links to start an email/IM/etc. As for non-MS software, I really like using Sublime Text as a code navigator. It has _AMAZING_ performance when browsing code on a network share. I can load all the MS Office code from a remote development machine, over the network, into Sublime Text and the file-search works within seconds. I have no idea how it indexes all the files so quickly. ------ daleharvey One of the most surprising things I have seen at Mozilla is the use of Bugzilla, its still mostly black magic and its terrible as a tool for non familiar people to file and find bugs, but as a company wide source of truth for most issues from event relations, it issues to plain bugs and project management its actually ... good. And its usually pretty hard to say anything nice about Bugzilla. ~~~ fhd2 I started contributing to Mozilla lately and I'm amazed how good Bugzilla has become compared to when I last tried to use it (around 5 years ago). I'm also amazed at how effective Mozilla works with it. ------ sklivvz1971 At Stack Overflow we use * google docs * google mail * google hangouts (with perma-rooms) * our own awesome chat ([http://chat.stackoverflow.com](http://chat.stackoverflow.com)) * trello from everything from shopping lists to kanban boards * our own hosted git and hg, with a kiln "skin" for the looks (plus pretty much any public repo for the myriad open source projects we maintain) * our own live status ([https://github.com/opserver/Opserver](https://github.com/opserver/Opserver)) * team city for CI/CD * vydio for large whole company meetings ~~~ smcnally Perma-rooms? ~~~ sklivvz1971 Yeah, we create a hangout and keep on using the same for a few months, then it expires. We have a redirect in place so everybody goes to the same place. ------ medwezys Screenhero is nice for remote pair programming, remote tmux/pssh sessions as well when both devs use vim/emacs, also: [https://github.com/portly/pssh](https://github.com/portly/pssh). Campfire for chats, dumbot as a minimalistic task manager in campfire [https://github.com/tadast/dumbot#tasks](https://github.com/tadast/dumbot#tasks) Github issues for technical/code problems. Google hangouts for standups ------ alain34 \- MS Lync for IM \- New Relic for LAMP stack monitoring [http://www.newrelic.com](http://www.newrelic.com) \- Zabbix for infrastructure monitoring [https://www.zabbix.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://www.zabbix.org/wiki/Main_Page) \- Splunk for storing all syslog [http://www.splunk.com](http://www.splunk.com) \- TargetProcess for agile pm [http://www.targetprocess.com](http://www.targetprocess.com) \- burndown chart generation [http://www.conceptuel.co.uk/burnDown](http://www.conceptuel.co.uk/burnDown) (one of mine actually) \- reviewboard for code review [http://www.reviewboard.org](http://www.reviewboard.org) ------ eccp In job #1 (5+ years remote): features and bugs have no formal platform, mostly wiki and sprint planning in spreadsheets. Ocassional phone calls but mostly Skype meetings. Knowledge base: dokuwiki. Code hosted on Bitbucket. Cisco compatible VPN (on Ubuntu: network-manager-vpnc-gnome), Virtualbox, Windows Remote Desktop for accessing servers. Trello (soon) and we used Pivotal Tracker with little success. Server monitoring with New Relic. In job #2 (remote, almost 4 months in): Features, bugs, release planning, code and some documentation, all in Github. Chat: IRC Cloud or Skype. Calls and screen sharing: Skype or Google Hangouts. No VPN but lots of SSHing into machines on Digital Ocean. Some other documentation in Google docs. ------ nate Draft [https://draftin.com/](https://draftin.com/) :) ------ coderzach Floobits. It's somewhat difficult to get setup, but once it works it's great. ------ fhd2 At Eyeo (8 developers, no two in the same place), we use: \- IRC (most of us use IRCCloud) \- Discourse (a forum, I can really recommend this even if you have chat, and Discourse is particularly good) \- Skype (only used for one on one meetings) \- Oovoo (like Skype, but has free video conferencing, we use it for meetings with more than two people) \- Rietveld (a review system, we have mandatory reviews for all changes, really really important for distributed teams IMO) \- Trello (we're in the middle of migrating to a real bug tracker (Roundup, what bugs.python.org uses) though) \- Google Drive (mostly as a wiki replacement) ~~~ kofman Have you considered hackpad.com for a wiki replacement? ------ eswat At Benbria we use this arsenal: * Google Mail & Calendar * Hipchat. Main communication method, water cooler and catch-all for any new activity for our deployments and GitHub repos * GitHub. We use everything it has to offer and have actually migrated to Issues from Trello for task management * Google Docs. For feature specs and anything that needs to be in sync outside the development team * Dropbox. Mainly used by the design team right now, as a single source for assets and putting mocks in * Skype. Usually for one-on-ones and interviewing candidates * Salesforce ------ cwisecarver We've been using a free trial of Slack ([https://slack.com/](https://slack.com/)) for about a month now and I can't imagine working without it. It's great for war rooms centered around solving a problem. It's great for team members in different timezones, they can catch up on the days events without asking. The mobile apps and thick clients are fantastic. ~~~ flavor8 Slack is great. I run a few teams of freelancers who are in various timezones; we have a room per team. ------ logn [https://jitsi.org/](https://jitsi.org/) is the best chat/cam software I've found. It works perfectly on Linux, and I've not heard of Mac/Win problems either. Skype has never worked well for me on Linux. I like Hamster for time tracking, [https://projecthamster.wordpress.com/](https://projecthamster.wordpress.com/) ------ maratd Google Docs + Google Mail + Google Calendar + Google Hangouts Duet ([http://www.duetapp.com/](http://www.duetapp.com/)) Cloud9 IDE ([https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9/](https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9/)) Timer Tab ([http://www.timer-tab.com/](http://www.timer-tab.com/)) Skype Bitbucket and Github VirtualBox (running Ubuntu with all the usual stuff) Photoshop Notepad++ Calculator That's pretty much my entire toolbelt. ~~~ estebank ssh and a vpn client seem glaringly absent from that list. Photoshop for remote working? I fail to see how it relates. ~~~ maratd > ssh and a vpn client seem glaringly absent from that list. "VirtualBox (running Ubuntu with all the usual stuff)" All my terminal stuff is in there. I also use Secure Shell for Chrome for SSH. ------ kayoone Suprised nobody mentioned teamviewer. Teamviewer meetings are totally awesome for multi platform high performance screen sharing ------ tiboll I've join a new company few days ago, this is the first time I'm working remotely and full time. Basicaly we use: \- Github for source code mostly (I've made some pull requests since I'm new on the project) \- Hipchat, since I've join, Skype before that. \- Dropbox for file sharing and design. \- Google Apps \- Basecamp for project managment and I may not know the full stack yet but we use cloud services for everything! ------ tluyben2 Git(hub), Goplanapp, Hangouts, Google docs, Dropbox, Webex. Still haven't found a good alternative for Skype, but for me Skype these days hogs so much CPU that I removed it. Webex is much better anyway IMHO (compression works so well that it works on slow connections as well), but it's not for the same purpose as Skype. ------ projuce Hangouts - for voice/video (standups) Hipchat - for chat Trello - Tasks Google Docs - Knowledge, collaborative editing Github - code versioning Has anyone tried sqwiggle.com, we tried it, but we get the same thing from impromptu google hangouts for free. A truely native sqwiggle app that integrates more into what we are doing makes sense. ~~~ ericbieller Thanks for trying out Sqwiggle! Solid feedback, we're working hard to make the experience more seamless with the OS. Would love to hear if you have any other thoughts or ideas. Let us know at howdy at sqwiggle dot com. ------ AH4oFVbPT4f8 We're not a start up but we use * JIRA - issue tracking and feature management * Agile - scrum management * Confluence - documentation, mockups, feedback * Bitbucket/Git - code repository * Facetime or Google Hangout for video chat * Salesforce chatter for IM though Hipchat is a better solution. We're a small company so we need to be able to answer questions from marketing, sales, operations throughout the day ------ blakesterz We're using Producteev, Skype, Google Docs. Nothing fancy really, nothing very expensive either. Tried (and loved) Basecamp, but it was really just too expensive. All the real "work" is done via SSH on one Ubuntu server or another at various hosts. Ansible makes things way easier as well. ------ altras Our remote stack is based on: gitlab/github, skype, trello, google docs (we shifted from dropbox) and that's it. We don't need persistent chat because we're not big and we have a habit to use trello A LOT (we have like ~20 boards) :) ------ scoj Small team of <5 developers \- Jira \- Confluence \- Gmail \- Hangouts (chat and video) \- Gyazo (just started using) for quickly posting images \- Beanstalk App (source control) Pretty short list when i think about it. ------ xentronium We're a small remote-only shop (5 programmers), we use redmine, email and google hangouts for short weekly meetings. IM is usually via jabber. Also basecamp for communication with the managers and between them. ------ Jemaclus For my remote work, I use Google Docs (tracking things) and Sqwiggle (video conferencing). Everything else is just normal stuff I use in my regular job and regular life. ------ scotty79 Trello, Skype, Github, VirtualBox, [http://www.getharvest.com/](http://www.getharvest.com/), Dropbox, Browserstack, Google Docs ------ leewrangler I've used a combination of terminal, ssh, vim, tmux, Skype, Hipchat, and Google Hangouts. Those do basically everything I need. EDIT: I use Asana and Google Docs as well. ------ itry ssh,screen,vim,skype. simple as that. works like a charm. ~~~ ams6110 tmux and emacs for me. but yeah. ------ anonymouscowar1 My company uses a Cisco VPN and Cisco jabber video chat for remote workers. I run the VPN client in an Ubuntu VM on VMware Workstation. ~~~ lifeisstillgood How much is that and what's it like for Linux / hard to install etc? do you need Cisco routers? was v impressed by Cisco video in contract recently but they were Fortune 500 so I assumed it was beyond us mortals ~~~ anonymouscowar1 The client side of the VPN is pretty straightforward. It's a closed source program that basically creates a `tun` device. So I run it in a VM so it can't harm my home machine, and just use iptables to route work traffic to it. No idea what is needed on the infrastructure side. No idea how much the video costs either, but my employer is a Fortune 500 company. ~~~ jlgaddis There's also "OpenConnect", an open source replacement for Cisco's VPN client. On the infrastructure side, you'll have a Cisco router or firewall providing remote access VPN services. ~~~ anonymouscowar1 Yeah, the problem with OpenConnect is that every time they bump the 'cstub' binary on the cisco remote end, OpenConnect stops working until you grab the new one somehow. ('cstub' is a wonderful program that is downloaded over HTTP and runs as root. It's supposed to monitor security, or something. I did mention I run this on a VM, right?) ------ Shalle Video conferences: Skype & Blackboard Chat: Skype & IRC Productivity: Viscosity, Sublime, Tower, SSH, VirtualBox, Adobe CS6 ------ saryant \- Hipchat (ongoing chatroom) \- Google Hangouts (thrice weekly check-in meetings) \- Asana (task management) \- Github (all code is submitted as PR to be reviewed by someone else) ------ chime Toggl is nice for simple timekeeping. ------ didgeoridoo Baiboard (iPad app) is awesome for remote collaborative concept sketching. ------ asjo autossh (sometimes you need a tunnel), ssh (to connect), x11vnc (when I have a running X session remotely), xvncserver (when I haven't), and vinagre (to show the desktop remotely). ------ nyddle Skype, Basecamp, Google Docs ------ kylered hipchat, github, google hangout, waffle.io, google docs, chatbot ------ jimworm GMail, Google Hangouts tmux, vim git, Bitbucket, Github ------ oakaz Slack is awesome ------ kayoone Suprised

Summarizes what it's like working for most big companies (as a developer/engineer) - chaostheory http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20071026.html ====== mickt Surprisingly like real life (in a big company where managers care more about their fiefdoms that doing what's right).

ngrok tunnels: better, faster, stronger - inconshreveable http://inconshreveable.com/09-25-2013/ngrok-tunnels-better-faster-stronger/ ====== RobSpectre Ngrok is one of the best tools in my belt for debugging webhooks at Twilio. Secure, fast, reliable and - above all - useful. Stoked for the new features Alan - thanks! ~~~ kilink A problem I've found with testing Twilio using Ngrok is the latency; occasionally connections will get closed by Twilio by timing out before they even hit my machine. ~~~ inconshreveable One of the core features of this release is improved latency, but if latency was ever bad enough to cause Twilio to time out, I consider that a critical issue. Please report it to me if you ever encounter anything like that in the future. ------ wuster Great concept, thanks for sharing. This is a valid alternative to getting a cloud machine (e.g. EC2) and providing a reverse proxy from your localhost to an open port on the cloud machine. ------ alinspired Haven't tried ngrok yet, but maybe someone can tell me how it's different from creating an ssh tunnel (in a case when I do have a server/vps with public ip running sshd) ? ------ vertis Very cool. I'll have to give it a spin. I can think of quite a few things this could help with. Kudos also for the TLS everywhere. ------ cleverjake Ah! Multiple tunnels is great, my biggest issue was piping multiple services. ------ dergachev Would it make sense to try to get this to start on boot? ------ csense I'm starting to see more and more projects written in Go.

Stiffness of the human foot and evolution of the transverse arch - miobrien https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10371 ====== ice109 odd thing to be posted here... but I'll take this opportunity to pull ask for advice: I run 30-40 miles/week, in 7.5 increments, and at the upper end of that range my feet hurt almost unbearably by the end of the run and immediately after. it's interfering with me extending my range (shooting for 50/week). what can I do? I have decent shoes and I get new ones when the tread wears down. also my form is pretty good I think (exclusively toe striking). ~~~ todd8 I never got my normal mileage up to 50/week, so consider this advice from someone that never ran as well as you do. Some readers may not be runners so I will explain how I trained. I'm not that fast and didn't run in college. I was definitely a casual runner. I kept the mileage under control and that helped me avoid injuries. It sounds like you train harder than I ever did, but I did qualify for and ran Boston. My training was the common seven month training regimen to prepare for a marathon: 3 weekday runs, say MWF, and one long weekend run each Sunday. By the second month I would add speed work at a track something like six 400m runs fast. The three weekday runs were around 3 miles each in the first month and might get up to 5 miles by the time I was ready for the marathon. The long run is basically increased in distance by one mile per week. After I hit 13 miles I would cut back to a long run ever other week, but increase the distance by 2 miles each run. In 26 weeks you was able to do a marathon distance in a long training run at an easy pace. I would work on my speed at the track and the short runs. I would not do any more really long runs once I was 3 weeks from the marathon. After the marathon I would take a few months off and then start again around 7 months in advance of the annual local marathon. By the fifth year I was fast enough to qualify for Boston. So my training was almost all under 40/wk and more like 30/wk early in the season. Having lots of days off let my feet recover. I found that always having two different brands of training shoes helped me avoid the overuse injuries that many of my training cohort seemed to experience. I would alternate shoes each day. This way my feet would at least get some break from the particular way the shoe flexed, etc. I would switch brands every so often--they all felt a bit different. My body isn't ideal for running, so I really had to focus on form: very light footfalls, shorter more rapid strides and no overreaching to keep the wear and tear modest. ~~~ ice109 two pairs of shoes is a good idea. thanks.

New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums - mikro2nd https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/18/aws_toyota_alliance/ ====== taftster And here's the thing. These types of driving habit trackers (not necessarily new in the auto-insurance industry) are touted as a means to reduce the cost of insurance for good drivers. But what qualifies as a "good driver" is likely to be more like 10% of drivers. For everyone else, this won't reduce the insurance costs at all. It's frankly just a way for insurance companies to extort more profit from drivers. I don't want a black box in my car of any type, even if I already qualify for the best possible insurance rates. Your driving habits are a huge privacy concern and we should all guard them very carefully. ~~~ giancarlostoro > For everyone else, this won't reduce the insurance costs at all. It will likely raise it to subsidize things, somebody else has to pay your premium... Companies are never in the business of making less money. ~~~ lotsofpulp >It will likely raise it to subsidize things, somebody else has to pay your premium I don't know what this means, but an insurance company can be incentivized to lower premiums as a means to win new business. If an insurance company offered me lower premiums in exchange for monitoring my driving, I might do it. I already have dash cams to ensure I don't get found at fault if it isn't my fault. ~~~ blacksmith_tb Insurance companies have been offering just this deal for years - they will stick a GPS logger into the OBD2 port on your car, and then ask you to let them pull data off it periodically[1]. 1: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/08/14/data- moni...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/08/14/data-monitoring- saves-some-people-money-on-car-insurance-but-some-will-pay-more/#2f4d754d2334) ------ calmworm This removes "New Toyotas" from my list of potential next vehicles, though it's likely just a matter of time before all new vehicles have a direct link with insurance companies. ~~~ novok Even toyotas sold today have cellular modems that track your location, it's called "toyota safety connect". There is no obvious way to turn it off either. ~~~ tomc1985 I imagine that you can still take the car to a mechanic and ask them to remove the sim card to disconnect the system ~~~ bradly At least for Volvo they are used for by their service mechanics as well, so you will want to make sure it doesn't void any warranty claims. ------ Someone1234 Insurance companies want to double dip: They want to sell insurance and profit off of that, and then profit off of selling your personal location/habit information on the back-end. Even if they aren't doing it today, they want to be positioned to be in the "data business" tomorrow. It will start out as "opt out" before becoming normalized/expected. Even putting aside the fact that modern vehicle's electrical systems are already stretched thin and this is yet another constant battery drain. The privacy implications of this cannot be ignored even if the data is "anonymized" (not least of all because multiple sources of "anonymized" data can be combined to bypass it entirely). ~~~ donmcronald And you can be guaranteed the car manufacturers aren't going to be selling them data that would let them do statistical analysis on the vehicles. I think it'll be super anti consumer. All those systems will be used to "prove" the driver is at fault for everything. It'll never be a mechanical malfunction or an infrastructure issue. It'll always be the "bad" driver that causes accidents. ------ canada_dry Part of the slippery slope that insurance companies have been trying to get customers to willingly adopt... Just install this safe driver app to receive _up-to_ 15% off your rate! Soon: our company's insurer now requires all employees to install this exercise monitoring app on their phone! And finally: to be eligible for insurance you must submit a saliva sample. ~~~ Someone1234 > Soon: our company's insurer now requires all employees to install this > exercise monitoring app on their phone! Not _soon_. My employer already offers a 10% premium discount program, but you have to take part in a monthly "healthy living" program that encourages you can hook in your smart phone/watch/etc (you earn "points" towards your discount, not doing so hurts your point totals and you need to do something else privacy invading instead). It is operated by a third party rather than my employer, but that doesn't protect your privacy in the broad context, just protects you from additional workplace discrimination. ------ balls187 1 year from now: "Toyota AWS keys compromised due to misconfigured S3 bucket." ~~~ ryanisnan No it would be more likely that "Millions of Toyota drivers driving data leaked due to misconfigured S3 bucket" ------ OldHand2018 Cars have been so well-built for so long that car companies doing this crap with data (remember that Ford's outgoing CEO talked about monetizing driving data) should cause people (that care) to just stop buying new cars. Bonus: you don't have to agree to forced arbitration for any defects you encounter! ~~~ jkaplowitz In much of the world, the forced arbitration clauses are illegal and unenforceable anyway for consumer contracts (though often not when the purchase is for business rather than consumer purposes). And there is a bill in Congress that would apply a similar approach to the US if the Democrats manage to take control of the federal government and don't lose their desire to enact the law once they gain the ability to do so. I admit I'm not sure what the situation would be if I buy a new personal Toyota in my current residence (Quebec, Canada - forced consumer arbitration is illegal) and then later import it into the US as part of a move there. But I'm hoping I'd avoid the trap. At least the current version of the congressional bill is retroactive in its restoration of access to the courts. I hope that stays true in any final version. ------ tibbydudeza It reminds me of BMW wanting to charge for add on "options" that you paid for at delivery but after 2 years of ownership you need to re-up. rear view camera/park distance control/cruise control (SaaS). I guess with car sales going south they need to nickel and dime their remaining customers. ------ lykahb It's interesting to see that most of the discussion here revolves around effectiveness and economic impact of tracking. Ten years ago the talking point would be about invasion to privacy. The personal privacy is vanishing not only in practice, but as a value of the society as well. ------ kylehotchkiss Anybody know how to disable the 4G chip permanently upon buying a new car? Are they making ECUs require the 4G chip to be active? ~~~ shakna It's a difficult process that changes greatly from model to model, and often comes with... Unexpected... Functionality loss. Like for a particular VW model I'm thinking of, you need to disassemble the entire front of the car to get at it, and it disables the seat warmer for no obvious reason. ~~~ bleepblorp Unless the car is phoning home to enable options you've paid for, you might be able to evade anti-functionality issues by replacing the antenna with a dummy load (resistor) rather than by removing the modem entirely. ------ closetohome I would say "hard pass" on this, but at some point in the future, it will no doubt be significantly more expensive to acquire car insurance without this kind of oversight. Ideally there would be some legislation in place that precludes charging people extra for retaining their privacy, but I'm not holding my breath. ------ mulmen My parents installed one of the addon driving monitors in their car to get an insurance discount. It lasted about a month. Apparently they drive like maniacs. ------ anm89 What a nightmare. Avoiding owning a car starts to sounds better and better every day. ------ jdhn To paraphrase Charlton Heston, you can pry my my manual transmission, non- infotainment having car from my cold, dead hands! ------ bvanderveen Just go buy a pre-2012 Toyota, take it to a reputable independent Toyota- specific shop in your area, and say "make it good, boss". Pay him whatever he asks. Then go find an insurance broker, ask them to put you in touch with someone who can provide you with an agreed-value insurance policy. Insure the vehicle for purchase price + what the shop changed you. Get regular oil changes at Jiffylube, and take the car into the Toyota guy once a year. Although it may not be flashy, you'll have a reliable, efficient ride for many, many years. New cars simply aren't worth the creepy factor. ------ zepearl I just bought a Volvo (but I didn't get it yet) => apparently all Volvos have an embedded "Event Data Recorder": _This vehicle is equipped with an "Event Data Recorder" (EDR). Its primary purpose is to register and record data related to traffic accidents or collision-like situations, such as times when the airbag deploys or the vehicle strikes an obstacle in the road. The data is recorded in order to increase understanding of how vehicle systems work in these types of situations. The EDR is designed to record data related to vehicle dynamics and safety systems for a short time, usually 30 seconds or less. Etc..._ The article is here [https://www.volvocars.com/ph/support/manuals/xc90/2016/intro...](https://www.volvocars.com/ph/support/manuals/xc90/2016/introduction/introduction/recording- data) (same for other models). Personally I'm OK with that - it's not an ongoing recording of how I drive, the data is not pushed out of the car, and it might actually help defending myself if I have an accident and I think that I'm not guilty. ~~~ abawany I believe these have existed in vehicles for quite a while and have been used as evidence for/against the driver. According to [1], 85% of all vehicles in 2010 were expected to already have these things installed. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder) ~~~ zepearl Thank you, until now I was totally unaware of such systems. But good to have things stored locally than to have them uploaded anywhere to then be used for some analysis (puah, probably a point to be discussed). Personally I'm OK if used for&against the driver (from a technical perspective, not as souce of abolute truth) if the duration of the recordings are short. ~~~ abawany In a defensive driving course I took in the prior decade, the instructor informed us that these collect data in a rolling 5 minute window until an adverse event occurs. ------ tobyhinloopen This and the DLC are the worst trends in new cars. ------ propogandist Hyundai and Genesis have been doing this with their vehicles. They offer a 3 year complimetary connected service program, which includes terms that allow mining of car telemetry and GPS data, which is then sold to data broker VeriRisk, who resells to insurance and other industry. All this only screws the driver over and most people simply do not know this is happening. [https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hyundai-motor- ameri...](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hyundai-motor-america- selects-verisk-for-usage-based-insurance-300630938.html) ------ rayhendricks This is bullshit and is designed to enable Amazon to allow Toyota and its insurance “partners” to extract more money out of the average American driver. Remember how Kroger/Safeway/friends started their loyalty programs? Just give us your purchase data + a unique identifier and we will only charge you the normal price not the jacked up price. This is the same thing. 20 years from now this will be normal because most older cars will be off the road. My guess is Give it 5 years and we’ll find out that the algorithm is unfairly targeting minority neighborhoods and jacking up insurance rates too. ------ throwaway0a5e If the insurance companies wanted to confirm that everyone who hogged the left lane slowly in a Prius 5-10yr ago traded up to a Tacoma any salesman could have told them that for free. ------ metric10 I wish insurers weren't so heavy handed with this technology. If it's possible to tell if someone is a "good" or "bad" driver via this technology, why not at least just tell the driver without the big brother BS? Many drivers might change their habits based on this information. I know insurers have apps that you can install on your phone or ODBC modules you can install. Does anyone know of any way to collect this data privately without reporting it to an insurer? ------ modeless Tesla is doing this with their new Tesla insurance product. But at least they won't be sending the data to other insurers, since they want to keep it for their own use. ~~~ ra7 Tesla CFO just yesterday bragged about the amount of data that's available to collect from the car for insurance purposes [1]: > “We’re working now on what we call Version 2 or we can call it the first > version of our telematics product. And so really ultimately where we want to > get to with Tesla Insurance is to be able to use the data that’s captured in > the car, in the driving profile of the person in the car to be able to > assess correlations and probabilities of crash and be able then to assess a > premium on a monthly basis for that customer. And what makes this very > exciting for us is the amount of data that is available with the customers’ > permission to use is, it’s not available in any other product or any other > vehicle in the world. So this gives us a unique advantage in terms of > information.” [1] - [https://electrek.co/2020/08/18/tesla-expand-insurance- busine...](https://electrek.co/2020/08/18/tesla-expand-insurance-business/) ------ webninja I really hope they manage to separate the brake and gas pedal technology from the onboard computer. To the best of my understanding, there’s a central processing unit that controls everything and can receive remote commands. Hacking it is literally the perfect way to remotely and unsuspiciously assassinate people. The 15CY (2015+) vehicles are all interconnected like this. ------ tibbydudeza And also to the NSA. ------ protomyth So, how do I install a firewall on my vehicle? ~~~ shoes_for_thee Well that'll usually be installed by the factory between the engine and passenger compartment. ~~~ james_s_tayler Ah touche hahaha ------ rangibaby Maybe this will lead to speed limit reform in Japan. There is a legal requirement that the police need to prove that someone is definitely speeding, so police and automated speed cameras both allow speeding 15-20km over posted speed limits, which means that de jure speed limits are all set 20km under the de facto speed limit. ------ djsumdog I'm going to keep my dumb, manual transmission, non-Internet enable, 2006 WRX for as long as humanly possible. ------ viburnum Cars kill 35,000 people in America every year. America has over twice the fatality rate of other rich countries. ~~~ edmundsauto Adjusted per vehicle mile, or per capita? Is that also adjusted for differences in types of driving (city/highway)? I don't doubt your numbers, just want to make sure I have more clarity before I remember it. ------ senectus1 This is how automated driving becomes mainstream. Insurance companies will classify Automated drivers as "Best drivers" and insurance for those sorts of cars will be _really_ low compared to even blemish free human drivers. ------ apazzolini I didn't see it in the article - does anyone know which model year this will take effect from? I'm in the market for a new 4Runner, but that may switch to a used model instead. ~~~ herman_toothrot I'd like to know this too, same reason. The article sorta makes it sound like current vehicles are already equipped with the hardware. ------ novok Need laws to force cars to go into airplane mode and for there to be no loss of non-networked functionality if you remove their modems or go into said airplane mode. ~~~ james_s_tayler "cars to go into airplane mode" That sounds so funny and ridiculous. ------ slipheen You can typically find a guide to where any given modem is and manually remove it, but it's increasingly difficult to do so and causes functionally downgrades. ~~~ dylan604 Until their counter move in the cat&mouse game is to embed the radio into the SoC. Maybe find the antenna lead and cut it? ------ adrr I wonder if you can use CCPA deletion request to remove all the data. ------ flukus Surely this will be illegal in Europe thanks to the GDPR? At the same time it demonstrates why laws like the GDPR are needed. ------ lvs This surveillance capitalism has to be stopped. ------ mrfusion Is this something you can turn off? ------ pruthvishetty Cue: Tesla insurance. ------ marta_morena_25 I wonder how many people complaining here take their phone into the vehicle, or use Google Maps. Sure, the data from the car (whatever is included there) might give some additional insights, but these are very local (i.e. status of the car and perhaps lane assist) compared to what Google/Apple already collect anyway (i.e. the "big picture", which is far more valuable). At least here you get something tangible out of it: Lower insurance premiums (if they were higher, nobody would buy the freakin cars and I am pretty sure using this data for insurance quotes must be an opt-in anyway) ~~~ taftster There are several things wrong with your post. For one, Google/Apple selling your driving data to an insurance company is not likely happening today. This would be the same type of mistreatment of personal information as it would be selling your health data to a health insurance company. Not that I know, but I highly doubt that personal driving data is being shared with insurance companies from big tech. If they are, this would be a huge privacy agreement violation and would cause a massive lawsuit action against said companies. You're also being misled to believe that these driving trackers will actually reduce costs for drivers. In fact, they only serve as a means to raise insurance premium on drivers that don't qualify for the absolute best rate. Did you ever run a stop sign? 5 MPH over the speed limit? Change lanes without signaling? This level of detail is possible with very accurate GPS and will only serve for the insurance companies to raise rates on most drivers. There is absolutely nothing good about this move from Toyota, and other auto manufactures will no doubt follow suit. This will likely be yet-another- erosion-of-privacy that only serves big business. You should not so easily desire a "you are the product" relationship with auto manufacturers. ~~~ lkbm Why don't insurers just raise all rates 50% right now? My guess is it's because there's a competitive market. This doesn't change this. This allows for better price discrimination than our current tables based just on age, car, neighborhood, gender, etc. This will raise rates for high-risk drivers and lower them for low-risk drivers. If the insurer does the first and not the latter, the latter will go to an insurer who does. It seems like the view here is that everyone will only do the former, but again: why don't they do that right now? Why does the effect of competition vanish in this case? "Every insurer will use this technology eventually" isn't an answer. Every insurer has accident data by age. As a result, they offer lower rates to lower-risk age groups. ~~~ icedistilled >age, car, neighborhood, gender I wish. it's even worse than that. It's priced on your credit score, so if you're poor you're screwed, and it's priced on whether you're married too. Here's how to get the best rates in the current system. In addition to avoiding tickets/accidents become a 50 year old female married driver who has an excellent credit score and drives a lower trim subaru crosstrek. Or they could price based on actual driving behavior. Cue outrage. ------ Press2forEN Just tell me which rectangle of silicon to drill out.

Responsive Web Typography With FlowType.JS - malij http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/09/18/introducing-flowtype-js/ ====== pedalpete Checking out the source code [https://github.com/simplefocus/FlowType.JS/blob/master/flowt...](https://github.com/simplefocus/FlowType.JS/blob/master/flowtype.js), I was amazed to find how simply they've implemented this. Beautiful.

Naming is an act of creation - joedunn https://medium.com/coaching-notes/naming-is-an-act-of-creation-3510b3b16ef5 ====== asprouse I find that while coding I practice lazing naming where I am able to start writing `function foo` and which allows me to bypass the upfront naming deliberation. Once I have my code written I can assign an accurate name to function and if the name is too long or convoluted I consider revising the code. So naming for me ends up being a useful tool for self-reviewing my code.

... so THIS is where Apple tests our Apps - cburgdorfer https://twitter.com/cburgdorfer/status/317652392726376448 Looks like a space ship... ====== JCB_K So this is a location sharing app, and a founder/developer posts privately shared locations on Twitter? Seems like a good reason to avoid using it. ~~~ mkr-hn I wonder if the app has a privacy policy. ~~~ cburgdorfer I'm still working on the privacy policy, but until then please check <http://www.whereareyou-app.com> I don't track where the app itself is being used. But I have to store the locations of the reactions to share back to the requester. I happened to find out apple's location simply because they were the only ones to use the app (apart from my tests). But I don't keep any personal data (the app doesn't require mail/registration/identification etc.) hence it is impossible to connect any coordinates in the database with an existing individual. ------ jgeorge On the surface, interesting. Under the surface, it makes me want to be sure to avoid your apps in case I show up somewhere "interesting" enough for you to post on Twitter. :-(

Being a Manager Is Lonely - platz http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2015/01/being-a-manager-is-lonely.html ====== smacktoward This post is not so much about management being lonely (though it is, at all levels) as it is about the special loneliness of _middle_ management. If you're a top manager, a founder or C-level type, you still have to deal with loneliness (since the power you have over the people below you in the org chart inevitably crimps any relationships you form with them), but you at least get the compensating benefit of being able, to some degree, to determine your own destiny: you make decisions, the company pivots to follow them. Middle managers don't even get that; they're sandwiched between the people above them, who actually get to decide what the "company line" is, and those below them, who just have to follow it. Middle managers have to not just follow it, but _enthusiastically agree_ with it, even if they think it's stupid or counterproductive. (Or at least they have to do so whenever the people they manage are watching.) Failure to do so, to participate eagerly in whatever fad thinking the people at the top are high on this week, is what I used to hear described when I worked on an Air Force base as "a career- limiting maneuver." And on top of that, they have to work in an environment where even the limited power they _do_ have to make a difference can be thrown out the window at any time. All it takes is for someone higher up the food chain to take an interest in your team and suddenly all the decisions you've made start getting overridden. Their reasons for doing so can be completely arbitrary, but that doesn't matter. If you're lucky, the person doing the overriding is at least generous enough not to do that to you in front of your team. If you're lucky. This is part of the reason why the traditional career path of promoting senior developers into middle management is so destructive. The usual critique of that model revolves around programmers often not having the kinds of skills and experiences that make good managers, and that's true. But it's also true that middle management just generally sucks as a job, regardless of who you put in it. ~~~ lemdj The best-liked and most effective managers that I have worked with did not always show support for the company's decisions. Instead, they would say "we have to do this, but: (1) here is how I can make it as painless as possible for you (2) here is how we can make sure that you still achieve your personal objectives" Sometimes (depending on the sensitivity of the issue) they would also tell the team what they were doing to try and get the decision changed. I have been fortunate to work places where the higher levels of management welcomed dissenting opinions - maybe that is one of the key bits to look for when determining if a (traditionally-structured) company is a good place to be a mid-level manager. ~~~ sailfast Agreed - I don't think that all honesty has to go out the window just because you are in a management position. Communicating decisions is one aspect, but effectively implementing them in your team is a whole other thing. Honest discussion of concerns and what can be improved is important, and as much as management likes to think their poker face is awesome, employees are smart and see straight through bullshit. Secondly, what I heard in your comment (and agree with) but don't see in the original post is anything about engaging to be an advocate for your employees up the chain, giving them an opportunity to tell you what they need, the questions they have, the things you can do. To a certain extent this might make you lonelier on the "who do I talk to?" side, but helps a great deal as a reminder of the purpose of the job. ------ Htsthbjig Learn to say "no". I have a company that I managed. In the company I was the "boss", but my boss was our customers. You need to say no to customers often. Before learning to say no life was miserable. After I did it was heaven. Learn to say reasonable noes to your customers, to your upper managers, to your partner,to your kids, and your life will be much better. Forget the advice of that stupid blog. You should not always support upper management, you are not a drone. If you work in the army and they tell you to kill every civilian inside a village, you must say no. When upper management wants to do something that is stupid and you will have to support and be responsible for it, you should say no(after you double proof that it is not you who is wrong). Get a mentor you respect and admire. Create a mastermind of the best managers you could find. You will discover management is not what you think it is(or better said, it does not have to be that way). ------ walterbell Leadership is lonely. There's always a boss behind the boss, even in the C-suite. Good managers can translate in all directions of a network graph, not merely from the nonlocal to the local. The Manager Tools podcast gives insight into the language and thought processes of top-down thinkers. Useful for learning how how to work within and around such structures: [http://www.manager- tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-...](http://www.manager- tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-myth-just-world-part-1) & [http://www.manager- tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-...](http://www.manager- tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-myth-just-world-part-2) . This should be balanced by authors like Tim Ferris, Chris Malburg ([http://www.amazon.com/How-Fire-Boss-Chris- Malburg/dp/0425127...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Fire-Boss-Chris- Malburg/dp/0425127346)), or your favorite historical barbarian. There's a Heinz von Foerster essay on free will within deterministic systems, _" Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide. Why? Simply because the decidable questions are already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked, and by the choice of rules of how to connect what we call "the question" with what we may take for an "answer.""_, [http://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html](http://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html) & [http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the- park](http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park) Complex bureacracies (academia, airlines, government, large enterprises) illustrate that thinking humans are most valuable at the boundary of system determinism. Any human who just does what the "rules" or "book" or "computer" says, will eventually be replaced by a mindless algorithm/app. But airline customer service people in First Class, or executive assistants who have worked with the same CEO for decades, or great managers - define human free will and agency, with their decision-making capacity for handling the entropy of "irregular operations". If we view large organizations as semi-deterministic programs for which we have lost the source code, how would that change our view of management? ------ seasoup As a middle manager there will be some decisions that are yours to make, the higher you go in middle management, the more of these decisions there will be. An important part of your job is knowing which of these decisions is yours to make and not criticize people above you in the hierarchy for making decisions that they can make. Sure, push back a little before the decision is made to influence it, but once it's made you do have to back it. The key for me was to not focus on things I thought were wrong, but focus instead on the good parts of the decision. If there are no good parts of the decision and it happens too many times, may be time to move on. ------ ChuckMcM You need a mentor. Someone who is also a manager, you can trust implicitly, and you can talk to about your thoughts without it "getting back" to the people. ------ ia totally agree. i think it's why many many many tech managers aren't technical. most truly technical people cannot put up with the cognitive dissonance required to convincingly say one thing while believing the opposite. ------ sheepmullet "But their advice is clear: if you are asked your opinion, you must agree with the decision, maybe stoically, but you must agree, not just concede. You must speak for the company, not for yourself." And this is why middle management is next to useless and why there have been so many cuts over the last 20 years. If you aren't honest with your direct reports then you will be seen as untrustworthy and/or clueless. Either way I'm certainly not going to feel inclined to be honest and straightforward with you. ------ drderidder I don't like the manager / developer separation. I've had better results using lightweight strategies to let projects be more or less self-managing. Basically just creating a shared vision, giving responsibilities to people, letting them set their own goals, and then publishing to the group how those goals are progressing on a weekly basis. It doesn't take much time and people usually appreciate the communication. ------ Spooky23 There's way too much black and white in the blog post and these comments here. It's more art than science. The reality is as a manager you're an influencer and leader. You also need to have personal integrity or you'll just end up depressed. If you have no ability to influence upper management, you need to work on how to connect with your boss.

Unibox - A New Take on the OS X Mail Client - lassejansen http://www.macrumors.com/2012/08/27/unibox-a-new-take-on-the-os-x-mail-client/ ====== phren0logy I thought twitter didn't allow this kind of aggregation across services in native clients anymore? <https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api>

The Rise and Fall of Cribspot - objections https://www.tcbusinessnews.com/2018/04/29/the-rise-and-fall-of-cribspot/ ====== a_t48 How is this different from a property management company (say, Property Force)? The fact that they have a website over just putting out on CraigsList? ------ SlowRobotAhead > The vision was to provide an end-to-end housing solution, with landlords > handing control of their properties over to Cribspot and still earning a > passive income. Tenants could use the platform to find properties, tour > properties virtually, ask questions about different houses or apartments, > schedule property maintenance, or pay rent online. > “It ended up being a lot more people-intensive than we thought,” Dancer > said. > The new challenges ate into Cribspot’s profit margins. Between furnishing > apartments, handling maintenance claims, and even offering a rent guarantee > for landlords, Cribspot was spending too much money. ... Who in the hell was advising these guys!? They wanted to intentionally take on all all the worst parts of being landlords while the actual property owner sat around with a guarantee of being paid? I get that the idea is that handling these issues in volume may seem like you get good at it and develop processes - but that only works if you happen to see the same exact issues over and over. That’s not the rental industry. Everyone has stories of landlords and vice versa. It was “more people-intensive” than they had expected huh? I wonder what they were expecting because it seems obvious. ~~~ neonate Other people's mistakes always are, especially in hindsight. What's not so clear is what value there is in "what were they thinking" beration.

