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Microsoft's Bing Refuses Search Term "Sex" In India - gasull http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/06/06/2338233/Microsofts-Bing-Refuses-Search-Term-Sex-In-India?from=rss ====== ideamonk Microsoft has finally understood how to generate buzz and get publicity... even without having to spend 100 million dollars. ~~~ dmnd I doubt it's intentional. Pornography is illegal in India (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_india#Online_por...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_india#Online_pornography)). Microsoft is being conservative when complying with the Information Technology Act of 2000. "According to the act, anyone publishing or transmitting or causing to be published or transmitted content of a pornographic nature can be punished with imprisonment or a fine." - [http://in.reuters.com/article/paidmediaAtoms/idIN19619307872...](http://in.reuters.com/article/paidmediaAtoms/idIN196193078720090603) ~~~ ideamonk What if someone needs information on sex (something which is so natural to human beings) instead of "To get results, change your search terms." I should at least be given a wikipedia link or pages with information on safe sex, etc.. "To get results, change your search terms." and no option to turn the filter off -- bad user experience sex isn't pornography right! ------ jsz0 It seems like Microsoft has a bad habit of letting lawyers, executives, and accountants sink good products & services with arbitrary and silly restrictions on how you can actually use it. ------ endtime This is slightly tangential, I guess, but could someone explain this facet of Indian culture to me? I have heard that India can be very socially conservative, but, well, the Kama Sutra did come from there. Is there a sort of Victorian dichotomy of public conservatism and private debauchery? Is it a religious thing? Is the Kama Sutra the product of an older culture that no longer really exists? Are there strong generational divisions on this sort of issue? ~~~ kamawhosits The Kama Sutra is so old there's a whole chapter on what to do with your tail. ~~~ sho Did you create that account for the sole purpose of making that joke!? ~~~ yesidid Yes I did. ------ gommm Oh and I thought that I was going to give microsoft a chance and try using bing instead of google... But yes I can confirm it, here (in malaysia) searching for sex returns "THE SEARCH SEX MAY RETURN SEXUALLY EXPLICIT CONTENT." (and all in caps as if they needed to shout it on top of that) No way I'm going to use a search engine like this. ~~~ froo ... and so the trolling begins. Seriously though, this is news on HN why? MS not allowing a sexual term in India.. ooo, what about Google helping the Indian authorities on the arrest of an Orkut user over making comments about a Political leader in India, even though freedom of speech is one of the six fundamental rights the Indian Constitution grants its citizens. Which do you think is the worse of the two? It's not that I'm pro-bing, I'm just anti-anti-bing. How about we give the site a few months to fuckup before we start with the comments like above. I'd much rather see people judge the site based on its merits rather than get so instantly polarised before it's had a chance to find its footing. ~~~ gommm Well it's simple I'm currently living in Malaysia if a search engine doesn't allow me to search for things I'm not going to use it... I'm not much pro-google either for the reason above... It's just that I think such action from MS is short-sighted (and don't tell me it's because of the local regulations since Google and Yahoo here do search for those terms). Now it's true I guess it doesn't add much to the discussion, it's just that I'm quite irritated when I see a company that self-censors in order to get the local governments to appreciate them. ~~~ froo Well, simple question... have you used Bing extensively before today? If so, have you searched for content of a sexual nature and if not, do you honestly care? For all we know, it could have been an oversight on MS's part (the site is less than a week old) and it will be a simple case of switching on or off a setting eventually, like what you can do with Google. EDIT - I signed into Bing using my Live account and noticed theres a setting to filter sexually explicit content like with Google, so perhaps this is the same thing, maybe you just need to sign in to do it. EDIT #2 - I just switched to India & Malaysia's settings (was on Australia) and noticed that you couldn't set location or the sexual settings (seemed like a recurring theme), but then switched to China and noticed you could set Location, so perhaps its just a bug ~~~ gommm I switched to bing as my main search engine 3 days ago to test it out (I like the idea of having more than one search engine with significant market shares so I had to give it a try). Now it's true I hadn't search any content that triggered the filter in that time (I don't only think about that :-) ) but not long ago I was looking at what was the legality of having pornographic photos uploaded by users in a user generated content site and if it was better to filter them out systematically or wait for members to report such photos and those search wouldn't have worked on bing. But as said, it's mostly an emotional argument on my part because I don't like companies to self-censor themselves when they could help the countries to become more opened.. I've also signed into Bing with a live account and didn't notice such a setting... maybe it's also disabled in Malaysia? Anyhow, I'm one of those strange people who block the google, bing and yahoo cookie because I don't really want search engines to have a complete history of my searches associated with my profile so this wouldn't be enough... EDIT: Small fact in passing: while it blocks the english term 'sex', it doesn't block the malay word 'seks'... Strange now this term is also blocked?? ------ boundlessdreamz It is blocked in germany and in many other countries. Try searching for sex in bing.de ------ dkasper In the US version of the site you can change this setting in the preferences tab, but it doesn't seem to be available for India or many other countries for that matter. I think putting this setting in and making a link to the preferences on the block page would solve the problem for most people would it not?

Do Open Source Software Developers Listen to Their Users? - ingve http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.06893 ====== ChikkaChiChi They got responses to 5 questions from 72 OSS developers with projects on SourceForge. There is absolutely no way you can draw any sort of reasonable conclusion from that sample. ~~~ afarrell That is a good point. Projects that are on sourceforge are going to select for less recently created projects and projects less likely to migrate to a platform with better developer experience. ------ afarrell One bit of nuance to this is how one defines "users". An existing open source project (or even perhaps an exiting proprietary product) is likely to think of its users as "those people who currently use the product", while a startup building a product to be sold to a future larger userbase is going to think of them more broadly. The problem with this is that the former is subject to selection bias. All the people who are currently using the product are by selection, those who have the patience to deal with its' usability warts. Therefore, if an outsider to a project wants to make a change in favor of usability, they have a much harder time overcoming the objection that changing the code might break things. The same is true on a second level: All of the existing developers of a project are those who are by selection already comfortable with both the development process and the resulting product. If someone wants to join, they have to already be familiar with how the project is structured and how it does things. They probably have to already be comfortable with this. Someone who hates working on projects without automated testing is very unlikely to join such a project and then convince the team to adopt automated testing. Of course, you can't just let random new people come into a project without pushing back on them; Often their ideas are genuinely bad ideas which come from a lack of understanding & context. ~~~ ploxiln You also can't just join a commercial software project. But you can fork an open source one. For most open source software projects, the "user base" is developers who like open source software. That's a good thing really; otherwise, there would be nothing that works well for people like me, as all commercial software companies go after the much bigger markets. ------ infinity0 As a FOSS developer, my aim is to grow the FOSS community _in the long term_. Number of users, and their real or perceived wants, is only sometimes helpful to this goal. Sometimes it is not, for example when "shiny" is prioritised over solid engineering or security, or when a short-term attention gain from temporary "hired guns" is prioritised over attracting reliable and skilled workers that will help to sustain the community. ------ Maultasche I think that this is a complicated question for two reasons. 1\. It probably greatly depends on the open source project. Some developers are probably in tune with their users while other barely realize that users exist. 2\. Some people have a different definition of "listening to their users" than others. Users who want something but don't get it may regard the developer as not listening to them. The developer, on the other hand, may be hearing everything users are asking for, but aren't implementing everything that's requested because it isn't practical or just doesn't fit in with the scope and future plans for the project. A developer can't just throw in everything that users want because the result may be a horrible mess. So even if the developer listens to what users are saying and directs the project in a way that makes sense from a long-term perspective, many users may feel like the developer isn't listening to them. That's really a communications issue. If the developer simply ignores requests because they don't make sense (or makes hostile responses), they're more likely to be regarded as not listening. If their responses are respectful and they post information about their design decisions and how they are implementing certain requested features and why, then they're a lot more likely to be perceived as listening to their users. ------ LordKano The only time I ever attempted to engage with the developers of an open source project, the answer was a resounding "NO". ~~~ talmand "Contribute or shut up" seems to be a common response. My experience, not extensive mind you, is mixed on the matter. The people who make the communication positive gets my attention, even if they so no. Otherwise, I'll still possibly use the project as needed but I don't feel the need to contribute even if I could. ~~~ agibsonccc I think it depends on the project. I get a ton of feature requests that are off the beaten trail. I basically give people the feed back of: We have limited bandwidth, but I'm happy to point you in the right direction. "Contribute or shut up" worded differently may not be an ideal answer but it's an understandable one. Imagine if you were a resource constrained engineer having hundreds of queries and emails a day about certain things users want and then not only have that feature not be something of interest to anyone but that user but also have it be something that isn't even on your road map. Technology that's general purpose enough (in our case machin e learning/scientific computing) will give you this. There's a huge delta between say: a resource constrained but heavily used project and a javascript lib that only provides a slightly better basic widget. It's no excuse for OSS devs to be rude but I hope you can understand what it looks like from our side a bit. ------ jmnicolas Right now the only example of big changes asked by users I can come with is Gnome 3 ... you can guess what would be my answer to the question in the title ;-) ~~~ phkahler >> Gnome 3 Hey, we think hot corners are cool because they're easy to hit with a mouse - never mind that we're moving to more of a touch friendly interface. And speaking of touch interfaces, isn't it cool using swipe-to-unlock with a mouse? Users like that! Oh, we abandoned the old HIG. I mean who needs UI guidelines? Why would users want an icon labeled "email" and not the name of the program? ===== They have some things really right and some just so wrong. And from what I've read they don't listen as if they have a coherent plan, but it's not really making sense to me what that plan is. ------ afarrell > According to the results, majority of OSS developers neither consider > usability as their top priority nor do they consult usability experts. A rigorous examination of thing's which most people consider to be obvious is still valuable. ------ vonnik I'm part of two open-source frameworks -- [http://deeplearning4j.org](http://deeplearning4j.org) and [http://nd4j.org](http://nd4j.org) \-- and I can tell you that we spend about half our time listening to users, fixing bugs they report, adding features they request and improving the docs. It really helps when other users kick in to help. ------ thawkins Smart, interesting new functionality that is made inaccessible due to poor usability is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. ------ harlowja I try to (and I work in 5+ opensource projects/libraries). It's a two-way street here, the users need to also listen and engage with the developers. So don't forget that to, opensource people (especially if they are doing it in there spare/free-time) require working with, not being dictated to ;) ------ baseballmerpeak Unless it is directly related to functionality, no.

Hackers and Founders South Bay - iamelgringo http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/about/ ====== iamelgringo We're getting together on May 20th in San Jose if anyone is interested. ------ motoko Ok, sure. I'll try to see you there.

Refill cartridges cost more than a new (fully loaded) printer - bfrs https://plus.google.com/101416274833608453021/posts/T9iENrg8roa ====== vlad I looked up the model number, and two interesting facts are not pointed out (as Sebastian probably did not expect this to appear all over the internet). The first fact is that HP offers the printer and cartridges at similar prices on their web site. This means the discrepancy is not due to a crazy sale on Amazon. Even according to the HP web site, the price of four replacement cartridges is $822, while the price of the printer (which includes the cartridges) is $699. Though Amazon reports that at some point, the printer may have been sold for up to $885 since it was launched in October, that's still almost identical to the cost of the cartridges.) Second, also by design, the printer comes with the full cartridges, not starter ones... [http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF28a/18972-18972-33...](http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF28a/18972-18972-3328060-15077-236268-4184772-4184773-4184776.html?dnr=1) ~~~ vlad I can only imagine that: 1) HP makes a profit when people buy this $699 printer (though not as large as when they sell four ink tanks without a printer for $822); 2) Every printer re-purchase helps maintain their 40% marketshare in the printer business, if it's measured by printers sold rather than cartridges sold; 3) Every printer re-purchase keeps a sale away from Brother or another competitor; 4) HP's printing division has now been merged into the declining PC division, so nobody would notice the declining printer margins amongst lower-margin PC's anyway. "HP's new CEO Meg Whitman, who calls the printing division "the lifeblood of HP," responded to the decline by folding it into the PC division, which saw a 15% drop in revenue last quarter. _That will solve one problem: concealing the extent of the decline in HP's printer margins by blending it with lower-margin PCs._ More practically, it could give HP greater leverage in negotiating prices with component suppliers." From: <http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/03/29/hps-printer-problem/> ------ mcargian The printer usually comes with less ink per cartridge than the refills. So buying a new printer every time you run out of ink is not cheaper than buying the refills. Nor practical. ~~~ genwin When my $50 laserjet runs out of ink (going on 3 years now; I don't print much), I may just leave it at the end of the driveway and get another $50 printer, even if the > $50 cartridge would last longer than the starter cartridge. ~~~ dangrossman You should check check the prices first. I know I looked into Brother lasers, and the preinstalled cartridge is only rated for 600 pages. A high-yield black toner cartridge is only $47 and prints 2600 pages. And $50 doesn't get you much of a laser printer. ~~~ biturd And the rating of 600 pages is low, it is determined in software on the starter toner. On my brother, there is a small hole on the cartridge that light is passed through to detect the toner level. My printer is at 3200 pages on the starter toner because I put a piece of tape over the sensor which makes it believe it is always full of toner. New printers from Brother which I bought the same model for my in-laws, have solved this hack. But you can buy a replacement gear online for a few bucks, it pops on, and then you have access to the same method I used to trick the printer. Once the stater runs out, I will get a toner replacement and also tape the sensor. Even if it prints a little light, all it takes it taking the cartridge out and shaking it a little. This will buy you another month. If you are on Mac OS X or Linux and access the printer through CUPS, ( not sure about Windows and how to access these settings ) and you can set the DPI to a lower rate and put it in toner saver mode. I can't tell a difference unless I have a side by side to compare. Plus, this is just black and white so invoices, driving directions, stuff like that. I don't care about the quality of a halftone image. ~~~ dangrossman Should note that doing this can damage the printer. The toner particles that don't stick keep getting recycled back into the cartridge until eventually clumps of that crud are most of what's in it, and you're still trying to use more and more voltage to pull it out onto the paper... possibly getting it stuck somewhere else in the printer, damaging the drum, clogging a fan, or any number of risks. If you're 5 times past the rated capacity of the cartridge and it's printing light, instead of shaking the crud around and putting it back in, just buy another cartridge... unless you WANT to destroy your in-laws' printer and burn their house down. ~~~ justincormack Citation needed. I have never heard of a house being burned down by this means. ------ polemic Ug: > _"Sounds like a market begging for disruption."_ (in comments) There have been 'disrupters' at work for many years now. I wish people wouldn't assume that (a) this sort of market distortion hasn't been noticed for years, (b) leveraged for almost as many, and (c) that there are actually reasons why the market delivers these prices. ~~~ wmf It is interesting to note that Brother and Kodak didn't even seem to put a dent in the market leaders with their "rational" business model. ------ rsiqueira That's why I installed and use BULK INK refillable instead of the original cartridges in all my printers. Costas are 97% less than original ink. This is my printer with the external bulk ink: <http://bit.do/bulkink> ~~~ chmike Did you do it yourself or can this be bought ? ------ antidoh One solution is to not print, except when absolutely necessary for legal/financial events. Go to UPS or Staples to do the few printings per year that you absolutely must do. My printer hasn't printed for at least a year. The scanner still works, and UPS/Staples is just down the street. Not for everyone, works for me. HP can die in a fire. ------ Anechoic A lot of folks point toward much-less expensive third party toner cartridges and refill kits. I tried that route with my two Konica Minolta color laser printers and had _horrible_ experience with cartridges/kits from several vendors: toner leaking in the printer, streaks, squeaking, colors that were off, etc. YMMV but for know I'm sticking with OEM toner. And yes, the toner 4-pack is more expensive than a new printer. So much so that when I used up the toner on my printer I bought a new one since I wasn't all that satisfied with the printer I had. ~~~ mturmon Same here, with a recent HP color laser printer. It's not worth the hassle for me to use the third-party cartridges. ~~~ SageRaven I picked up a HP LaserJet 4000 for $10 at a thrift store a few years ago. $40 for some RAM, a NIC, new toner cart, and a duplexer and I've enjoyed one hell of a great printer. The 3rd party black toner carts have never given me issues. Is there something different about color toner? Has the fact that my printer is 15 years old allowed 3rd party toner/cart makers time to "get it right"? Or are new printers just crap in comparison to older models? ------ Geee That's how it's been for years (always). Also, that's the reason why they put authentication chips in those cartridges to try to stop you from refilling them or putting in cheap alternatives. However, this doesn't stop the counterfeiters and you can get the cartridges for tenth of the price. [http://www.alibaba.com/product- gs/569376994/CE400_1_2_3A_Las...](http://www.alibaba.com/product- gs/569376994/CE400_1_2_3A_Laserjet_Color.html) ------ B-Scan That's a "bait and hook" business model, just like Nespresso's: <http://www.businessmodelinspiration.com/?p=55> and Gillette's: [http://www.boardofinnovation.com/business-revenue-model- exam...](http://www.boardofinnovation.com/business-revenue-model- examples/bait-and-hook) ------ scorpion032 This. And try downloading a driver to run a HP printer and you will be forced to download a 750 MB "HP Digital Solution" crapware. Thats why I avoid HP printers. ~~~ sjwright My favourite feature of Mac OS X is one ruthlessly stolen from Windows 98: most contemporary printers will just "work" when you connect them up. No need to install any drivers. And you don't just get a basic driver, you get a full- featured driver that can operate all the printer's features, tell you the ink levels, and not fill your computer up with garbage. ------ citricsquid Hasn't it been long established that printers are a loss leader? I have a HP printer that cost me peanuts and at every opportunity the printer pushes me to purchase HP printer cartridges. Yes you can game the system but most people don't understand that and it never crosses their mind because of how absurd it is. ~~~ dangrossman This isn't the case for consumer printers anymore, though. Ink isn't as expensive as it once was (HP/Lexmark/Epson/Canon all have $10-15 black inkjet cartridges), and printers don't ship with so much ink that it's cheaper to buy the printer. It's the same with low-end laser printers too; a $99 Brother comes with a 600 page cartridge, where a $50 replacement prints 2600 pages. I guess the situation is different for business-grade stuff where the toner costs $800 a pop. ------ chanux <http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers> ------ Natsu I remember getting a new printer _and_ extra ink for less than a refill: [http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/12/03/211250/what-do-you- do...](http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/12/03/211250/what-do-you-do-when- printers-cost-less-than-ink) ------ droithomme The original printer claims it comes with 6000 page yield color cartridges but a 5500 page yield starter cartridge for the black. There are also 2000 page low yield color and 11000 page high yield black cartridges available. The replacement cartridges he is looking at are 6000 page yield for color and 11000 for black. So the black is twice the capacity of the original. You can also find aftermarket compatible toner, the high yield version 10,000 black and 6,000 for each color, for $330 for a complete set of cartridges for this machine - <http://www.lenscomputers.com/hp-m551-vp.html>. ------ DanBC Some websites allow you to sort printers by price. They then list the cartridges that you can use with those printers. But some people would want to sort the carts by price, and then see the printers that accept those carts. These people can't (for whatever reason) use toner refills or third-party carts. (There is a complication with number of sheets printer per cart, but that's easy enough to fix.) And if you're a toner refill company some people will buy printers based on how much they'll have to spend to get new toner, so listing your cheapest print-per-page refill kit would be useful. ------ cabirum Epson went even further: <http://pryf.livejournal.com/1829152.html> It's in Russian, but look at the pics: it's the same cartridges made in 2010, 2011 and 2012. ~~~ stalled Epson is never mentioned in the linked blog post, it says those are HP ink cartridges. Also according to original story those are only from 2010 and 2012 + another model added for comparison: HP 350/2010 _(left)_ , HP 350/2012 _(center)_ , HP 301/2012 _(right)_. Original non-blogspam article in English: [http://www.hpinkcartridges.co.uk/technology- blog/2012/05/hp-...](http://www.hpinkcartridges.co.uk/technology- blog/2012/05/hp-introduces-nano-sponge) ------ Qz You can get really cheap refill cartridges on Amazon. I paid maybe 8 bucks for C Y M and x3 B. They're not 'official' but they work just fine, in my case better even than the normal ones. ------ adventureful Is there a good reason why someone hasn't done a Dollar Shave Club business model for printers + inks? I would think it would decimate the ink racket. Granted, it may have been tried numerous times and failed due to the hardware dominance the major printer players enjoy (and throwing out an existing printer isn't the same as throwing out a razor from Gillette, so you have to capture transitional customers). And of course hair grows fairly consistently, whereas ink usage is less consistent - but offices can always stock back a couple cartridges if they're not using enough and downgrade their account with the click of a button until they burn through them. ~~~ brianbreslin Easier to stock 3 blade types and 3 handles than 500 diff ink types. That only obstacle I see. Also people don't buy ink so regularly I have no idea what intervals I buy ink at ------ webwanderings I don't own a printer for home use and most likely never will.

Microsoft to forcibly install Bing search in Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus users - notlukesky https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-forcibly-install-bing-search-extension-in-chrome-for-office-365-proplus-users/ ====== that_lurker Soon there will be an article with a title of something like "Google blocks Microsofs addon"

Ask HN: 55 years old and no experience, am I too old to get a job? - fiftyfivenoexp I can program in many languages (ruby, python, lisp, clojure, java (no expert), scala,R, javascript ES6, Haskell (level as in rwh, lysh, I must be the yegge exception), prolog, erlang (no expert in otp), elixir (don&#x27;t know phoenix), mysql (basic sql queries,normalizacion),ruby sinatra (not rails), and a little django. Linux: (bash programming &gt;&gt; tee grep awk). I have a degree and a PhD in math, also a CS degree (90s, 3 year time,from a European University, my final work was about matroids, Edmond&#x27;s algorithm for the intersection of matroids implemented in prolog, applications to graph theory, NP-complete problems, and heuristics like in Papadimitriu). I have published some papers in complexity theory, physics and abstract math. I have a good grasp of theoretical and applied statistics. I have some knowledge of machine learning (in decreasing order: books like esl; R, ipython and sklean. Some AI knowledge (like in norvig Modern IA). My hackerrank profile is not bad (solving problem there mostly in Lisp).<p>But I have no experience working with a team, and is very likely I won&#x27;t be able to cope with frequents tight deadlines. English is my second language. I enjoy programming and learning new skill by myself and I&#x27;m able to learn quickly.<p>I wonder if, at my age, I will be able to get a job as a programmer or data scientists. Any tips? ====== dahdum You certainly have the academic background and skill to work, but may I ask what you've been doing for the past 20 years? If you've been working in any type of technical or academic role you'll still be a good candidate. If you haven't worked it will be difficult to land the first one, and I think becoming an expert with common web platforms such as React will help the most. Plenty of small companies are looking for people on contract, and you'll build recent work experience. ~~~ degenerate Don't ignore this question OP. Every single employer is going to wonder exactly the same thing. What _have_ you been doing for 20 years, exactly? If you've been tilling the rice fields in bangladesh and becoming one with nature to start your own religion, own it! You have to be forward with that information otherwise employers will get cold feet. ------ currymj I think your academic career counts as experience. I would think your best bet is data science/machine learning. If you have read and mostly understood ESL i’d think you’re basically qualified. Play around with Tensorflow/PyTorch and modern neural networks so you can say you know about deep learning. Knowledge of “classical” statistics is a competitive advantage. Perhaps frame yourself as a consultant or contractor, if you find you face age discrimination. The advantage of having an older person with experience and wisdom might be more apparent, vs competing for entry level jobs. ------ SQL2219 The following ideas are my opinions, based upon my own experiences. I don't have any data to back this up. I wouldn't apply to immature companies (startups and similar), as I think they are going to be the most prejudiced. I think the opportunities for you will exist in healthcare, banking, govt. or utilities that need skills like yours. I feel there are lots of good paying jobs in these types of companies that would be more open hiring an older worker. I see you have R and Python along with some SQL, perhaps this along with your PhD in math could be leveraged into a data science job, or jr position in data science. Take a look at kaggle.com, perhaps you can do something there to get your foot in the door. ~~~ fiftyfivenoexp Thanks, I will try to learn more about feature engineering. Long ago I read Machine Learning for Hackers, and followed one of the author blogs about the julia language. ------ vfulco2 I am only a few years younger than you, American, and run a professional services company (resumes/linkedin profiles/interview coaching, academic work) in Shanghai after 24 years on/off Wall Street. Look up my email and shoot me your resume. I will give it a thorough review for glaring issues. Please give me a week as my client schedule is full. Free for you (fiftyfivenoexp) although I typically charge for the service. You can look me up on LinkedIn for background. ------ exegete A lot of STEM PhD's are transitioning into data science in industry. It seems you have a lot of CS background as well, so "data engineer" might also be a role you should look into. Also, you say you have no experience working with a team. So no collaborations? No co-authors (surely you must have some students working for you)? I see from another comment that you had to go through the tenure process. I'm sure you had some deadlines to meet there and some important requirements to meet. As far as tips, I have found this article helpful: [https://blog.insightdatascience.com/preparing-for-the- transi...](https://blog.insightdatascience.com/preparing-for-the-transition- to-data-science-e9194c90b42c?gi=40f8586a4ff0) ------ anoncoward111 I'd say you are infinitely more qualified than me. Network hard, in person, apply to a lot of places. I'd actually be curious to hear if you succeed because if you don't, then I'm certain is horribly wrong and biased with current hiring practices ~~~ fiftyfivenoexp Thanks for the tips. Anyway, I think that if all that is needed is to learn the latest web framework and measure code by lines of code/hour that knowledge is of little use. Now going to gym, just to stay in good shape. I see you are brave by your name. ~~~ soneca Don't learn the latest web framework, you should leverage your current knowledge. Web development is not a good choice for you. And I say this without the implicit prejudice I noticed in your comment, as I'm a web developer myself, I had to learn _" the latest web framework"_ to get a job, and I like it. Also, I never heard about such a thing as measuding lines of code per hour ------ Learn2win I am in a similar situation and i am happy about it. I don't belong to anyone; that means i can work for anyone. This gives the flexibility to get involved in projects I am truly passionate about. There are things maturity does better; one of the those is the ability to think logically, clearly and abstractly. Based on your skills, you would be under selling yourself as a programmer because you have more than just programming skills. What you have are problem solving skills. If I were you, I would look for consultant & advisor jobs. I know a couple a companies that look for people with your set of skills, shoot me an email if you're interested. ------ DoreenMichele I'm not a programmer, but I got my first full time job at age 41. I was a homemaker for 2 decades before that. I put education and volunteer experience on my resume. My recollection is that the book _What color is your parachute?_ has some good tips for getting your first job and points out that everyone has a "first job" at some point. ------ cimmanom With an academic background in math, there’s probably demand for your background in certain BigCos — Google; finance; anywhere investing heavily in developing new machine learning techniques. A (non-spammy) recruiter may also be able to help you find the companies that are looking for your expertise. ------ bytematic Jesus I wish I could absorb your knowledge, reading that paragraph gives me anxiety. It would be so stupid and against everything I could understand of rational decision making if you couldn't get hired. ------ modells It depends. I had a sysadmin consulting co. in high school that serviced nuclear, mech and thermo engineering companies. ML/AI, scientific and other specialized software eng are rarely picky in anything but pedigree and experience. For general-purpose coding, I wouldn’t bother unless you’re hackathon-insanely productive... also such jobs are more standardized and therefore more readily outsourced. Haskell (biceps emojis here) ------ abc_lisper Yeah, you can, if you can avoid startups and cool dudes. Im pretty sure you if you are proficient enough, you can get a job in Enterprise/IT. ------ sammy_cool Did you try already? Not sure what your CV looks like but the way you list your experience is a bit concerning. That's quite a lot of stuff. And you say you don't have much to show for it. Most people are going to assume you're mediocre or even a beginner in all of these. Say less and people will assume more competence. ------ slipwalker i would build a profile on some(many) freelancing site(s), and take a couple programming gigs to build up a portfolio on Linkedin. From there, apply to as many jobs as you seem fit while polishing your soft skills ( deadlines and teams are a harsh reality ). ~~~ fiftyfivenoexp Thanks, I don't have a portfolio. I think is time to create one. ------ DEADBEEFC0FFEE Pretty sure if you can do statistics you can get work. I would stop referring to yourself as No Experience, it's not true. If you're successful in academia, you probaly have lots of experience. ------ runjake A related Ask HN thread from last week that may help shed some light: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17624888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17624888) ------ Jugurtha If you're in Algiers, Algeria, can you get in touch? We'll work something up. ------ slow_donkey Willing to relocate? Friends company should be hiring. Pm me hn@raindeer.io ------ ghostbust555 If you want to start small and take on a website or mobile app look at gigster ------ lifeencoder Don't Forget: Age is just a number! ~~~ fiftyfivenoexp But unfortunatly is a bounded number. Going to see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol with my sons just to get some tips about how to overcome difficulties. Thanks all for the positive feedback. I tried to upvote everyone, but can't do it because I replied and hn rules. Thanks folks. ~~~ Latteland Lots of good comments. It sounds like you have lots of programming breadth, the question is how much depth you have, can you be a regular programmer or are you a special area of knowledge type programmer. You don't sound like a UI programmer necessarily from that skillset. 1\. Data science is often deeper stats knowledge, less programming (ie can sketch something up together using python and libraries, then a programmer can take over to make it production). But you have to understand stats and ideas. I'd expect you to do this or pick it up. Most CS people aren't very deep in stats, so you can do better than them in that area. 2\. Regular programming jobs - I think this would be a bit harder to start in. Companies will not know how to evaluate all that various different experience. So you'll have to find something that matches up with a companies needs. a. Maybe some scientific or statistical scientific programming, other than data science? b. Maybe you can find some open source project to contribute to to show you capabilities. You could take a very short term gig to build up your resume and confidence of what programming is like today. Interviews - interviews at many companies are unfortunately more about passing a potentially tricky design problem. Try to do one or two problems every day or two at one of the "leet" code type sites. When I interviewed recently at several big-software-cos I was surprised to get multiple leet code problems - and I'm a software engineer with 20 years experience, working on infrastructure. You should search for data science interview questions to get ready for that. There's huge demand for different kinds of software expertise, but you will have to work and network to get through until you can talk to engineers and interview. I could boil all this down to: 1\. data science looks very promising for you 2\. look on linked-in for companies hiring 3\. search for data science interview questions on the web 4\. interview and get that job! ~~~ User23 > Maybe you can find some open source project to contribute to to show you > capabilities. I came here to say this. It's a big deal. It proves that you can write quality code and work with a team. It's also trendy, which doesn't hurt. ~~~ damm > I came here to say this. It's a big deal. It proves that you can write > quality code and work with a team. It's also trendy, which doesn't hurt. Absolutely. If were a model with a portfolio with no pictures in it; you won't get hired. So it has to be full; of valid content you can share. People want to see it. Otherwise you won't be taken as seriously ------ noncomformist43 In my 40s, I just started working my first real job as a data scientist. I'm a polymath but I've lived most of my life as an entrepreneur and party boy. I've helped out at other people's startups before but usually got bored fast and quit. This time feels like it's going to be different. The work is interesting and I feel a genuine sense of purpose. I guess it was finally time to grow up.

Bad habits: Your house is holding you back - imartin2k https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/blog/your-house-is-holding-you-back-seriously ====== jaggederest There's a corollary to this: Sometimes your house isn't the thing holding you back. Sometimes, getting the right environment won't work, because the problem is in your expectations, not in what you're doing. When you keep thinking "If only I had X / lived in Y, I could Z", you're really failing to think about (as the author said) the things you can do in your current situation. But again, that intervention in your current situation isn't magic, so you have to start with your expectations. Can I do 10% better here? Possibly, indeed. Can I change everything at once? Highly unlikely. Is moving to a different place going to make you a different person? Nope. It might make some things more possible, but it's just a possibility. ------ sdan Same thing for a student like myself. I get easily distracted by websites such as HN, Reddit, and YT that I can't focus or do any work. When I'm at the library, suddenly I feel no urge to waste time on those websites and am consistently productive (albeit slow). I feel like your point can also apply to the workplace as well. ~~~ zapzupnz I oddly felt the opposite as a student. At the library, I couldn't concentrate because I couldn't relax. At home, I did waste a lot of time — but I was relaxed, so I could engage in different behaviours. 50 minutes of writing, 10 minutes of game, 40 minutes of writing, 20 minutes of game, 30 minutes of writing, 30 minutes of game, 20 minutes of writing, 40 minutes of game, 10 minutes of writing… oh, it's done. Well, gaming all the rest of the night! ------ RickJWagner I think there is some good advice here, for young people. But also a caveat. I moved around a lot when I was younger, and now live several hundred miles from my hometown. In my new place, I have friends that have never moved-- they are my age, yet they still have high-school friends, family, and acquaintances that stretch back decades. This brings a web of trust that's really strong. Having a "place" in a community is immensely advantageous. There are pros to moving around, but there are also pros to staying put. ------ vages I think this is a confusion of causation and correlation: When the time comes and you are so motivated to do something that you're willing to move, your motivation levels are probably so high that you could have changed without moving. Or perhaps moving is just like any other tool for behavior change: sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I know this flies in the face of everything the author said, but I'm reluctant when it comes to accepting anecdotal evidence. At least when the suggested remedy is as expensive as moving. ~~~ johnchristopher Your reasoning is as much an anecdote but it doesn't even come from actual personal experience. There are evidences that moving to a different environment has an impact on behaviour, see [https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2012/01/02/1444317...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnam-taught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits) Granted that article is click-baity and devoid of helpful and actionable advice. Ít's a blog post to promote a self-help coach dude. edit: funny, looks like he has an update [https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/blog/cheaper-ways- to-...](https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/blog/cheaper-ways-to-change- than-moving) ------ nitins Yeah, I think this has worked for me also. I have have been stuck with my place/job for sometime now. I should probably look for a change. ------ enraged_camel It seems this could easily apply to, say, your office or your job, as it can to your house. ------ z3t4 If you are not motivated to train, go to the gym anyway and sit in the bubble pool or something. So that going to the gym becomes a habit. But the trick is to condition your training so that you always feel fresh and motivated. ------ randomacct3847 An extended trip to a new city (at least 8-10 days) does the same thing IMO, especially a place you’ve never visited before. ------ eurticket Oh duh, to change my life I just need to pack up and move! Why is this a top post--what have we become here? I'm all for behavioral tweaking, such as adding new behaviors onto things you're already doing. E.g after you brush your teeth you do 2 push ups. Those work a lot of the time and there has been a lot great posts on HN about that. But, this as any advice is a luxury to even think makes any rational sense. Context is a benefit from being able to move at will. And while I'm not condemning view points of any one type of person, but because you're privileged to be able to move doesn't mean it's worth anything to be providing for people actually looking to change their lives; and find real 'context' in the environment they are unable to move out of. ~~~ nostrebored Moving to a new place is fantastically inexpensive. He didn't say you had to switch countries, just neighborhoods.

Startup Pitch Decks that raised over $400M - yarapavan https://attach.io/startup-pitch-decks/ ====== lafay It's a silly headline, implying that Powerpoint wizardry was the primary factor behind the raise. I suspect that companies with growth metrics like these could walk in with pitch decks that look like chicken scratch, or none at all, and get the same investment. ~~~ lighttower Absolutely AGREE. In fact, I think the establishment (VCs, Angels, Media, wannabes?) should stop feeding the illusion that this stuff matters in anything but marginal cases. The commenter below who asked for a network graph is suggesting something that could put this debate on solid factual footing ~~~ Terribledactyl It's like peacock plumage, the biggest, strongest bird is still going to "win" but you gotta look good doing it. Or yell at an intern to whip up some slides. ------ andrewchoi For those who wanted a look at which decks raised large amounts of money, the two you're concerned with are WeWork (355mm series D): [https://attach.io/startup-pitch- decks/#wework](https://attach.io/startup-pitch-decks/#wework) and Mixpanel (65mm Series B): [https://attach.io/startup-pitch- decks/#mixpanel](https://attach.io/startup-pitch-decks/#mixpanel) ------ AndrewKemendo I'd rather see the network graph between the founders and investors/advisors than a pitch deck. Decks are formalities only. ~~~ lighttower What resources are available to help construct a network graph of the company at the time of the raise? This could be the evidentiary footing necessary to finally end the ridiculous harping on pitch decks. What does become important is the founding team's ability to attract those names. And here we can derive a metric for what matters in a start-up CEO. ~~~ AndrewKemendo Not sure. I think Crunchbase and Mattermark are the only ones actively collecting that kind of information in a consolidated way. Any public data on founders would be highly biased toward founders with the drive to put a lot out about themselves publicly or are already well known. ------ mandarlimaye If the slides don't work .. enable third-party cookies for slideshare

Ask HN: What Are Some Things I Can Do To Help My Startup Be Successful? - zxlk21e I&#x27;m a first time startup founder. I&#x27;ve been doing the &quot;work for myself&quot; thing for the last decade... finally stopped doing &quot;me-too&quot; sites and rolled up the sleeves to build something that doesn&#x27;t exist.<p>I&#x27;m a horrible marketer and I don&#x27;t have deep pockets. For the record, my startup is a hobby marketplace. Overcoming the chicken and egg scenario with bounties and incentives placed on listing &quot;wanted&quot; items, leverage special relationships not available to the general public of collectors... essentially focusing on bringing liquidity to markets where it traditionally has not existed.<p>My space is one where the light from the Techcrunch&#x27;s of the world doesn&#x27;t shine. I really don&#x27;t have the opportunity that many of the tech startups do. ====== Sujan Go where your hobbyists are right now. Forums, usenet, blogs, mailing lists, whatever. Tell them about it, why it's better than what is there right now, and ask them for feedback. If it is two-sided (as almost all market places are), go to where the sellers are, too. Contact them individually, they will be happy to find better marketplaces. ~~~ zxlk21e Excellent feedback. This is exactly what I've done and it does work. Now I just need to get them to stick around and actually use the thing.

The Hunger Affecting Billions - koolhead17 https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/the-hidden-hunger-affecting-billions/ ====== pascalxus The fallacy is thinking that you need GMOs to address malnutrition and it just isn't so. There's so many whole grain foods and whole plant foods that have more than enough nutrients. And, I don't just mean a couple. There's dozens even hundreds of super high nutrient dense natural foods out there. heck, even the weeds that grow in your sidewalk are literally packed with extremely high nutrient density: for example: Purslane. Purslane contains well over 200% of your DRI of Iron in just 200 calories. I could list hundreds more, and i've ranked them according to each nutrient here: [https://kale.world/c](https://kale.world/c). Just set the bar to Iron and you'll see what i mean. And it's not just Iron, it's pretty much every nutrient you could possibly need. Even your standard Potatoes are really high in Iron (as long as you don't strip them of their skin which is the first thing everybody does). It's no wonder people end up with iron deficiency when you strip the skin off potatoes and fruits and eat processed rice (which once again strips off all the nutrients). And for grains, there's so many things to choose from: Teff, Whole wheat, wild rice, oat flour, oats, cornmeal, farro, brown rice. You could literally pick almost any grain that hasn't been processed to death, and you'd find that it's pretty nutrient dense. It's the processing (and unsustainable agriculture practices) which reduces the nutrient density so much. the processing and the adding of sugar and oil which contains no nutrients. Nature provides us which foods that are naturally high in minerals and vitamins without the constant need for humans to muck with it. I think we should focus less on trying to change things we don't understand and spend more time and effort actually just growing the foods sustainably in the first place. ------ pixxel “Two billion people do not get enough micronutrients in their diets, which can lead to severe health conditions.“ ------ mc32 Seems like it’s malnutrition rather than hunger as understood by most people ... and the proposed solution is basically GMOs... which unfortunately gets a bad rap.

Teenagers who read news online may be a criminals, according to the DoJ (2013) - ColinWright https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/are-you-teenager-who-reads-news-online-according-justice-department-you-may-be ====== rayiner The CFAA is a clusterfuck that has generated splits among the federal appellate courts on what it means. The Second Circuit, adopting a narrow interpretation of what "exceeds authorized access" means, put it well: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=117839932121315...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=11783993212131547013&q=807+F.3d+508&hl=en&as_sdt=20006) ("Where, as here, ordinary tools of legislative construction fail to establish that the Government's position is unambiguously correct, we are required by the rule of lenity to adopt the interpretation that favors the defendant. Santos, 553 U.S. at 514, 128 S.Ct. 2020; United States v. Granderson, 511 U.S. 39, 54, 114 S.Ct. 1259, 127 L.Ed.2d 611 (1994). We do not think it too much to ask that Congress define criminal conduct with precision and clarity."). Can't give the DOJ a pass here either. Prosecutors should not be pushing the boundaries of creative legal theories; that's for defense lawyers. ------ phkahler If violating a web sites terms of service is a felony, then the government has delegated authority in defining felonies to every web site operator. That is not appropriate. This goes back to the old problem of identity. If people were identifiable on the internet then web sites could easily blacklist or whitelist users and no rely on ToS for things like this. ~~~ mtl_usr I was once called "snobbish" because I used the term " transitive" while discussing a similar issue with non-technical people in the legal field. If only the legislator understood technology instead of simply using the "everything is a contract" and the "website is like a house people can break into" (failed) analogies. ------ DarkKomunalec "And it’s no excuse to say that the vast majority of these cases will never be prosecuted. As the Ninth Circuit explained, “Ubiquitous, seldom-prosecuted crimes invite arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” Instead of pursuing only suspects of actual crimes, it opens the door for prosecutors to go after people because the government doesn’t like them." This should be branded onto anyone that ever defended an overbroad law with 'It'll only be used to go after bad guys!' ~~~ Chathamization This is a huge problem with the U.S. legal system. A lot of common behavior has been criminalized, to the point where most people could probably be pursued for something. There's a general shrug about this, followed by a "I doubt they'd actually go after you for that." But that ends up meaning that authorities can target an individual when they want to, and since this is often followed by throwing a lot of shade about the targeted individual people think it's justified. ~~~ euyyn What's an example of such common behavior? ~~~ ItendToDisagree Off the top of my head... Distracted driving is a crime in many states now (where distracted has been interpreted more or less broadly to include electronic devices or even eating while driving). Having a phone playing Spotify/Pandora/$X into your car stereo can be a punishable offense in MA, OR, WA, NY, etc. Just because there have not been actual convictions for said offenses does not mean they are not prosecutable. Depending on the state, simply interacting with an electronic device while driving (to change the station for example), can be a punishable offense. ~~~ cr0sh > Depending on the state, simply interacting with an electronic device while > driving (to change the station for example), can be a punishable offense. I wonder if these laws have an "out" for police officers while they are driving...? ~~~ smileysteve In Georgia, yep, police are specifically exempted. They can do whatever they want on their laptops (or other devices) ------ a_imho Isn't everyone violating the CFAA [1] already? It is not clear whether a child is being prosecuted for this kind of specific tos violation. [1][http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/11/you-are-committing- crime-r...](http://blog.erratasec.com/2012/11/you-are-committing-crime-right- now.html) ~~~ II2II The point is that one law means that the age restriction is a standard clause in most website's TOS, while another law makes it a felony for minors to access website because of that standard term of service. The combination of the two laws is what makes it different from violating the TOS due to a clause being inserted at the site owner's own volition. ------ throwanem This comes out of the Lori Drew case. For those unaware, Lori Drew, a grown- ass woman, recruited accomplices into a weaponized catfishing campaign that drove a 13-year-old to suicide. That's apparently not a crime, or so I gather a federal district court has ruled. I'm not sure I would want one to rule differently - there are subtle and trepidatious ramifications here, and the social norms of online behavior are as yet very ill defined. But this isn't the hill I'd choose to die on. ------ interfixus > _In the DOJ’s world, this means anyone under 18 who reads a Hearst newspaper > online could hypothetically face jail time_ Jail time? What is it with this American propensity for locking up more or less everybody? As seen from the other site of the pond, it does at times sort of beggar belief. ~~~ cr0sh Many prisons in the US are privately operated (Corrections Corporation of America is one of the large companies that run private prisons). These companies then sell certain services to the public - such as telemarketing (seriously). In other words, that person you're talking to in a telemarketing context may very well be a prisoner in a CCA owned facility! Now - prisoners aren't forced (?) to participate in these activities, but they are highly encouraged; it gives them a bit of money for the commissary (very small bit) and other things, plus gives them "job skills" for the outside, and probably also a mark on their records for later parole review purposes ("hey, she participated in this, and became a model "employee" as a telemarketer - let's factor that into her record for an early release"). So - there is a strong incentive to participate in these programs. They aren't limited to telemarketing either: If you can think of something which can be done by low-skilled workers who are a "captive audience" so to speak, it is probably sold as a service by these private prison companies to other businesses. For instance, another big one is "product assembly" (putting furniture together, or electronics, or other similar work). So - these companies - the private prisons - need more employees, right? You know, to sell their services. These employees are very cheap (and easy to coerce to work - after all, they are also prisoners!): Just pay lowest-bidder for food and housing, then get 'em inside. Best way to do that is to lobby for more restrictive laws, make more things felonies, etc... Right? Understand? Kinda sounds like a form of indentured servitude, or corporate prison slavery, right? Maybe because it is...? Because that's how it really is here in the "Land of the Free! (tm)(c)(r)". /USA! USA!, MAGA!, and all that crap... ~~~ scaryspooky Private prisons have 7% state and 18% federal of the total population. Blaming private prisons for the problems of US corrections as a whole is disingenuous. [https://www.aclu.org/issues/mass- incarceration/privatization...](https://www.aclu.org/issues/mass- incarceration/privatization-criminal-justice/private-prisons) ------ hellbanner Related (also frontpage): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14891301) ------ cardamomo This is basically a re-write of this EFF post from 2013: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/are-you-teenager- who-r...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/are-you-teenager-who-reads- news-online-according-justice-department-you-may-be) Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5486398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5486398) EDIT: Someone has updated the original post. Yay!

Is there a market for generalist (non-technical) web consultants? - ybalkind I often see medium sized Corporates getting completely fleeced when they outsource their corporate websites and digital marketing. Not only are they getting overcharged, but because they don&#x27;t really understand digital they end up getting less than ideal outcomes.<p>I&#x27;ve been toying with the idea of becoming an independent digital consultant to the type of corporates which don&#x27;t usually have a solid foundation in digital, helping them understand what they can and should do online, and managing the process of outsourcing this function..<p>When one hears of successful consultants, they usually have a more specialist technical understanding. What I propose offering is just a bit of digital marketing, an understanding of the web dev and design process, user experience, content creation, and social media.<p>Does anyone know of any success stories of people going independent as digital&#x2F;web consultants such as I&#x27;m envisioning (links to blogs or case studies would be most appreciated)? Or are these skills too easily obtainable to make for a successful consulting career? ====== notahacker Many if not most PR and media planning companies advise corporates on digital marketing without actually doing design and build in-house, and it's not too difficult to sell design and build as part of your services whilst passing the implementation of the project on to a partner company or contractor. Digital agencies that specialise in more technical projects tend to liaise with corporates through largely "non-technical" account directors rather than developers or analysts anyway. Ability to sell your services is far more important than technical skill for most consulting roles. ~~~ CyberFonic Yup, sales ability is crucial. You also have to consider whether you are operating as a pure consultant or being the principal contractor. In the later case, you would have greater control, but also responsible for SNAFUs. ------ mak4athp It's extremely hard to sell a novel "job title" as a consultant. Most clients will want to see examples or case studies of your success in the role -- so that they can understand what you do -- and that can't happen until you get some clients. You'll have a very hard time selling it as "I've done this, that and the other thing in a few different places so of course I can do this for". You either need to find the established title that already applies to the role you want (project manager?), capture the rest of the supply chain (digital agency?), or you need to stumble into a defining gig before you start marketing yourself. ------ allendoerfer As long as you know, what the costs(x) are, you can sell x for costs(x) + y and keep it. When somebody asks you how you do it, the typical answer is, that you work with _a network of experts_ in their field. As long as I still get the payment I myself ask for. I have no problem working for somebody, who does this and manages to get an additional slice of the pie. Because without him or her the pie could very well be nonexistent. ------ anon3_ You sound like a project manager, it seems to me like you bring everything together in one package. Reading into how to run Agile / Scrum processes would be great. As for the "easily obtainable" bit, wipe away the depressive framing! It turns a world of abundance into a vicious cycle of scarcity; it creates a race to the bottom, when as a consultant, you're showing others clearly how to get to the top, you're with them to help them execute. Look into NLP. Read a Tony Robbins book. Focusing on the value you and potential you unlock for others is how we get ahead. And hustle :)

Will Digg.com be sold in 2007? - python_kiss ====== python_kiss Considering Reddit's exit strategy last year, it makes sense to evaluate if Digg will be up for grabs this year. While LinkedIn and Facebook have signalled towards a possible IPO, Digg hasn't. So in your opinion, will Kevin Rose receive his big paycheck this year? Who is likely to acquire them, and for how much? ~~~ danielha Digg's generated revenue is still nothing to sneeze at (an article in BusinessWeek reports that they brought in $3 million in ad revenue for 2006). I wouldn't be surprised if they held out for quite a while longer. Kevin Rose seems to be putting a lot of energy into Revision3 right now. Seeing as Digg is a integral part of some of their productions, I think they'd like to retain control.

The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer - sant0sk1 http://furbo.org/2011/07/13/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-independent-developer/ ====== onan_barbarian One of the issues here that wasn't mentioned, facing independent developers, is the almost pathological tendency of some people/groups in the F/OSS community to clone any even mildly successful product for no particular reason. I'm a big fan of free and open source software (especially when it's genuinely new or fills an actual gap, like the GNU tools and Linux), but there are times I wonder whether there are a lot of vested interests out there who would like to drive the cost of software to zero and make us all work for a wage providing 'services'. There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin. Between the ideologues like Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself (I know his position is supposedly more nuanced than that, but free software effectively amounts to this if you have to hand out source to all and sundry) and the open-source-friendly companies like IBM and Google - who have every reason to drive the $$$ available off software to zero, it's easy to feel a bit beleaguered. ~~~ onan_barbarian To clarify my point, my problem is not with open source in general, it's with 'feature-by-feature clones of an innovative piece of software'. The process of building, say, VisiCalc is a lot riskier and harder than turning Excel into Libre Office Calc. If Bricklin had known he was going to have to compete with free in a matter of a few months after release, he might have done something else entirely. This may be hard to understand for people that haven't ever designed anything difficult, but frankly, it's _so_ much easier to clone something than build it the first time. Even just knowing that something is possible is a huge leg up. If you think routinized F/OSS cloning of software is an actual service to innovation, you need your head examined. If nothing else, it makes going into a patent frenzy with every idea far more tempting. It's hard for me to prove a counterfactual, of course, and show all the wonderful things that have been discouraged by the prospect of immediate shitty open source clones. I fully accept that open source allows us to build innovative things on top of other software layers - it's not necessarily all bad. But it's not necessarily all good either. ~~~ wladimir So you think Excel was an "innovative piece of software" in the first place? It wasn't. Many spreadsheets existed before that. A much more practical angle: there is no MS Office or equivalent for operating systems such as Linux and BSD, so the OS people had to write their own. To be honest I think the developers of LibreOffice are heroes. Not many people in the open source scene want to be seen working on 'boring clone' projects like an office productivity suite, and would rather innovate. But the fact is, it is a necessary evil for many users, and the availability of OO has helped Linux adoption a lot. ~~~ onan_barbarian You appear not to have read the post you are responding to. I'm particularly baffled as to why you are reassuring me that other spreadsheets existed pre- Excel given that my post mentions VisiCalc and Dan Bricklin. As we used to say in high school: "No shit, Sherlock". Nor are you making a germane response to my post, which is not that LibreOffice is bad and Excel is good, but that if the creator of Visicalc had been in the situation where a few short months after he created his spreadsheet someone was going to clone it and give it away for free, he may not have bothered. ------ noonespecial The sad reality is that if you make something of value, there are rotten people who will come and try to steal from you. The author thinks he's discovered something new. I don't think he has. "Patent trolling" might be a bit of a new angle but business has always been risky. In some parts of the world, if you farm a little too much, gangs come by in rusty toyotas with AK47's and help themselves (and might kidnap your children for good measure). In our society, we've allowed these men to wear suits and pretend they are contributing members and in exchange, they no longer use guns. This seems like a valid compromise until we as a society outgrow this sort of behavior. (Here's hoping) There are tools for managing risk. Create an LLC and have professional liability insurance. Sure bad stuff can happen. I had an over-zealous zoning official try to revoke the business license for my house because I was "manufacturing" software (and manufacturing is zoned industrial, donchaknow). I wish there weren't patent trolls, but at some point you have to admit that you can't spend your life worrying about all of the bad stuff that _could_ happen. Take a few reasonable precautions and then do your thing. ~~~ rbarooah Neither an LLC nor liability insurance will stop your business being destroyed and years of your life being wasted if a troll decides to target you. Would you suggest an LLC for each product so that they can only be attacked individually? ~~~ noonespecial Actually, if they are suitably different, _yes_. It has the added benefit of making it easy to sell the product/business down the road or convert to a different kind of Corp to get investors. If a product is good enough to make money on it's own, it's good enough for its own LLC. ------ bugsy He's got his history completely wrong. From the first days that home computers were affordable at all, there were tons of very small software shops. I recall purchasing programs from computer stores that came in poly bags containing a photocopied manual on card stock and a cassette tape with a photocopied label that had been glued on by hand. If you called the company for support, sometimes you woke the guy up. ------ programminggeek All businesses have risk. Even if you are an indie one man shop you are in fact a business and there are risks. Same thing goes for being a lawyer or accountant or contractor. If you screw up, it could cost you financially in a very big way, even if you didn't intend to do anything wrong. Even successful businesses can crumble, even billion dollar businesses can get beat up by litigation to the point it isn't even worth continuing. To say that the sky is falling for indie devs is a bit silly. There are plenty of places you can build, innovate, distribute, and succeed. Sure, the iTunes App Store thing is big today, or maybe Facebook, or maybe Steam, or maybe Wii's downloadable channel, it doesn't matter. Any one of those could be gone in a year or two. Here's an example, there are people out there who make millions of dollars selling e-books and mediocre/overpriced software on Clickbank right now. Some of those people get sued I'm sure for their products. More people show up. You could take the same ebook and sell it on Kindle or Nook if you got shut down or you could sell your software on the Mac App Store or Chrome Web Store if CB went under. There are so many platforms to distribute and build software and businesses on now, it really is hard to complain about the death of the indie developer because there are so many new companies getting started every day on all these different platforms that didn't exist even 5 years ago. As a business owner you can't control all risk, but you certainly can and should plan around them. If one channel gets shut down, move on to a different one or a different product. Great devs and great companies aren't built on one hit one time wonders. ~~~ maxxxxx The problem is that a lawsuit easily can take out a small developer. Even if the lawsuit is completely frivolous. I can't afford tens of thousands of dollars for a lawsuit. If I get sued my company is probably done. It doesn't matter if the suit has merit or not. ~~~ mechanical_fish I haven't gone through this or anything, so maybe an actual lawyer would be happy to speak up in this thread. But my simpleminded understanding is that your typical frivolous lawsuit goes like this, only less transparently: TROLLCORP: "We're suing your company for ONE MILLION DOLLARS." CEO (through a lawyer, of course): "Well, oops, we've only got ten thousand in the bank plus a couple of old Macbooks. After that we're just going to declare bankruptcy and you won't see a dime." TROLLCORP: "Well, okay, frankly, we don't want to see you go bankrupt. Bankruptcy court is no fun at all. We don't need to pay for a tedious legal battle. We just want the money. How about you just give us the ten thousand plus 5% of all future revenue from your products?" CEO: "If I spend the ten thousand on a lawyer, I can file some motions to delay your lawsuit. _Then_ I can go bankrupt. You'll get nothing then. So, how about one thousand bucks and 0.5% of future revenue?" TROLLCORP: "Two thousand and 2%." CEO: "Done." As with any parasitic transaction, the parasite has no rational interest in killing you. Dead companies don't pay. The danger, of course, is that they won't be reasonable and will accidentally push too hard, in their attempt to convince you to search under more sofa cushions for loose change that they can take. Or that they are, in fact, happy to kill your company because they think it will be an instructive demonstration for the other companies they sue. Or that they will gradually consume your time and suck your blood and your company will eventually die of exhaustion in 2% increments. But, you know, this is why it's good to be a _small_ company. Having nothing means having nothing to lose. ~~~ 5hoom The "can't squeeze blood from a stone" defence is probably your best bet if you're a really small operation, but as you say you'd just better hope the patent troll is behaving in a rational manner & not trying to make an example of you. I would assume that a rational troll would only harass you if you were getting noticed & making a profit, but who knows what kind of reasoning goes on within the lizard hind-brain of your standard patent troll types... ------ felipemnoa If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. It does suck that now independent developers have to also worry about patent litigation. However, it will not stop the most resolved developers from continuing forward. On the bright side, patent trolls are patenting the most obvious patents right now. In 20-30 years all of those patent will expire. I'll be amazed if 20 years from now we will still continue to patent obvious things like one click button transactions. If so, we all deserve to go down the ship of financial failure since it is us, society, that allows such things. Meanwhile, if we could only find the best ways to make patent trolls' lives more painful... At least it would dissuade the casual patent troll. ~~~ rbarooah The implication is that products for which there is a demand won't come to market. It might not be easy, but society is harmed if we make it artificially harder to respond to market demand. ~~~ felipemnoa I understand, but unfortunately short term (like next year) is hard to change that (or maybe we can we just haven't figured it out). It is still better to continue moving forward, we'll figure something out along the way. ~~~ rbarooah What do you mean by 'moving forward', and what do you expect to happen that's going to change things in the longer term? ~~~ felipemnoa I mean don't just give up. I don't know what will change, but things have a way to work themselves up if one continues to hammer at the problem. There will always be issues when trying to do something important. This is just another one. And as I write this I realize that I sound a bit corny. The shame... (no sarcasm intended) ~~~ rbarooah It's not particularly corny, and it's hard to disagree about not giving up in principle. That said, human political systems can and do lead to sustained bad results. In my mind, 'things working themselves up' really means, 'someone finds and implements a solution'. Meanwhile actual indie developers are as we speak, prevented from working on adding value to the economy because they are forced to spend their time and money dealing with trolls. ------ endlessvoid94 Unrelated, but interesting nonetheless: the current software industry has a strikingly similar feel to the early texas oil prospecting days. Independents are suddenly able to take a little bit of risk, take on some money (then: banks, now: angels and VCs), and work by themselves or in small teams to produce something that lots of people need (then: oil, now: good software). Some of the biggest fortunes in history were made back then (1900 - 1930s), just as some of the biggest fortunes are now being made in this industry. The digger I deep (no pun intended), the more similar these two stages of history look alike. I'm sure there are other eras that also share these common threads. ------ daimyoyo What I'd like to see is a collective legal fund to protect devs from patent trolls. Like insurance, everyone pays into the system and if you need representation, high quality lawyers would be there for you. That seems to me to be the best solution to this problem short of abolishing software patents altogether. ~~~ rbarooah I like they idea, but I don't see how it reduces the risk. If someone has a valid patent, you're still in trouble. ~~~ dhess An independent developers' patent pool, then. ~~~ rbarooah Patent pools are no defense against trolls. ~~~ dhess Fair point. ------ mkn _In the days where software was distributed on magnetic media, such as reels of tape, cassettes, or floppy disks, it cost a lot of money to get the product to a customer._ One of us is misremembering. _I_ seem to recall an interview with Gates and/or Ballmer where they talked about the realization that the cost of 5 or 6 floppies at wholesale was insignificant compared to the revenue from the software, that it was a no-brainer cost-wise. CDs were the first time when cost became an issue, iirc (again) because you had to pay for one or more masters to print the production copies. I'd feel better if his history was right. _This time the retail channel itself is very cheap, but the ancillary costs, both financially and emotionally, are very high._ _And, of course, only large companies and publishers can bear these costs. My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one._ I can't even address the "emotional costs" he talks about, but there is a precedent for dealing with risks of this kind. For consulting engineers, it's called "errors and omissions insurance." It strikes me that if there isn't something like that for developers, one plausible reason is that this kind of liability hasn't actually been a problem. Is there errors and omissions insurance for developers? _From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees._ The author uses the phrase "from our experience," but I wonder what that experience actually is. At this point, it's not even anecdotal, because he doesn't supply the anecdote! We can't even begin to ask if his experience generalizes. For example, did he get good counsel? Was he actually infringing? Should he have settled? Did he avail himself of the FSF or ESF if applicable? Should his product have been more profitable? I think I'm either blessed or cursed with too much curiosity to take this guy at his word. ~~~ allwein >The author uses the phrase "from our experience," but I wonder what that experience actually is. At this point, it's not even anecdotal, because he doesn't supply the anecdote! Craig is a very well-known developer and author in the Mac and iPhone developer community and works at Iconfactory. They're one of the first companies that was addected when the Lodsys patent issue came to light. Even if you didn't know that, the very previous entry on his blog is an open letter to Apple about the problems his company is having with the patent issues. It's a little disingenuous to call someone out about omissions in a blog entry while taking zero effort to familiarize yourself with any of their work. ~~~ boucher It seems perhaps as disingenuous to think that because you know a (very) little bit about the Lodsys issue that the anecdote that all of a products profits can be consumed is true even in this instance. After all, Apple has been standing up in defense of individual developers on this issue. ~~~ smashing This is not true. While this may be true in the future, Apple is not currently involved in the legal defense of companies involved in the Lodsys lawsuits and there is no timetable for which they will enter into such an involvement. ------ soitgoes Does anyone have any statistics about the number of independent developers / startups that suffer a significant negative financial impact because of a patent infringement lawsuit? My gut feeling is that it's a very small percentage. A few years ago, I think Paul Graham wrote an article suggesting startups shouldn't worry about being sued because in practice it rarely happens to them. ------ rbarooah Does anyone think that a legislation preventing NPE's from suing for patent infringement would be practical? They'd still be able to hold them - just not sue. It seems like something that large corporations as well as independents could get behind. ~~~ wtracy How do you prove that an organization is an NPE? All they have to do is hire a couple of college kids dirt cheap and they can show that they are "developing" a product. Denying patent protection to anyone who doesn't already have a finished product out on the market opens a whole new can of worms. ~~~ rbarooah The law already deals with vague definitions. It really wouldn't be too hard to write something that erred on the side of making it somewhat hard to prove that you were practicing. ------ zentechen Should move the corporate to China and clone the heck out of everything. Facebook -> RenRen Twitter -> Weibo YouTube -> Tudou Google -> Baidu Flickr -> YuPoo See <http://www.randomwire.com/chinese-web-20-clones> Yeah, Trolls, go ahead and sue them. ------ danssig Well, the good thing about it is maybe this will force a "Silicon Valley" to finally appear in Europe where the odds aren't stacked so badly against the little guy. ------ sreitshamer I wonder what 37 signals would do. ------ benihana It's really hard to want to continue reading when the third sentence says this: _Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980’s_ I understand the point: that things are the more the same than ever, that this guy is a salty old sonofabitch who's forgotten more than i've learned, but seriously. Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980s other than the tools? The entire way we think about why we're building software and what we're trying to get out of has changed and is still changing. ------ hxf148 Our startup (<http://infostripe.com>) is built on independent spirit. So far we have been doing well. It's a struggle sometimes but always worth the effort. ~~~ bretthopper Every comment you've made has a link to your startup in it. There's a difference between self promotion and spam. ~~~ hxf148 It's true, I do mention my startup a lot. It's just that we are a small (aka unfunded) startup with lots of dev and little marketing.. when I see an article that is relevant and I have a thought on it I link to try and reach out. I don't have much time to really get into comments as I'd like. I read a lot though. I will try and find other ways to contribute.

New hints of volcanism under the heart of northern Europe - headalgorithm https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/new-hints-volcanism-under-heart-northern-europe ====== f_allwein Interesting, but the headline is a bit misleading. „The heart of Northern Europe“ sounds like it’s in the Nordic countries, whereas the study is about the Eifel region, in the West of Germany and pretty close to the heart of Europe. ~~~ lambdasquirrel Yeah that's kind of a big deal, since there's plenty of known volcanism in Italy. Eifel is still along ways from Pompeii though. To put it another way, I wouldn't worry until they start having hot springs over there. ~~~ PeterStuer The region is full of nuclear plants though. ~~~ mbeex Define 'region'. Germany as a whole has six nuclear power plants left, with planned shutdowns not after 2022. [https://www.bmu.de/themen/atomenergie- strahlenschutz/nuklear...](https://www.bmu.de/themen/atomenergie- strahlenschutz/nukleare-sicherheit/aufsicht-ueber- kernkraftwerke/kernkraftwerke-in-deutschland/) ~~~ PeterStuer The German one's are indeed extinguising, but the reactors Thiange (Belgium) and Cattenom (France) are still operational. ------ tannhaeuser What's new about it? The Eifel region (a part of which is literally called Vulkan-Eifel) has been known for centuries if not milleniae for its volcano seas. "Maar" is even part of many city names in that region. ~~~ Etheryte Perhaps a better title would be "Hints of new volcanic activity under the Eifel region". The geographic background is well known, but the study finds the activity was larger than expected: > The Eifel area is the only region in the study where the ground motion > appeared significantly greater than expected ------ dreen Those lakes seem to have no flow of water in or out, so I guess they just rely on groundwater flow to refill it, but how come it didnt overgrow and fill up with mud centuries ago? ~~~ s1artibartfast A lack of flowing rivers carrying sediment to the lakes probably helps the lakes, there is less mud to fill them up.

The Magic CmdLine and how I got it back - ttsiodras http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/bashheimer.html ====== kazinator GDB can almost be a dynamic computing environment: $ gdb ./txr GNU gdb [ ... ] [ ... ] Reading symbols from /home/kaz/txr/txr...done. (gdb) b eval Breakpoint 1 at 0x808f6b0: file eval.c, line 969. (gdb) r -p '(+ 2 2)' Starting program: /home/kaz/txr/txr -p '(+ 2 2)' Breakpoint 1, eval (form=0xb7fb919c, env=0xb7fb92ac, ctx_form=0xb7fb919c) at eval.c:969 969 { (gdb) p d(form) (+ 2 2) $1 = void (gdb) p d(cons(form, form)) ((+ 2 2) + 2 2) $2 = void (gdb) p d(cdr(form)) (2 2) $3 = void (gdb) p d(cons(0x1, 0x1)) (0 . 0) $4 = void (gdb) p cons(0x1, 0x0) $5 = (obj_t *) 0xb7fb921c (gdb) p cons(0x9, $5) $6 = (obj_t *) 0xb7fb920c (gdb) p cons(0x19, $6) $7 = (obj_t *) 0xb7fb91fc (gdb) p d($7) (6 2 0) You can test functions that are not even called anywhere from the C code. The d function is such a function; it's only there for use out of GDB. (gdb) p (0) $10 = 0 (gdb) p d(0) nil $11 = void (gdb) p t $12 = (val) 0xb7fe5eac (gdb) p d(t) t $13 = void (gdb) p typeof(t) $14 = (obj_t *) 0xb7fe5d3c (gdb) p d(typeof(t)) sym $15 = void (gdb) p d(symbol_name(t)) "t" $16 = void (gdb) p d(symbol_name(0)) "nil" $17 = void Take out the trash, and show it: (gdb) p gc() $18 = void (gdb) p d($7) #<garbage: 0xb7fb91fc> ~~~ zilog80 And in combination with conditional breakpoints executing commands, you can have GDB "dance" any application to whatever tune you wish: commands ... call d(cons(form)) call symbol_name(t) cont end It really is a marvelous tool - unfortunately, people don't know anything except the basics (if that) ~~~ voltagex_ Is there anywhere I can learn specifically about the commands you mentioned? ~~~ ttsiodras I've used them too - just "info gdb" then search (/) for "Breakpoint Command". ------ sp332 Just curious about one of the last steps: cat /proc/53165/exe > /tmp/oldBash I would have reached for 'cp /proc/53165/exe /tmp/oldBash', instead of using cat. Is there an advantage to using cat here, or is it just the same? ~~~ ttsiodras Indeed! No idea what went through my brain when I wrote that :-) ~~~ zokier Could you just use `gdb --pid 53165 /proc/53165/exe`? ~~~ hobofan If that works, is there any reason why gdb shouldn't automatically use the /proc/PID/exe? ~~~ zb Probably because /proc is very Linux-specific, and gdb is not. ------ andmarios Why not ctrl+c, then arrow up and enter? If the command can't be stopped even for a few milliseconds then there is something wrong with it. ~~~ ttsiodras I didn't want to send any signal - because I could not remember what I had done, and was afraid for sideeffects (I did remember that the logic had to do with database actions). I wanted to see the command without "messing" with the execution in any way - after all, it was running fine for 6 months, why interrupt it (and face potential effort in fixing messed up state) if I could see the command "from the outside"? And that I did :-) ~~~ __david__ C-z is actually your friend here. I've never ever seen SIGSTOP affect anything negatively. I even SIGSTOP Mac OS X apps sometimes. They just beachball until you SIGCONT them, then they happily continue, oblivious. If you're worried about timing out of the process being unresponsive, just C-z and then "bg" real quick. Then you can up arrow at your leisure and "fg" when you've copied the command away... ~~~ ttsiodras Try doing the Ctrl-z/fg sequence in this: "while true ; do sleep 1 ; done". Under Linux at least, you'll see that after 'fg', the loop ends :-( Apparently C-z followed by fg is not bulletproof... ~~~ chaosfox Thats an interesting example. zsh does the right thing, when you bg it back it recovers the loop as it was. Bash seems to forget about the loop and only recovers the "sleep 1", when it starts executing again it sleeps 1 and exits. If you want to make sure it will work you should wrap it around another bash: bash -c 'while true ; do sleep 1 ; done' should work fine. ~~~ __david__ Parens work too: (while true ; do sleep 1 ; done) ------ metafex The tip about getting the binary from /proc is also helpful if you upgrade screen/tmux and the newer version doesn't allow you to reattach to it. With that you can use the old one to reattach, work your magic, and restart the session. ~~~ zilog80 You just explained why I could not attach to an already existing screen last month - it all fits now... ------ barrkel When I read the problem description, I decided to try and solve it myself. I used gcore to dump the running bash process, then ran strings on the core dump, then grepped for likely command line stuff. 'while' is reasonable choice for a loop. There aren't that many strings in the dump file in any case, most of the sizeable ones are function definitions and environment variables. Relying on gdb makes getting to the right data much more precise, but my approach took about 20 seconds. ------ vacri I saw things being saved to /tmp, and kept expecting a turn for the worse from a sudden reboot... Fantastic article though - I've learned a couple of things from it, thank you. ~~~ ttsiodras My pleasure :-) ------ eponeponepon Great story... but I read through it hoping to see the fabled command in its entirety at the end! Any chance..? :) ~~~ ttsiodras God, no :-) Some people here are already rather mean in their comments - imagine what would happen if I revealed The Magic CmdLine (TM)... No, that privilege is reserved for the Inner Circle :-) But I'll give you a teaser... It involved a lot of ImageMagick and "pdfimages" and "zxing" and "tesseract" and "pdfjoin" invocations... and the uploaded files were PDFs with scanned barcoded pages. ~~~ eponeponepon Aw, there's nothing worse than a mystery! ;) (I can imagine the gory details tbh - it sounds like there is every chance I have had a _very_ similar command for a pretty similar purpose running for a good long while now... except mine's in a VBScript..!) ~~~ ttsiodras :-) Across the road (on Reddit/programming), a commenter already described me pretty well: "Everything about your (rather interesting) story... reaffirms everything I know about Linux sysadmins - if you encounter a problem, your go-to solution is to write a script ... Honestly, you guys would script a sandwich if you could :P" The only thing wrong in that sentence, is that I am not a sysadmin (hence the knowledge of the Dark Arts - of GDB :-) ------ krick Now this is both interesting and well written post indeed. ------ claar This was a fun read and great hack. Thanks for sharing. ~~~ ttsiodras My pleasure! It was a lot of fun hunting all this down, I just had to share it :-) ~~~ slowmovintarget It is indeed cool, but the single best lesson to come of it might be to start the work in a script in the first place. Still, cool beans. :) ------ eridal the best I've read since a long time!! ------ MDCore Nice hack! I hope you learn to start save your notes/commands/snippets to a text file as you go. ~~~ ttsiodras I do, indeed - and in Git repos, usually :-) How that one got by me is a mystery - let's chalk it up to stress and pretend it never happened :-) ~~~ MDCore Hehe. And to contradict myself, if you HAD written it all down you wouldn't have the cool story :) ------ jarin Er, why not just use the `history` command (or hit the up arrow)? ~~~ ttsiodras Good question. Well, when you have forgotten everything about a 10 lines long command line you wrote 6 months ago, you don't know what side effects a signal may cause... You don't have the heart to signal anything, except surrender. Luckily, I found a workaround :-) ~~~ albertoleal While I'm unable to come with this on my own, the article was pretty easy to digest and understand. It seems that the take-away lesson from the article is that you should save it in a bash script. ------ ErikRogneby screen doesn't have history? ~~~ keeperofdakeys It has a finite buffer, so I imagine 6 months worth of logs would have easily blown away the history of you running the command. ~~~ zilog80 You can configure it though, to be much larger than its default settings. Still, 6 months... he'd probably have to hack it as he did, no matter what :-) ------ kelvin0 Cool tricks, but reads like a how-to of things not to do when writing any type of code and deploying it. A Jedi? Maybe at getting himself out of the quicksand he lays himself into ... ~~~ ttsiodras Oh come on :-) You're telling me that you've never - under tremendous pressure - hacked things that quickly "handle" something - and then forgotten about them till much later? Jeez, tough crowd :-) ~~~ mst Those who do, blog. Those who don't, snark at those blog posts on HN. ------ hammerandtongs I appreciate the spirit and the knowledge that you wrote this blog post with BUT - The extra few seconds to put this in a .sh file in the first place ... priceless. Even for the basic case of debugging it and getting it working. I don't think in the 20-25 years I've been "doing" unix that I've ever done this (I doubt anyone that has worked with me considers me ocd fwiw but this is beyond the pale). Behaviors like this lead to "magic" work environments and are just pants on head places to work at/with. I would be really mad the first time I found you doing this and I'd look for a different work situation for one of us the second time :) Thanks for the cool post. ------ bogomipz you're a jedi because you discovered the /proc file system? Right, OK. ------ ricket My mom has Alzheimer's disease. I either sympathize with your situation, or if you were using it as an expression, I find the misuse a bit offensive. Particularly in this context for me, it brings up a painful memory of one of the first signs of Alzheimer's in my mom, when she called me because she had entirely forgotten her computer password. As a sidenote to anyone reading this, I really appreciate that the Hacker News community occasionally posts and upvotes Alzheimer's articles. I read every one that I see. Anyway, I beg that you might not use "Alzheimer's" as an expression for forgetfulness, just as you might avoid calling someone "ADD" when they multitask to a fault. ~~~ mgraczyk It's worth noting that the author appears to be in Greece. Assuming he's a non-native speaker, it doesn't really make sense to be "offended" by his misuse of the term. Maybe a better way to put it would be "We don't typically use 'Alzheimer's' to refer to forgetfulness because it brings up negative emotions for some people." ~~~ oxioxi Greek language is more about emotion than content. Hyperbole is used to emphasize meaning. I cannot forget he first time I went to Greece and my aunt kissed me, bit me, and said she was going to eat me. I was 6. I was petrified. It is common in Greece to express disappointment affectionately by saying ' I am going to kill you'. It is our cultural ignorance in the US that makes Americans easy targets for ridicule. If we project ourselves as a superpower to the world, then where indeed are our superpowers of understanding?