Announcing MongoDB 3.0 - meghan https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/announcing-mongodb-30 ====== davidw > a database so powerful, flexible, and easy to manage that it can be the new > DBMS standard for any team, in any industry. It's good to see they haven't sacrificed the hype while working on other features :-/ ~~~ stingraycharles As much as I agree with your sentiment, it still remains one of the most popular databases out there. All us techies can learn something from the hype they managed to create. ~~~ jsjohnst Source needed. Can't make outlandish claims like that without supporting evidence. Here's a couple disproving your claim: [https://www.scalebase.com/the-state-of-the-open-source- datab...](https://www.scalebase.com/the-state-of-the-open-source-database- market-mysql-leads-the-way/) [http://db-engines.com/en/ranking](http://db-engines.com/en/ranking) ~~~ morsch So grandparent claims it's one of the most popular databases out there; your first links claims it's in 4th place of all open-source databases; the second link says it's 4th place overall. Sounds fine to me (of course, who knows how those sites came up with those statistics). Maybe he ninja-edited and originally said _the_ most popular, I guess that'd explain the rage. ~~~ jsjohnst I'm pretty sure it said it was "the" most popular before, hence the replies, but I could be wrong. ~~~ stingraycharles No it was not, because that would be very easy to disprove (I can imagine MySQL and PostgreSQL being far more popular). ------ harel OK, I'll provide a user's perspective as we are invested in Mongo as a storage system for statistical data and have been using it for a good few years now. MongoDb has been, so far, very good to us. I did not experience any of the problems people sometimes cry so very vocally about. My main concern about Mongo is actually one that is addressed by this release so I'm quite excited to try it out - data compression. Mongo is generally quite irresponsible about disk space usage. Yes disks are cheap but I rather not have a 2TB dataset if I can have half the size, thank you very much. As a side note, the hype from MongoDb the company equals the anti-hype you get on places like HN, so I guess they even out. ~~~ functional_test You may also really like TokuMX. It has the same API as Mongo (even works with Mongo drivers) but way lower disk use, faster indices, and better query semantics (e.g. updates don't affect the cursor you're iterating right now). After using MongoDB for years (very happily too, I'm not one of the anti-Mongo crowd), I ended up switching and it's been great. ~~~ harel Thanks for the tip. I'll be sure to check it out. ------ jimbokun "We will continue to push the envelope in data interaction semantics, by implementing a transaction system for the distributed document model." So...Mongo "can be the new DBMS standard for any team, in any industry", and they don't even support transactions yet? ~~~ gaius I am old enough to remember MySQL in the 90s, those guys sneered at anyone who said they needed transactions, just do it in your application. Same with enforcing relational integrity, just do it in your application. We all know how that turned out. ~~~ frik MySQL is one of the top 3 databases, it is used as main database in Facebook, Wikipedia and many other high traffic we sites. There are forks like MariaDB and alternatives with more features like Postgres. MySQL with its several different db engines is unique and with the default InnoDB engine it is on par with its competitors. ~~~ gaius Yes, the InnoDB engine adds transactions, foreign keys, and all the other traditional RDBMS features that the original authors of MySQL didn't think anyone needed. InnoDB by the way is an Oracle product. ~~~ Xorlev InnoDB wasn't always an Oracle product. It was bought in 2005. ~~~ lafar6502 Like many other Oracle 'products' ------ nevi-me I'm excited to see 3.0, but from what I've seen on JIRA, there might still be some issues with WiredTiger (fair considering how they moved from RocksDB to WT in a short period). Will be interesting to see if they'll close out those issues before they drop 3.0 in March. A few months ago they closed up some of JIRA (comments and a bit epics/sprints), so some issues would be created and have no comments exposed. I thought they were working on transactions in this release (while they were still around 2.7.3 or so), but I guess that's not the case. Lastly, I wonder how this will impact TokuMX, both positively and negatively? Really whether they'll be making their crown improvements into a pluggable storage type/engine, and if users would be able to take that and plug it into Mongo without patent issues on their fractal tree indexing. Nonetheless, exciting news for some of us who are building on web-scale, MVCCABCD databases which operate at the speed of hype and web-scale :) EDIT: saw that Tokutek has created TokuMXse, only after my post ------ james33 I feel like the vast majority of people that bash on MongoDB didn't fully understand it and what it was good for when they tried it. We've been using it in production for nearly 3 years in online games and have had nothing but good experiences with it. This 3.0 release will be yet another big step forward and we are excited to reap the continued benefits. ~~~ nemo44x That's mainly correct. Or they used for it something it simply isn't suitable for. You can't just throw random data into it and expect it to work. Proper document modeling and understanding write concern solve almost all the problems people have with MongoDB. It still has a ways to go but so many of the comments here are issues from way back in v2.0. Regardless, it's still very popular and only gaining popularity. And improving. ~~~ vkjv Agreed. I've also been using it in production for years and the hate is often misguided. My issues are almost never with lack of features, but almost always with the cavalier attitude towards bugs, even catastrophic ones. ------ kosma > Reduces operational overhead up to 95% And 40% more hip. Gotta love those numbers. Also, don't forget about the new WiredTiger storage engine - sounds way cooler than, say, InnoDB! Hype is strong with this one. ~~~ lclarkmichalek Eh, Wired Tiger was built outside of Mongo ([http://www.wiredtiger.com/](http://www.wiredtiger.com/)), and does seem to be legitimately decent. ~~~ kosma ...and their most important improvement isn't even their own. I'm not a fan of bashing any product, but after using MongoDB in several projects, in legitimate document database use cases, I just can't find any bright side. ~~~ lclarkmichalek Oh, I can't stand Mongo. But I have nothing but respect for the Wild Tiger guys, and wouldn't want to see them slandered ;) ------ vegabook I'm writing 20000 financial ticks per second into Mongo on commodity hardware, namely a bog-standard i7 with 32 gig costing less than 2k. I don't have a big budget. I don't have a lot of time to mess with ACID. There is _no way_ postgres will do this for under 10-20k, without twice the work. I just need to keep up with the firehose of data I get from my financial application. I'm talking about my own big-data issue and even if a few records were ever to get lost, I don't care, because that's what big data is about: statistical sampling. And that does not require 100% in 100% of cases safety of every data point. That by the way, is the truth of big data. Who cares if a few records theoretically can be lost? I just need to capture as much as possible as fast as possible. Mongo fits perfectly. Redis would work, but I'd need 512 gig of RAM..... I don't understand all the angst against this technology. If you need rollback-able transaction-guaranteed, exactly-once consistency, normalised schema with triggers left right and centre, you knew long ago that this wasn't the tech for you. Why is everyone so negative? I for one cannot wait to be able to store 4x more data on the same SSD, and using less RAM. In my view, Mongo is a massive enabling technology for startups on limited budget. ------ Kiro Am I the only one using MongoDB who think it works great? I'm really happy with it. ~~~ 127001brewer I have been developing with MongoDB for about the past year. (Briefly, I have developed, and continue to support, an ASP.NET MVC C# Web Application that's used by a few thousand people daily. For my personal projects that use MongoDB, I develop with PHP and Python.) Overall, I enjoy working with MongoDB, because it ( _generally_ ) maps directly to your object - there is no need for an additional layer (such as an Object Relational Mapper (ORM)). However, you have to be _more careful_ with your data structure. For example, having sub-arrays in sub-arrays is probably not a good idea. I will be happy to share more, so feel free to look up my profile. ~~~ msandford I ran a website and operations for a company that did over 1mm a year in revenue. Everything was done off of a single machine that was the webserver, database server and media server. Had 10k customers all of whom were active daily. Postgres and Python/Django and I never saw load averages much over 10%. Unless you have a substantial fraction of a million daily users you probably don't need mongo. ~~~ 127001brewer I agree with that MongoDB may have been overkill, but my web application's architecture was chosen before I joined the team. ------ lesingerouge Somebody at MongoDB must have read the early Oracle story. Start with one consumer niche (in mongo's case I think it's the common building-cms-based- websites web developer), improve the product, market ruthlessly. Granted, their product is not excellent and it has major flaws and lacks some common DB features, but they have the advantage of developer-ease-of-use and low barrier to use. I think this product is simply not yet "DONE". ------ ericingram We've been using TokuMX for a while and I highly recommend others take a serious look there. It already contains the benefits cited for MongoDB 3 and more. Toku also has a release candidate for the new Mongo storage engine API named TokuMXse, though it's interesting to see that TokuMX proper still outperforms it: [http://www.tokutek.com/2015/01/first-tokumxse-performance- nu...](http://www.tokutek.com/2015/01/first-tokumxse-performance-numbers/) ~~~ nemo44x Problem is where it is branched. I don't think they will be able to keep up well. Plus, the new MongoDB storage engine (wire tiger) takes care of its biggest issue which Toku addresses. Plus, I think you'll be able to just buy Toku's storage engine if you want it when they make it pluggable with the new MonogDB storage engine API. ------ mlschmitt23 I agree this announcement is dripping with hype, but all the same I'm excited to get my hands on this. Seems like they're trying to address (some) common pain points. ------ jungleg I'll add to what @harel says below. If it wasn't for MongoDB, my last company would have probably not survived. Sure, our usecase was very specific (very write-heavy app) but MongoDB delivered and still delivers without any problems. I think there can be usecases where MongoDB is not the best fit, but for wide number of applications, MongoDB is the perfect fit. ~~~ disbelief I'm actually surprised that MongoDB saved your write-heavy app. In my experience, it's Mongo's poor write throughput that causes the most headaches. This 3.0 release finally begins to address that with collection and document level concurrency control (locking). ------ alexgaribay Can some people who have used Mongo in production elaborate on their experiences where Mongo worked well or didn't work well? I see a lot of more hate than I do love for Mongo on HN and I'm curious why. ~~~ disbelief I've used Mongo in two large projects and have mixed feelings about it. Pros: It's great for building your MVP. Super easy to get up and running, super easy to work with at a superficial level (I'm talking about storing data and querying here more than ops and administration), dataset can grow to a fairly large size without you having to think about your database at all, freeing you to think about your business. Mongo was my first brush with "schemaless" and that's a big advantage particularly for early-stage projects where things are in flux. I also enjoy using JS as the query language, because I like JS, but YMMV. Also for certain use cases, particularly the single document case, it's probably one of the best solutions available. However, in my experience, this ends up being a limitation if your data doesn't fit nicely into a single document, and the types of data that do fit this use case are rare. The cons you've probably heard before: no transactions, no joins, not ACID compliant, until very recently writes locked the entire database, scaling/sharding _just works_ until it doesn't. ------ jimbokun The differences between mongodb.com and mongodb.org are striking. I was confused about why there was no links to documentation on the .com, until I stumbled onto the .org, which lists actual features right on the home page. Also striking: no mention of 3.0 on the .org home page at all, and on the downloads page, you have to scroll down to "Development Releases (unstable)" to find any reference to the 3.0 builds. [https://www.mongodb.org/downloads](https://www.mongodb.org/downloads) Quite the split personality between the two sites. ~~~ nemo44x The .com is the corporation behind MongoDB. .org is the open source project. Yes, they are intertwined heavily at this point (but it wasn't always this case back in the day) but I can understand why they try and keep their separation of concerns here. ------ ddorian43 You can build a slow product and when you make it normal-speed you say 5x faster! ------ vkjv Am I the only person that things the sheer number of people that have had scaling issues with mongo is a GOOD thing? I think it speaks to changing technology landscape and attitude towards data. Many more people are collecting and working on larger data sets than they would have ever dreamed of years ago. I credit MongoDB, in part, to allowing developers to do this and encourage them to try. Sure it has it's limitations and may not be as great in areas as other databases, but, wow have a lot of people tried and succeeded. tl;dr, If reverse survivor-ship bias is a thing, I think mongodb has it. ~~~ tracker1 I've been pretty happy with mongodb overall for a few years now. It isn't always the best fit... but it's a very good fit for a lot of scenarios. Replication and sharding in mongodb is way easier to get started with than most databases, and the failover for replication is very good as well. Though understanding how it works is still advised. Such as not having more than X nodes voting for electing a leader in case of failover, etc. That said, there are situations I'd be more inclined to reach for ElasticSearch, Cassandra or others. As soon as RethinkDB has it's automatic failover story in place, I'd put it above MongoDB though, slightly nicer developer interface, and admin is much nicer than others. Then again, if PostgreSQL got replication with failover in the box, I'd probably use that far more. ------ endijs "MongoDB 3.0 will be generally available in March, when we finish putting it through its paces. Stay tuned for our latest release candidate, we would love it if you would try it out and give us feedback." So... no 3.0 final yet. That's disappointing. However - I'm really excited about 3.0. Initial tests show way better performance than 2.6. Plus data takes just 1/4th of disk space. That's amazing. I hope this is just beginning and each next release will add more and more features based on what WT can deliver. ------ cheald I'm actually fairly interested in the WiredTiger integration. I switched from MongoDB to TokuMX about a year ago because of disk space and atomicity concerns, and Toku's been really good to me. Mongo 3.0 promises to catch up in many respects; if it does, then it might actually solve the vast majority of the complaints that people have historically had with it. The marketing copy still pretends that TokuMX doesn't exist, though - it's had these features and more (including transactions) for quite some time now. ------ tankerdude The announcement, to me, was way over the top. There was so much noise in the announcement with very little in terms of signal. It reads almost like vaporware, even though it probably was not. Just give us facts, plain and simple. What it improves and how it improves it. When there are that many adjectives about the project, it just causes me to tune out a bit. Was this supposed to be part of a sales deck or something? (An as aside, I use mongo and know its pluses and minuses so reading all that hoopla is just unseemly.) ------ fasteo MongoDB seems to be a love/hate relation. I haven't used it myself, but I found this article[1] very useful. My conclusion is that MongoDB works, but you need to understand it and take some time to plan the deployment. [1] [https://blog.serverdensity.com/does-everyone-hate- mongodb/](https://blog.serverdensity.com/does-everyone-hate-mongodb/) ------ nnain Slightly off topic: I prepared this MongoDB Quick Reference Card last year; never put it online before. Hope it'll be useful to someone looking for a quick peek into how mongo db commands work - [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58502821/mongodb_qrc.pdf](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58502821/mongodb_qrc.pdf) ------ astral303 Comment threads like these help me learn how different the HN groupthink/prevailing thought is from the reality on the ground. In reality, MongoDB works well enough to be where they are, armed with the money they have. ~~~ nemo44x That's the point so many here fail to address. Lots of businesses are using MongoDB at large scale (2PB clusters) and willing to talk about it too. MongoDB gets a bad rep, some of it their own fault for sure, but it's not as lousy as some people here make it out to be. Careful object modeling goes a long ways. Wired Tiger will be a massive improvement on their current storage engine, which is pretty awful for write-heavy loads to be sure. ------ je42 Anybody knows how FoundationDB compares to MongoDB 3.0 ? ------ jedberg Do they still value speed over durability? If so, thanks but no thanks. I prefer my database to be durable. If I want speed, I use RAM. ~~~ nemo44x You've always been able to control this with write concern on a per-write basis. If you can handle an instance where and acknowledged write may not get replicated and possibly lost (logging use case - fast writes) then use that level of write concern. If you require extreme durability (slower writes but more durable) then use that level. In many applications you have both requirements and MongoDB lets you choose at write time the level of durability you want. ~~~ jedberg Does version 3 fix the issue where the database lies to you and says the write was complete once it hits the network socket and doesn't wait for the ack? [http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo- ft/](http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft/) ~~~ nemo44x He was using v2.0 in that article. A version that is years old and pretty awful. The default then was that a write was fired from the client and that's it - fire and forget. A stupid default. The default since is to get an ack from the server. You can control this on each write and make it more durable (make sure it is replicated to 1, majority or all replicas) or faster (just get to the server). The default is to be written to the primary server and put into the transaction log so if it doesn't get committed to disk (possibly 60 seconds by default) it can recover. The transaction log is flushed (fsync) every 100ms by default and is configurable. You can also specify that the write is only acknowledged after the transaction log is synced. Anyways the default is it is put into the transaction log and then acknowledged. ~~~ jedberg Ok, fair enough. Then the answer is yes, they did fix it. :) I guess I'll give it another look then. But I'm still a little wary of a database built by people who ever thought that such behavior was acceptable for a database... ~~~ nemo44x I'd make sure you use the new storage engine, wiredtiger too if you give them another shot. The standard one works well on read heavy use cases but saturates I/O pretty quickly if you're doing a lot of updates that make documents grow if you don't take some precautions. I also agree, having a setting of "fire and forget", although useful in some (limited!) use cases, is not a sane default. ------ iagooar You got your chance, Mongo, and you screwed it up. I tried getting the most out of you. I treated you like a princess, I indulged you, your wishes became my wishes and your thoughts were my thoughts. I stopped listening to all that criticism around you and thought of you as of a misunderstood child, even as you would refuse to do even the easiest tasks one could imagine. I gave you everything there is to give, but you broke my heart. You left me in the most critical moments. I trusted you, but you would go your own way. Tears were shed and countless sleepless nights were to follow. Remember that night you disappeared without leaving a sign? I sent you messages which got a response only after many hours. You didn't give a damn about my needs. One you told me: "it's not me, it's you". And I believed you, I truly did. It's over now. It's been some time without you, and I'm getting better. I have discovered, that not everyone is like you. Some DBs care, they really do. You can trust them, they give you their everything. I'm still struggling falling in love again, but it's getting better. Don't write me back. Goodbye. ~~~ bhouston How is a non factual comment like this being up voted? Just because it aligns with hn prejudices? Edit: I guess for the same reasons I am being down voted without comment. ~~~ krenoten Because it alludes to problems many people have experienced with this product. All verbal communication is indirect to a degree. This is no exception. ~~~ xtrumanx You have to admit that it feels very out of place here on HN. I wouldn't have minded it as much if it wasn't so long and including some detailed issues OP faced with Mongo. ------ slantview So I heard this means it's webscale now?

Road-Tripping with the Amazon Nomads - scott_s https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20687434/amazon-sellers-nomad-merchants-products-malls-walmart ====== gumby A fascinating example of arbitrage. There are a lot of horrible (Uber, counterfeiters exploiting Amazon's product co-mingling etc etc) and horrifying (DoorDash) examples of the modern economy, but this seems like a great example of computing both at the edge (phones) and cloud (amazon's pricing database) for the benefit of everyone (retailer gets rid of those jeep toys; buyer elsewhere can find a jeep toy, and person driving around gets paid to facilitate). I love it. ------ tedmcory77 Chris is one of the most generous people Ive seen in the business. Not afraid of hard work either.

Realistic rain drops in JS - vvnraman http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/demo1.html ====== mgraczyk Looks great! The biggest drops sort of spoil the illusion at times because they pass in front of or behind other drops without absorbing them. Maybe a cool tweak for v2 would be to add some simple collision resolution? It would probably look great if you did a front to back sort based on droplet size, and resolved collisions (which you'd have to detect) by deleting the smaller droplet. ~~~ pbnjay Looks like they did: [http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/demo012_3.html](http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/demo012_3.html) ~~~ starbugstone That patch of blue sky on the right doesn't feel quite right and takes the realism out of it a bit. I know, just me being fussy. Impressive use of canvas though, it could be really nice as an appeasing background image on a site. Using the navigator geolocalisation and a weather site we could have a weather sensitive site. Have to test resource wise and see. ------ jameszhao00 Looks pretty cool but the heavy aliasing is a bit distracting. ~~~ fudged71 Yeah, I mostly see blinking pixels. Maybe it is better on a retina display. ~~~ TheSpiceIsLife Very convincing on Retina display from two feet or more. ------ TD-Linux This is more impressive than I first thought... I wiped my screen, thinking I had sneezed on it. ------ seanica Press F11 then refresh. Reminds of screensavers I wrote in the 90s/early 2000s. Very nice. ------ piratebroadcast I'm finally getting pretty comfortable with Rails, HTML, CSS, enough to actually use things like this. Can anyone recommend slick/good looking js like this that would be fun to toy with? ~~~ thekingshorses You can try it out my hacker news web app for mobile. [http://hn.premii.com](http://hn.premii.com) Source code at [http://github.com/premii/hn](http://github.com/premii/hn) Or This is another awesome HN app. Scroll down to bottom for source code. [http://hackerwebapp.com/](http://hackerwebapp.com/) ------ futhey Love it, used it in a project a while back. Unfortunately it's pretty resource intensive. Had to disable it for most mobile and tablet browsers. ------ verelo This is really great, amazing to see that things like this are possible on a common users browser. What was the inspiration behind creating this? ------ james33 This is just begging for some JS audio to go with it! ~~~ kawsper It would work great together with [http://www.rainymood.com/](http://www.rainymood.com/) ------ devgutt really cool. Something to help the mood [http://www.noisli.com/](http://www.noisli.com/) ------ rubiquity How do I make it go away? ~~~ matrix It's a demo page. You can see the other examples here: [http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/](http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/) (click on the images to see each demo)

First Evidence of Sleep in Flight - dnetesn http://maxplanck.nautil.us/article/326/first-evidence-of-sleep-in-flight ====== jfk13 While this may be the "first evidence" in the sense of measurements of brain activity, swifts apparently sleeping at 10,000 feet were directly observed 100 years ago: [https://www.rspb.org.uk/globalassets/downloads/documents/con...](https://www.rspb.org.uk/globalassets/downloads/documents/conservation --sustainability/help-swifts/amazing-swift-facts.pdf) ------ esoterae Technically we've known for decades that humans can sleep while flying airplanes :+/ ------ ilamont _When the birds circled on rising air currents the hemisphere connected to the eye facing the direction of the turn was typically awake while the other was asleep, suggesting that the birds were watching where they were going. “The frigatebirds may be keeping an eye out for other birds to prevent collisions much like ducks keep an eye out for predators,” says Rattenborg._ Earlier it said these brief periods of sleep would start as the sun went down; does it mean that they would only catch some sleep at dusk/twilight, or this would continue throughout the night? And if it's at night, do the birds have good enough night vision to see anything flying nearby or swimming on the surface below (such as their prey, squid and flying fish)? ------ jobigoud Imagine what we could achieve if humans needed only 42 minutes of sleep per day… ~~~ gnulinux I think it would give a constant time advantage. If humanity operates on O(f(t)) in that case we would operate on O(C f(t)). That is, as opposed, improvements that change the model itself (i.e. f) such as increased productivity, automation, cultural shifts etc... ~~~ jobigoud I thought about this argument some more. Instead of spending ten times longer awake, you could say the same for living ten times longer. It's also just a linear increase your reasoning would apply. But I feel that if all geniuses of history had lived 800 years they could have achieve more and we would be further along. It changes the model because along the way we make meta discoveries about learning and methodology and science itself, and even just discoveries that we build upon. That feeds back into our progress. ------ tome In business class, maybe. ------ mrbonner Could anyone ever been able to subscribe to their print edition on shop.nautil.us? I like the look and feel of their magazines and would like to support them. But, the subscription webpage has been broken forever. I twitted their support staff a month ago and hasn’t heard anything yet. What a shame. ~~~ berelig I subscribed in early 2018 and have only received two issues since. Sometime in the summer I received an email that they were having issues raising the funds necessary to publish the upcoming print edition. ~~~ mrbonner Apparently a tough chicken and egg problem for them: not having enough money to print so they stop accepting new subscriptions and hence will not getting any more funding. I really want to pay for their print magazines. ------ arkey There are several other articles about this dating from 2016 [0][1]. Still, the articles back in 2016 also come as a big surprise for me, since I remember having a kids encyclopaedia back in 1994 [2] that had a small snippet mentioning a certain migratory bird that travelled an insane distance and used warm currents that generated lift to basically take a nap mid-flight. So unless this is ruled out and not considered "flying", I really don't understand how many "first times" there have been. [0] [https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-just-seen- birds...](https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-just-seen-birds-sleep- while-flying-for-the-first-time-ever) [1] [https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-birds-sleep- during-f...](https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-birds-sleep-during- flight-without-d-1784760623) [2] Sorry, I can't provide a source at the moment, will try to find it later. Edit: to be fair, this article is citing the ones in 2016. I found other articles from as early as 2014 [3] but maybe this is just about how for the first time the theory is actually based upon measured, empirical data. Like an article that was recently in HN about semi-automatic weapons being more deadly than non-automatic ones. [3] [http://sabersabor.es/una-vida-de-record-los-10-hechos- porten...](http://sabersabor.es/una-vida-de-record-los-10-hechos-portentosos- del-vencejo/) ~~~ ShakMR > This article was originally published by Max Planck Neuroscience on Aug. 3, > 2016. The relevant study can be retrieved here.

Ask HN: Why aren't phones software? - Toenex I&#x27;ve recently started using my phone providers software app to make and receive calls and texts from other devices and it has wondering why we aren&#x27;t phones purely software and the handsets generic? I can see we need to replace the sim card with a software key and I get that the provider is subsidising the cost so wants a lock-in period but are these the only things? ====== Jacen SIM cards are used for authentication on the network. Using a dedicated encryption chip is this only way to ensure authentication, software keys are too easy to steal. Today, any device with a sim card reader and GSM antenna may be used as a phone: computers, tablets, and so on. I don't know where you live, but, in many country, today, you can buy phone service without a phone, and with no lock-in period. ~~~ Toenex Here's a scenario. I need to make a call but my phone is out of charge. "Here use mine." you say as you hand me your handset. I login on your handset, make my call, logout and hand it back to you. The call came from my number, charged to me I just happened to use your handset. ~~~ mattmalin This is the current system, but with "use this physical item, the SIM card, to login". This does assumes that the replacement phone in question is unlocked so can work on the other SIM card, but is certainly something that many people do quite often. ~~~ Toenex and that I have my sim card with me. ~~~ mattmalin Agreed, not an equivalent system. Another scenario where this causes issues that a login equivalent can improve: imagine losing your phone including SIM card. This then causes a full interruption of all services tied to that phone number including actual phone service, and SMS, until the SIM is replaced. This usually takes hours/days depending on your location or carrier. The other big difference in just swapping out sim cards is the need for a full phone reset and the interruption to the service of whomever you're borrowing the phone! ~~~ Toenex Yep, essentially lots of 'not quites' with the current system. I want phone-as-easy-as-email. I logon and immediately calls are routed to that device and I can pick up voicemail, make calls and send texts. If I have another phone account I can use the same handset to log into that account at the same time and all calls to that number get routed to the device as well. If the device has radio hardware (such as phone handset) it uses the radio network otherwise it uses wifi or whatever other network comms that device has. When I logout it all stops. As a customer that's the interface to 'phone' that I want. Phone is soft, not hard. ------ hiepnv :D, so you need to write down that key or remember it when you want to use on another device or if that key is provided somehow,such as pushing a request to provider to get it using internet, then what happened when there is no connection but gsm or imagine when you use that key for few devices? what will be your main device and you want to suspend the others? Many problems must be solved if you'd like to use a key instead of a SIM card :D ------ mobinni Because like all things, people love options. Consumerism would fail if everything was generic. ~~~ Toenex Surely I'd have more options if I could use any handset? I'm a computer literate guy but I still end up carrying 2 handsets - one work, one personal - most of the time because the handsets aren't truly generic. ~~~ AndrewDucker What do you mean generic? People like different screen sizes, are willing to pay different amounts for different amounts of storage, processor speeds, etc. ~~~ Toenex I mean pick up my wife's phone, log in and now it's mine. ~~~ AndrewDucker Aaah, Android can do a lot of that. The latest versions support multiple user logins, so you can share a phone other than the (which you'd have to swap).

ShowHN: QRSplice - Use animated QR Codes to transfer data between iOS devices - rpledge http://qrsplice.com ====== rpledge My QR code hack just went live, check it out. Send text data between 2 iOS devices with an animated QR code. It works pretty well until the file size starts to get big. Let me know what you think. ~~~ NickNam Is this just a one-way thing? Or is there confirmation that the file was sent? ~~~ rpledge It's one way, but there is enough metadata so the receiver knows when it has the complete file.

Microsoft Said to Be Talking With News Corporation About Joint Yahoo Bid - gibsonf1 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/technology/10google.html?ei=5065&en=d0335626b3163fd3&ex=1208404800&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print ====== dcurtis Why in the hell is Yahoo, all of the sudden, so valuable to Microsoft? Why didn't they make this offer a year ago or six months ago? What prompted them to suddenly, out of the blue, give them an unsolicited offer? And now that they've essentially declined, why is Microsoft so eager to perform a hostile takeover? Also, why can no one give a straight answer to these questions? ~~~ wallflower It's hard to answer your question. Yahoo gets a significant amount of traffic (around 500 million users) that it doesn't _monetize_ (it's biggest problem) as well as Google and Microsoft sees merging with Yahoo (combining pageviews and engineering talent) as sort of a Custer's Last Stand / Alamo against the inevitability of Google becoming the premier advertising service on the Internet and becoming the provider of whatever supplants CPM advertising in the future (potentially something that measures your direct influence on people to buy products - Facebook SocialAds just the beginning - see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119295>) There are a lot of _If's_ If Google contextual ads weren't like The Blob and eating up the CPMs of its competitors If a Microsoft merger with Yahoo managed to arithmetically combine their traffic (pageviews to properties and more importantly, search traffic) If Yahoo didn't start showing signs of trouble (reorgs, Jerry Yang coming back) If Microsoft managed to inject some of Yahoo's engineering talent (Yahoo pipes, for example) into its organization (notwithstanding some of the premier engineers + leaders have left/are leaving)

What I Learned from Reading Every Amazon Shareholders Letter - vinnyglennon https://medium.com/@gsvpioneer/what-i-learned-from-reading-every-amazon-shareholders-letter-cdc35f309e8b ====== jondubois >> If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on. I believe this is from Eric Schmidt. It's probably the single most important principle that you have to follow if you want to have a successful career. Especially if you're an engineer. Most fast growing tech companies are founded by random dumb kids in their garages. Don't try to build the rocket yourself (that's a gamble that practically never ends well); let someone else do it and try to hitch a ride. That is the safest way by far. It's much easier to identify a good rocket ship than to build it yourself. ~~~ adventured > Most fast growing tech companies are founded by random dumb kids in their > garages. Most fast growing tech companies were in fact founded by people between the ages of ~28 and ~50 (and not in a garage), not by kids in garages. The kid in the garage founding a major tech company is a very rare exception. I can add a lot more names to this list: Paul Graham (31, Viaweb), Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp), Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp), Ev Williams (34, Twitter), Jack Dorsey (33, Square), Elon Musk (32, Tesla), Garrett Camp (30, Uber), Travis Kalanick (32, Uber), Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb), Adam Neumann (31, WeWork), Reed Hastings (37, Netflix), Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn), Jack Ma (35, Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon), Jerry Sanders (33, AMD), Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce), Ross Perot (32, EDS), Peter Norton (39, Norton), Larry Ellison (33, Oracle), Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus), Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco), Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco), Gordon Moore (39, Intel), Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com), Scott Cook (31, Intuit), Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari), Paul Galvin (33, Motorola), Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm), David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft; 64 Workday), Aneel Bhusri (39, Workday), Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems), John McAfee (42, McAfee), Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec), Scott McNealy (28, Sun), Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay), Rich Barton (29 for Expedia, 38 for Zillow), Jim Clark (38 for SGI, and 49 for Netscape), Charles Wang (32, CA), David Packard (27, HP), John Warnock (42, Adobe), Robert Noyce (30 at Fairchild, 41 for Intel), Rod Canion (37, Compaq), Jen- Hsun Huang (30, nVidia), Eli Harari (41, SanDisk), Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk), Al Shugart (48, Seagate), Finis Conner (34, Seagate), Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom), Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom), Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring), William Shockley (45, Shockley), Ron Rivest (35, RSA), Adi Shamir (30, RSA), John Walker (32, Autodesk), Halsey Minor (30, CNet), David Filo (28, Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp), Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon), Andrew Mason (29, Groupon), David Hitz (28, NetApp), Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom), Demis Hassabis (34, DeepMind), Tim Westergren (35, Pandora), Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify), Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye), Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick), Ben Silbermann (28, Pinterest), Evan Sharp (28, Pinterest), Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek), Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor), Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials), Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments), Richard Egan (43, EMC), Gary Kildall (32, Digital Research), Hasso Plattner (28, SAP), Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks), Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com), Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com), Ed Iacobucci (36, Citrix Systems), Ray Noorda (55, Novell), Tom Leighton (42, Akamai), Daniel Lewin (28, Akamai), Michael Mauldin (35, Lycos), Tom Anderson (33, MySpace), Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace), Mark Pincus (41, Zynga), Nir Zuk (30, Palo Alto Networks), Caterina Fake (34, Flickr), Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr), Kevin Systrom (27, Instagram), Adi Tatarko (37, Houzz), Brian Armstrong (29, Coinbase), Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper), Peter Thiel (31, PayPal; 37, Palantir), Jay Walker (42, priceline.com), Pony Ma (27, Tencent), Robin Li (32, Baidu), Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com), Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi), Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei), Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex), Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten), Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi), Cheng Wei (29, Didi Chuxing), James Liang (29, Ctrip) ~~~ Lon7 Garage doesn't literally mean garage in this context. Another way to put it is: Most fast growing tech companies are started by young people barely into adulthood on a laptop. I see a lot of late 20's in your list, and a lot of companies that started with one person writing some code on a computer. ~~~ watwut Late 20ties is miles different than early 20ties, especially for those who went to college. Very very different. Anything over 22 does not count as "barely into adulthood". 23 years old are adults in all meanings of the word. ~~~ raarts In my experience men only reach adulthood at 30, (women at 25). And I'd like to hear the opinion of others (who are passed this age). ~~~ pgwhalen Please elaborate on how you define adulthood, and why it’s so different between men and women. ~~~ SamReidHughes Women have to worry about settling down earlier. ~~~ watwut Still, what does adulthood means for you? 26 year old dudes are adults, full stop. And in my experience, they don't think nor act like teenagers whether they settled down or not, whether they married or not, whether they kept old hobbies or not. ------ falcolas It’s funny. I’ve heard the “Disagree but commit” from a lot of managers lately; usually used to shut peons up. Ironic that it’s original usage (at least where these managers heard it from) speaks to the opposite direction: leadership should trust their teams. ~~~ mabbo Even internally to Amazon, it's misunderstood. The point is to gather all the facts, make a decision as a team or group, then have everyone commit to the decision and not whine about how they should have done what _I_ said we should do. You disagree, but you commit to the decision of the group for cohesion and productivity. It's also a means to prevent groupthink. No one should be thought poorly of _for_ disagreeing, so everyone should be giving all their thoughts, even ones that contradict what the group is thinking. Just so long as they get those points out before the decision is made, of course. ~~~ kevan Exactly. No matter how good an idea is, if people in the team are sabotaging it because they don't like it you'll have a bad time. A variation on Patton's quote: A mediocre plan executed well is better than a great plan executed poorly. ------ FussyZeus Is it safe in this thread to bring up the human cost of Amazon's (and likely by extension Bezo's) almost sociopathic pursuit of success? I wouldn't deny Amazon is a successful company, but how many horror stories from employees being ground to dust under their management have crossed HN's front page? How many companies are now refusing to do business with Amazon because of the iron-fisted requirements enforcement on their suppliers? How many sales on Amazon are of shit quality, ripoff products no better than you'd find on the streets of Hong Kong? I mean eschewing any and all corporate, social, and ethical responsibility will definitely make you a truck load of money, but I wouldn't call it exactly a net gain for all involved. ~~~ dizzystar I had a roommate who worked in the Amazon warehouse. He said it was very chill and easy work. Mind that he was someone who was a day-laborer, worked in filthy factories, and so on, so it's possible contrast principals are at play here. As for the quality of the products, there are many 3rd party sellers on Amazon who are selling garbage. This is unfortunate, but that's a tough battle for Amazon or the competing sellers to lock down. I'm not sure why you'd defend the suppliers who refuse to sell due to iron fisted policies, yet complain about the quality of the products sold. Amazon had / has to do something to clean up the mess. Hopefully it will be beneficial to the buying experience on Amazon. ~~~ krapp In my experience working in an Amazon warehouse (albeit only one,) it depends. I could barely walk for two months after I started, just because I wasn't physically prepared to stand or do repetitive movements for ten hours a day - and I work in one of the biggest FC's in the network so it was a six or seven minute struggle across the building and down two flights of stairs to get to the car sometimes. I don't blame Amazon for that, though. I do blame them for complaining about the cost of providing us with aspirin, then simply deciding not to provide it anymore. The work is tedious and exploitative, and it's very apparent working there that Amazon considers you little more than a meat machine there to run an algorithm, despite the lip service otherwise, and often your job depends on metrics you're not even allowed to see, and the pay is terrible. But, some people don't mind it. Some people actually like it. Others have to be carted off in an ambulance because they worked themselves into heat exhaustion. ------ ggambetta It's a very interesting read, and I can't help the feeling that lately Jeff Bezos is taking the place of Steve Jobs as the superhuman CEO (deservedly, it seems!). ~~~ OtterCoder Then you haven't been an Amazon supplier dangling at the end of a rope as Bezos tries to wring blood from a stone. ~~~ mrich That sounds a bit familiar to how Apple dealt with their suppliers. ~~~ Aloha Any big company, apple, wallmart, ford.. and on and on. ~~~ eru To give a contrast, Aldi has an excellent reputation with suppliers. That German hard discounter pays like clockwork. ~~~ protomyth I gotta admit that I can forgive a multiple of sins when I'm paid on time. ------ Lon7 Amazon shareholder letters seem to be becoming the new Berkshire shareholder letters [0]. They are friendly, engaging, and most importantly, written by an author who steadfastly holds by principles that haven't changed in decades. If you haven't read any of the berkshire letters you really should. [http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html) ------ tootie It's still amazing to me that an online book store is now the #1 seller of server infrastructure. ~~~ leereeves Many people were selling things online when Amazon was just a book store. Amazon was the best of them all. To me, it doesn't sound so strange that the #1 online store grew to be a strong competitor in other online businesses as well. ------ baybal2 Too abstract. Amazon businesses outside of North America get steamrolled by Alibaba one after another, yet people laud their "innovative business model," when it isn't (sell web hosting, and stuff over internet, something a gazillion other companies do) ~~~ yuvalmer That's nonsense. It's only true for China (for obvious reasons). Amazon is more successful in India, UK, Germany, France, Japan, and the list goes on. ~~~ baybal2 See, they are in the business of selling fancy trinkets from China as it is what 9 out of 10 consumer goods are. No mater what they do, a Chinese company will be having an edge over them no matter what they will do.

Uber cracked two 80s video games by giving an AI algorithm a new type of memory - rbanffy https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612470/uber-has-cracked-two-classic-80s-video-games-by-giving-an-ai-algorithm-a-new-type-of-memory/ ====== userbinator Before I read the article, I thought it was about a different type of cracking, one which is often applied to 80s video games. ~~~ ArtWomb Same ;) ------ ineedasername From the article: _lots of behaviors that are necessary to advance within the game do not help increase the score until much later_ I found this passage very interesting, as it seems like the definition of the benefits that can extend from delayed gratification. That optimizing for a local maxima isn't always the best way to get the best global maxima. Maybe algorithms that can encapsulate that will be useful in getting corporations away from the habit of chasing the highest short-term gains at the expense of long term viability. ~~~ jetrink Another way to look at it is that these games have less obvious causal relationships. If the game is Pac-Man, it is immediately obvious that eating a dot makes the score go up, because the effect always and immediately follows the cause. The further the effect is separated from the cause, the more possibilities the machine must entertain. Imagine, in a different game, you activate three switches and a door opens. Why did the door open? Maybe all three switches must be activated for the door to open. Maybe the final switch controls the door and the other switches control something else. Maybe you must always activate the switches in a particular order as a security measure. The game probably gives context (e.g. the third switch is labeled 'open door') that a human can use to eliminate the many possibilities, but the machine must experiment before knowing what is relevant. When you separate cause and effect in time, the machine must deal with many possible 'switches'. ------ Voloskaya Go-explore is weird for me. The main reasons for it's success are all based on very specific thing that barely transfer to anything such as the ability to save a state and restart from it at anytime (in this case using features from the emulator). It look almost like an engineering project. I don't like bad-mouthing the work of others, so I kind of feel bad for saying that and maybe someone can prove me wrong: But is this not borderline "cheating" (in quotes because obviously there is no agreed-upon rules)? The goal never was to solve Montezuma's revenge just for the sake of it. We could have done that way before by using hard engineering. The interesting thing about this game is that it reveals inherent flaws in our reinforcement learning approach. And so, if you manage to solve this game using a domain- transferable approach, surely that means you have made some significant progress in RL. That's doesn't seem to be the case here? ~~~ svantana I thought so too at first, but here's my new thinking: The most efficient way to learn real world tasks (for say a robot) is to learn in a realistic simulated environment, which ideally can be controlled by the agent, e.g. rewinding state after a failure to correct that particular behaviour. Ideally the simulation is regularly calibrated against real experiments, including confidence intervals on the real and simulated sensor inputs. Given that model of learning, Uber's approach here is very reasonable. ~~~ Voloskaya Good point! Uber definitly has simulated road environments, so it makes sense indeed. Thanks for sharing. ------ ArtWomb From Alex Irpan's response: _I was sour on the results themselves, because they smelled too much like PR, like a result that was shaped by PR, warped in a way that preferred flashy numbers too much and applicability too little_ Harsh! OpenReview's double blind system seems to work quite well in this regard as a peer review mechanism. Quick Opinions on Go-Explore [https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/11/27/go- explore.html](https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/11/27/go-explore.html) ~~~ vanderZwan Of course it's harsh when you pull the quote out of context: > _Like Go-Explore, this post had interesting ideas that I hadn’t seen before, > which is everything you could want out of research. And like Go-Explore, I > was sour on the results themselves, because they smelled too much like PR, > like a result that was shaped by PR, warped in a way that preferred flashy > numbers too much and applicability too little._ ~~~ gjm11 That little bit is actually talking about a different, earlier, AI game- playing effort. The bulk of Irpan's blog post is describing Go-Explore, and it is about as harsh as the grandparent of this comment suggests. ~~~ vanderZwan I think the writing article is making it very clear what he dislikes: that the research is twisted by PR into making inappropriate claims and comparisons. Even though it contains interesting and novel ideas. That is in no way harsh on the actual research and validity of the results itself. ------ tom_wilde Link to Uber Engineering page on this: [https://eng.uber.com/go- explore/](https://eng.uber.com/go-explore/) From the linked page: To enable the community to benefit from Go-Explore and help investigate its potential, source code and a full paper describing Go-Explore will be available here shortly. ~~~ vanderZwan Thanks, was looking for that link. Tangent: I notice I find it really annoying whenever an internet article talks about a blog post or other article, yet doesn't link to the source on the spot. Take this sentence from technologyreview's article: > _The approach leads to some interesting practical applications, Clune and > his team write in a blog post released today_ There is no excuse to have a sentence like this and not have "a blog post" be a hyperlink. It feels rude somehow, like it's breaking internet etiquette. ~~~ ghthor I agree, its rude and breaking an internet etiquette. It also makes it much more difficult for the search robots to make a mapping between pages. ------ degenerate In the article, Uber says " _Surprisingly, despite considerable research effort, so far no algorithm has obtained a score greater than 0 on Pitfall._ " I played pitfall as a kid and it seems quite straightforward for a computer to solve... jump over the puddle. I'd like if someone could talk more about this game in particular, specifically why it's so hard for AI to solve. Any interesting paper/link on the subject? ~~~ Voloskaya I don't know Pitfall, but generally speaking, the games that are hard to solve are the ones with sparse rewards. In the game, do you get points when you overcome some obstacles? If not and you only get points for successfully completing the entire level, then it becomes very hard for an agent to learn: How can it know if it is improving within the level itself? ~~~ b_tterc_p I would do the following. 1) Train a model to predict what happens next given an input 2) Each frame, predict the next frames given all possible inputs 3) Choose the input that maximizes uncertainty I would expect this to learn to avoid deaths relatively quickly. It doesn’t need to be good at knowing what will happen next, just better at recognizing specific dead ends (e.g. spikes or holes). ~~~ pas [https://blog.openai.com/reinforcement-learning-with- predicti...](https://blog.openai.com/reinforcement-learning-with-prediction- based-rewards/) ------ peter_d_sherman "The problem with both Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall! is that there are few reliable reward signals. Both titles involve typical scenarios: protagonists explore blockish worlds filled with deadly creatures and traps. But in each case, lots of behaviors that are necessary to advance within the game do not help increase the score until much later." Opinion: Equally true in non incubator-assisted entrepreneurship... that is, real entrepreneurship... ------ 0db532a0 Can someone explain how this might help in optimising vehicle routes as opposed to existing combinatorial algorithms made expressly for this purpose? ~~~ detaro Given that they name "robot learning" as an application, the target domain is probably self-driving cars, not route optimization. ~~~ 0db532a0 “Better reinforcement-learning algorithms could ultimately prove useful for things like autonomous driving and optimizing vehicle routes” ~~~ detaro Ah, I had missed that line. Unless I missed it in the Uber post too, that does seem to be a claim the TR writer added? ------ mLuby This kind of research should be done by universities or already profitable companies. Using someone else's VC money for this seems questionable at best. ~~~ chriskanan It is extremely useful for recruiting talent. Top talent wants to do basic research, so this is a powerful lure for keeping them at the company rather than in academia. I'm at NeurIPS this week, and many companies are here and they heavily advertise how many papers they have in the conference as part of their recruitment efforts for both (applied) AI research and AI engineering positions. ~~~ dagw Exactly. This is one thing I always ask when interviewing for a new job, and any company that cannot give me a decent answer goes to the bottom of my list.

Google Analytics infographic presentation-ready reports - whatagraph http://app.whatagraph.com ====== sharmadwivid Applied for report. Let's hope for good!!!

Move over mod_python, here comes mod_wsgi. - benhoyt http://blog.micropledge.com/2007/09/the-up-and-coming-mod_wsgi/ ====== mattculbreth I've recently used nginx to reverse-proxy and load balance to both paste and mongrel. Much easier setup. If you're doing a custom app I tend to think this is better than running a big Apache up front. ------ cdr I've been using mod_wsgi for some time (I think trac recommended it). Interesting that this blog post is getting so much attention. For apache (and I'm a fan of apache) it doesn't get any better. ~~~ inklesspen I use mod_proxy to reverse-proxy to paste.httpserver. Much better, IMHO. ------ leisuresuit or instead use lighttpd with FastCGI and web.py. something like this... <http://webpy.org/recommended_setup> ~~~ falsestprophet Even reddit, the developers of web.py, aren't using it anymore. ~~~ kevinl How do you know it? Http header viewer shows Reddit use lighttpd/1.4.13. ~~~ kirubakaran He is referring to: <http://reddit.com/info/29qac/comments/c29rpx> Summary if you don't know the story: aaronsw wrote web.py, founded Infogami (yc funded) and merged with Reddit. Then he had a falling out with spez and kn0thing (original founders of Reddit). When Reddit was rewritten, web.py was not used. I personally like web.py. Any of you using it for your startup/projects? (May be we can swap tips) If you are not using web.py for a particular reason, can you please share that too? ~~~ pg Steve is too lazy (in the good sense) to have ditched web.py for anything except legitimate technical reasons. ~~~ kirubakaran Thank you. This is exactly what I was wondering about and wanted to know from someone in the know. ~~~ nostrademons Spez had mentioned, off-handedly, that there tend to be painful bugs in the main web.py distributions: <http://programming.reddit.com/info/14v8a/comments/c14y1i> ~~~ kirubakaran Thanks nos`. Are you still using Pylons? And templates? Would you recommend MochiKit for js lib? ~~~ nostrademons Actually, I went with web.py after all. I blame temporary insanity. That, and web.py was easily understandable without a whole lot of docs to go through, and I wanted to get _something_ up quickly. We may yet rewrite in Pylons, but it's low priority, as web.py is working for us. (We also have practically zero traffic though.) For templates, we use Mako after having previously used Cheetah, same as the rewritten Reddit. Mako is a very well-done, well-thought-out library. There were some things that Cheetah had a lot of trouble with (like unicode support and fragment libraries) that Mako handles without breaking a sweat. For JS lib, we eventually settled on jQuery after having tried out Prototype, YUI, and Mootools (never used Mochikit, sorry). This was largely because that seems to be where the momentum is these days. Also, jQuery has a very elegant selector + plugin architecture and a growing collection of plugins. And it's the first JavaScript library I've seen that's intimately aware of namespace issues and tries to balance ease-of-use (no silly YAHOO.widgets.slider.SliderThumb chains here) and not-breaking-anything. This has been a major issue at my day job - we use several Prototype-dependent libraries and they _all_ seem to be incompatible with each other, along with any other JS libraries. On the downside, jQuery is still fairly immature, so you may have to write some widgets yourself that are provided with other libraries. That's changing quickly though, since many people are writing plugins now. ------ tocomment Can someone just settle Apache vs Lighthttpd for me :-)