Announcing the Scala IDE for Eclipse 2.0 - soc88 http://blog.typesafe.com/scala-ide-for-eclipse-20 ====== soc88 A great release in my opinion, and a brand new web site, too.

For a new job is it standard now to ask 4 blog, github, stackoverflow, linkedin - beyondjaded I understand the reason behind this as it shows very transparently your skill but is it expected all this is done in your free time just for the love of it? If these don't fit into your current job logging into stackoverflow every night or updating some killer github modules definitely, combined with reading the latest texts takes a lot of time away from family and loved ones and turns a 40 hour week into a 60 hour week.&#60;p&#62;Has anyone got any thoughts on this, it's a bit of a sensitive subject and while I love software there are other parts of life I enjoy just as much and look forward to in my freetime.&#60;p&#62;Am I just managing my time badly or is it that competitive now? ====== thejteam Perhaps its an internet company thing? Maybe a California/SV thing? I don't know of anybody asking for this.(Located East Coast and rural). The company I work for is on linkedin and has gotten resumes from it before, although none good enough for an interview. They have never asked any candidates for any outside information like that. Describe the design and code for a project is a standard interview question, but even then only for people just out of college. The type of work we do though doesn't require cutting edge coding skills, though. I guess we look for people who can really think through things and come up with a good design. I think evaluating this is easier in interview discussions than looking at code, especially if the evaluator has never thought about the problem before. ------ petervandijck It's not 20 hours a week, it's 20 hours once, only when looking for a job. If you can't be bothered to put some brief, good code on github to review, why would I be bothered to interview you? ~~~ beyondjaded well I've seen some local jobs asking for people who can contributed to the core of Jquery or Prototype for example and their github accounts to go with that. If this fits in with your previous job description like you say it doesn't take long to tidy things up but being a really valid part of any open source community whether takes a lot of time and is definitely comparable to another part time job on top of a normal job ------ jister only shortsighted fools will require you to have all those although some may ask but it's definitely not required

Castro has his doubts on Communism - zmitri http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/fidel-castros-doubts-about-cuban-communism-and-iranian-anti-semitism/?partner=rss&emc=rss ====== zmitri This has really changed my view point on Castro. I'm not sure if he's been looking at lives of Cubans and realizing that maybe the revolution wasn't worth it, or if he's just getting older and his youthful " altruistic idealism" is fading. Nice to see people can change their mind, and recollect... even after decades. ~~~ stephenjudkins It would have been great if he'd realized it earlier. However, I imagine that growing up during the great depression (especially under a series of kleptocrat dictators) changes one's perspectives on the relative merits of different economic systems. I'm currently reading a book on J. Robert Oppenheimer, and I've been struck by the seeming ubiquity of very left-wing views among brilliant young theoretical physicists in the 1930s. Combine the dire economic circumstances in the US at the time with the rise of the Nazis and little accurate knowledge of life under Stalin, and some very smart people came to conclusions that seem very misguided in retrospect. ~~~ maxharris It is very difficult to develop your own philosophy from scratch, which is what it took back then to come to correct conclusions. In fact, doing this took nothing less than a genius in the field, and these are very rare. ------ ataggart >"The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore." Anymore?! What, it was working sometime during the past half-century of murders, starvation, political imprisonment, destruction of wealth and civil liberties, poverty, de facto slavery, and general screwing-over of generations of Cubans to the extent they'd be willing to risk their lives floating in a cardboard box to Florida? ~~~ jbooth It's actually been a lot nicer to live in Cuba during most of that time than much of the rest of Latin America. Pinochet comes to mind. ~~~ hugh3 What was so bad about Pinochet by South American dictator standards? It's hard to think of any metric under which Pinochet's Chile could be considered worse than Castro's Cuba. ~~~ jbooth That's because you've spent your American life hearing about how Castro is the devil (because Cuba was allied with the USSR!) and hearing very little about Pinochet or any of the rest of Reagan's buddies. I mean look at the comment I responded to, it sounded like they were running gas chambers in Cuba. I'm no defender of communism or non-democratic governments but just because someone wasn't allied with us doesn't necessarily make them more of a monster. ~~~ hugh3 Actually I asked for information on how Pinochet was worse than Castro, not just a repetition of the assertion that he was combined with a false assumption about my nationality. I don't claim to be an expert on South American dictators, but as far as I know the worst thing Pinochet did was to kill and imprison thousands of political dissidents, which is coincidentally also the worst thing that Castro did. ~~~ jbooth You've almost got it. Now think: How come for certain people, whenever Castro comes up we hear about how he was/is some exaggerated monster yet those people don't actually seem concerned about Latin Americans or any other monsters in Latin American history? ~~~ hugh3 Geez, you're _still_ not answering my question about how one was worse than the other, you're just responding with unwarranted patronization and innuendo about "certain people". I'm the one arguing they're both in the same ballpark. You're the one trying to argue Pinochet was worse. ------ absconditus Source: [http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fid...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fidel- cuban-model-doesnt-even-work-for-us-anymore/62602/) ------ echaozh At least he admits what's real. We know the system doesn't work here in China, but they won't admit it. They even force people to think the opposite. ------ gloob This is the very definition of politics.

Show HN: Bolt electric skateboard 2017 update, more range and a new Smartphone app - LooerCell https://boltmotion.com/blogs/blog/introducing-bolt-2017-the-most-portable-electric-skateboard-just-got-better ====== timthelion Does the app respect user privacy? Is it just a bluetooth remote control or is there a web service connected to it? ~~~ LooerCell The remote controller is just radio, not Bluetooth. But inside the board there is also a Bluetooth module that connects just to a smartphone app. Data remains in the app. You can then decide to upload it to a web service in case you want to see the data on an interactive map or you want to share it. Anyway, it's just riding data, it's not associated with any of your personal information.

The Joystick Store - devmonk http://www.thejoystickstore.com/ ====== devmonk Sale on Atari 800 Series and Commodore C64 Series joysticks Nov 18th, 2010 one day only at $16.99 USD. Only 250 were made of these and only 50 of each will be available for the sale. Have a few of these at home and they work well with Stella, etc. ------ devmonk Check this out, too. A little more expensive, but a clear, led lit a2600 USB joystick is awesome: <http://www.reflexaudio.com/products_joystick.htm>

Huawei has started selling laptops with a the Deepin Linux OS pre-installed - rbanffy https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/09/12/huawei-just-started-selling-laptops-with-deepin-linux-pre-installed/ ====== tga I am not at the point where I care about a "beautiful" Linux on a laptop, I'd be happy with twm and Motif widgets if only the hardware would be 100% supported and everything would work. For a reference point, a vanilla Ubuntu LTS install on random (non-certified) T-series ThinkPads still doesn't always suspend/wake up properly, doesn't hibernate properly, crashes X when used with a docking station, has issues with Bluetooth headsets (no microphone), has issues selecting the output audio device, doesn't support the fingerprint reader (I think), has hiccups with external screens, and altogether less battery life than in Windows. (I'm sure some of these work on other models and others have workarounds, this is just my recent experience with trying to run Linux without spending time on tweaks). I would seriously consider switching my work machine to any laptop/distro combination that would get closer to the experience one has on MacOS (not perfect, but close enough to be productive), no matter where it was made. ~~~ diffeomorphism Ubuntu certifies most Thinkpads: [https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/models?vendors=Leno...](https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/models?vendors=Lenovo&page=4) I currently have an X1 Yoga (3rd), where Lenovo messed up modern standby on both windows and linux. Luckily they have since added standard S3 as an option in the UEFI settings. Everything else works out of the box except the fingerprint reader. Battery life is comparable. > I would seriously consider switching my work machine to any laptop/distro > combination that would get closer to the experience one has on MacOS In my experience hackintoshes are pretty annoying and quite far from "close enough to be productive" out of the box. Or were you comparing with a laptop where your OS of choice is preinstalled? Then "without spending time on tweaks" is trivially true; someone else did that for you already. ~~~ tga To clarify, I was talking about the experience you get using MacOS on a Mac, definitely not a Hackintosh. Of course this is due to Apple (in most part) fully supporting all (their) hardware. ------ chvid A well built Unix based alternative to Mac would be attractive to many in particular developers. Huawei can address the security concerns by using established open source software (which they seem to have). Would be great to have an alternative to the windows/mac duopoly. ~~~ ptah just to be pedantic: macOS is Unix whereas linux is not [https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3653.htm](https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3653.htm) ~~~ chungus_khan Actually, Huawei's own EulerOS (which is based on CentOS Linux) is UNIX certified as well: [https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm](https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm) Linux is not inherently compliant (and Deepin isn't AFAIK), but it is entirely possible to package a distribution which is and submit it for certification. ------ mytailorisrich Huawei seems to have put together a top design team. Both their phones and laptops look gorgeous and the quality is there, too. ~~~ rasz Dont forget their stores, they sure know a thing or two about copying designs 1:1. ~~~ dannyr Interesting that you only mention copying on Huawei's part but not how Apple has copied features on their IPhones from Huawei and other Asian phone makers. ~~~ mytailorisrich It does look like the latest iPhone is playing catch-up with its 3 cameras. Personally I prefer the design of the Huawei P30 Pro, though, so I'd say that Huawei has out-cooled Apple. ~~~ tannhaeuser Well the latest iPhone has caught up to Philips shavers visually IMO. I'm not kidding, the distinctive "retro" look of it comes from associating that kind of design with the 1960s. ~~~ aries1980 Don't forget the Rowenta Surfline iMac. ------ Smithalicious >As for Deepin, its Chinese origins tend to ignite controversy (and anxiety within privacy purists) in the Linux world, however the distribution is open source and the code is available on GitHub. Isn't this just plain racist? Is there any actual reason to believe that there's any privacy issues with Deepin, other that that it was made by Chinese people? Not to mention that I've never heard this particular FUD before, so I'm doubtful that it "tends to ignite" anything. ~~~ sgt I think it has to do with that China has a terrible human right's reputation (yet we all use Chinese products, so there's that), but mainly that Huawei is pretty much obliged by law to build backdoors and share any kind of information with the Chinese government if they are asked to do so. ~~~ aibrahem So does the US, I've yet to hear a valid argument on why the US is a better citizen on the global stage than China. Domistically a very weak argument could be made that the US doesn't violate the rights of their own citizens as bad as China, but between FISA courts, the NSA and programs like PRISM (which is more than a decade old now), this argument barely makes sense. ~~~ klingonopera Well, for one, whoever's running the US gets changed after two terms, sometimes it's a pity, sometimes it couldn't happen fast enough. But in my opinion, it's definitely better than having the same person running things for who-knows how long, regardless of the integrity of that person. ~~~ KaoruAoiShiho A couple dozen people change at the top but literally everyone else stays on, including all the criminals in military and intelligence. It's an absolute joke. ------ Tinfoilhat666 Linux is the best thing that has happened for China and Russia. It helps them escape the Microsoft/Apple/Google control. Even North Korea has its own linux distro to avoid US software. Desktop linux will be a reality. ~~~ AnIdiotOnTheNet > Desktop linux will be a reality. This is the 'Fusion power is just around the corner' of the computing world. There's only one way Desktop Linux succeeds, and that's that all the other Desktop OSs are abandoned or drive themselves into the dirt the way Win10 seems intent on doing. ~~~ diffeomorphism Windows has WSL (2 by now). ChromeOS supports desktop linux apps. Samsung has linux on DeX. I wouldn't be surprised if in the not too far future also macOS or iOS ship with some version of homebrew or macports included out of the box. ~~~ AnIdiotOnTheNet What's your point? Running Linux optionally in a VM isn't what people mean when they talk about Desktop Linux. Neither is homebrew (which is Linux how, exactly?). ChromeOS is on Chromebooks, which are explicitly not desktops because their whole design is as a web kiosk. ~~~ diffeomorphism My point is running desktop linux apps. My point is that it is NOT "optionally" but officially and encouraged. Also your notion of chromebooks is about a decade out of date. ~~~ AnIdiotOnTheNet Oh I see, we've shifted the goalposts from Linux on the Desktop to Linux Apps on a proprietary OS on the Desktop. ------ papermachete In other news, you can install the Deepin desktop environment on any distro and avoid unwanted packages/repos/configurations. ------ simula67 Does it have replaceable parts? I am willing to pay good money for a computer just like Mac, but which can be upgraded piece by piece. ~~~ ijiiijji1 Lenovo T480. Accept no substitutes. ------ tannhaeuser "Deepin Linux"? Is it known by anyone? Sounds scary enough. ~~~ captn3m0 [https://distrowatch.com/table- mobile.php?distribution=deepin](https://distrowatch.com/table- mobile.php?distribution=deepin) The main devs are Chinese and iirc, ZTE is funding their effort. Based on Debian with a beautiful new DE based on Qt. ~~~ bostik Well that's certainly interesting... I used to work for the guy who pushed the original Qt acquisition at Nokia. He later on, after the Elopcalypse, moved to Huawei to head one of their R&D units. Wouldn't be at all surprised if he and his teams had his palm prints all over this one. Custom media players certainly play to his history and strengths. (Shot in the dark: I will guess that the media player is built on GStreamer for the codec support and exposed through QtMultimedia elements.) ~~~ captn3m0 Looks like Qt + mpv: [https://github.com/linuxdeepin/deepin-movie- reborn](https://github.com/linuxdeepin/deepin-movie-reborn) ~~~ bostik Oh. My guess was wrong on almost all accounts. ------ l1n Title should probably be `Huawei has started selling laptops with the Deepin Linux OS pre-installed` (no stray `a`) ------ bjoli 3:2 aspect ratio on the matebook x! I have said for quite some time that I would wait with buying a laptop until someone else than MS had that aspect ratio. I guess this means I will be getting a new laptop. ------ warabe Why don’t they pre install Ubuntu? It’s so simple, isn’t it? ~~~ diffeomorphism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Kylin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Kylin) It is. ------ type0 The beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I don't consider Deepin desktop env more beautiful than Plasma, Budgie, Cinnamon or Gnome. This title is very clickbaity, so many distros are have this strage names Clear Linux, Scientific Linux, Beautiful Linux, Stupidly Easy Linux etc. You'd never know how "deep in" the article you will find relevant information. ------ klingonopera Why not just use a stock Linux distro, and maybe just change the wallpaper to something Huawei-specific? Add a desktop shortcut to some special Huawei- specific app store, if they want, but keeping the OS stock pretty much signals that they really couldn't care less about putting in bloatware, backdoors, malware or similar, which would be a very welcome change in the OEM equipment world. I'd suggest Ubuntu, because of it's popularity and non-tech-user-friendliness, then again I'm not sure if they're allowed to do that, since Canonical Ltd. and Trump, thus, depsite open-source, possibly also requires special licenses, IDK (e.g. I once wanted to install OpenSUSE and then there was something in the licensing agreement about EAR directives from the US, so I cancelled that). I've never heard of Deepin Linux, is it popular in mainland China? Apart from that, there've always been a steady stream of Laptops available with Linux, it's not a novelty item... many of those that are advertised as "non-OS" often have some form of Linux bundled in, just in case. ~~~ pmlnr [https://www.distrowatch.com/](https://www.distrowatch.com/) -> Deepin is the 10th most common distro. ~~~ klingonopera It ranked 2013: 55th, 2014: 24th, 2015: 18th, 2016: 11th, 2017: 11th, 2018: 21st and presently, in 2019, is at 10th spot. That's quite a shot to stardom, and yet, judging from the replies, I don't seem to be the only one who's never heard of it. Still, I'd be interested to know, how Deepin is doing in China, is it comparable to Ubuntu in the Western world? ~~~ diffeomorphism Stardom among the small number of people visiting a random website. > They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com > was accessed each day, nothing more. [https://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity](https://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity) ------ drcongo This is an advert, not news. ------ RocketSyntax they are $50!!! ------ pfalafel I want to see how this Hong Kong story develops before I buy new China goods. ~~~ mikojan So how is the invasion of Iraq affecting your buying decision process with regards to american goods?

Happy Birthday Docker - julien421 http://blog.docker.io/2014/03/happy-birthday-docker/ ====== dchuk I realize this is hard to ask for at this stage because Docker is still rapidly evolving, but all I want is a thorough book/tutorial/guide/screencast that walks me through the process of barely understanding Docker to using it for my web apps. I know that I will want to use this in the future, I just can't be bothered to learn yet-another-thing given how fast everything changes nowadays. Is anyone writing a book on Docker? Tutsplus.com screencast series? Udemy course? ~~~ shykes Yeah, a full end-to-end explanation of how Docker can help you is one of the things we need to get better at. A full revamp of the documentation is underway :) There's a book being written at [http://dockerbook.com/](http://dockerbook.com/) There's also a really nice online tutorial at [https://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/](https://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/) ~~~ dchuk Thanks for the links! ------ shykes That video of the project's activity over time is pretty awesome and almost brought a tear to my eye :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCiS812oRU8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCiS812oRU8) (link didn't work for me on iOS) ~~~ gabemart It's a really impressive visualization. Does anyone know how it was made? ~~~ julien421 We used Gource: [https://code.google.com/p/gource/](https://code.google.com/p/gource/) ~~~ nodesocket On OS X you can install with: brew install gource ------ aus_ I work for a large financial company. At our shop, we are currently building out an internal cloud infrastructure where we build on too of the OpenStack API to provide users with self service deployment much like AWS. In order to deploy to production, we mandate a process requiring users to have an existing chef recipe before any production guest can be deployed. We also restrict logins to existing production nodes unless there is an emergency. (This attempts to keep configuration management entropy to a minimum.) all of this works ok, but I think it could be better with Docker. In a few weeks, I have a chance to present a new idea to senior executives. I'd like to pitch Docker, at least as something to keep an eye on. Any thoughts on what points I should drive home? ~~~ jschorr Offhand, the major benefits for your use case seem to be: \- Speed and Flexibility: Extremely quick turn around time from development to production; Docker images usually start in under 10s and multiple images can be run concurrently. If a user needs to update their running service(s), they can even have multiple versions running at the same time behind something like HAProxy (which itself could be in another Docker container), allowing real- time migration. \- If your users build their images and test them on their own machines, they can then deploy the same images to your production machines with the knowledge that (barring unusual circumstances) they will have the same exact image and dependencies running there. This means no need to write a recipe, _less_ worries about security, and more freedom for your users to use whatever libs they deem necessary (assuming such freedom is allowed). \- If running images directly is not doable for security reasons, your users could use Dockerfiles [1] which still allow you the benefits of Docker but with the ability to review all commands used to create the image. They can even be built in real-time off of GitHub pushes [2] (disclosure: I'm a co- founder at Quay.io) [1] [http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/reference/builder/](http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/reference/builder/) [2] [http://blog.devtable.com/2014/03/link-your-quayio- repositori...](http://blog.devtable.com/2014/03/link-your-quayio-repositories- to-github.html) ------ shykes It's worth noting that as of yesterday the Docker index ([https://index.docker.io](https://index.docker.io)) now offers github-style paid features. You can host private docker images, tie them to your source repo so that they are automatically rebuilt from source, trigger web hooks on new versions, etc. [http://blog.docker.io/2014/03/introducing-private-repos- webh...](http://blog.docker.io/2014/03/introducing-private-repos-webhooks-and- more/) ------ nickstinemates Having been @ Docker for about 9 months, all I can say is I am blown away by the incredible involvement from the community and the vibrant ecosystem that has been created as a result. While it has been an amazing year, I am even more excited every day about future prospects and momentum we're collectively building in the industry. This is only the beginning. ------ thu Memories ! I thought I have started to look into Docker in April last year. To make sure I didn't make up things, I looked into my git logs. The first reference to Docker in the commit message is: Author: Vo Minh Thu <noteed@gmail.com> Date: Sun May 5 23:21:51 2013 +0300 Run ssp-build inside docker ssp is the name I used for Assertive, which was supposed to be a hosted Continuous Integration service for the OpenERP community. ssp-build is spawned inside Docker by a worker process. I put it on hold since around May although I put it online a few days ago (Here is an example of what it does: [http://assertive.io/build/1](http://assertive.io/build/1)). Actually I have a first mention of Docker in my TODO.md file dating back to March 29 ! Assertive will be generalized and will be coupled to [https://reesd.com](https://reesd.com) (that's the reason I went to put it online a few days ago). Docker was my first practical exposure to Linux containers. Thanks a lot for making it a great open source project ! ------ gabrtv The project is moving so fast it warps time. Hard to believe it's only been a year. Big congrats to the team. ------ alecsmart1 I've been reading about Docker for a while. But am unable to wrap my head around it. I've gone through the samples and I only see it good for creating SaaS apps. Can someone please correct? What am I missing? What is the brouhaha all about? ~~~ j_s Simplistically: if you deploy to Linux, Docker provides 90%+ of the benefits of virtualization without the performance penalty. ~~~ brokenparser And without the security benefits of proper virtualisation, too. At least lxc since recently has the ability to run containers as a regular user, but I'll stick to KVM guests secured with MLS policies for now. ~~~ nickstinemates Why not combine the two and get the value of both? And, a reminder, you can still use LXC with Docker. It's fully supported. ~~~ brokenparser Because the guests have their own SELinux policies. Docker containers don't come with policies, but if it would support running containers under a user account I could at least restrict each to their own category so that theoretically a chmod -R 777 / (inside a container) and access to the host wouldn't compromise other containers (unless the kernel is exploitable, in which case KVM would still win). ~~~ nickstinemates Maybe we're talking past each other here, but, Dan Walsh, author of SELinux, is working to bring SELinux natively to libcontainer / docker. I'd love to talk more about your needs and how we can help. My email is always open - nick@docker.com ------ CSDude I have been using Docker to grade HW submission since October, in a more disposable and safer way, and I am building an automated system around it, kudos to Docker and the team ~~~ nickstinemates That is amazing. Can we talk more about it? We also have a ton of people for you to talk to / benefit from if you're interested in that. nick@docker.com ~~~ Hortinstein please make this public if it happens! ~~~ CSDude I will, contact me if interested mustafa91 at gmail

I cant promise time but why people look so mad at me? - itsmejax People always ask when you finish that thing. How can I answer when I do not know the time frame?<p>I cant promise anything. ====== icedchai Take your “honest” estimate, double it, and round up to the next highest value (day, week, month...) ------ LeoSolaris "This is a difficult problem with multiple unknowns. I will have a progress report for you tomorrow." Make sure that you are reaching out to the rest of your team. ------ sharemywin Will it probably take about year? Will it probably take about month? Will it probably take about week? Will it probably be done in a day? Most of the time their looking for a ballpark.

Compo4All: Making Arcade Games Social Again - ekianjo http://www.pandoralive.info/?p=185 ====== ParadisoShlee This simple little idea has been keeping my OpenPandora in my hands a lot recently. Passive social gaming has always been one of the more interesting and non-explored parts of multiplayer. I remember playing a TRIALS HD on my 360 and my friends are shown as a passive dot. I kept wanting to chase that dot and beat the high score of somebody who wasn't even playing. ~~~ ParadisoShlee P.S. To everybody who saw the words "Open Pandora" and laughed... the project was taken over over a year ago and is actually running pretty smoothly. I really like my 1Ghz (2012) model Pandora :) ------ yamara I love this as an idea to bring older games into new light, and tying it into MAME is a fantastic idea to get a broad spread of both games and users. Plus, a large amount of coins popped into arcades was to beat that elusive high score, and this just makes that more relevant. For extremely popular games, I could see adding rankings based on region or perhaps other breakdowns, if you kept a user profile. ------ ekianjo Author here. This piece of software only runs on the Open Pandora Linux Handheld for now, but the developer says it's very portable and it is likely to spread to other platforms in the very near future. ~~~ skeezix It is very trivial to port, as theres not all that much to it right now .. just some code to do HTTP PUT and GET to transfer RAM snapshot blobs back and forth with the server. Opening it up (if desired) to indie and homebrew games, other emus, other target platforms and host platforms, adding new features.. lots we can do, and hopefully part of the game, but a lot to do before we get there :) Or perhaps theres already an open source or standardized protocol for doing achivements and high scoring and so forth; an open source 'game centre' etc would be nice.. ~~~ yareally I'd incorporate it into a mobile game for phones or tablets if it's less annoying to users than alternative. The alternative solutions I've seen for android at least want too much info or annoy users by persisting to ask them if they want to use it (albeit that could also be due to the developer). An open solution with a non invasive license would be great for us indie developers ------ kingu Compo4All: Making Arcade Games antiSocial Again ;)

San Francisco to finally get broadband competition - jasonwong http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/20/BA2T1KCHSC.DTL&feed=rss.news ====== jasonwong It looks like the BoS _finally_ approved AT&T to compete with Comcast on the low end. SF has areas unreachable by cable (such as major swaths of downtown), and my old office only alternative was 3MBps DSL, due to distance from the CO. The roll out will take years, but at least we'll start seeing the prices come down a bit - with higher speeds! Evil competition is better than no competition.

Rate my mini-app: Tweetbow - helium http://tweetbow.appspot.com/ ====== helium Yes, I know this is Yet Another Twitter App but I was just having some fun using the Twitter API with javascript and trying out Google App engine. However, I also do think it could be useful in discovering people you want to follow on Twitter. Any comments and suggestions would be appreciated. ------ dxjones You have a small bug in your HTML: "<<title>" (double <<, oops) It an interesting exercise, to see it implemented using only Javascript. The main thing about Twitter is the actual _tweets_ , not just the faces of the people twittering. You should at least display some tweets. ~~~ helium Oops...it's fixed now. Thanks! Well you know, I envisioned some people using Twitter more as a dating site might find this useful. Also scanning text takes much longer than images.

Gauge blocks (a.k.a. gage blocks; Johansson gauges; slip gauges; Jo blocks) - bookofjoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block ====== bookofjoe Wringing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block#Wringing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block#Wringing)

Huge Backlog of Ships Waiting to Pass Through the Panama Canal - protomyth https://gcaptain.com/there-is-a-huge-backlog-of-ships-waiting-to-pass-through-the-panama-canal/ ====== jtchang The panama canal is not only an engineering marvel but a financial one as well. It can cost up to a quarter million for passage if you are a large container ship (such as a panamax class ship). One thing that I was surprised was that the lateral drift was not computer controlled. Scary that even a small miscalculation can rip a hole in the ship's hull. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4F867o_U1w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4F867o_U1w) ~~~ RyJones Thanks for that. Funny they say the Kentucky Highway makes it to the Atlantic "without a scratch" after it was bounced off the wall of the locks; you can clearly see the huge smear/scratch on the paint in shots after the collision. ------ paulsutter That's not a lot of ships. More ships are always waiting near Singapore (zoom in): [http://s3.amazonaws.com/mongabay/indonesia- java/600/java_000...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/mongabay/indonesia- java/600/java_0001.jpg) Does anyone know why there are so many ships waiting at Singapore? Are they merely idle? Waiting for port access? (if you're not familiar, look where Singapore sits on a map. Every ship between east asia and europe/middle east passes by). ~~~ simonbyrne Could still be surplus capacity from the post-GFC slump. From 2009: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/business/global/13ship.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/business/global/13ship.html) > Vessels have flocked to Singapore because it has few storms, excellent ship > repair teams, cheap fuel from its own refinery and, most important, > proximity to Asian ports that might eventually have cargo to ship. ------ grecy If you ever get the change, I highly recommend a visit to the canal. The scale is hard to comprehend. Watching container ships pass through is super satisfying from an engineering perspective. My visit: [http://theroadchoseme.com/the-panama- canal](http://theroadchoseme.com/the-panama-canal) ------ kylelibra If you are wondering why: "A statement provided to us Friday from the Panama Canal Authority said that a high level of arrivals during the last in September coincided with schedule dry-chamber maintenance." ~~~ throwaway_exer Scheduled with who? Obviously not their clients, the shipping companies. Kind of like ebay not considering their 2-hour Sunday "planned maintenance events" to be outages ... for 2 decades. ~~~ helper What are the shipping companies going to do, use the Nicaragua Canal? ~~~ im3w1l Dock ships on both sides of land. Truck goods from one ship to the other. Or maybe that would also be too expensive? ~~~ zrail There's a railroad. It can carry about 1,500 containers a day[1]. There are approximately 175,000 containers waiting to transit the canal, based on the 33,500 figure in the linked Wiki page and the 5 day wait. [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_Railway#2001_reco...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_Railway#2001_reconstruction) ~~~ WildUtah Technically Panama's is the first transcontinental railroad, beating the Union Pacific by fourteen years. Panama's was running in 1855 while the line over the Sierra Nevada opened in 1869. ------ toomim It's likely that this is due to corruption in Panama with pressure from Nicaragua and Hong Kong. The official reasons given don't make sense: > Marine Traffic Control said the backlog is primarily due to weather > conditions, including several days of fog at the canal. But we spoke with a > canal insider, who said that in his decades of experience he has only seen > it like this when there is some other issue going on – not one that’s > weather related. Thus, something is happening behind the scenes that they don't want to talk about. Maybe there is political pressure from Nicaragua/Hong Kong proponents of the Nicaraguan canal. The biggest reason cited by the WSJ not to build the canal is lack of demand: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-wants-to-dig-the- nicaragua...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-wants-to-dig-the-nicaragua- canal-1439159390) It's quite possible that Nicaragua/Hong Kong are putting pressure on Panama to increase the wait times. Perhaps they scheduled the "Dry chamber maintenance" during a high-shipping seasons on purpose: > A statement provided to us Friday from the Panama Canal Authority said that > a high level of arrivals during the last in September coincided with > schedule dry-chamber maintenance. ~~~ rory096 Why would Panama willingly do anything to encourage the Nicaragua Canal? It poses a huge competitive threat (if it were likely to be built). ~~~ Evolved Unless they were colluding to increase wait times to get the Nicaragua Canal built and then share the profits (unlikely). More likely is Panama isn't doing this to encourage building the Nicaragua Canal but instead is just doing this to increase premium slot prices. Could Magic Mountain and Knott's Berry Farm run more roller coaster trains and decrease wait times? Sure, but then there wouldn't be as much incentive for people to buy flash/front-of-the-line passes. I'd be willing to bet the waits are at least partially artificially created to support the flash passes as yet another source of revenue. ~~~ ghshephard Speaking from experience, The waits at magic mountain in the 80s ran upwards of an hour+, and that was prior to flash/front-of-line passes, so I don't think there is a correlation. ~~~ Evolved An hour wait at Magic Mountain nowadays seems to be the norm moreso than the exception. Have you been there in the summer when X2 has had waits in the 2-3 hour range WITHOUT a Flash Pass? This still occurs and the ride is over 12 years old now. I'd argue it is somewhat due to incomes rising enough to allow more people to attend MM. MM has responded by offering Flash Passes but what I've yet to see is even on the busiest day, running multiple cars at a quick enough clip to minimize wait times. With this kind of demand, they really don't have to minimize wait times since as much as people complain about the times, they still go. Furthermore, the Flash Pass isn't so much a front-of-the-line pass as it is a bypass-most-of-the-line pass. It still deposits you in the loading/unloading area so you could still hypothetically have a 15-20 minute wait depending on how many riders are already in the loading/unloading area. Edit: Goliath (built in 2000) still routinely has 1-2 hour waits and might even rival Tatsu for most Flash Passed coaster given that X2 was, up until recently, not even able to be added to the standard Flash Pass unless you upgraded to the Gold or Platinum Flash Passes. Tell me that doesn't smell like an incentive to increase waits to drive sales of Flash Passes in lieu of outright raising prices to control demand. ------ techdragon I still don't understand why anyone building a new canal through Central America would not be trying to maximise the effectiveness of their work by building a sea level canal wide either enough for continuous crossing in both directions or dig two canals and make each one continuous flow in a single direction. Yes it's a bigger challenge, but these projects are some of the few remaining opportunities in modern economics to say "we expect payback time of two decades" and not get laughed at. No locks no lock maintenance, continuous flow, more ship, more money. It's also possible to use novel techniques from the last hundred years of progress to "dredge forward" using water itself as an an active tool to wash away all but any hard rock terrain that needs clearing. The rain and loose soils that hurt the first attempt at the Panama Canal could be turned into a positive factor with today's technology. ~~~ fraserharris a) You can not escape the need for locks because there is a 8" height difference of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean. Additionally you have tidal variation. b) The Panama Canal locks are already in pairs to allow simultaneous bi- directional traffic. They are currently building a third set of larger locks that will increase maximum dimensions of vessels transiting the Panama Canal. ~~~ Asbostos Just because there's a height difference with locks, doesn't mean some kind of singularity would develop without them. Either the height difference would disappear, or continuous currents through the canal would maintain it. In the Panama canal, they benefit from keeping the inland lakes above sea level so that they're deep enough. If they were connected to the sea, they'd lower significantly and even more excavation would be needed to make a path for ships. There would also be fascinating effects of strong currents through it, sea level changes, fresh water lakes becoming salt water (sorry local people!), and fish migrating. ~~~ ChristinaM The average difference is 8" but with tides it can be up to 12' and it changes constantly. It'd be really tough for the ships to handle in the confined space especially when eddies form along the edges and with currents changing over a period of hours. A lot of these ships only travel at 10-15 knots and they aren't very maneuverable. I was recently on a sailboat going through Hell Gate on the East River in NYC. It has about a 6' tidal range. We can motor at 6 knots. When the tide was at peak flood into Long Island Sound we were doing about 1/2 knot over the ground. You can time an East River transit to work around the tides, the Panama Canal is too long for that to work. (I don't recommend transiting Hell Gate under those conditions, the UN closed the river longer than they said they would and we only managed because there wasn't any wind. We should have anchored and waited a few hours, we would have gotten through almost as quickly.) ------ OscarCunningham It never ceases to amuse me that the Panama canal runs from the Atlantic in the west to the Pacific in the east. ~~~ owenversteeg For the curious - Panama connects North and South America horizontally, thus the Atlantic is to the north of the country and the Pacific is to the south. The canal cuts southeast across the country. ------ jrapdx3 Doubtful that operators of the Panama Canal would be holding up traffic because of the proposed Nicaragua canal. After all construction on that project hasn't even started yet. Furthermore, the new, bigger Panama 3rd set of locks are now being tested, due to open next year. Doesn't make sense for Panama to slow things down in view of the loss of income, the fees collected are serious money, probably the major income source for the country. Next year would be a very interesting time to visit the canal re: opening of the new channel. A few years back I was on a cruise that traversed the canal, a highly educational and memorable trip worth doing. The Panamanians we encountered were proud of the Canal expansion project, a significant national achievement, something important to celebrate.