Ask HN: Visual Design for Hackers - DanI-S Take a look at the Rails Rumble 2010 entries: http://railsrumble.com/<p>There's a whole stack of apps there, developed within 48 hours by small groups of people. They're not all beautiful, but there is (to my eye) a pretty high standard of presentation for most of them.<p>I am sure I am not alone in feeling like there's this chunk of knowledge I'm missing - in terms of how, and when, to go about making something beautiful.<p>I'm fascinated by the concept of optimizing user experience - it certainly has the potential to make or break an application's popularity. If you can spend valuable time tweaking code to make it more appealing to the compiler, why can't it work in the other direction too? Though I don't think it's reasonable to expect myself to be incredible at both, I'd like to be able to put together a prototype that looks nice. After all, I wouldn't show people code that I knew was bad and ugly.<p>Part A - I would love to know - how does this aspect fit into the flow of the project? At what point do you start turning things from black-text-on-white-background into a beautiful and intelligent layout? I'm sure it's usually incremental, but is there a specific point at which you decide to shift focus over to implementing your UI? I know I usually go through many notebook pages of UI ideas even before I've written any code. Is it worthwhile doing mockups in photoshop at this stage? Showing different designs to people and asking for feedback? Or do you usually do this after your core functionality is built? And where do you draw the line, say 'this is ready enough for now!' and release the thing?<p>Part B - In terms of user interface and usability, there's a lot of information out there. Much of it, however, is from the early days of graphical computing and the web. There are still great things to learn from stuff like Joel on Software but I'd like some good information about user interactions and expectations in the AJAX era. There must have been some more wisdom accumulated in the last decade! I'm looking for some shoulders to stand on - 'our experience showed us that you should never do &#60;xyz&#62; because users find it confusing'.<p>Part C - I've always been curious about how small teams of people manage to cope with the graphical elements of web application building. Does a team of 2-3 people in an early days startup usually contain a designer/artist? Is that something you can reliably outsource? Is it ever a good idea to have your design done by someone else and then shoehorn your view code and javascript into it (for a prototype/beta), or should it always be a closely collaborative process?<p>Part D - Finally - I'm interested in any of you people who can see BOTH sides of the coin. If you started off as a programmer and then learned how to make stuff sexy and usable - what put you on that path? Where did you start learning? What were your major obstacles, and how did you overcome them?<p>Looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say.<p>Dan ====== olalonde I am myself a professional programmer that has some basic design skills, but I'll try to answer your question as well as I can. A - I'm pretty sure most people design the UX/UI before they start coding (at least mock ups). If you have already coded all your backend, you might feel constrained when designing the UI or might realize too late that you oversaw some critical parts of your system. Let me illustrate: Let's say you are building a "C.V. builder app". You might start coding with the assumption that the user has to be login to start building his C.V. However, if you imagine the UX first, you might realize that it would be nice to ask the user to register only once he wants to save his newly created C.V. That simple detail might have a huge impact on your code base. B - Some resources & inspiration: <http://uxmovement.com/>, <http://ui- patterns.com/>, <http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/inspiration/>, <http://www.dribbble.com>. C - If you're good at UX/UI design but lack the Photoshop skills to bring your vision to life, it should be safe to outsource. In any case, make sure your designer really "gets" your vision. D - I started learning to design and program at about the same time. Since then, I've put most my time into programming and although I consider myself pretty good at designing user interfaces, I lack the technical skill and experience to make them look beautiful. If you're the same as me, I would suggest spending some time trying to really master Photoshop or such tool. Also, some color/typography theory can't hurt. ~~~ sudont > I lack the technical skill and experience to make them look beautiful. It's called practice. I've known designers who have each won handfuls of AIGA awards. The common thread was that they never stopped designing things. Talent is a leg up only for the first few steps. HN people have weekend programming projects; these designers had _daily_ side design projects, in addition to their daily design duties. The amount of time dedicated to this was staggering. I think their only real talent was being able to self-immerse themselves so deeply in the subject without burnout. ------ alanh I’m about to go to sleep, but I just want to drop a few of my favorite rules of thumb. (I love UX and constantly bitch about bad interfaces, FWIW.) \- Visual hierarchies. Color theory. Understand both of these, and use them. \- Don’t use the words “me” or “my” in your interfaces (with rare exceptions like “✓ remember me”, which is _de-facto_ standardized) \- Native controls/widgets give users lots of free platform-specific and accessibility functionality that they expect. Don’t implement your own text box / dropdown / scrollbars without a damn good reason. \- Use color sparingly, to convey meaning and/or draw attention. \- What is the purpose of each and every design element? Can it be removed, or does it have no purpose? Then remove it. (Maybe keeping one exception to the rule gives your site a touch of personality / a brand). \- Reading the OS X HIG is eye-opening. Don’t try to follow it _online,_ though! \- Can stuff line up? It probably should. \- When should you show a throbber or “Loading…” message? The answer is _not_ “whenever something is loading”. It’s “whenever the user _must_ wait for something to load, or whenever an update or change of view as a result of a direct user action is not immediately visible.” And this should be minimized. \- Don’t half-ass buttons. If they hover or have an active (depressed) state, then the hover (“over”) state should look like a slightly lighter or darker version of the normal (“up”) state; the depressed (“down”) state should look physically depressed, if applicable; invert the gradient, swap the borders, or whatever. It looks like I’m starting to list pet peeves instead of the big ones, so good night! ~~~ aloneinkyoto \- Always show a useful fallback for empty views. Preferably visually distinct and "subordinate" to actual content (e.g. centered gray text instead of left aligned black text). \- Try to minimize the impact of destructive actions and try to offer the possibility to rollback potentially dangerous actions. Make dangerous actions look dangerous (e.g. make delete buttons red). \- Think about visual distance and distraction, especially in flowing text. Columns look good, but forces the eye to scan for the start of the next column when reaching the end of the previous. Don't place two equally important things right next to each other, etc... ------ mrpsbrk Hi. I am a designer that is trying without too much zeal to learn to program. Here go some advice, no idea whether it helps. First, i believe that "looking great" and "being good user experience" are actually very, very different things. Designers are good just at the first. The second remains a dark art for programmer and designer alike. For example, thinking about which user input you need or could do without, which order to ask for them and so on, falls i believe neither there nor here. Which effect you should apply to the input box is utterly immaterial, and i would venture that a competent designer can make any kind of use-process beautiful to look at. As for making beautiful, i have found no way to develop this except by endless boring practice. The best illustrator is generally the one who has done more illustrations. Rules or techniques (as in crutches) tend to give good results in the very short term and become stifling very quickly. If you lack the stamina or interest to simply draw, i guess this is not a bad thing. The other way to see the thing is that you'll eventually get better at it. That said, designers do tend to develop a variety of manias and sensibilities that, well, _seem to be related_ , vaguely, to their craft. If you're willing to try to get that, i would recommend a very, very old book. I know this goes directly against what you were looking for, but, again, that is my opinion: Symbols and Signs, by Adrian Frutiger. (Amazon has it, not sure if it is bad form to put an amazon link here... Also, i do only know the Brazilian edition so i can give no advice about that...). Maybe this book can come out sounding like full of rules, but that is not the point. Another, more recent book that is also incredible, but even more paranoid (the guy goes pages and pages discussing commas, then semi commas, then colons, and i just love it!) is The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. Finally, designers always do end up getting a bit of cognitive psychology, and it is a good thing, but no self-respecting psychologist could purport to understand the human cognitive system, so i would say avoid the ones who are too sure of themselves like how-to guides to Gestalt, those are just gimmics. Find something that is serious about cognitive science, but not serious enough that you'll sleep, and that is it. You can always go back for more... ------ samratjp As a friend of mine says - marketing and good UX is like laying grass out for the goats. It must be easily reachable and in digestible chunks. 1) Mock-ups. Supposed to be mocked upon. Take a good page design you like, import it into Photoshop (or w/e) and start boxing the important elements. A lot of well designed sites are on the 960px width bandwagon (even Apple's homepage + most YC startups). Short answer - look up Blueprint CSS framework and 960px grids on Noupe.com 2) Mockingbird is awesome! Just worry about the creative flow first, then put it on a grid. 3) Like a special effect or design on a site, google "jquery site-name effect- name" will usually net some good plugins. Learn and repeat. Don't know what effect-name is? Firebug it :-) I am by no means a true designer, but I feel that the only thing stopping you/me/anyone is the labeling. When you feel that happening, just think of Iron Man, he designs the whole stack ;-) ------ alialithinks Hey Dan, I would definitely recommend reading these sources for getting a comprehensive understanding about general design principals and core ideas: The Gestalt Principles The guiding theory in understanding how the human brain process images and visual data. [http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/gest...](http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.htm) Web Typography Great resource for understanding typography and especially for the web <http://webtypography.net/> A List Apart I am sure you are already familiar with this awesome publication by the Happy Cog crew and other contributors. To me this covers most of the on screen design issues in today's world and it keeps on evolving which is awesome. <http://www.alistapart.com/> I Hope this help! ------ retro212 Part A - I always make few screens in Photoshop before coding. These screens include form, items listing and generic text page. These are not complete and finished designs, they just help me to visualize stuff upfront, and to design some common elements (buttons, form controls etc). After that I customize every screen based on content it displays. Part B - There are many sites that write about UI and UX, they should be googleable :) Part C - I'm doing both development and design of our apps. I think that designers that don't code can't really design good app because you must have all of the interactions under control, and for that you must understand how things work both on server side and client side. I don't think they should know how to setup server and deploy app, but there must be some understanding of how things work. Part D - When I started working as a developer, I worked in web studio that also did great design. But they also gave me the ability to try and design stuff along them. They taught me about typography, layouts etc. I even did some print stuff because I wanted to learn it. Little by little pieces started to fall in place. I'm far from great designer, but I can design things that are nice and usable. The biggest problem is that I really like boxes. When I'm designing stuff I'm automatically placing things so they can be easily sliced. But I'm working on it. My advice is to just start working on some designs, and to find some friendly designer that will help you with constructive criticism. ------ yatsyk I very impressed with level of design work of Rails Rumble winners. Are any blog posts from contestants about design process, tools, resources they used (stock images, templates) and so on? ------ jayair I do both and I am trying to help other hackers figure out more about design as well. A: I usually have a vision in mind for the project or the feature. To do this I try and break it down into smaller parts and optimize for the one thing I want the users to do for that part. For complicated designs I go through ideas on a notepad before I settle on something. The most important part of this process is to understand why a certain design element needs to be put in. If my design elements lack purpose I take them out. Once I have that then I go about building stuff. Sometimes the end result will differ from the vision in which case it might literally be "back to the drawing board". B: I haven't found too many recent ones. But I generally prefer patterns like these - <http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/> C: I'm generally against outsourcing UI/UX. I think specific icon and graphic design work can be outsourced. To me UI/UX is the app itself and early on you don't necessarily have a clear view of what it is going to be. D: I started off as a developer and found the need to incorporate better design. I started by trying to understand what I like and why I like it. I found a couple of big problems: there weren't too many good resources that catered to our type, most design advice wasn't practical enough and improving my taste took a long while. I'm putting together a series of posts on what I learnt, hopefully that helps people out. Feel free to get in touch via Twitter or email. ------ mgeraci As the designer in a three person startup (the other two are coders), I can give some information on our process. A - Our design process starts with a discussion of feature ideas and requirements from the code side. Then work goes in parallel until each team has a workable mockup/prototype. This period of work alone is critical to the development of the app from the visual and user experience side of things. It also gives me freedom to try lots of new ideas. I'll usually do a couple of revisions based on comments from my co-founders, and then get some outside opinions. B - I fear that user interface and usability comes more from trial and error than reading. I haven't found a good resource for the technical side of design, but olalonde's link to uxmovement.com looks great. C - Our startup has 2 coders and 1 designer. We're a rails shop, and I know enough ruby to implement my designs. This mix usually works really well as far as delegation of work. I'm not sure how standard this is. D - Can't say much here since I started on the design side and have more recently been programming. As an aside - if you're comfortable in css and are adding a new page or feature to an existing site, I've found that it can be fast to prototype in html rather than Photoshop/Illustrator. ------ davidcann I think that all _developers_ should be able to design layouts that make sense. Pure programmers (writing algorithms, optimizing, scaling, etc.) don't really need design skills. You definitely need product developer(s) on your team if your startup is consumer facing at all. In such a small (2-3 person) team, everyone needs to do multiple jobs, so if none of you have decent design skills, then start practicing now. Part A - Usually a proof-of-concept happens first either in basic wireframe mockups or basic/ugly code. Once you'er clear on the product you want to build, then full designs are done in Photoshop or, once in a while, direct HTML. Part B - I would mostly ignore that stuff. Simply look at great/big sites and see what the do right, but _more importantly_ look at what they could improve and do that yourself. Basically, make your interface design as simple as possible while having the minimum feature set to make your product useful - finding that balance is where you become a great product developer. Part C - Don't outsource your design. If you commit to design as a core competency in your development team, then you understand that design is not just visual - design encapsulates everything that the user experiences with your product. Part D - I started off as a cartoon animator in college, but found I was better at coding, then I realized that to make great products, I need to have great design. I didn't have a design monkey, so I started creating my own designs (poorly at first) taking inspiration from products I enjoyed. To overcome obstacles in design, I simply take the worst part of a page/workflow and fix that first... repeat until the product is due or there aren't any cringe-worthy features. ------ joeld42 A fun way to learn a little or at least get inspired is to check out LayerTennis on fridays: <http://www.layertennis.com> Each round, each layer, ask yourself "do I like that or not"? and then try to articulate why or why not. Why is this layer: <http://layertennis.com/100910/07.php> not as effective as the next volley: <http://layertennis.com/100910/08.php> For example, I didn't notice at the time that the quote had six letter 'O's in it, but now that I see it it's hard to miss. They create a lot of repetition a rhythm that ties them to the shape on the other side. The symbol and the text relate to each other even before considering the meaning of the words. Seriously, one of the hardest parts of design is to learn how to form strong opinions and understand your reasons for them, without being arbitrary. Design is just a million tiny decisions. ------ DTrejo Some Quora questions I was looking at yesterday that you might find helpful (I plan to comb through these and pick out books and blogs to read more of): What are the best books on UI/UX design for software engineers? [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-books-on-UI-UX- design...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-books-on-UI-UX-design-for- software-engineers) What are the best resources for learning bleeding-edge web UI and UX design? [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-resources-for- learnin...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-resources-for-learning- bleeding-edge-web-UI-and-UX-design) What are the best design blogs? <http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best- design-blogs> What are the best books written on design? [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the- best-books-written-on-desi...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-books- written-on-design) ------ bobbywilson0 Part A - I am on the side of completing as much UX up front as possible. Bad visual design is something that no one can ignore. I think that ideally before you even have done the "black-text-on-white-background" prototype you start with UX. Part B - Steve Krug has a couple of simple concrete usability books. Other than links I have seen mentioned. <http://ilovetypography.com/> learning good type will help a ton with design <http://www.useit.com/> Jakob Nielsen is kind of the godfather of usability, some people love him, some hate him, either way you will learn something from this guy. Also, going through tons of websites and critiquing them by yourself or with peers, writing down everything that works well and doesn't work well, that you would change. Do little usability tests on your sites, even on sites that aren't yours with family or peers. Part C - I don't know as much about startups. I do know that having a designer on hand is much nicer to work with than outsourced. Ultimately I think it would be like dealing with anyone else outsourced in terms of reliability. Part D - I actually started as a designer, and IE 6 crushed my soul. I am still very interested in UX though. I think starting as a programmer, I would just try to recreate designs you think are appealing. I would also try to learn the grid system. Use CSS frameworks as training wheels that have a solid grid, and decent typography (eg. Blueprint). I started constraining myself to HTML and CSS, and I think you should too, leave Photoshop alone until you can make decent designs in just HTML and CSS. Then, when you are completely comfortable using the two, then look to PS to add details that you can't achieve otherwise. The big obstacle you will run into, is that you will feel like you aren't making as good of designs as designer X. Design in my opinion is much more personal and emotional than programming so don't let that get to you. Good Luck! ------ earlyriser A) I start with mockups, then the polished design and at last the programming. For users, the interface is all that they have, then the UX stuff needs to be defined very early (in my case). I like 37signals "epicenter design" approach. Start with the more important pages and with the more important information chunks of these pages. B) useit.com and my collection maybe <http://www.delicious.com/egogol/ui> C) have someone good for design in your team. If you can't, exchange your programming hours vs design hours. Ideally it should be a collaborative process. D) The important thing is that the user gets the things done. The UX determine how the programming process should work. BONUS) Test a lot. Test your mockups, test your design, test your running app. Every step will reveal different problems. ------ PhrosTT I am a programmer with fairly advanced photoshop skills. I am not a good designer. I know this because when I see good designs, I realize I NEVER could have come up with that. If you're a programmer, you should be able to nail the science half of the equation. As for the art half, I would just shamelessly rip cool things you find when searching "css inspiration" or whatever ["great artists steal"]. It's easy to go overboard reading about UX and all the articles completely over-analyzing the topic. Unless your product is centered on revolutionary interface like hipmunk, you're probably safe just using established interaction patterns and getting feedback from "normal people". Just see if your non-techie friends can handle it. If so you probably have enough to launch. Most big sites were ugly at launch... ------ synnik I work both sides of the coin. I have a degree in fine Arts, but have been a software guy for many years. I put in an initial design when I make a HTML mock-up. I tweak it until I think it is good, then start to code the actual functions. As I work with it, within a few days, the constant usage and testing show me what is wrong with my design. I then often iterate, updating the design whenever it starts to annoy me. At the start of the project, this is often once a week. After a few revisions, I slow down, and by the time I've been working with an app 6 months, it is fairly stable. In terms of how you actually make your design, the KISS principle remains valid. It is much easier to add small UI elements to make a page more interesting than to scale back from an over-engineered design. ------ DanI-S I've been working since posting this and haven't had time to properly read or reply to your comments, but wow - some really fantastic stuff here, from some very respectable people. I am going to have a great time reading and exploring what people have said, once I get a moment to sit down... It seems a shame that all this expertise be confined to the bowels of the HN news list (which isn't search engine indexed, right?) - would it be acceptable to make some attempt to compile it into a (properly referenced, ofc) blog post or something that the rest of the world can see? What do people think about that? Thanks for your responses, I am very impressed. Dan ------ swah Also, why Ruby project pages mostly look beautiful or at least like someone tried to make it look pleasant, and every Java project (except Octobot) has absolutely no CSS? ~~~ petercooper One reason that Rubyists are Rubyists and not Java developers is because they care how stuff looks rather than solely how it _works._ Given this, there's an aesthetic culture that doesn't exist so greatly in other spheres. ------ LeBlanc You should check out this talk that Jason Putori, the designer for Mint gave titled "10 Things: Design for Non-Designers". <http://vimeo.com/15066599> ------ redwoods These are great questions. Exactly the ones I am asking myself right now as a non technical guy trying to work out which piece of the puzzle to start with in building out my project . ------ angelbob There's Jakob Neilsen, of course: <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/> For your part B advice, it's almost a one-stop shop. ------ idan Hi Dan, First off: I gave a talk on this very topic at DjangoCon EU 2010. Video: <http://djangoconeu.blip.tv/file/3685673/>, slides: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/32311867/Design-for-Developers>. A) there always comes a point in any project when I have that "fully baked" feeling -- a stage where I feel like I have spent enough time putting myself in the users shoes to understand how they can best accomplish their goals. Sometimes this comes quickly, and sometimes not -- it truly depends on the project. I don't go further than sketching until I've reached this phase; sketches are cheap and I don't need the high resolution which photoshop affords. Generally, I'll spend some time in photoshop after the sketching stage to work out a visual design "langauge" -- what's the colorscheme, what visual conventions am I going to use throughout the site, etc. I'll take one or two "core" parts of the site and mock them up in photoshop to figure out how the visual aspects affect the design, but I won't do every single page in photoshop -- it's a waste of time. B: I don't know. There's general stuff about performance from Steve Souders, and overall I think resources like ALA are probably a good starting point. C: It depends on your product, but I'd argue that good design is something that happens primarily _before_ code gets written. The frontend of your app should inform your backend, and vice-versa -- ergo a designer co-founder is an extremely important asset, IMO. Every project with design "added later" looks like it had the design added later, not baked in from the start. D: I'm a designer/developer combo, coming from a formal background in computer science. I guess I started getting into graphic design and photography during high school. Learn about graphic design for print since it has a lot of history; the web is still in its adolescence and is heavily informed by this history. Don't neglect to learn a little about typography. In the end the web is mostly about reading words, so it behooves you to learn the art and science of arranging words on a page so as to maximize legibility and beauty. The biggest obstacle to learning this stuff is a broken understanding of design. It's a discipline like any other; you might not have the aptitude to become a master but you can learn the basics and become proficient, just like you did with code. It took you a decent amount of time to become a proficient coder; don't assume that three weeks of reading will turn you into a proficient designer. Stick with it, learn the terminology so you can start to read things written for an audience of designers, and don't forget to actually do stuff yourself -- like in code, there's no substitute for sitting down and grappling with some work on your own. ------ sp4rki A) At what point? From the beginning. You said it yourself, you go through notebook pages with UI before even writing code. You need to have a structure in place before you begin anything. Sure you can morph it as you go, but you need a direct connection to what you are trying to achieve. At the same time you're coding some functionality, you should be thinking about how this is going to be displayed. It's of course not necessary to do any of the graphics or styling at this point, but it works better if you give it some thought and try to form some type of layout and broad design ideas as you go. It's worth doing photoshop mockups when you reach a point where the application development can benefit from being graphically beautiful (which can vary immensely... every project is an island). You draw the line at the first moment you can. If and when you reach a minimum point where your application could be used by the masses, freaking ship it. You can fix and add features later, but the moment you have enough to ship that thing out the door - do it. Software is never "finished" anyways, so you'll need to keep going at it anyways. B) Almost all the information regarding UI usability and user experience holds up regardless of age. The concepts are the same now and when it was written. There are also a LOT of resources written in the last few years, so I'd disagree that all the information is old. In any case, it really doesn't matter, you're still going to need to come up with your own conclusions for your specific case. No amount of UI/XI reading is going to allow you to skip having to do you're own testing and to draw your own conclusions on what works for you. C) In the web industry the designer/artist is generally also the guy that codes your Html/Css/Jquery. A front end developer is generally the person that designs interaction and pretty screens. The back end guy is the one doing the algorithms, database work, etc. You can outsource everything, though the results are usually not even on the same league as the worst results you can get from a good team that clicks working together. You can always have a contractor come in and work with you or your team if needed, and that can sometimes be a better compromise than outsourcing per se. D)I started as a programmer at an early age, but I was also an artist. What put me on that path is that I wanted to know how to do everything. From Photoshop to Rails to C to server security and deployment. I started learning by doing. Don't look for guidance man, just work on a project and when you need something you're not comfortable doing, freaking do it anyways. Need to do graphics, test layouts, a/b testing? Read on it and start doing it asap. At some point you'll become decent at it, and then one day you're actually good at doing it too! Obstacles? There are no obstacles, only challenges. Challenge yourself and you'll come out a winner. ------ enra We participated in the Rails Rumble with Splendid Bacon <http://splendidbacon.com> and I did the design and most of the fronted ui. (I wrote a summary about the process: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803155>) A) - Usually in our projects or in my projects, I try go with the design first, starting with describing what we are doing, why, for who and how.(The Five W’s Of <http://52weeksofux.com/post/890288783/the-five-ws-of-ux>). The concept, being 5 lines or 5 pages, sets the background for the whole project. From there I try to go with sketches, or wireframes to iterate the views or the interaction flows. Then start doing the ui in Photsohop. When I'm quite set with the UI I start implementing that and iterating the interface along the way. After that, or about in the same time we start coding the features. B) - I'm not sure how much wisdom we have accumulated. About some things sure, but natural multitouch interfaces or multimillion user web services are still quite new. If we would have followed Jacob Nielsens advice on everything, we woudn't have sites we have today. I think the best way is to keep updated what's out there and from there you can get inspired to find your own solutions. That's why I have iPads & iPhones, try to use most of the new services to understand how they work and how they're built. I try to learn from other people and their process (like with simple todo app, Cultured Code produces a lot of sketches and mockups <http://culturedcode.com/things/iphone/makingof/> and one of other Rails Rumble attendees described their process: [http://www.thevisualclick.com/notebook/2010/10/2010-rails- ru...](http://www.thevisualclick.com/notebook/2010/10/2010-rails-rumble-the- design-process-of-commendable-kids/) C) - In our company we usually have 2-3 person teams, where one of them is a designer, which is something I would recommend. Personally I think the best is if the designer can also implement the design, because Photoshop mockup is not the actual design, the app or it's interface is. For best result, you need to be charge of the whole interaction. D) - I'm not that sure which way around I got started, I had some classical arts education as a kid, and later started making websites and developed some web services. I'm quite bad programmer, altough in addition to html&css I can handle javascript, rails and php. I think the first step is to know what's is great and what isn't so you know how well you're doing in your own projects. So develope your taste by surrounding yourself with great design. And like in any other learning, the key is just practice. If you have coded hundreds of features, then by the same time I might have done dozen of designs. For me the hardest part still finding the right process for some cases. Sometimes I'm able to see the whole thing right way, and sometimes I'm just stuck or feel that something is wrong with the design without knowing what. ------ wushupork Hi Dan I also think that the stuff that came out of Rails Rumble looked pretty awesome especially done in 48hrs. I created ShelfLuv in about that timeframe as well and see both sides of the coin to use your terminology. Part A: To me the design and UX is first and foremost. Especially w/ a hackathon - think of your product like a runway fashion show. On the front side it just needs to look and work perfect. Under the hood for me, out of the gate doesn't matter as much as long as it works and isn't slow to the point that it affects the user's perception of the product. I typically try to think of the user's interaction/perception/experience first. Mockups in Photoshop are pretty useful to me, but so are HTML mockups. It all depends on what I am trying to achieve. A visual experience - playing around w/ that would be best served to me by toying around in Photoshop. An interaction experience, mocking variations of that in jquery is best because I can click around. I can touch and feel my app. However I mostly start everything with sketches on pieces of paper or my notebook. I try to draw different variations. I look at how other webapps/apps do them. With ShelfLuv there werent many ideas or variations. I didn't start having variations until I had something working to show. If there's nothing to show yet, I feel that people have no baseline with which to compare. It's a lot easier for most people to say A is better than B, than to just show them B and ask them if this is any good. Part B - I find that a layperson is immensely useful in this arena. One of my sounding boards is my wife. She's very intelligent but is not what you would call a techie or designer type. Alot of times I just want to use icons but many nontechie people will have no clue what these icons mean. Of course it's a compose icon - it's a pen and paper. Part C - I would say you can outsource visual design, but it would be hard to outsource the interaction design and how the app works. Interaction is a process that can be very iterative. You try something, it doesn't work and you try it again. Part D - I am an engineer by training but started focusing on user experience and interaction about midway in my career. I felt like I could have the most impact on users through a great product experience. I started by reading a lot of blogs and sites of great designers. I look at and try a lot of web apps and sites. I also buy a lot of iphone/ipad apps to see how they work and what they've done. Major obstacles for me is that I'm not a graphic artist and I can't design from scratch. I know designers who like to create textures and stuff from scratch and to me I feel more like a cobbler of design elements rather than an original creator of design. I will put this design element together with that element. I'm basically pretty handy at tweaking and modifying in Photoshop but ask me to create stuff in Photoshop and Illustrator from scratch using the pen/brushes/paths and I'm lost. ------ sahillavingia Actually, I'm doing this thing where I'm offering hackers around 5-10 hours of design work per week (plus additional direction help and the like) for a percentage of the company. Normally around 1-5%, depending on a bunch of things including valuation. I think it's a great deal. If I get 3% of your company, and my design help increases the value of your company by 10% (that's ridicolously easy, too!) you've already made a net profit out of the deal. What do you think? ~~~ spokey I'm not sure if this comment is quite appropriate on this thread (as it is a borderline commercial offer and quite possibly off-topic for the OP's question), but I think your model is interesting and I'd love to know a little more. 1) Is your 5-10 hours/week offer indefinite or for some fixed period? Are you capping the number of start-ups you are working with? (This offer doesn't seem to be infinitely scalable.) 2) Do you see this role more as employee-working-for-stock or as angel- investor-contributing-design-skills-instead-of-money? Maybe another way of asking that is: are you taking direction from the founders/owners or are you offering advice/support as you see fit? Are you OK with a founder who only wants you slice up a PSD she designed or are you looking for an adviser role? 3) I think there is a lot of sense in pg's advice around giving up a small percentage of the company in exchange for a much greater chance of success, but I'm not sure it is obvious that your offer is a "great deal" for the founders as you state. I'll accept that in some cases a good design can increase the value/success of a company by 10% or more but I think in this specific scenario (early stage start-up, possibly with long-hanging fruit design challenges): a) A 10% improvement in the _current_ value of the company probably isn't worth 3% of the _eventual_ value of the company if it is successful. That is, it may be easy to take a company from $1000/mo to $1100/mo through 5-10 hours of design, but barring major oversight I think it will be a lot more difficult to take a company from $10M to $11M through graphic/web design alone. b) On the founder side of the equation whether or not the design work will increase the value of the company more than it cost is really only half of the question. The other half is comparison shopping: is there a cheaper way to do this? For instance, if you assume a modest $500,000 exit then 3-5% is $15,000 to $35,000, which may be a roughly competitive rate for design services (e.g., that's $60 to $100/hr if you assume 50 5 hour weeks). Obviously if you assume a $1M exit those rates double. If you assume a $5M exit those rates grow by an order of magnitude, and I hope I'm not a cheapskate in thinking that $600 to $1000/hr is a disproportionately high rate for all but the most remarkable web designers and even then is probably only appropriate for the most design sensitive web apps (whichever those are). I may well be wrong, but I have a hard time believing that for most start-ups a bit of early stage design work really provides an additional 6-7 figures of valuation in the long run. Is that what are saying is "ridiculously easy"? c) A moderately successful start up should be able to afford market rates for design services, and I'd guess that it is rare for great rather than merely acceptable design to be the difference between moderate success and failure. Why shouldn't a firm just limp along with an acceptable design until they can afford a great one? (And if they don't have an acceptable design yet they can certainly get one for less than 3% of the company.) In other words, I think the major challenge to your offer isn't about whether or not design can offer a 10% improvement but more about whether or not 3% of the company is the easiest/cheapest/lowest risk way to get that improvement.

Metafilter comments vs. Youtube comments - joshwa http://www.thatsaspicymeatball.com/comments/ ====== deathbyzen I. Hate. Youtube. Comments. I have hated them forever. It's the one thing I can't wrap my fucking head around. How hard is it for a company valued at billions of dollars to hire some MODERATORS? I hate the stupid Digg-like approach of voting up and down comments by users. While that usually filters out ad spam and exceptionally racist or stupid comments, it is not enough. I'm not saying that I want MetaFilter-esque short essays on a fucking Chris Crocker vid, but I crave some semblance of order. Bah, I'm probably in the minority on this one. ~~~ gahahaha I don't know, but YouTube probably can't hire moderators for the comments, because then they would implicitly acknowledge that they CAN moderate stuff, and thereby open themselves up for lawsuits about posting copyrighted material. ------ chrisbroadfoot Needs moar stupidfilter. <http://stupidfilter.org/main/>

Colour e-reader with video in development - AndrewDucker http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/8610962.stm ====== Luyt I am very interested in deveopments in eInk technologies. I wish I could buy an eInk monitor with a DVI input so that I can use it for programming outside. I like to sit on a terrace or on the beach, but laptops/LCD screens are unreadable in bright sunlight; and these glossy screens they all seem to have nowadays don't help). I also noted the presenter rotates the prototype from landscape to portrait and back, but the video doesn't rotate with it. ------ unwind By the way, the cartoon video shown in the first video is Big Buck Bunny (<http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/>), an award-winning short created using open source software, primarily Blender. ------ ieure I hear it’ll be called “iPad.” ~~~ AndrewDucker An iPad doesn't need a backlight any more? Good Lord! When did that happen?

Ask HN: Email provider for sending transactional emails? - lucaspiller I run a website monitoring service, and send out email notifications to my customers whenever there is a problem. I&#x27;m currently using SendGrid with a shared IP, however a lot of my emails are being rejected due to blacklisted IPs. As the notifications don&#x27;t get through, it leads to not very happy customers.<p>Over the past month I&#x27;ve sent 75k emails, and nearly 5,000 have been blocked due to the IP being on spam lists (I should note that 0 of my emails have been marked as spam). My customers are usually small businesses who have overly aggressive spam filters, so that definitely doesn&#x27;t help.<p>I contacted SendGrid support and the only thing they could recommend was that I upgrade to a plan with a dedicated IP. Although $19.95 to $79.95 per month isn&#x27;t too bad, after you send 100k messages per month their prices go up quite a lot (it jumps to $165 for 200k messages), so I&#x27;ve been thinking of moving anyway. The only thing I use them for is as a SMTP server - I don&#x27;t use any of their marketing tools.<p>So.. can anyone recommend a good provider who will be more supporting? ====== djyaz1200 We use mailgun and have had a pleasant experience. Good luck!

Why Did Yahoo Buy Summly? - scholia http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-bought-a-30m-startup-2013-4 ====== theatraine I would be interested to see the Summly summarization of this article! I think it would read something like this: Yahoo bought Summly, a startup with an app that not many people used, made no money, and employed no technical geniuses (since it wasn't actually built by them), because Marissa Mayer believes summarization technology is "going to be huge for Yahoo". ~~~ runnr_az Yeah... I guess? Doesn't really help it make sense.... ~~~ harlanlewis I believe that is exactly the point. ------ jasonkester You know, I think I prefer to live in a world where giant tech companies occasionally act in strange, irrational ways that result in random people getting multi-million dollar windfalls. Especially if said people vaguely resemble, well, me. That being, entrepreneurial software folk running companies with trivially buildable products. That's the sort of person in my mind that _should_ have as many foolish megacorporations as possible stumbling over one another to randomly dump tens of millions of dollars in cash upon them. Given the alternative world, where all companies behave rationally at all times and nobody ever makes mistakes that could possibly make, say, me a gozillionaire overnight, I think I'll keep living in this world. Keep up the good work, Yahoo! _[Disclaimer: I own a small pile Yahoo stock (that made me a bunch of money in the 90's and has been taking it steadily back ever since), so I probably lost a few hundred dollars because of this particular deal. I'm happy to pay it, much as people who buy lottery tickets are happy to pay it. Having a crazy, aquisition-happy company out there doing its thing is more than worth the price]_ ~~~ macspoofing >You know, I think I prefer to live in a world where giant tech companies occasionally act in strange, irrational ways that result in random people getting multi-million dollar windfalls. You're in luck, that happens all the time with executive compensation packages. ------ ksherlock Maybe this was edited in later (I missed it the first time), but... >Though Summly's own Web site once said: "SRI International, with the help of the Summly team, built the summarization technology behind Summly," we are told that D'Aloisio "invented" the product's original technology. >In a statement provided to us by a Yahoo spokesperson, an SRI spokesperson says: "Basically, Nick developed the original code for Summly." >"After the original product was built, SRI supported development of the technology and provided artificial intelligence expertise in machine learning and natural language processing." I don't know about you, but I need a pretty large grain of salt. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y11ps1H6Aq4> is a youtube demo of his first app, trimit, 9 months and $300,000 in VC before summly. It seems 2 comprez ur mezages like this. Maybe that's the original code. ~~~ eridius At the 1 minute mark he says "some other.. form.. of documentation.. which I don't know what that is". So either he misspoke, or he didn't actually even develop that original app. ~~~ dangero The video isn't made by the Summly founder. It's just a random person reviewing the app. ------ podperson I used automatic summarization to try to reduce the article to a pithy tweet and ended up with: "Fuck, I don't know. And what's with Bezos investing in BusinessInsider? And what is Amazon's business plan anyway? And why does Apple's stock keep dropping whenever it gains market share?" ~~~ OGinparadise _And what's with Bezos investing in BusinessInsider?_ For peanuts they more or less buy good coverage in a widely read news site. A certain VC fund also invested in them and PandoDaily. It's a great investment, even if Business Insider goes kaput 2 years from now. ------ bsimpson I just read the whole article, and I still don't know why Yahoo! bought Summly. ~~~ spoiler I guess it has something to do with IP. The way I understood it was that the company Summly licenced the summarisation algorithm was selling it to Yahoo!, but they couldn't do that because Summly was using it, too. So, to get them out of the way, Yahoo! bought them and shut them down. Disclaimer: This is just the way I understood it, I might be partially or completely wrong. ~~~ dhaivatpandya That doesn't make much sense - as far as I understand, so far as the US, you cannot patent or hold a license over an algorithm, only an implementation thereof. ~~~ LucasCollecchia Yes, but if the algorithm is a trade secret and you're licensing it out with terms of use that aren't favorable to you, you may determine that its in your best interest to buy the company rather than get sued for breach of the licensing contract depending on how much cash you're anticipating to lose through that litigation. ------ spdy It´s a strategic investment to make people invested in Summly happy. <http://summly.com/about.html> Their will be follow ups and some of them might lean towards Yahoo on the next acquisition. ~~~ notlisted My thoughts exactly. The 17MM was a 'cheap' way to save face for big-name investors and "celebrities" who'd been duped. Circle-jerk money. "Angel Investors and Advisors include; Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Jessica Powell, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Seb Bishop, Shakil Khan, Spencer Hyman, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Vivi Nevo, Yoko Ono and many more. We are also working closely with News Corporation on the summarization of their content." Edit: actually, reading all of the comments on this page, I think my explanation is less likely than the "summly may have had a special license, and SRI couldn't be sold unless summly was acquired as well" (without resulting in lawsuits or sub-licensing deals) and/or "a nice way to pay more for SRI via the backdoor" (artificially increasing the value of the summly stock they held -> more $$ for SRI). Do we know how much stock SRI owned of the company? Perhaps they provided services in exchange for summly shares? Wouldn't be the first time. ------ volandovengo Interesting but confused on the conclusion... If the real story is that Yahoo bought the technology to summarize articles from SRI International, who partly owned Summly -> why did Summly's owners make 30 million? ~~~ Notre1 Exactly. I came here looking to see if anyone else had a good idea of what theory this article was trying to express. I think the author is trying to infer that Yahoo agreed to buy Summly, so that SRI could liquidate their equity in Summly. Maybe, SRI saw Summly as a loser and as part of their negotiations with Yahoo, they asked Yahoo to turn this loss position into a win. So, maybe, then that $30M price was really $20M as part of the SRI deal and then $10M for assets and aqui-hire talent of Summly itself. Acquiring Summly seems to have been an almost incidental side effect of a deal Yahoo made with SRI for a piece of "summarization technology." A source tells us that Yahoo has "agreements in place" with SRI for "knowledge transfer," and the acquisition of IP, code, and technology. Until Yahoo bought it, SRI International held equity in Summly. ~~~ UK-AL Eh, surely just paying that acquisition money directly to sri would be a better win? ~~~ samstave Maybe that would be too overt. Maybe they needed to get a way to get a license with SRI that didn't look like a me too act and also nullify existing licenses. If SRI actually had equity in Summly, then this is a way to pay off SRI, grab the license for Summly and potentially get SRI to make a change to its licensing agreement with other companies in Yahoo's best interest. However, I thought that Apple wholly owned SRI, which would make my speculation BS... ------ jgalt212 Perhaps Yahoo saw some positive benefit in paying off Summly's coterie of celebrity investors and advisers. <http://summly.com/about.html> ~~~ el_fuser Wow... That reads like a poster for the slogan "it's not what you know, it's who you know". ------ fnbr Are there sources for the $30 million? I've only seen it mentioned in secondary sources, never in an official Yahoo press release (or similar). I suspect that was leaked, and the real price was much lower. ------ bonjourmr Everyone around the world was saying 'Yahoo' a fortnight ago for the first time in a long time because of this purchase of summly and coincidentally, Yahoo also quietly became the default search in Safari for iPhones during March. I like to think this is all great marketing and survival positioning by Yahoo as the big 3 companies/partnerships (read on) rear up for an exciting next few years in technology. Why would Apple change the default search? Well Apple and Google are the main rivals in the mobile market, it makes sense for both Apple to choose an alternative default search engine, as they don't want to strengthen their main rival. I also think Apple's recent 'interest' in robotics (Siri, hiring ex- segway engineer) v.s. Google's robotic cars & Glass, this will be another front that Apple will have to fight Google on. "1 Billion People Will Use Mobile As Primary Internet Access Point In 2012" [http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/consumers- lov...](http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/consumers-love-their- smartphones-now.html) That leaves them with two options, the first being Bing. No way in hell would they choose Microsoft to partner with, with MS' purchase of Skype and close ties with FB you can expect MS to push harder than ever in the Mobile space, over the next few years (assuming they can tie all of their products together neatly). So that really only leaves Yahoo for search, which works out well for both companies; Yahoo get to survive the battle of the big 3 and still appear somewhat relevant and Apple are no longer strengthening their main rival. I really have no idea what I'm talking about but it sounds interesting. tl;dr - purchase of summly was marketing and survival by Yahoo ~~~ Me1000 Google is still the default search engine on the iPhone. They just removed the "google" button and replaced it with "Search" ------ mindcrime Dear Marissa: The next logical step for Yahoo! is to move into the enterprise. I know a great startup you could acquire that would accelerate your move into that space. I expect it could be had for somewhere around what you paid for Summly. Call me. Mindcrime ~~~ mgkimsal usually helps to put a phone number if you're expecting a call. ~~~ mindcrime It's in my profile. :-) ------ UK-AL Why didn't they just go direct to SRI? I'm guessing summly got a good lisencing deal. ~~~ nilkn I'm confused on how summly would have gotten a better licensing deal than Yahoo! could have managed. [Honest question.] ~~~ kd0amg Plain old price discrimination? I wouldn't expect SRI to try to get a Yahoo- sized license fee out of some tiny startup. ~~~ jeffgreco Sure, but would a tiny startup get exclusive rights? ------ jmduke Tech news from the USAToday news section and TechCrunch to Anandtech and, yes, Hacker News was dominated by news of the Summly acquisition for five days. That PR alone was well worth the purchase price. ~~~ volandovengo Hmmm... but this is bad PR. The PR read that Yahoo is acquiring a company but shutting down its product and getting only 2 of their engineers for 30 million dollars. PR like that gets Yahoo's name in the press but does nothing to improve the image that Yahoo has no idea what it's doing. ~~~ JacobAldridge _"does nothing to improve the image that Yahoo has no idea what it's doing."_ I think that's true, but only true to those people who read (or remembered or understood) beyond "Yahoo buys hot new company, hot new technology, hot new talent". The PR implication is that Yahoo is investing in once again being hot and new. For those of us who understand the details of the company and product being bought, Yahoo's reputation was already entrenched. For the majority of readers, however, "hot new Yahoo" was the takeaway[1]. [1] Based on my experience as a journalist / writer, and the half dozen people who raised Summly in conversation with me the week the acquisition went public. ~~~ harlanlewis But startup acquisition news doesn't reach the vast, VAST majority of Yahoo's current, prospective, or desired users. Even pretending news like this reached a broad audience (while also pretending that audience doesn't have the same context you're attributing to HackerNews readers), acquisitions aren't just expensive - they're expensive with a significant risk of creating longterm internal pain of varying types and degrees for what, at best, could be a shortterm positive blip in general opinion. How does this perceived misuse of funds and focus impact Yahoo employees? Their moral, productivity, and general satisfaction/enthusiasm? Does it make it easier to attract great new hires who meet Mayer's hiring standards? ([http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-employees-worry-that- ma...](http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-employees-worry-that-marissa- mayers-hiring-standards-are-too-high-2013-3)) Brand marketing has real value, but this has got to be the least efficient way to do it. ~~~ cookiecaper I don't know, who are Yahoo's prospective customers? Search advertisers, right? They need goodwill with small business owners, whether those businesspersons are technically inclined or not. I'm sure they reached many of that type with this announcement. What niche do you think Yahoo needs for a customer base but has totally failed to contact? ------ brudgers To the degree Summly's license to the technology was transferable, the purchase makes a lot of sense because it prevents strategic acquisition of Summly by a potential Yahoo competitor. Even if not transferable, the purchase prevents Summly from partnering with a Yahoo competitor, and that is very likely to have been allowed by Summly's license. With nearly $4 billion in net income last year, the purported purchase price is less than a penny to the dollar. ------ louischatriot It's great to get some insight on a deal that, frankly, I couldn't understand. I am of course biased, because I believe (like many others) that algorithms are bad at summarization, except for already well-structured content (news are usually like this). That includes most blogposts and videos. My startup (tldr.io) is trying to actually solve the summarization problem using crowdsourcing. For example, here is the summary of this article: [https://tldr.io/tldrs/516542c52dcbc1ab3b0000d2/heres-the- rea...](https://tldr.io/tldrs/516542c52dcbc1ab3b0000d2/heres-the-real-reason- marissa-mayer-bought-a-17-year-olds-startup-for-30-million) ------ securingsincity I actually stopped reading Gizmodo because i thought the article where they made him cry a few years back was too far. Shaming a 15 year old kid publicly no matter how annoying seemed too far. Now he successfully gets summly acquired and the support for and shade that has been thrown at this kid has been so massive. I still don't know what to think of the kid, but I do think that SRI's tech definitely meets the needs of Yahoo and would fit perfectly with their media content. ~~~ UK-AL I don't like how they treated him. However I think it does expose the difference between media reporting(tech genius,visionary, future leader, hard working) and actual reality(Narcissistic, child like, unprofessional). And those traits have been exposed again, since he claimed to invent the tech and developed the app in the media. Media have hailed shower of praises, mainly because he uses a top PR agency. Its kind of depressing for me, because it seems to mean being showy, and having a good PR facade is worth far more than people doing the actual work. ~~~ badgar > Its kind of depressing for me, because it seems to mean being showy, and > having a good PR facade is worth far more than people doing the actual work. Marketing is a huge part of the startup world. There's a reason people are told to stop building at MVP - what you build isn't really important, and you're really likely to throw away what you built and switch to something else. ------ jahansafd Very few people invent anything. Most developers with limited resources work with groundbreaking technologies(built by others) to create something meaningful. ------ LandoCalrissian My question then, is why didn't Yahoo just try and work with SRI International directly and not deal with Summly? ------ ig1 Flagged. This article contains zero new information and just speculation. Unless you were involved in the transaction you have no idea what was involved. Maybe they overpaid and maybe they didn't. If you believe Yahoo are stupid you're free to go and short Yahoo shares. They are after all a publicly traded company. Lets stop with all this stupid speculation where people rehash the small amount of public information for the purpose of linkbait. ------ fauldsh I'm getting increasingly intrigued to how much advertising they're getting for their $30m ------ fosterzone Well curated article Thanks ------ michaelochurch _Further, D'Aloisio deserves credit for outsourcing technology development and app development to the right firms, and coalescing their work into a product that made him millions._ I can't tell if this is a brilliant dog-whistle dig or if it's actually being said without irony. ~~~ pseut All of the articles I've read about Summly have a bit at the end where the author bends over backwards to not appear to be crapping on a 17yo. I read that passage the same way. ~~~ badgar Considering how much heat gizmodo got for calling out the same kid two years ago, I'm not surprised. ~~~ dopamean What's the story there? I'm unfamiliar. Link? ~~~ bobwaycott The founder (then 15 yrs old) was basically dishonest, annoying, ridiculous ... etc. More here: [http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app- deve...](http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-developer- cry) ~~~ zem not surprised they got heat - however annoying the guy was, that was a deeply mean-spirited article. ------ biswajitsharma Now about that Kid, D'Alosio ... I don't care he built it or not, he made money like a crazy chicken!! I think that's enough!! :) Coming back to Yahoo! I believe Marissa Mayer has something in mind. She is a smart lady, smart enough to point out what we are pointing out here. If not, we'll soon see another JC Penney episode here. ------ algosio The Sad Part is they could actually be out buying companies like <http://www.algorithms.io>

This is the IPaddress(37.59.164.208) calling a hacked script file on my server - ziggrat 37.59.164.208 - - [09/Nov/2012:00:31:55 -0600] "POST /scripts/wp-trackbacks9.php HTTP/1.1" 200 183 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 When i traced it i found the location as France and its going to Google homepage when i run it in the address bar. I'm unable to understand this and need your help HN. ====== dexcs It just a redirect to google: < HTTP/1.1 200 OK < Server: nginx < Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:26:14 GMT < Content-Type: text/html < Connection: keep-alive < Content-Length: 97 < Last- Modified: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:01:40 GMT < Expires: Sat, 10 Nov 2012 11:26:14 GMT < Cache-Control: max-age=86400 < Cache-Control: private < Cache-Control: must-revalidate < Accept-Ranges: bytes < <html> <head> <meta http- equiv="refresh" content="0; url=[http://www.google.com>](http://www.google.com>); </head> </html> ~~~ ziggrat Thanks. This bot is using a old wordpress hack. How can this kind of thing be stopped? I dont mean stopping it after it happens, I mean getting the bot down, maybe like DDOS it or something. ~~~ xvolter The easiest would be to modify your web server to reject requests to that URL. Therefore it no longer causes annoyances. However, if that URL is still being used, your best shot is to reject on a per-IP basis. You cannot DDOS any server, a DDOS attack works primary on web servers, and the server it's coming from isn't likely to have a web server that matters, since it just redirects DDOSing would be nearly impossible to accomplish without a huge effort. What may be easier is getting the website shutdown, if you trace the host provider or ISP you can file a claim and possibly get their connection or hosting turned off. ~~~ bmelton I don't mean to seem critical, but 1) it would be slightly better to DROP requests to the URL than to reject them and 2) you can DDOS plenty of other servers besides web servers. You're right of course that there likely isn't a server attached to the IP address (though you could likely tie up at least the one thread with programmatic recursion / redirects), but DDOSing isn't particular to web servers at all. ~~~ xvolter No, but DDOSing does require an open listener - the most common and easiest is a web server. If whoever is trying to use some old Wordpress hacks is smart, however likely that is, he/she would not have a ton of ports open. You can also drop requests if per-IP if you are setup on a web provider that has a hardware firewall, but I do not know your setup, so my recommendation was one that would work anywhere.