After A Hot Start, Justin.tv Spins Off Socialcam, Its ‘Instagram for Video’ - Mazy http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/29/after-a-hot-start-justin-tv-spins-off-socialcam-its-instagram-for-video/ ====== andrewcross How would this work for the investors of Justin.tv? I know that Justin.tv has a stake in Socialcam, but to go from owning 100% of the value to something less seems like a lousy deal for the investors. I suppose you could make the argument that this will enable Socialcam to grow more quickly and thus drive higher value for everyone, but it seems like quite a high risk. ~~~ byrneseyeview Justin.tv owns some of it. What they're probably doing is having Socialcam issue some stock to investors, and to grant lots options to the founding team. Imagine that SocialCam has 100 shares now. They might have the company sell 50 shares to outside investors for funding (so Justin.tv owns ~67%, _but_ that is 67% post-money, and the total value of the stake will be the same). Then the company could allocate 50 shares to an option pool for their founders. That dilutes Justin.tv's stake down to 50%. Nobody has to give anything up--the investors are putting in money, and the options are a form of employee compensation. ~~~ callmeed I don't quite follow. The investors _in Justin.tv_ now own a smaller share (or none) of SocialCam, right? How is this allowed (without approval)? And who would approve it if growth is good? ~~~ drusenko That's certainly one way to paint the picture. Most of investing, though, is trying to grow the pie, not necessarily focusing on your specific piece. I've been on the founder side (trying to convince investors to spin off a new company) and the pitch goes like this: Before, you had an ownership stake in 1 company with two products. After, you have an ownership stake in 2 companies. Both of these companies are out to grow, raise money and exit in their own right, and have teams solely devoted to hitting a home run. From that perspective, you could argue that you now own more than you did before, essentially by growing the pie. ------ tmcneal Justin.tv's strategy of using their video-hosting infrastructure to aggressively pursue verticals within the video watching/sharing/hosting space is working out really well. They seem to have a knack for identifying how people use video and streaming on the web, and are creating products that serve the specific needs of each group. ------ johnrob Justin.tv seems like it's doing really well (at least from the outside), which makes it difficult to understand why they keep launching new products. ~~~ JonLim Why not? They're continuing to create really great products that scratch their own itches and are allowing the company to grow. Seems like they have the resources for it and the drive and ambition. ------ terhechte Interesting. I suspect that Instagram are also contemplating adding video sooner or later, given that in their API images are to be found in the "media" branch, and for each entry there the data-type is labelled as "image".

Automatic face-blurring in images made easy - nadavs http://cloudinary.com/blog/automatic_face_blurring_in_images_made_easy ====== nadavs This blog post explains how to keep people privacy in photos by automatically blurring their faces. A pixelization effect is applied on images. Together with automatic face detection, only faces in a picture are blurred as intensely as you need. Image transformations are transformed on-the-fly in the cloud. Code samples in Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP and Node.js are included.

Do Grades Matter? A Discussion About Thinking Bigger While at CMU (2016) [pdf] - senatorobama https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kayvonf/misc/do_grades_matter.pdf ====== CryoLogic Some of the smartest, most successful and most driven people I know are highschool dropouts. It's a shame we put such an emphasis on grades, which really just reflect someone's ability to spit out things that have already been figured out - not any proof of ingenuity, curiosity, or the ability to learn on the fly. (before the replies - yes I know a lot of dropouts without any ambition or discipline as well - but living in a highly educated community it's easy to note many of the "educated" people really lack ambition and ingenuity whatsoever.) On an anecdotal note, I dropped out of high-school got a job in tech and went back to college - I went to a top 10 university (graduated) and didn't learn much I couldn't have taught myself. It did help me get more interviews though. ~~~ dahart > before the replies - yes I know a lot of dropouts without any ambition or > discipline as well - but living in a highly educated community it's easy to > note many of the "educated" people really lack ambition and ingenuity > whatsoever. I don't think the argument normally has anything to do with how much ambition & ingenuity college educated people have. Looking at college educated people with low ambition isn't a great reason to drop out of school. The issue is that, statistically, college degrees are strongly correlated with better outcomes. There's a variety of reasons, and of course it does not mean that every dropout will do worse. Most people who drop out don't drop for a positive, because they're doing something better. They drop out for a negative, because they don't like school or authority or it's too hard or they're uninterested or drugs or poverty, etc.. If you're giving advice to someone who doesn't know what to do, going to college and doing well there is hands down the better recommendation on average for most people. If they're driven and strong enough to drop out because they're learning faster on their own, or have something more important to do, or see the potential to make more money now, then they're probably going to ignore advice anyway. The strong driven successful people who don't need a college degree also don't need the advice or any emphasis on grades, because they know what they want, and they've found their own metrics. Everyone else, most people, will probably benefit by staying in school longer. [http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/02/11/the-rising-cost- of...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/02/11/the-rising-cost-of-not-going- to-college/) ------ sotojuan This slideshow points at some key problems high achieving people face post- high school - how to stand out when everyone's as smart/hard working as you when all you know is getting good grades? I knew a lot of people who double majored (even attempted to triple major...) and filled up their schedule so much that (apologies if this sounds a bit rude) they had an "empty" life outside of classes. This actually hurt people in the CS job search (not a problem for CMU grads though). The ones found a job easily are doing the same things as me, a lifelong B+/A- student. Of course, this is anecdotal and all, and who knows where we'll be in ten years, but I always wondered if all the stress and lack of free time during ages 18-22 was worth it. I know a lot of careers demand a ton of your time in undergrad for grades, extracurriculars, preparing for grad school, etc. I'm glad programming interviews focused more on practical skills and problem solving skills - my undergrad was a lot less stressful and more fun that way and I was able to explore and mess around with technology and life in general. ------ z1mm32m4n > _You have to struggle /agonize over it. You have to immerse yourself in it. > You have to think about it all the time._ We see these ideas echoed over and over by intensely successful people. For example, it's the same one Richard Hamming claims in his famous talk, "You and Your Research"[1]. Kayvon's talk focuses heavily on the side of academia, but the claim holds equally well in two other areas: 1\. Community involvement. As an undergrad, over-commitment to classes leaves little time to give back to the "community," for definitions of community like classmates, under- represented groups, the wider campus, etc. For example, you can't be a great undergrad TA if you don't put close to or more work into the class than your students do. This means TA'ing should factor into your schedule like taking another class. If you're already overloaded on classes and TA'ing a class, how can you hope to contribute something valuable to your students? 2\. Self-driven deeper understanding. In all these discussions, we're starting from the assumption that the student is driven; otherwise, they wouldn't be motivated to take tons of classes in the first place. By taking fewer classes, there's more available time for the _motivated_ student to read an interesting paper related to the lecture that week--and read it _thoroughly_. There's more time to think critically about interesting, new problems, and even to discover one's own passions or calling. As one last note; if you're a student ever in the position to take a class from Kayvon, I'd very strongly recommend it. [1]: [http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html) ~~~ oddity Kayvon was my undergraduate thesis advisor as well as an instructor for a class I took while there, and it's hard to exaggerate how fantastic he was. I second your recommendation. ~~~ aerioux hehe hi :^) isn't this the slide show kayvon showed us at the research symposium? ------ Powerofmene IMO high grades are simply an indication of the ability to meet the expectations of either the Professor or the parents if they are paying tuition or even to yourself if that is how you measure success. Grades are not typically an indication of mastery of the subject matter because that comes with application of that which was learned rather than a recitation of that which was taught. Low grades, well they are a horse of a different color altogether. ------ Upvoter33 one problem w/ cmu education: it burns a lot of people out. I've known many a bright folk to go in flying high and come out just wanting to find something more relaxing to do. simply put: it's not for everyone. of course, many other top schools are the same way... ~~~ sotojuan I think the point of the slides (and college in general) is that you don't necessarily have to stress out yourself to be an all As student with a double major to get a good job. Instead, relax a bit more and build software. ~~~ David Really? I didn't see that in the slides. I saw "trade classes or grades for other stuff (but still work to or past your limit)" specifically with the references to not sleeping. As a CMU alum that both hit home and depressed me. I can't, and don't want, to do that kind of shit anymore. Why are we encouraging our undergrads to work to the point of harm in order to excel? Excellence can happen without all nighters, and it's more sustainable that way. In essence, I agree with you but I don't think the slides do. ------ sjg007 The reason to go to university is to work with and learn from the best and smartest people in an area you enjoy. There is a ton of opportunity and you just have to take advantage. It is also a great time to figure out yourself, what you want and only have to answer to yourself. I do think colleges should offer a 101 course where you get to work on establishing healthy habits and provide an understanding of mental health etc...

Glitch employees vote to form union, joining CWA - lflux https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/tech-workers-app-developer-glitch-vote-form-union-and-join-cwa-organizing-initiative ====== Apocryphon My highlights: > 90% of the workers indicated their support for joining CWA and authorized > CWA to be their bargaining representative > about half of whom work in the New York City headquarters and half of whom > work remotely throughout the country > Employees at major American tech and game companies have grown increasingly > active and outspoken about workplace issues, including sexual assault and > harassment, ageism, unequal pay, “crunch time” (i.e. long-term overtime and > overworking), poor treatment of contract workers, inadequate racial and > gender diversity, and lack of transparency and inclusion in decision-making > around controversial contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and > Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). > “We appreciate that unlike so many employers, the Glitch management team > decided to respect the rights of its workforce to choose union > representation without fear or coercion." > CWA was founded by telecom workers, and supports media workers through its > Newsguild-CWA and NABET-CWA sectors. ~~~ m0zg Game studios especially need this. I'm a conservative in most other labor- related things (liberal on social issues), but holy shit the devs are abused by the game studios. ~~~ pkaler Former game developer here. Game studios don't need unions, they need better management. Basically, an 18-year-old QA tester gets promoted to lead QA then associate producer then assistant producer and then producer. The producer manages by industry lore. And industry lore is terrible. Unionization is not going to fix the management training problem. ~~~ einpoklum > Game studios don't need unions, they need better management. If workers unionize [1], they can force bad management out, or curtail its badness, or in extreme cases - replace management with collective ownership. [1] - in an independent, non-corrupt union. ~~~ manfredo Or game developers can just hire non-union employees. The reality is that game development studios can get away with poor work life balance because there's people who are passionate about making games and are willing to accept poor working conditions to get a chance at their dream job. This Stage Actor's Guild exists, but aspiring actors still have to work second jobs to put a roof over their heads. When a job is a lot of people's dream job, conditions are going to be poor because the supply of potential labor is very large as compared to the demand. Also, I have no idea where you get the idea that unions can somehow force collective ownership. The company belongs to the shareholders, unions don't magically get to take other people's property. ~~~ Apocryphon Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they? I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it. Eventually management will run out of non- union workers to hire. Or the non-union workers themselves will demand better treatment. ~~~ manfredo > Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they? Non-voting shares, yes. Voting shares are usually only given to very senior people, if ever, and not nearly enough to form anything close to a controlling ownership of the company. > I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video > gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would > otherwise jump straight into it. Eventually management will run out of non- > union workers to hire. Or the non-union workers themselves will demand > better treatment. Decades of game development suggests otherwise. Like acting, it's people's dream job. And when the supply of labor exceeds the demand workers do not have leverage. ~~~ Apocryphon For decades there was no interest nor action towards unionizing in game development. Greater scrutiny into the industry from modern game journalism, and perhaps worsening experiences as the industry heads towards Hollywood-like AAA titles produced by monolithic studios, is surely causing _something_ to change. ~~~ manfredo Game developers' experiencing the misery of crunch time and layoffs is something I've heard about firsthand since the early 2000s at the latest. Reading accounts from earlier games' development cycles suggests that this has been common for even longer than that. Game development has always had cyclical labor demands and tight deadlines. I think you need to qualify the claim that these experiences are worsening. In fact, from most of the veteran developers I've talked to report the opposite: before the proliferation of the internet crunch time was way more serious since patching was not a viable option. Nowadays it's pretty much the norm that games have significant bugs for the first week or two and still need to mature after release. This creates greater room for error and less pressure to fix every bug before release. ~~~ Apocryphon That's fair, perhaps conditions haven't been substantially worse than in previous console generations. But it sounds like there's something driving the push towards unionizing/organizing, whatever it is. And it sounds like the general public is more aware it being a brutal industry. ~~~ pandaman Despite the popular belief, game developers are pretty well paid. Not every indie or QA contractor, of course, but it's a rich industry with 6 figure salaries and profit sharing/royalty bonuses in successful studios. So, of course, any union would love to represent game developers for a share of their income. Likewise, you don't often hear of, say, restaurant workers needing union representation because they do not make much money and rarely interest unions. This is what's driving calls for unionization IMHO. And I agree with manfredo, I started in the industry in 90s, and crunch was already there. If anything, the situation improved in mid 00s, with CA strengthening exempt employees classification and later 00s with ea_spouse lawsuit. E.g. mandatory crunches are gone, it used to be that people were forced to stay late and come in on weekends even if they had nothing to do but good luck pulling this now. Nowadays people mostly crunch either because their bonus comes out of the game's sales (and/or metacritic score, like in EA) or because they are paid OT. ~~~ einpoklum > So, of course, any union would love to represent game developers for a share > of their income You're talking about the large, collaborationist unions we know in the US - e.g. those in the AFL-CIO - where "the union" is an external entity to "the unionizing workers"; and often with the bureaucratic motivations you describe. I specifically mentioned that's not the kind of unionization I advise. Also, payment is just one of many issues in a workplace. The basic need for a union is that the company's owners have the mechanisms for thinking, discussing, deciding acting collectively and concertedly, but its employees do not. That's what a union should be. On that basis, employees may want to tackle issues like: * Treatment by managers/management * Workplace culture * Physical working conditions * Workforce size vs. "squeezing" of existing employees * Advancement opportunities within the company/organization * Professional standards and so on. Finally, remember that a gaming development house has a lot of employees other than developers per se: QA, art, production, administrative etc. > Nowadays people mostly crunch ... or because they are paid OT. If people make a good salary, they don't work overtime because they don't need to. There must be some kind of psychological pressure in that direction. Overwork should be avoided. \- who have joint interests and may wish to discuss things, take decisions, and act collect ~~~ pandaman I am not discussing whatever reasons you envisioned for unionization of our industry from the outside. I am just noting where the unionization effort is actually coming from. Pardon my cynicism, but I don't believe the big union care about anything other than payment, which drives their fees. Otherwise, as I said, they would had been pushing in retail with, at least, same effort as they do in the games industry. >If people make a good salary, they don't work overtime because they don't need to. Sure, they don't need to but, nevertheless, they like their fat bonuses. ------ lbotos Here is a question: Why don't we have more smaller unions in America, but instead these GIANT mega unions? I get collective bargaining is better with more numbers, but it feels like there is no way to have a "new" union exist? ~~~ baybal2 Bigger union == bigger bargaining power Other countries have much less liquid labour markets, or have bargaining powers of unions backed by governments, so they don't have to grow so much to make a difference. ~~~ dantheman Bigger Union == More Corruption How does this bigger union give them any more bargaining power against glitch? ------ gadders Interesting development. Glitch used to be Fog Creek, where Joel Spolsky talked of treating developers well (latest hardware, private offices etc) and paying them well. I wonder if the culture has changed and that's why the developers felt the need to create a union. [[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide- to-d...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide-to- developers-2/)] ~~~ hinkley Joel talking about the great care they took to build their offices (in a way that I felt was a huge mistake) was sort of the beginning of me realizing that he doesn't get everything right. There's also an uncanny valley effect, where ignoring a problem entirely means that your employees may have needs they aren't aware of, and as soon as you shine a light on it, their job satisfaction is actually lower until you get it right. I think a couple of my bosses understood this intuitively and would invite us to participate in developing solutions. We are much more patient with ourselves than with others. ~~~ Apocryphon What's wrong with how they built their offices, in your opinion? ~~~ hinkley There's a lot of crappy office politics that circles around access to daylight. You invariably have a mismatch between Valuable Employees and Valuable deskspace, jockying for position becomes a distraction and having multiple grades of desk just kind of beats the newer employees about the head and shoulders with how little they matter. It is, in a word, fractious. The best solution I've seen for this is to keep most of the windows in public spaces. If I go for water or to the bathroom, I should get daylight. Impromptu meeting spaces and lunch spots: daylight. The thing is, developers say they want daylight at their desk, and then they realize that they can't actually work in natural light (this has gotten better in just the last few years, but I've been watching this happen for 20), and so the people who 'own' the windows end up closing the blinds to work in peace. The worse this ever got, we had the top floor of a building and so many blinds were closed all day that we might as well have rented space in the basement for half the price/ft² So now if I am to get any daylight it is at the sole discretion of someone already on an ego trip? No thank you. Move the desks so that people can _see_ daylight but aren't _in_ daylight. All the windows stay open, your AC bills are a little lower, and the steepness of the pecking order is not quite so brazen. ~~~ hinkley I'm still trying to locate the iteration that bugged me, but from what I can see of their new-new-new offices, they seem to be more in keeping with the style I talk about above: [https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open- offices-...](https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open-offices-the- new-fog-creek-headquarters-bc2f70d7c7dc) ... except that there is so little workspace that I had to stare at the picture for about fifteen seconds to figure out if they did, in fact, have any employees at all. ------ ridv I hope the CWA treats them better than they treat the SUNY grad students they represent. All State University of New York graduate students are also represented by CWA. [1] Out of the lowly salary I earned as a grad student, I had to pay dues to them throughout the entire five years I spent in grad school. I never felt like they particularly cared about us or got to see a return on this investment. They made a show of coming by the campus once in a while, especially when elections were happening, but other than that I can't recall a single time where I felt it was beneficial to be part of the CWA. [1] [https://cwa1104.com/apprenticeship- program](https://cwa1104.com/apprenticeship-program) ~~~ nwmcsween This is the thing with unions they don't care about one persons issues at a workplace but general issues like pay when compared to other companies in the same field. If the company previously had toxic people in high places the people will just adjust to follow union rules while still being toxic. ------ baybal2 I've been hearing for a long time that there were attempts at making a union at Microsoft back in nineties. Anybody privy to the info how it fared? ------ whoisjuan Ignorant question. But how do union dues work? Is it a percentage of your paycheck or a fixes cost? Also I assume there’s a formation/founding cost. How does that work? ~~~ kyoob It's usually a percentage of workers' paychecks, between 1-2% is pretty standard. Founding, organizing, and legal stuff for newly forming unions can be handled by the larger organization (e.g. CWA) using pooled dues from existing unions within that organization. ~~~ sevenf0ur Losing that much per paycheck with nothing guaranteed in return would chaff me after awhile. I hope it works out for them. ~~~ johnpowell I was a union HVAC guy for a few years. And one very nice thing was that there were union shops and they went through the union to find employees. So if work dried up at one place the union would take care of getting my unemployment going and then when work came up they would call and say that I was needed elsewhere. This probably wouldn't translate well to software. But it works great if you are installing ducts. Same goes for plumbers and electricians. My sisters first husband was a union electrician. That is why I looked into getting a union gig. I hate job hunting. In the years I did it I worked for five different companies. I didn't have to run around dropping off resumes and doing practice tests. I just got a call from the union and was told where to go to work. And I made significantly more than my non-union counterparts. Easily more than the dues I had to pay. ~~~ fiter Is this one of the angles that unions use to sell themselves to companies? They can help by providing a well of valuable resources to draw on in an as- needed basis. When both hiring and firing would be an easier proposition, I could see more activity occurring as a result. These people would have experience at different companies and could provide their knowledge like many say is the benefit of people rotating jobs a lot in the SF Bay Area. ~~~ dragonwriter > Is this one of the angles that unions use to sell themselves to companies? Unions don't sell themselves to companies in the first place. ~~~ fiter Why not? I would presume that would help with regard to union busting, scabs, outsourcing, etc. ~~~ dragonwriter > Why not? The same reason your criminal defense attorney doesn't sell themselves to the public prosecutor's office. ~~~ fiter Are you implying that public prosecutors have the option to not interact with criminal defense attorneys, because companies certainly have the option to hire employees that do not work for unions. ~~~ dragonwriter > Are you implying that public prosecutors have the option to not interact > with criminal defense attorneys, No, I'm implying that working for an actor’s counterparty compromises your ability to represent that actor in adversarial interactions with the same counterparty, which is a core function of unions with respect to employers as it is with defense attorneys with respect to prosecutors. > companies certainly have the option to hire employees that do not work for > unions. Not in the US; even where union shops are prohibited by state right-to-work laws, adverse employment decisions on the basis of union membership or union- related activity by an employer are prohibited by the National Labor Relations Act. That is, in some cases, employers are allowed to hire employees who aren't members of a union, but they aren't legally permitted to hire employees _because_ (even in part) they aren't members of unions. ~~~ fiter You're even more compromised if you are removed. In the US, do you think companies have not moved manufacturing from union plants to non-union plants? Do you think they have not moved manufacturing out of US plants? Do you think this does not have to do with union membership? I believe the adversarial view of unions and employers results in inefficiency and waste. I was suggesting an alternative view of unions and employers, but I believe I now understand you: you think this is impossible. ~~~ dragonwriter > You're even more compromised if you are removed. Unions (or their leadership) perceived as serving management _are_ removed, invariably and swiftly, by their constituents, whether through decertification or leadership elections. ~~~ fiter I cannot tell if you are intentionally misreading my statement. If you are not, what I meant is that the union would be removed. ~~~ dragonwriter That's what I am saying, too. I'm just saying that being beholden to management is a more certain way for them to be removed than being adversarial. ------ ryanmarsh Do unions (specifically this union) promote and standardize levels of craftsmanship or is that still an unsolved problem? I kinda wish proper guilds would become a thing in tech. I feel they could solve both the craftsmanship and workers rights problems but oh well... ------ quest88 I wonder why they need a union. Is something currently not working in their favor? ~~~ throwaway10018 Throwaway account because duh. Note that I am not a current Glitch employee, but am well-connected to Glitch née Fog Creek. Management was basically incredibly incompetent, for a long time, and were so unfair to employees at the company that they felt this was the only option. There is a Tweet stream a couple months ago from someone who left the company who highlighted the amazing degree to which they were unfairly reviewed and unfairly criticized, alongside how much work product they were expected to produce (which was unreasonable). I have enough corroboration to say that the tweet stream as written is fairly unbiased, and that their experience was common. My understanding is the employees felt backed into a corner. I think unions can be very, very valuable, but I think needing one at a small company that took a series A round quite recently speaks more to management failure than anything else. I'm happy that they unionized, because it sounds like they needed to, but I am so fucking disappointed that it was necessary. ~~~ quest88 Thanks for the report, exactly what I was looking for! This is something I wish had been in the article. Even something vague, like "Employees reported they were unhappy with management and the performance evaluation system. The union with CWA will work with management to blah blah blah". Agree that it sounds like a management failure. Thanks! ~~~ mamoswined [https://glitch.com/glimmer/post/the-year-in- glitches/](https://glitch.com/glimmer/post/the-year-in-glitches/) > But as we rapidly grew our team, we failed to commensurately grow the processes and infrastructure necessary to support everyone properly. The result has been a lot of needless stress and tension and frustration. On its own, this is a significant problem, but when we’ve talked a lot about wanting to build a company that does these things better, a failure here is twice as painful for the people on our team who are affected. As the person who most often talks publicly about the positive ambitions we have here at Glitch, I’m also the person ultimately responsible for the times we haven’t delivered on those promises. ------ pmoriarty The recent flowering of union membership in the tech industry really warms my heart and makes me hope that this is the start of a pro-union resurgence nation-wide that reverses the conservative anti-union backlash that has dominated the US for decades. Unfortunately, conservatives have been mostly successful in gaining control of the courts, so expect union-busting measures to be rubber-stamped by them. There is likely to be much conflict between labor and owners. ~~~ chrisco255 My concern as a libertarian is that unionizing tech will lead to calcification, decline of agility and innovation, and diversity of business structure. There's no question that the U.S. has been more innovative in tech than other countries over the past few decades. That's thanks to an entrepreneurial culture that encourages risk taking. Unions attempt to limit risk to employees. In doing so, they limit the agility of organizations. That is a significant trade-off worth pondering and debating. ~~~ vangelis Funny, I feel the same way about MBA mills and slash and burn private equity firms. ~~~ SpicyLemonZest That's a pretty universal viewpoint. Even the most business-friendly people would be skeptical of someone saying that private equity "warms their heart", or talking about how we need to stop MBA-busting and reverse the "liberal anti-MBA backlash". ------ pje Congratulations! ------ godzillabrennus Six months from now we will likely be wishing we had union jobs. ------ ColonelSanders For a union, it's concerning when some things are more tailored to the whims, edge cases, personal niches of the most vocal, rather than shielding the common denominator of the cooperative from management's business decisions. I'd like to explain what I like, and what I'm concerned about: > Employees at major American tech and game companies have grown increasingly > active and outspoken about workplace issues, Very union related, that's what unions are for. > including sexual assault and harassment, Already unlawful. They are addressable to the NLRB and civil legal system. > ageism, That's vague, but there are protections against this > unequal pay, Not sure what this means, pay between workers of the same level of seniority performing the same responsibilities? Overtime? A lot of things factor into equal pay. A junior employee isn't going to make as much as a 20 year employee. > “crunch time” (i.e. long-term overtime and overworking), Looks right. These are covered in union contracts > poor treatment of contract workers, If they have union membership? Wouldn't it be about defining a standard of what a salaried employee is? > inadequate racial and gender diversity, What does that mean? Inadequate to whom? What makes those characteristics worthy but other characteristics not? I find it very hurtful and insensitive to people who struggle, suffer, overcome odds, from difficult upbringings, but not member of some class or facet. Why reduce the struggle, character, and worth of someone down to those things? Where does this come from? What does this say to your colleagues who don't have these traits? Do they have life easy? Have you walked a mile in their shoes? > and lack of transparency and inclusion in decision-making around > controversial contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and Immigration > and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That is not the kind of decision I think employees should be deciding. Though if a larger organization wanted to allow someone to move somewhere else in the org, that seems fair ~~~ Apocryphon > Already unlawful. They are addressable to the NLRB and civil legal system. > That's vague, but there are protections against this > Wouldn't it be about defining a standard of what a salaried employee is? Unions can be an additional safety net/layer of protection/tool against these discriminations and abuses. In a time when HR departments are often derided as existing to protect the company instead of workers, and it often takes either media exposure or self-publishing (as with Susan Fowler) for discrimination against protected classes to be acknowledged, a union could be a place for the discriminated to turn to where HR reps fail. At least then you don't have to hire your own lawyer. > unequal pay, This might be a gender gap criticism meaning unequal pay between workers with the same title but of different genders. > That is not the kind of decision I think employees should be deciding. Why? The stigma of culture war and political battles aside, why shouldn't employees take part in making business decisions in general? ~~~ ColonelSanders > Why? The stigma of culture war and political battles aside, why shouldn't > employees take part in making business decisions in general? Basically, no. That's what's management is for. They can become manager's if they want to impact that, though. Are they qualified to understand what they're talking about? If they have a disagreement, is there a reason why they wouldn't raise it via proper channels rather than effect other things that are vital to the organization? Are they big picture thinkers that have taken the time to digest the system, uninfluenced by social pressures? Some people don't care about their organization's goals, their coworkers, and decide to act out for their own vanity, at everyone else's expense. And that is one reason why management exists. To answer your question, while they may be wrong, there's a purpose in shielding decision making away from those who lose sight of the org's goals. The point of the union is when management makes decisions, which can be unfair and uncaring to the worker, that their rights, safety, and livelihood also are represented with fairness. The alternative I offered to you was, in an organization large enough, they could request to move to a different project. ~~~ fogetti Saying that they can become managers is like saying they can become the president of the U.S. The point is that you cannot become a manager at all if you disagree with management in the first place (and that doesn't mean you don't have the chops). Also the number of management seats are limited. The number of union seats has no upper limit. ~~~ ColonelSanders > Saying that they can become managers is like saying they can become the > president of the U.S. I don't think that analogy is proportional, since that'd make a manager at a furniture store on par with a head of state. But I get it, there isn't unlimited management roles. Because if there were, everyone would be on their own. If you want to influence and shape business decisions - you want to be a manager. How do you become one? By showing competence as an employee and joining a lower management position. Successes are how they climb the ladder. Yes, they definitely can innovate, and they can also play it safe. People in upper management also hop between companies and have similar positions. ~~~ fogetti I think you don't understand what I said. You can't climb the ladder if you disagree with management. And that's not because you have no talent and management has the talent. There is no such correlation. Is this clear now or do you need more help to understand?

Russian Court Bans Telegram App After 18-Minute Hearing - dbasedweeb https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/world/europe/russia-telegram-encryption.html ====== walrus01 I wonder how they intend to implement this. Russia for the most part doesn't have anything like the great firewall. Probably by court order from their version of the FCC forcing the largest ISPs with international connectivity to put in static null routes for certain V4 and v6 IP blocks that contain the telegram registration servers. ~~~ slezyr They've already blocked 118998 resources. They simply publish list of resources which needs to blocked by ISPs. [https://antizapret.info/stat.php](https://antizapret.info/stat.php) ------ coolspot It is interesting how other messaging services including also end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp manages to be still not banned in the Russia. ~~~ adamnemecek It’s because WhatsApp doesn’t have anti Putin interests unlike Durov. ~~~ loceng That reason doesn't satisfy, it's not taking into account the connection to encryption. We can't know if this is simply an attempt to shutdown Telegram from use in the country, or whether they would have found the next most believable excuse to block them if Telegram gave into the encryption issue.

Top domains on HN by average score (warning: check comments first) - andreyf http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rC4oeGjG_04iG63oBJvy2xw&output=html ====== teej If you would rather not have your Google account revealed to all of HN, log out of Google before following the link. ~~~ mjgoins Can someone explain why? I assume the link got changed a long time ago by now. ~~~ gojomo At first, when you viewed the spreadsheet, you saw a richer interface that: (1) popped a little message when others started viewing, with their logged-in Google username (2) offered an expandable chat sidebar (3) showed each others' active selection-area via different selection colors (correlated with colors in the char sidebar) The warning was fair but it was actually kind of interesting. I think the best case mixing fairness-of-disclosure and options-to-viewers would be a link to the static doc, but another link on the static doc allowing upgrade to the interactive interface (perhaps with a hint of what you'll see and reveal if doing so). Dug up from my browser history, this was the original link, which reveals your logged-in Google username to other simultaneous document viewers: !!! [http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rC4oeGjG_04iG63oBJvy2...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rC4oeGjG_04iG63oBJvy2xw) ------ smokinn I don't know who I was following around but it was fun just clicking under your cell selection =) ------ gojomo Sites based on the real name of their primary writer are very strong: graham, sivers, yegge, shaw, buchheit, maroon, joel, aaron, pmarca, ejohn, godin. (A message about authenticity, voice, and personal brands?) Other sites known as the outlet of a single author also do well: catonmat, daringfireball, raganwald, blogmaverick, avc. ~~~ skolor While I have no evidence to support this, I would guess this has to do with the editing process. Comparing this list to <http://top.searchyc.com/domains>, you see a lot of similar results. The difference is that some of them have quite a lot of results (Techcrunch, Wired), but not nearly as high of a average score. In fact, it looks like the sites hitting the top of the list for average score are ones that are written by a single author, who has several strong opinions (ZedShaw is a good example). Since Hacker News doesn't allow down voting, it seems that by draw up a commotion, and getting people interested in a semi- controversial idea is what wins votes here. ------ gibsonf1 For better reading: (remove-duplicates Top_news.YC_submissions :key #'first :test #'string=) ------ socratees From the charts I see TechCrunch.com is the domain with highest number of posts and points as well. ------ noodle make it public? edit: cool, it got made public. ------ yangyang Has anyone done something like this, but grouping by (user, domain), and maybe ordering on something like (number of user submissions / number of user submissions for this domain)? ------ AndrewWarner What do you guys make of this list? Love to hear your analysis. ~~~ fludlight I'd like to blacklist about half of these domains. Some people might find Techcrunch, *.blogspot.com, AppleInsider, et al worthwhile, but I just don't care for them. ~~~ quizbiz blacklisting *.blogspot.com would really be pushing it. ~~~ ptomato Indeed. Steve Yegge? Paul Buchheit? not to mention any of google's blogs. ------ wglb There seems to be some duplication further down in the list--rows fully identical are repeated. ------ mattmaroon Holy crap, 95 of my articles have been submitted here? I would not have guessed that. ------ AndrewWarner What's the time frame on this? ~~~ andreyf Got the data from here: <http://top.searchyc.com/domains_by_points> So I think the entire history of the site is included. ~~~ epi0Bauqu What are the differences between this and the searchyc page? ------ vaksel seems to be a lot of duplicates on that list

UK's Draft Communications Data Bill to be redrafte - jofo25 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20676284 ====== Gilly_LDN The plans in the draft bill include: Internet service providers having to store for a year all details of online communication in the UK - such as the time, duration, originator and recipient of a communication and the location of the device from which it was made. They would also be having to store for the first time all Britons' web browsing history and details of messages sent on social media, webmail, voice calls over the internet and gaming, in addition to emails and phone calls Police not having to seek permission to access details of these communications, if investigating a crime Police having to get a warrant from the home secretary to be able to see the actual content of any messages Four bodies having access to data: the police, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the intelligence agencies and HM Revenue and Customs

The best books on Critical Thinking - Reedx https://fivebooks.com/best-books/critical-thinking-nigel-warburton/ ====== masonic All book links are shrouded affiliate links (tag=fivebooks001-20).

So Reddit's down. How is this community different? - 3minus1 ====== MichaelStubbs Having only been here for a short time myself, I think the general answer to your question would be: Hacker News is a lot more focused and has a much richer (in terms of experience, knowledge) community with a much lower tolerance for noise/novelty accounts/meme spouting/trolls. ~~~ retroafroman I upvoted this because it's completely accurate, but at the same time reminds me of some of the things I don't like about HN. HN has a much higher tolerance for people constantly submitting things from their blogs for self promotion. If a person submits something self promotional on reddit and expects to escape sharp criticism from the community, they better acknowledge that they are being self promotional, and be awfully humble about it. Here, it seems to me that everyone acknowledges that everyone else is out to make a buck and deals with it. tl;dr - HN has more tolerance for shameless self promotion than reddit as well as fewer trolls. ------ kunjaan More news about entrepreneurship, startup, selling companies, management.. ------ wattjustin Less trolls.