Ask HN: What are some small scripts you use daily? - poiuz What are some small scripts you use daily? ====== macNchz I wind up making lots of interim files when importing/exporting/munging/analyzing data–to help keep track of these things (CSVs, scripts and miscellany that I may or may not want to revisit in the future) I have a function I call _today_ to auto-create daily scratch directories: TODAY_DIR="$HOME/today/" DATE_DIR=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d') if [ ! -d $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR ]; then mkdir -p $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR fi; echo $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR So you can do stuff like this with less thinking/typing: cp somefile.csv $(today) I've been using this for a few years and continually find it handy, both at the command line and in keeping files clustered when I want to dig something up later. It is slightly less helpful if you regularly work past midnight, though! ------ mod Not exactly a script, but I work at home and sometimes I need to drown out the kids (or the wife!). I have this in my .bashrc: alias whitenoise='play -q -c 2 -n synth brownnoise band -n 1600 1500 tremolo .1 30' It plays some fuzzy whitenoise, which drowns them out and lets me keep focused (music is often distracting to me). ------ davidbanham I call this blingle. I call it after any long running operation that I want to be notified of. It pops a desktop notification and sends a push message to my phone. eg: make deploy; blingle #!/bin/bash MSG=${@:-"Job complete"} notify-send "$MSG" curl -s \ --form-string "token=TOKEN" \ --form-string "user=UID" \ --form-string "message=$MSG" \ https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json ~~~ st0le For a free alternative, check instapush.im or pushbullet ------ tedmiston I have letters like r and b aliased in my bash profile to check for and run a bash script, if it exists, in each project directory (r = ./run.sh, b = ./build.sh). In each of those scripts, I typically have a one liner depending on what the project requires. A simple build one is: #!/usr/bin/env bash make build And run: #!/usr/bin/env bash docker run foo/bar Or maybe: #!/usr/bin/env bash python manage.py runserver I might also add (source) environment variable settings, etc. Sort of like my own personal decentralized makefile. Then I add each script to my .git/info/exclude for each project. It saves so much time switching between projects to not have to remember any particular one's build or run commands. ~~~ z1mm32m4n This is brilliant; I think I'll start doing this. One slight modification: name the build and run scripts something that you will never expect to be in that repo (maybe like run-xyz.sh where xyz are my initials, 10 random characters, etc.). Then, the filename can be excluded in a global gitignore file. ~~~ tedmiston Yeah, good points. Maybe putting the script(s) inside a .whatever directory inside the project root like some other dev tools do is worth consideration. What do you think? ------ ggm This is awk which emits the stream of unique things, as they are seen. it doesn't require sorted input. It runs at the cost of building the obvious hash in memory so can drive you to swap over large inputs, but its portable, does not require post-install s/w typically not on small systems and it delivers outcomes fast. I use it all the time when I have some UNIX pipe emitting things and I want to "see" the uniques before I do sort | uniq -c type things. #!/bin/sh awk '{ if (!h[$0]) { print $0; h[$0]=1 } }' ~~~ tyingq I do something similar with Perl, since I know the syntax a bit better. It allows me to (from memory) scrub out non-unique things like timestamps. So, without the scrubbing: tail -f somefile | perl -ne '!$SEEN{$_}++ and print' Scrubbing off leading timestamps: tail -f somefile | perl -ne 's/^[0-9:]//;!$SEEN{$_}++ and print' ------ hboon I wrote [https://github.com/hboon/genie](https://github.com/hboon/genie) which lets me run create directory-specific aliases such as: push -> git push origin develop; git push origin master; git push origin --tags; terminal-notifier -title "Pushed to Git" -message "Project X" In another directory, push may push different branches. Ditto for pull, release, keep, etc Use them daily. ------ nonsequ I run an AHK script with a little over 2000 abbreviations (e.g. typing 'abbn' expands to 'abbreviation'). It helps me type 100+ WPM without too much strain. ~~~ luck_fenovo That's a cool idea. Do you have your file posted anywhere? If not I may cook something up on my own, I'm curious to try it out. ~~~ ajonit AHK has been working great for me over the years. My addresses, snippets of emails, expansions are all stored in an ahk file. I use various email addresses for different sites; so a@a would become aj(at)ajonit(dot)com or a@l would become admin(at)learnqtp(dot)com. The possibilities are endless. Few year's back I created a video for my blog readers and published an AHK template. You may download it here [http://www.learnqtp.com/get-productive- with-automation-autoh...](http://www.learnqtp.com/get-productive-with- automation-autohotkey/) ------ KJBweb I created a Perl script called anyconnector which allows me to jump around between different Cisco Anyconnect VPN's using details stored in KeePass entries. e.g. To connect: anyconnector -c env-name Disconnect: anyconnector -d Get status: anyconnector -s It gets used by my team all day, every day. ~~~ arfar Looks pretty handy! How do you interface with the KeePass database? Is there a library? with Perl bindings? ~~~ KJBweb There's quite a neat little library with an impressive amount of functionality for interacting with Keepass, called "File::KeePass;". Here's a copy of the script itself: [https://gist.github.com/kjbweb/38508fd92669101ec1fca4bea62bc...](https://gist.github.com/kjbweb/38508fd92669101ec1fca4bea62bcefe) It works on Mac's too, so I've been told. ------ charris0 My thinkpad running Linux is a bit temperamental when changing displays, often enumerating an existing display port as a new one. I use the following script to switch to dual external monitors at a standard resolution, and a counterpart script to switch back to the internal hidef monitor. If only I could reliably fix xfce4's panel placement all of the time...and not have to restart chrome and pycharm/intelliJ on each display change! #!/bin/bash EXT1=`xrandr --current | sed 's/^\(.*\) connected.*$/\1/p;d' | grep -v ^eDP | head -n 1` EXT2=`xrandr --current | sed 's/^\(.*\) connected.*$/\1/p;d' | grep HDMI | head -n 1` INT=`xrandr --current | sed 's/^\(.*\) connected.*$/\1/p;d' | grep -v ^DP | head -n 1` xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/DPI -s 96 xfconf-query -c xfce4-panel -p /panels/panel-1/size -s 28 xrandr \ --output VIRTUAL1 --off \ --output ${INT} --off \ --output ${EXT2} --mode 1680x1050 --pos 0x150 --rotate normal \ --output ${EXT1} --mode 1920x1200 --pos 1680x0 --rotate normal --primary ------ luord Something that I added to my bash profile is this simple `cd` override that triggers `workon` from `virtualenvwrapper` if the folder I'm accessing has a `virtualenv` with the same name. cd() { command cd "$@" [[ "$OLDPWD" == "$HOME"/Work/* && ! -z "$VIRTUAL_ENV" && "$OLDPWD" == *"${VIRTUAL_ENV##*/}"* && "$PWD" != *"${VIRTUAL_ENV##*/}"* ]] && deactivate [[ -z "$VIRTUAL_ENV" && "$PWD" == "$HOME"/Work/* ]] && next="$(sed -e "s/^.*Work\///" -e "s/\/.*$//" <<< "$PWD")" && [[ -d "$WORKON_HOME"/"$next" ]] && workon "$next" && unset next } Yes, too many one-liners and short-circuits are usually a no-no, but it's not like anyone else is ever going to use this and I like these shortcuts. ------ hilti Syncing current dev directory to my webserver using rsync multiple times a day: rsync -rlptvDC --progress --rsh="ssh -l username" * myserver.com ------ stevekemp I created a git-repository of the scripts I use often: [https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util](https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util) That seems to be somewhat popular on github, but I rarely receive feedback so I'm not sure if people star because they use them too, or just because they suspect they might. ------ carapace I have a lil thing I call "did" that just greps my shell history for a term, sorting and de-duplicating the result: $ cat `which did` grep $1 ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq I also set HISTSIZE=10000000 I don't mind having a large history file laying around because it's so useful. ~~~ mod Thanks for this one. I hadn't stumbled on a good way to search my history before. ~~~ carapace Cheers. :) ------ nicwolff This Bash function rebases and pushes all my feature branches on the upstream "develop" branch: rebase-all () { old=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`; stashed=`git stash`; for b in $(git branch --format '%(authorname) %(refname:short)' | sed -ne "s/^`git config --get user.name` //p" | grep -- -); do git checkout $b && git rebase origin/develop && git push --force || ( git rebase --abort && echo Could not rebase $b ); echo; done; git checkout $old; if [ "$stashed" != "No local changes to save" ]; then git stash pop; fi } ------ aynulhabib I'm in sales for a surveying/feedback SaaS co. Before demos I brand the survey/account with the prospect's company's colors & logo. During the demo I send custom branded, inline email surveys to a test gmail account to help my prospect understand the survey respondent POV. I also have to delete that test-survey email every hour so that the next prospect I demo isn't privy to who is exploring us. I often have to do 4-8 demos a day so as you can imagine that got old fast. I wipe the inbox for my test gmail account every hour at the :45 minute mark using a ruby script. I don't automate the sending because it's part of the education of the prospect. ------ david-cako [https://github.com/david-cako/flac-phobic](https://github.com/david- cako/flac-phobic) Biggest timesaver in the world for someone who listens to as much music as I do and doesn't want to deal with manually transcoding FLAC files. iTunes and Apple Music will soon support FLAC natively, though -- previously it was out of necessity, space, and not wanting to use VLC and lose my main/single use of my Apple Watch. It's still about the latter two. I recently also set it to output a manifest that I can feed into rsync on my work computer to pull my library from my backup server. ------ tmaly I have a small perl script I wrote called helpme by default it shows a list of topics. Then if you run it with the topic, it displays the details about the topic. I use it to remember how to do less frequent stuff at my day job. ~~~ shincert How does it work? ~~~ tmaly Its super simple 11 lines of code then lines for the topics and description. I have a topics hash/dictionary. If the helpme command is run without a topic argument, it prints out all the topic keys to the dictionary one per line. If it is run with a topic argument, it just prints out the value for that topic. ------ bitshepherd I wrote a Docker helper script, which resets it to a baseline state when I need to clear out cruft post-restart. I call it harpoon, so I can harpoon the whale when I go to restart my dev machine. ~~~ shincert I'm interested. Care to share? ------ bilalq bash functions: # Helper function for running command in each subdirectory under current one. function each { if [ -z $1 ]; then : # If no command is given, then this is a no-op. else find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -not -path '*/\.*' -type d -exec sh -c "(echo {} && cd {} && $* && echo)" \; fi } zsh functions: # Helper function for navigating tmux sessions export WORKSPACE_ROOT=$HOME/workspace ws() { if [ -z $1 ]; then if [ -z $TMUX ]; then tmux attach-session else cd $WORKSPACE_ROOT fi elif [[ $1 == 'ls' ]]; then tmux list-sessions else tmux attach -t $1 || cd $WORKSPACE_ROOT/$1/src; tmux new-session -s $1 fi } # Helper function for running command in each subdirectory under current one. each() { if [ -z $1 ]; then # If no command is given, just exit else find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -not -path '*/\.*' -type d -exec sh -c "(echo {} && cd {} && $* && echo)" \; fi } ------ davewasthere I have a deployment script that is part of my one-click deployment to the customer's webserver. It's kind of a legacy to having really crap interwebs though, as my upload used to be in the 700-900 kbit/sec range, so it strips out anything from the deploy package that isn't absolutely essential to create sort of a delta of changes. Makes deployments blistering fast now that I've got 30 Megabit/sec up though... :) ------ qubyte I wrote a docker-wrapped script to create keys and certificates for use with HTTPS for development. These are configured with algorithms which modern browsers won't complain about. It also allows alternate domains. [https://hub.docker.com/r/qubyte/cert- creator/](https://hub.docker.com/r/qubyte/cert-creator/) ------ anotheryou \- a bat to launch some programs as admin on windows on startup ahk scripts: \- Easy Window Dragging (KDE style) \- Rocker (click left-right mouse button to go forward in explorer etc, right- left to go back) \- hidedesk (hides desktop icons unless I click on the desktop, sadly a bit buggy) \- some custom script to unify hotkeys for the brightness of my external dell monitor and my laptop screen. browser fixes: \- some drag to scroll js for greasmonkey \- shortcut for bookmarking to pocket with keyboard only (with tags) ------ smpetrey Over the years I’ve taught some of my (macOS user) co-workers the magic of the Automator.app It’s transformed the office. It’s the little things ya know. ~~~ siquick Can you give some use case examples? ------ sprobertson `watch-reload [watch dir] [reload domain]`, which watches for changes in a directory and triggers a reload for tabs matching a certain domain using a Chrome extension. `watch-copy [copy to dir]`, which watches for changes in the current directory and builds and copies to another directory. `set-lights [group name] [on/off/high/low]`, which posts commands to a Hue bridge. ------ tranvu I start projects very often and find myself using my scaffolding [tool]([https://github.com/vutran/zel](https://github.com/vutran/zel)) for minimal dotfiles (which are downloaded from a repo) very often. Also use it a lot for syncing dotfiles in my user directory between my work and home computers. ------ matt_s I like using a lot of aliases and chaining them together if I can and it makes sense. The most common one I use all the time is one that changes the command prompt to show what git branch I'm on when in that directory. Just google it if you'd like. If you repeat some command a lot or a chain of commands and it takes a lot of tedious typing, then script it. ------ 12s12m I have a simple script called ~/bin/shipit web [master=] $ cat $(type -P shipit) #!/bin/bash exec ./shipit web [master=] $ This allows me to tweak every projects deploy script and also maintain it in version control. ------ simplyianm A very unsafe python script to unescape strings. #!/usr/bin/env python import sys def unescape(string): print eval(string) if __name__ == '__main__': unescape(sys.stdin.read()) ------ koolba I have a shell alias that creates a temp directory labeled with the current time stamp and suffixed tag then changes to it. Makes it very quick get a new scratch area for shell fu. Plus all the scratch dirs are in one place so cleanup is a breeze to free up space. ~~~ munchor Sharing is caring? :) ~~~ koolba Ask and ye shall receive! make-scratch-dir () { local name="$1" local pattern='^[a-z0-9\\-]+$' if [[ "$#" != 1 ]]; then echo "Usage: make-scratch-dir <name>" 1>&2 return 1 elif [[ ! "$name" =~ $pattern ]]; then echo "Invalid name: ${name}" fi local full_path="$HOME/tmp/scratch/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)-${name}" mkdir -p "${full_path}" pushd "${full_path}" echo "Now in temp dir: ${full_path}" } The directory change is done via pushd so you can hop back via popd. Also, it restricts the suffixes to ensure the directories are all "simple" names. ~~~ effie I didn't know of pushd, very interesting, may be useful for directory traversal in general. ------ danbolt I typically have a script that prints out my local IP, instead of if/ipconfig or some OS UI. If I'm hosting a static page with an HTML5 game, it's then pretty easy to access it on another computer or my phone. ------ pvaldes Classify digital photographs that I need to review by its content. Import/export data from/to a DB, analyze it statistically and show graphically the info. Pretty standard. ------ bazillion I use this to do a `git pull` on all of my folders inside of my "sites" folder: #!/bin/bash for i in /sites/*/.git; do ( echo $i; cd $i/..; git pull; ); done ~~~ stevekemp Take a look at `mr` which allows you to script updating/checking out/etc on a large number of git, mercurial, and other repositories: [https://myrepos.branchable.com/](https://myrepos.branchable.com/) For example I store all my repos beneath ~/Repos/ so I can update them all, checking out any missing ones with: cd ~/Repos/ mr checkout mr update ------ coinjobber There's a gui app on top of the script, so not sure if it counts, but I find SelfControl (selfcontrolapp.com) indispensible for staying focused each day. ~~~ shincert I've installed it recently but some sites are hard. For example, I'd block YouTube in the blink of an eye, but what if I really need to look up a video tutorial or something in the middle of a work session? ------ zexodus my screens are somewhat too bright if i want to do work at night so #!/bin/bash xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --brightness $1 xrandr --output HDMI-0 --brightness $1 xrandr --output DVI-D-0 --brightness $1 ~

Google maps cut prices by 88% - njx http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57459328-93/google-slashes-price-88-for-using-google-maps-api ====== georgemcbay $0.50 per 1000 maps is way better pricing than $4 per 1000 maps, yet still a lot more expensive than using OpenStreetMap even if you factor in CPU and bandwidth costs to run your own data/tile servers. Assuming OSM is "good enough" for your usage when compared to Google Maps, I don't think this pricing change really modifies the decision much for a lot of people. This may slow down the tide of those switching over but I don't think it will reverse or stop it. ~~~ stickfigure Agreed, this is too little too late. We're about to roll out a major maps-based feature that we've been working frantically on for the last several weeks (a yelp-like discovery system for amateur athletic events). Despite having _extensive_ past development experience with Google Maps, the price forced us to go with an OSM-based system (MapQuest tiles + Leaflet). The surprise? Leaflet/OSM is actually a lot _nicer_ to develop against than Google Maps. Leaflet is a superior API, and the fact that it's open source means I'm never left wondering "WTF?" when there is some strange drawing glitch. I'm never going back. There are a handful of features that Google Maps provides that OSM does not, and the quality of the Google geocoder is slightly superior. But for drawing a map and icons/polygons, scrolling to determine search bounds, etc, OSM is a superior solution. I would never have discovered this without getting "pushed out of the nest" by price. One catch: To do HTTPS, we have to proxy the tiles. No big deal. ~~~ stickfigure ...and now it's deployed. You can see it here: <https://www.voo.st/> ~~~ white_devil _"You don't have JavaScript enabled. Good luck with that. You're probably also running a painfully old web browser. It hurts us to see you suffer so."_ You might want to tone that down a notch. I'm running Opera v12, but just keep JS off by default, white-listing sites as necessary. ~~~ stickfigure Oops! This is one of those things that was supposed to be rewritten but never did. I guess the lesson is to be more careful about leaving snarky comments in public-facing copy... you might forget to change it. Thanks for the reminder, this will be fixed this afternoon :) ------ chris123 "Closing the barn door after the horse is gone" is the first thing that popped into my mind when I read this headline. The second thing was that they were being "penny wise and pound foolish" when they raised prices in the first place (last October, I guess it was). So they got like six months of revenue bump, pissed a lot of people off and created an opportunity for at least one big and viable competitor. Smart. And now they flip flop. The message is that if they think they can bend you over a barrel and have their way, they will. And then, if the competitive landscape changes, giving you a chance to get their dick out of your *ss, they will try to kiss and makeup (until they sense their next opportunity to bend you over). What did idiot Bush say? "Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me twice..." <http://youtu.be/eKgPY1adc0A> ~~~ ww520 Google has lost lots of credibility among 3rd party developers using their API and services with the dramatic price hike with Google Maps and AppEngine. You would never know when they will decide to jack up the price again. ~~~ angkec Exactly what I was thinking. First reaction from me was that they will raise the price again when they gain market share, second reaction was a quiet note to myself that if they ever drop price on AppEngine like they did to GMap I shall not go back since my startup was hurt so bad with their vendor lock-in and dramatic price raise. ------ jeffnappi It's pretty shady how Google muscled out the competition by offering Google Maps for free after the acquisition of Keyhole. They basically murdered MapQuest and other "overpriced" solutions only to raise their price to even higher levels once they had a near monopoly on the embedded maps market. Clever, but dirty. Certainly this could be considered "evil". ------ cs702 Wow. The parties that will ultimately suffer most from this are Navteq and TomTom, which now charge between one and two orders of magnitude more than Google for map data. For car makers seeking to add built-in navigation to their vehicles, Google Maps is now a much more compelling choice than either of those two companies' offerings. (FWIW, TomTom is reportedly Apple's supplier of map data.) ~~~ rmc They aren't doing this because they want to hurt TomTom & Navteq. They are doing this because _they are suffering_ from OpenStreetMap, who charges many orders of magnitude less than Google Maps _even with this price drop_. ~~~ jan_g The problem with open street maps is that it so much worse than google maps. Orders of magnitude worse. I love the concept and in theory that concept is unbeatable (who else but those living in the area have the most intricate knowledge of roads, paths, etc?). But as of now, it is simply not comparable. Many features missing, and the data is very incomplete (many streets missing, missing buildings and street numbers, parks, POIs, ...). ~~~ tedunangst But OSM can get better, and better faster. I toyed with it just a bit and fixed a few things myself. Google maps? I filed a bug or two, then _two years_ later they closed it as not applicable. ~~~ idspispopd With a sufficient critical mass now in or transitioning to OSM, it's trivial that OSM will get better. If Apple are going to contribute to OSM(which is likely based on their shared project history) then it's expected to increase in quality quickly. However, even without their contribution, OSM is already at a level of maturity to compete with the bulk of GM implementations. It seems that most people just need basic location services. ------ latchkey We switched from Google Maps to OSM because they were too expensive. Now that we are using the Leaflet JS lib, we are really happy with it. Not only is it a fairly nice API, but it is open source, so it is much easier to debug than working with Google's obfuscated code. Even with this price reduction, I see no reason to even consider switching back. The only downside to OSM is that we needed the tiles served up through https since our site is always https, but there are workarounds for that. ;-) ------ jeffnappi There's a good discussion on this over at the Reddit thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/vhj7g/google_sl...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/vhj7g/google_slashes_price_88_for_using_google_maps_api/) I found this comment very interesting: "I'm a developer for a major online brand and finding our locations is an utterly crucial part of our business. When Google started charging us for mapping they played hard when coming to a deal to pay for their services. They spelled out a price and there was no negotiating. The arrogance from anyone we had contact with at Google was mind-blowing. We quietly re-developed our location search to use to Bing and pulled the trigger one day. Needless to say Microsoft was more than happy to have our business and was very helpful. As far as mapping, Bing is surprisingly accurate and competitive. We've never looked back. Google wanted over 2 million per year just to show our locations." ------ mgkimsal about. damn. time. Yes... they'd only recently hiked their prices (last year?) but they shouldn't have in the first place. I'd priced out using google maps for a service, and it was cost prohibitive. However, so was bing maps, and getting a firm price from bing was even harder because my use case didn't fit in 'standard use cases'. In our case, apparently using a mobile app to add metadata to a location constituted 'asset tracking', which puts you in to a whole other level of pricing stratosphere. I just get the feeling that many mapping apps out there that use google/bing/whatever are totally skirting the actual real pricing and use case terms, much like loads of people copy Photoshop. As long as Adobe turns a blind eye to some level of piracy, it keeps Photoshop top of mind and gives people fewer reasons to seek alternatives. ~~~ ghshephard I'm curious why the hostility. Isn't Google's positioning little more than a simple factor in your decision making process as to which mapping provider you wish to use? Indeed, I'm wondering why the HN crowd isn't _upset_ at the reduced pricing, because now it reduces the incentive to use (and contribute to, improve) OSM. ~~~ mgkimsal Yeah, it probably came across as a bit hostile, because trying to get accurate pricing models from various sources was a big pain. Google has/had a lead in this market because of an earlier behaviour of encouraging open/easy use of their maps and APIs. Without much warning, they _significantly_ raised pricing, and now have significantly reduced it, in less than 9 months. They've lost a lot of credibility, and it's becoming more apparent that the 'do no evil' era mentality there is going away. They didn't drop prices just because they "listened to customers". If they'd bothered to ask customers beforehand, they'd have known $4/1000 is just way too much for most users. Instead, they reacted hastily due to a perceived threat of Apple entering the market, and probably a big exodus of the smaller players who were using them before (also known as tomorrow's larger players). ~~~ ak217 I think part of the reason for these fluctuations is that certain divisions within Google are under a lot of pressure to be profitable. So maybe Maps were really looking hard to make money because this kind of order came down the line from Page or whomever (I'm sure that division has a comparatively huge budget, with their scale of operations on the ground). After which maybe they realized that the kind of profitability that drives developers away is not what they were looking for. The whole "do no evil" handwringing is a bit misplaced here, I think. Google is providing a service, they're free to set their prices. They're not trying to sabotage the OSM project, and the api remains free for not for profit use. ~~~ ghshephard If anything - Google was greatly helping the OSM project by directing so much energy towards it. ------ corywatilo It's about time. It's nice to see Google is feeling the pressure from other (relatively up-and-coming) mapping services like OpenStreetMaps and MapBox to the point where they actually made their prices more competitive. Also I've worked with several large websites who have moved from GMaps to Bing Maps over the past few years. GMaps is great, but ultimately not worth the price at $4/1000, especially for a small site operator like myself. ------ andye I don't like google more and more...when they didn't feel any competition out there, they gave you a very high price. And when there are some other choices, they reduce the price sharply. Why not just give the developers the low price first? Take the GAE as the example, if you enable billing, you have to pay at least $9 a month, no matter how much more you are using over the quota. Now, Google is not friendly to developers at all. ~~~ tbatterii GAE is for "big boy" apps not projects for hobbyists. The pricing reflects that. ------ sheff This price reduction looks like it is only for sites supported by advertising / unmonetised sites. Any startup planning on charging for an app or service which incorporates any kind of map will still have to pay a minimum $10,000 a year license fee to use Google Maps, which is ridiculously high as a starting point. What Googles mishandling of the charging changes has done is to heavily publicise the fact that the alternatives (mainly OSM) are now good enough for major companies to switch to without much hassle. ~~~ chrisbroadfoot It's possible to use the free API on a commercial site. ~~~ sheff I was just going by the "Do I need to use Google Maps API for Business?" in the FAQ here :<http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps-faq.html> . "If you are charging a fee for access to your Maps solution, whether for a business or consumer audience, you are required to purchase the Maps API Premier." To me this reads as, any SAAS web app which used a Google map anywhere would be required to pay $10,000 per year plus usage charges. ~~~ zackham <https://developers.google.com/maps/terms> 10.1.2(a): "You must not charge users or any other third party any fee for the use of the Maps API Implementation, the Service, or the Content ... " You can use it on a commercial site, but the maps implementation must be available to free users. It limits your options but there are plenty of sites that are commercial ventures and work within these limitations. ------ josephlord iOS 6 may be a big part of this. They might have preferred to reduce prices to other customers before but if they offered it to everyone they would have had to offer it to Apple who may have been the majority of their maps revenue and it was also a mechanism to add cost to Android's key competition. Now Apple are leaving anyway the difference that the price cut makes will be smaller (in absolute terms) and it will not harm Android either. ------ rmc Good to see OpenStreetMap starting to really shake up geodata. ------ JiPi I wonder if will affect Geocoding limits too? [https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/#...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/#Limits) ~~~ JiPi "if it will" _ ~~~ ThePherocity You can edit a post ^ ------ zackham Wow this is fantastic news. We are in the process of shifting some of our usage to OSM (and will likely continue) but this makes GMaps a reasonable expense now. ------ PatrickL We developed some webbased application using Google Maps and before going in beta, had to change to OSM because of change of Google's pricing structure (we simply cannot afford the 10.000+$ API Premier license fee). But we are hopelessly stuck with OSM are not able to determine the exact location based on address details. Is anyone interested to help out for a few hundred $ ....? ------ joeblau Thank goodness! I made a speed trap tracking (vroomtrap.com -- graveyard) program a while ago that never got off the ground, but when I heard about their price increase, I was dumbfounded. All in all; I have been pretty amazed by Google's new "monetize everything" initiative. Glad to see that competition from OSM and others is keeping them in check. ------ bojanbabic I hope they will do same with appengine prices. I'd be willing to return if they had more reasonable pricing. ------ jpb0104 This doesn't seem to affect their Enterprise prices does it? ------ danielrm26 Someone's afraid of iOS 6 Beta 2. ------ Wajeez A bit too late?

AMD Ryzen 7 2700X User Publishes Benchmarks and Overclocking Results - O_H_E https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700x-user-publishes-benchmarks-overclocking-results-ahead-of-launch/ ====== VladTheImplier Lovely news! This is my next CPU after many years of my trusty FX8350@4.8 GHz. Last time I waited for the second revision of the architecture to avoid the usual launch hurdles. Christmas is apparently coming in April this year. ~~~ letsgetsilly Same here. As a web developer and gamer it's hard to ignore the Intel lineup, but I'm a big fan of supporting the under-dog, and it makes it easy when there's so much value packed in. I assume that motherboards with new chipsets will be released as well, but I've heard less about them. ~~~ O_H_E The Ryzen 2 lineup should work on the same AM4 socket, AMD claims that the newer X470 chipset will give better performance. ------ nobleach As someone who purchased (early adopted) the Ryzen 5 2400g APU a couple of days after release, I regret every bit of it. We still don't have any motherboards that support it well. I've heard the ASUS boards do okay but they have to be flashed to a new BIOS version (with a different processor in the socket). I'm glad that folks like the hype, but the reality is just terrible. ~~~ linuxftw > I regret every bit of it. Why make a statement without even one item of support as to why you regret it? The ASUS board problem sounds inconvenient, to say the least, but the way your phrased it implies it doesn't effect you in particular. Comments on a popular online electronics retailer's website seem to be positive for this model. ~~~ nobleach No, I've heard good things about the ASUS. The ASRock (which is what I bought) is absolutely terrible. I regret buying the ASRock because I now have a computer that freezes constantly. It's not related to processor load or heat. It simply just doesn't work well at all. Sometimes an hour, sometimes 5 minutes.... I'm hoping I'm phrasing this well enough. ~~~ swindmill FWIW I am running a two week old Ryzen 5 2400G and ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Gaming-ITX/ac setup with rock solid stability under Windows 10. I did end up having to run my 3200MHz memory at 2933Mhz to avoid some issues. This is the max memory speed the CPU supports anyways so I don't consider it a large loss. The ASRock published memory QVL agrees with my finding that 3200MHz isn't stable with the specific memory I'm using. See [https://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/Fatal1ty%20X370%20Gaming- ITXac...](https://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/Fatal1ty%20X370%20Gaming- ITXac/index.asp#MemoryRR) What ASRock model are you using? Are you sure the culprit is the CPU or motherboard and not another component? ~~~ nobleach I'm running the micro-atx AB350M Pro4 AM4. One can never be TOO sure that it's not something else, but I've run it on one stick of ram, with no other peripherals (removed WiFi PCIe card) and the problem persists. Still, the single stick of ram is the best it's ever run. I'd love to run at 2933, but it "seems" to freeze even more at those speeds. I hate that this is all non- scientific anecdotal evidence. That seems to be right in line with everything else over at the ASRock forums. ~~~ dragontamer As an owner of an x360 Raven Ridge Envy, I'm also having similar issues. GPU Drivers on Raven Ridge seem to be borked at the moment. I'm running Win10, default drivers (which seem to be 17.7 GPU drivers). HP Envy x360 laptop CANNOT upgrade to more recent drivers. Have you tried updating to 18.3 or later GPU drivers?? Raven Ridge is allegedly all the same die, so I wouldn't be surprised if the iGPU drivers between both of our systems have a similar issue. But yeah, its looking to me like Raven Ridge (the iGPU parts) still have some warts. The pure CPU Ryzen parts had warts too when they were released, but they were fixed much more quickly. ~~~ nobleach I'll give updating the GPU drivers a shot and report back this evening. It's now become my "I'll try anything" setup. ~~~ dragontamer Yeah, its a shame too. As long as my laptop doesn't crash, its actually kind of awesome. But crashing makes it unable to do any kind of "serious" work. Nothing breaks a workflow like a forced unexpected reboot. This "crashing" issue seems to be isolated to Raven Ridge. I've seen a lot of complaints about it here and there online. There was an obscure crash on Pinnacle Ridge CPUs (1800x, Threadripper, and EPYC) on Linux, but it was allegedly fixed months ago. So based on my experience and research, it seems like Raven Ridge needs to be avoided. Its drivers just aren't good enough for prime time yet. Let me know if you're able to successfully update to something newer. ~~~ nobleach Oddly, wiping the thing out and installing with a brand new download of Windows 10 from MS's site has done wonders. My old install media was pretty old. I haven't installed a single external driver for anything this time around and it hasn't crashed. My Vega video driver was even recognized. I'm gonna let it run for a day or so before declaring any victory. Fun side note, I JUST placed an order for an ASUS mobo to replace this one. ------ IronWolve Beating an 8700K and 7820x, not bad at all. Nice to see AMD giving Intel some competition again. Hopefully this leads intel to drop prices, ~~~ Carioca The 8700K's main draw over the Ryzens is single-core performance though. ~~~ dragontamer True, but it looks like these 2700X will come out under the 8700K's price point. So if a Ryzen7 2700X has better multithreaded (aka: compile times, blender rendering, etc. etc.) speeds than something spec'd ~$50 to ~$100 more than it, that's a winner by any stretch of the imagination. Single-core performance is most important in Javascript and Video Games. But most production tasks these days are multithreaded. ------ flyinghamster Nice incremental update, but since I already have a Ryzen 7 1700 on an Asrock X370 Taichi and it's been wonderful, I'll take a pass. If I hadn't already upgraded from my FX-6100, though, it would be worth looking into this one. As it stands, already having the 1700, I'd move up to a Threadripper if I could afford to upgrade, since a new motherboard would be needed anyway. ~~~ RussianCow > since a new motherboard would be needed anyway. Minor correction: The Ryzen 2000 series uses the same socket, so you can use the same motherboard, although AMD claims that the newer X470 chipset will give you better performance. Either way, I agree with your assessment: It doesn't seem worth it to upgrade if you already have a Ryzen 7. ~~~ dogma1138 The x470 and 370 chipsets are identical it’s a rebrand. They changed some of the power delivery requirements to match the higher TDP of some of CPUs and apparently not all previously made boards were upto snuff or at least that is the party line. ------ Aardwolf > It also comes with a clear fan, for better RGB light illumination than its > predecessor which only had an RGB ring. How did the RGB naming trend get started? Rgb leds and colorful illuminated gaming pc's both already existed for decades. But only recently I saw the name RGB pop up in motherboards, keyboards, etc... as if it's something new ~~~ drakenot I recently built a new PC so I had to wade into this space again. The main difference I believe is that many components themselves now have their own LED lighting. Before, it was primarily LED fans or light strips. Now, motherboards have their own LED line traces. Ram has it's own LED lights. There is also support to control the colors of these components from software. ~~~ krylon I just wish the lighting told me something useful. If the CPU fan changed color to indicate temperature or CPU load, that would be _really_ cool. Likewise, if RAM lighting indicated the rate of data transfer. That would be pretty awesome. But all this fluff just to make PC more pretty seems pointless to somehow. (Don't get me wrong, if you like that sort of thing, by all means, enjoy it. My sister's boyfriend has a gaming PC with a big glass window in the case so one can see all the pretty lights quietly shifting around. It _is_ pretty, and I bet it's boatloads of fun to look at when tripping.) ~~~ sangnoir > I just wish the lighting told me something useful. There's a cross-platform, open source project that does this[1]. You can even script it and bind colors and effects not just to CPU load but to any variable (I don't know - maybe requests being served per second) 1\. [https://github.com/dcerisano/RGB-LED-Motherboard-Header- Driv...](https://github.com/dcerisano/RGB-LED-Motherboard-Header-Driver-App) ~~~ krylon That is really, really cool! My PC case does not have a window, so I will never know the difference. But it is very cool one can do that! ------ Retric Looks good. I am going to wait to see Intel's response, but this may finally be worth upgrading from an overclocked 2600k mostly used for gaming. ------ baybal2 I wish AMD will make newer generations of their desktop CPUs chipsetless just as their motherboard cores. For Intel, going for a separate chipset is a requirement dictated by their design process and big die sizes, for AMD, it is just a way to make an additional $10-$20 per CPU sale. Chipsetless setup should allow for smaller motherboards with better POL setup. ------ shmerl So what's the best upgrade path from 1700X, 2700 or 2700X? 2700X sounds more like an upgrade from 1800X. ~~~ TwoNineA Why do you want to upgrade the 1700X? What does the 2000 line bring other than a 15% (being very optimistic) performance gain? ~~~ shmerl Personally, because my CPU has a hardware bug[1], which is now worked around by disabling package C6 state, and I already went through RMA for the segfault bug, so I'd rather now get a newer CPU to begin with. [1]: [https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683](https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683) ~~~ IronBacon I think I've read locks/hangs' reports even with newer APUs, and at this moment I'm not sure if disabling C6 state on package (or was it core?) is an effective workaround. Or the suggestion to slightly increase voltage or a light overclock. I wanted to upgrade to Ryzen but I don't want to spend time to troubleshoot the HW. Seems like it's only triggered on a BSD/Linux system, don't know if they were joking when they said that Windos is never that idle... ~~~ shmerl _> I think I've read locks/hangs' reports even with newer APUs, and at this moment I'm not sure if disabling C6 state on package (or was it core?) is an effective workaround._ For me it is. It's triggered by the firmware setting: Advanced > AMD CBS > Zen Common Options > Power Supply Idle Control = "Common current idle" (instead of auto) That disables package C6 state for me (checked with zenstates.py), and freezes and random reboots disappear after that: C6 State - Package - Disabled C6 State - Core - Enabled On auto setting for the above, I get: C6 State - Package - Enabled C6 State - Core - Enabled And it highly annoyingly randomly freezes and reboots in such case. Another workaround is in the linked thread, to compile the kernel with special rcu options, I tried that, and it works, but it's not really a good method. _> don't know if they were joking when they said that Windows is never that idle..._ I don't think they are joking. ~~~ IronBacon I've read of people that experienced hangs even with the RCU workaround. About the C6 state is good to know, but the lack of some kind of official confirmation from AMD is kinda disturbing as it looks like the change to the BIOS came from them. I'm really torn... Edit: disturbing is not the right word, disappointing is better ~~~ shmerl Yeah, lack of communication on these bugs from AMD is really annoying, especially since there is no way to know whether they are fixed in newer CPUs already or not. ------ mciancia Clickbait, overclocked Ryzen 7 2700X scores the same as i7 7820X. It's a bit different story ~~~ pcr0 For about $100 cheaper.. The big news here is Intel not having a monopoly on desktop CPUs anymore. I personally remember Intel being the only serious CPU choice for building a desktop since at least 2015. Now a lot of low-medium high desktop builds are using Ryzen instead for the perf/$. ~~~ digi_owl Thats because AMD basically bet the farm on the GPU replacing the FPU for doing floating point math, but never got any real traction for it on the OS level. ~~~ keldaris I'd buy that argument if they had actually showed any investment in helping that assumption come to pass. Instead, their ecosystem is a barren wasteland compared to what Nvidia has built.

Dripping water turned into a standing wave. Amazing. - derrida http://blog.makezine.com/2012/05/02/dripping-water-turned-into-standing-waves/ ====== ColinWright <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3864994> ~~~ rsanchez1 Honestly can't people check that someone else didn't already post the same story? ------ stephengillie That's a really cool optical illusion. It's similar to watching car tires on TV, where sometimes the rim spokes look to be spinning in reverse while the car travels at highway speeds. ------ omegant This one is pretty cool too! <http://youtu.be/jQDjJRYmeWg>

SWIFT - a Free, Open-Source alternative to Adobe Flash - skykooler http://swift-swf.blogspot.com/p/about-swift.html ====== skykooler This is the alpha release.