Amazon Isn’t the Only Shop Online - prostoalex https://www.wsj.com/articles/shipping-delays-out-of-stock-items-amazon-isnt-the-only-shop-online-11586165400 ====== ebg13 I tried ordering some things from Home Depot the other day, and they silently cancelled half of my order while still charging me the same amount for delivery from the store and while saying that some things can only be delivered from a warehouse and that some things can only be delivered from a specific store _and_ that delivery from each store has a $45 minimum purchase before they'll even consider delivery despite the fact that they're charging the same amount for delivery from the store no matter how much you order. That of course makes it difficult to then order the remaining items even if you call them and demand a refund for the first delivery fee, because the remaining items now don't meet the minimum. Then the delivery from the warehouse is some weird arbitrary calculation involving a nominal+ amount that then gets divided up across the items you're ordering (3.77 here, 2.83 there, and so on) such that if you remove any item the delivery fees for the other items all go up, and then there are some items that deliver for free if you order more than $45 worth _from the warehouse_ which of course doesn't help you if some items can only be purchased from the individual stores. And then there are still things like cans of spraypaint that you can't get delivered at all and you're only allowed to pick up in person. I know that right now is an exceptional time, but this kind of shopping experience is part of why people choose Amazon first. ~~~ jakearmitage HomeDepot's ecommerce is a joke. Not only the shopping experience is poor, they treat logistics as if they were doing you a favor. And, on top of all that, you get damaged items. I made 7 purchases and all 7, in different periods of time, had to be returned or replaced. Same for Lowe's. There's a reason people shop on Amazon. Other than BestBuy, no other retailer "gets" ecommerce. ~~~ mauvehaus I beg to differ. Rock Auto is where it's at for auto parts. The website is ugly as hammered shit, but it's fast, shows you the options grouped by rough quality level (economy/you cheapskate, daily driver, performance, etc), shows you what part to select so it _ships from the same warehouse_ as the parts already in your cart and saves you shipping, and returns are painless (disclaimer: I've only ever done returns for core exchanges). I have never had a better online purchasing experience. And the prices are a fraction of what you pay at a brick and mortar place. Especially for e.g. wiper blades. Companies that "get" e-commerce are out there, but a lot of them are quietly and competently doing their thing in unsexy domains and aren't trying to eat the whole pie. Rock Auto, for instance, isn't trying to serve every idiot on the planet with a car. If you can't keep your lefts/rights and fronts/backs straight when ordering e.g. brake hoses, you're going to find it a frustrating experience. Putting up a (small) barrier to entry to keep out the least clueful people probably helps keep their costs down. Not affiliated, just a very happy repeat customer. ~~~ dan_quixote My nomination is McMaster-Carr (mcmaster.com) - They have a huge catalog of parts/tools yet somehow it's so intuitive to browse. I was a mechanical engineer in a previous life and McMaster's website was my bible. Step one for any new prototype design was to browse this site. Best case scenario, you could cobble together your prototype from various COTS (commercial off the shelf) McMaster parts. And if that wasn't an option, scan the catalog for necessary parts and raw materials. If they don't exist at McMaster, your design idea just got at least 10X expensive and lead time doubled. ~~~ sambroner I was always shocked by McMaster-Carr's delivery speed. I felt like the parts would arrive as quickly as I could have conceivably picked them up. This was 10 years ago now, so sort of like Amazon Prime before it became ubiquitous, but for materials and tools. However McMaster was and remains much better organized and much better spec-ed. ~~~ frandroid That's because they already have to delivery that fast for car repair shops. Fast delivery has never been an extra for them, it's always been the core product. What's interesting is that considering the existing logistics, none of these guys though of expanding into other ecommerce earlier. One of them could have been Amazon... ~~~ dan_quixote I'm glad they didn't to be honest. It would have diluted their existing product. ------ larrik Right when this all was starting, I had finally chosen a bass guitar I wanted. I decided to try and support a non-Amazon business in GuitarCenter (the local music shops focus a lot more on school band instruments). So, I order online, and pick the "pick up at store" option, since it says they are in stock. I show up, and an hour later they figure out that they don't have it in stock, they only have the floor model (which I can have for a whopping 5% off...). Apparently, the system (a green screen app, no less) can't tell the difference between "new in stock" and "floor model". I got the rundown of their logistics chain (which is basically just UPS), and I lost confidence that even ordering ship-to-home online again would even work. So, I bought it from Amazon for the same price and got it later that week... ~~~ selykg Check out Sweetwater next time. They are significantly better. Their site actually shows you each guitar/bass they have in stock and they have an entire gallery Of photos for each. If you order one they’ll send a zip or the whole collection of photos. If you call and talk to the sales rep for you (you’re assigned one) they can usually knock 5-15% off. They also make sure each guitar/bass is setup to factory spec before sending it out. ~~~ larrik Never really heard of them before. Looks like everything I bought is out of stock anyway, but it's good to know there are alternatives. ~~~ selykg I imagine a lot of gear is tough to get unless it’s high end stuff right now. There has been a ton of people picking up instruments during the shelter in place orders. Sweetwater is significantly better than GuitarCenter though. Better customer support, better site, better warranty, better everything. ~~~ dionian ordered a single speaker once and they contacted me to make sure i didnt want two, which i actually did... really next level customer service ------ Wistar Although the focus is somewhat narrower than amazon, for my professional needs I have had nothing but an excellent online experience with bhphotovideo. I have ordered hundreds of items worth tens of thousands of dollars from them starting about 2007. Their site can be a little frustrating, mostly from not narrow-enough categorization, but their app for iOS is very good. Their prices are usually as good and often better than amazon. The users' product reviews are useful and well-written and the site/app shows which reviewers are verified purchasers of the product they are reviewing and offers comprehensive review filtering. They also invest a lot of effort in producing their own product demo videos and articles done by obviously knowledgeable people which, given the breadth of their catalog, is particularly impressive and serves well more than just to shill their wares. They have great packaging for shipping and I have not once had an order go missing or show up broken or damaged despite many of my orders being fragile items. Well-oiled machine. ~~~ alyx Tried placing an order online Saturday afternoon, only to be informed that the website was not taking orders due to Shabbos. I very nearly skipped over to Adorama. The mind boggles trying to resolve why a server cannot accept an order while staff is respecting Shabbos. ~~~ schwartzworld B&H is run and staffed by Hasidic Jews. They have strict definitions of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath and they may not always be intuitive to outsiders, for example, for many religious Jews, pressing the elevator button is forbidden, but riding in an elevator that is programmed to just stop on every floor is fine. Your mind is free to boggle, but Jews are entitled to close their businesses on the Sabbath just the same as Christians. In the county I grew up in, everything but supermarkets is closed on Sunday, for example. ------ Diederich Help requested. My wife, who is in her 50s, is immunocompromised, and she also has a history of fast escalating and difficult to treat respiratory problems. We are and have been (for the past 32 days) treating this bug very carefully. If she catches it, she has a very good chance of not surviving it. Our son and I are at less risk, but we can easily bring this bug home. We've been having more and more trouble getting food. We have a fair quantity of emergency supplies, but we'd rather not tap into those. At first it was the various delivery options: instacart, various others, but they became less usable. Early last week we started doing Amazon Prime Now, which allowed us to place and pay for orders at Whole Foods, then wait in the parking lot for them to put the orders in our trunk. Over the past few days, this has gotten less viable. We'd find ourselves driving 50 miles to pickup a $30 order. So, we're open to suggestions. We live in Mountain View, the SF Bay Area. We have been able to buy quite a bit of chicken and beef, and we have a 50 pound bag of flour coming in, so we're certainly not in any danger of starvation. It's just kind of a low-grade anxiety that kind of sucks. Thanks! PS: We have a pretty rigorous decontamination process that everything goes through before it comes into the house, so we feel pretty good about that. ~~~ gwittel I am in MV. Unfortunately most online things are overwhelmed. They don't have enough shoppers. You can keep checking for a slot opening up, but its a challenge and hard to plan for. Are you specifically looking for fresh items, or are there particular things you need? Staples are usually available, and you can sometimes get them from smaller vendors online. At least those you can plan ahead for a future delivery. For some staples I've had luck with Target and random online (usually specialty/gourmet) sellers. For fresh items, its harder -- either get lucky with online or go =/. You can try the smaller chains as they are lower foot traffic or in some cases are better at rate limiting customers. I've had luck with Ava's downtown (they also have early hours for senior and/or immunocompromised). Nijiya is rate limiting, as is Trader Joes (expect 30+ min line though). Nob Hill has been OK, they also have special pre-packaged boxes for seniors and at risk customers. They are first come/first serve, and have mixes of staples/fresh foods. They say they're available via e-cart as well, but I haven't tried. I've had to book Nob Hill ~1 week ahead (and didn't get everything). Dittmer's is also rate limiting (but sounds like you're good on meats). As a last resort -- the MV farmer's market opens an early for seniors and immunocompromised (so either 8 or 8:30, I can't remember and its not listed online). I've been ~9 and its busier than I'd like. They're trying to enforce line spacing and do limit number of people in booths. Some booths only sell pre-bagged items held behind the counter (e.g. apples from Rainbow). As a last resort -- maybe a shared grocery need list with friends/neighbors? Someone can pick up an extra item or two when they're out. We've been doing that at times and following usual safety procedures afterward. Take care! ~~~ dehrmann > early hours for senior and/or immunocompromised I get why stores would do this, but unless there are significantly fewer people in the store, could putting these people in one place actually be a bad idea? Is there any good data backing this up? ~~~ Diederich I agree with your concerns; I haven't seen any data about this. ------ jedberg Yeah I’ve ordered a few things now directly from the manufacturer. The problem is in a lot of cases I’ll see stuff that’s slightly cheaper on their site but then shipping is ridiculous. I ordered a mono price stand up desk recently. The price on Amazon was $10 more, but Monoprice wanted $45 for domestic shipping! So I waited three extra days and saved $35. It’s kind of a toss up now between speed and price depending on the item. I mean, it always was, but when prime is functioning normally, the speed is almost always worth the price (to me). ~~~ bluetidepro I agree 100% with this. It's appalling how many other sites (esp. the direct manufacturer ones, like you mentioned) use dark patterns with their shipping/handling prices. It really does make you understand why everyone wants to use the big sites like Amazon, at least they are pretty straight fwd when it comes to the price, shipping, fees, etc. Nothing worse than getting down an e-commerce funnel only to find you wasted 10+ mins filling out stages of forms to then find the shipping/handling cost is absolutely ridiculous, and have to bail. ~~~ dangrossman It's not a dark pattern that shipping actually costs everyone that isn't Amazon a lot. Go get a shipping quote from UPS or FedEx for sending a desk across the country. It's not going to be any cheaper than these stores are charging. They're not hiding extra profit in their shipping fees. People are so used to Amazon Prime that they have no idea what things cost to ship any more. I run a small online store and every 1-pound package I mail out costs $8-12 in postage by the cheapest shipping method available to me, at commercial shipping rates. If the box is over a cubic foot in size and going to a state on the other side of the country, it can quickly double or triple in cost. Amazon has $120/year in Prime subscription fees to subsidize the displayed shipping costs, puts some of the shipping fee into the item price (they're rarely the cheapest for most products, especially very cheap or very heavy ones), has a warehouse within 20 miles of every American so that nearly everything they ship is a same-zone local shipment, and has their own delivery network so they don't have to pay carriers. No other business has those things. ~~~ plorkyeran Honest sites let you enter a zip code at the very start of the shopping process and display an estimated shipping cost as you're looking at items. Dishonest sites make no mention of shipping costs until you're at the very end of the checkout process. ~~~ odysseus I think in many cases it's not a matter of dishonesty, but of laziness, lack of care, or not wanting to pay for a better checkout experience. ~~~ t-writescode Also, there’s probably A/B testing that shows orders of magnitude less engagement if you put any blockers in the way of seeing the product. ~~~ plorkyeran It doesn't have to block you from seeing the product. Some e-commerce sites let you enter a zip code on any page to get estimated shipping prices, but don't require you to. Some let you enter a zip code as soon as you've added something to your cart. Some don't do estimated shipping prices at all and don't give you any idea how much shipping will be until you're at that step of the checkout flow. ~~~ t-writescode Fair enough. I suppose I'm just used to what I'm used to. Shipping prices only seem to be something surprising nowadays with Amazon. Before that, it was accepted and commonplace. I wonder if that makes it a dark pattern now. ------ double0jimb0 Amazon has massive network of 3rd Party Sellers who ship items directly from their own warehouses, not relying on Amazon’s currently-hobbled fulfillment centers You can find these by selecting “other sellers” on the Amazon product page. This has been the way to get stuff quickly on Amazon for the last 3 weeks. Then on Friday, with no warning or explanation, Amazon extended all shipping times quoted out to April 20th, including the shipping times provided by 3rd party sellers. This extension has no basis in reality, as 3rd party sellers have not experienced any shipping delays because they don’t use Amazon’s warehouses. This was a hugely anti-competitive move by Amazon that has severely impacted 3rd party sellers and directly misleads consumers. Numerous 3rd party sellers have reported this situation to the DOJ. If any reporters want more info, please reach out. Email in profile. ~~~ CPLX For what it's worth, the solution is just to order whatever you want anyways, and watch it ship to you 2-3 days later. ~~~ double0jimb0 Well of course, but most people go by what they read on the screen in front of them at the time of purchase. ------ LatteLazy >Amazon Isn’t the Only Shop Online They sort of are at the moment, at least here in greater London... My normal groceries company have cancelled online orders silently and will not deliver anything. They can't even update their websites with new opening times. The local DIY (B&Q) store are taking order for essential items only (loft ladders and plants are essential, but not light bulbs or fuses wtf?) Amazon randomly added a month to all their delivery _estimates_ but everything is still coming in a few days and I can get whatever I want. To be honest, it makes sense to manage infrastructure of supply centrally. That's the genius of amazon, not retail but supply. While other companies can barely ring up items, Amazon connects buyers to sellers before either know the trade will happen. ~~~ thewebcount Instacart in Los Angeles did this to me. I ordered groceries and the local store uses Instacart to deliver them. When they didn't show up, I had to call Instacart to find out they had canceled my order. They were just not going to tell me, apparently. ~~~ LatteLazy I can understand that places have problems with volume of orders or items not being in stock. But it should be really hard to cancel a client order and NOT tell them. How is it they don't have something that emails you when your order is killed already and automatically!? ------ nataz Amazon shipping hack - order what you want to order, wait 48 hours to see if it ships, and if it doesn't cancel and order elsewhere. This assumes you value ordering through Amazon (I do b/c prime shipping, easy return policy, and I have a large gift card balance) One thing I've noticed is that amazon may list a delivery date far out in the future, but it's possible you still get the product quickly, depending on what I can only assume are local warehouse logistic issues. Over the past two weeks I've ordered packing/shipping supplies, a high chair, some electronics, and a board game which all had expected delivery dates of +1 month, and they all arrived in 2 days. YMMV. ~~~ ehsankia I really wish they could provide more clarity. I haven't tried ordering things that list as May, but browsing items, I randomly see individual items that for some reason have much closer dates. I even saw one with 1-day shipping. It makes no sense to me. I wish they could give a slightly better window prediction than "this may take a month"... ~~~ greenshackle2 They are shipping "priority items" quickly. Who knows how they determine what are "priority items". When I ordered hygiene items (shampoo, soap, etc.) they shipped the next day. But my order of kitchen equipment has expected delivery in May (which I'm totally fine with). ~~~ odysseus This is going to be great, because the last time I ordered soap (in mid February, before most of the lockdowns started), it took Amazon 10 days to get it to me, even with Prime. Looking forward to seeing this improved on my next soap delivery ... ------ bluGill I always search for alternative sellers. They are more likely to have someone who knows the product. A plumbing supplier will know something about pipes and I have some reason to trust them when they give advantages to their different price levels. I don't need 200 different brands of 1/2 inch pipe connections, I need the 3 different levels of pressure they are rated for, and the choice of material they are made from. They also tend to provide reasonable sorting so that I can find what I need without scrolling for ages. ------ sneak A lot of the things I used to buy on Amazon I buy on eBay instead using “buy it now”. Even free shipping items are frequently less than Amazon. I’ve already phased out AWS, I hope to stop using amazon.com by the end of the year. I don’t like doing business with military contractors. ~~~ bdcravens I assume you use Linux for your operating system then? Both Apple and Microsoft do business with the military. ~~~ sneak My personal morals find a difference between “we sell physical goods and anyone can buy them without restriction” and “we will build you a whole set of dedicated custom data centers with racist hiring policies”. [https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/](https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/) Also, Apple doesn’t sell OSes. One could buy secondhand Macs. Linux is used by the military, too. The issue is not “not matching”, it is a question of providing financial support to those who deliberately assist in the undertaking of violence. Selling (or giving away) your goods to all comers isn’t that. Custom services and consulting absolutely is. There’s also that whole Apple tapping-iCloud-in-China-for-the-CCP thing. I don’t think I’ll be on iOS much longer, especially now that Signal is fully cross-platform and runs on iPad. I’ve already deprecated iMessage amongst everyone I talk to in anticipation of the switch. Hell, I’ve even been on broadcast radio talking about how iCloud will leak your private data. I think it’s a mistake to view the attitude of Apple toward military contracting (not just sales) as the same as that of Microsoft or Amazon. If when Apple employs hundreds of people who are full-time embedded in the military to help them use their products, maybe that situation will change. To your point, I have moved off of GitHub, and have encouraged others to do the same: [https://sneak.berlin/20200307/the-case-against-microsoft- and...](https://sneak.berlin/20200307/the-case-against-microsoft-and-github/) We can all take small steps to improve our choices each day. Over time and across people, these things add up. The worst thing we could do is assume that every choice is the same and carries the same negative consequences and act uncritically. In that vein, I appreciate your pushback: critical thinking about our choices should be the one constant. There is always a place we can improve. ~~~ bdcravens Apple has engaged in active development, not just passive sales [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense- tech/pentagon...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-defense- tech/pentagon-teams-up-with-apple-boeing-to-develop-wearable-tech- idUSKCN0QX12D20150828) ~~~ sneak > _MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter awarded > $75 million on Friday to help a consortium of high-tech firms and > researchers develop electronic systems packed with sensors flexible enough > to be worn by soldiers or molded onto the skin of a plane._ > _Carter said funding for the Obama administration’s newest manufacturing > institute would go to the FlexTech Alliance, a consortium of 162 companies, > universities and other groups, from Boeing (BA.N), Apple (AAPL.O) and > Harvard, to Advantest Akron Polymer Systems and Kalamazoo Valley Community > College._ > _The group will work to advance the development and manufacture of so-called > flexible hybrid electronics, which can be embedded with sensors and > stretched, twisted and bent to fit aircraft or other platform where they > will be used._ A $75 million research grant into a consortium of 162 companies (of which Apple is a member) to develop flexible wearable tech is not remotely what I am talking about in this thread. ------ rsync Mcmaster-carr is fantastic: [https://www.mcmaster.com/](https://www.mcmaster.com/) Very simple UI with access to technical diagrams. Good pricing. If I order before noon or 2pm or something, here in the bay area I receive the items next day. I wish all web stores could be like this. ~~~ ncheek McMaster has a powerfully simple website. You can get to any item with mcmaster.com/<part number>. They often provide 3D models of their parts. You can even paste in a list of items to quickly bulk-add to your cart. It just works. Their customer service is also second to none. I've never had the phone ring more than once before being answered by a real person. And they'll respond 24/7 to phone calls or emails. Oh, and they've accepted returns a year after I bought something, no questions asked. In the Atlanta area they usually deliver same-day via courier, or you can drive over to their warehouse for will call. McMaster can often be more expensive than other distributors, especially for things like metal stock (I recommend price-comparing with onlinemetals.com or midweststeelsupply.com but be careful about Midwest Steel's processing times). But you're paying for the service and ease of use. Probably the biggest problem I have with McMaster is their lack of insight into shipping cost. They don't give you even an estimate of the shipping before you check out, it just gets added once they ship. I will say their shipping prices have always been fair but it can be scary to buy something not knowing what it will cost. ~~~ spacemark I've probably put in 100 McMaster orders over the last year via work, side gig, and home projects. My take on this is that their prime customers (businesses) do not put shipping costs in their top 5 or maybe even top 10 priorities. Businesses pushing out products or engaged in rapid prototyping or meeting a deadline are much more concerned with speed, and McMaster __always __beats Amazon in shipping time to my workplace (usually less than 24 hours from order to delivery, no joke). Their customer also values accurate technical data so they 've put a lot of effort into CAD models and are very responsive to customer service calls. In short, they know their customer persona. I wouldn't hold my breath that they'll add upfront shipping costs any time soon! ~~~ daniel_reetz This exactly matches my experience. I run a prototyping shop in the LA area. I get items the very same day from McMaster. That kind of feedback loop is priceless. They ship with DGC for most deliveries, and DGC is usually cost- competitive with any other service. ------ yeutterg Amazon third-party seller here. If a Prime product is showing a long delivery time, try to look for non-Prime offers. You want to find offers that say "Ships from and sold by X," where X is NOT Amazon. The reason being, these sellers have their own fulfillment and may be able to beat Amazon's speed by a wide margin. We now offer this for our product, and I know a lot of other sellers are doing the same. We used to only have a Prime (Fulfilled by Amazon) offer, but this crisis caused us to adapt as customers were getting 1-month delivery estimates. We enabled "Fulfilled by Merchant" offers on our account, and I sent some inventory to my apartment (and ordered lots of shipping boxes). Within a couple days, the self-fulfilled option got the "buy box" on Amazon, so now most people viewing our listing will see a delivery estimate of about one week. It doesn't have the "Prime" badge, but we get a decent number of orders through this, enough to survive. We send out all orders with First Class Mail, and I pack them up around 3PM each business day in order to get them to the post office by the 5PM cutoff. It appears most customers are receiving orders between 2 and 5 days after ordering (including the opposite coast). This is even faster than the time estimate customers see on Amazon, and way faster than Prime. Disclaimer: your mileage may vary. ------ CodeSheikh Amazon's (+Wholefood) supply-chain failure is an eye-opener for me during COVID-19 crisis. I hate to acknowledge my dependability on Amazon Prime while living in a big city. I am not sure how I will break my habit but I know for a fact that I won't be ordering everything from Amazon Prime in the future. For a company that commands e-commerce space in year 2020, it is really frustrating to find this workflow while ordering from WF while using Amazon's app, it is a joke and UI/UX 101 blunder. You add items to your cart. They run out of inventory. Items disappear from your cart. Either you place your order assuming all items were in your cart or you don't get a delivery slot and you have to add those items again. Why can't they just borrow the same feature from Amazon.com where unavailable items move conveniently to "Save later" section? ------ alias_neo This is an important thing to remember. Just last night, I was ordering an item on Amazon, and pointed out to my wife that it is gonna take a week to delivery on prime. That's fine, there's more important things going on in the world. But she said; "Why does it have to be from Amazon? If you're not getting it Prime speed, why not buy it elsewhere?" So I went to the manufacturers website and bought it directly, and it was 15% cheaper than Amazon, and will supposedly arrive a little faster. I think I may try do this more. I already do this, where possible to support small businesses. ------ Animats Amazon is holding up much better than other online retailers. Ordering works fine. My Amazon orders are showing up, although slowly. Safeway and Smart and Final can't even give me a delivery slot. Smart and Final's web site was failing over the weekend - Cloudflare timeouts, login timeouts, false credit card declines, HTTP error 461 (there is no standard 461 error.), and a "Site undergoing maintenance" message from their "DevOps Team". Back up now, though. ------ thebean11 The estimates on Amazon right now seem way longer than the reality. I'm getting all my packages in 2-3 days despite Amazon estimating a week or more. ~~~ irrational Not me. Amazon is estimating 2-3 weeks on most things now, and so far are sticking by their estimates. ~~~ eshyong I'm guessing a lot of this is location dependent, and based on warehouse- proximity. ~~~ bradlys It's also based on the items you're ordering. Some stuff we've ordered arrives within a few days or less. Other items that I've ordered (tools) has taken about 3 weeks to arrive. Some items keep getting pushed back. I would cancel and buy elsewhere but I'd pay a lot in shipping since these aren't all items I can buy from one place online. I have shopped online for other items though. I bought some insoles for really cheap from a UK based bicycle store, the items got here in less than a week... all the way from the UK! It's not like all shipping is broken down - just Amazon. ~~~ xkjkls Yeah, Amazon has stopped issuing purchase orders for a huge number of non- essentials, which probably contributes to really high delivery estimates. If anything is out of stock at their warehouse, they have no idea when they might have room to restock. ------ buzzert If anyone is looking for computer parts, I gotta shoutout Newegg. Been using them for more than 15 years, and they’ve been extremely great at delivering during the pandemic. ~~~ ShamelessC With all the social distancing going on and my general laziness towards staying active without being forced to, paired with the massive hype surrounding Half-Life: Alyx, I decided to build a VR ready computer. Newegg was fine. I'd been using them since my first build 15 years ago. But this time I also had access to the amazing website pcpartpicker.com. Not only do they make it easy to find parts that are all compatible with each other, but you'll also be given multiple shopping options with discounts. Most of it I got from Newegg but I was able to save about 75$ by getting the PSU and MoBo from bhphotovideo.com which was a surprisingly good experience. BTW, HL Alyx is as amazing as they say and you really don't have to spend a fortune to play it. My entire build was only 650$ and my VR headset of choice (Samsung Odyssey) only 270$. I was worried I'd made a mistake by going with a cheap headset but it works very well. ------ benbristow I usually prefer to use Amazon just because the experience is so simple and in the UK their logistics delivery service is pretty good with live tracking when the parcel gets near to your home. Amazon can be annoying when using third party sellers though and might end up getting dispatched with an alternative delivery service, god forbid Royal Mail who don't have any live tracking feature. I'm always happy to help out smaller/alternative businesses though if they offer competitive prices and use decent delivery firms like DPD. ------ daniel_reetz I really felt this. Seeing things go out-of-stock or become unavailable for months was a strong reminder of how things used to be online - when I purchased different types of items from different independent web retailers. I went searching for many of them, most are gone. Does anyone remember Pricewatch? Old school computer parts sellers like CompGeeks? Those were really interesting times. ------ jdlyga Well then give us a list! Nearly everything else I've checked is either out of stock or doesn't deliver to my house. ~~~ gambler Most chain stores and even some local stores have online storefront and still ship items. It's a good time to support them. You don't want to live in the world where Amazon is the only game left in town. Also, Ebay. ------ loser777 I’ve observed this with big and small business alike: \+ bought a baking steel direct from the seller (shipping time ~5 days vs. 1 month+, so I canceled the amazon order) \+ monitor out of stock for over a week on amazon (in stock at bnh, shipping time ~4 days) \+ monitor arm I didn’t even bother looking at on amazon (shipping time direct from seller ~2 days) ~~~ chrisweekly bnh? ~~~ Arcsech [https://www.bhphotovideo.com/](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/) presumably. I've ordered some things from there, and generally had a good experience, with a few notes: \- For large purchases at least, they are very scrupulous about sending tax documents to your home state to make sure the sales tax gets paid. This is probably a social good overall, but unusual for internet retailers and may take some folks by surprise. \- They follow a Jewish holiday schedule, including the Sabbath, and do not take orders on the Sabbath (in New York's time zone, at least). Again, not a negative, but unusual for modern businesses, especially online ones. ~~~ ghaff Last time I ordered from them, I think they collected the sales tax. I'm not sure when this started; I am a long-time customer but they're not a store I tend to purchase from frequently. I like them overall and I tend to prefer using them to Amazon for AV type of purchases. ~~~ hsitz Doesn't just about everywhere collect sales tax online now? BHPhotoVideo is my go-to place for tech and music stuff. I got their affiliated payboo credit card that pays the sales tax for you, saves me that 10% on every order. ------ vernie I've been using eBay lately. Sellers have been consistently delivering in 2 days and it feels just as likely that I'll get fake shit as from Amazon these days. ~~~ dawnerd I sell on eBay and it's pretty easy to beat Amazon. Most first class and priority packages arrive in under 3 days depending on your location to an airport. I'm right next to PDX and almost all of my packages go through there and end up on the other side of the US overnight. Those packages typically take two days. Also helps I ship same day so they're on a flight that night or the next morning. As for the fakes, they certainly exist on eBay but it's a lot easier to spot. If an item doesn't have good pictures, that's a huge red flag. I personally stay away from sellers that just use stock images. I want to know exactly what I'm getting. ~~~ kube-system I avoid shady listings when I really need the item, but if I'm looking for a deal, I've never had an issue leaning on eBay's buyer protection. I've gotten all of my best deals from poorly-listed items. ------ manigandham [http://archive.is/k3zNE](http://archive.is/k3zNE) ------ Waterluvian My wife orders from walmart.ca often. It's generally good but still feels lower quality than Amazon (which has its own issues, yes). Last week they shipped an entirely wrong item. So my kids aren't getting their Duplo set for Easter. ------ salvagedcircuit Ironically, I find that I am ordering more from Mcmastercarr and digikey more than ever. ------ StillBored Yah, the only thing that's been arriving from Amazon lately are the things sold and shipped by 3rd party sellers. Frankly, i've been paying the extra to just order from the smaller shops lately because amazon's critical "prioritization" algorithm doesn't seem to know what is actually critical. Part to fix my cloths washing machine? 3 weeks from Amazon, two days from Granger. Problem solved, plus unlike a similar part I ordered a couple months ago from amazon, I'm pretty sure the granger parts aren't counterfeit. The box stamped "Made in U.S.A" is likely legitimate. ~~~ gniv Did you mean grainger.com ? ~~~ StillBored Yes, I managed to type it incorrectly twice, and noticed it after the edit button expired. ------ gtm1260 Its so unfair to expect consumers to go through hell on these random websites with poor UI/UX, customer service, logistics, and inventory monitoring systems. I don't think amazon should be able to crush small businesses etc, but I don't think appealing to people's sense of personal responsibility is the answer. There needs to be a viable way for other businesses to compete with amazon's level of service if they want consumers to change their habits. ~~~ Kalium The logistics, inventory management, and customer service operations at the scale of Amazon are something that become possible with truly immense scale. They're crushingly expensive at small scale - call center, warehouses, pre- positioning goods, etc. There are definitely ways to outsource any or all of these things, but at a cost in quality. I know I've often had unpleasant experiences with outsourced customer support call centers. Tools like Square or Shopify help, but only to a point. So I think my conclusion might be different from yours - small, local businesses need a viable way to compete with Amazon in ways where Amazon _doesn 't_ have a vast advantage. ~~~ gtm1260 Ah totally! I agree with your conclusion. I guess with the measures in place right now to fight COVID, the areas where Amazon might not have a vast advantage like niche selection, deep knowledge in a certain product area, being able to buy something in store immediatley etc. didn't occur to me. ------ wiredone Amazon’s value isn’t in the fact it’s a store with great shipping. It’s the trust component. Returns are simple, shipping and stock management is a non event and they have basically everything. Every other online shopping experience I’ve had has been hit and miss. Get the simple things right And sure I’ll try it. But no one has just look at these comments. ------ complianceowl The HN is a very intelligent community, so I'd like to hear your thoughts out loud here. Do you guys think supply chains will move closer to home because of this pandemic? I'm hearing every narrative under the sun right now: "This will establish globalism even more", "No! This marks the abrupt END of globalism." What are your thoughts? ~~~ twblalock Supply chains need to be more resilient, and that probably means making them more global rather than less. A pandemic could originate in any country. Making things "at home" would turn out to be a bad idea if the pandemic originates at home. If that happened we would like to be able to get help from other countries. ~~~ jshevek De-globalization, in this case, brings redundancy. This is less efficient, but more fault tolerant. Striving for domestic manufacturing does not prevent imports from occurring if deemed necessary. Tariffs are easy to wave, in an emergency. ------ awaythrower Also beware of phony Magento sites that don't have actual products, but are just trying to get CCs, PayPal or crypto payments. ~~~ prox How does that work? I’ve seen a lot of copy paste webshops of formerly retired domains. They obviously look quickly hacked together (allthough looking professional enough to the untrained eye) ~~~ awaythrower I would bet scraping from Amazon, reducing prices randomly from 20-50%, and being sure search engines and aggregators see it, i.e., Google/Google Shopping. ------ A4ET8a8uTh0 Last week experience. I tried gettin display port to hdmi for my docking station for work on Amazon. It was in Amazon basics category. Solid shopping experience, but it was not sent for 3 days so I cancelled. Annoying, but cancellation experience was great. I decided to do pick up from BestBuy. Great. Store near me has one in store. I purchase at 5PM. At 6PM ( when they close ), they send me an email saying they don't have it in store anymore. Great, but I can't cancel w/o creating account. Can't reach live person, because, ironically, Covid19. Screw it. I bought on CC. I can dispute it later. I go to Newegg. No issues. stuff gets here in 3 days. Amazon isn't the only store and its convenience is waning during this outbreak. They are lucky they are doing so many things right compared to competition. Personally, I am debating dropping Prime, which I had for one main reason:fast free shipping. ------ tanyatik Is it even ethical to shop on Amazon for non-essentials these days? There are big concerns amid worker safety. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/technology/coronavirus- am...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/technology/coronavirus-amazon- workers.html) ~~~ xkjkls I'm not sure these concerns are unique to any other business with a warehouse, however. ------ nkkollaw Sure, Amazon might not be the only one, but every time I tried to buy somewhere else, something happened. They charged me twice, charged me to never sent me the product and forcing me to waste 2 weeks, sent to the wrong address, etc. Amazon seems to be the only one that can actually do their job properly without hassles. ------ Someone1234 One reason previously for using Amazon was recommendations for example their "Customers who viewed this item also viewed: [list of alternative items]." Unfortunately the recommendations boxes like the "Customers who viewed this item also viewed" have been completely removed, with no real replacement except "sponsored." I don't consider sponsored ads a replacement for actual recommendations based on real people's buying behavior. Obviously Amazon wants us to though so they can double-dip. Personally I am buying less, not more, because I cannot find things. But maybe it is more profitable to Amazon for us to spend longer looking, more sponsor spot revenue. Talk about perverse incentives, make more money from a slower shopping experience. ------ ehnto As a developer with most of my experience in boutique and enterprise eCommerce, I am surprised this is a conversation piece! There are plenty of large and small online retailers who are doing just fine. If you think Amazon has everything you are definitely mistaken, but for many it's probably enough of everything. I encourage everyone to buy directly from manufacturers and local businesses where possible, especially if you are not from the US. We feel like we want an Amazon dominant market, but the effects it has on what products exist and what businesses thrive is somewhat insidious and unseen. ------ bombledmonk I just bought something from Best Buy online when Amazon said the same item was in stock, but would not arrive until April 27th. BB said it be here Thursday, though is usually a day early because of proximity to the warehouse. ------ arbuge I'm having increasingly bad experiences on Amazon. The most obvious ones are common problems - the reviews can't be trusted, and they're no longer price leaders in many cases. But there are some new experiences I'm running into now. Today, for the first time ever, I was double-charged for the same order. Customer support claims I was only charged once and there's no way to upload them a screenshot of my card statement so that they can see what I'm seeing. To be clear, these are two real charges (not pending charges or temporary authorizations) for the same order. ------ beamatronic Reading this entire thread, something became very clear to me: there is STILL a lot of room for improvement to be made for online e-commerce. Someone should invent a local-first inventory-first Amazon ~~~ sneak Like a local delivery-only costco, perhaps? ------ tmaly Amazon was sold out of bakers yeast as were the local grocery stores. I was able to order from a specialty place. The order was delivered 2 days later. The price was very reasonable. For certain things, I am seeing some serious prices. People are selling cotton masks 4 for $25. That seems a little steep given that a box of N95 masks went for $6 before this. I just ordered parts for building a new computer. I had to order from 4 different places as Amazon did not have half of the items in stock. There are definitely some supply chain issues. ------ rchaud Best Buy's ecommerce site is great; they don't have the absurd levels of info overload and upselling of a typical Amazon page. In Canada, Amazon's electronics offerings are rife with awful Chinese brands sold by dropshippers. Amazon seemingly doesn't carry any of the inventory themselves unless it's a Fire tablet or Echo. It's actually a big relief to shop online via at a proper outlet (even Walmart.ca is more reliable) than through the Bezos flea market. ------ ww520 Is it possible to ask for price reduction or refund on the Prime membership due to the long delivery time? The point of Prime is mostly moot without the speedy delivery. ~~~ dawnerd I cancelled my prime for the time being and it automatically refunded the 12.99 ------ yCloser EU here, things seem pretty good here. * I ordered 20kg of oranges from sicily, no shipping costs, arrived in 2days * Coffee, same thing * a bass guitar, same * groceries are delivered in a day from local shops * for electronics i bought from many shops, usually takes ~1week. still OK for a washing machine or those big items ...seems that "the infrastructure" that amazon required for ups/dhl/* are being used by any other (even tiny) buisiness. My only complain is Ikea. Ikea doesn't cooperate. ~~~ _n_b_ Totally OT but where did you order the oranges from? I am in need of a few kg for juicing and it's expensive from the local grocery delivery folks around me... ~~~ yCloser from www.aranciadoc.com ------ badrabbit Two things about amazon: 1) Their customer service is astonishing! Still have not seen better. Google might just take over the world if they came even 20% close to Amazon with this regard. 2) Their giftcards. I don't know what it is but theirs has the highest value. Even visa and mastercard will not be accepted at some places if you don't have a cash gift card, but amazon's have incredible purchasing power. ------ non-entity The thing about Amazon though, was the luxury of being able to order stuff and have it by my door _the next day_. This was especially great for products where the traditional brick and mortar retail died out a long time ago for that industry (i.e. electronic components) or stuff that you want / need regularly but isnt carried in stores near you. ------ giancarlostoro Amazon is the only shop selling the most convenience. At least Walmart and Target have online order and parking spots to pick up your orders from, but I can only imagine a lot of old brick and mortar type of stores are way behind the times. Just some stories on here are horror story level examples of the night and day kind of service you can get in regards to buyer convenience. ------ blensor I have started to fall back to a shopping site run by our postal service [1] which has been trying for several months through TV ads to get people to use the more regional shopping site rather than Amazon. I guess they could not have hoped for a better scenario than a countrywide lockdown paired with shipping delays at Amazon [1] shoepping.at ------ radium3d Prices on amazon have been way higher than alternatives lately. Be sure to check other online outlets. ------ jupp0r To any other non-amazon stores out there: have toilet paper in stock and I'll give it a try! ------ tanilama If Amazon has shipping delay in US, then it is unlikely other smaller shops can fare it better. ~~~ jshevek At the beginning of the pandemic, Amazon was overwhelmed by people panic buying or preparing for shelter in place. The problem was not primarily the shipping industry, it was within Amazon. They've since hired large numbers of people and deprioritized [items deemed] non-essential so that people can get their essential needs in a timely manner. ~~~ StillBored How does amazon know what is essential? ~~~ jshevek _Edit: I thought you said "determine" rather than "know", answered accordingly below. Of course they don't "know", that's not a helpful question._ The same way everyone does when trying to solve this problem systemically (vs individually), by making imperfect decisions and leaning on categories. My UVC lamp was delayed. I think that's more important than someone else's "third month" bunker food, but what are you going to do. ------ derrekl I emailed a local comic shop that’s closed to the public, but I was able to order $100 worth of trade paperbacks. Got it 2 days later. No “online” shop, but still worked. As best you can, try to spend money with the local stores you used to go to. ------ Finnucane Too bad they didn't mention bookshop.org for getting books. ~~~ binaryorganic I recently learned about bookshop, and was super excited until I actually started making a wishlist of stuff I wanted and found half of it to either be back ordered or not exist in their system at all. Turns out all orders are processed through a single book supplier and if they don’t have it bookshop won’t either. As someone who doesn’t use Amazon, I tend to use indiebound, which just pairs you with the closest independent bookstore who has the thing you want. ------ olafure I used to use Amazon a lot. The two big factor were pricing and reviews. Today their review system is massively rigged and can't be trusted. ------ neonate [https://archive.md/k3zNE](https://archive.md/k3zNE) ~~~ monkpit Https cert error ------ chadash pro tip: I find that when things sell out on Amazon, there is often a lag before it sells out on sites that cater to businesses. The first place to check is staples.com, but I've even started placing a few orders with restaurant supply stores and such. ------ homero How are the shipping companies keeping up? That's the bottleneck. ------ LoSboccacc yeah but the less shops you use the smaller the surface attack for your personal and payment information ------ renewiltord I was going to say how Amazon might as well be the only guys online but this article is really good and offers real alternatives. Very cool. ------ jshevek Edit: Article can be read here: [http://archive.md/k3zNE](http://archive.md/k3zNE) It seems like WSJ.com should not be the link used without a follow-up link giving access to the whole community. > _Are paywalls ok? It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds._ ------ Kaibeezy paywall, whatever :( yep, amazon has been useless lately - ebay, on the other hand, all those independent sellers, very responsive! ~~~ Diederich [http://archive.md/k3zNE](http://archive.md/k3zNE) ~~~ Kaibeezy thank you ------ MisterTea Can someone please explain to me like I'm 5 why adults have to be told that other retail outlets exist besides Amazon? If you are one of these people, please kindly explain to me how you forgot there are other shops. ~~~ maerF0x0 > please kindly explain to me how you forgot there are other shops. I will provide one anecdata. Often times the first place I look for the existence of an item is Amazon. That is if I want a certain cable, I do not open and search 5-10 different places (overstock, target, bestbuy et al). I just go to amazon and choose from what they have. There may be better, there may be cheaper, but unlikely with a sufficient margin to compensate for the overhead of searching more places, learning more nuances (return policy, shipping) etc.

UBlock Origin for Safari - bijection https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari ====== kobayashi Yes! Been waiting for a uBlock Origin for Safari for a while. I looked into Ellis Tsung, the listed dev, but can't find much about him. The LinkedIn profile most likely (IMO) to be his only has 35 contacts and I've never heard of his other projects listed on his personal webpage. Throwing this out here in case somebody as something to add. The most important aspect one should look for in an app (/extension) before installation is whether or not the dev is sufficiently trustworthy. Not yet sure about this individual. Also, if we're making wish lists, somebody please look into uMatrix for Safari! ~~~ chris_wot I dunno. If the source is available and has enough eyeballs, then trust in the author is still important but less so than someone providing binaries based on closed sources. As I feel Microsoft has taken a _long_ time to learn. ~~~ throwanem No, not really. Once I install the extension, unless I do something unusual, I've signed up to automatically download and run whatever code is signed with the right key and put in the update channel. If the dev isn't trustworthy, I'm almost certainly going to be hosed before I know I have a problem. Being able to see exactly how I got hosed, after the fact, is somewhat cold comfort. ~~~ chinathrow Indeed - and extensions get sold all the time for fast cash. ------ Archio This is fantastic news, especially if this fork is well maintained and/or gets merged upstream. Safari has the lightest battery usage and fastest speed by far of any browser on my Macbook, but it sucks that the best extensions aren't always available. ~~~ BipolarElsa >or gets merged upstream I don't understand what that means. Do you mean that it will be updated automatically on your Safari once you download it initially? ~~~ devy This repo is a fork of gorhill/uBlock. Merging it upstream means merging the changes in this fork back to gorhill/uBlock so that majority of the UO community can enjoy the Safari compatibility of UO and this fork's user base can enjoy bugfixes from the gorhill/uBlock. And as users of ad blockers, we don't end up with 2 similar but slightly different softwares. Ideally, this fork should be merged back as a PR to the original repo instead of advertising it as-is. ------ alfanick I've been using uBlock on Safari for quite a while now (I've got 0.9.5.2 version installed atm). I cannot find any info what is the difference between uBlock and the uBlock Origin, can anyone elaborate on this? Is the difference like between Adblock and Adblock Plus? ~~~ madeofpalk Long story short - uBlock Origin is a fork by the original developer who worked on uBlock. ~~~ hrrsn In addition, the uBlock Safari port has been dead for some time. ~~~ bangonkeyboard Not that that's stopped the ex-maintainer from soliciting donations for it. ------ kfdhskafjs But is it better than using extensions like Wipr that used the built-in ad- blocking system? ~~~ arm Well, this is what the developer of the JS Blocker extension for Safari has to say about it¹: “ _Safari has a new feature called "Content Blockers" that allows for extremely efficient resource blocking on both the desktop and iOS version of Safari. As much as I'd like to incorporate this into JS Blocker, it is not feasible to do so. Using a content blocker will prevent JS Blocker from showing you exactly what's going on on a website (i.e. you won't see what's allowed or blocked.) It'll also break all of JS Blocker's "other" features, such as showing alerts within the webpage and canvas fingerprinting protection. Besides the loss of features, content blockers are limited to 50,000 rules. While this seems like a high number, it isn't enough for efficient protection and a lot of rules would need to be cut out to even run a content blocker. Until Apple eases the restrictions (or at least raises the number of rules that can be in a content blocker), JS Blocker will not be using this API._” ―――――― ¹ — [http://jsblocker.toggleable.com/](http://jsblocker.toggleable.com/) ~~~ LeoPanthera The whole point of the content blocking API is to protect the users privacy. Without it, the plugin gets to see every single web page you visit, and its contents, and could do anything with that information. I've been using 1Blocker which, while not free, uses the API and seems to work very well. (And can sync your block settings with the iOS.) ~~~ stephenr Agreed. Content blockers are also not executing js code for every resource the page tries to load: it's just the defined blocking rules that get processed. I'm also using 1blocker. Lacking an existing site (or time to build one myself) for sharing 1blocker packages, I've started storing them here: [https://bitbucket.org/stephenreay/1blocker- packages](https://bitbucket.org/stephenreay/1blocker-packages) ------ blue_box It doesn't block youtube ads. ~~~ draw_down Hmm, what does? ~~~ mitchty Ironically enough, the original ublock does on safari. ------ 4ad My understanding is that this doesn't use the newish Safari content block API, am I right? What's the best ad blocker that uses the Safari content block API? I use Adguard, and it's ok, but I'd want something else. Paying money is no problem. ~~~ ino I use wipr and it's excellent. I've been using it for a year and haven't seen any ads so far, not even video ads from big or small websites. The macOS version is free so you can test it. The iOS version is $1 and it's very worth it. ~~~ 4ad Unfortunately wipr doesn't have any settings (whitelists, extra filters, etc) on macOS. ------ esturk Very nice. Just tried it on (www.bbcamerica.com) and it works as oppose to the regular ublock that removes google analytics and don't know how to handle getting stuck. Will definitely test it out more and report any bugs. ~~~ wtallis > and it works as oppose to the regular ublock that removes google analytics > and don't know how to handle getting stuck. Is this a matter of something changed in the extension itself, or is it a difference in what filters they subscribe to by default? Far too much discussion of adblockers ignores that the third-party filters are not the same as the browser extension. Filter subscriptions are mostly interchangeable between the various AdBlock derivatives and replacements, and it's also quite possible to use them with only filters you create yourself. Also, it sounds like the Google Analytics problem you're referring to is what NoScript's surrogate scripts feature is for. ~~~ gorhill > Is this a matter of something changed in the extension itself Probably related to the `redirect` filter option, introduced in uBO 1.4.0[1]. [1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.4.0](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.4.0) ------ dzhiurgis Is there content blocker for iOS that supports custom filters? ~~~ navs Quite a few. 1Blocker is one of them: [https://1blocker.com](https://1blocker.com) ~~~ canuckintime And you'll need custom lists for 1Blocker because it exempts some ad networks by default. ~~~ pvg It exempts them on purpose or just happens not to include them? Which networks? ~~~ Sachse The Deck isn't blocked by default, but the author provides a package you can easily download to block them as well. ~~~ navs They, being 1Blocker, have posted about this before. It's felt that The Deck is non-intrusive and therefore not something that needs blocking. ------ theWatcher37 Great! Will this come to iOS soon? ~~~ JustSomeNobody I'm going to HN[0] you and say just use AdBlock on iOS. Works great! [0] When someone ask for one thing and someone tells you to use another without addressing the actual question. ------ jariz Is this a unofficial fork? Why is it not included with the main uBlock project? ~~~ kencausey Short version: Author of uBlock Origin is original author of uBlock and decided to hand it off. Drama ensued and original author decided to fork what had previously been his own project and continue. See [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38) ------ raybb If that was a response to the comment someone recently posted asking for it to be ported to Safari than bravo for the quick response! ------ isaac_is_goat Microsoft Edge next please? ~~~ staticelf I started looking for how to develop plugins for Edge to port it, but could not find any resources from Microsoft which is pretty strange. They simply state "Microsoft Edge supports a new HTML, JavaScript and CSS based extension model. This new model is Chrome-compatible which means that existing Chrome extension developers will be able to migrate their extensions to Microsoft Edge with minimal changes." but not how to actually add the extension or anything to get going. ~~~ vxNsr Yeah, it looks like four now they're only doing joint official extensions. Basically you gotta work with someone at Microsoft to have your extension added to the store. Otherwise you can create a regular chrome extension and side load it, and it works like 75% of the time.

Procore IPO and S-1 - publiccomps Procore is going public and just published its S-1. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;1611052&#x2F;000119312520057081&#x2F;d564161ds1.htm#toc564161_12. It&#x27;s a $339m ARR growing 55% annually. A reminder that software is still eating the world and competition is still mostly spreadsheets not other SaaS companies ====== gus_massa Copy your opinion as a comment in your other submission [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22448864](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22448864) so all the discussion is in a single page.

Encryption with Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) - triberian http://digital-era.net/encryption-with-gnu-privacy-guard-gpg/ ====== jmnicolas On all the encryption tutorials I found they always assume 2 and only 2 people trying to talk privately. I wonder how would one encrypt a conversation between say 15 people. ~~~ mike-cardwell Multiple -r's: gpg -e -r recipient1@example.com -r recipient2@example.com That products some ciphertext which can be decrypted by either recipient. ~~~ roberto I learned this the hard way when using gpg+mutt back in 2001. All my Sent mail was being encrypted only with the recipient's key, so I couldn't read it myself. There's an option to also encrypt outgoing email with your own GPG key. ~~~ clogston In case anyone is wondering how to make this the default behavior: "encrypt-to YOUR_KEY_ID" in your gpg.conf ------ schroedinger23 This article also suggests that you should use a 2048 Bit key, and you really shouldn't. Better to go with 4096 Bit. And I guess every CPU is fast enough. ------ calibwam This does not go into the Web of Trust and having your key signed, maybe the most complicated part of PGP, and perhaps also its most important feature. ~~~ eli Web of Trust isn't too useful if you don't know how to sign a message or check a signature. ~~~ cyphunk Specifically "check a signature". Even everyone that knows how to sign fail to really check anything. Honestly, if it aint boiled down to a green or red icon then people are going to misuse, assume security when its not, or just click "yes". If you get a new public key for someone, and it's signed by someone else you don't know (most of the time this is the case) are you going to bother to utilise that signature to increase the trust? No. Are you going to assume increased trust somehow regardless? Yes. FAIL. Modify it further, if it is signed by someone you do know what are the chances your UI is going to give you any sort of indication that this is more trusted that other message workflows? And if it doesn't give you any indication (most leave it up to you to check) who's gonna bother to look just passed "your friend <yourfiendsname@company>" ASCII and actually check the key? no one. FAIL. PGP WoT fails miserably. ~~~ mike-cardwell I use PGP extensively. However, I haven't bothered with the web of trust, for the same reason I don't publish my address book for everyone to read, privacy. ~~~ Torgo I have already run into this at work. I have customers whose keys are publicly available, and others who should not be, and so I cannot effectively use keysigning internally to manage relationships. This is because I don't want to upload every key I know about to a public keyserver. Maybe I am mistaken or maybe there's a way to do that without having multiple keyrings or something, but that's kind of the problem. It's really hard to tell what I would or would not be sharing because there's no "interface" to speak of and I am hardly an expert. ------ egeozcan There seems to be also a windows implementation: [http://www.gpg4win.org/](http://www.gpg4win.org/) (Wondering why the site doesn't use ssl, though) On a related note, I have a hard time understanding why a web site talking about digital security also doesn't have a certificate. ~~~ IgorPartola Lots of GPG themed sites do not. Notice that key servers provide web access over plain HTTP as well. My best guess is that they do not want to buy into the CA infrastructure and provide security using GPG itself. Also check out MonkeySphere. ~~~ egeozcan > My best guess is that they do not want to buy into the CA infrastructure and > provide security using GPG itself. This may be true (I really have no idea) but isn't it like travelling on a highway at night with your normal lights turned off because you have a better system based on infrared? After reading about the story of that guy who hacked into a computer by MITMing the notepad++ site, I became even more convinced that all pages must have certificates. Nowadays it's also possible to get a basic ssl cert for free, I can't figure out what the catch is really. ~~~ IgorPartola Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. Even my personal 100% static content site is served over HTTPS only. I am just commenting on the pattern that any GPG-themed sites I've seen follow. ------ kzrdude Did anyone else see reop recently? It's a sort of simple reimagining of easy- to-use public key crypto. [http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/reop](http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/reop) ------ vitaluha "To encrypt a File:" gpg -o encrypted_file.gpg –encrypt -r original.file # they didn't put recipient after -r ? ~~~ reedalex01 In this case it will just prompt you for for the recipient. This command is too verbose though. You can type: gpg -e file The output will be file.gpg. It will ask you for a recipient unless you have "default-recipient" or "default-recipient-selt" set in gpg.conf. ------ ausjke Best blog on using GPG that I have seen. Thanks!

US imposes visa restrictions on Huawei employees, other Chinese tech workers - aspenmayer https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-imposes-visa-restrictions-on-huawei-employees-other-chinese-tech-workers/ ====== disabled This is only the start, and more like the tip of the iceberg as for what is to come. You should be very concerned. This could affect American tech workers traveling on business, even outside of China or Asia. A lot of developed countries require Americans to obtain a visa waiver to enter their country. Even Europe is implementing theirs, the ETIAS. We might see a lot of things closing off, irrespective to Americans, or maybe even much softer versions of the great firewall of China occurring, over actions like this. Even if I am way off, it is still worrisome.

My evolving view of open source licenses - edw519 http://www.stevestreeting.com/2009/09/15/my-evolving-view-of-open-source-licenses/ ====== mmt _It’s an understandable point of view, if very hacker-oriented, but it’s not one that I personally sign up to._ To me, hacker-orientation being proportional to GPL-style restrictiveness is the major take-away. ~~~ apotheon It's not proportional -- it's just understandable within the general characteristics of a hacker mindset. So, too, are other licensing styles.

RemedyBG: Replacing the Visual Studio Debugger - noch https://remedybg.handmade.network ====== int_19h It would be nice to make it talk the VS debug adapter protocol. Then you could ironically use it in VS and VS Code, and non-ironically, in any editor that chooses to support that. Given how quickly LSP took off, I would expect there to be a few eventually. [https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter- protocol/](https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter-protocol/) ~~~ jpfr GDB can be driven remotely since a long time. Emacs and Eclipse both integrate GDB via the MI interface. LLDB supports it as well. [https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/GDB_002fMI...](https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/GDB_002fMI.html) What is the advantage of the debug adapter protocol against the existing debugger--editor integration protocols? ~~~ int_19h Mainly that DAP was designed as such from the get go, with multiple implementations for many very different languages being one of the driving assumptions behind its design. MI, on the other hand, was originally just an API to use gdb programmatically, and was later repurposed by others simply because it was already implemented by other tooling, dealing with its gdb-specific idiosyncrasies being the path of least resistance. [https://kichwacoders.com/2017/08/02/gdbs-mi-is-not-a- debug-p...](https://kichwacoders.com/2017/08/02/gdbs-mi-is-not-a-debug- protocol/) As a consequence, DAP is much easier to work with from the IDE side, and it's easier to implement an adapter, as well. Looking at this table - even ignoring all the Microsoft-made ones - how many of the languages listed have a MI debugger implementation? [https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter- protocol/implement...](https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter- protocol/implementors/adapters/) On the tooling side, Emacs and Eclipse are both covered: [https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter- protocol/implement...](https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter- protocol/implementors/tools/) Still, for native debugging specifically, it's a good point that on the IDE side, MI is currently better supported. So implementing that first would make more sense in terms of lighting up more IDEs, at the price of a somewhat more complex implementation. DAP can be implemented on top of MI - this is exactly what the VSCode C++ debug adapter does. ------ gmueckl Why would you want to avoid the Visual Studio debugger? Can anyone enlighten me? I personally haven't encountered a better debugger yet, so I'm puzzled. ~~~ joeld42 Just because everything else is worse, doesn't mean visual studio couldn't be better. I've been watching the development of this, here's their main points: It's slow. Stepping through code and updating watches can take a few seconds. Which really does slow you down when you're doing a lot of work with it. It's ginormous, you shouldn't need a huge program with tons of dependencies to debug things. And finally, it's primitive. It usually works for what it does but it would be nice for a debugger to be more flexible and allow things like: Displaying blocks of memory as images, allowing custom display visualization, and navigation of your own data structures, or charting how a value changes over time. Debugger functionality has been pretty stagnant for at least a decade. Also plugging in project specific debugging tools like serialization and custom tools would be neat. ~~~ WalterGR _It’s slow._ Do you use ReSharper? It’s been a while since I used either ReSharper or Visual Studio, but I remember ReSharper being like lashing a half-ton Snap On tool chest to your car. ~~~ mattnewport Yeah, I had to turn ReSharper off despite liking some of its features as it brings my monster development PC to its knees and is basically unusable due to its abysmal performance. It makes vanilla Visual Studio seem svelte and responsive by comparison. ~~~ gmueckl How big is the project you are working on? Resharper qas a net productivity gain for me on moderately complex projects (the lag was more than compensated by the speed gained from the mode powerful editing and refactoring, let alone the lower barrier to start otherwise tedious refactoring jobs) ~~~ mattnewport It's not huge. It's a Unity project and it's a couple of years of development with a team that has grown from just me to 4 programmers in that time so it's a decent size but there are much bigger Unity projects out there I'm sure. ------ strmpnk RemedyBG is still very young but I'm impressed by the consistent progress. I don't think it will be replacing other debuggers for my needs quite yet but I'm happy to sponsor work like this. If you're on windows and work with native executables, consider giving it a shot. ------ malkia Seems like it's using Dear IMGUI ~~~ taspeotis This is confirmed by the author: > Also, for the user interface, I am using Dear ImGui which has been a joy to > use.

Mind the Tools - bkudria http://www.slideshare.net/al3x/mind-the-tools ====== artpop Yep, tools evolve and you should keep up, nothing new there. However the only thing that has ever really mattered has been to achieve good outcomes for our users. Everything else is self-indulgent tripe really. But hey, we love that. ------ boundlessdreamz I could learn nothing useful from the slides :( ~~~ vdoma I mostly second that. The only thing I learnt was that there is a programming language called Ur. Maybe if we had the audio, it would be different. ------ etherael the part about css frameworks was somewhat interesting. I think jQuery etc are a pretty nice answer to cross browser compatibility issues, they're not a slam dunk to the point where you never have to worry about it again, but they do a pretty good job to make a landscape designed my microsoft to be as inconsistent as possible into something a lot more tolerable. The missing piece of the puzzle for me has always been layout, how practical / realistic is it to expect the same amount of smoothing there from CSS frameworks as you get from the javascript world with JS frameworks?

HTML5 webcam to canvas stream (Demo + annotated code) - cbrandolino_ http://cbrandolino.github.com/camvas ====== program I got nice quality on Chrome 21. Substitute the window.requestAnimationFrame directive with: window.requestAnimationFrame = (function() { return window.requestAnimationFrame || window.webkitRequestAnimationFrame || window.mozRequestAnimationFrame || window.oRequestAnimationFrame || window.msRequestAnimationFrame || function(callback) { window.setTimeout(callback, 1000 / 60); }; })(); and it will work in Opera 12 too. ~~~ cbrandolino_ Wow, I was sure they implemented requestAnimationFrame already! Anyway, I limited myself to trying out the various vendors' prefixes; this being mainly an experiment/preview I'd rather keep the code clean than support non-cutting-edge browsers. I'll update the paragraph about the compatibility though; thanks for the heads up! ------ jlsync Last weekend at #devfestlondon I attempted streaming and sharing these video streams over socket.io with a node.js backend. Demo is <http://svideo.herokuapp.com/> and <http://svideo.jit.su/> \- your image stream is shared on the internet. ~~~ ukc Looking forward to seeing more projects like these - is the heroku app open source? ------ bencevans I wrote a li'l app that does something along the same lines. However it captures a data uri from the webcam video and sends it via a websocket to a second user who's also doing the same. It gives you a video chat just without the audio... <https://github.com/bencevans/MediaStream> Just thought it may be of interest ;) ------ franze hi, this is as good a moment as any to promote a little bit a lib i coded some time ago. a simple (cross browser) wrapper to make getUserMedia really simple, you call Sinne.getUserVideo(success, error[, options]) //https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/Sinne and get back a nice HTML5 video element with the webcam as the input here is a simple demo using the `Sinne` <http://www.backpacker.io/> \- an HTML5 mirror ~~~ se85 You can't really call it cross browser when it doesn't support browsers that don't have getUserMedia. You had me excited for a second there because something like this with a flash fallback mechanism would be really, really useful. ~~~ franze addy osmani has coded <https://github.com/addyosmani/getUserMedia.js> which has a flash fallback, but the thing is that the flash fallback still needs you to implement a complete different logic then getUserMedia, so it's far from a perfect solution. i raised the issue here [https://github.com/addyosmani/getUserMedia.js/issues/2#issue...](https://github.com/addyosmani/getUserMedia.js/issues/2#issuecomment-7926029) (and suggested a possible solution), but for this we would need the help of a flash megamind-ninja. ~~~ se85 That's great, I might actually be able to use this to significantly improve a certain project I am working on. It would be really nice to have it using the same API, but yeah, it would be really tricky to actually pull it off. Then again, I heard about gifsockets (<http://github.com/videlalvaro/gifsockets>) earlier today, so I guess anything is possible! ------ Jelte12345 Strange enough my performance is real crappy (3fps) when I launch it, but when I switch to another tab and back it's great. This happens on Chrome 21 with none of the flags enabled. ------ dkroy Really cool, keep up the good work. It works in Google Chrome 21.0.1180.89, on Windows 7 just fine. ------ ionwake the FPS are really low - is there a way to improve that? ~~~ cbrandolino_ I'm afraid it depends on the browser implementation. It works fine on Chrome 12 odd on linux, with all hardware accelerations activated under chrome://flags/ ~~~ ionwake i had around 2fps - is the res too high? ~~~ ionwake suddenly my fps is totally awesome and fine!Looks good - Being paranoid I wonder if the stream was being uploaded to your site ~~~ cbrandolino_ Lol, look at the commit history for the pages branch - the JS didn't change since submission ^^ ~~~ ionwake I know - I am just insane - looks great - thanks for sharing ------ ionwake what is p2p performance like? what amount of code would have to be written? ~~~ cbrandolino_ Well, for what concerns the part I focused on (the canvas part) there should not be any performance issue with p2p. For WebRTC p2p video streaming in general, it seems promising. At the moment, though, there's little to no browser support and getting a full system (there's also a server involved, to initiate the connections) is not automated or abstracted yet. For more info, check out this page: <http://www.webrtc.org/running-the-demos> ------ jayniz SLOW CLAP ~~~ cbrandolino_ Oh you! Can you suggest a gif? ^^ ~~~ cbrandolino_ Uh, from the downvotes I gather that was inappropriate. Sorry; I'm completely new to HN. Anyway the backstory is that me and jayniz used to work together, and he usually adds a gif to each of his readme files.

How to charge for websites? - sdaityari http://www.sitepoint.com/charge-websites-fixed-price-projects/ ====== at-fates-hands I've seen and used just about every approach to this, yet the author completely skips the most lucrative approach, the subscription based model. I've used this on larger clients and have had great success with it. It gives them a sense of comfort since they're paying me monthly to keep their content fresh and SEO up-to-date and still have the opportunity for a redesign after a year. Plus, it gives me a nice chunk or recurring monthly revenue and establishes a long-term relationship. ~~~ elmoren How does this model usually work with web design? Is it simply that the client subscribes to n hours per month for updates, hosting isssues, etc? Then if the client wants substantial work done, they can temporarily contract for more hours? ~~~ at-fates-hands Usually what happens as part of the subscription, they pay for each individual part of the work. So design is one part, development is another. Content is another and SEO is another. Newsletter articles, responsiveness, and other features are all individually priced. In the end, they might have 6-10K worth of services they want, so you just put them on "subscription" and let them pay monthly. At the one year mark, you can let them redesign and update the content and seo, which usually involves more development, more content writing, etc. You basically bill them again with say a 10-15% discount and then you're good for another year. You can also offer additional services at a discounted monthly rate as well like writing blog posts or articles that are added to their site on a schedule so it helps with SERPS and content weight of their site. ------ CheckHook I'm not sure how seriously I should take this advice when the authors website looks like this: [http://www.optimalworks.net/](http://www.optimalworks.net/) ~~~ nfoz I typically hate on websites pretty hard, but actually I don't have much problem with that site. Maybe it's a bit orange, but it's clear and usable. What are your objections to it? ~~~ ChristianBundy * No visual heirarchy since everything is incredibly saturated * Useless stock icons are _way_ bigger than the text describing them * Horrible use of white space * Weird margins and padding * Constantly moving animation at the top right * Tacky quotes like "We will not rest until you have a site to be proud of." * Only 2 clients ever (and only one of them even has a screenshot) * Their RSS feed names their blog "BLOGNAME". I'm not attacking the site, just listing the things that jumped out at me. ------ deckar01 I like to charge a flat rate for the first X number of hours, then charge $Y/hour after that. This forces me to gather the requirement before making an estimate. It discourages the customer from adding new requirement unless it is worth $Y/hour to them. ------ fiatjaf Here's a question: why does the model website-as-a-service works for blogs, but not for other kinds of websites? You see, wordpress.com charges for blogs, ghost.io charges for blogs, other people give blogs for free, but still benefit from it somehow, also there's the example of portfolio WaaS like 4ormat.com, but this model only applies to these cases, never to hospital sites, restaurant sites, hotel sites, book sites, or any other kind of website. Then people in need of these other kinds of website always fell into building a blog, even paying for other people to build them a self-hosted pretty awful solution Wordpress blog. has this been tried? ~~~ deadghost Off the top of my head, they already exist for music/dance studios and real estate. You just don't come across them because you aren't looking. ~~~ fiatjaf Can you point me to them? ~~~ deadghost [http://www.mainstreetsites.com/](http://www.mainstreetsites.com/) [http://yourvirtuoso.com/](http://yourvirtuoso.com/) I've also seen some for real estate and others. ------ csomar My small experience with charging is related specifically to the client size. If you want to charge $350/hour, weekly and on a long basis, odds are you'll be charging a corporation and not a household. My experience also, you probably won't get $350/hour even if you charge the client so. There will be middle man, taxes, vat, payment delays, accounting and many other expenses... That's why you should be charging at least $200/hour. And that's for the very mundane, and noncompetitive tasks. ~~~ Raphmedia Note that this really depends where you are from. In my part of Canada, you would be charging around $90 to $120 / hour. ~~~ csomar I'm doing remote work. Currently in an underdeveloped country. ~~~ maxk42 I'm doing remote work in a major US city. I've been charging well above market rates for a while now, but haven't been able to break the $100 / hour barrier yet. I feel like my income is stagnating -- my skills and expertise are at the top of their game, but I just haven't been able to find projects where I'm able to charge more. Where should I be looking? Is there an effective way for me to change my approach? ------ davidw This is sensible, but can't he find someone to compare us computer folks to besides used car dealers? That's not painting a happy picture in many people's minds. ~~~ kohanz Agreed. The analogy also breaks down quickly because there is no car dealer that sells both a 10-year old Ford and F1 McLaren. Generally, dealerships offer very narrow bands of value within that large range. ~~~ robmclarty Don't be a used-car web dev then. Be the luxury sedan - sport car web dev. I explain to my clients (not necessarily through this analogy) that I'm definitely not the cheapest dev/designer they'll be able to find, but that they'll gain more quality, etc. for more money with me (with case studies to back that claim up). I don't sell my clients used cars, and so they don't expect to pay used-car rates with me ;) ------ ekspreso Why does this site eat 50% of my CPU? ~~~ robmclarty Close down those porn tabs you have open? idk. lol

Refactoring Computer Engineer Barbie - larockt http://blog.infoadvisors.com/index.php/2014/01/30/refactoring-computer-engineer-barbie/ ====== jdanton1 Good post

“I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging” - tmflannery http://extension765.com/sdr/18-raiders ====== anigbrowl _for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are_ This is a massive problem, both with less experienced directors and even some famous ones. It's important to establish the geography of a scene because if you don't the audience will be constantly distracted during action sequences - Michael Bay's _Transformers_ films are particularly egregious offenders in this regard, despite having massive budgets an thus access to the best skills that money can buy. In the 3 I've seen so far, I end up getting completely lost during the obligatory climactic battle between the good and bad robots after about 3-4 minutesand the only way to get through it is to sit back in numb passivity (which I suspect may be intentional givent he semi- propagandistic nature of these films, but that's another story). It doesn't help that the geography of many scenes is wholly imaginary, as many scenes are not shot in a contiguous physical location but may involve trick positioning within the same location, two wholly different locations, or apparently contiguous events that are shot at completely different times. Furthermore, there's a rule of thumb called 'the 180 rule' which holds that there's an imaginary line of interest between the primary character in a scene and the object of his/her scrutiny, and that editing continuity demands you pick one side of that line and keep the cameras within that 180-degree side of an imaginary circle - otherwise the audience (and indeed the editors) get confused about who is looking at what and which way they are positioning themselves within the scene. One can break this rule like any other but it needs to be done deliberately and in a way that signals a shift of focus to the audience. Keeping track of all this during the often-chaotic environment of production is a lot harder than you might imagine. Almost all films, even vary large- budget ones, have at least one shot where the image has to be flipped from left to right to correct a camera positioning error - it's better that Brad Pitt's wristwatch seem to momentarily be on the wrong arm than that the positional grammar be broken by a poorly-chosen angle. ~~~ julian37 For people (not just film students) interested in this sort of thing, I recommend "The Grammar of the Film Language" by Daniel Arijon. A fantastic book that's fundamentally changed the way I see movies. [http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel- Arijon/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel- Arijon/dp/187950507X) ~~~ anigbrowl Seconded. It is the only book I've seen that takes a truly systematic approach. It seems to have fallen out of favor due to the 1970s-era line drawings involving increasingly naked people which some people find sexist or just weird. Two other books worth mentioning are _The Visual Story_ by Bruce Block and _If it 's Purple Someone's Gonna Die_ by Patti Bellatoni. The first one is about shapes and the second one is about color. You can pick up all 3 for under $100 and you will get more out of it than most people do from spending many thou$and$ on film school. ------ waterlesscloud Soderbergh has a couple other re-cuts on his site, too. One intermixes the two PSYCHOs, the original and the shot-for-shot remake. The other is a radical re-cut of HEAVEN'S GATE. I've watched a couple hundred movies this year, but it's that HEAVEN'S GATE edit I keep coming back to in my head. I'm not really sure why (which is probably why). He somehow found the movie lurking inside the sprawling version that was released. [http://extension765.com/sdr/16-heavens-gate-the-butchers- cut](http://extension765.com/sdr/16-heavens-gate-the-butchers-cut) ------ jere I watched a few minutes and was really impressed. I don't feel like I have the time to watch all of it, but I totally would have if this was an assignment in a film class (I remember watching a single film 5 times in a row or one scene 30 times). I made a short film in college and it's terribly embarrassing as an artifact, but I just rewatched it without sound and it's quite awesome that way. :) ------ rdtsc Hehe, once you start noticing staging, lighting and framing, looking for shadows of the boom mic shadow from above, you won't be able to stop easily. You'll be enjoying a movie and all of the sudden instead of just watching the movie you are explicitly noticing editing cuts and camera positioning and thinking about it. ------ jdnier So how were any of you able to watch this? ("Sorry Because of it's privacy settings, this video cannot be played here.") ~~~ lgas For me it says "The server refused the connection." where the video should be. ------ macintux This really needs a more descriptive title. [http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the- lost...](http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the-lost-ark- steven-soderbergh/) is an interesting look at a few of the highlights. ~~~ dang A hard one for titles. We gave it a try by picking a sentence from the article. ~~~ hammock Who is we? ~~~ th0br0 dang is one of the HN mods

Ask HN: Why would weapons research be a bad thing? - sillysaurus3 In the thread about YC&#x27;s investment of Helion, there was an interesting sub-topic: the fear that the founding team might pivot into weapons research. People have expressed concern that it might be risky for an investment firm to be investing in weapons research because it might harm their halo effect.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why weapons research would even slightly diminish an investment firm&#x27;s halo effect. More than that, I don&#x27;t understand how weapons research could ever be anything but a positive thing. Societies with fierce weapons are empirically safer than those with outdated weapons.<p>I thought this would be an interesting topic for discussion, and since it&#x27;s offtopic for the original thread, I figured I&#x27;d make an Ask HN about it. I&#x27;m quite open to being persuaded. ====== krapp >Societies with fierce weapons are empirically safer than those with outdated weapons. I think weapons are only relevant to safety when they're used, or when the threat of their use is plausible. More modern weapons with their greater killing power make the society using them safer, but only when they're being used against other societies, with a certain distance. Used domestically, and with the possibility of retaliation, not so much. ------ seesomesense "Societies with fierce weapons are empirically safer than those with outdated weapons." Here is a gedanken experiment: Assume that YC decides to invest in SunniTech, a startup that does research into sustainable, ecologically friendly, easy to make, pastel coloured, child friendly and highly lethal briefcase H-bombs for use by Hamas. Describe in 10 words or less, the impact of this hypothetical decision on : 1\. your view of YC 2\. the political fall out 3\. the regulatory and legal ramifications. ------ darkstar999 For me, it's a matter of ethics. I would be spending time/money on figuring out better ways to destroy things or kill people. I'm not sure I could sleep well knowing that. ------ vasilipupkin "Societies with fierce weapons are empirically safer than those with outdated weapons" \- correlation does not imply causation. ~~~ GFK_of_xmaspast c.f. the old Heinlein canard about how 'an armed society is a polite society'.