Why Gmail's new design is unsuitable for heavy use - jzb http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/11/5-problems-with-gmails-new-des.php ====== awakeasleep There should be a publication archiving the superficially thoughtful, hate- filled tirades that occur in reaction to every change that happens to public facing things. Then, when we create something, we can look through the archives and see the volume of ire directed at what we've come to love, and draw a relaxed breath realizing you really can't please everyone. ~~~ ubernostrum Except this was neither hate-filled nor superficial. The toolbar buttons, for example are a great example of a major usability mistake: what we used to call "mystery meat navigation" back in the day, because it was difficult or even impossible to know in advance what would happen if you clicked a given button. ~~~ floris If anything the icons would make it more suitable for "heavy use" because once you get used to them they are an improvement to the old text, defeating the point of this superficial article even more. ~~~ JabavuAdams > If anything the icons would make it more suitable No, this is incorrect. I'm a heavy user of Gmail, and I still can't find the damn new refresh button. How many weeks should it take for me to get used to this so-called "improvement". I preferred it when it was text. I just don't see the new spiral icon thingie as "refresh". Another way to look at it is if you make an improvement to something I don't care about, it's not an improvement. Especially, if it makes my job harder. You need to actually measure what users do, not generalize from unsupported assertions. ~~~ digitaltoad I'm exactly opposite. I had no problem finding the refresh button since the icon used is basically the same exact icon used for refresh in multiple apps that I use everyday, including every browser that I use (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). It looks to me like a lot of the icons that have been used seem to be a standard in a lot of apps that use icons without text. ------ FuzzyDunlop I like the cleanliness of the new design and the use of whitespace to separate things. There are two general problems I have. One is the fact that the UI controls tend to blend in with the rest of the page, and the fact they're just icons isn't much help either. The other is inconsistency or otherwise controverting user expectation. The first problem means to mark something as spam I have to first remember where to look for the button that doesn't stand out. I then have to hover over it until the tooltip shows to make sure I've got the right one. The second one manifests itself in the behaviour of the toolbar, some of the UI element positions, and what I would call some rather basic principles: On the actual mail screen, the toolbar has a fixed position, so it always sticks to the top of the page when you scroll. On the inbox, it doesn't. Why not? The star icon is on the left on the inbox page. Why is it on the right when you view the email? (This has persisted from the old design, to be fair.) Why have they taken an Android design cue and put the form submission elements at the top of the page? When you fill in any form, you expect the submit/cancel buttons to be _below_ the form you're filling in, not above. I have been caught out several times trying to scroll the compose page (that no longer scrolls at all), only to realise the button I'm looking for is actually at the opposite end. While Google may be getting a better eye for aesthetic design and simplicity, I think they're still quite a way from mastering intuition. ------ carterschonwald My biggest issue personally with the new gmail design is that all the current theme options are "two tone". By this I mean that with the old themes, you could have 1 color for the background in the left pane, another for the menu area of the current folder, and possibly another for the background in the email thread/ composition region. For the new gmail look, theres just "background color" and "foreground color". Now I may just be a simple sentient hominid computer user, but most human beings that are neither horse nor hammerhead shark have this wonderful thing called depth perception (and color perception) which allows for more nuance in our perception than just "front bit" and "back thingy", and moreover our brain does a lot of heuristics when giving us our vision, one of which is using contrast in two neighboring objects to detect that they are separated (by those regions called borders). Phrased a bit more directly, I think the biggest problem with the new gmail / reader ui's is not aesthetics. Its not UI standard practice, its not this new found homogeneity or "sparseness", though these all tie into the underlying problem. Rather its that the human brain is optimized for using contrast in depth or color or shade as a core hinting tool in perception. If they're going to stick to general new style, they need to provide more dimensions in how different ui elements can be themed. The closest metaphorical analogue I can think of would be that the current ui approach would be like having the classic cartoon "Samurai Jack" (which has a very nice style that is notable for being one of the few cartoons that lack black outlines at all) being colored with only two very close shades of gray & a smattering of black and white in a few small places. Sure you can still see everything, but your brain has to work harder to actually keep track of it all. ------ tikhonj I actually rather like the new design. It looks better and is more consistent than before. Unlike the poster, I actually really like the simple geometric style it now uses. It's a nice break from the incessant rounded corners and gradients that so many other web sites seem to favor (HN's design is similarly refreshing). The icons are a major change and take getting used to, but I think they improve the experience overall. The one think I find really stupid are the gear icons--one in the top righthand corner for the Google+ style bar and one gmail-specific. Having two identical icons that do the same thing is bad. Apart from that, I think it's a good design. However, while I like the new design, I really dislike the default theme. Some of the gripes about separating content from the UI are addressed the other themes. I particularly like the "dusk" and "dark" ones. Overall, with a few reservations, I like where they're taking the design and hope to see more web apps follow suit. ------ 2arrs2ells I've found that, using keyboard shortcuts (and with a decent Internet connection), Gmail becomes about as efficient as Pine/Alpine (I've never used mutt). I don't love the redesign (I think the placement/appearance of the "important" and "starred" markers is terrible), but since they didn't change keyboard shortcuts at all, I can still plow through reading/replying/labeling messages. ~~~ dasil003 Yeah, my biggest complaint originally was the lack of density, since being about to see the maximum number of emails has long been a killer feature of Gmail, but they fixed that with the compact view. The contrast issues are there, but it really doesn't bother me because I'm in Gmail hours every day. All I need is consistency, responsiveness and comprehensive keyboard shortcuts. ------ saturdaysaint Gmail was never especially pretty, but the redesign and my experience in highly focused mobile apps have pushed me back to Apple's native apps. To me, the most important elements of the screen seem to pop out in Apple's apps, and settings and controls sit thoughtfully in the background. My eyes gravitate to the most salient elements of the screen - the mail list and the currently opened e-mail. The compose window literally pushes to the foreground; I find the effect focusing. You can hide screen elements you don't use! In Gmail I feel like every control demands my attention equally. Having a big red "compose" button might be nice for a novice, but it's irritating to me. I search my e-mails every now and then, but not nearly enough to justify the large search bar. Ditto with Gchat - MMS and Facebook have replaced IM as far as I'm concerned. The "Plus Bar" at the top of the screen is useless if you, you know, actually already have Google's Apps open most of the time (in which case clicking anything gives you an extraneous tab). Huge swathes of my screen are dedicated to things I barely use. ~~~ itcmcgrath Yes! I find the new interface has made me less efficient and distracted by the screen elements I use the least. ~~~ saturdaysaint I don't know why it's taken so long to get on my nerves, but yeah, going from Gmail to native Mac apps really feels like going from a 7" netbook to a full size laptop. ------ dylangs1030 The title is grossly inaccurate. I agree in principle with the author that Gmail has some legitimate criticisms which can be levied against it, but the title construes a much more serious tone than the article delivers. The first paragraph or so of the article, the opening, doesn't give a real criticism. It gives a short dissemination of why Gmail's theme isn't really fashionable. And while it makes a good segue into claiming Gmail is sacrificing feature for looks, I don't agree if that's the implicit complaint. I think Gmail can support "heavy use" even if it doesn't delineate from the side interface and doesn't give an entirely straightforward icon for every folder and label. ------ antimora My little rant on Gmail's UX. The Gmail's user interface has bloated over the years. I want my email to be simple. I don't want chat, ads, additional info related the recipients or senders on the top right corner, which is created to draw users attention to ads. I don't my top toolbar be fixed; I want it to go away when I scroll down. The only things I like about the gmail over other email clients is: search, conversation, and spam filters, but it's becoming like an Outlook. ------ mtkd I found the icons a bit challenging at first (as a heavy user) but through that now. It's really awesome to use in comparison with any other client I've worked with. If I could change one thing it would be the unread/read background contrast. ~~~ steve-howard I dunno. Is it ever good UI design to replace clearly labeled buttons with cute but confusing icons? Just because you can get used to it doesn't mean it's a good change. ~~~ dasil003 Yes, for heavy users, because it makes it easier to see the important textual content on the screen instead of a lot of UI elements. ~~~ sliverstorm Agreed, a minimalistic (but fully functional) interface lacking eye-candy is a positive for heavy users. It reduces noise on-screen. ------ chimeracoder Gmail's redesign was what convinced me to finally switch to mutt. I receive a lot of emails. I have to respond to a lot of them quickly. I don't want a slick, modern-art-inspired user-interface - I just want to get in and out of my inbox as fast as possible, with minimal distractions. ~~~ rbanffy Putting an ssh service that runs Gmail through a mutt-like interface is the kind of 20%-time project I would do if I were at Google. ~~~ dan00 mutt + gmail + offlineimap ~~~ chimeracoder Is there a way to get archive, labels, and sending from multiple addresses to work? If so, I think I could abandon the web client completely. ------ thurn I'm a heavy user, and I still have no idea what the buttons do because I exclusively use the keyboard shortcuts. I'd assume most really heavy Gmail users avoid using the mouse. ------ notatoad the idea that this tirade is specific to "heavy users" is laughable. if anything, it applies more to light use than to heavy use. "mystery meat" navigation is generally a no-no, but the exception to that rule is in heavily used interfaces like email clients, where whatever is used will be memorized by all users incredibly quickly, and the removal of labels can actually streamline the interface. the author doesn't make a single valid point regarding why the new interface is worse specifically for heavy users. its just a collection of negative reactions to change, like every other criticism since they introduced the new layout. ~~~ watmough Here's what the mail box toolbars look like in the old versus new, and the author does cover these. I think these pictures speak for themselves. One is a model of clarity and the other is a context-sensitive, icon-infested mess. <http://imgur.com/a/X4gdp> ------ yaix On my netbook, Gmail is now almost unusable. All the position:fixed elements at the top and botton and left side take up so much space, that the square left for the actual email message has become rediculessly small. If they offered simply a "super-compact with no fixed bs" option, I would be happy. The rest of the new design I really don't care about. ------ dlaw I was an intern at Google when this change was first rolled out internally. Google employees had quite similar reactions. The change was not implemented because people liked it, or didn't like it -- it was implemented because there was cold, hard data showing that new users utilized the new design more effectively than the old design. ~~~ typpo What were the metrics used to determine that the design is "more effective"? ------ cjfont Some comments: _"A major problem that I have with the new interface is that Gmail has gone from text-based buttons to an icon-only design."_ The text is there, it's simply been converted into tooltips. Are you really going to need to have the text there after using the button a few dozen times? _"The bad is that the compact is hard to read, and comfortable displays less information than the classic Gmail design."_ Perhaps it's because I'm using a custom theme and so my view is different, but I don't really see much different between "compact" and the old design. _"Google has also removed the bottom toolbar from the interface. So if you're at the bottom of your inbox, you have to move the mouse back up to the top of the screen to archive, spam, mark messages read, and so forth."_ Seriously? Are you going to suffer from RSI from moving your mouse up the screen each time you view your inbox? Not sure why your cursor keeps ending up at the bottom of the screen each time you finish checking your inbox. The only points I can really agree with the author on is that the new interface is slower to use than before, and also on the excessive use of whitespace -- there does seem to be a lot of unused area with the new look (although it does make my theme look prettier). ~~~ schwit The best icon is a word. There's no interpretation necessary between picture and purpose. This new version looks like something from Microsoft ... change for the sake of change. ~~~ CamperBob Exactly. If icons are the answer, why don't we use hieroglyphics everywhere? ------ roxtar The one thing which I hate most about Gmail's new design is the damned feedback button is always there the next time, no matter how many times I hit "X". ~~~ gujk If there is something you don't like about Gmail, just click the feedback button and let Google know. [http://ubuntuincident.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/hide-about- th...](http://ubuntuincident.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/hide-about-the-new-look- send-feedback-in-gmail/) ~~~ roxtar Yes sir, I did do that. Thanks for the link. ------ teye Tufte, who we all seem to worship, would praise separation of elements with whitespace instead of dividing lines. This article, like most things from uxmovement.com, would be a lot easier to stomach with data backing up the author's preferences. ~~~ gbog I don't even know who is Tufte, and don't worship anyone, thanks. ------ yarone My #1 complaint: The grabber for expanding the height of the textbox has been deleted! See here: <http://i.imgur.com/MEGM1.png> Previously, I'd expand the textbox to give myself more space (and "breathing room", if you will). ------ tghw "There's no divider between the mail contents and the navigation on either side. Too much white space in many areas." Um, the white space _is_ the divider. This really feels like they're complaining because something changed and no one likes change. ~~~ zbowling Is just whitespace enough to be considered a real divider? You're eyes can't track it every well in a complicated interface. You need a huge amount of whitespace to work like real dividing line. ------ Kev I've been using the new design for about a week and overall I think it's an improvement, but I've been griping non-stop about the chat/contact area hogging space even when you drag it down as small as possible. This comment started out as another one of those gripes, until I decided to make one more attempt to hide the chat area for good. Turns out that clicking on the speech bubble icon closes the contacts list/chat area. Can't believe it took me a week to try that. ------ kapilkale I think the visuals are fine. But there are lots of new UI issues. For example, I frequently copy / paste an email address into from an email header into the search bar. Now I can't do that without clicking that tiny little triangle, which is so small I usually miss. It's extremely annoying. If there's a better way to do this I'd love to know. edit- the tiny triangle: <http://i.imgur.com/U4qBR.png> ~~~ nooneelse If you hover over the person's name, and then click "more" in the popup, there is a "Recent conversations" option that runs a similar search. ------ antirez I think this design is very good and better for heavy users compared to the previous one: * The new way to reply to emails makes it a lot faster to reply in the common case. It makes emails more similars to chat conversations where you can reply with just one line or alike, that is a _necessary_ shift today, otherwise no one will reply to emails soon as it is a killer of your time. * The icons will tell you what they do if your pointer is over the icon, since there are a few icons after a week or so you know what every one is doing, and the fact they are very well "exposed" in the UI makes their use comfortable. * New stars make more sense, less different types, more semantically shaped and colored. * When the UI is set to "compact" is the perfect amount of information IMHO, if you receive a lot of emails. But you can change that depending on the amount of conversions you handle and on your tastes. What I really don't like instead? Formatting is not retained on emails, it strips newlines, spaces and so forth in a random way. This is very very bad. ------ J_Darnley I wonder why he doesn't try the basic interface. It still has text buttons and all the "information density" you could need. ------ mwsherman I wonder the degree to which user data is driving their choices. On the one hand, they have a lot of it. On the other, it can’t really drive design. Data can be used to support hypotheses, but it will not tell you what to try. Very curious how Google deals with this. ------ ChuckMcM I felt this was pretty fairly articulated critique of the changes to Gmail. And the author admits that some of their issue may be part of a resistance to change meme. I've gone on record with my issues about too much white space. And even in 'compact' mode it is less useful to me. Overall its the down side of G+ which has the effect of opening up things to change which perhaps shouldn't be changed. But on the positive side it creates opportunity for folks like Mailgunner to get in. Its the tech version of the circle of life. ------ gorloth The new gmail interface really feels like it's made for a touchscreen, problem is a touchscreen UI feels awkward on a system with a mouse. Question for all you web people out there, what would the difficulty of making a stylish/greasemonkey/something script to keep the old layout/look? I'm a programmer but I work on embedded systems in C, I don't have to worry about this fancy internet stuff. ------ mark_l_watson After getting used to the icons and learning to switch on "compact" mode on my laptop, I like it about as well as the old version. ------ lwhi I wonder if the interface would have been better received if the tighter density was used as a default setting? Do first impressions of a UI add as much weight to the way we perceive it, as they do when meeting a person for the first time? Personally I think the interface is good .. I like it, and I'm sure I'll grow more comfortable with it as time goes on. ------ JohnTHaller If you're a heavy email user, you should not be using webmail. You should be using a real email client. ~~~ btilly If you're a heavy email user who uses your email from multiple machines, an efficient webmail is perfect. ~~~ dredmorbius No, you use offlineimap to dump the mail to the host(s) you need to access it from, and GET SHIT DONE. Or you aggregate the mail to a single system you access via SSH and GET SHIT DONE. So long as you're using Web protocols to talk to your mail, cut out the complexity of the browser and leverage ssh & screen. Similarly, if you deal with mail from multiple systems, you can relay/forward it, or aggregate it via multiple retrieval systems (offlineimap is great and synchronizes sent/read mail from numerous locations), but older POP protocols can also work) I have a daily mailstream that runs in the thousands of messages (many boxes, much complaining, many people, other stuff). _I need an email system that surfaces stuff that matters, fast, effectively, and efficiently, and lets me find, process, and adjudicate mail practically._ If you've never used an efficient and powerful console/CLI mail client such as mutt or mh, you have no idea of the power this provides. ~~~ snowwrestler In my daily life there are 10 devices I might use to access email. Instead of spending time to configure IMAP and/or SSH on every device, I just log into Gmail and get shit done the same way in all 10 places. ~~~ jarek It takes a lot of effort to configure an ssh client to be sure. ------ davvid What's with the zero pixel left margin? Lots of websites seem to be doing that these days. ~~~ gujk Usually it is a variable margin that wasn't tested on a screen the width of a normal human's. ------ ck2 I still do not understand why the old interface cannot be made available for another year or two. The visual changes are obviously just cosmetic with little to no backend modification. It definitely feels like designers were given complete override to engineers. ------ mrleinad So, everyone and their mothers are creating web applications suitable for tablets. Do you really believe there's no room for web applications that could be accessed from a good ol' desktop pc? How come is that? ------ el_presidente People love to whine about changes to websites. OTOH, nobody complains when their TV remote changes layout or when their living room rearranges itself overnight. It's a double standard. ------ tomrod What? Gmail redesigned? I use a desktop client, so I never really focus on the webside. ------ mkramlich I also think the new design is a step backwards in usability. And yes I thought we all learned by now that symbolic icons are not as good as text labels. That's pretty much the point of human languages like English -- they are symbols which have a meaning, and you arrange them in different ways to convey different meanings. Given a choice between some arbitrary shape and the text "STOP", guess which one will more clearly and unambiguously convey "STOP"? ~~~ gujk The pencil icon, obviously. Or maybe the square with a rectangle on top. ------ gcb even though i think windows is wrong by not unpleasing users with design changes for the better... and not agreeing that white space _may_ be ok to separate the tag list and the message, there's no excuse to: 1\. the buttons without labels. your user WILL have to hover the mouse every time he forgets one button. 2\. the fact that it moved from a huge clickable area to 17x17px button to see the message headers (and that the header information was vastly reduced) maybe some huge user testing proved those right... but my constant cursing says that at least a 5% exist.

Ask HN: What happened to those guys from Infinite Detail? (voxel graphics) - sergiotapia I remember seeing a video from them early 2012 and haven't heard a peep since.<p>They touted being able to provide infinite detail in computer graphics, but many people argued that animation is extremely difficult, if not impossible and their idea was a pipe dream.<p>Anybody heard from them since?<p>They were Australian if I remember correctly. ====== bjourne Here is an interview with them (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxtuZE5pOGA>). But after that they've been totally silent.

You probably don't want to run Firefox Nightly any more - jlgaddis https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxNoNightly ====== zaarn It seems people simply _want_ to be outraged at Mozilla. The shield study isn't even running yet and several people have raised concerns over the opt- out policy in the mailing list and bugtracker but obviously that doesn't matter. What matters is that the original suggestion was opt-out. Of course, rightfully, nobody is going to send a message on the bugtracker or mailing list or otherwise participating to ensure this doesn't happen. Rather, everyone goes out and yells how terrible Mozilla is and how Google is being nice since they atleast tell you about it upfront. (Completely ignoring that Google is steering Chrome into a new IE-Era of web development) I don't think the blog post above accurately represents the current situation on the shield study nor does it reflect how several people engaged on it are trying to prevent this exact kind of PR disaster. ~~~ belorn Here is a simple question, why do Mozilla not have a policy that dictate that any increase in data collection from one version to the next _must_ either be opt-in or follow a lengthy documented process with the community, in public (similar to RFC in ietf and wikipedia), and a clear update to the privacy policy. Bureaucracy can be helpful in creating trust that important changes won't just sneak up on people unannounced. ~~~ calcifer > documented process with the community, in public You mean exactly like it's happenning in the mailing list right now? Even when the discussion is public, it seems some people prefer to rant on social media instead of contributing to the official discussion. ~~~ belorn So what does that process look like? Is there a formal process with clear method on how and when the decision is made, how it get propagate into a decision and how the documentation and announcement to users will be? Is there a formal policy document you can link me that defines the process how additional data collection are added in mozilla projects? It seems to me that what we have is a in-prompt discussion because people happen to detect a change and managed to raised the issue just before it went live. A formal process would make people trust the project that issues like this isn't depended on the chance that a data collection will be detected before it goes live and only then be brought to discussion in the public mailing list. ~~~ chuckharmston There is: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection) ------ kenhwang This is honestly the reason I do use Nightly. I'm volunteering to provide information that I understand could be very intimate in hopes it's useful to Mozilla in making Firefox better. Data drives better decisions, and I'd rather the technically savvy volunteer their privacy than it being extracted from the general populace. So yes, kick me a bit, I'll let you know what breaks. ~~~ toflon Same here. Call me naive all you want, but I do think Mozilla has our best intention. They won't sell the data, they will try to keep it as secure as possible and anonymize it. As seen they even made a deal with Cloudflare to ensure they don't log any of that data. I'm a strong advocate for privacy but if I'm going to give away my data I'd rather have it be Mozilla than Facebook or Google. ~~~ OskarS Yeah, totally agree. Mozilla needs user data like this for their product, and I think it's a perfectly reasonable solution to collect it from Nightly users who have opted into being guinea pigs. > I'm a strong advocate for privacy but if I'm going to give away my data I'd > rather have it be Mozilla than Facebook or Google. Yep. There's no company I trust more than Mozilla when it comes to handling my data in a safe and responsible manner. ------ Sean1708 The full quote, since I think that the author of this post cherry-picked unfairly: >> As one of the folks who brought up the initial concern let me be clear that at this point my only real concern here is one of optics. The DoH service we're using is likely more private than anything the user is currently using. > It isn't explicit right now that using nightly means opting in to > participating in studies like this, and I think the text of the download > page antedates our ability to do those studies. The text of the Firefox > privacy page says that prerelease products "may contain different privacy > characteristics" than release, but doesn't enumerate them. I also can't find > a public-facing description of how we handle, secure and audit PII data in > experiments involving partner organizations. > In both cases I'm confident we have solid policies and protocols there, I > just don't see a way to point a concerned user to that information. > I'm working on that now. ------ geofft > _(although at the moment I 'm still using Firefox 56)_ There are unpatched security holes in Firefox 56. If you're really mad about the extensions change, downgrade to Firefox 52 ESR. Running Firefox 56 and worrying about the security of your DNS data is a nonsensical threat model. ~~~ aepiepaey There's really no good forward if you're stuck in where the author is. Either you upgrade and lose several important addons, and functionality in other addons. These are often what makes Firefox a good browser (for you). The second option is to downgrade to ESR, which will delay the need to upgrade for a few more months. This may invalidate parts of your profile. It also means you lose out on a number of significant performance improvements included in 56. And the last option, of course, the author's choice (which recommend against): staying on 56. This is of course a bad idea for the reason you stated, plus you lose out on future performance improvements and possibly new web technologies. You will also keep getting nagged by Firefox to upgrade. So, there is no good option, and you have to pick your poison: Upgrade past 57 suffer significant amounts of usability/efficiency, downgrade to 52 and lose parts of your profile and get significantly worse performance, or stay on 56 and risk the browser getting compromised. ~~~ gruez I hate to victim blame, but he's entirely at fault for the predicament he's in. It was widely known that legacy extensions would be phased out it 56, and a few searches related to firefox 56 will tell you that ESR would be the only branch that supports both legacy extensions AND will recieve security patches past 56. So he should have switched over to ESR before 53 came out. ------ aorth I understand the desire for statistics, but they should make it more obvious that nightly isn't _just_ daily builds from master. I've run Nightly from time to time and had no idea it was automatically opting in to Shield studies. Both this and the Mr. Robot extension issue a few months ago erode my trust in Mozilla a little. Counterpoint: only god knows what Google is sending itself from Chrome! ~~~ nallerooth The difference here is that you expect Google to collect -a lot- of data about you and your browsing habits. You can also be quite sure that they'll want to keep that data to themselves. When my data ends up at a third party, especially without my knowledge, I'm much more concerned about it being sold and or shared further. ~~~ geofft > _When my data ends up at a third party, especially without my knowledge, I > 'm much more concerned about it being sold and or shared further._ As stated in the mailing list thread linked in the article, Mozilla has a legal agreement with Cloudflare that the data will not be stored long-term, let alone sold or shared. My reading is that they're keeping information about DNS requests and responses, but _not_ who made the request, for 24 hours for debugging purposes, and then getting rid of all logs. The data they're actually interested in is performance, not the DNS flow itself. You're welcome to decide that Mozilla's trust in other companies is misplaced even if they get a signed contract, and if you do, _that_ would be a good reason to cease using Firefox (Nightly or otherwise!). But if you're not of that opinion, it doesn't make sense to worry that the data simply happens to go through a third party. (Also, what third parties see your DNS data today? Do you think your ISP is not tracking this?) ------ r00fus I'm ok as long as they make it _up front and clear_. It's not meant to have the "latest greatest" \- it's meant to collect analytics to understand and respond to where changes in the nightly might have broken something critical. That said, a large chunk of the web is getting very personal. So I'm not sure Mozilla's rights to do as they please matter if the venn-diagram between nightly-users and privacy-stalwarts is anywhere near 30% overlap. ~~~ nallerooth I agree. They can send my data wherever they want - as long as they tell me about it so that I can make an informed decision. Now, nightly is nightly - you don't accidentally build and install it on your system. But if this behavior is included in other pre-release versions (such as the developer edition), the need for informing the user becomes even more important. I've installed the developer edition from the Arch linux User Repository (AUR), which means that I don't see any release notes or information boxes on the developer edition website when I'm getting the software. A small popup in a corner telling me that "There's a new way to help improve firefox" after an upgrade/install would solve this. I don't want 15 levels of confirmation and a roll of tin foil - I just want something informing me that my data will be sent to a new receiver, and why. ------ dahdum Opt-out privacy violations are not new for Mozilla, did worse than this to German users last year, discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708) ------ myfonj > Mozilla's apparent goal of using Nightly users as a captive pool of test > dummies. I thought that it is the main purpose of Nightly, roughly paraphrased but overall accurate. I'm using it as my semi-primary ("work") browser and from the day one I live in faith that 1) it may stop working any time 2) there is some Mozillian peeking over my shoulder all the time (figuratively). ------ orf Man running an old, insecure version of Firefox with several unpatched critical security issues is outraged at DNS hostnames being sent to a US company (in a more secure manner no less). Ok. ------ FrankDixon I don't see the problem actually, if I want a normal browser I can do my online banking in, for sure, I won't use the nightly version. To me, nightly means, anything could happen. ------ sergiosgc Mozilla should be careful about EU's GDPR. Under GDPR, explicit user authorization is needed for every use of personal data. An opt-out does not comply with the law. Nor does a blanket TOS or Privacy Policy. The law comes into effect in May. ~~~ loa_in_ One doesn't download FF Nightly by accident though. ------ discreditable I trust Mozilla has done the diligence to handle the data correctly. If I didn't trust Mozilla I wouldn't use Nightly or even Firefox. I use Nightly because I want to help Mozilla test and make Firefox better. For me that includes opting-in to studies, reporting bugs, and helping test about:config flags they mention in their Nightly blog. ------ cpeterso When you first run Firefox, it shows the following page describing the types of telemetry data Firefox shares and a button to configure your telemetry options if you'd like to change them: [https://www.mozilla.org/privacy/firefox/](https://www.mozilla.org/privacy/firefox/) ~~~ einr The eye-catching headline in huge type, is "at Mozilla, we believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet". Only later in this document -- that basically no one is going to read in detail after reading the headline -- do they detail how they intend to not respect my privacy. Let's be clear: this is a dark pattern with intention to mislead. Mozilla has serious and growing issues with respecting user privacy by default, and judging by the recent roadmap, it seems like it's going to get worse.* * [https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2017/12/09/add-on-recommendati...](https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2017/12/09/add-on-recommendations-for-firefox-users-a-prototype-recommender-system-leveraging-existing-data-sources/) ------ bad_user Mozilla, wtf? I can understand mistakes like Mr. Robot, mistakes happen. But I can't understand an explicit company policy. I have opted in Firefox's data collection every time I was asked. But such data gathering should always be opt-in. Ask in a nice way and you'll get contributors. And if not, well that should give you a hint that you shouldn't do it. You're better than this, really. It's why I use Firefox. So please stop it with the mistakes. ~~~ Vinnl That's what the mail thread this article was referring to was discussing: how can they properly communicate this, and the privacy safeguards they put in place, to the user? ------ JepZ I wonder why Mozilla is lately so fond of collecting user data. Do they have a new data mining department which is looking for work? Did someone tell them to do data driven development/marketing? If they really want to know more about what we are doing, they could just ask us, don't they? I mean, something like building a FF extension which offers to participate in a monthly survey and at the end of each survey it can ask which data the user wants to attach to his survey responses this _one time_. And if they ask the users for all hosts they have visited during the last month, many people will ask what Mozilla wants to do with that data and Mozilla can explain their intent so that everybody can decide if he wants to support that cause. Yes, that would probably yield much less data and would be more cumbersome for Mozilla, but in the end it would be a _fair_ way of letting your users participate in the development process. As users we want a product which we can trust 100% that it will keep our data on our computer as long as we don't explicitly say otherwise. ~~~ monsieurbanana > Yes, that would probably yield much less data So in other words, probably not much better than doing nothing at all. ------ ggm explain to me why DOH is worse than 8.8.8.8 or even your ISPs DNS? why isn't DOH possibly _more_ protecting of your privacy than these other services? ~~~ gsnedders Plenty of people are concerned about any US based company having access to their DNS logs; even with the pro-privacy agreement CloudFlare have in place with Mozilla, the US government has past form of doing bulk data collection from US based companies. Your ISP's DNS may well be covered by relatively strong data protection laws (versus those in the US) and don't lead to a foreign government gaining access to all your browsing history, even if in principle they could be MitM'd. ~~~ ggm so again, how does this make DOH worse than 8.8.8.8? ~~~ Macha You manually opt in to 8.8.8.8. You may be using something with stronger legal protections than Cloudflare and will not be aware you need to opt out of this. The strength of encryption on the network is irrelevant if you don't trust the recipient. ------ AnarchistNode7 Hate me for that, but my opinion is that there is no reason for using Firefox at all anymore. Mozilla as company have decided that honesty, dignity and loyalty towards their origin user base was less important than the hopeless try to defeat Google Chrome and take their place in market share. All what Mozilla does is simplifying the browser, removing every single bit of more advanced customization features to be most attractive to the typical mainstream user who thinks that customization, features and choice is bloat and should have no part inside the product. How should i as wary user ever have faith in Mozilla as i see what they have been doing since 2013? If they want to be so badly like Google Chrome, then i can also use the original instead. I - as being loosely connected to the Anonymous collective - value morality most. And that morality... Mozilla has thrown over board without thinking twice about it. ------ jamiesonbecker Seems like multiple issues with Firefox (Cliqz and now this). FF's new privacy policy has so many exceptions that it makes it challenging to read: [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/privacy/firefox/) The Brave browser seems to be carrying the torch for privacy these days: Brave is not in the business of selling personal information. We believe the best way to ensure your private personal information is protected is to make every effort to _ensure we are not receiving your private personal information in the first place._ [https://www.brave.com/privacy/](https://www.brave.com/privacy/) [https://www.brave.com/](https://www.brave.com/) ------ tradesmanhelix IMO, this blog post is needlessly alarmist and even misleading. On the pre-release FF downloads page [1] it says, "Firefox Nightly automatically sends feedback to Mozilla." Not sure how the author of this post got the impression that Nightly _doesn't_ collect user metrics and analytics, but this is its explicit purpose. If the author really cares about privacy, he should just use the main Firefox release or, even better, something like Waterfox or PaleMoon. But please - don't slam Mozilla for creating dedicated analytics and tracking release channels and then using those channels for, you know, analytics and tracking. [1] [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/channel/desktop/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/channel/desktop/) ------ dhimes Well, I'm glad OP pointed out that nightly might do unexpected things with my browsing habit information in order to gather data on browser use in nightly- I admit, I hadn't really thought that through. It won't stop me from using it for development browsing and some other things, but it might give me pause before visiting some sites I suppose (so I would switch browsers). My problem with nightly is that it doesn't automatically update, so I have to reinstall every day. And I'm just too lazy (errr, "busy") to be bothered with that. Is there away around this issue on Mint (Ubuntu)? I even put a menu entry into my "shortcuts" menu on fluxbox, but it's nightly from December or something. ------ gkya Firefox profiles are a hard thing to discover. When you start Developer Edition Firefox up by default it starts in its own profile. I'd guess Nightly does the same too. Regardless, it'd be nice of Mozilla to make profiles more accessible through the default UI. I've set up my FF to start with the profile selector every time I start it up, but in firefox in order to switch profiles one has to go to about:profiles. ------ ppbutt User intrusion seems to be a pattern with Mozilla now. ~~~ digi_owl Frankly big name FOSS projects have developed a massive paternalist streak over the last decade or so. This in complete ignorance that what attracted people to them in the first place was to escape the paternalism (and black box nature of proprietary software) from the likes of Microsoft. ------ jchw DNS over HTTPS being skewed into a bad thing is a new one for me. How could this be worse than sending it in plain text to any other entity? At least in this case it's going to be limited to Cloudflare and not whoever's watching in between. If this is part of what it takes to get this technology rolled out, then do what it takes imo. ------ neoeldex Hmm, it's not great they intend to send this information to the great firewall in the sky. If it were mozilla's own servers, I'd re-enable the usage collection on nightly. Bit more of the same with the screencapture features, it's a shame we can't host and configure our own services.... ------ HugoDaniel Are container tabs already available outside of Nightly ? ~~~ seba_dos1 I'm using them on Developer Edition, although I think I had to install an extension that makes use of them (in my case, Tab Center Redux) in order to enable them. ------ snowpanda What about Firefox Beta? Does anyone know? ~~~ TD-Linux A better source is the original posting: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/_8OAKUHso0c) Not even in Nightly yet. ------ kuschku The GDPR is only a momth away, I've already sent a complaint to the local data privacy officer about Firefox' constant violations of the requirement for explicit consent (see: CliqZ before), so let's hope the hammer swings hard this time. If Mozilla still can't see why they shouldn't automatically transmit analytics and studies for everything, they deserve to be sued into the ground. Same with Google. ~~~ dotsh Some people just want to see the world burn. So maybe let's delete the whole internet and get back to letters, telegrams, pidgins and encyclopaedias? No one is forcing you to use dev, nightly or anything else if it is not consistent with your faith. Especially Mozilla they made some silly things but are one of the most "privacy and shit" companies out there and they will not come to your house and beat you because you do not want to do something. ~~~ kuschku That's certainly one approach. The other approach is that, unless explicit consent is given, people are supposed to be safe. Nightly is often required because a lot of functionality for developers is only available there, e.g. custom xpi legacy addons even in FF61. It's nightly or nothing for this, and as a reminder, stable also was affected by CliqZ. ~~~ dotsh You are using Nightly "wrong" because of attachment to old extensions that will perish in June when all legacy stuff will be blocked. Nightly is only for testing out new features and it's not intended to be production ready browser... but everyone has an own use case. Yet do not beat them for wanting to change something for the better after using testing technology. ~~~ kuschku I'm not using it for "old" extensions. Even today, every new feature you want to have in the WebExtension API needs to be implemented as a legacy extension providing this API first, then it will get tested, and then it will maybe become part of core Firefox. The official process to add apis for WebExtensions is to write a legacy extension. Which is exactly what I'm doing to support my custom extension that replaces the entire history and bookmarking system, UI and toolbars of Firefox, for which I need a custom API. I suggest you read the wiki on why nightly still supports legacy extensions before judging people. ~~~ dotsh I'm not judging I wrote that everyone has it's own use case. My only point is don't use test version if you don't want to be tested or opt-out of it. ;)

Scalable ACID - ithkuil http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/08/problems-with-acid-and-how-to-fix-them.html ====== jlgbecom From a development standpoint, I don't quite understand the advantages of NoSQL over SQL. I get that you don't have to have a rigidly defined table structure, and that your data structure can change when your application changes, but I guess I'm one of those curmudgeons that prefers rigidity over permissiveness. I like that I have to think hard about my table structure and models before and as I code. I also rarely feel bogged down by SQL, although I've been using it for over a decade, so that helps. As for scalability, as this post shows, I think the best thing to come out of NoSQL is the race for greater scalability it has and will continue to inspire in SQL solutions. ~~~ steveklabnik There are some times when the standard normal form is a real pain, for example, and your data fits better as a document or a simple key-value. I mentioned one such instance for me here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637903> ~~~ davidmathers I think you're making the common mistake of confusing relational databases with entity-relationship modeling. I can't really figure out your foo example though, needs to be a bit more specific. ------ ekidd This looks interesting, but I still can't tell how it relates to the CAP theorem. Are they sacrificing global consistency? Availability? Partition- tolerance? Or do they have a subtle reformulation of these constraints which allows them to "get around" the restrictions imposed by the CAP theorem? Most of the popular NoSQL solutions were designed to run as large server clusters, possibly distributed across multiple data centers. They're designed to handle such problems as, "Our fiber backbone is down, and our database has split into a 5,000 machine cluster and a 7,000 machine cluster! And it's three days before Christmas!" (This is more or less the problem Amazon's database is designed to survive.) For any given "NoSQL" database, you want to figure out how they handle this problem: Do they allow the 5,000 and 7,000 node datacenters to become temporarily inconsistent? Do they block writes to the entire database? Do they block writes to the 5,000 node database (because it doesn't have a quorum)? Any of these options are valid—you just need to know what tradeoffs you're choosing. ~~~ joe_the_user The author basically doesn't believe CAP represents a good model of the database tradeoffs; _"Over the past few weeks, in my advanced database system implementation class I teach at Yale, I’ve been covering the CAP theorem, its implications, and various scalable NoSQL systems that would appear to be influenced in their design by the constraints of CAP. Over the course of my coverage of this topic, I am convinced that CAP falls far short of giving a complete picture of the engineering tradeoffs behind building scalable, distributed systems."_ [http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap- an...](http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-and-yahoos- little.html) ------ michael_dorfman _Our view (and yes, this may seem counterintuitive at first), is that the problem with ACID is not that its guarantees are too strong (and that therefore scaling these guarantees in a shared-nothing cluster of machines is too hard), but rather that its guarantees are too weak, and that this weakness is hindering scalability._ That is indeed counter-intuitive at first, but they make a good case. I'm impressed with the idea, and hope to follow this more closely. Anyone know any other research on the subject? ------ jleader I only skimmed the paper pointed to by the blog post, but one quote jumped out at me: "Hence, in an era where disk reads caused wild variation in transaction length, allowing nondeterministic reordering was the only viable option." In other words, when all your data is in ram (possibly distributed across a cluster of machines connected by a relatively fast network), the performance tradeoffs are very different than when your data is on rotating mechanical disks. I don't know that I'm convinced that their approach is better, but they've certainly given me something to think about (and re-read in more detail later). ------ prodigal_erik This sounds a lot like optimistic vs. pessimistic concurrency control, but over the set of _all_ transactions in flight. You proceed assuming none of them are going to fail, but if any of them do, you're really screwed--you have to abort all of them and roll back to the last valid state to accept any more. Still, if we can stop rolling our own half-assed transactions over a set of feature-poor data stores, we'll avoid a lot of ugly problems. ~~~ btilly If I read the article correctly, one requirement of their system is that transactions have to be defined in such a way that all transactions succeed for some definition of success. ------ richchan The idea does sound interesting - so it looks like they are trying to reduce the amount of network handshaking by imposing a stricter isolation. I am not sure I am convinced by their results though. They say their deterministic system seems viable when comparing its performance to traditional systems under short in-memory transactions. That is a special case that is clearly in their favor though. In that situation, the amount of time spent in processing data is greatly reduced so the network overhead becomes much more significant - so the system that does less network communications will obviously win... I guess it may potentially be good for in-memory database systems for stuff like OLTP apps (e.g. VoltDB and TimesTen), but then I think most OLTP apps are okay with a more relaxed isolation... ~~~ ora600 Daniel Abadi is one of the authors of the HStore paper that VoltDB is based on. It looks like the deterministic order system is using similar requirements and assumptions. ------ steveklabnik I think this would be better without the adversity. Nobody has to 'win' or 'lose' on 'either side' of 'the debate.' The whole way this is framed (by everyone, not just this) irks me. Different tools for different cases. Polyglot persistence is the way forward. ~~~ zacharypinter Odd... I didn't find the tone of the article to be at all confrontational. The author gave a great summary of the NoSQL movement, its goals, and how his team has an idea that might accomplish many of those goals in a different way. ~~~ steveklabnik If there weren't so many "ZOMG NOSQL SUCKS" articles recently, I might agree with you, but "The poorly kept secret is that it's all about scale, if RDBMS-s would scale, nobody would NoSQL, and by the way, it's a lazy solution anyway!" in the first few paragraphs triggered my "I'm really getting sick of this" reaction. ------ richardmarr "In our opinion, the NoSQL decision to give up on ACID is the lazy solution to these scalability and replication issues." They had me up until they called NoSQL "lazy" and claimed NoSQL solutions "give up on ACID". They aren't lazy and a lot of them support ACID, or most of it. From that point on this veers away from logic and moves towards a self- justified argument. Tools are just tools. If you need immediate consistency then go for an immediately consistent solution, if you don't then you should feel free to take advantage of the performance gain of eventual consistency. ~~~ lemming The thing is that implementing ACID is, well, atomic - you either support it or you don't. Anything else is one of a series of different types of compromise. All currently available NoSQL systems I'm aware of compromise it very heavily, resulting in greatly increased programmer complexity for the types of applications that really require something that looks like ACID. I'd be interested to know which ones you think support ACID - as far as I'm aware none of them claim to support anything like it (with the possible exception of VoltDB, which has its own set of problems). ~~~ jbellis Scalaris has supported ACID transactions for years, but it never caught on because at scale you care more about availability than about having transactions: <http://twitter.com/Werner/status/1008722501> ~~~ jhugg If you're counting important things (money, inventory, etc), being up with the wrong answer can be worse than not being up. ------ azim _In summary, it is really hard to guarantee ACID across scalable, highly available, shared-nothing systems due to complex and high overhead commit protocols, and difficult tradeoffs in available replication schemes._ It's hard, but it's doable. I find it quite striking that no one ever seems to mention the two leading high performance parallel databases, HP Neoview and Teradata. Is it that people don't realize they exist? ~~~ aweisberg Neoview and Teradata are OLAP databases. OLTP is a different problem. ~~~ gaius I can tell you a hilarious story about a former employer who bought a Teradata to run a trading system on... ------ runT1ME Who uses serializable isolation level? I find that claim dubious, and I don't think ordering the way he talks about is better than read committed. ------ rit Academics writing papers is not the same thing as people actually solving problems in production. Not to be ornery about this or anything. ~~~ swannodette Great production implementations can start from coders reading papers on a rigorously explored idea.

'Second Life' is frontier for AI research - alexk http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24668099/ ====== LPTS I wonder if you could make an AI research project where instead of making computers smart like people, you tried to get computer users to act like machines, entirely predictable. I bet there would be something to learn there too. I also wonder if you could create a basic set of antlike behaviors for some MMRPG games and some set of rules for mutation, and evolutionarily grow some bot thats perfect at the game.

You know a site has its shit together when… - bubble_boi https://medium.com/@david.gilbertson/you-know-a-site-has-its-shit-together-when-8ee21040d0bc#.kfqcjq5qu ====== ChoHag > I’m sure there’s some historical reason for valuing short variable names. > ... Maybe in the past our ancestors had to pay by the letter Yes that's it.

It's time to rewrite Java from scratch, security expert says - Garbage http://www.pcworld.com/article/2025160/its-time-to-rewrite-java-from-scratch-security-expert-says.html ====== reirob When seeing this title and before reading the article I had the reaction: "This is already done. Google already rewrote Java. For Androi." Now after reading the article I can quote: "Now is a good time to rewrite some core components from scratch and insure that they're bug-free, rather than patching the application from one version to another," Botezatu said." So it about to rewrite SOME core components and NOT to rewrite Java completely from scratch. ------ gus_massa Even if you rewrite them from scratch, you probably would still have (new) bugs, and some minor corner cases incompatibilities that would break the old user code. Things You Should Never Do, Part I: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

Medium abruptly cancels membership programs of 21 subscription publishers - ilamont http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/medium-abruptly-cancels-the-membership-programs-of-its-21-remaining-publisher-partners/ ====== rainbowmverse Hitting random paywalls was why I stopped clicking Medium links. Some of the stuff on there was interesting to read, but not enough worth paying for.

Rubyhunt.org – Best articles, news, gems and videos about ruby everyday - eyupatis http://rubyhunt.org/ ====== lutfidemirci It looks cool to stay up to date. Just a little thing: You may change the top icon to a flat ruby icon (maybe something from the projectnoun). Is it open source? If it is open source, can you give me the link? then we can contribute. ~~~ eyupatis I changed the logo to a flat ruby icon as you say. It is not open source now, but we can make open source it. I will follow telescope versions for the project so is it necessary to make open source it?

Bytecode features not available in the Java language - henk53 http://stackoverflow.com/a/23218472/472792 ====== malft Didn't see my favorite on the list: creating the bool 2. I believe there are a couple of methods in the JDK that do if (dangerousFlag == true) doCheck(); ... foo(dangerousFlag ? bar : baz); ~~~ peeters Wait, I love learning new things about Java, but I feel in the dark here. What is your example demonstrating? ~~~ onedognight If true is book(1) then the check bool(2) == true will fail but bool(2) ? a : b will act as if bool(2) were true and this inconsistency could lead to unintended execution paths. ~~~ peeters Ah, I'm with you. Thanks. ------ peeters As far as not catching checked exceptions goes, this is actually possible in the Java language as well since the language allows throwing a generic type parameter. It's pretty difficult to do by accident though, and does at least give a compile warning. public class Dangerous { public static void main (String ... args) { Dangerous.<RuntimeException>throwUnchecked(new IOException("Forgot to catch me!")); } static <T extends Exception> void throwUnchecked(Exception e) throws T{ throw (T) e; } } ------ jodah I knew the SO answer must have been written by Raf before I even got to the author section. Check out his great library, ByteBuddy, if you want to try mucking with some of this stuff: [http://bytebuddy.net](http://bytebuddy.net) ------ whitten If the Java Virtual Machines don't always execute certain Java Byte Codes, how does a compiler to JVB for another language know that the generated code is run ? ~~~ krilnon There's an official specification for what and how a program that claims to be a JVM implementation should operate given Java bytecode. So someone writing a language that compiles to Java bytecode would typically either target the specification (and test on as many implementations as they felt necessary), or target a specific implementation like HotSpot and ignore the rest. ------ quotemstr You can define two methods that differ only by return type. That's how covariant returns work. Check the javap output and recoil in horror. ~~~ peeters True. One of them is a bridge method. Here's an example: class CovariantReturn extends CovariantReturnBase { public Integer produce() { return 5; } } class CovariantReturnBase { public Number produce() { return 4.5; } } And the relevant javap output for CovariantReturn: public java.lang.Integer produce(); flags: ACC_PUBLIC Code: ... public java.lang.Number produce(); flags: ACC_PUBLIC, ACC_BRIDGE, ACC_SYNTHETIC Code: ...

Ask HN: Do you know any huge-bandwidth case that using Cloudflare free/pro plan? - Elect2 And what is the bandwidth? ====== foobarbazetc Their sales people start emailing you at ~4Tb/month on the business plan.

Announcing Yeoman 1.0 beta 4 - cleverjake http://addyosmani.com/blog/yeoman-update-announcing-1-0-beta-4/ ====== _pius Congratulations on the new release. Ironically, I tried Yeoman in earnest for the first time yesterday. I've got deep respect for the authors, but I've had a pretty miserable experience with Yeoman so far, even after giving it another try this morning. In particular: * Using the web app generator seems to download an absurd number of dependencies every time. It takes _minutes_ to download everything to start a simple app, about as long as it takes me to install Rails from scratch on the same system. * After generating an app, I've yet to be able to actually run grunt on the result ... it always errors out with something. If it's not a jshint warning that causes it to abort, it's a Compass warning. One of the great joys of writing HTML5 + Javascript apps is that the experience tends to feel clean and unencumbered. So far, Yeoman has done nothing but make my workflow much more complex and error-prone. Things just feel ... rickety. At the end of the day, I gave up and used Initializr [1] to start the app. Didn't even want to bother trying out Brunch [2], I was so frustrated. I wanted to love it and I know there are folks out there who've had great luck with Yeoman; hopefully some of them can chime in to tell me what I'm missing. [1] <http://www.initializr.com/> [2] <http://brunch.io> ~~~ bicknergseng I started using it about two weeks ago and was pretty disappointed, too. The 1.0 beta was broken for things like coffeescript, backbone, custom generators, etc, and they pulled the previous version of Yeoman from the site. I got it to work for what I was trying to do, but spent twice as much time on Yeoman as I did working on my app. Not unexpected given the pre 1.0 state of both Yeoman and the Node community at large, but I wish they'd left the previous (functional) version accessible. Either way, excited to see this kind of community development. Great work on Yeoman, excited about its potential. ------ mberning I could see where this would be useful for somebody just starting out, and maybe that is what they are shooting for, but I see people outgrowing this pretty fast. Once people reach a certain level of competence it's going to be quicker and/or easier to set things up themselves. ~~~ jlongster Others are disagreeing with you, but I actually agree. Yeoman isn't attractive to me at all. It's a lot of boilerplate and the return just isn't enough. It's much easier to directly set things up, and create custom boilerplates for my needs. ~~~ greaterweb I think there may be some confusion by some as to just what Yeoman is and it's usefulness. My opinion is that Yeoman strives to improve your workflow and tooling in front end development. The core team has engaged the dev community and identified how people are working, what tooling they use and what pain points they experience. Yeoman serves to centralize workflow and tooling and ease those pain points. The generators are very useful as well and extensible. Again, Yeoman may not be right for everyone but I would be interested to know more about your workflow and tooling and contrast it to some of the concepts pursued. This feedback would be useful to those considering Yeoman. ~~~ jlongster I think there's a certain kind of person that's attractive to these kind of verbose, complex bootstrapping tools. Not that that's a bad thing at all, but like you said, it's not for everyone. I can see the usefulness, but when I try to use it, it just feels like it has a steep learning curve and I could better invest my time elsewhere. I use node heavily, and setting up the project, `npm install express` and a few other libraries, only takes a few seconds. I can start writing code quickly. I also don't create new projects _that_ often, but I can't imagine most people are daily creating new projects. At work we have our own django bootstrap that we can easily hack on and clone. I can't say exactly why it doesn't fit my use case, but it just doesn't feel right for some reason. It has a ton of dependencies. I don't see why I shouldn't just use grunt and bower directly, etc etc. ------ brian_c Yeoman makes it quicker and easier to generate boilerplate code, but I think the goal should be to __eliminate __boilerplate and abstract it away. Yeoman keeps spaghetti organized, but it's still spaghetti. ------ jongold Stupid question but what kinds of projects are people using Yeoman & Brunch etc for? I've been getting into lots of frontend MV* recently; a mix of stuff that I put in the Rails asset pipeline at work, and fun hacks on the weekend which I tend to use Brunch or Yeoman for. Are people using Yeoman apps in production? How does it work deploying them & handling load etc etc? I'm assuming that Yeoman is more useful than just toy projects? ------ crucialfelix I was messing around with Yeoman this weekend. The real strength I think is in the library of generators and the tools that the generator has in addition to the grunt derived ones. The default generator is a one page webapp and that makes everybody think that that is what yeoman is, but there are many more: [https://github.com/search?q=yeoman+generator&ref=cmdform](https://github.com/search?q=yeoman+generator&ref=cmdform) 65 repos there ------ niyazpk I am already using gruntjs for js/sass/images compression & combining, template compilation, and a whole lot of other build related stuff. Can somebody please convince me why I would want to switch to yeomen? ~~~ Narretz You are not switching to Yeoman if you use grunt, since yeoman uses grunt for all the tasks you mentioned. Yeoman is for quickly setting up and adding common parts to your app. For example, in angular you can create controllers, directives etc. skeletons, based on predefined or your own scaffolds. Using it will only be good if the generator for your app is good. ------ outside1234 Thanks for all the hard work - glad to see that Windows support is almost ready. I'll give that a try. ------ rschmitty Is there an example with backbone requirejs and karma testing for yeoman out in the wild?

Shorter Workweeks Would Wipe Out the Much-Hyped Threat of Robots Stealing Jobs - azuajef http://www.alternet.org/economy/why-shorter-workweeks-would-wipeout-much-hyped-threat-robots-stealing-our-jobs?akid=14343.2563486.j-rsgB&rd=1&src=newsletter1058194&t=22 ====== qbrass It increases the cost of human labor, giving more of an advantage to replacing them with robots.

Caching NoOp for use in JavaScript | Randomized - honyock http://matthewbjordan.me/2013/09/25/noop-caching.html ====== tantalor [http://jsperf.com/noop/2](http://jsperf.com/noop/2) ~~~ honyock [http://jsperf.com/nooptest](http://jsperf.com/nooptest)

Am I getting Craigslist scammed? - tech-historian https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/126350/am-i-getting-craigslist-scammed ====== caymanjim There's a YouTuber by the name of "Kitboga" who makes a living messing with refund scammers. It's not exactly the same scam, but it's similar enough: they convince people that they've been over-refunded, and try to con the target into repaying the difference. Kitboga is kind of obnoxious, but I do appreciate his devotion to wasting scammers' time. If I were targeted by this sort of Craigslist scammer, I'd probably mess with them until I got bored.

Worlds Most Feared Financial Sanction 311Act Challenged and Beaten David V Goliath - jayjay1010 http://bpabankclassaction.com/index.php?p=/discussion/14/fincen-fuks-up-so-badly-they-resort-to-retreating-and-pretending-they-never-existed#latest ====== jayjay1010 This matters to tech startups because as many grow internationally they will navigate international banks and local laws and tax polices which will undoubtably challenge them with compliance issues and thus suffer risks beyond their control and could face direct impact from sanctions imposed by FinCEN!

Our 36 Hours on Show HN - justinlaing https://medium.com/@justinlaing/our-36-hours-on-show-hn-34d47b6b56ee#.k9a8i7pt4 ====== minimaxir Hmm, this is the first "I Hit The HN Front Page" humblebrag posts that's not a humblebrag, and as a result is interesting. Being successful is not a binary get-on-front-page or not; ranking on the front page matters. At #27 of 30, that is effectively off the front page. (for reference in how important ranking matters, when one of my submissions went from #1 to #3, the number of active users dropped _by 2 /3rds_. Going from #3 to #20 halved the traffic again.) ~~~ justinlaing Definitely, 27 is pretty low. But it did drive a lot more traffic than being #5 on Show. Which I think is interesting. I would have thought more people looked at Show. But I guess not. ------ Ezhik And now you're trying to break back on the front page, clever. ~~~ justinlaing Sure, but hopefully providing some insight for others! It was definitely a learning experience.

Best Screenplay Goes to the Algorithms - brycehalley http://m.nautil.us/issue/79/catalysts/best-screenplay-goes-to-the-algorithms ====== throwawaylolx >Best Screenplay Goes to the Algorithms No, it doesn't, according to the article itself: >The judges at the film festival placed Sunspring in the top 10, though it did not win.

How to Make the Switch from Android to iOS - iProject http://gizmodo.com/5943175/how-to-make-the-switch-from-android-to-ios?tag=iOS-6 ====== endyourif Boo! I love my Android and I have no plans of every joining the Apple family.

The Leica Q: A six month field test - Tomte http://craigmod.com/sputnik/leica_q/ ====== brotherjerky I love how thorough and thoughtful this article is, especially since it's on a personal web site. Reminds me of what the web used to be, before big clickbait sites took over. Just someone writing at length about something they are passionate about. ------ KaiserPro I could understand the point of leica, in the 40s-60s it was quiet, well built, had good lenses and was reliable. (it had a fabric shutter, or something similar, which means it didn't click. This allowed people to be "in the moment") In the digital world, I just don't understand the point of them. Sure yes its a full frame with a decent lens in a similar body size as the old compact rangefinders. But. the image quality just isn't worth the $4K. Thats top end SLR price. Under its all its just a panasonic lumix. If it was a separate entity, I could sorta see the point. You are paying for the name, and thats it. What I'd really like is a leica/fujion style body, but with a nikon sensor and lens adaptor. (Although I suspect that its not really possible because the focal point is much too deep.) ~~~ FireBeyond I'm someone who thinks Leica is a bit overpriced. But as the owner of a 5D Mk III and several L lenses, -and- a Lumix DMC- LX100... the Leica is not a Lumix. This isn't even the best article for image quality (though there are certainly many very good shots). But where the Leica excels is razor sharp images that don't have any hint of "is that sharpened in Photoshop?" (for example: [http://i1.wp.com/www.stevehuffphoto.com/wp- content/uploads/2...](http://i1.wp.com/www.stevehuffphoto.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/11/L1000366.jpg) ) ~~~ foldr It looks pretty ordinary to me, to be honest. Even entry level DSLRs produce very sharp images these days. ------ keltex The alternative camera (and one for 1/4 the price) is the Fuji X100T. Many people love this camera: [http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/x100t.htm](http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/x100t.htm) ~~~ martijn_himself I posted exactly this comment and then I noticed yours. Are these camera's actually comparable or is it apples and oranges? ~~~ alistairSH Yes and no. They are comparable, in that they are both fairly compact, fixed prime lens cameras that offer high quality (camera build and image). They are not comparable,as the Leica has a better/faster autofocus system. In theory it has better optics as well, though I haven't seen a side-by-side. A good friend is a professional photographer. His carry-around fun camera is the X100T. I think his professional-grade stuff is Nikon. I'm sure he'd love the Leica, but it's a lot of money for what is unlikely to be used professionally (at least not by him). ------ mjhoy Craig Mod's reviews convinced me to get the GF1 many years ago, and I am still very happy with that camera. Though it has interchangeable lenses I often use it with a prime 20mm (film equivalent of 40mm) which, I discovered, are simply a joy to use: the lack of the "feature" of a zoom can free your mind in the moment of exploration. ~~~ miseg I should have replied to your comment, instead of posting a new one. I agree with your sense of freeing, but if, as the author talks about, you'll crop many of your shots, it doesn't sound so freeing then. ~~~ mjhoy I was also surprised about the cropping! For my own photographs I never crop, I don't really see the point. But perhaps he is publishing photos, in which case I understand it. ------ Tomte Under the heading "Video": "I think the Q does video." That's it. I love his writing style. ------ dsmithatx Glad I googled the camera and found out it cost +$4000 before reading are review about it. It should have been the first sentence of the article since most of us will never dream of spending that on a camera. ~~~ petercooper You'll want to file "Leica" away in that area of your brain where brands like "Ferrari" or "Rolex" are. It's basically the equivalent in cameras. ~~~ brudgers A camera produces artifacts. To _me_ that makes it a bit different than a car or a watch: Roli tell the same time, Ferrari's pick up the same cartons of milk, but lenses and sensors and firmware capture different images. I see Leica as of a kind with other multi thousand dollar cameras...it's not as if a Nikon or a Cannon is any more or less reasonable. ------ VeejayRampay I never quite understood Leica. The quality of their products is undoubtedly extremely high, I won't try to deny that and they deserve credit for decades of excellence in the field. But as the owner of a Voigtländer R4A coupled with a Nokton 35mm f/1.4 (bought for a total of $1200, which was quite the investment for me) I can't help but be amazed by how much it would have cost me to buy the Leica equivalent (5 times that amount). It's quite obvious looking at the results that Leica does not offer that superior a result for that hefty price (and even though I know that it's a tad simplistic to reason in those terms, it certainly wouldn't have bought me 5 times the quality). Leica reminds me of Apple, it's all about status and perceived value. Hats off to them for reaching that lucrative niche market. ~~~ pepve > it's all about status and perceived value Yet the author of this post taped off the lettering to make it look like a generic camera. ~~~ greggman Here in Asia Leica is sold in high end fashion malls, not in the photography equipment or electronics area of town. In fact in Japan there's a Leica counter in the men's fashion accessories area of Mitsukoshi Mens in Ginza. In Hong Kong there's one in Harbour City, a high end fashion mall. In Singapore there's one in ION Orchard, another fashion mall. Where as if you want any other brand of camera in all those cities you go to the electronics area of town. Akihabara or Shinjuku's Yodobashi Camera in Japan, Mong Kok in HK, Sim Lim or Funan Digitallife Mall in SG In other words, Leica themselves are positioning their cameras as fashion accessories. Something to show you have $$$$$$ ~~~ rogeryu If I were Leica and I could sell my camera as accessory in a fashion mall, why not? This tells me more about the people shopping there, than about Leica. It's probably not Leica positioning themselves there, but some smart business people seeing good margins. ------ miseg I'd struggle with the idea of shooting at such a wide angle, and relying on cropping later. Theoretically, at least, I like the idea of letting a fixed focal length in the camera guide how I frame images around me. ~~~ ska 28mm isn't really so wide on a full frame. In some ways it is more natural than 50mm, in that it frames more like we see with two eyes side by side (50 is closer to the projection we see though) without much in the way of distortion. Once you get used to the frame, you would't need to crop all the time, but I guess it saves you some foot zooming. ~~~ alistairSH WRT to foot zooming, shooting portraits with a 28mm requires some SERIOUS foot zooming. You have to be VERY comfortable getting close to subjects. Fine if you know them; possibly awkward if you don't. ~~~ miseg Interesting. Do you tend to crop portraits you take at 28mm? ~~~ aaronbrethorst You shouldn't take portraits with a 28mm lens, at least not if you can avoid it. It'll distort your subject's features, making their chin, or nose, or whatever look abnormally large. Better to use an 85mm lens if you can. ~~~ foldr It will distort their features if you get in close. For the same distance from the subject, any focal length with give you the same amount of (perspective) distortion. So if you shoot from 10ft away and crop, you'll get the same results (modulo resolution) as you would have gotten if you'd shot from 10ft away with a longer focal length and filled the frame. ~~~ aaronbrethorst 10 foot subject distance on a 28mm lens isn't much of a portrait. Unless you're doing an environmental portrait with an emphasis on the environment. ~~~ foldr Well, that's why I said "shoot from 10ft away and crop". ~~~ aaronbrethorst How much resolution does your sensor offer? ------ nandreev For anyone looking for the 80/20 alternative here (80% of the experience/results for 20% of the cost), take a look at the Ricoh GR. It doesn't have a viewfinder, but the ergonomics are superb. APS-C sensor, fixed 28mm lens (a very sharp one at that), and 16mp. Goes with me on every trip. Ming Thein's review: [http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/05/06/review-2013-ricoh- gr-di...](http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/05/06/review-2013-ricoh-gr- digital-v/) ------ njharman Um, is the price really $4,000!? Am I the only one that thinks nothing costing that much is a "travel camera"? The one of several cameras I own that I toss in my bag when I don't want or need capabilities of my "expensive" gear. I wouldn't carry something costing $4000 on me anywhere I wasn't very familiar with / felt safe in. ------ rffn I wonder how this camera compares to a Sony A7 (or it's successors) if the Sony is paired with a comparable lens. I recall having heard that either the first or the second generation A7 has the same sensor as the Leica Q but this might be wrong. ------ jmount Images look like they lost contrast due to some sort of flare effect. ------ dgdsgdsg Nice advertisement... ------ jordache blah... Full Frame is overrated. For reasons one may want full frame, someone else may want a cropped sensor for other equally legitimate reasons. I love my Fuji X100. Manual Focus is also overrated. As long as you have a quick phase detecting AF solution, you won't miss the tactile mechnical MF. The X100 is not there yet, but future generations will surely provide satisfactory AF speed. ~~~ jordache oh yeah.. all the people who think bokeh downvoted. Do you know the concept of non-shallow DOF and how that is beneficial in many low light/wide-open aperture circumstances? ------ CyberDildonics Maybe there should be a separate site called Hacker Ads ------ mtrycz The article contains referral links for amazon at the bottom. Just saying. ~~~ alistairSH So? Bloggers deserve to eat too.

Ask HN: Let's talk gpt-3 hype. overblown or justified? - hejja I&#x27;ve counted between 3-5 GPT posts on the front page all today and yesterday<p>Not to mention 74% of my twitter feed.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I was at peak hype. Top 10% of gpt-3 hypebeasts.<p>But now I&#x27;m thinking: &quot;it&#x27;s good, but what are the practical use cases that is effectively a babbling machine&quot;<p>In other words if it&#x27;s 95% believable, with the amount of nuance required for high skilled use cases or jobs, well, that&#x27;s still not enough.<p>Your thoughts? ====== forgotmypw17 In terms of human development, publicly available and disclosed machine intelligence has reached what in human child development would be considered a major new milestone. Previously, Eliza and the likes could only mimic basic speech construction, with increasing levels of correctness. Now, GPT-3 can mimic meaning and understading, rather convincingly. Its mistakes are akin to a child's naive questions. I would put its equivalent human age at about 3-5 years old. Sometimes 5-year- olds can come up with nonsense, and sometimes you have an "out of the mouths of babes" moment. That's really huge, IMO.

More than 1000 drug plants never inspected - sndean http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i5/1000-drug-plants-never-inspected.html ====== Cerium This is not really surprising. The FDA has to be very careful with how they manage their resources. Before being allowed entry to the USA, the company must file information about what they are doing and where and who they are. They must also have a representative in the USA. All this information allows the FDA to quickly find the source of problems and stop them should a situation arrive. If we handled this in any other way it would place an undue burden on either the taxpayer or the companies. Who should pay the inspection fees for a company importing very small volumes? In the end, yes it is shocking, but the system generally works. ~~~ DrScump The Showa Denko K.K. tryptophan disaster[0] is one counterpoint. [0] [http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/trypto...](http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/trypto.html)

Ask HN: Anyone ever tried a hackathon while water fasting? - cvaidya1986 I want to specifically know if it helped with speed of execution and creativity. ====== allwein Can you ask your real question? Obviously you're not looking for just "yes" or "no". I'm assuming that you're considering doing a hackathon while fasting and have some questions or concerns. What are those questions and concerns? ~~~ cvaidya1986 Updated the question thank you.

Dead Slow Ahead is a transcendent sci-fi documentary (2016) - crtasm https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/14/11223298/dead-slow-ahead-movie-review-sxsw ====== fiiv It does not seem to be easy to obtain a copy, legally or not. Looks fascinating. ~~~ crtasm I really liked it, the sound design especially. As much as I dislike promoting amazon their UK site is the only place I can see it for sale. I'm told it's on private trackers.

Sparrho: personalised recommendation platform for scientific content - fitzwatermellow https://www.sparrho.com/ ====== nl This seems nice, but wow the whole process of setting up a channel seems like a return to 2000 technology. Enter keywords, choose sources, click some weird icon? Hmm. The Allen AI institute's Semantic Search product[1] is much better at exploring a topic. OTOH it has no way to subscribe [1] [https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=Deep%20Learning](https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=Deep%20Learning) ~~~ versteegen I don't really see what you're complaining about. You can filter by document type (is that what you mean by source?), but it's not necessary. Comparing the results of these two sites, SemanticScholar gives me the most cited papers from the last ten years, which I already knew about, while Sparrho feeds me very recent but still highly relevant papers which I mostly hadn't seen. Therefore I find Sparrho far more useful for already familiar topics. Neither site seems to have an option to change the search timeframe. ~~~ nl _I don 't really see what you're complaining about_ Really? When I do a search, I'm seeing a big block at the top of the UI to get me to setup a channel. It's big enough that I'm only seeing on row of search results (15" MBP). _You can filter by document type (is that what you mean by source?)_ The bottom of this block says "Select specific article source (currently optimised for Chemistry). _Comparing the results of these two sites, SemanticScholar gives me the most cited papers from the last ten years, which I already knew about, while Sparrho feeds me very recent but still highly relevant papers which I mostly hadn 't seen. Therefore I find Sparrho far more useful for already familiar topics. Neither site seems to have an option to change the search timeframe._ I agree that are for different things, but SemenaticScholar does have the option to change the timeframe (on the right-hand side, there is a graph with number of results per year. Slide the sliders down the bottom, eg: [https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?year[]=2015&year[]=20...](https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?year\[\]=2015&year\[\]=2016&q=Deep%20Learning)) ~~~ versteegen _The bottom of this block says "Select specific article source (currently optimised for Chemistry)._ Ah, I didn't notice that, because it's cut off at "Select specific article source (currently optimised for". There are several font problems, most alarmingly some 400px high text. And there is apparently no way to select the journals, despite what it says. _SemenaticScholar does have the option to change the timeframe_ Thanks! ------ java-man something similar I've done for [http://news-ai.com](http://news-ai.com)

In the New Cold War, Deindustrialization Means Disarmament - vimy https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/12/china-industry-manufacturing-cold-war/ ====== lefrenchy > They show the peril of ceding control of vast swaths of the world’s > manufacturing to a regime that builds at home, and exports abroad, a model > of governance that is fundamentally in conflict with American values and > democracies everywhere. This seems like a bold claim, and I didn’t feel the last part was really backed up. I guess I just don’t see how that is the part of the model of governance that is in conflict with democracy.

Ask HN: What's a cool old/vintage computer to buy? - arduinomancer Are there any cool computers from the 80s&#x2F;90s you&#x27;d recommend picking up that aren&#x27;t super expensive or rare?<p>Just want to have some fun messing around with an old system to see what its like and get a better understanding of what computers used to be like. I started on Windows 95 so never had a chance to experience any of these old systems.<p>Thanks! ====== malux85 You might have a lot of fun with DOS, if you wanted physical hardware look for a 486 cpu with 8 or so megs of ram, you can put on DOS6.11 and Windows 3.11 and have a play, this was (close enough)the final step before Windows 95 Also have a look at installing djgpp and you can see what a DOS based text-ui IDE looked like. Also install Desqview for what an alternate desktop environment looks like. One thing you’ll learn is that installation of all of this will require some tweaking and research, you’ll have to learn about config.sys and playing with extended memory managers, but that’s part of the fun! Might be more fun to do this on an emulator though, because otherwise you’ll have to mess about with floppy disks or maybe early CDROMs and getting hold of functional ones might be challenging. That era had tons of great games too! Duke Nukem 1 and 2, Blake Stone, Nyet, Jill of the Jungle, DOOM, try a few games too Have fun! Shout out if you get stuck! ------ LarryMade2 Commodore VIC-20 \- Has a decent built in BASIC in ROM Only 3.5K or programming RAM (well, a little more if you know where to POKE... heh) Has a 22 column by 23 row screen (composite or RF) \- Uses Atari 2600/8-bit standard joysticks, paddles. \- Either use cassette tape or Disk or get one of the current compact flash Drive options to do storage (CF can allow you more easily get things from the internet connected world to the VIC and visa versa) \- Very well documented on programming and hardware - [http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/](http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/) \- Still an active community for VIC-20 enthusiasts. \- If not a VIC-20 I'd suggest a Commodore-16, then you have 16K and much expanded BASIC as well as a built-in machine language monitor assembler/disassembler. Still can use the Disk Drive CF, but you may need an adapter to use the more common Commodore tape drives... and adapter for Atari Style joysticks. \- Commodore 64 prices are getting a bit high, but if you prefer something more 80s mainstream the Commodore 64 or 128 are way more popular. But for uniqueness and fun at budget VIC-20/C16 are it... Maybe Plus/4. ~~~ LarryMade2 Trivia: Linus Torvalds first computer was a VIC-20 :-) ------ detaro I'd start by playing with emulators a bit. It's not the same as having the actual thing, but is a cheap way of seeing what you might like? ------ rmason I'd suggest a NeXT Cube. Got a friend with one that's not running and finding parts is extremely difficult however. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube) Another one, a phone I personally owned, is a Palm phone, it was the Kyocera Palm Phone 6035 from 2001! This was a smartphone before that term existed and was eight years before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyocera_6035](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyocera_6035) ------ ddingus For just messing around, I suggest a C64. That one has games, demos, and is a lot of fun to program. An Apple 2 is also good, but for different reasons. Gaming can be fun, but the real benefit to that machine is that it is completely documented, with schematics, and almost entirely software driven. It's a lot like an early PC, with slots, etc... Both machines have lots of cool devices that make them easier to work with today. Once you have a machine, you can program it, make some hardware for it, interface it to various things, write programs, and do so in a small scale environment. Marvel at what people actually got done! Have fun. ------ chung-leong Amiga is a system I would like to get my hands on. I still remember being trolled by Amiga aficionados at my local BBS. While I was trying to get my CGI screen to display more colors there were these rebels talking about the miracle of HAM. ------ steve_taylor Totally biased recommendation: Commodore 64. ~~~ Colt45RPM I totally second that! ------ phendrenad2 Cheapest _complete_ option is probably an even older PC, which you can install DOS on. ------ EdwardMSmith As far as home computers - Amiga (any one, really) For crazy fun, deskside SGI Onyx RE2.

To Reduce Inequality, Let’s Downsize the Financial Sector - howard941 https://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/t/0/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=1391935 ====== towaway1138 We could also reduce inequality by blowing up the planet. Instead, how about trying to raise the quality of life for those at the bottom?

Ask HN: What are the biggest problems you think need fixing? - philco Im tired of seeing "yet another ___ app" being thrown around.<p>What are the biggest problems you face? If you're not facing anything significant, what are the largest problems you see the world facing? ====== jstanley I'm really bad at parking my car. I'm not interested in getting a machine to park it for me, but a simple and accurate guide/tutorial on how to park might help. I am a member of my university's programming team, but I never have the motivation to practice. I am aware that practice is what is needed, but when I get time for programming I always spend it on other projects, rather than contest practice. I don't know how to solve this. Init scripts are a right hassle. You could provide (or write a guide explaining, if one already exists) a tool so that you can turn any program that runs as a main loop into a daemon, with an init script. And with as few dependencies as possible. For example, I could just put a shell script in /etc/init.d/my-program that has #!/bin/sh run-magic-daemon $* "my-program --options" which then deals with the arguments to the init script, and deals with starting up and daemonising my-program. It should also deal with redirecting stdout/stderr to a log file, writing a pid file for later usage, etc. I often end up with hundreds of tabs open. Something to close the ones I used least recently might help. Buying domains is really annoying. Why can't I just type the domain and click "buy" without the registrar trying to sell me other services, or the same name on other TLDs, etc? Just a simple domain registrar for human beings (or a decent guide to the pros and cons of existing domain registrars) would be very helpful. If you end up starting a registrar, it may be easiest to do it as a reseller rather than ponying up the ICANN fees. Hope these provide some inspiration. If you want to talk via email, you can find me at james@incoherency.co.uk ~~~ jaredsohn >Buying domains is really annoying. badger.com provides a really nice experience (albeit only for .com/.org/.net/.info/.me). Get your first domain for only $5 if you use my affiliate code (<http://www.badger.com/fivebucks>). ------ mkjonesuk A quick web prototyping tool with no dependencies above what the browser can run (JS/CSS/HTML). I'm stuck using HAML and Bootstrap to throw quick mock-ups together. It's great and works fine but I have to load a pre-processor app (like PrePros or Koala) and HAML can't include elements into templates like header like headers/footers I have to copy/paste into every new template I'm putting together. I looked into Moustache and Hogan but neither of these offered what I'm after and they were pretty difficult to set up. I think the Mixture app will solve this when released but I've had issues getting the beta to properly run and it looks pretty bulky for what I need. ------ turbojerry Sociopaths in positions of power. While serial killers get most of the attention, socio-/psycho-paths in positions of power in societies cause huge problems, wars, financial fraud leading to financial collapses etc etc. So the task would be to identify them, quarantine them and then work out how to treat them so they could be safely released back into society. If this is not done, there is an extremely high possibility that one or more of them will be the cause of a human created extinction event such as global thermonuclear conflict. ------ tmoertel One of the biggest problems in modern society is that most people are quantitatively illiterate and therefore poorly equipped to solve the problems of modern society. ------ piratebroadcast I'm in a web developer course and I really really need to get my Ruby in good/great shape. It is my first programming language and I am not getting it as quickly as others in the class. I'm not hopeless, but I am not where I want to be. ------ atgm I was looking at furniture the other day and it's really, really hard to visualize where/how furniture will fit in a given room with just pictures (which can vary based on lens used) and dimensions. ------ gesman \- Spam \- Depression ------ Reallynow Access to clean water. Diarrhea. ~~~ turbojerry Michael Pritchard: How to make filthy water drinkable [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=5784565&whence=ite...](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=5784565&whence=item%3fid%3d5782824) ------ djb_hackernews public works projects, gridlock traffic, effective urban planning.

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters - urs2102 https://basecamp.com/shapeup ====== aarondf Would love this as a PDF ~~~ williamstein Or any format at all that can be easily downloaded to my phone for offline reading.

I Accidentally Invented Electronics in 1906 - razorburn http://gizmodo.com/5550365/i-accidentally-invented-electronics-in-1906 ====== hartror I would have enjoyed a bit more explanation of how he came to the Audion than "Without quite knowing what he was doing".

J.C.R. Licklider on the History of Personal Workstations (1986) [video] - dang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN--t9jXQc0 ====== dang This is the only talk online by the visionary who conceived and funded the Internet. It's quite amazing, though it needs a bit of patience at first; stick with it. Licklider was everybody's genius absent-minded uncle, and this is your chance to join the family. He covers a myriad of ideas about interactive computing, many of which are still futuristic. He strongly defends 'open' software and talks about Moore's Law under a different name. You get glimpses into how his mind works. He mentions dozens of different researchers and now-forgotten strands of work. He tells great stories, such as how he was walking in the dark, fell into an open grave, had trouble getting out so sat down to think instead, and came up with the idea of the personal workstation. The bits about analog computers are fascinating. There are cameos by Butler Lampson and others. Licklider was the sort of prophet whose vision usually remains unexecuted, but he turned out to be a social genius too, with an unmatched eye for talent. Some spacetime wormhole landed him at DARPA with a budget in 1962 and he played his cards brilliantly. It's an if-only story that actually worked out. We all owe this guy. It's Saturday. Take some time and watch this—it's a rare window into the background of our world. Watch it all the way to the end and you'll get to hear Alan Perlis quip that the historical purpose of AT&T was Bell Labs. Edit: Forgot to mention that I found it via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989390). Thanks, whistlerbrk! ~~~ whistlerbrk _tips hat_ my pleasure. I'll add that I've recently begun to read about the fascinating early history of computing myself through a series of HN threads which led me to read, "Tools for Thought" by Howard Rheingold. That book is highly cited in another book mentioned here in the comments about Licklider, "The Dream Machine". I highly recommend Tools for Thought. It is very clear from reading these histories that the early pioneers of the field knew with a very high degree of accuracy how the future of computing would play out over the coming decades. That book is humbling to say the least. ------ xjay The owner of this Youtube channel works at VPRI with Alan Kay. I believe he mentioned he got a bunch of these tapes from Alan, which he has then been digitizing and uploading now and then. A number of these ACM talks were recently made available on Youtube by the Computer History Museum [1], with talks/reflections by Butler Lampson, Chuck Tacker, Doug Engelbart, Larry Roberts, Gordon Bell, and many more. [1] [https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos) ~~~ mjn The tape was from the collection of the Computer History Museum, inherited from the collection of their predecessor, the Computer History Museum in Boston. It had just never been digitized. There's a blog post on it here: [http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-1986-acm- conference...](http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-1986-acm-conference- on-the-history-of-personal-workstations/) ------ base698 I just finished reading "The Dream Machine" and recommend it highly to anyone in the industry. It's got Licklider a the forefront. [http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution- Com...](http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution- Computing/dp/014200135X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=) ~~~ erikpukinskis This should be on every programmer's "Must Read" list of computer history books. I would put this up there with "Hackers" in terms of the volume of critical information about how basic questions of computer science were answered. ~~~ vidarh I'd add on "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry". The three together and the three gives very nicely complementary angles and additional stories. ------ bch "Where Wizards Stay Up Late"[0] is a fascinating account of the invention of the internet (Licklider a major player). I found it to be _much_ more interesting than I expected from the subject material. Highly recommended. [0] [http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up- Late/dp/06848326...](http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up- Late/dp/0684832674) ~~~ guiambros Another good read is "Machines of Loving Grace" [1]. Much more focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) vs. Intelligence Amplification (IA), but covers a lot of the work influenced by Engelbart and Licklider. [1] [http://smile.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common- Between...](http://smile.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between- ebook/dp/B00OP06CRG) ------ mjn Oh, very neat. I've read most of the papers in the proceedings of this conference, the 1986 ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations [1], which is full of great information. But while 10 of the 13 speakers wrote up their talks as papers for the proceedings, three didn't, and this was one of the missing ones (the other two were the talks from Alan Kay and Charles H. House). So it's great to now have the talk available. [1] Open access, click on the "table of contents" tab: [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=12178&picked=prox](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=12178&picked=prox) ------ wcarss Weird timing! Just this afternoon I finished cleaning up a transcript of an Oral History interview with Licklider from 1988: [http://wcarss.ca/refs/aspray-licklider- interview.html](http://wcarss.ca/refs/aspray-licklider-interview.html) ~~~ theoh Hey, I'm reading that and there's an apparent typo of "oral" which should be "aural": "and I put together oral radar" Edit: Also, some footnotes might be helpful. There's a reference to problems with DC bias when all bits are the same; could be good to put that in contemporary context of 8b/10b codes etc. The following words seem to be a reference to Christopher Strachey: "Licklider: Yes, probably the first person who wrote about it was a young Britisher. He mentioned the concept at a computer meeting in Paris, I think in 1960 -- sponsored by UNESCO, maybe." See [http://www.bobbemer.com/TIMESHAR.HTM](http://www.bobbemer.com/TIMESHAR.HTM) ~~~ wcarss Ah thanks, I was wondering who that was! The interviewers just nod along when he says it. Good idea on adding some footnotes like that. I'm trying to get a paper/interview/essay-reading group started (which is why I'm hosting the page) and some additional support material would likely be quite useful for folks in reading it. ------ rasz_pl This guy funded Douglas Engelbart (mother of all demos). Doug mentions him in this interview: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1oNBImSX0M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1oNBImSX0M) ------ corysama The youtube poster's video collection is full of similar material. [https://www.youtube.com/user/yoshikiohshima/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/yoshikiohshima/videos) ------ walterbell A few mins from the end of the video, he said he wished they had picked another name than "workstation". Then someone from the audience suggested a different name, which Licklider said would probably sell better. Can anyone make out that name? ~~~ bluejellybean P "something" stations, almost like "pleasurestation". Hard to make out. ~~~ dang You might be right—it would explain why Licklider replies by joking that it would sell better. ------ carussell Jeff Moser on Licklider: [http://www.moserware.com/2008/05/who-is-this-licklider- guy.h...](http://www.moserware.com/2008/05/who-is-this-licklider-guy.html) ------ dang If you want more like I did, this interview with Licklider's son contains quite a bit of information: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi4pVeyAhU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi4pVeyAhU0) And this is only a minute long but has some great clips of Licklider and Larry Roberts. Anybody know what broadcast it came from? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GfOTUoBpRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GfOTUoBpRw) ~~~ jcr I spotted something, but it doesn't seem to be related to the "one minute" vid you linked to. None the less, it's fun; "J.C.R. Licklider in One Minute" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMpfmDEC5JQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMpfmDEC5JQ) The 1963 "Intergalactic Computer Network" paper is also fun reading. [http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider- IntergalacticNetwork.pd...](http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider- IntergalacticNetwork.pdf) ------ stevebmark Starts at 4:30, direct link: [https://youtu.be/SN-- t9jXQc0?t=270](https://youtu.be/SN--t9jXQc0?t=270) ------ kev009 This was really good listening for a lazy Saturday. He pretty much outlays the road to tablet PCs, massive LCD TVs, etc. ------ mwcampbell He talked a lot about input and displays. I wonder what he would think of today's tablets and touchscreen laptops. ~~~ dang I was surprised by how early the work on touchscreens he mentions was. Was it the 1950s, or am I misremembering? The one I want most is the brain-computer interface he talks about. It's disappointing that we haven't gotten further on that in 30 years. ~~~ jcr When the "touch screen" was invented depends on how you define the term. For "light pen" based system, early/mid 1950's. For capacitive systems, it's the mid/late 1960's. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen) >" _The first light pen was created around 1955 as part of the Whirlwind >project at MIT.[2][3]_" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#History) >" _E.A. Johnson described his work on capacitive touchscreens in a short article published in 1965[6] and then more fully with photographs and diagrams in an article published in 1967.[7]_ "

Microsoft announces new Windows 10 Start menu design and updated Alt-Tab - Tomte https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/1/21310597/microsoft-windows-10-start-menu-design-new-alt-tab-features ====== PaulKeeble The messing around with stuff that adds no value or makes things worse continues. The new alt tab behaviour for edge sounds quite awful, what is wrong with ctrl + tab for this purpose exactly?

Ant engineering captured in slow motion detail - zck http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22604193 ====== arh68 The original paper (and movies!) are available at <http://crablab.gatech.edu/pages/publications/index.htm>

Ask HN: know an industry well? - haliax I'm looking for startup ideas, and feel like there's a nice market to be had in many of the industries that aren't consumer facing or household names - and hence get less attention from the tech community. Does anyone on HN know a specific industry - and its technical/technically solvable bellyaches? I'd be interested to hear about it / collaborate. ====== run4yourlives Insurance, Insurance, Insurance. Specifically Health and P&C lines. Although Health Insurance is starting to see some innovation in the US. Reasons: 1\. Perceived high barrier to entry, yet that isn't the case. 2\. Major players are tech dinosaurs at best. 3\. Small brokers (potential customers) dominate the landscape. 4\. Legislation keeps markets small because there is little in common from one area to the next - everything is niche. 5\. SV thinks it's boring, so you don't need to be the second coming of Steve Jobs to be very successful. ~~~ haliax Would you be up for an email/AIM chat about this? ~~~ run4yourlives Sure, my username at gmail. Be warned I'm in Canada though, so my knowledge about the US market is limited, and the two countries are very different in the health insurance sector, as you can imagine. ------ paulhart I asked a question recently in relation to an industry I know well: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1396541> I'm specifically looking at providing a video-based training service for a very-well-known vendor's product that many companies in this sector use. Not really a technical challenge, more a knowledge transfer challenge. ~~~ haliax Do you think that tech training is a decent market in general, or just for this one industry? ~~~ paulhart I think you're most likely to succeed if you can provide a quality service in a constrained market. In my specific case, the choices available are to either go to the vendor and pay more than 100k to get all the training for 10-15 people simultaneously, or to find someone who's been through it already and mind-meld. I've found one other group who is doing something similar to what I'm thinking, but their offering is laughable (machine voiceover!). I believe I could easily charge 1k-2k per month for site licenses of well constructed materials. Maybe quite a bit more, especially if I offer custom materials for clients. The foundation would be shared across all though. ------ rdl Defense contracting (communications, deployed software systems). Medical software (PACS/RIS in radiology primarily; some automated lab and pharmacy experience, medical paging. Limited EHR/EMR experience). Firearms (retail, wholesale, and manufacturing of small arms) (plus crypto/security and some datacenter/cloud/etc. stuff, but that's better covered by existing startups) ------ zmmz Industry: IT side of stock exchanges. Quite a space to explore as it is one of the last parts of the sector that is not widely covered by conventional financial media (FT etc.) and has no commonly used resources on the web. Barriers: End users (traders) usually have no say in the choice of platform/software, extremely secretive industry, most solutions are tailored. ------ tirrellp I know a specific industry, and I have a deep understanding of the current technlology as well as better solutions: Petroleum controls and automation. Ripe for the picking. Unfortunately, like most 'enterprisey' industries, the long sales cycle will eat you alive if you are not well funded. ~~~ HeyLaughingBoy Are you talking on the production side (refineries) or consumption (fuel dispensing)? I used to sell a product that was on fuel trucks and have always wondered what else I could do with it. ~~~ tirrellp I am talking about the downstream side of production as far as mass metering and additizing. Specifically, where the fuel goes after it has been refined and traveled through the pipeline to the place where the tanker trucks take it to your local gas station. That also includes massive movements by rail and barge. ------ mschaecher Read Clayton Christensen

Browser Permissions on Android: What No One Is Talking About - CyberSkys https://snapsearch.online/general/browser-permissions-on-android/ ====== foepys Why do I need to enable JavaScript to read this text post? What exactly does JavaScript do here except unhide the content? Especially when this post talks about privacy and safety. ~~~ zzo38computer Like I often see, it is readable if you disable CSS too. ------ est31 There is a point that the browser apps take a large number of permissions, but compared to apps, websites take much less of your data. That's one of the reasons why so many websites like reddit push you to use the app on mobile. ~~~ doc_gunthrop > That's one of the reasons why so many websites like reddit push you to use > the app on mobile. The Yelp website is one of the biggest offenders in this regard. If you're not viewing it in desktop mode then be prepared to get redirected to the Play store any time you tap on any link. ~~~ Red_Leaves_Flyy I treat yelp and Pinterest links like links on [insert sketchy site]. ------ _bxg1 When Android apps can freely draw over other apps without warning, privacy permissions feel almost like security-theater. ------ iwasakabukiman Since the original post seems confused about why a browser would ask for contacts: A legitimate reason could be so that they can easily autofill forms for you. ~~~ l0b0 What, for when I report my friends to the police? Seriously though, the assumption that I would be one of my own contacts is weird. ------ gcbw3 android have means to let browser/apps download and save files locally in SD/Download without the Storage permission. Chrome decides not to use it, because reasons. ~~~ CyberSkys Yes, that's exactly the point - it's not required to ask for permissions - they still want to. ------ jamal_sayo this is definitely something to think about thank you ------ jj1sam its not a surprise that chrome is one of them..

Google should allow for the sharing of email filters. - vishaldpatel Just a thought.. for all you gmail employees reading hacker news =). A lot of problems can be solved for my friends if I could somehow share my e-mail filters with them =). ====== koeselitz But Gmail already _does_ allow sharing of email filters. It's something they added recently, I think - it's still in the Google Labs tab. It's called "Filter Import/Export." (Edit: that's the cool thing about Gmail, really - if you can think of a feature, they probably already thought of it, too.) Edit #2: looks like it exports filters in XML, which is nice. Here's a pretty good overview of the feature: [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/export-gmail- filter...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/export-gmail-filters.html) ~~~ vishaldpatel Many thanks =) ------ forkrulassail Yes, that would indeed be awesome. I have about 17 emails coming into my gmail account. And have extensive filtering, prioritization going.

Error in RSS produced by Hacker news - ivan slash which should be placed after .com in item link address is placed after 'item' ====== a-priori I just noticed this. The feed is generating links like this: <http://news.ycombinator.comitem/?id=100946> ... when they should read this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100946> ~~~ quimax Yeah, you are right, you can solve it in the address bar, but I guess to check for the typo makes more sense ,-) PG ? Anybody there? ~~~ pg I'll fix it. Edit: fixed; sorry. ~~~ quimax Thanks ------ christefano pg, could you please change the MIME type of the feed to application/rss+xml (it's currently text/html)? Some by-the-book aggregators won't read this feed properly. [http://feedvalidator.org/docs/warning/UnexpectedContentType....](http://feedvalidator.org/docs/warning/UnexpectedContentType.html) Thanks. ------ andreyf lol! Not many people using the RSS, I gather? ~~~ wlievens I use it. Only issue I ever had was that a few weeks ago, all items' descriptions showed up as Undefined or something. But that's fixed now.

Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision - cedricr http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/gene-patents-probably-dead-worldwide-following-australian-court-decision/ ====== ihodes An odd title; this patent was already struck down by the Supreme Court of the USA in 2013[0]. Now it's no longer valid in Australia. The cost of tests for BRCA1/2 mutations is dropping dramatically; were the medical apparatus of the USA not so drastically broken, the cost to consumers of this test would today cost the consumer around $50 US. This is thanks largely to the ACLU and some geneticists in NYC, including Harry Ostrer. [0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad_Genetics#Association_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad_Genetics#Association_for_Molecular_Pathology_v._Myriad_Genetics) ~~~ matt_heimer Does anyone know how the medical test at the heart of this legal issue compares to something like the raw data from 23andme? 23andme v4 gives you 25 SNPs for BRCA1 and BRCA2. ~~~ ihodes A comprehensive test looking at the BRCAs may deeply sequence sequence the entire gene(s); spanning around 150 thousand base pairs. You'd not only want to look for SNPs, but novel SNVs, and various structural variants (SVs) and copy-number variants (CNVs). I don't know the most common class of mutations for BRCA1 and 2, so it may be the case that a smaller, cheaper panel could be nearly as effective as well. ------ mirimir Now, if we can just agree that natural products and traditional cures can't be patented. India has been fighting hard for that. ~~~ ekianjo If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. Patents are an invention from another Era and make absolutely no sense nowadays, and we see them constantly abused to make our lives worse in the end. ~~~ doki_pen Not true. Patents increase the incentive for people to do hard research and development. Whether or not that increased incentive is necessary is debatable. ~~~ Peaker They also decrease the incentive for people to do research and development (e.g: as derivative works from existing inventions). Which effect is stronger? It is very plausible that overall, the decrease is far stronger than the increase, as the vast majority of inventions are derivative. ------ icanhackit Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist? I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society would have more able-bodied and able-minded people to work or even conduct themselves in a way that didn't transmit their illness, whether physically or through dependance. By leaving the weak weakened, we indirectly transmit that ailment to others by physical and economic forces. You're only as strong as your weakest point. ~~~ rayiner The question is: what kind of valuable things would still be produced? You'll still get iPhones, but will you get ARM cores or Snapdragon chipsets or LTE or MPEG4 or pills that cure Hep-C? The bigger picture is that almost all hard R&D takes place under the umbrella of _some sort_ of protection from copying. Intel spends billions a year on semiconductor R&D, and protects it with trade secrets. Pharma companies spend billions on drug R&D and protect them with patents. Even internet companies like Google and Facebook depend on being able to hide a lot of their "secret sauce" (either algorithms or compilations of user information) on the server- side where it can't be easily copied. Hard R&D that isn't protected from copying is usually subsidized. The core internet protocols were subsidized by the Government. Advances in core browser protocols are subsidized by Internet companies that rely heavily on ad revenue. Going back further in history, Bell Labs was subsidized by AT&T's telephone monopoly and PARC was subsidized by Xerox's copier monopoly. That model can work too, but has its own problems. ~~~ icanhackit You make some compelling points but I'm still not convinced that this form of protectionism is the only avenue to innovation. The strength of a company is often in its organization, processes, location, and systems which are difficult to copy in a cohesive way without being gifted with similar circumstances. Why can't a company's strength and success in the marketplace be defined by these characteristics as opposed to legislative shields? Winner- takes-all systems often shape organizational behavior to be more defensive than creative. ~~~ kbenson Let's not reduce this argument to innovation for _companies_. Individuals innovate and patent as well. There is a tendency to focus purely on the negative effects of a system that seems to be failing it's purpose. It's important to understand the system as a whole, and it's history. Has the patent system ever functioned for the purpose it was designed for? If it isn't functioning correctly now, is that in part or in whole? Is it not functioning because it has been changed, because the world has changed, or both. Finally, is there a way to alter the system, whether that be to curtail it, expand it, or just change how it operates, that might yield a better functioning system? Personally, I'm not for abolishing patents. They had a very clearly defined purpose (innovation encouragement) when they were first created. I think they've been mostly perverted into another purpose (wealth protection), more- so in some industries than others. They've been expanded from court rulings to cover things which were not originally thought patentable. What we need here is a well reasoned legislative overhaul. What we'll get if we're extremely lucky is a hole-ridden clusterfuck of revisions, but if we're lucky, it will somewhat address the current problems. The new problems will be something we discover and address tomorrow. ~~~ JoeAltmaier I don't think you can disentangle those two purposes. Innovation is encouraged precisely because you can profit from your invention. I believe the cost and delay of patent litigation is the real problem. It's important to identify the critical issue before effective change can happen. ~~~ kbenson My point was when wealth protection is a tool to bolster innovation, then the incentives are aligned correctly. When people, or more importantly legislators, forget that and think the _purpose_ of patents is to reward for innovation, we get some perverse incentives. In a perfect world, protection would be inversely proportional to the amount of innovation the sector is experiencing, and would also be scaled to the amount the innovation helps. But those are both hard to measure realistically. ------ mcv Did Myriad really claim to own the gene itself as their invention? If so, there are a lot of people who'd probably like to sue them for infecting them with that invention. It seems to me that all Myriad could possibly patent, is a unique detection method for that gene. But that wouldn't stop anyone from using a different detection method. But what interests me more about this case is that the article expects an Australian court decision to be taken as global jurisprudence. What's the logic behind that? And is that really where we're headed? ~~~ dbbolton SCOTUS struck down patents on naturally occurring gene sequences themselves and decided that the "mere isolation" thereof cannot be patented: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass%27n_for_Molecular_Patholog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass%27n_for_Molecular_Pathology_v._Myriad_Genetics,_Inc.#Decision_of_the_Supreme_Court) However, "artificial" sequences can be. I'm not aware of any test cases that establish boundaries on the difference though. It would be logical to assume you'd have to alter the nucleotide sequence to the extent that the resulting peptide or protein is not naturally occurring (e.g. changing a TTT codon to TTC wouldn't suffice, since both will ultimately be translated into phenylalanine). Contrary to this reasoning, complementary DNA _is_ patentable in the US on the grounds that it's "not naturally occurring". So, if you take the mRNA corresponding to an un-patentable DNA sequence and mix it with a few enzymes and nucleotides that react in a deterministic fashion, you can then patent the sequence of the final product: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_DNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_DNA) In a gross oversimplification, it's almost as if the court said: "you can't patent natural English words, but you can patent the ROT13 versions of them". But regarding methods, the majority opinion clearly said they're fair game (just as you can't patent gold, but you could patent a novel approach to mining or extracting it) and there are several valid examples in the US today: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_patents_in_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_patents_in_the_United_States#Gene_patents) ------ guard-of-terra It is very reassuring that after 20 years of software patent debates courts decided to not start this over with genes. ------ hliyan It's good to see a rational decision with regards to science coming out of Australia. Aussies have been getting too much bad rap due to the Abbot government. ~~~ eru We just tossed Abbott. Let's see if that helps. ~~~ shoo He wasn't tossed, his party threw him out. We still have to wear the shame of collectively permitting those bastards to be voted in to federal government. They're still there. ~~~ caf His party gave him the arse because polling showed he was seriously on the nose with the electorate and had been so since shortly after his election. ------ amelius Does this mean that Monsanto's patents are also invalid? ~~~ tectec I would think that Monsanto's patents are quite different. They use plant breeding to _create_ new varieties. These patents of Myriad Genetics are just using DNA sequencing to find existing genes. ~~~ vesinisa I agree with your view that Monsanto is unlikely affected, but the article is quite misleadingly named. With "gene patent" I immediately think of Monsanto. But this ruling seems to only affect those who claim exclusive right to _discovering_ properties of existing genes - not those who _create_ organisms with unique genetic properties, like Monsanto. ------ DomreiRoam I think this press [1] release of the institut curie gives a lot of information. other press release can be find here [2]. [1] [http://www.institut-curie.org/sites/default/files/myriad- gen...](http://www.institut-curie.org/sites/default/files/myriad-genetics- predisposition-breastt-cance.pdf) [2] [http://www.institut-curie.org/press- release/by-type/377](http://www.institut-curie.org/press-release/by-type/377) ~~~ pjc50 That's dated 2008? ~~~ DomreiRoam Yes but at this time the institut who is specialized in cancer had done lots of research and was very against the privatization of the public research and that the researcher couldn't research further because of this patent. The Curie institut reacted to the patent as a research institution, here we have the impact on a practical health issue. ------ stillsut Patents are a trade: you get an 18 year monopoly for public disclosure of how your innovation works. In societies that lack patent protection, much innovation becomes a trade secret guarded against public use for generations, think China and the silk trade. By removing patents, you remove the incentive to make public how your medicine works. That, actually sounds scarier to me than temporary price mark ups. ------ personjerry Although we might be clear on what we perceive to be the right ruling, it is not always so simple. For example, what if we claimed in software that any software program, given that it is merely a series of bits, is therefore merely a number, and thus a "product of mathematics" not produced by man? ~~~ lifeisstillgood Copyright is far and away the best IP category for software - I strongly argue it is a form of literacy anyway. And I am not convinced there is any mathematics outside the mind of humans - it's an odd one, but is not maths a model of the world rather than the world itself? ~~~ thaumasiotes > is not maths a model of the world rather than the world itself? This isn't right. It sounds like a very "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" view of things. Any model of anything is math. The world is bound by the math, not the other way around. ------ Gatsky I think the fears that this will stifle innovation are greatly exaggerated. In fact, this patent was stifling innovation. Because of the expense, we have tested far fewer patients than we could have for BRCA1/2 mutations, and there thus remain many mutations of unknown significance that can only be resolved with more detailed clinical annotation from testing many more people. It's a classic case of a patent hampering the usefulness of an invention, so that someone can make money. Myriad really were relentless opportunists with very well fed lawyers. The idea of a patent on a gene is completely nonsensical to anybody working in genomics these days. I can pay $1000 and sequence all 3 billion base pairs of my DNA. Using open source software and publicly available databases funded by governments and charities I can analyse my own DNA. What role does a gene patent have in any of this? What if I discover that I have an unreported variant in the patented gene? Can I now patent my own version of the gene, and charge my offspring a license fee for reproducing this gene each time one of their cells divide? Do they pay extra if they are homozygous? Soul-destroying patent disputes have become a feature of the life sciences, it drives me mad. The story is always the same. A scientist performing research in a seemingly unimpressive field discovers something interesting. They generously publish their rough results because that's how science works. Then someone else comes along and refines it a bit before slapping a patent on it, because nobody else has yet. 20 years of legal battles ensue. Companies are still fighting over the PCR patents for example, even AFTER the patents have expired [1]. Now it looks like the same crap is going to transpire with CRISPR. The funny thing about these cases is that most of the research and innovation happens at the beginning, before the patents are even in operation, again questioning the notion that patents foster innovation. As has been pointed out many times before, it is rare for a biotech/life sciences company to generate the kind of profit that permits them to do blue sky research. Most of that happens from government funded work. Big pharma doesn't really count, it costs them too much to develop each drug. They certainly don't have anything akin to Bell Labs, Xerox PARC or Google X. Anyway, Myriad actually doesn't have any products any more. All the extremely simple tests they do can be run by anyone. They offer a whole lot of 'services' like genetic counselling and patient education, but that's all to create a veneer of legitimacy and hide the fact they are patent trolls. I feel sorry for their scientists trying to do research in this environment. [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction#Paten...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction#Patent_disputes) ------ daveloyall I first read "gene _patients_ probably dead". ------ onewaystreet > This is a result that will have major practical consequences, and is likely > to save thousands of lives. No, companies will stop doing research now. ~~~ kybernetyk >No, companies will stop doing research now. That's what I'm worried about, too. For example C60 [1] is a curious molecule that can't be patented anymore. In a rat study it showed to prolong the rats' lives by over 90% [2] by protecting the rats from cancer. Sadly there won't be any human study anytime soon (if at all) because it's just not financially viable without the possibility of patenting the stuff and extracting fantasy prices for it. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene) [2] [http://www.kurzweilai.net/fullerene-c60-administration- doubl...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/fullerene-c60-administration-doubles-rat- lifespan-with-no-toxicity) ~~~ flipp3r You should read the comment section of the second link. The badly done research was done by someone whose business is selling snake oil with c60 in it. ~~~ kybernetyk Hmm, interesting. Has anyone here access to the referenced paper [1] and can confirm that "Anthony Loera" worked on it? [1] [http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S014296121200323...](http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0142961212003237?via=sd) Ref.: Baati T, et al., The prolongation of the lifespan of rats by repeated oral administration of [60]fullerene, Biomaterials (2012), doi:10.1016/j.biomaterials.2012.03.036

Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force - petethomas http://chronicle.com/article/Business-Can-Pay-to-Train-Its/231015/ ====== learc83 The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years out of date. Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph theory, and complexity analysis will still have immense value--a scrum master certification won't. ~~~ kartickvad I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. In college, I didn't learn version control, continuous integration (continuously submitting your work in small changelists or patches), unit testing, making sure you're building the right product before building it, delivering the simplest possible code and design that meets the requirements, code quality, working in teams, untangling dependencies and making as much progress as possible today without waiting for all your dependencies to be resolved, and so on. I expect that all these skills will be very much relevant 20 years from now. So, don't confuse long-term value with "grounded in CS fundamentals". Programming isn't a hard science like physics. ~~~ learc83 >I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. I didn't say that. I said most industry processes are fads. I also didn't say that nothing that isn't grounded in CS fundamentals has long term value. There are plenty of other skills that have long term value. Office politics, salary negotiation, self-promotion are much more valuable than knowing how to run a few git commands. But non of those things should be taught in a Computer Science program. They are fundamentally vocational skills. Just like version control, unit testing, and continuous integration are vocational skills. Sure they're useful but they should be taught in an internship/apprenticeship or on the job. >In college, I didn't learn version control... I learned to use subversion, and other than the fact that they are are both version control systems, what I learned didn't really carry over to distributed version control like Git. In a CS program you should be learning things like how to implement a version control system, not how to use Git. I would have been pissed paying thousands of dollars per semester for a professor to walk me through a Git tutorial. I don't have a problem if a professor wants you to use github to submit your assignments or something like that. And sure some of the vocational skills you listed are going to be useful for years to come. But these skills should be ancillary. They should be just a happy side effect--like learning teamwork during a group project. ~~~ kartickvad I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for that. In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view. ~~~ learc83 That's perfectly fine. What you're looking for is vocational training, not a liberal college education. Non professional college programs are explicitly not vocational training. If they were, they wouldn't require spending nearly half your time on general education requirements (assuming we're talking about the US here). I doubt art history, physics, or psychology has proven much direct use to you in your career. >In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view. Finite state machines and pushdown automata are an incredibly common pattern, and I can't see how you can work as a professional software developer without running into that pattern time and again. Have you never used regular expressions? Automata (usually taught along with theory of computation) teaches you all kinds of useful real world knowledge, like why you can't parse HTML with regular expressions, and why you can't write a program to tell if another program will eventually halt. ~~~ kartickvad My idea of education is one that teaches you skills that are broadly used throughout your career. I don't a priori reject things that meet this criteria just because it's not based in theory (because theory is not an end to itself), or by applying arbitrary labels like "vocational" (whatever that means), "liberal" or "professional". As for art history and psychology, that's a different debate to be had about education — whether these should be part of education and how much time they should take. As for your question, I've used regexes, but you don't need to understand the details of the regex engine in order to use them. Neither do I, in my day-to- day work, write programs that try to tell if other programs halt. ~~~ learc83 >but you don't need to understand the details of the regex engine in order to use them. Yes, at some point you do. Without understanding how regular expressions actually work, you can't know when it is appropriate to use them. Many things aren't possible with regular expressions and many grammars aren't parsable with regular expressions. You can either waste time trying to write an impossible regex (or write one that works on your tests, but blows up in the wild) or you can study automata theory and understand what actually goes on underneath. As for the halting problem, I'll leave you this stack overflow explanation for why it is beneficial to understand. [http://cs.stackexchange.com/a/32853](http://cs.stackexchange.com/a/32853) Many problems in CS have already been solved, some are impossible to solve. You can either waste time on trial and error trying to reinvent the wheel or you can study the theoretical underpinnings. Do you want to spend a week trying to model a problem as a finite state machine, only to determine that finite state machine isn't powerful enough to solve your problem? Do you want to spend a month banging your head against a wall trying to solve a problem that you could have solved in 5 minutes had you realized it was just a well known graph theory problem all along? A problem that was solved decades ago. The only way to know these things is to study the theory behind what you do. Why do you think Civil Engineers are required to take physics? The difference between an Engineer and an artisan is a rigorous understanding of the formal system underpinning his work. Artisans build through trial and error and experiences, and they leave many failed projects in their wake while they gain this experience. Engineers use theory and modeling to limit the number of failed projects to the net benefit of everyone involved. ------ yummyfajitas For the most part, bonding agreements ("you can't leave for X years without repaying us for your training") are considered exploitative and usually not legally enforceable. As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force - if a business invests $20k in training and $80k in salary, there is nothing stopping another employer from offering $90k in salary after training is complete. If an investment can't be protected it's pointless to make it. Having employees pay for (and be compensated for) their own training is the most reasonable workaround. ~~~ mrbabbage [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs) How would training followed by a bonding period be considered differently than other mechanisms inducing employees to stay? Could these other mechanisms also be legally questionable? E.g. some San Francisco Bay Area technology companies offer large (~$20k) signing bonuses to new uni graduate hires that the employee must return if she leaves within her first year at the company. Similarly, companies offer five- year equity packages that deliver no equity until the twelfth month. ~~~ __z Yeah, I heard about companies who pay for college - as long as you stay one year after your last class. If not you have to pay them back. Actually, just pay back just the tuition you spent in the last year. ~~~ mariodiana Seeing as Army ROTC will want 4 years, it sounds like a great deal. ~~~ __z If you take classes for 4 years then you'll have to stay 5 to get your education fully paid off. If you took 4 years of classes and worked for 4 years then you'd owe them 1 year tuition (the previous year) That being said, this deal was to further your education for your job. So you couldn't get your masters in finance unless you worked in finance. A software developer couldn't get their finance degree paid for. This was for a company my friend worked for. ------ zrail The whole for-profit code school thing has been giving me the creeps since I started hearing about it years ago, precisely because it's the potential employees paying for hyper-specific training. I wonder if there would be fewer outcries about a talent shortage if companies were somehow incentivized to hire these more junior people with the explicit goal of training them up to a productive level. ~~~ linkregister My opinion is divided about the "pay-to-play" model of workers paying for their own training. On one hand, they assume all the risk and financial hardship of training. On the other hand, compared to other developed economies (British, Australian), they have more opportunities to change careers because the risk of training has already been assumed by the worker. I've found that American hiring is far more flexible than the Commonwealth tradition of jockeying for an apprenticeship. And older workers have far less opportunity for apprenticeships. It's hard to defend the code schools though. There are a high amount of horror stories we hear about them on HN, from both the students' and hiring managers' perspectives. ~~~ mseebach > There are a high amount of horror stories we hear about them on HN, from > both the students' and hiring managers' perspectives. Can you link to them? I'm trying to do due diligence on some of them, but haven't been able to find much at all of substance. I'm specifically interested in Maker's Academy in London. ~~~ linkregister Just going from what I remembered reading, here are the ones that stood out the most. Comments vary from supporters to detractors. Ask HN threads I found interesting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844848) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7147664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7147664) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9616691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9616691) The one I really wanted to find, which accompanied an article about some students who felt scammed by their bootcamp, is eluding me right now. It was an interesting article about how the students were required to post misleading stories on social media that made the school look better than it was. Edit: I found out why it was hard to find; it was taken down. Here's the link to the comments. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492381) ------ walterbell The Uber robotics talent raid of CMU took piratization to a logical extreme, [http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ube...](http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/uber- self-driving-cars-carnegie-mellon-poached) _" They took all the guys that were working on vehicle autonomy — basically whole groups, whole teams of developers, commercialization specialists, all the guys that find grants and who were bringing the intellectual property," recalls a person who was there during the departures" ... Uber snatched up about 50 people from Carnegie Mellon, including many from its highest ranks. ... the deal includes a "transition period" that keeps some of the departed staffers around ... "The work of these employees is very incestuous and loose," says the same NREC insider. "They are given free rein of the facilities as part-time CMU employees, but there are absolutely no checks on the work that they are doing or what [intellectual property] they are taking. Is it for CMU? Is it for Uber? None of us here know."_ Edit: could CMU have gotten better IP licensing terms and ROI for the University, if they had spun out the entire team (with private financing) and had an open auction of RoboticsResearchCo to the many companies investing in this field? ~~~ cgearhart I think this is a better example of dysfunction in academia than retaining/training a workforce. In particular, previous articles suggest that most folks saw their salaries _doubled_ , with six-figure incentive checks to lure them away. From what I hear, it's not so much that the new salary is unusually high for industry researchers and engineers, but that the old salaries were unusually low (except in academia). CMU could probably have gotten better return if they hadn't made it a point to underpay them so much compared to their market value. ~~~ walterbell Historically, university researchers doing fundamental research with mass- market industrial applications have been spun out into a company, so that both the university and the researchers have an upside opportunity for founding equity stakes. A signing bonus or normalized salary is in an entirely different (smaller) class of compensation, especially since there was already an international track record of investment into the commercialization of self-driving vehicles. ------ nateabele > _The trick is to relabel it as education, then complain that your > prospective employees aren’t getting the right kind._ Well, I guess if already-educated workers are the norm in your industry, companies are going to change their hiring practices accordingly. It's okay not to like it, but arguing against it on the basis that 'it didn't used to be like this' just makes you look entitled and whiny. > _Bemoaning the unpreparedness of undergraduates isn’t new. Today, however, > those complaints are getting a more sympathetic hearing from the policy > makers who govern public higher education._ Yeah, well, when policy makers are responsible for all the cheap money flowing into the system (without which the system would probably collapse at this point), I guess that'll happen. ~~~ cgearhart > _...if already-educated workers are the norm..._ That's the point -- there's a difference between education and training. It is only an issue because so much of the education looks very similar to the desired training. It is _not_ the purpose of an education to produce new employees, but to provide a broad basis for experiencing and making sense of the world. It just so happens that you also learn transferrable skills like a basic familiarity with a particular field, along with some tools and techniques that help you organize and solve problems. A proper education is not an extended code bootcamp, nor should it be. ~~~ nateabele > _That 's the point -- there's a difference between education and training._ Excellent point. Two problems: (1) Over the past ~2.5 generations, the narrative about education has been informed by the conventional wisdom of {grades -> university -> job -> pension}. Hence, education is now only nominally about producing 'citizens of the republic' (so to speak), and _de facto_ about producing well-trained workers. Disambiguating these goals is important, but hampered by... (2) The perverse incentives created by cheap government money encourage malinvestment (i.e. an English degree [I say this with love — my wife is an English major]), and the consequent propensity of industry to not only see it as a jobs program, but also as a government policy problem. ------ paulpauper One possible solution is cognitive screening - the use of tests such as the Wonderlic, SAT/ACT, or Wechsler to find prospective employees who can learn quickly and have good critical thinking skills (and thus would benefit the most from on-site training for technical tasks. training obviously costs money), but unfortunately something called 'disparate impact' makes this difficult to implement, so employers instead have to let colleges do the screening, turning an advanced degree into a very overpriced, time consuming 'IQ test'. Some people are more concerned about hurt feelings than providing equal opportunities. The 'logic' is if the tests expose a reality that isn't politically correct, we must do away with the test, so the result is more student loan debt, a worse labor market, and more credentialism. ~~~ dragonwriter > The 'logic' is if the tests expose a reality that isn't politically correct, > we must do away with the test Untrue. The logic is if there is a disparate impact against a legally- protected class, such that the test would be a convenient cover for illegal discrimination, and you allow discrimination using the test without demonstration of relevance, it becomes an easy, obvious, and effective tool for those looking for cover for discrimination on an illegal basis; to avoid that, the logic goes, you simply require those who wish to use the test as a basis for discrimination in that case to actually be able demonstrate that the test is meaningful to the job and that it is applied as a discrimination factor in a manner consistent with the way that it is meaningful to the job. If they've actually done the kind of analysis that would let them know that the test really is useful, this is trivial; it does, however, prevent adopting a test with discriminatory effect against a protected class merely based on intuition or conventional wisdom. The type of analysis involved may be costly, but then, if it really is something that those wishing to apply have high confidence would be valuable for their business, that type of analysis would be worthwhile to pay for. The reason it is difficult is because none of the people who like to talk about how useful these things would be when talk is cheap wants to put their money where the mouth is on the issue. ~~~ yummyfajitas Strangely, we are unwilling to apply that same logic to traditional hiring processes. I.e., few companies have ever done a study (sufficient to win in court) to prove that their subjective human opinion-based tests do not have a disparate impact. Yet processes like this are somehow allowed. I.e., if my subjective human hiring technique is biased, you need to prove I discriminated on purpose. If my objective, IQ-based technique is biased, I need to prove I didn't. Why this disparity? ~~~ learc83 >Why this disparity? For the simple fact that we already have evidence that some protected classes perform worse on IQ tests. Therefore, simply by using an IQ test you are discriminating against a protected class. The burden is on you to prove that the discrimination is necessary. No one needs to prove that discrimination is happening because you are using a test that has already been show to be discriminatory. Interview based hiring techniques are much more varied than IQ tests, and they have not been shown to be near universally discriminatory. Therefore the burden is first to prove that discrimination is happening in the particular situation. ~~~ __z >they have not been shown to be near universally discriminatory. They actually have... I am not going to get fully into it at the moment (but there's a ton of research on the topic) but we know that resumes that say Lakisha are significantly less likely to get a callback than a resume that says Karen. Another example is blinding in orchestras. When the practice became the applicant played behind a curtain (so they judge didn't know what the applicant looked like) the number of women in orchestras increased. ~~~ learc83 I'm with you on this, but there are differences. Subjective interview based hiring across all companies has been show to be discriminatory towards protected classes. But that's different than showing a specific company's hiring process is discriminative. If company A uses IQ test X, and IQ test X has been shown to be discriminatory, then you can say definitively that the hiring process of company A is discriminatory. If company B uses hiring process Y, and you can show that hiring process Y is discriminatory in 50% of the companies that use it, you can't make a definitive conclusion about company B in the same way you can company A. ~~~ __z Yea, I agree, thanks for clarifying. There is a huge difference is explicit bias (give applicants an IQ test even though we'll weed out the blacks or even _to_ weed out the blacks) and _subconscious_ bias - which is an incredibly complex problem. Most companies _are_ trying to eliminate (unintended) bias in the hiring process. ------ theodorewiles As a lib arts graduate, I might be biased, but I believe that it's still the best education for the type of decision-making that's most useful in real- world business decisions: ambiguous and incomplete information from a variety of sources with competing interests. That being said, if you're not in a leadership position that kind of decision making isn't what you're doing: you're most likely just optimizing on your own little anthill, so a "profit-centered" education like the article is against might make sense for the worker bees. Another thing that I think is usually missing from the "train your workers" debate is how much variance there is in productivity, and how actual productivity is usually unknowable unless you have 2-3 months of project data for a given worker (these are assumptions). So hire unskilled contract workers, fire 80% of them, and then train the remaining 20%. They won't have the credentials to work elsewhere, and you've been able to identify the true all-stars using data on their actual work product. ------ laurentoget It seems expecting schools to do all the training your employees will ever need would not be a good bet from a business point of view either. If your employees have the exact same skills as the competition's employees how do you expect the business differentiate itself? ------ wwweston It's true that business _should_ pay to train its own work force, but I'm not convinced it _can_. Businesses that would like to but that operate in a sector where a competitor can successfully externalize that cost will be at a competitive disadvantage. And businesses that subscribe to managerialism -- the idea that it's primarily management/leadership skills that differentiate a business, rather than domain knowledge -- may not know how to train employees at all, as it takes someone with domain knowledge to know how that can be done... ------ nitwit005 Companies are often eating the cost of training employees without admitting to it. Pick some company at random, look around, and there will often be piles of people who have no official training or certifications to speak of, and no relevant degree, but who are perfectly competent at their jobs. Somehow, magic happened, and they were trained, despite no training money in the budget. A lot of it is just done semi-officially. The boss points at some guy he trusts and tells him to fill them in, and lower productivity is accepted for some period. ------ joshu I thought tech internships were more about recruiting than about training. ------ vinnyc Students aren't dealing with the proper issues that arise in a regular workplace. Many professors lack knowledge on what has been going on between them leaving the workplace and today. Because of this students are learning principles that aren't fully applicable to many business jobs today instead of learning how to deal with corporate incompetence. If companies train employees on how to deal with personnel, they will learn more of the technicalities on the job underneath a hopefully competent supervisor. ~~~ emodendroket Why should they? That's the whole argument of this piece -- that they shouldn't.

Comparison of S3 and Rackspace/Mosso Cloud Files - timf http://blog.mosso.com/2009/02/a-quantitative-comparison-of-rackspace-and-amazon-cloud-storage-solutions/ ====== mdasen The comparisons they use are quite contrived. For example, Mosso charges $0.01 for every 500 PUT requests (vs. Amazon's $0.01 for every 1,000 PUTs). However, Mosso gives you free PUTs if the file is over 100K so they made the tests to have a 150K filesize meaning that they have no request charges. Whether that's true of your application is another story. Likewise, the test is 1TB of incoming bandwidth and 100GB of outgoing bandwidth. Now, Amazon easily trumps Mosso on outgoing bandwidth charges - BUT Mosso is offering free incoming bandwidth __until the end of the month __. Seems a little unfair to be creating a comparison on a situation that will exist for another 19 days. I should also note that Mosso seems to measure in Gigabytes instead of Gibibytes. Why? Well, they're storing 5TB which would be 5120GB, but they've calculated their pricing based on 5000GB as being 5TB (5000 * 0.15 + 100 * 0.22 = 722). So, you're actually getting less storage. It's not that important in the small range, but when you're talking about terrabytes of storage it sure as hell becomes important. It means that each terrabyte used on their system is over 90GB short. Now, Amazon might be using the same logic there so I should pull back. Really, it's cheap to do a comparison using pricing that's going to go up in under a month from when you wrote the comparison. ~~~ ecarlin Hey mdasen - Thanks for digging into the details. Please allow me to clarify a couple of things... 1\. Average File Size - You have nailed the difference in request fee pricing but failed to point out that 2 of the 5 scenarios show an avg file size of 75KB. In fact, scenarios 1 and 2 are exactly the same with the exception of file size and were included to specifically highlight the difference in pricing both above and below the 100KB threshold. Also, in some instances, a smaller avg file size results in Amazon costs being even MORE expensive. For example, take a look at scenario #5 and set the average file size to 50KB. The savings with Rack INCREASE from $3,116.97 to $3,525.70. That's because Amazon charges CDN and origin fetch request fees, neither of which Rack/Mosso does. The point of the calculator was to make something that is difficult to compare more quantitative. Your assumption that file sizes over 100KB would always benefit Rackspace is a good example of why the calc was created. As scenario 5 shows, that's not always the case. We tried not to pull any punches and make the scenarios reasonable and fair (I'm an architect and don't particularly care for hyped up marketing). We believe in complete transparency which is also why we make the calculator available. We encourage anyone and everyone to run their own scenarios. If there are errors in the calc, that is another story and we welcome feedback so we can fix any that exist. We recognize we won't be cheaper in EVERY case, but at least people will have the data they need to make an informed decision. 2\. Incoming Bandwidth Charges - You are correct that incoming BW is temporarily free. I can't speak in great detail here but we won't simply be introducing an incoming BW charge. Instead, we'll be making some broader cloud pricing changes that will also impact Files BW pricing. That's still a bit of a moving target but I have a newer version of the calc that includes these changes and it doesn't change the fundamental result. When the new pricing is released, we will be releasing a new version of the calculator. Again, full transparency. We thought about waiting until the pricing changes go into affect before releasing this analysis, but since there isn't a fundamental difference, we wanted to get the analysis out now. That said, even with the EXISTING pricing, adding in an incoming BW charge doesn't really change the result. For example, on the "Pricing" tab of the workbook, change the 0 to .10 for "BW in" under Cloud Files. We're still less expensive on all scenarios (with support) and less expensive (or roughly the same) on 4 of the 5 scenarios without support. 3\. Gigabytes vs. Gibibytes - We measure in increments of 1024, not 1000 and the pricing breakpoints (see the Pricing tab) are the same. The amount of storage and bandwidth used is an input to the calculator so any number can be entered. We probably should have used 5120 instead of 5000, etc, etc. so your point is well taken. I'll update that for the next version. Again, thanks for digging in. In general, we expect some degree of skepticism (as there SHOULD be when any company produces their own comparative analysis) but we felt there was a very quantifiable message that wasn't being told. We have tried to be as fair and transparent as we could be in the analysis and we don't necessarily want you to take our word for it. We encourage any and all to look at the cost and performance for yourself. If we've made a mistake, let us know so we can fix it. If it would be of use, don't hesitate to e-mail me directly at erik[dot]carlin[at]rackspace.com. Regards, Erik Carlin ~~~ timf It's unfortunate that HN has gotten so busy lately that your reply won't be seen by more people. Thankyou for taking the time here to clarify the argument. ------ cperciva Mosso thinks that Mosso is better than the competition? I'm shocked. ~~~ dabeeeenster The data itself seems pretty objective... ~~~ jacquesm that may be, but the wording suggests serious bias: "cloud files saves you" is not the kind of language you'd expect in an objective review. ------ jacquesm Is there a more objective comparison of these services somewhere ? Well, at least they didn't do the usual, pay someone else to come up with an 'impartial review'. ~~~ moe They both have nice pricing calculators: <http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html> <http://www.mosso.com/pricingfiles.jsp> Just tack in your values and see for yourself. ------ ggruschow Impressive latency results for static files. Too bad that's not what I do. Post another ad when the on-demand instances are available and priced hourly. ~~~ wmf The CDN latency test may be flawed. They accessed an 8K file once every 5 minutes, but CDNs are designed for large files that are frequently accessed. Amazon's high latency may be due to cache misses that would not occur if the traffic was heavier.

The App of the Summer Is Randonautica - aspenmayer https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/randonautica-app-tiktok-body-reddit-quantum/614401/ ====== aspenmayer [https://www.randonautica.com/](https://www.randonautica.com/) [https://bot.randonauts.com/](https://bot.randonauts.com/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/randonauts/](https://www.reddit.com/r/randonauts/) [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.randonauti...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.randonautica.app) [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/randonautica/id1493743521](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/randonautica/id1493743521) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h148J7ym7W](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h148J7ym7W) [https://medium.com/@TheAndromedus/randonauting-for- dummies-h...](https://medium.com/@TheAndromedus/randonauting-for-dummies-how- to-hack-reality-with-your-phone-using-quantum-randomness-5ce82f66c10e) [https://archive.is/wOdvb](https://archive.is/wOdvb) For those who have trouble with the link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200722032338/https://www.theat...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200722032338/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/randonautica- app-tiktok-body-reddit-quantum/614401/) [https://archive.is/Pn26l](https://archive.is/Pn26l)

Gmail may hand over IP addresses of journalists - kirubakaran http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Gmail_may_hand_over_IP_addresses_of_journalists ====== tumult Great, love being reminded my local court system are a bunch of shills. However, before you burst into flames, note: _To comply with the law, unless you provide us with a copy of a motion to quash the subpoena (or other formal objection filed in court) via email at legal-support@google.com by 5pm Pacific Time on September 16, 2009, Google will assume you do not have an objection to production of the requested information and may provide responsive documents on this date._ So Google is notifying them, and basically telling the account holders to give Google a reason to motion to quash the subpeona. Which is good. Court system totally willing to issue subpoenas which would reveal identities over what I'm assuming to be a civil suit filed by corrupt property developers after they were exposed (please correct me if I'm wrong.) Google not instantly turning over the data, and asking the account holders to provide an objection. Still less evil™ p.s. edit: I would also like to add that the Wikileaks editorial says: _According to the notifying letter from Google to the journal, Google intends to hand over the requested records without defense and suggests that the Journal file a counter-motion with the Santa-Clara court itself._ which I think is actually false, according to my reading of the notice Google gave the account holders above. This would also indicate the headline is inflammatory/linkbait.. ~~~ anigbrowl I find Wikileaks summaries are of extremely variable accuracy - they're well- intentioned but often prefer the most extreme-sounding interpretation of a document/story. I basically don't trust the summary pages at all, except in a 'why you might care!' way. Wikileaks itself, though, is pure gold. ------ lupin_sansei Isn't it part of common law that you have to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?". If so, how can it be legal to withhold information (read sources, ip addresses etc) while under examination in a court? ~~~ jrockway This expression is just convention, not something legally meaningful. The next part of that expression is "so help you God", which you can't be legally required to say. In many courts, the affirmation is just "Do you promise to tell me the truth?" As for "the whole truth", it's up to the other side's lawyer to ask you the right questions; if you answer all the questions truthfully while you're on the stand, that is your only legal obligation. (If the questions are directly about your crime, you also have the right to refuse to answer.) Anyway, if everyone were legally required to confess to crimes they committed, nobody would do that, and then the crime would be not admitting to a crime. By not admitting to that, ... the cycle continues, and with no evidence, there is no case against you. ------ jsm386 As a journalist, with sources to protect, working for a publication whose very mission 'corruption fighting' is going to invite problems exactly like these, shouldn't you be using something other than Gmail? I've never needed something like this but a quick search [http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=secure+anon...](http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=secure+anonymous+email&aq=0&aqi=g10&oq=secure+anony&fp=9733483af0cc9d26) leads me to believe there is a better solution. ------ onreact-com Try this next time: Anonymous Blogging with Wordpress & Tor <http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/guide/> + Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents [http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/handbook_bloggers_cyberdissidents...](http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/handbook_bloggers_cyberdissidents- GB.pdf) ~~~ restruct But don't choose Gmail as your webmail provider? ~~~ mikeryan I am not an expert in this. But I think if you get a Gmail account with non identifiable information. Then access Gmail through Tor (There's a Tor plugin for Firefox) you've done enough to make it extremely hard to track you down. ~~~ jacquesm You'd better make sure you do that from a 'virgin' machine then or your cookies or other signature information will give you away in a heartbeat. ~~~ aarongough Or my favourite: a virtual machine with a snapshot of it's state just after the install of all your necessary programs, HDD set to read only (like you can do in parallels) and used from there...

Patent trolls want $1,000 per employee for using scanners - blackhole http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners/ ====== api I personally hope the patent law abuse gets to the point that it destroys the entire patent system. So go for it. Sue schools, the elderly, whatever. ~~~ vertis And then what? We'll have nothing at all? I'm certainly not in favour of these patent trolls but you have to have a more nuanced approach to intellectual property than 'Burn down the House' It's a balance between encouraging innovation by protecting intellectual property, and discouraging it because of patent abuse (etc). Destroying the patent system completely would most certainly have a negative effect. ~~~ dasil003 > _Destroying the patent system completely would most certainly have a > negative effect_ Why are you so sure of this? Government granted monopoly is not the only incentive to create something, but there are definitely countless examples of how patents have been used to squash innovation and disruption. I grant that patents have had some positive effects, but I would not assume they are net-positive. Also, they were primarily designed in a time when there were fewer ideas and getting things into production was much more expensive (this applies to physical things, let along software with zero marginal cost), and it was much easier for an incumbent to steal an idea and crush a startup simply by the barriers to entry to manufacturing and distribution. Since then lobbying efforts have only pushed intellectual property rights in one direction. Even medical research patents which are often held up as necessary create perverse incentives that tie up R&D dollars in unproven new drugs, and making arbitrary tweaks to existing newish medicines in order to secure patent protection, making research into natural or public domain compounds come to a standstill regardless of efficacy. Obviously I'm biased since I work in software, but I think we'd be fine without patents. Trademark and copyright address much more important issues in my opinion. ~~~ wheaties Medical treatments, vaccines, and drugs cost enormous amounts of money to bring to market due to all the regulations and requirements we've created ensuring a pill is not fatal. Why would any company in their right mind develop any sort of drug if it cost $100m and anyone after them could take the idea free of cost? Patents are good/needed to promote the quality of medicine. There they're good. ~~~ rdtsc That is exactly what the drug companies say. That's funny at is as if you are just reciting back their propaganda. It turns out a lot more money is spent on marketing and lobbying that is spent on research. Also a lot of cutting edge research is actually performed by public universities by professors on that state's (or NIH's) dime. > Patents are good/needed to promote the quality of medicine. There they're > good. Well that really is the crux of the argument. I would argue that patents make the medicine worse. Medicine I also consider to be the health and well-being of citizens not profitability of drug companies. I can be convinced that the current patent system help the profitability of drug companies I am not sure if it help the sick people. ~~~ dhimes _That is exactly what the drug companies say_ Yeah, there's a reason for that. _It turns out a lot more money is spent on marketing and lobbying that is spent on research._ Don't confuse pharmaceutical companies with biotech companies. _Also a lot of cutting edge research is actually performed by public universities by professors on that state's (or NIH's) dime._ Often, the same researcher then spins out the company that tries to commercialize the research. _I can be convinced that the current patent system help the profitability of drug companies I am not sure if it help the sick people._ Without them you wouldn't have the medicine. Then that won't help the sick people. As it stands, there is a difference between the medicine that rich people can afford and that poor people can afford. That may be morally objectionable- and maybe we should fix it. But at least the medicine exists, and eventually it gets cheaper on average for everybody. I am _very much_ for patent reform, but we have to do it intelligently. Where patents help- keep them. Modify them maybe. Where they are despicable destroy them. At least in some cases in medicine-- as in other high barrier-to-entry endeavors-- I am convinced they are useful. In other cases they are infuriating. ~~~ belorn >Often, the same researcher then spins out the company that tries to commercialize the research. It seems to me that you imply that there is some added value from the commercialization. But commercialization does not cause added value in itself. Sometimes, commercialization just mean marketing and profit center. However the real question is, what does commercialization of an already founded and paid invention has to do with patents. Why should research which is paid with tax money (through NIH) be patentable, and how does that benefit society? ~~~ dhimes There is often substantial risk turning a research result (molecule X inhibits virus Y) into a safe medicine. You have to do significant, expensive testing. That is where the money is spent because that is where commercialization fails. ~~~ sageikosa Also, pharmaceutical drugs don't just pop out of Wonka-like machines in a manner similar to the Everlasting Gobstopper. The production process has to be efficient. Efficiency is a function of the cost to research, design, construct and operate the production facilities and QA, and the expected returns. ~~~ belorn Well, if you want efficiency, thats were all the factories with generics lives. They use capitalism, that is competition to produce the best product for the lowest price. As for testing (the above comment), thats where FDA approved monopolies comes in. FDA want to incentivize testing and producing of products, even once they fall out of patent protection, so FDA themselves gives out limited timed monopolies after a drug gone through all the testing. Thats a monopoly on top of regular patents for most drugs. FDA don't assume patents to cover the cost beyond the initial research. They consider that more incentives are needed, targeted for testing and producing of products. ~~~ sageikosa I wasn't disagreeing with the poster above, I was adding additional insight into what it takes to initially commercialize a product (assuming the initial research was publicly funded). Before a decision to produce can begin, there is additional R&D into: \- scale production design and cost analysis \- analysis of potential market size \- risks and boundaries of treatment identified via clinical trials If the potential market size and production costs work out to be marginally profitable (to be an attractive investment): \- initial outlay of prototype production facilities \- scale production and distribution processes (some drugs have limited shelf life or require special handling) \- market building (disseminating information about the treatment to health providers, and tracking market penetration) to make sure the market potential is fully used Production of generics is "efficient" because by the time generic production gets underway (at patent expiration), they can sell as an alternative to a pre-built market with processes already proven by years of practice. ~~~ belorn What prevents generics to do cost analysis, market research, prototype production facilities, scale production and distribution processes, and market building? Isn't those step normal procedures for any commercial venture. To make the car an analogy, when producing a new car, a company need to do cost analysis to weighing materials, product facilities, prototype building. They also need to do market building to push their product in a market already buzzing with competition. They need to care about the distribution processes. They can't patent this, and even if they could, I doubt the car industry would be helped by it. Generics, like any other form of commercial entities do prefer a pre-built market. This is same for everyone else too, as everyone is currently making the same pads, laptops, phones and mp3 players as last "hit product". This however doesn't mean that there aren't any new companies trying new things. Same goes for generics. The "putting a product into the market" is't someting patents are needed or even suggested to cover. Its the cost of the invention that is covered by the patents. Patents cover the cost of inventing. The FDA granted monopoly covers the testing. Everything else rest onto the commercial entity to resolve. This is the order of things, through patents are so far not covering the cost of the invention, as that is taken care by tax dollars distributed to research by NIH. Thus the logical thing to do is to either cut the budget of NIH and let "patents" take care of the inventing (as intended), or reconsider patents as funding for inventions. ~~~ sageikosa Yes, in any normal commercial venture, those are the normal procedures for commercializing something, which are the investment. Re-reading back to the top of this thread, I see this spun out specifically from a one-liner about research by professors at public universities. The funding sources for professors at public universities is varied (depends on what funding they have managed to gather and what strings were attached, and what they were intended for), and the degree that the results of their research is clinically applicable also varies. A researcher may discover that a certain receptor on a cell's surface responds to a specific molecular structure, but this is far from being a treatment. Depending on who funded a particular research study, the results may be pre-assigned to a private entity, or may become public information. It all depends on how the research was commissioned. In any case, university researchers don't _usually_ create new drugs, they discover relationships; they just don't typically have that mandate (as far as I am aware, which admittedly isn't that much). Incidentally, patents are not to cover "invention" costs, they are so that inventors can get the rewards of invention while at the same time exposing their invention, rewards and costs are not the same thing. For drugs, public exposure is a necessity of the way we require FDA approval; since without such regulation, drug related litigation would ultimately end up in open court anyway to prove liability or negligence, it has been deemed a public good to do this public exposure prior to market introduction, and require a degree of pre-approval (that we assign directly to a government agency). In the US of A, the FDA grants neither a monopoly, nor a patent. The FDA's purpose in new drug development is the declaratory judgment regarding the safety or applicability of a drug. It is perfectly possible to get a patent, but fail FDA approval. It is also possible that the process to produce a drug at scale is itself a novel application or invention and itself patentable (though that may also need FDA approval separately from the drug treatment). ~~~ dhimes _It is perfectly possible to get a patent, but fail FDA approval._ I believe this happened to Eli Lilly yesterday. EDIT: Not sure it was Lilly- I heard the news on the radio this morning and I can't find the source on the news sites. Annoying. ------ jetti The article mentions that it is hard to invalidate patents with prior art and that the patent holders will say that it is a narrower scope than previous patents. If that is the case, I can't see how this isn't extortion. There is no way that these "companies" could know the kind of network that the companies they are sending letters to use. They may be just guessing that they are even using a scanner. They are just mass mailing threats and hoping for money back. Also, how is it even legal to target the users of technology in a patent infringement case like this? Wouldn't the manufactures (of hardware AND software) be the ones that would need to license the patent, not end users? I get why you would target the end user but is that legal/valid? ~~~ scott_s I agree that it is extortion in spirit. But I wonder if patent trolls can be prosecuted on current extortion laws, as their defense would be "We're just trying to enforce our lawful patents." If prosecutors would not want to try, then I wonder how we could change extortion laws to include this practice. ~~~ neurotech1 IANAL but wouldn't it be easier to convict on mail fraud first. Corporate "accounts receivable" type scams have been convicted before of mail fraud. The scammers send an invoice to a corporation, and if it looks routine, it gets paid without a second thought. Sooner or later, some patent troll is going to be dumb enough to send out "Unpaid License Fee" letters and set a precedence on the extortion charge. ~~~ joshkaufman Getty Images has been doing this with stock photography license claims for years: <http://www.extortionletterinfo.com/> ------ veidr It would help in cases like this if: a.) the litigant was not allowed to dismiss the suit without the consent of the defendant, and b.) there was some mechanism whereby anybody who was subsequently sued on the basis of the same basic claims of infringement of the same patent could use the result of the first case as part of their defense. (E.g., unless the original verdict was overturned on appeal, the plaintiff would have to make some new novel claims that were not part of the original case when suing their next victim.) This would require changes to the law, but not nearly such drastic change as abolishing the patent system entirely (which I think is scheduled to happen right around the time the USA switches to the metric system). I was the victim of a very similar shakedown tactic at the hands of DirecTV in 2002. They had hired (sorry, "successfully lobbied to obtain the services of") the US Marshals to raid some small companies that sold smart card programming gear. DirecTV then got their marshal pals to copy the companies' customer databases, and then systematically went after the end users, threatening to sue unless the users paid up $5k to 'settle'. In my case, our company had indeed bought some smart card programming gear, but I was incensed and inclined to fight (as it sounds like the protagonist of this Ars story was). But the only "fight" we were able to effect was to have our lawyers write a letter (basically, "fuck you, we program smart cards, bring it on") to make them go away _for us_. They abandoned their threat to sue us, but this didn't affect any of the thousands of other people they were going after with the same exact scam. Our patent system would be better if the law forced the litigant to a conclusion once a patent suit was brought, and _also_ made it much harder to repeat the same shakedown once one victim had successfully fought it and won. That's not to say it would _fix_ the problem of patent trolls, but since it would weaken the _patent itself_ (once somebody had the balls and money to fight a bullshit patent shakedown and win) we wouldn't have to give a shit how many shell companies Myrvhold and similar parasites have. (We'd only have to give a shit that they have millions of unique B.S. patents.) ~~~ astrodust Until the US courts have a loser pays (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorneys_fees)>) system, this will never happen. ------ jrockway $1,000 per employee is the most bogus request I've ever heard in my life. Even if the concept were patentable, I'd say a reasonable demand would be $1 per Internet-capable scanner sold. The patent trolls should really read Joel Spolsky's guide on pricing enterprise software. Saving $200,000 is worth hiring some lawyers to fuck you up. Saving $75 isn't. ~~~ lutorm I find it extremely dubious that you could actually infringe on a patent merely by _using_ a consumer product. Disregarding this particular patent, is that sort of claim actually grounded in fact? ~~~ rst Well, if the product's manufacturer has licensed the patent, then the "exhaustion doctrine" generally keeps the patent holder from taking a second whack from people who bought it. That's what ordinarily shields end-users of consumer products from this kind of nonsense. If the manufacturer hasn't licensed the product, though, the users may well be fair game, in the eyes of the law. ~~~ lutorm But end users generally don't know and have no way of knowing what technology is inside a product. That seems pretty sketchy. While it's true that unintentionally infringing on a patent is not an excuse, if I'm liable for someone else's infringing without my knowledge my potential liability is completely unlimited. ------ astrodust One simple reform to the patent system would be to force an _automatic_ review of any patent involved in a lawsuit where the patent might be rendered invalid before the court needs to weigh in on the matter. Right now the court needs to decide if the patent is enforceable, which seems like it's basically doing the job the patent issuing entity should've done in the first place. ~~~ krickle Yes! I love this. If we can reduce the cost of defending these we would eliminate them without needing anything else. ------ pavel_lishin > the only variations are the six-letter name of the shell company and the > royalty demands This sounds a lot like the automated, python-scripted corporations in Stross's Accelerando. ~~~ unimpressive Would that make these _literal_ shell companies? ------ krschultz Major root cause that could be fixed without hurting anyone other than patent trolls: the relatively anonymous registration of patents. If I'm being threatened with a lawsuit for patent infringement, how can I not find out the owners of the patents? That is crazy. If you want to leverage a patent, you should have to be registered with the patent office so that you can be held accountable. Anyone using a patent for legit reasons wouldn't be hampered by this, but it would make hunting down patent trolls a whole lot easier. ~~~ crusso Plus if these patents are so valuable, then it would be nice if their sale from one shell company to another had tax implications. Once a licensing campaign has been initiated for one shell company, that should put some idea of a value on the patent(s). If you can be assessed taxes for options in a company that isn't public that you have no way to exercise, selling assets from one shell company to another should have tax implications as well. Maybe that would limit the creation of mazes of ownership of these patent portfolios. ~~~ krschultz I really like the idea of relating the value of a patent to the registration cost. If the patent is giving you $10 million a year in income, you should have to pay more for that right than if it brings you $10,000 a year in income. At least then we would have a list of patent holders and how much they are making from licensing. ~~~ cheeseprocedure The registration costs would need to be non-trivial to discourage abuse, which would harm legitimate small-scale innovators. Also, who decides (or validates) the "worth" of a patent? We would be replacing one regulatory nightmare with another. ~~~ jakejake I think it would be awesome but it will never happen. You claim a value for your patent. It is treated as property and subject to tax if transferred from one entity to the next. The catch is that you can only sue for a certain percent of the claimed value. You can change the claimed value of your patent, but then you must pay a tax as if that was earned income. You would have to be allowed to set your initial claimed value of the patent at whatever you wish. Kinda the same way that when you start a corporation you can decide how many shares you have (like 1.000 or 10,000 or 1,000,000). But once that is set you can't just change them around without registering the change with the state. In theory it would punish people who transfer patents a lot, but have almost no affect on people who register or hold onto patents. Since trolls thrive on shell companies, it would be very expensive to constantly transfer high-value patents. ------ downandout In my experience, these places don't actually make any money, so fear not. I did some database consulting work for a company that was in a similar business a few years back. They wound up shutting down after about six weeks because no one bothered paying them. Out of more than $12 million in demands, they received less than $4,000 after sending their first batch. That was when they decided to shut down. I suspect something similar will happen with these guys and anyone that follows them. ------ padseeker Why the heck aren't the hardware manufacturers stepping up on this one? Why should I pay HP/Xerox/Canon/Ricoh thousands for using their manufactured hardware when it does not cover the ability to use it? I realize being a hacker news reader/tech person means I would know better, but wouldn't some of these people think to themselves "Why isn't this cost included into the hardware?". And why aren't the manufacturers that profit from this type of hardware stepping up as it has the chance to discourage people from buying their stuff. ------ neurotech1 Maybe I should do an AMA on my work for a patent attorney. It would get boring because his MO seems to be to only sue companies that negotiate license deals in "bad faith", and nowhere near the frivolous action seen in here. Most of his work is in filing patents. The last conversation we had was actually about supporting the EFF, so I'm sure that is quite telling to what direction we're heading. ------ arbuge It strikes me that one root cause of the patent troll problem, besides unscrupulous trolls and their evil lawyers, is idiot patent examiners who would allow patenting the process of drinking a cup of coffee of morning if there was no prior art on file on the subject. It all comes down to incentives. Good patent lawyers know they can make big bucks working in private practice (possibly for trolls), whilst mediocre ones happy with a government salary go ... where else? ... the USPTO. ~~~ wpietri Do you have any facts to back this up? The one patent examiner I know is very smart. But he's also part of a rigid system with very clear criteria. If there's a problem, I suspect it's a systemic problem. ------ h4pless Could someone (or has someone already tried to) patent the process of patent trolling? I know that such a patent shouldn't be granted because the idea obviously isn't original but it seems as though there are so many bogus patents sneaking through the cracks that it could be possible. It would be nice if there was someone you could call to troll the trolls. ~~~ cschmidt Strangely Halliburton seems to have done this: [http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/11/12/halliburton-patenting- pa...](http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/11/12/halliburton-patenting-patent- trolling-to-block-patent-trolls/) ~~~ hdj What did happen to this application? Accepted or dismissed? ~~~ verroq Surely there's been prior art. ------ DanBC Now we know the format of the letters I'm waiting for anonymous to send a bunch of letters to every member of US legislature. ~~~ olefoo Actually, it should be sent to their re-election campaign committees; legislators themselves are considered members of the government, and would not be considered businesses in their own right. Whereas their campaign comittees are heavily regulated businesses that get lots of financial scrutiny and are very short of cash usually. Although that is a dangerous precedent to set; once you start using that sort of tactic, it will become yet another way for big business to lock out candidates they don't like and would have an overall chilling effect on participation in the political process. ------ storf45 This is just disgusting. Well, here's their contact, facebook, and twitter information if anyone wants to get in touch with them for services! Contact: <http://www.hkw-law.com/contact> Facebook: <http://www.facebook.com/hkwlaw> Twitter: <https://twitter.com/atllawfirm> ------ jonkelly We got hit with one of these letters. I read through it and it was clear that we weren't actually infringing -- it only applied to the use of distribution to employees via the scanner. Luckily that functionality is pretty much impossible to make work on the Brother MFC that we have. We had our lawyer send back a note saying that we weren't infringing and that was the end of it. My guess is that showing that you are actually paying attention and have a competent attorney is a good way to avoid getting victimized (at least some of the time). ------ hdj I'm not fully certain and I would love some verification/counter-argument, but wouldn't the new Public Use Anywhere in the World aspect invalidate atleast some of the garbage patents like the one discussed in the article? [http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/11/15...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/11/15/a-powerful- new-weapon-against-patent-trolls/) ~~~ mcherm Not really. The difficulty of invalidating the patent isn't the real barrier to standing up to these sorts of legal threats. The real barrier is that _whether you win or not_ , it costs $100,000 or more to be sued in a patent lawsuit. Here are your choices: (A) Pay up. The extorting patentholder charges you $80,000. (B) Hire a lawyer to defend you in court. The lawyer charges you $100,000. You also might lose and have to pay damages. (C) Defend yourself in court without a specialist patent lawyer. Unless you ARE a specialist patent lawyer, you are guaranteed to lose. Pay triple damages plus lawyer fees -- actually, just pay everything you own and go live on the street. Which would you choose? ~~~ krickle And note that C is only an option if you are being sued as an individual, if you are being sued as a corporate entity you cannot defend your company pro se, you must retain a licensed attorney. ~~~ mcherm Right... good point. ------ jasimq I don't know about the different kinds of patents, but shouldn't the printer manufacturers be paying up licensing fees? ~~~ drstewart The letter from the patent trolls actually explains why they don't do that (the real reason is probably because it's easier to get a 30 person small business to pay up instead of a giant corporation with a retainer of lawyers). ------ edouard1234567 The clock is ticking for these patent trolls, scanners will soon become completely useless (posted on HN yesterday) [http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/google-expensify- paperless-...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/google-expensify- paperless-2013/) ------ JackFr Couldn't someone end this by gettingt a business process patent on patent trolling? ~~~ mcherm Doesn't help if you can't find the correct shell company to serve with the lawsuit. ------ zalzane I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for them to send one of these extortion notices to the wrong guy who will get enraged enough to shoot up their office. I wonder if a chain of such shootings would set a precedent for change. ~~~ angdis It is amazing how much rage a story like this can produce in people who work in non-legal professions. The law-firms involved, of course, don't see it that way. This is just work for them-- although I can't fathom how they can sleep at night making a living by being what amounts to a parasite. ~~~ pavel_lishin I've worked in a situation where I believed that what I was doing was fairly unethical. I wasn't sending out bogus legal threats, but I was doing development work for a company I consider flat-out evil. I dealt with it by donating all the money I made during those hours to a relevant charity. It helped. ~~~ meric Might need to donate more - for every $1 you got paid, the evil company received more than $1 of benefit. ;) ------ edouard1234567 Yet another patent troll nonsense. Who needs scanners anyway... maybe people will come to their senses and stop printing signing & scanning... a waste of paper, energy and precision! ------ ChuckMcM It would be interesting to see if you could pursue a case of legal malpractice against the firm which took this case to the patent office in the first place. ~~~ mcherm On what grounds? That law firm successfully obtained a patent which (even if later invalidated) resulted in revenues for their client (the extortion money). That is not malpractice, it is SUCCESSFUL practice -- and more so if the patent is highly questionable, as it may have been the legal firm's skill that resulted in the patent being issued. ~~~ ChuckMcM On the same grounds that lawyers are sanctioned for bringing frivolous or extortionate lawsuits. I think you bring a poor strawman to the debate, its not a question of whether or not the lawyer was successful, its a question of whether they were working toward the betterment of the system. For example. doctors may be sued for malpractice for performing surgeries that are unneeded even though the surgery is completely successful. They violate the terms of their licensing in the state where they practice by doing so. My point is that there are many ways to mitigate the perils of the patent system without destroying it. One is to make abuse of it to have some cost. So a proposal might be like this [1]: To prosecute a patent (represent an inventor as their attorney in the application process) requires licensing by the patent licensing bar. That license states that willfully bringing a patent before the commission that is found later to be invalidated, and such invalidation shows negligence on the part of the prosecuting attorney, that attorney or their firm, is co-liable for any charges or court costs incurred by the folks who invalidated the patent. It would also be interesting in public shaming of people who claim to have 'invented' such preposterous things. That is a much more social thing though. [1] I'm not a lawyer, and I know it doesn't work like this today, its a proposal to make it 'painful' to try to game the system as a lawyer. ------ pixl97 Ob. SMBC [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2761#c...](http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2761#comic) ------ hexagonc Politicians aren't going to do anything about patent trolls until politicians start getting threatened and/or sued by patent trolls. ------ zem honest question - does the united states not have barratry laws? why do they not cover cases like this? ------ mesozoic So who has the patent on patent trolling? ~~~ gefh IBM: [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...](http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20100332285.PGNR.&OS=DN/20100332285RS=DN/20100332285)