Crystal 0.34 - fells https://crystal-lang.org/2020/04/06/crystal-0.34.0-released.html ====== strzibny If only all the attention and love for Golang goes for Crystal. I will keep dreaming... :) ~~~ flafla2 Indeed. I don't know much about this language, but the x86-64 OS written from scratch in crystal was one of the most impressive things I've seen during my time on HN [1]. In the thread about it [2], it was mentioned that the author was in high school. [1] [https://github.com/ffwff/lilith](https://github.com/ffwff/lilith) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860713](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860713) ------ keithyjohnson I hope someday Crystal will supplant Java. ~~~ oweiler That is unlikely to happen. Crystal has no corporate backing, it has no distinguishing features (in comparison to other, more popular languages), and most of all, it has no Rails. ~~~ fastball Does Java have a Rails? ~~~ AlchemistCamp It has Play. [https://www.playframework.com/](https://www.playframework.com/) ~~~ The_rationalist Why Play instead of spring? ~~~ AlchemistCamp Is that closer to a "Rails for Java" than Play is? ------ dang Recent and related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22725829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22725829) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22331005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22331005) Other threads in the past year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883882) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860713](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860713) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21053366) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20897029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20897029) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20110253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20110253) (small) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694006) Other large threads can be found among various crystals: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22crystal%22%20comments%3E20&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none) ~~~ rvz I'm sorry but this is a new post (posted yesterday) which appears to be specifically about 0.34, which should be worth discussing about the changelog? ~~~ dang Links don't imply that something shouldn't have been posted! They are just for curious readers to explore further. It's a way of sharing the riches of HN's archives. Sometimes I spell this out explicitly: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20links%20curious&sort=byDate&type=comment). But it gets tedious to keep repeating. I'm still looking for a brief, unambiguous wording that doesn't lead to misunderstanding. (Separately, it's true that HN normally shouldn't have a new front page thread for each incremental release of a project, because there are many more of those than there are slots on the front page. Users tend to upvote them reflexively as a sort of referendum on projects they like, and the threads is almost always a discussion of the project in general rather than of the specifics of a release. Those do get repetitive. But I wasn't implying anything about that with links.) ~~~ elbear You could use the first paragraph of this comment in every post with links. For me that's explicit enough, even if a bit long to type. But you could save it somewhere and paste in the comment. ~~~ dang Alas, that would be too pasty. The hivemind breaks out in hives with that much repetition. ------ partomniscient Today I found out Crystal was a language that I didn't know existed until now, however one thing I couldn't work out about Crystal was a simple outline of its intended reason for existence/purpose? i.e. You should consider Crystal instead of Ruby/lang-other for xxx because yyyy... or is this someone attempting to write a new language simply because they want to have what they think is 'the right thing' (which is perfectly acceptable, but not clear if this is the only reason). I guessed it was inspired by Ruby from the syntax, but aside from not having too many variations of do..while, I couldn't easily discern what its intended reason for being is. (I kind of got the comment about the best thing about it is there is no Rails for Crystal). I did poke around quite a bit and it's not in the FAQ, so it probably should be. ~~~ adamnemecek Types and speed. Also native. ~~~ The_rationalist How is this an innovation? Kotlin and C# are probably faster on average. Also Kotlin can be native ------ captn3m0 I worked on a simple cli-tool using crystal over the last few weeks, and it has been pretty great. The standard-library is nifty, and there are shards for common problems (not everything though). Waiting eagerly for a way to cross-compile to Windows so I can build/release binaries the way golang projects do. ------ ksec Apart from Lucky [1], what other Web Framework are there for Crystal? [1] [https://luckyframework.org](https://luckyframework.org) ~~~ viraptor There's [https://amberframework.org/](https://amberframework.org/)

U.S. Companies Turn to German Vocational Training Model to Fill Jobs Gap - jseliger http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-companies-turn-to-german-training-model-to-fill-jobs-gap-1474911069 ====== eonw I grew up in the US and worked in Austria for a number of years in my twenties, I was always impressed with this part of their education and professional process, always wondered when American companies would get smart and follow suit. Many jobs don't need a degree, they just need you to know how to do one thing really well. A short well focused training program would do that. ~~~ segmondy Yeah, but will the students stay? Or will they take their free training and go elsewhere? ~~~ eonw Lets take an example like a auto body shop(i knew a guy in Austria that owned one and did training), although they could take the skills he had taught them elsewhere, he could also hire off of his competitors as well. Some could start their own thing, but not everyone is meant or wants to run a business. ------ Futurebot I posted an Ask HN related to this, would love to get some feedback on it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12561580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12561580) Short version: Does anyone do this in software for certain specialties (like application security, DevOps, etc.) either for people with no experience (or more likely) generalist dev experience? What Dan Luu termed "trainingball" and what Matasano (sort of?) used to do with its proverbial .NET programmers: [https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/](https://danluu.com/programmer- moneyball/) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7260087](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7260087)

Arc Iris Presents iTMRW: A Sci-Fi Ballet - odd_volume https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zachtenorio/arc-iris-presents-itmrw-a-sci-fi-ballet?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=arc%20iris ====== odd_volume Over the past four years, we have been living in a bizarre mashup of 1984 and a Kanye West rant. Down is up, up is down, and left is the direction you swipe a 5"x 5" human who doesn't immediately tickle your fancy. Fires are burning, politicians are failing, and you can get cat treats delivered to your house with the click of a button. Imagine what it'll be like in 2080. Welcome to the world of iTMRW. What is the iTMRW experience? A live performance of Arc Iris' forthcoming futuristic concept album + six dancers + projections + a spectacular light show + video art + sound installation + audience interaction. The Story: The romance of Robert and his android partner, Jenny, unfolds against the backdrop of a world where advanced technology is both a source of and a “cure” for human alienation. Advertisements come in the form of pop-up thoughts, entire cities float on islands of trash, and female forms are purchased and discarded at will. The piece takes its title from iTMRW (pronounced "eye tomorrow"), the ultra mega-corporation that produces and sells every single thing known to man. Amazon, Google, and Facebook hooked up with the U.S government, made ugly, ugly love, and spawned a demon baby.

So You Want to Buy: Startup Office Snacks - dmor http://refer.ly/so_you_want_to_buy__startup_office_snacks/c/984171a826c511e2a4ec22000a1d0d51 I am using Referly (my YC startup) test this idea, but hopefully it will help some of you as well. One my most frustrating yet fun statup jobs has been trying to order food for everyone (this becomes quite challenging as a company gets to be 40 or 50 people). I tried to compile office snack ideas into a single shopping list along with commentary and advice. Is this useful? How could we make it better? ====== mindslight Ah, so straight-up referral spam becomes acceptable when done by somebody who should know better? Cool! Next up: Top 5 sites for buying V1agra and C1a1is for ma5sive gr0wth hack1ng at l0w 1ow pr1ces. ~~~ dmor This is really interesting to me, because it _could_ be helpful and useful (I mean, I just bought $900 worth of stuff for my startup so it's not just a random collection of crap) but it comes of as spam. Can you help me understand what it is that sets off the "spam bit"? Also, what does "should know better" mean? If I wrote this as a blog post on Svbtle and it was a story with a bunch of referral links instead would it be different? Is the credibility of it damaged by the fact I could make money if you buy the things I suggested? Or something else... And lastly, is this unique to the HN community and its acceptable methods of communication, or a broader turnoff you would notice even if you hadn't found this link here? ~~~ mindslight So is this the part where you engage with criticism, as the worst that will happen is fanning the flames of controversy which just drives more attention? But I'm not saying that your comment isn't in earnest either - you're wishing to figure out how to categorically make spam look like not spam, as your startup is based on making it easy for people to spam their friends and associates, and so is highly vulnerable to the social repercussions of bad first impressions. A simple and easy first step to making your site seem less spammy would be to register a whole bunch of different domains composed of relevant keywords. These can be used to mitigate being banned from link aggregator sites and to delay users noticing the pattern. Markov chain generated text surrounding the links would do wonders on the less savvy users, too. I'm sure there are plenty more of such tips if you hang out in the right forums. What you fail to realize is that credibility has been destroyed by each and every detail of the situation. The earnest blog that has the occasional spammy referral post can be mostly forgiven (although the users that upvote it shouldn't be), as it's clear that the writer has a life purpose besides referral links. I see no such redeeming qualities here. "Should know better" refers to the fact that you present yourself as part of the tech community, while simultaneously disrespecting the general consensus on spam. Although maybe it's just that the shark that was jumped has died of old age. Oh, I just remembered it's Sunday - I've got to go do a bit of sanitation hacking. ~~~ dmor Yes, creating lot's of domains is precisely what other affiliates do and what I have been trying to avoid - it feels very dishonest to me. I am extremely aware of how this looks, how affiliates are viewed, and how credibility is destroyed at every step. That's why it is so fascinating to me and why I'm trying to understand if there is a problem to solve for affiliates. There is also a good chance that this is just not the right kind of content for this community. How would you feel if Referly much more clearly said "hey, if you decide to buy through my links that is totally up to you - but if you do I am going to earn 6-8% commission. This doesn't change the price of your products, but I hope it will serve as a nice tip to me for organizing all this info in one place for you. If not, no worries" ~~~ mindslight I just don't see the angle. A respected blog posting affiliate links is about my limit of 'earnestly recommending products and happen to be making commission'. Referly seems primed to create low-authority (quality is irrelevant) lists which are then posted to various community sites, much like you have just done. You _might_ be able to save some credibility by also including non-affiliate links so users are given an easy-to-act-on choice, but I cringe for even possibly helping. ~~~ dmor Don't worry, you won't burn in the pit of spam hell... we don't want to be a spam site. The sad thing is that my credibility is poorly reflected in this Referly post, but if you were to read it in the context of distributionhacks.com, daniellemorrill.com or the Twilio company blog it would have a totally different meaning. And that is the secret we have uncovered I think... the results of my experiment will be forthcoming This is also why Klout is such a bunch of crap. ~~~ mindslight FWIW, my original comment was written in the context of what I've seen of distributionhacks (which I am not interested in, to put it mildly). I don't know if that changes your data point or what. I don't really think you've uncovered a secret - perceived motives matter _a lot_ (for example how your account has remained unhellbanned, whereas as a 1-week old 'affiliateseo7132' would have been gone quite quickly). I actually didn't doubt that you sincerely compiled a list of recommended snacks, but the context of 'how can we put stuff in people's faces and cause them be interested' coupled with affiliate links for junk food puts you in spamming territory no matter how much meta thinking or startupspeak you have going on (these things just make for the ridiculousness of it). Though I'm sure the strength of various audiences' mental immune systems will vary considerably. ------ mvkel I've made a similar list directly on Amazon. It's awesome, as I can just click "re-order" when we're running low for the items I don't have a subscription to. What sucks is Amazon carries nothing but garbage food (like the items you listed); no healthy snacks that don't make a keyboard greasy, or orange. What I've consistently bought: peanut butter crackers, trail mix snacks, water. I wish Amazon carried more _naturally_ sugar-free snack food! ~~~ dmor I agree, I was really struggling to find healthy stuff on their (at least the almonds and beef jerky are a bit better but still, not by much). I have been considering setting up subscription, but not sure how long stuff is going to last. What do you subscribe to? ~~~ mvkel Strictly non-perishables that we can never have too much of. In short, trail mix and water :) There aren't many subscription options on Amazon, either. Something that will mature over the next few years, I'm sure. ~~~ jmharvey I've found that having plenty of fruit on hand is key to being able to work long startup days without feeling like crap at the end of the week. Non-perishables are somewhat overrated: most food will be eaten (especially once you know what people like and what they don't like), and having a few dollars' worth of fruit go bad each week is a tiny amount of your food budget. ~~~ mvkel Yeah, we get fruit and other perishables, of course. I was just describing the items I can (and do) order off Amazon. ------ rdl I'm puzzled why people buy popcorn in bags (with nasty fake butter, etc. -- there's actually a disease, Popcorn Workers Lung <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronchiolitis_obliterans>). You can just use regular paper bags, put some popcorn in, and pop it. It works fine. There isn't a microwave susceptor or anything like that in the bag. (some tv dinners actually do include materials designed to heat up from microwaves to directly cook the food, particularly foods with low water content which would otherwise not get cooked well in the microwave.) ------ incomethax Maybe it's just a result of us being in the Midwest, but most of the snacks displayed here aren't all that cheap to me. I can get things cheaper if I go to Woodman's (local grocery store) or Costco. ------ dgabriel In the Boston area, Boston Organics will deliver a tasty assortment of organic fruits weekly. We get this at my office, and it goes fast. <http://www.bostonorganics.com/> I'm sure there are equivalents in other cities. ------ greattypo Would love to see a healthy version next.. :) Also anyone who buys Diet Coke on Amazon is crazy. ~~~ dmor I will work on the healthy version, but have found it is surprisingly hard to come up with at a reasonable price, it has always been a challenge in companies I've worked at. I usually buy Diet Coke at Costco, where do you get yours? ------ kdeer1 Gross, this list is a 1-way ticket to the Cancer Ward! ------ rdl Also, Jack Link's brand beef jerky is disgusting. Really. almost any of the commercial stuff is disgusting. If you don't make your own, my favorite is <http://www.bigjohnsbeefjerky.com/> It's actually made from tolerably good meat, not overly processed, and is cut into nice thin slices which are easy to eat. ------ natasham25 The food on there is pretty disgusting. Not sure why startup culture goes together with junk food. It's like buying poison for your team. ------ kdeer1 i don't have a problem with the referral links, but all this so - called food is the worst stuff for your health. If you want to poison your employees then go ahead feed this to them. You should learn a little bit about living healthy.

Ask HN: What kind of companies are willing to deal with "eccentric" workers? - similion How many places are willing to deal with an "eccentric" employee who makes very odd (but inexpensive) demands that usually go against the cultural norms of the company but is otherwise a very productive worker?<p>Are there any big companies out there that are willing to accommodate the special exceptions of a harmless but eccentric employee?<p>Let's just say this employee will probably break every trivial HR (and Security and Building Management) rule for a traditional company and will definitely do things that makes any "rock star" company go nuts. ====== miorel Is this a hypothetical question? What kind of demands/exceptions are we talking about here? ~~~ similion Smart, Well Dressed, Presentable, Straight Arrow, Tin Foil Hat Movement. Think Richard Stallman but with more tinfoil, better dressed, and little problem working with proprietary systems. Refuses to use any tracking devices (think RFID). ~~~ stray By "Tin Foil Hat Movement" I assume you mean to be funny, while stopping any possibility of a meaningful conversation regarding some topics he's interested in. If he's so smart, perhaps he's smart enough to understand things you don't. For all I know, he's batshit insane -- but then again, people smarter than we are often seem weird. Just sayin' ~~~ similion Technical people and people who need to get things done love working with the guy. Everyone else, not that big a fan.

How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth - imartin2k http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/technology/how-the-internet-is-loosening-our-grip-on-the-truth.html?_r=1 ====== jmnicolas My opinion is that the mainstream press lost all its credibility by abusing the trust we put in it so now they're lamenting that no one believes them. Just let me give one glaring example with Syria : western powers are funding and training terrorists which the press still call "moderate rebels". There's not a single journalist that had the courage* to denounce this situation. * I'm not talking about Apple "courage" admittedly, this is --loose your job-- courage ------ jessrobertson Not sure I agree that the internet is loosening our grip on the truth. It's simply highlighting the fact that most people never had a grasp on it in the first place...

D3 6.0 - catacombs https://github.com/d3/d3/blob/master/CHANGES.md ====== cjv I've always been curious on what Mike would do if he could completely rewrite D3. I saw some experiments with a declarative API [0] which seems really interesting. It seems like the main learning curve for learning D3 is deeply understanding the underlying web technologies (looking at you SVG), so could something D3-like have a more abstracted renderer? Anyway, once you use Observable - Jupyter notebooks are forever ruined, which is the highest praise I can give. Thanks for all your hard work Mike! [0] [https://observablehq.com/@unkleho/introducing-d3-render- trul...](https://observablehq.com/@unkleho/introducing-d3-render-truly- declarative-and-reusable-d3) ~~~ _spoonman While learning D3 I was stuck on a simple bar chart problem. Just could not figure it out. Asked on the D3 slack. None other than Mike himself took the time to look at my code and point out the error. Then he gave me some general tips that he noticed. The guy is so generous with his time and expertise and I admire him a great deal. ~~~ raxor53 Mike is everywhere D3 is, it's incredible. Most of the popular D3 questions on StackOverflow are answered by him. ------ atonse The first few days I used d3, I really struggled. And I got very frustrated. I simply couldn’t understand why the library was so popular. But I powered through because people whose thought patterns I respected, swore by it. Then I read some blog post somewhere. I wish I could give that author the credit they deserved. It explained the fundamental building blocks of d3, the selection APIs, etc with such clarity. Once the light bulb went off, I was able to quickly iterate on some pretty awesome totally custom stuff quickly and have sung d3’s praises ever since (it’s been 5 years). ~~~ summitsummit can you share that post? im of the former camp as of right now ~~~ infogulch Presumably, gp has forgotten. > I wish I could give that author the credit they deserved. ~~~ siddboots These two posts by the creator, Mike Bostock, sound similar to what the gp described. [https://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/](https://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/) [https://observablehq.com/@d3/selection- join](https://observablehq.com/@d3/selection-join) ~~~ tonto The data join thing is interesting. I'd be curious about other future opportunities for d3 to sync up more with react. Posts like this [0] show that d3 can "just generate the path" and then at that point you can use different renderers like React e.g. return <path d={line(data)}/>. It is more limited doing it this way but more ties into the react model would be wonderful [https://observablehq.com/@d3/d3-line](https://observablehq.com/@d3/d3-line) ~~~ jwilber I don’t have any public codebase examples at hand, but what we’ve done at work also works quite well: basically we implement our D3 charts as a class with methods corresponding to desired lifecycle events. We then create a Component wrapper around said class and call the methods during their corresponding lifecycle events. (Idk how confusing or not that was but I wish I had a repo to share to make it clearer). There’s also a book I read while ago from Swizec Teller on d3 + react integration[0]. It may be dated by now as it’s been some time since I last read it, but it’s worth looking into! [0] [https://leanpub.com/reactd3jses6](https://leanpub.com/reactd3jses6) ------ enjalot We are hosting a d3 meetup online Thursday 8/27 (tomorrow) more info here: [http://meetu.ps/e/Jh8GY/1kwFr/d](http://meetu.ps/e/Jh8GY/1kwFr/d) Mike Bostock will be doing an AMA at the end if you have burning d3v6 questions (though you can expect some more documentation on upgrading to come very soon!) I'll also plug our other two speakers, Mike Freeman and Amelia Wattenberger who are amazing d3 educators & authors. It's exciting that this is the first big online d3 meetup since the pandemic put a stop to in-person events, and as a consequence of being online anyone can participate! ~~~ azemetre oh man, I'd love to attend but that is such an awkward time for me. Will the talk be recorded and hosted anywhere? ~~~ lbuchman Yes, the recording will be posted to the Observable to YouTube channel after the event. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCD2tAKN32ya7V639gkbWhg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCD2tAKN32ya7V639gkbWhg) ------ jedbrown For those looking for higher level interfaces for interactive visualization via D3, check out Vega/Vega-Lite [1] and Altair [2] (a Python library based on Vega-Lite). [1] [https://vega.github.io/](https://vega.github.io/) [2] [https://altair- viz.github.io/](https://altair-viz.github.io/) [3] [https://vega.github.io/vega/about/vega- and-d3/](https://vega.github.io/vega/about/vega-and-d3/) ~~~ kqr One of the things I really like about D3 is how there's nothing it won't do, precisely because it's a lower level interface. With many higher level interfaces, things go great until I eventually run into a situation where I would like to do a tiny tweak that would improve readability a lot, and it turns out the higher level interface does not support that, so I'm out of luck. That said, I haven't tried Vega. What are your experiences in terms of that problem with Vega? ~~~ gampleman I think they serve different use cases. I love Vega-lite for exploratory analysis and for quick prototyping. You can get fantastically complex visualisations very quickly with it. But for building "production" visualisations, I think the low level approach is better: you'll get much smaller bundle sizes, you have much more control over the final look and that control tends to be expressed "naturally" rather than in convoluted configuration. ~~~ awake I would not even touch vega, it’s the engine vega lite is built on. Vega lite is a declarative json format for representing charts. The spec is very well thought out and you can rapidly iterate on prototypes. Altair is a python wrapper for vega lite ------ vmception I just wish all the cool animated examples of D3 were updated to use the latest version of the library. Mike had such cool and colorful ideas for the web 8 years ago which still wow supporters of any project. But I have had to spend significant time and money updating things to work with Vue or React while simultaneously trying to figure out what changed across versions of D3 while simultaneously trying to figure out what the inherited version of D3 was even doing. Mike seems to have opted for more practical designs in the latter half of the decade in his exploration of data visualizations. While other contributors lack inspiration of using this as an art form. ~~~ mbostock We’ve updated hundreds of examples to the latest version. Here’s the gallery: [https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery](https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery) We’re still in the process of republishing some of them and were hoping to announce tomorrow but it looks like someone noticed and here we are on HN. ~~~ vmception Good to see you here today, and glad to know that. Why ES2015 specifically? Like where are the compatibility issues or is this a necessary upgrade path for older versions and then you’ll phase into es6 or leapfrog that to something even newer? Or if ES2015 is “good enough”? Javascript can be a hot mess, there isn’t always a need to keep up and the troubles arise when you try to. ~~~ mbostock Collections (Map and Set) and iterables; the latter practically requires for- of syntax and so can’t be supported in older browsers. d3.group and d3.rollup are much more enjoyable to use than d3.nest. ~~~ vmception Is this a consideration of many JS library maintainers? Or just you because D3 has broad appeal. This and other compatibility charts shows only Internet Explorer continuing to be the bane of your existence. [https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/](https://kangax.github.io/compat- table/es6/) ~~~ nicoburns IE11 is still widely supported across a lot of the industry. It's use is declining, but I suspect it'll be a a good while yet before it disappears because there are still so many IE-only internal apps. ------ Waterluvian Does the full adoption of ES6 modules result in trivial tree shaking? I’ve found that’s one of my favourite effects of libraries adopting the newer module styles Edit: it’s modular but the modules I peeked at have sideEffects set and look pretty clean. I’m excited to see what I can do and keep tiny bundles! (I’m obsessed lately with making neat gadgets that load instantly) ~~~ mbostock D3 has been written in ES modules since the beginning of 2016 when we adopted Rollup for bundling. The difference now is that we’re adopting ES2015 language features that can’t be transpiled (namely for-of). We didn’t get around to it for 6.0 (mostly for fear of breaking backwards- compatibility in Node), but we plan on adopting type: "module" for Node in the nearish future. In the meantime you can consume D3 as an ES module using Skypack if desired. [https://cdn.skypack.dev/d3](https://cdn.skypack.dev/d3) ------ tylerscott As a former Protovis user whose mouth hit the floor the day he discovered D3, I never cease to be amazed at the quality of work Mike does. Thanks, Mike! ~~~ mbostock Thank you! ------ motohagiography Sankey diagrams are still blowing enterprise minds in 2020. I don't know what award it would be, but it should be important, and the author should get it. ~~~ jeffbee Didn't the inventor of flow diagrams die in the 19th century? ------ jakecopp Is anybody else annoyed by how tightly coupled D3.js is with [https://observablehq.com](https://observablehq.com)? It's basically impossible to get started with D3 without using the Observable online playground, I find it so frustrating. ~~~ jiofih Hmm no. It is not coupled to Observable at all, what problems exactly are you facing to use it elsewhere? ~~~ jakecopp Both the introduction link [1] and examples link [2] on the D3 homepage [3] and Github [4] only shows sketches on Observable - is there any official D3 getting started documentation _not_ on Observable? Similar frustations are aired in a forum post: "I want to learn D3. I don`t want to learn Observable. Is that ok?" [5]. [1]: [https://observablehq.com/@d3/learn-d3](https://observablehq.com/@d3/learn-d3) [2]: [https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery](https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery) [3]: [https://d3js.org/](https://d3js.org/) [4]: [https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki](https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki) [5]: [https://talk.observablehq.com/t/i-want-to-learn-d3-i-don- t-w...](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/i-want-to-learn-d3-i-don-t-want-to- learn-observable-is-that-ok/1957) ~~~ addicted The vast majority of library documentation of even major libraries is simply text with no playground. The fact that they’ve made the effort to add a playground by leveraging a fairly easy to use tech should not be held against the open source maintainers! Besides, all those examples are trivially reproducible locally, the way you would have to do it for the vast majority of languages which don’t give such fancy interactivity in their tutorials. ------ renewiltord Which wrapper library around d3 that's declarative would people recommend? I'm thinking something where I can swap the state in React between renders and it updates intelligently with animations etc. ~~~ iaml Just use d3 directly in react, rendering svg is ok for most cases. You would want to ignore all the dom manipulation parts of d3, but otherwise they work well together. ~~~ yoran Indeed. When you Google for "React/Vue/Ember D3", the tutorials always use the DOM manipulation layer of D3. But every front-end framework already comes with a great reactive system to ensure the DOM is in sync with the data. And those are a lot easier to use than D3's in my opinion. The only tutorial that doesn't do this and that "gets" it is one by Amelia Wattenberger: [https://wattenberger.com/blog/react- and-d3](https://wattenberger.com/blog/react-and-d3). I recommend this tutorial to understand how to use D3 in React. ------ romanr It seems like a very versatile framework, but nowhere I can find any recipe or guide of a very simple case - how to combine different types of charts in one? Like simple line chart overlaying the bar chart. It seems to be only possible by rendering them as completely separate charts and then overlaying one on top of each other in DOM? Which seems hacky. ~~~ fourthark D3 is pretty low level - geometry and binding data to create DOM elements. It’s not really a charting library - look for libraries built on top of it for abstractions like “composite chart” or whatever. So yeah at the D3 level you would just draw one chart and then draw another chart on top, probably each wrapped in a <g> if you’re using SVG. Maybe they’d share X/Y scales. ------ d0m What's the best resource(s) to learn D3 for an experienced dev? I find most books/tutorials to be overly verbose. ~~~ mbostock I published a new tutorial for D3 earlier this year: [https://observablehq.com/@d3/learn-d3](https://observablehq.com/@d3/learn-d3) ~~~ Ao7bei3s Thanks. Is there anything in it that is now outdated? It would be nice to mention the D3 version targeted in the very first paragraph. ~~~ mbostock This tutorial, along with the hundreds of other examples we maintain on Observable, are kept up-to-date with all D3 releases. ------ ldd Oh, D3.js is awesome, and all the cool visualizations that I saw over the years makes me glad it exists. Let's share our creations here! Here's mine: a tech tree using D3.js made many years ago: [https://github.com/ldd/tech-tree-js](https://github.com/ldd/tech-tree-js) ------ jwilber Awesome, I’m always shocked by how much D3 has to offer and the quality amount of time + effort Mike Bostock continues to invest into the project. On a different note, hoping the CORS issued I received when using a v6 version d3-fetch with local files got updated ~~~ mbostock Thanks. Philippe Rivière has been helping substantially and making amazing contributions! If you think you’ve found a bug please file an issue on GitHub. (That said, d3-fetch is just a trivial wrapper on the native Fetch API, so any CORS error there is probably expected.) ------ yoran I love D3. I tried plenty of other higher level libraries but very quickly you run into customization issues. So for Backtest ([https://backtest.curvo.eu/](https://backtest.curvo.eu/)), I moved all the charts to D3. It's a bit lower level and was more work to set up initially, but now I'm in full control and can easily extend any chart. D3 is a great piece of software! ------ ricardonunez I use d3 in my map generator app. I’ll look into this update to add and rewrite some of the features. Labels have been an issue lingering around for too long. ------ in9 For me, a data scientist, learning D3 feels so far off since the background needed to learn it seems vastly connected with some notion of frontend concepts, which for me are very foreign. And honestly, I don't care much about UI programming. Is this impression correct? Is there a way around this? A learning source that covers both? ------ canada_dry I love D3, have been using it on and off for years. The biggest pain point I have coming back to it - esp after a release or two - are the scope of the changes!! Many methods and properties have changed thus most of the examples, blog posts, and stackoverflow assistance are outdated so it generally takes much longer than I had hoped - but the results are always worth it. ------ daemonk Awesome. I am a huge fan of D3. I am still using v4. But I will definitely spend some time migrating on my next refactoring. ~~~ mbostock The changes between v4 and v5 are tiny (adopting promises in d3-fetch instead of callbacks). The changes between v5 and v6 are also largely backwards- compatible, so hopefully your upgrade will be painless. A migration guide is here: [https://observablehq.com/d/f91cccf0cad5e9cb](https://observablehq.com/d/f91cccf0cad5e9cb) ------ zebraflask I have several charts on my development list that I have been planning to use D3 for - this new release is perfect timing. ------ ncmncm Just won't render, at all, for me. Lotta "Notebook not responding. There may be an infinite loop that has crashed this notebook, or a notebook open in another tab.". So why should something happening in another tab be allowed to mess anything up? (Not that there is anything.) No, sir, I didn't like it. ------ RocketSyntax exciting to see event listeners drag, zoom. they make data come alive

Adobe CIO resigns - insiderinsider Insider reports that Adobe CIO has resigned ====== insiderinsider i think its interesting because most of the svp's are leaving adobe , David Wadhwani left recently , Naresh Gupta couple of months back and coming to the CIO when the industry is trying to get some level of gender equality, Adobe's leadership is just male dominated with no representation of female

Fleck: A Lisp that runs wherever Bash is - rcarmo https://github.com/chr15m/flk/ ====== seisvelas Cool! Aside from satisfying the preference for a non-Schemey syntax, what is the advantage of Fleck over the Scheme shell (who's manual page contains this classic gem of a rant: [https://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html](https://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html)) or the newer Racket Shell (unfortunately named Rash)? ~~~ 75dvtwin Speculating here... but in my reading: Fleck does not require a compiled executable to be installed. As long as you have bash Fleck will work. For scsh you have to have to install platform specific executable. If it is available in a particular distro, perhaps it is not that bad. I write, these days, a lot of Ansible installation tools For Multiple versions of (and almost bare) linux, freebsd, openbsd (and hopefully at some point for DragonFlyBSD). Today, I have to write shell-specific scripts to do application-centric process management, application-centric backup preparation steps, health monitors, smoke tests and so on. To minimize my work, I instruct Ansible to preinstall bash everywhere... and then I run the bash scripts. But writing bash scripts is, well,... unsettling (hard to get used to primitive return values, lack of normal enumerated parameter passing and so on) With Fleck (at least this is my reading), I will be able to install Fleck via Ansible and then write all the scripts in Scheme (which I much prefer compared to bash, zsh or anything else). I guess, if, in the future, Fleck will help me to avoid worrying about Powershell, kornshell and so on -- I would be delighted. Sort of like shell-vm on top of base shells :-) ~~~ aasasd > _I instruct Ansible to preinstall bash everywhere... and then I run the bash > scripts_ Wait a minute. I may be mistaken, but I thought Ansible needed Python on the managed machines, to run some of the modules. Afaik it uploads some Python code via ssh before doing the work proper. ~~~ capableweb I'm pretty sure Ansible doesn't _require_ python on the target machine as I've run Ansible before with servers that didn't have python on them. ~~~ aasasd Ah, yes, the ‘raw’ and ‘script’ modules can work without Python, so I guess this makes 75dvtwin's workflow possible. ([https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/i...](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/intro_installation.html#managed- node-requirements)) ------ aasasd Afaik Mal makes interpreters, not transpiled Lisps like Clojure. Notably, depending on the platform, transpiling on-the-fly may be feasible for scripting. Fennel, on Lua, does its thing pretty damn fast even on my horribly underpowered machine. ~~~ pjmlp _Compiled_ Lisps like Clojure. ------ hellofunk It explicitly says that it does not support clojure code, yet all examples use the clojure file name extension. Weird. But still very cool nonetheless. ~~~ chr15m It supports a limited subset of Clojure code. I will update the README to reflect this more accurately, thanks for the feedback! ------ em-bee i was hoping for a lisp-like syntax for bash commands, but this seems to do something else. to run a bash command i need to do: (sh __* "echo >&2 hello") what i expected is: (echo >&2 hello) or possibly (sh __* echo >&2 hello) if i have to quote the whole bash command, then this becomes impractical because it adds an additional quoting layer, and doesn't make bash quoting any easier. ~~~ chr15m This could be accomplished with a fairly simple macro. Patches welcome! ------ Terretta > _Now you can use a humble LISP to do Bash things. Bash as a scripting > language has many edges, but it is everywhere..._ Just in time ... > _Starting with macOS Catalina, your Mac uses zsh as the default login shell > and interactive shell. You can make zsh the default in earlier versions of > macOS as well._ [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208050](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT208050) ~~~ ngcc_hk What is your intent? The program need to go zsh? ~~~ skissane Well, the big problem with bash on macOS is it is stuck on bash 3.x. FSF changed license of bash, starting with 4.0, from GPLv2 to GPLv3, and Apple's corporate policy says no GPLv3 allowed, so macOS stuck on bash 3.x. You write a script on Linux using bash 4.x features, take it to run on macOS with bash 3.x and it doesn't work. (You can still install bash 4.x on macOS, but if you have to install bash 4.x that gets rid of the argument "bash is everywhere and we don't have to install it so that's why we use it instead of something else".) Apple is trying to move macOS users to zsh because they like the license (it is MIT-like) and hence will be keeping up to date with new versions of it, instead of being stuck in the past like they are with bash.

Massive high school texting scandal results in… sanity - omnibrain https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/12/15/massive-high-school-texting-scandal-results-in-sanity/ ====== DrScump "The fact that sexting is consensual on all sides" No, it _isn 't_. The whole purpose for laws protecting kids from sexual abuse is that kids can be _too young to formulate consent_ because they don't understand the risks and implications. ~~~ Nadya Consensual in casual sense. Not legal sense. Legally they can't consent (under age of 16) but there are a bunch of caveats and "as long as both are under 18" or "age difference is no greater than 2 years" etc. That muddy the water. The case is centered around a boyfriend and girlfriend of similar age sending each other nudes. "Sane" people see no issue with children (teens, whichever your preferred term for minors is) exploring their sexuality so long as neither is feeling pressured to do so (read: consent. In the _casual_ sense, not the legal one.) The very fact that it is legal for them to _fuck each other_ but not legal to _share nude photos_ is the "sanity" approach to the law. Why should A be legal but B be illegal? This is where "intent of the law" is brought into play.

Show HN: Guestboard 2.0 – Our Alternative to FB Events – Now with Video Chat - hamslamwich https://guestboard.co ====== hamslamwich Hey everyone, Peter, Nick, and Joseph here with [https://guestboard.co](https://guestboard.co), and we're back with some significant improvements, a snazzy iOS app, as well as our own pivot/response to the growing need for virtual event solutions. The problem that Guestboard continues to solve is that there are MANY event types that are too complex for a simple digital invite like Paperless Post, and too small for pricey event software. Facebook Events used to claim this title, but the average Joe/Jane needs a flexible and intuitive tool that can scale with their needs, and can manage groups of 10 - 1000 people, whether it's personal or professional events. But with COVID, we were presented with a new hurdle. In-person events being out the window for a while, we didn't want to lose sight of our original mission. But we also needed to meet the changing landscape. Among other updates, we just released our Video Chat widget– one of 10 optional (and free) event tools you can activate in your event board. The Video Chat widget is nothing groundbreaking, to be honest. Just stable, encrypted videocalls powered by Jitsi Meet's open source platform. But with this, we were able to build one important distinguishing feature.. With Video Chat, you can schedule multiple AND concurrent video calls, with slick invitations that are sent directly to your existing guest list within Guestboard. When paired with other widgets like Schedule, Checklist, Message Board and Shared Resources, you're able to build an event board that is perfectly tailored to the needs of your group, foster a little community around your event, and streamline your communication all in one place. As always, we're here for some real feedback and critique, so if you're the type of person who typically wrangles large groups of people, how can we solve your pain points even further? Happy Friday! ------ yodon Homepage looks absolutely beautiful, but I suspect it would convert better if you had more visual emphasis on getting people to click on your call to action (which presumably is hosting an event). ~~~ hamslamwich Thanks! Always good to remember the CTAs :) We'll take a fresh look at the page with that in mind. ------ skinnymuch The product looks great. Congrats with 2.0. However, I used Jitsi Meet on a daily basis for a year. I was a frequent person to a Jitsi Meet room recently as well. It was and is pretty bad relative to others. There’s almost always an issue once you get to double digits. Even in smaller numbers, it is buggier far more than Whereby or Zoom. Its cpu and Bandwidth usage is too high too compared to better video options. I avoid Jitsi as much as possible.