10 Communication Secrets of Great Leaders - EREFUNDO http://www.linkedin.com/share?viewLink=&sid=s1016258766&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eforbes%2Ecom%2Fsites%2Fmikemyatt%2F2012%2F04%2F04%2F10-communication-secrets-of-great-leaders%2F&urlhash=o42f&pk=member-home&pp=5&poster=4447702&uid=5593551856501522432&trk=NUS_UNIU_SHARE-title Key to Innovation is Communication ====== EREFUNDO I have always been the "extrovert" in my team (PayGuard)..... always passionate and excited to share my ideas. The greatest thing I have ever learned from all our meetings is knowing when to just shut up and listen. I came to the realization that my team members are just as smart or even smarter than I am. I also realized how lucky I am to be working with such people.

Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses - ftrflyr http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-national-guard-bonus-20161020-snap-story.html ====== rileymat2 "Robert D’Andrea, a retired Army major and Iraq veteran, was told to return a $20,000 bonus he received in 2008 because auditors could not find a copy of the contract he says he signed." How is this possible? If private businesses could do this, it would be mayhem. ~~~ dogma1138 I'm surprised that this is somehow even passed the slightest political oversight. You need to be a special kind of bastard to ask some one who willingly signed up to get shot at while defending their country to pay back any amount of money they got paid for doing so. Wars aren't pretty, regardless of what you think about them, and especially about Iraq and Afghanistan never ever take it out on the soldiers, they are probably on your side because unlike most of us they actually seen war. Soldiers don't decide when, where or against whom to go to war, they are not at fault I never understood how the left in the US could blame people who either got drafted (vietnam) or signed up to defend their country (post 9/11) for the atrocities of war. ~~~ return0 My understanding is that the US has a professional army. Why are they called "volunteers"? Over here, a volunteer is someone who voluntarily joins earlier than required to begin his mandatory army service. People who join a job are all volunteers of course, but that's not remarkable. ~~~ dogma1138 There are two types of military service compulsory and voluntary hence they are called volunteers. Compulsory involves conscription or a draft, I'm not sure how the "jail or army" thing is classified but since you are given a choice it's technically stelly voluntary. The "professional" classification of the army doesn't mean it's voluntary professional means that you can be a career soldier and you are paid for doing so even if you are drafted, conscripts on the other hand are not paid other than a small stipend. That said once you sign up the contract this isn't a job, you can't quit, you can't "call in sick", can't say no to anything, you are effectively forced to give up certain rights for the duration of the contract. ~~~ return0 compulsory is definitely not voluntary. otoh i dont think theres any difference between professional and voluntary. ------ QUFB I'm not a veteran, I'm a desk jockey. I didn't like the foreign entanglements we've been involved with over the past 15 years. But that's not the point here. When young men and women volunteer to fight and die for our country, and are made promises by the system, these promises should be honored. This behavior by the California National Guard is disgusting. ~~~ nucleardog I don't get why it has to be at all about the role itself, the honour of the military, or anything else. If I'm extended an offer of employment including a $10,000 signing bonus, sign, take the job, receive my bonus, complete the job as agreed, and the contract expires and I go on my way... The company doesn't get to come back to me years later and say "Oh, oops, I actually forgot to have my boss sign off on that bonus I gave you. You need to give it back." If you broke agreements with your financers on where/how that money was to be spent, that's _your problem_. Our contract was still valid - you have broken your contract with your financer and _you_ can deal with the penalties. ~~~ bww Seriously. The people who illegally gave away the government's money should be on the hook for repaying it. Not the people who accepted it legitimately and in good faith. ------ CalChris _“We’d be more than happy to absolve these people of their debts. We just can’t do it. We’d be breaking the law.”_ Ok. There's a law, a bad law that needs to be changed. Is Congress so dysfunctional it can't fix this monstrosity? ~~~ withdavidli Yes. Think about the 911 bill. Taking a decade to help cover medical costs of first responders and those that helped dig out dead bodies and hoping to find survivors. It was so sad to see Jon Stewart talk about this years later with only one person from the original panel because two were too ill now to show up and one died. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3350433/John- Stewart...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3350433/John-Stewart-s- poignant-return-Daily-three-chairs-Former-host-Trevor-Noah-s-guest-leaves- spaces-9-11-responders-dead-ill-join-show.html) ~~~ toomuchtodo Kudos to Jon Stewart though. He walked the halls of Congress on his own time after leaving the Daily Show to shame representatives into passing the bill responsible for covering the care of first responders. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L11Bxolo44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L11Bxolo44) ------ johngalt This smells like recruiters gaming the system while under pressure from the top to fill quotas. In the same vein as Wells Fargo. Hit this impossible target or you're fired. We can't tell you to lie/cheat people to hit the numbers but we will promote the people who do and PIP the ones who don't. Meanwhile we will go through the motions of legal compliance. Everyone gets what they want and the higher ups can come back later and act like it is a huge surprise to them that the people they hired and trained were gaming the system. ------ throwawayIndian Elsewhere, a for-profit prison extended their contract[1] with Feds barely a month after the Department of Justice said it would end[2] contracts with private prison operators. [1] [https://twitter.com/i/moments/789498562904293376](https://twitter.com/i/moments/789498562904293376) [2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post- nation/wp/2016/08/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post- nation/wp/2016/08/18/justice-department-says-it-will-end-use-of-private- prisons/) These are pretty quick u-turns by an establishment that's confident about business as usual following elections. Gravy-train! ~~~ mikecb This was for a DHS immigration facility, not for a prison. (Not that it makes it any better, but it doesn't break with Justice's decision.) ------ TillE The article doesn't quote anyone from California's Congressional delegation, or from the White House. Is there really no reaction here? We're talking about a few million dollars from the federal government to relieve an awful situation. ~~~ rhizome Personally, as a Californian I'm calling everybody on my chain-of-legislation on Monday. ~~~ toomuchtodo THANK YOU. Only through action does change occur. ------ erentz It's not clear from the article how this situation came to be. Were these soldiers told how much they would receive before enlisting? If so surely that is a contract and they don't have to repay. It only makes sense if they ALL received more than they were told and all didn't report it. But ~10,000 people doing this doesn't make sense. ~~~ chrismcb From the article "Investigations have determined that lack of oversight allowed for widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet enlistment targets." ~~~ erentz But fraud on the part of the California Guard is an internal matter. If I form a contract with a company that says they will pay me some amount of money, but the company representative was committing fraud internally then too bad. The company needs to deal with that. It can't reneg on its agreement years later after having already fulfilled the terms of the agreement. ~~~ derekp7 If you buy a piece of electronic equipment from a dealer at a flea market, and it is later found out that the merchandise was stolen, you have to return the merchandise to the original owner. Even if there was a valid contract between you and the dealer that sold it to you. I think this is seen as something similar -- the people giving out the bonus money basically "stole" it, so it wasn't theirs to give. Kind of like if a sales person at a store told you "buy now and I can give you an instant rebate", then pulled rebate money from the cash register. I think you'd have to give that money back too (assuming the "rebate" wasn't authorized, and was effectively stolen money). ~~~ anotheryou But if the dealer was known he would have to reimburse me, no? Also what if I where no longer in possession of the good? ~~~ robryk > But if the dealer was known he would have to reimburse me, no? Yes, but even if you've caused a judgement against him to be passed there'd likely be nothing to collect from (because you're not the only person in such a situation and he's likely had used the money). ------ a3n I tell my son, his friends, and anyone who will listen: don't join the military unless this is your calling, indicated by God's finger touching your heart. Because the military will treat you like shit if it's merely inconvenient to do otherwise. VA. Guard units called up to combat for one day shy of the time that would qualify them for combat pay. The linked article. Institutional abuse. Forced reenlistment during questionable wars. Etc. USN, E6, 1975-1981. Not that that gives me any particular place on the moral ground. And for the record, I had a relatively easy time in the Navy. But even if I'd never been in, I'd be as outraged as I am now. ------ cjslep I imagine this only damages the USA. The next time they need heavy recruitment numbers, people will look at the signing bonuses offered and either say "My life is worth more than this amount" or "this amount is too good to be true, they'll ask for it back in the future" and not sign on. ------ dbg31415 So did recruiters cut bigger checks than they were supposed to? If so, someone had to sign off on that... either recruiters or the managers should be held accountable. Soldiers got contracts promising one amount but received checks for another amount? Yeah, they should have to pay that back then. But who wrote checks and / or promised numbers higher than the contracts? ~~~ DanBC > Soldiers got contracts promising one amount but received checks for another > amount? Yeah, they should have to pay that back then. No, soldiers got promised one amount, got contracts for that amount, got paid that amount, and now it's being clawed back because the people who did the original promising and paperwork filing were breaking various laws. ~~~ dbg31415 Well if they have contracts for the higher amount... how is this a thing? Unless the contracts weren't signed by someone from the government who could sign those contracts? How would the soldiers know if the government recruiter was legit or not... yeah seems fucked. Government didn't supervise their recruiters correctly. Wouldn't that make all the contracts void? Messy. If the military needs bodies, they should just go back to drafting them. Would help society see the true cost of policing the world instead of taking advantage of the poor. ------ ZanyProgrammer As an Army vet myself, the truth is is that the Army will never miss an opportunity for fucking you over. Its the nature of the system. If you can make it to 20 years, you are some combination of exceptional/lucky/broken from years of fuckery. "We just can’t do it. We’d be breaking the law" Yeah, I'm sure the California National Guard tried _really, really_ hard not to go after their bonuses. ~~~ apsec112 Can you go into more detail? I'm not trying to dispute what you say, but as someone who's never been in the military, I'm curious what kind of trouble soldiers are likely to run into. ~~~ marktangotango Note he's talking specifically about active duty Army, not necessarily any other branch. I can relate a story as an example. I was enlisted in the late 90's and stationed Germany. I had a POV (personal vehicle) that I had to license/register. I had to drive to a neighboring facility to get to the license office. The office was closed, for some stupid reason (they where short staffed, and someone was out sick). The Area Military Police where in the same building, and I (stupidly) stopped a the desk sargeant and complained. I was escorted in to see the MP Sergeant Major, who yelled at me for a while, and took my ration card and confiscated my license plates (for no reason other than he could bully a lower enisted). So this all meant I had to leave my car, and take the train back to my home base. I was late, and got into a lot of trouble for that. Then, I had to beg and finagle to go back and get my car properly licensed a week later, when I was supposed to have already had it done. This all contributed to me getting a reputation as 'shit bag', do nothing low life of a private. You get a lot hell when you have that type of reputation; a lot of 'extra duty' and unfair treatment. Like being ordered to crawl through mud in near freezing weather, with no change of clothes and no oppurtunity to dry off for DAYS. But yeah, normal humans can't comprehend; fuckery. The term "fuck fuck" games from the reddit link is very fitting. ~~~ ZanyProgrammer I was actually a reservist :) And I'm a she not he :D ------ rhapsodic And yet we can afford to bail out Wall Street firms that pay their executives millions in bonuses for driving their companies into the ground. ------ aplomb Instead of hitting the soldiers who signed what they thought were reenlistment bonuses, why don't they pommel the commanding officers who presided over these "overpayments"? ------ Negative1 Wasn't clear from the article; did someone or a group of people break the law so that these ("illegal") bonuses could be paid? Basically, who (or what org) will be held accountable for this so that it won't happen again? ~~~ detaro At least a partial answer is there, but presumably there are lot more people involved: > _Army Master Sgt. Toni Jaffe, the California Guard’s incentive manager, > pleaded guilty in 2011 to filing false claims of $15.2 million and was > sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Three officers also pleaded guilty > to fraud and were put on probation after paying restitution._ ~~~ vacri It's disturbing that someone whose actions have brought such heartache and hardship to so many gets such a short sentence compared to 'blue collar' crimes. Rob a shop with a weapon, and you harm one person and get a trivial amount of money, but you'd be lucky to see a sentence that short. ------ fencepost It sounds like this was not at all limited to California, just that there were more cases there due to various reasons (population, individuals, policies/incentives). I'll be writing to my representative (Duckworth), both candidates to replace her, and her Senate opponent (Kirk). I expect responses at least from the two named since both are former military. ------ zachruss92 Honestly, this story is just sad. I understand that there was fraud involved in order to incentivize soldiers to reenlist, but it's not their fault; It was the people who manipulated them into reenlisting. I definitely think in this case the government should "forgive" this debt - and they probably will. VA benefits are already pretty flimsy, our vets have it hard enough. ------ lucio >>Robert D’Andrea, a retired Army major and Iraq veteran, was told to return a $20,000 bonus he received in 2008 because _auditors_ could not find a copy of the contract he says he signed. >>We’d be more than happy to absolve these people of their debts. We just can’t do it. We’d be breaking the law. \- Stop quoting laws at us. We carry weapons ------ guelo Not really surprised, the California Guard has been a corrupt mismanaged scandal-plagued organization for a long time. ------ Keverw This is so unbelievable they could mess up somthing like this. I hope this becomes major news. These people shouldn't be paying for someone else mistakes. If the money is mentioned in the contract, I don't see how they could just take it because of their mistake. ------ serg_chernata So much of war is already unapologetically about about money. This is just adding insult to injury. ~~~ apsec112 Looking down Wikipedia's list of active conflicts ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts)), it's hard to believe that money is a primary cause of any of them. I'm sure someone somewhere is making a profit, but that's different from the conflict being "about money". ~~~ Skeptique It would be poor press to announce that a war is about money, but the veneer of pretense is thin. The Syrian war, especially given Russia's involvement is almost certainly about securing passage for natural gas pipelines. Who thinks the Iraq war was actually about Freedom? That might have been the rallying cry but it was about securing access to oil and securing massive re- building contracts and/or reparation money. Many argue that the 1990s stock market boom was a direct result of the US getting $10/barrel oil via the Iraq war reparation deal, where they repaid the US for the costs of having to attack the US. Any war where people suddenly have an interest in saving humanity should be viewed very skeptically, since there are hundreds of crises of freedom around the world. If the crisis happens to be on top of a giant oil field, well, then there may be some conflating variable. ~~~ apsec112 "The Syrian war, especially given Russia's involvement is almost certainly about securing passage for natural gas pipelines." Do you have a cite for that? No one on any side is building pipelines in Syria anytime soon, because, well, war. Also, pretty sure if I told Suheil al-Hassan or Abu Mohammad al-Julani they were fighting for natural gas pipelines, they'd knock my teeth out. ~~~ cameldrv I have no idea if or how much this factors in, or even if it's true, but the story I've heard is that several years back, there was a plan for a pipeline that would go from Qatar and Saudi Arabia through Jordan, Syria, and Turkey to Europe. This would be a significant economic threat to Russia, since gas exports are about $25 billion/yr, about 2% of Russia's GDP, and a big source of hard currency, but also important is Russia's use of its gas pipelines to Europe to threaten to cut off supplies to countries in Eastern and Central Europe, which would not be possible if there were a gulf source of gas available. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have a lot of gas that is going to waste or is staying in the ground, so they could easily supply the European market. Supposedly, Assad turned down the deal, and the civil war started shortly after. ~~~ jcranmer The main Russian alternative pipeline I'm aware of is Nabucco, which would be from Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan via Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany. I've not been aware of any pipeline projects from Qatar and Saudi Arabia--their natural gas is exported mostly via LNG. Considering that, unlike oil, natural gas prices are not priced equally around the world, and that the price for natural gas is much, much higher in Asia than elsewhere (Europe is about 20% the price of Asia and the US about a third to a half that of Europe (yay fracking!)), it's much more profitable for them to export to Asia. Edit: After doing some research, I did find that there was a proposal for a Qatar-Turkey pipeline in 2010 (see [https://web.archive.org/web/20120228125310/http://pipelinesi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120228125310/http://pipelinesinternational.com/news/pipeline_projects_in_the_middle_east/040183) ). It was proposed to connect to Nabucco, which hasn't been built. The articles that link the Syrian civil war, or more specifically Qatari involvement in said war, contend that Qatar wants a Muslim Brotherhood government to build the pipeline, which ignores Saudi coolness to the idea of the pipeline (Saudi Arabia also funds rebels in the civil war) and the fact that Qatar also funded the uprisings in Libya and Egypt, in the path of no contended pipeline. In other words, the idea that the Syrian civil war is mostly about gas pipelines looks rather like people trying to find some resource that the war must be about because they can't believe war is about anything other than resources. ------ blazespin Maybe this is a good thing as it will make it harder to get people to go to war next time. Perhaps we might think twice about invading other countries. ------ AKifer It's a scheme as old as the world, even Julius Caesar owed money to his legions men and did not pay them. ------ WalterBright Isn't there a statute of limitations on such belated claims? ------ cbreeden This is weird. I'm extremely surprised that some kind of statue of limitations does not apply here. I'm not sure we are getting the whole story. ------ Frogolocalypse That is sickening ------ olegkikin Sue. ------ thomasmarriott Abhorrent. ------ cloudjacker Idiots all the way to the top, looks like something only the President or Congress can remedy

What to do when stuck on a problem? Sleep. - zackyap http://www.zackyap.com/post/30716510801/what-to-do-when-stuck-on-a-problem-sleep ====== mtkd Anything that takes you away from the problem will help. Take a shower if you don't have long. I recommend walking before taking on a big problem - even if you're not stuck. A 1h walk means you are unable to code your first solution, by the time you get back you'll be 4 iterations on in your head - you've just saved yourself 2 days. ~~~ genwin I too find that planning code while in the shower or during a walk is much more effective than when at the computer or whiteboard. ------ kiba So, it's a short post about how sleeping might help, but there's no attempt to actually conduct a scientific experiment to find out if you get better ideas by doing that. At the very least you could do is supplement your post with some citations. Are startup people so lazy that they rely only on seat-of-the-pant anecdotal evidences? ~~~ lvh To be fair, he does at least reference Wikipedia, which has well-sourced statements at least partially backing up what he appears to be claiming. ~~~ zackyap ^ Yeap. This. I was mainly trying to share a problem solving technique that's been working for me. I did look up Wikipedia for an explanation and linked to it. It was a pretty decent explanation with credible research sources. I'll make it more obvious that it isn't some sort of scientific self-quote. Thanks for the suggestion and thanks for backing me up. ------ atirip Yes, yes, exactly what i am doing for a long time, deliberatley. My brain works at night, i usally can not get very good sleep, but i do see lot of interesting dreams and somehow the solution presents himself at some point. Be prepared you may forgot the solution when you wake up like dreams you saw. So try to not mix them in the middle of the night ;-) And no, i cannot help with that, i can separate them somehow. ~~~ zackyap I spend some time thinking through the ideas when I wake. Evernote works great for me especially when it's copy or marketing ideas.

Body Count Rises as Philippine President Wages War on Drugs - Archio http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/world/asia/philippines-duterte-drug-killing.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news ====== hitokx I don't know much about the subject, but I have the feeling that thousands of people are going to die and drugs will still be a problem.

Ask HN: What is the state of the art in text to speech? - thom With a particular interest in systems that might be run offline on mobiles! ====== zip6 I don't know what the current state of the art is, but you should take a look at WaveNet if you haven't already - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03499.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03499.pdf) While trying to search for an answer, I came across this list of papers, which has a section on speech synthesis - [https://github.com/zzw922cn/awesome- speech-recognition-speec...](https://github.com/zzw922cn/awesome-speech- recognition-speech-synthesis-papers)

I created Wire Storm, an Electronics Themed Puzzle Game for iPhone/iPad - sprite http://www.wire-storm.com ====== sprite I recently released this game for iPhone and iPad. It was developed 45 days and is written in Objective-C and using the Cocos 2d framework. My inspiration came from my interest in electronics. I would love some feedback on the game. ~~~ d0ne I've actually tried this game out and it is very clean. Good work sprite. What was the most challenging part of the app development process? ~~~ sprite The most challenging part was perfecting the level generation while maintaining generation speed on the slower devices. I ended up generating precompiled level seeds. Each level seed is then randomly shuffled 20,000 times on the device.

Slacker: RPC by clojure and for clojure - sunng https://github.com/sunng87/slacker ====== lbt05 seems interesting and expect lazy-seq support in future

GitHub's Wild West Approach To Licensing Has Hidden Costs - oBeLx http://readwrite.com/2013/07/16/githubs-wild-west-approach-to-licensing-has-hidden-costs ====== BWStearns I wonder how they weighted a repo. If I have a toy project up on GitHub that I never really intended to do anything with or have anyone use, is that really the same thing as putting up a useful library that I made and simply didn't license? ------ DamnYuppie Out of curiosity when did open source become "The Man" as implied by this article?

Dell in talks to merge with EMC for $50bn - roymurdock http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/07/dell-emc-in-talks-to-merge-dj-citing-sources.html ====== QUFB Michael Dell in 2002: [http://www.cnet.com/news/dell-apple-should-close- shop/](http://www.cnet.com/news/dell-apple-should-close-shop/) ~~~ melling 1997 [http://youtu.be/_hq0Ny1WgFs](http://youtu.be/_hq0Ny1WgFs) I think there's a video somewhere where Steve say F* Michael Dell.

BlackRock bulks up research into artificial intelligence - thisisit https://www.ft.com/content/4f5720ce-1552-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44 ====== thisisit Non-paywall link: [https://outline.com/CsWtYW](https://outline.com/CsWtYW)

The fungus that devastates the Cavendish banana has now arrived in Latin America - reddotX https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/banana-fungus-latin-america-threatening-future/ ====== disillusioned Fun banana facts: Bananas are the most-sold item at most grocery stores and, notably, Wal-Mart. Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high purchase at gas stations and convenience stores. Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen. ~~~ neiman > Bananas are the most-sold item at most grocery stores and, notably, Wal- > Mart. In which country? The US? This can't be globally true.. ~~~ apexalpha I've heard this about Dutch stores as well. Supermarkets sell banana's at 0% margin or even a loss simply because it lures customers in. ~~~ nimajneb They have been 49 cents per pound in the grocery store in NY, both where I grew and in WNY for as long as I can remember. They have got to be at a loss if you consider they don't adjust for inflation or gas prices, etc. Milk does this too if I'm not mistaken, a lot of grocery stores use that as a customer lure as well. ------ sn41 Bananas are the prime cautionary tale against monoculture. The number of native breeds which are now gone for the sake of promotion of one particular breed leads to less resilience against disease and pests. Just in my corner of India, there are various varieties. [1] However, in the U.S., the only variety you often get to see is the insipid Cavendish, whose only merit seems to be shelf-life. If you travel in the tropics, do try out local varieties. It is an amazing fruit (?). [1] [http://mywordsnthoughts.com/myworld/all-about- kerala/differe...](http://mywordsnthoughts.com/myworld/all-about- kerala/different-types-of-banana-available-in-kerala/) ~~~ latchkey I currently live in Vietnam, but was recently traveling around Laos by motorbike. The bananas there are almost inedible... they taste awful. I found it fascinating how different they were compared with Vietnamese bananas. That said, I saw huge fields of farmed trees literally everywhere there (as well as in VN). I don't think they are in any real danger of disappearing like these articles say. It is very sensationalist news. ~~~ onion2k _That said, I saw huge fields of farmed trees literally everywhere there (as well as in VN). I don 't think they are in any real danger of disappearing like these articles say. It is very sensationalist news._ "I can't see the problem with my own eyes so I don't think there's a problem." is exactly the sort of thinking that leads to climate denial and anti-vaxx nonsense. Unless you've spent a lot of time and effort understanding the banana industry you simply aren't qualified to make that judgement. ~~~ latchkey Wow, that is a stretch to loop my thinking in with both of those movements. I am not even close to that nonsense. Of course I'm no expert, but this whole banana disappearance story has been going on for many years, yet we still have bananas. There is not even close to a shortage of bananas. It reminds me of the Helium is running out stories. Let me also remind you that the story is talking about a specific strain and my comment was clearly not about that strain. I could also say... unless you've driven 8500km all over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and seen first hand the millions of banana trees, your thinking might be constrained to some one sitting behind a keyboard. ~~~ onion2k _There is not even close to a shortage of bananas._ IANABE (I am not a banana expert) but I know that no one suggested there is a shortage right now. What's threatened is the world's supply of Cavendish bananas which is what every Western country imports. Prior to that everyone ate Gros Michel bananas, but practically all plantations growing that particular crop were wiped out in the space of 30 years by Panama Disease. Cavendish was the response - it _was_ Panama Disease resistant, but about 15 years ago the disease started attacking Cavendish crops. The concern is that this means we're a decade or two away from losing Cavendish _and we don 't have a suitable replacement_ (because, as people have said in this thread, other bananas aren't as tasty to Western palettes). To post "Nah, there's no problem" shows you don't quite understand that problem, and to cite that you've seen a few big banana plantations as evidence that the problem isn't a real one just compounds the issue. If Panama Disease mutates to attack the plantations you saw they could _all_ be gone in a decade. That's how virulent the disease is. It _is_ a problem. ~~~ latchkey > we don't have a suitable replacement That is your opinion. I've been lucky enough to taste plenty of other banana strains and there are definitely better banana's than Cavendish. The smaller ones that you generally get in this region, that are really ugly on the outside, taste so much better. > you've seen a few big banana plantations More than 'a few'... literally 3 whole countries worth. There is absolutely no shortage of trees and farms. Just to give you an idea of how much I've seen and I didn't even tag all of it... [https://imgur.com/a/olSoTXe](https://imgur.com/a/olSoTXe) I'm not saying that this disease isn't a problem, but I have hard time believing it is a catastrophic problem for all bananas. If you're going to go into big problems, I'd say that African Swine flu is a much larger issue for this region. I drove through countless 'checkpoints' all over northern VN/Laos where they sprayed down my motorbike wheels with some unknown chemicals. There are literally signs everywhere talking about the issue. Millions of swine have been slaughtered. Usually you see pigs running around freely on the roads, but once you get to a certain point in northern vn, you stop seeing them entirely. ~~~ onion2k _That is your opinion._ It's not my opinion. It's the opinion of every banana industry analyst who says losing the Cavendish would be the end of the banana export industry, which is pretty much all of them. There's a reason why we get articles catastrophising about the impact of Panama Disease posted to HN on a semi- regular basis. ~~~ latchkey > It's the opinion of every banana industry analyst who says losing the > Cavendish would be the end of the banana export industry, which is pretty > much all of them. What a great title for a business card. Of course they have every motivation to say that the sky is falling. It attracts attention, doesn't it? > There's a reason why we get articles catastrophising about the impact of > Panama Disease posted to HN on a semi-regular basis. I'm sure there is a reason, but it may not be what you think it is. ------ anfilt I find it weird that people would not like other variety of bananas. Like there are generally more than one type of apples, potatoes, onions, tomotoes, and lettuce at most grocery stores. I would like the choice. ~~~ burfog With most of those, each type has a distinct use. Granny Smith apples are for baking, McIntosh apples are for eating fresh, Red Delicious apples are for decoration, and the rest serve no purpose. Russet potatoes are for baking, stew, and fries. Purple potatoes are for frying up with steak. The rest serve no purpose. It's different with bananas. Cavendish is good. Maybe the Gros Michel is good too, but I wouldn't know. The rest are variations of sour, mushy, slimy, and too tiny. It's also a problem of telling when a banana is ripe. It is easy to memorize exactly how a single variety of banana ripens. If there are more varieties, they get mixed up and eaten at the wrong time. ~~~ jmull I can assure you, you are very wrong about the uses of other varieties of Apples and Potatoes. You're also wrong about russet potatoes for stew -- other varieties work out a lot better when you want your potatoes to hold their shape. (I would assume likewise with bananas as well, but I don't have the experience to know myself.) It's OK -- maybe you don't have the most acute tastebuds or just lack a culinary interest. It's even pretty much dead wrong to think about these things in terms of uses. Food can be a delight and an art, and proscribed "use" doesn't allow for that. Anyway: if you haven't tried it in a while, branch out. You might really enjoy and appreciate what you've been missing out on. ~~~ burfog I do have a strong culinary interest, but I'm also choosy. I try lots of things to discover what is best, and then I use what is best. Russet potatoes are the best for stew. The others have off flavors or don't soften as nicely. I have tried many types of cheese. I eliminated all except mozzarella and mild cheddar. I have tried every exotic fruit in the store except durian. I ended up liking jackfruit, dragonfruit, rambutan, lychee, longan, and loquat. The point of trying new foods is to find the best, not to pretend that they are all equally delicious. ------ ksherlock And has been since every 6 months since 2008. Probably even before then, but hn.alogolia.com doesn't go back further. ~~~ dang There's always money in the banana story. ------ tux1968 These sentences seemed at odds with one another: > Banana agriculture is itself partly to blame for the potential of the fungus > to spread. Commercial plantations grow almost exclusively one clonal > variety, called the Cavendish; these plants’ identical genetics mean they > are also identically susceptible to disease. and then very shortly after saying: > ... residents of banana-producing nations rely on a multitude of local > varieties, including plantains, for their food security. Panama disease TR4 > has a notoriously broad host range, meaning it threatens nearly all of these > varieties to some degree. ~~~ ggm I don't see these in conflict. commercially exported banana is based on clonal reproduction and is therefore _highly_ exposed to risk of a disease. All banana varieties (to some extent) have risk, the locally _consumed_ varieties are not always Cavendish, or LadyFinger but include more rich varieties which may or may not be clonally sourced, but do include seeded bananas and plantain varieties, but also have the risk: its just commercial agriculture has driven to a very very high risk of consequence. ------ brink There's a GMO variety of the Cavendish that is resistant to the Panama Disease. [https://www.accessscience.com/content/genetic-engineering- of...](https://www.accessscience.com/content/genetic-engineering-of-bananas- to-combat-panama-disease/BR1208171) ~~~ autokad I want to have GMO big mikes =( ~~~ Aloha I've always wanted to try a Big Mike ~~~ slavik81 Atlas Obscura had an article in which they ordered a box of Big Mikes from the Miami Fruit Company. It's a little on the pricy side to ship boxes of boutique fruits across the country, but they have quite an interesting selection. If I was in your shoes, I might wait for Big Mikes to be in season, then order the banana variety pack[1] (and ask that they include a Big Mike). You could pre-order a large box (10-14lbs) of Big Mikes[2], but that seems like a lot to buy at once. I've never heard of these folks before today, but now I kind of want to throw a fruit tasting party. [1]: [https://miamifruit.org/collections/fresh-and- dried/products/...](https://miamifruit.org/collections/fresh-and- dried/products/banana-variety-box) [2]: [https://miamifruit.org/collections/banana-pre- orders/product...](https://miamifruit.org/collections/banana-pre- orders/products/gros-michel-banana-box-pre-order) ~~~ deadmetheny I regularly order fruit from these guys and can attest that it's all very good quality. The banana sampler in particular is one of the few ways I can actually get a good variety of bananas outside of being on holiday. ------ jedberg > Other scientists—most notably, James Dale of the Queensland University of > Technology in Australia—are testing genetically modified disease-resistant > Cavendish bananas, but public acceptance of GMOs could prove a significant > obstacle to their widespread adoption. This is the problem right here. The lack of science education. A banana modified in a lab and one that is bred through selective breeding are both "GMO", it's just that one is done in a targeted manner and the other relies on random luck in the mutations. If people weren't so afraid of science this problem would already be solved. The two main producers refuse to even consider the "GMO" bananas because they are afraid they won't sell. If they would just take up the cause, they could put enough money behind this to solve the problem in a year. ~~~ icxa I'm pretty up to date on the science myself, and I still consider myself anti- GMO for a host of reasons, little to do with the science. My objections are more philosophical. two primary reasons: hubris and greed. The hubris to think we know which varietals are the best and will continue to be the best. We may go all in on one species or variant and then turns out an unknown bacteria we have previously no clue about wipes out all of them. You never know, you _need_ variety. Bacteria outnumber us all. number two: greed. You worried about tech being consolidated into the big 5? how about this scientific research? you want our _food_ , something we _actually_ depend on, to be consolidated into 2-3 chemical companies? I don't. Smaller reasons include: the power of being able to still survive on pure nature's means, and the freedom to do so. We don't realize it, but these things we do out here in the more advanced nations greatly impact the developing world, where a large portion of the world's population exists. ~~~ roywiggins > The hubris to think we know which varietals are the best and will continue > to be the best. If they don't grow GMO Cavendish, they will pick some other variety and grow _that_ everywhere, like they did after the Gros Michel went under. GMO doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for monoculture at all. > the power of being able to still survive on pure nature's means We haven't been able to do that since the dawn of agriculture. If modern agriculture disappeared tomorrow, the Cavendish plantations would not resemble Cavendish plantations very long, Panama disease or not. The only problem I have with a "GMO Cavendish" is that it would likely be patented, which could create a company with some _extraordinarily_ powerful IP, which is very dangerous. But that's a problem with the law, not GMOs per se. ~~~ xbmcuser Many of us that are considered anti gmo are more anti patent for food genes rather than of anti gmo. The developing world mostly has agricultural economy now Western companies are trying to horn in that as well. A few years ago an American company tried to patent and stop Pakistan and India from selling a rice variety called Basmati by modifing it genes and trying to patent it. When its come to gmo the trust deficit in rest of the world is not just about the science but of the western companies and their patents. ~~~ yoube Then don't call yourselves anti-GMO? ~~~ xbmcuser I didn't say we were anti-gmo rather we are labeled as anti-gmo despite our reservations being about the patenting systems rather than the science. ------ acd Cavendish banana are monoculture clones from the same original banana. That means that any disease that attacks one can attack all since the banana share the same dna and protective mechanism. The solution is not to clone with the same dna. also not to use pesticides which kills bees and insects. Pesticide will not only kill bugs they will kill all insects a like. “Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire. Though they were not the first known banana specimens in Europe, in around 1834 Cavendish received a shipment of bananas (from Mauritius) courtesy of the chaplain of Alton Towers (then the seat of the Earls of Shrewsbury).” Source [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana) ~~~ primroot Or get people to eat local as much as possible. The only people at risk from being more malnourished due to a scarcity of Cavendish bananas are those whose land has been plagued by the monoculture. And by the way [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/monkeys- bann...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/monkeys-banned-from- eating-bananas-at-devon-zoo-9058856.html) [Monkeys banned from eating bananas at Devon zoo]. I assume those were all Cavendish bananas. ------ axaxs So, my wife is from SEA. I never bothered to look into the name of their bananas, nor do they know it by any other name, but they are delicious. They are small, and grow more in a straight line than a bunch. While a Cavendish is mostly subtle, these taste like real fruit, more hearty and definitely sweet. So, my question is, why are we in USA stuck with these dud bananas, even in the absence of the Gros Michel? ------ PopeDotNinja A short, recent discussion I posted on /r/AskScienceDiscussion... "If Cavendish/dessert bananas get wiped out by some disease (e.g. Panama disease), how long would it take to cultivate a new dessert banana from wild growing options?" [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/c75ct...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/c75ctk/if_cavendishdessert_bananas_get_wiped_out_by_some/) P.S. For the casually curious, /r/AskScienceDiscussion is a more forgiving, less strict place to ask questions than /r//r/AskScience. It's more ask Bill Nye in a podcast than pose a perfect question to pass the scientist mod filter. ------ ralusek > Desperate, the predecessors of Chiquita and Dole switched production [from > the Gros Michel] to a banana they knew to be resistant to Panama disease, > despite its relatively bland flavor: the now-ubiquitous Cavendish. I want to try the Gros Michel. What I'm eating is relatively bland? ~~~ andrewla It might be urban legend, but apparently banana-flavored candy imitates the flavor of the Gros Michel, which is why it doesn’t really taste like a “banana” as we know it. ------ caymanjim Since it's inevitable that the current bananas will collapse from this, maybe it'll speed acceptance of GMO products. People will ignore their unfounded fears once it starts affecting them. ~~~ spraak People are already comfortable and used to other cultivars of other fruits. GMO isn't even necessary here, just other types of bananas. ~~~ caymanjim From the article: > Besides the Cavendish bananas that dominate modern supermarket shelves, > residents of banana-producing nations rely on a multitude of local > varieties, including plantains, for their food security. Panama disease TR4 > has a notoriously broad host range, meaning it threatens nearly all of these > varieties to some degree. Unfortunately, pretty much all banana species are vulnerable. Even if Cavendish is the most-affected, replacing Cavendish with another cultivar isn't a complete solution. Other banana cultivars don't have the same properties, and breeding a replacement dessert banana that is resistant, and then spreading that cultivar (and hoping that it too doesn't fall prey) is not a trivial undertaking. If a GMO solution can save the existing cultivars, which have established consumers, it's a better approach. Since all bananas are grown using monoculture grafting (because we long ago bred the seeds out), it's not as easy to produce new cultivars as with other fruits. ------ ArmandGrillet Related to the topic, I highly recommend this short documentary about the Cavendish banana and the deadly fungus affecting it: [https://youtu.be/YkI3zkQ4WBo](https://youtu.be/YkI3zkQ4WBo) ------ jjeaff Is the worry that they will just go away overnight all at once, but it just hasn't happened yet? Because the current price of bananas sure doesn't indicate a shortage. ------ thelittleone Bananas are an important staple with many potential uses. A guy in Bali came up with a process that makes flour from green bananas. The resulting bread products are delicious. Far better than regular gluten free bread and better than regular bread for toast (amazing crispiness). Lots of cafes are using this bread to satisfy the ever growing hippie tourism trade. ------ carapace Coffee is also having some problems: [https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2013/0605/Coffee- bl...](https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2013/0605/Coffee-blight-in- Central-America-Changing-livelihoods-and-your-cup-of-joe) ------ quickthrower2 "The banana is one step closer to disappearing" \- seems to be overstating it. They mean the Cavendish Banana and therefore large scale Banana cultivation. However we could still have a variety of bananas, lower scale and have banana be more of a treat than a common food. ~~~ onetimemanytime >> _However we could still have a variety of bananas, lower scale and have banana be more of a treat than a common food._ Those that could afford the $XX / lbs price would. ~~~ quickthrower2 It wouldn't be the only food like this, and nutritionally I think people can survive without bananas. I'd miss em though. Nothing like frozen banana + milk blended. ------ blondie9x What’s most scary is this. If the food can still be produced in a climate we have injured, will it even be nutritious? The answer is unfortunately no in most cases. Over farming leads to soil being turned over too much and plants that do not produce fruits and vegetables with vitamins. Another bad finding is high atmospheric carbon levels drive rice malnutrition. If rice then what else? And now a worsening climate is leading to plant extinction also. This is double bad news. ~~~ helkafen At least the soil issues can be fixed through regenerative practices, which also help mitigate climate change to some extent. Farmers should receive funding to safely transition to better practices. ------ winrid Fun fact - bananas are berries. ~~~ IvyMike Strange times for Berry Club. [https://www.mrlovenstein.com/comic/643](https://www.mrlovenstein.com/comic/643) ------ lukejduncan Can anyone recommend a good book to learn more about the GMO debate? ------ ptah would it help if banana plantations were not monocultures? would it stop the spread if other trees were in between ------ ptah interesting video illustrating how corporations control US military action ------ cryptozeus I guess there is always banana nut bread ! ------ jesse_m how will we express the scale of something now? ------ JackFr > the _epicenter_ of the global banana export industry Sigh. ------ lioeters "Yes! We Have No Bananas" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes!_We_Have_No_Bananas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes!_We_Have_No_Bananas) ~~~ carapace [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana) > This variety was once the dominant export banana to Europe and North > America, grown in Central America, but in the 1950s, Panama disease, a wilt > caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense, wiped out vast tracts > of Gros Michel plantations in Central America, though it is still grown on > non-infected land throughout the region. The song is from 1923, so likely no connection to the great banana blight, eh? Too bad, I thought so too. ~~~ lioeters I believe you're right, the song predates any widespread fungus issue with bananas. Would have been cool if the lyrics had been a satire / poke at the situation. I did find the following note about the song: > In 2008, The New York Times ran an op-ed, with the title "Yes, We Will have > no Bananas", regarding the outcome of fungal diseases afflicting the > Cavendish Banana [https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html) So we weren't the first to make the pun/connection - great minds think alike? :) I deserved the downvotes though, I knew it when I posted the flippant comment.