Is California's Budget Endangering Silicon Valley? - loganfrederick http://loganfrederick.com/blog/is-californias-budget-endangering-silicon-valley/ ====== digikata As an investment, educating, retaining, and attracting talented students in California would seem like a fundamentally positive way to raise the tax revenue in the state. Those university students will often work and start businesses where they are educated. We've seen recent articles with charts on individual ROI for college education cost vs additional future income - that should translate to long term increased state revenue. I think the mistake of the article is to focus to much on budget costs, and too little on where value generation could be - not just as an abstract social good, but as a way to prioritize and or structure funding which yields a very real return on investment.

Regulation, not technology is holding back driverless cars - ultrasaurus http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/business/economy/29view.html ====== jxcole My dad works in the airplane industry and had an interesting story to tell me that relates to this. (I'm not sure exactly how accurate it is or what the source is, sorry). Apparently, it is illegal for pilots to read while flying. Even if they are heading in a straight line with no one around for miles. This is because one time an pilot wasn't paying attention and due to a series of software failures, the plane turned into a mountain. Interestingly, the plane was tuning at a very exact amount so that the number of Gs remained constant. In any case, this single crash caused regulation to state that computers can never fly planes by themselves. This strikes me as rather unfair. If a single human crashed a plane, it does not make it illegal for humans to fly planes by themselves. Another example is that in London, subways must be driven by a human. Even though driving a subway may be trivial (there is no way to steer), Londoners apparently do not feel comfortable being driven by a non-living thing. They want to be sure that if they die, the driver dies too, adding a level of accountability. It seems that this sort of wide-spread mistrust of machines is driven more by socially normal paranoia than any kind of logic. I for one am rooting for machines to take over all forms of driving. There may be a few mishaps, but it will probably become hundreds of times safer eventually. ~~~ gst "Londoners apparently do not feel comfortable being driven by a non-living thing." Does not surprise me. Most Europeans have not even adapted to automatic transmission in cars, and still believe that a human can switch gears better with manual transmission (which has not been true for decades now). Makes me wonder if they ever adapt to fully automated driving. (And yes, I'm saying this as a European). ~~~ weavejester Clearly that's not universally true, otherwise racing drivers would use automatic gearboxes. It may be true for everyday driving, but I'd need to see some citations for this claim. Frankly, I'm a little dubious of automatic transmission. Perhaps I've just been driving the wrong cars, but I haven't found an automatic gearbox that can match a human being. For instance, if I'm descending a steep hill, I'll stick the car in a lower gear, but an automatic always chooses the higher gear. ~~~ ars Automatic transmissions avoid engine braking. If you want it, you need to choose it manually. And personally I never do for the simple reason that brakes are a lot cheaper than transmissions. And I rarely descend a hill long enough and steep enough that brake heating is a serious problem. (And when I do I usually just slow down, and stay slow.) ~~~ stretchwithme I downshift on hills because that keeps more of my stopping power ready to use. Brakes heat up when you use them continuously, reducing their effectiveness. ------ cletus No surprises there. The transition to driverless cars is (IMHO inevitable. At some point it will be cheap enough that the additional cost will pale in comparison to the lives that will be saved as well as the simple convenience of being able to do something else while commuting somewhere. Likewise I see this kind of thing replacing many forms of public transportation. There will simply be a fleet of cars. You'll say where you want to go and some system will route people and cars to destinations. But, the transition won't be quick or easy. You need look no further than the aviation industry to see why. Basically, automation in modern aircraft is a double-edged sword. It seems to erode the ability of pilots to actually fly [1], software errors causing deaths [2] and (I can't find the link to this) I also read a study that in more automated planes, pilots are more likely to believe erroneous instruments rather than their own senses and experience. The issue won't be how the car normally behaves because as demonstrations have shown, current systems require very little human intervention. The issue will be extraordinary circumstances plus the huge liability problem of any errors. Example: if someone runs a red light and causes a crash, killing someone, that person is responsible. If an automated car does the same thing, the manufacturer will be responsible. That alone will impede adoption. Instead I think you'll have what we already have: slowly adding automation to cars. Cars already have radars and can stop themselves from colliding, they can park themselves and so on. But at some point the driver will need to go away and that will be a tremendously challenging leap forward for society. [1]: [http://www.tourismandaviation.com/news-4530-- Pilot_Reliance_...](http://www.tourismandaviation.com/news-4530-- Pilot_Reliance_on_Automation_Erodes_Skills_) [2]: <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.77.html#subj6> ~~~ JoeCortopassi I couldn't get past the (unclosed parenthese in the second sentence. It's like my inner programmer went into OCD overload... ~~~ jacques_chester I couldn't get past the use of "parenthese"[ _] as a singular noun in the first sentence. It's like my inner pedant went into OCD overload. _ 1:Parenthesis :: >1:Parentheses ~~~ jacques_chester ... hoist on my own petard. ------ ______ Speed limits are another realm in which regulation can hold back the development of driverless cars, besides merely allowing them on the streets in the first place. With computerized drivers, it will finally be possible to fully enforce speed limits, by introducing some ceiling to the speed attainable by the car. I'm sure some "well-meaning" legislator will make it his or her priority to ensure that speed limits are never exceeded. However, at least in Massachusetts, if you go on the highway, everyone (including police) drive at ~75 MPH even though the posted speed limit is 55 or 65 MPH. Few will buy a car with this kind of handicap, were it to exist -- and I worry that it will. Many speed limits in the US were imposed decades ago, with less safe and responsive cars -- it would be a pity if potentially revolutionary technology advances were thwarted by this fact. Legislation has already crippled or made useless many useful automotive innovations. In the US, technologies that allow for adaptive cruise control (maintaining a distance to the car in front of you) can only decelerate the car, and not accelerate the car. This forces the driver to have to constantly accelerate, greatly reducing the effectiveness of this feature. Many computer- laden vehicles with navigation systems are similarly crippled -- they automatically "lock" when the car is in motion, and some (like in Lexus vehicles) cannot even be overridden by people sitting in the passenger seat... often causing unintended risks like drivers pulling over on busy highways just to readjust their GPS target. ~~~ adrianN Or they introduce a robot-only lane where the cars can decide for themselves what a safe speed it, making speed limits obsolete. When cars can communicate with each other about dangers, much higher speeds are possible with less distance between cars. ~~~ burgerbrain An absolutely fantastic idea. It's a shame it will never happen. ------ Jd The article doesn't make its case very well. The core problem people are presumably worried about is safety, and saying it they have a "good safety record" is hardly enough to reassure the senators, etc. who would presumably be responsible for relaxing restrictions. For example, what about edge cases? Suppose the Google car does just fine in normal driving conditions, but in a blizzard w/ 26 mile per hour gusts of wind (as I drove in recently), or when a tractor trailer flips over on the road in front of you? Humans have a certain intuition that allows them to do bizarre twitches in extreme situations (even including supernormal strength) that presumably no machine intelligence will be able to approach for a long time (if ever). Or what about the possibility of someone hacking the car? Could a worm engineered by some hostile government take millions of cars off the road -- or, worse, cause them all to steer into the median and cause mass damage and thousands of instant casualties? It is, frankly, irresponsible not to consider edge cases like these when drafting legislation, and while I'm all for gradual introduction and more testing, the author of this article has convinced me that senators sitting on their hands not doing anything are probably acting on the interests of the people much more so than those who wish to simply hand over driving and navigation functions to machines as soon as possible. ------ erikpukinskis I wonder if driverless cars could start out as a tool for people with disabilities. If such use were challenged, I can imagine the supreme court taking seriously a case by a person who is quadriplegic or blind demanding the right to use a self-driving car. If they can prove them safer, it will be hard to find a compelling government interest that could offset denying the use of this assistive technology. ~~~ kwis They appear to be starting as 'driver aids' on new cars. Today's higher-end cars have adopted technology that alerts you when you drift out of your lane, watches your blind spots, safely follows the car in front of you, performs emergency stops, parallel parks itself, and adjusts vehicle dynamics in a multitude of ways. My assumption is that this is a first step towards driverless cars, as it provides the manufacturers a way to test critical technologies in a safe environment. If the dealerships aren't downloading data from these systems, and sharing it back to the engineering groups, thats an enormous wasted opportunity. ~~~ janesvilleseo I believe your assumption is correct as well. All of these 'new high tech safety toys' are the tip of the iceberg. With all of these components being used and people becoming comfortable with them, we will soon see more adoption towards driverless cars. I think another major milestone towards this will be the next generation of GPS, with the increased accuracy it will help guide the cars where they need to go. ------ melling One idea would be to make some long haul roads, or sections of them, completely driverless. Maine to Miami along a section of I95, or NYC to LA. We could start the test with tractor trailers. Let them drive for a few years and tune the system. There would be a huge economic benefit to allowing trucks to run 24x7 without drivers. ~~~ paganel > There would be a huge economic benefit to allowing trucks to run 24x7 > without drivers. What would happen to the current drivers? Which new jobs should they pick? ~~~ eru Who cares? There was a time when 80% of the population used to work on farms. Now much less than 10% work on farms in the western world. Do we have 70% unemployment? ------ chrismealy We don't need driveless cars, we need carless people: <http://www.carfree.com/> ~~~ alnayyir This would make riding my motorcycle much safer, I like it. ~~~ seanx If driverless cars start reducing the car road toll then motorbikes will start to look really dangerous:(. I suppose we could get self driving motorbikes but that would be missing the point of riding. ~~~ nazgulnarsil given that a huge proportion, maybe even the majority, are caused by people in cars turning in front of or merging into motorcyclists I doubt it. ------ joel_ms >But it’s clear that in the early part of the 20th century, the original advent of the motor car was not impeded by anything like the current mélange of regulations, laws and lawsuits. They did try in the 19th century though, at least in the UK, with the Locomotive Acts[1]. The way those laws went out of their way to protect the status quo (i.e. horse-powered transport) is an interesting parallell to today's possible transition from human-controlled to computer-controlled transport. [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts> ~~~ meric "The Locomotive Act 1865 (Red Flag Act):[5] Set speed limits of 4 mph (6 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3 km/h) in towns. Stipulated that self-propelled vehicles should be accompanied by a crew of three: the driver, a stoker and a man with a red flag walking 60 yards (55 m) ahead of each vehicle. The man with a red flag or lantern enforced a walking pace, and warned horse riders and horse drawn traffic of the approach of a self propelled machine." ------ pnathan Some things aren't brought into focus here. (1) Off-highway driving happens. That means that the algorithms have to manage an uncontrolled environment where 'anything' can happen. (2) It is very expensive to create bug-free software. (3) You can't iterate by failing fast on life-critical systems after it is released. Failure means killing someone. (4) Legal liabilities. It's not going to work to say something like, "This car's driver software is not warranted free from defects". (5) Humans can manage situations utterly outside the norm; algorithms can not see beyond the vision of the designer. I work in an industry which operates _below_ the levels of software assurance that the medical/flight industries work at, and it is incredibly painstaking as it is. A fully automated car will be very expensive to build. I am not a paranoiac regarding software. I am a paranoiac regarding software bugs and the limits of the software designers. ------ blue1 I suspect that this kind of "risky" technology will be deployed first in more adventurous countries, like China. ------ uuilly Regulation and fear are to be expected. The question is, what to do about them? I predict the largest PR campaign in the history of technology. Public opinion generally drives regulation. So less public fear will lead to less regulation. While I have no way to prove it, I'd bet my right hand that Google's PR people made this story happen. I'd bet they also made the first NYT piece blowing up the Chauffeur project happen and they made it look serendipitous for authenticity. I think "The Suit is Back," and I think it's going to come back again and again. Prediction: Driverless cars will be portrayed in a very positive way in a major motion picture within the next year. ------ RyanMcGreal This is the crux of the matter: > imagine that the cars would save many lives over all, but lead to some bad > accidents when a car malfunctions. The evening news might show a > “Terminator” car spinning out of control and killing a child. There could be > demands to shut down the cars until just about every problem is solved. The > lives saved by the cars would not be as visible as the lives lost, and > therefore the law might thwart or delay what could be a very beneficial > innovation. It's otiose to point out that the premise of personal motor vehicles is _not_ called into question every time a human driver spins out of control and kills someone. ~~~ cyrus_ Human psychology operates in a realm only dimly linked to logic, my friend. Consider the response in the US to the "risk" of terrorism, which in quantitative terms is tiny. ------ wallflower I'm not sure I trust the underlying architectures that are being developed with my life... DDOS and MITM attacks take a whole-new meaning if the networked entities are 3-ton objects moving at 65 mph. ------ stretchwithme Its possible to prove that driverless cars can be safe. And that's by keeping cars from having accidents. If safety systems can keep human drivers from having accidents by stopping vehicles before they can have an accident, they can do the same for robotic vehicles. Such systems would place limits on how fast you could accelerate, turn the wheel or apply the brakes. And they would also brake for you when other vehicles, pedestrians and animals appear to be on a collision course. Such systems will have to be proven in the real world. And we are starting to see them. The newest Mercedes have such features. I predict that full blown systems will dramatically lower accidents for older people, teenagers and those who drive under the influence. Eventually all new cars will have these systems. And by then it will be a lot easier to trust the machines. ------ ultrasaurus So much of technical progress happens through delivering most of the value of the previous solution at a fraction of the cost (email vs postal mail). Society seems to rule this kind of progress out for a few industries like health care, I assume something similar is happening here. ~~~ william42 The problem with healthcare is not that progress is being ruled out but that healthcare is highly labor-driven. So far there's no machinery that can replace a doctor. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect> ~~~ pash > The problem with healthcare is not that progress is being ruled out but that > healthcare is highly labor-driven. So far there's no machinery that can > replace a doctor. As a matter of policy, the FDA will not approve any device that makes a medical diagnosis without human intervention. [1] Recently there have been numerous studies and much punditry accusing the American medical regulatory environment of stifling innovation and driving up costs. [2][3][4] The arguments are strikingly similar to Cowen's argument re autonomous cars. [1]: <http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/37596/> [2]: For a quick summary, see [http://reason.com/blog/2011/05/25/will-fda-regulation- kill-t...](http://reason.com/blog/2011/05/25/will-fda-regulation-kill-the-m) [3]: A much discussed recent report [PDF] is at [http://www.nvca.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc...](http://www.nvca.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=668&Itemid=93) [4]: An article in JAMA opined similarly [PAYWALL], <http://jama.ama- assn.org/content/305/15/1523.extract> ------ jomohke Ars Technica did a great series on the technology and economics of self driving cars a few years ago: [http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/future-of- driving...](http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/future-of-driving- part-1.ars) ------ zandor A somewhat similar note put very nicely by James May from Top Gear; <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS0IxnxwJSU> ------ toddh Perhaps it's because software has an obvious history of being buggy. A web service won't be down for a while if this fails, hundreds of lives being at risk on a 24 hour a day basis. Maybe a little wait-and-see is a reasoned approach for a complex interactive dynamical system like this? ~~~ burgerbrain I don't think there is a computer in the world that has a worse uptime than myself. Even old cheap Windows ME boxes did a fair enough job of being able to run without impairment for more than 20 hours or so. ~~~ toddh The complexity of the applications will be far greater than Windows ME. Good article on The Long, Dismal History of Software Project Failure - [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/the-long-dismal- his...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/the-long-dismal-history-of- software-project-failure.html). Before we let everyone's self-driving mashup on the road it might be good to figure out if they work first. ------ schwit "There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005." Can we stop calling all motor vehicle crashes accidents. If the driver was drunk or purposely distracted it is NO more an accident than if I was randomly firing a gun hoping no one got hit. ------ kmfrk Maybe we just need to emphasize the negative impact of long commutes. Suddenly you have that commute time to do something else. :) ------ georgieporgie _No state has anything close to a functioning system to inspect whether the computers in driverless cars are in good working order, much as we routinely test emissions and brake lights._ Having lived in Oregon, Arizona, and California, I have never had anything other than emissions routinely inspected. Demonstrate a car smart enough to monitor its own brake pad wear, alert on burnt out bulbs, and provide a clear readout of all detected issues (i.e. not a coded blinking service light, or plug interface) before you start trying to make it drive itself. (I do love the idea of an automated train of cars, and driving my drunk self home, though) ~~~ true_religion > Demonstrate a car smart enough to monitor its own brake pad wear, alert on > burnt out bulbs, and provide a clear readout of all detected issues (i.e. > not a coded blinking service light, or plug interface) before you start > trying to make it drive itself. I don't know about other cars, but all model Porsche's will do exactly this. Granted, it doesn't have as many sensors as I would like--leading to it only giving an 'engine warning' light for innumerable problems, but when it comes to breaks, oils, lights, etc. it has a pretty fine grained detection pattern. ~~~ spitfire Same with the jaguar XJ since 1988. brake pads low is neat to see show up in the display. The XJ has more sensors so it gives more than just check engine.

FreeBSD 8.2 released - kia http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.2R/announce.html ====== Getahobby This is going to kill me to say this because I have been using freebsd since 2.x but the lack of commercial support from the likes of Dell really hurts. Recently I couldn't find the cli utility to manage a raid card because the ports system had an out of date location for the source. I was reduced to shutting down a production server just to flip some configuration bits. Freebsd is absolutely rock solid as an OS. The support from certain hardware vendors is a different story. ~~~ calloc I wish there was a commercial vendor out there that would have FreeBSD available. It would be very helpful in getting it into more businesses as that is a major show stopper. ~~~ Lanzaa I believe there are commercial vendors supporting FreeBSD out there. Here is one that I have heard of: <http://www.ixsystems.com/bsdsupport> I'm sorry I don't have any experience with them, but you might be able to try them out. ------ trotsky Does anyone have any insight into how well freebsd runs on laptops? Power management, suspend, wireless and such? As an X desktop is it in the same league as fedora/opensuse when running KDE? ~~~ calloc Wireless depends on the chipset that is in use. Atheros still has by far the best support. Power management there are some, it is still hit and miss. My old laptop is fully supported, which is pretty awesome. As an X desktop you can run gnome, kde, xfce, xfwm, or really anything. Some components are Linux only (Xfce was recently bit by this) and thus may not work as expected or poorly if there is no abstraction layer that allows for us the use of devd(8) for example. FreeBSD is my favourite OS for servers, it has good hardware support there where it matters most, and best of all is extremely stable. If Linux has met your needs so far, or even Windows, then stick with it. You won't find anything new and exciting and may even find it frustrating that certain things don't work as expected due to differences in API's that are available. If you want a distribution of FreeBSD that is pretty well geared towards desktops, may I suggest taking a look at PC-BSD. They generally are not too far behind the official release of FreeBSD with their FreeBSD version, and it is an KDE environment that is easy to install. ~~~ jonathansizz Actually, PC-BSD is not at all behind FreeBSD these days: PC-BSD 8.2 was also released today. ~~~ calloc The last time I played with PC-BSD there was a lag time of a couple of days. I hadn't checked before making my statement above. I hereby stand corrected. ------ mberning It would be nice to see Amazon provide an official EC2 AMI for this release. ~~~ jambo Colin Percival is working on it. [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-12-20-FreeBSD-on- EC2-FA...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-12-20-FreeBSD-on-EC2-FAQ.html) ~~~ calloc According to this tweet they are up: <https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/39911086518050816> ------ uxp FreeBSD 7.4 was also released concurrently. <http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.4R/announce.html> ------ javanix If you are running ZFS this release marks a _major_ improvement. ZFS v15 really helps with the overzealous memory allocation that earlier versions were plagued with on FreeBSD. Upgrading to 8.2 gave me a 20% - 30% R/W performance increase out of the box without any sort of tuning or optimization. ------ Sargis Question: Will I get billed for a FreeBSD micro instance or does that fall under the 1 year free hosting? ~~~ zcid I currently run a free amazon micro instance with FreeBSD and haven't received any surprise charges. As long as you respect the boundaries of the free instance, you should have no problems.

UTC, TAI, and Unix time (1997) - marcopolis http://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html ====== acqq The article title should include (1997) as the year it was written. Much better (updated much more recently with the latest developments) link is: [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/leap/](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/leap/) also [http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/](http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/) "In 1970 the CCIR (predecessor of the ITU-R) decided to disconnect clocks from the rotation of the earth, but they kept the calendar connected to the rotation of the earth. That decision was implemented starting in 1972, and since then the leap seconds have maintained the connection. In 2015 the ITU-R will decide whether the calendar will also become disconnected from the rotation of the earth. If the ITU-R decides to abandon leap seconds in UTC then the calendar day will become regulated purely by cesium atoms, not by sunrise, noon, sunset, nor midnight. The ITU-R will choose between these two options." More background: [http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/amsci.html](http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/amsci.html) The possible solution: For most uses knowing about leap seconds is unnecessary. Ignoring them is convenient and enough for the common computers: you as the programmer can then assume that every day has 86400 seconds, and the variations due to leap seconds are probably less than those that happen due to your computer not having the atomic clock built in (the time provided by your hardware is, unsurprisingly, much less stable than the one of the atomic clocks and you probably don't care). The most recent popular article by Kuhn (2015) explains the problem most of the programmers and computer users have is easily solvable without changing UTC: [http://theconversation.com/an-extra-second-on-the-clock- why-...](http://theconversation.com/an-extra-second-on-the-clock-why-moving- from-astronomic-to-atomic-time-is-a-tricky-business-35970) "Unfortunately, the way NTP implemented leap seconds in Unix and Linux operating systems (which run most internet servers) made things worse: by leaping back in time to the beginning of the final second and repeating it. Any software reading off a clock twice within a second might find the deeply confusing situation of the second time-stamp predating the first. A combination of this and a particular bug in Linux caused computers to behave erratically and led to failures in some datacentres the last time a leap second was introduced in 2012, notably in one large airline booking system. Instead, alternative implementations now just slow down the computer’s clock briefly in the run up to a leap second to account for the difference." And his proposal (since 2005, updated in 2011 based on the use of similar principle by Google, still valid): [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/utc- sls/](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/utc-sls/) "UTC-SLS is a proposed standard for handling UTC leap seconds in computer protocols, operating-system APIs, and standard libraries. It aims to free the vast majority of software developers from even having to know about leap seconds and to minimize the risk of leap-second triggered system malfunction." "Overall, the Google experience suggests that there is a justifiable need for a smoothed version of UTC for use in computer APIs, if only for due diligence reasons. (...) UTC-SLS has many additional advantages and remains a desirable and more robust candidate for a standardized, long-term solution for the same problem. I like UTC-SLS as the best approach for most of common use cases. Edit: now UTC-SLS can be also discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018504) ~~~ dfc Steve Allen is one of the more vocal proponents of leap seconds and knows much more than I do about the issue. However the general thesis that "Discontinuing leap seconds would require many observatories and other organizations to procure new hardware and rewrite software that deals with time and the earth's rotation" has always left something to be desired. I have never understood why the needs of a small minority (astronomers) should be the deciding factor for society as a whole. The argument for leap seconds would be a lot stronger if it did not seem like a tyranny of the minority. ~~~ acqq The leap seconds in the UTC aren't making any problem if the operating systems wouldn't do "unexpected" things with them, as described by Kuhn. Specifically, the software "clocks" for "humans," those that are bound to the calendar time, should just have 86400 seconds in a day. (2) When the atomic clocks signal them the "leap" second they should just "smooth" it. We can have that with some updates of our favourite operating systems. It's a pure software thing. The solution (UTC-SLS) is simple and good enough for most of the uses, including Google's synchronisation needs of the millions of their computers. The UTC is still just the to-the-second approximation of the UT1 (1) which is by definition bound to the Earth rotation ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time) ). Steve Allen just tries to make people understand that the UTC is by definition "the human calendar time" (like: year, month, day, hour, minute, second) sent over the radio clocks. For the time less dependent on Earth TAI also exists ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time) ). So we already have the time reference that "just counts the atomic seconds." Had there been less confusion among the programmers regarding the leap second handling on the common systems we'd already all use the UTC-SLS solution and we wouldn't have to care about the leap seconds unless we really need TAI. \--- 1) Watch out for [http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/wrc/2015/Pages/defau...](http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/wrc/2015/Pages/default.aspx) (2 to 27 November 2015) if that changes. 2) POSIX already specifies that every day has exactly 86400 seconds for "Seconds Since the Epoch" and the current code relies on that: [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap04.html#tag_04_15) ~~~ dfc Why deal with the complexity of leap seconds; given TAI why should society as a whole deal with the complexity of leap seconds just because it makes life a little easier for astronomers? ~~~ acqq It's not about being easy for the astronomers but for the humans. The astronomers already have to use all of TAI, UT0, UT1 and UTC and much more complex calculations. We other humans use days. We have the daylight saving time and nobody cares for an hour difference twice a year because those who do care use the less moving time stamps, often called UTC, even if they are just "synchronized with UTC" and not exactly UTC, as they have in POSIX-inspired systems exactly 86400 seconds in a day, always. Only some of the programmers then "discover" the definition of the leap second and remain confused by the fact that their computers use "UTC" name and wrongly think that the exact leap seconds are important for them even if they only need the calendar time. If you use the POSIX time routines (and you almost certainly do use them unless you tweaked something wrongly) you already don't have to deal with the complexities of the leap seconds (but you should care about DST!) Every day in what POSIX calls "Seconds Since the Epoch" (but is sometimes referred to as UTC) has in fact the same number of seconds (if you know C it's what you get in time_t for all the time stamps). Only the OS-es have to be fixed to smooth the leap seconds instead of introducing them at once, and then even some obscure sync bugs will never happen any more. Google proved that it's a good approach.

AIRTAME introduces its wireless HDMI stick to the masses - robinwauters http://tech.eu/brief/airtame-launch/ ====== hansnik Anyone tried it yet? How's the performance? Is it usable for fullHD movie streaming?

Artflock - what Artix would be like in 2007 - sharpshoot http://www.artflock.com/other/page/ ====== iamwil Not bad. Though from a superficial glance, there's nothing particularly forward thinking or advanced about it, the site is well implemented and designed. I especially like the color scheme, though a little bright, it gives a sense that art is what's important here. ~~~ mpc Agreed. At first glance it looks like a domain-squatter site. ------ rms There is also www.etsy.com which is for anything handmade.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - roundsquare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo ====== gruseom When a friend of mine was in grad school, he helped a classmate prepare for her Test of English as a Foreign Language exam. They were going over some fine point about past tenses when, attempting to explain a mistake she had made, he said: _If you had had "had" here, you would have had to have had "have" there._ She screamed. ~~~ dcminter Reminiscent of the classic 'John, where Peter had had "had" had had "had had". "Had had" had had the examiner's approval.' ~~~ teach Interesting that Wikipedia only dates this from 1947; my 1964 copy of the 1935 book "Tricks and Amusements with coins, cards, string, paper and matches" by R.M. Abraham includes this problem on page 3! ~~~ jeff18 Please correct the article! :) ------ JadeNB One can't buffalo buffalo without thinking of the two old standbys: The horse raced past the barn fell. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence>) John while James had had had had had had had had had more fun. (That one was from an old puzzle book I had—had had?—as a kid. I find it much like the Buffalo sentence, in that you puzzle over it for a while, are told the resolution, and then say “Huh. OK, if you say so.”) EDIT: While my mind's on random funny sentences, this one was an old favourite of my mother's (who taught me all the grammar I know) from _Cheaper by the Dozen_. It is the reaction of a child, whose bedroom is on the second floor, on being presented with an unacceptable evening's reading: “What did you bring that book you know I don't like to be read to out of up for?” ~~~ pvg More hads can be had there - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_ha...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_a_better_effect_on_the_teacher) ~~~ JadeNB That's beautiful! It must be 20 years that I've been subconsciously bothered by that puzzle, because I couldn't understand what “more fun” was supposed to mean in that context. With ‘where’ in place of ‘while’ and “a better effect on the teacher” in place of “more fun”, it sudddenly makes sense. Also, the linked article links to “List of linguistic example sentences” ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sent...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences)), which introduced me to a beautiful Mitch Hedberg quote: > I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long. and helped me remember a word that has been eluding me for some time: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sent...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences#Syllepsis). Thanks! ------ abecedarius I'm always reminded of this by code like Buffalo buffalo = new Buffalo(BUFFALO); ------ nex3 Interestingly, one can in fact create valid English sentences of arbitrary length composed entirely of the word "Buffalo." By induction: n = 1 is valid as the imperative of the verb. That is to say, "Buffalo" means "You should harangue someone." n = 2 is valid again as the imperative, this time with a subject: buffalo. That is, "Buffalo buffalo" means "You should harangue some bison." For n > 2, assume that the sentence for n - 1 is valid. This sentence will contain at least one instance of the noun "buffalo" (meaning the animal), either with or without the adjective "Buffalo" (meaning the city) prefixing it. If there is no adjective, we can add one to get an n-length sentence. If there is an adjective, we can replace "Buffalo buffalo" (meaning bison from New York) with "buffalo buffalo buffalo" (meaning bison that are harangued by other bison), again yielding an n-length sentence. Thus, by induction, a buffalo sentence can be constructed for any n. ~~~ sp332 For n=2, you have a verb and an object, but no subject. ~~~ sp332 What's with the downvote? I understand the implied subject, but this part: _n = 2 is valid again as the imperative, this time with a subject: buffalo. That is, "Buffalo buffalo" means "You should harangue some bison."_ is wrong. The two "buffalo" are the verb and the object. Neither of them is a subject. ~~~ nex3 You're right. I got my terminology mixed up. ------ bdr The AI dream: code code codes codes code. ------ ghshephard From the Wikipedia article, the following was the only one that let me make sense of this: ""Alley cats [whom] Junkyard dogs intimidate [also happen to] intimidate Sewer rats."" (Where the place "Buffalo is replaced by "Alley", "Junkyard", "Sewer" - and the act, to buffalo, is replaced with "intimidate", while the animals "buffalo" is replaced with cats, dogs, and rats. I'll admit it took me a few minutes to get the implicit "whom" and "also happen to". ~~~ skorgu The way I remember it myself is by building it up in my head first: cows intimidate cows Scranton cows intimidate cows. cows Scranton cows intimidate intimidate cows Scranton cows Scranton cows intimidate intimidate cows Scranton cows Scranton cows intimidate intimidate Scranton cows. Once I've got the structure in my head with pauses to break it up for myself: Buffalo buffalo _pause_ Buffalo buffalo buffalo _pause_ buffalo Buffalo buffalo it's pretty easy to grok (and spit out on cue to the disbelief of others). ------ gjm11 Similar but (1) better because it doesn't use coincidental multiple meanings, (2) better because it doesn't use anything so obscure as buffalo=harass, and (3) worse because it needs two different words: oysters oysters oysters split split split "oysters split": oysters come apart into two pieces. "oysters oysters split split": oysters whom oysters split, split: those oysters whom other oysters take apart into two pieces, come apart into two pieces. "oysters oysters oysters split split split": oysters whom (oysters whom oysters split, split) split: those oysters whom (those oysters whom other oysters take apart into two pieces, in turn take apart into two pieces) come apart into two pieces. Much as with the buffalo sentence, this works for arbitrary values of 3. ------ dryicerx I bet Natural Language Processing Engines would crap them selves if they try to parse this correctly. _This is why we can't have nice things_ ~~~ wheels That's ok. Biological language processing engines crap themselves if they try to parse this correctly. ~~~ jimbokun The real problem is that an artificial language processing engine _will_ find a parse for it. One actual example I remember is a parse of "New fans run." About the operation of recently acquired fans, right? Well, the lexicon in our system found an instance of "New" as a proper noun (a band or something), the use of "fans" as a transitive verb, and one of the definition of "runs" as a noun (think baseball, for just one example). So you had this proper noun New fanning this abstract usage of runs as the parse that the system selected. This more than anything demonstrated to me the necessity of statistical techniques in NLP (now taken as a given, but a fairly recent development relative to the history of NLP research). ------ loumf I like "The Los Angelos Angels", which means "The The Angels Angels". ~~~ Perceval Kind of like "Montgomery of the El Alamein," which means Montgomery of the the the Amein. ------ eelco Ah, fun with grammar ;) Dutch comedian Kees Torn came up with a (Dutch) sentence, repeating one word 16 times in a row: "Als er bij het drop (waar bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen) Bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen, bergen bergen bergen bergen bergen." (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHnpjsR5q6g>) ~~~ loumf No coke, pepsi ------ philwelch Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put two hyphens between the words Fish and And, and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, and after Chips? ------ loup-vaillant Which is why overloading and type inference aren't very good friends. ------ compay One in German: Wenn fliegen hinter fliegen fliegen, fliegen fliegen fliegen hinter nach. It means something like, "when flies fly behind flies, then flies fly after flies." ~~~ jimbokun Shouldn't there be time and arrows in there somewhere? ~~~ LogicHoleFlaw Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. ~~~ BearOfNH Time flies like an arrow; space flies like a bow. ------ code_devil I remember one from grade 5 which is kind of similar ... "I saw a saw to saw a saw " (The Buffalo based is definitely not easy to comprehend in the first go) ------ cadr Make sure to click the 'Listen to this article' link at the bottom - many Wikipedia articles are _much_ funnier if someone is reading them to you. ------ donaq I am also reminded of Marklar from South Park. ------ biggitybones Everytime I come across this I have to go to the wikipedia page to check the grammar. I find these types of sentences incredibly creative (and confusing). A similar thing, inspired by buffalo and illustrated: <http://myapokalips.com/show/15#comic> ------ seanlinmt we have something similar in the hokkien dialect.. which goes .. kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong which consists of ... kong kong = grandpa kong = says kong = can kong = hit kong = dizy but you have to get the intonation right .. lol ~~~ dkimball Also [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den) . It's a private theory of mine that the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods were so lively because "this is an excellent shoulder of pork" sounded exactly like "I will attack your city at dawn"... :) ------ keefe my sentence parser is officially buffalo'd ------ lukev The buffalo sentence may be grammatically valid, but it's not "valid" by any real test of human understanding. Chomsky-esque generative grammar can't tell the whole story about human language. ~~~ billybob I think that's the point, actually. The fact that a sentence can be grammatically correct but not logically correct, or be both, but still not "make sense," is interesting in itself. It shows how difficult it is to determine whether a sentence is "valid" for speakers of that language. (Chomsky's classic example of "grammatical but not logical" was "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.") ~~~ billybob Think of it like this: Chomsky was testing the brain's language parser by handing it weird things and seeing how it reacts. Like you might do with a new programming language: what happens if I try to add strings, or divide them? Is zero true? Is the string "nil" true? Is == different from ===? Can I pass a function into a function? The brain's language center is undocumented, so we try throwing potential sentences at it and see what works or doesn't, then try to reverse engineer what it's doing. The buffalo sentence conforms to the rules we know about word order, and can be logically explained, but somehow it fails. Finding out why is part of the reverse engineering process. ~~~ lukev Yes... the interesting question is whether it fails because of a "rule" we're not aware of, or because it's simply too complex. The human mind is recursive, but is it simply that it only have a "stack depth" of 3 or 4 and can't parse more deeply than that? ~~~ foldr >The human mind is recursive, but is it simply that it only have a "stack depth" of 3 or 4 and can't parse more deeply than that? That was Chomsky and Miller's theory (although they weren't dealing with that particular example). ------ pmiller2 I saw a video a while back about Cyc where Lenat talks about how they make sure their AI is still acting somewhat sane by feeding it sentences like this one, or, "Can a can can-can?" ------ twelvethirteen the article touches on the fact that a sentence of any length could be constructed entirely out of buffalo, but it doesn't really explain how. here's how to make it arbitrarily long: start with "Buffalo[place] buffalo[noun] buffalo[verb] buffalo[noun]" after any "buffalo[noun]", insert "Buffalo[place] buffalo[noun] buffalo[verb]" to change the meaning to 'bison that Buffalo bison intimidate' youve just created a new grammatical sentence of length n+3. iterate and enjoy ~~~ calcnerd256 pumping lemma? ------ barnaby Well, it's good to know Buffalo NY has _something_ going for it. ~~~ jrockway That they have a bunch of overgrown cows that harass each other? ------ andrewvc Malkovich, malkovich malkovich malkovich. Malkovich? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur3CQE8xB3c> ------ ANH In college, my wife was told this sentence by a metaphysics professor. He also used to have acid flashbacks during class. ------ quux I like: Oysters oysters eat eat oysters. ------ gprisament Malkavich Malkavich, Malkavich Malkavich Malkavich ------ dmn Mind = Blown. ------ tcarnell Hey, it's available: buffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuff.com :-) ...but I think I prefer BadgerBadgerBadger.com

Ask HN: Does Facebook marketing work for any of you? - kiyanforoughi Use this article as a baseline of the discussion: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;101151565#_gus<p>Does Facebook marketing work for any of you? I&#x27;m in ecommerce and no one I know in the industry can make FB work on a profitable CPA-basis. I&#x27;m curious to see if anyone out there has made it work. ====== sherm8n Facebook marketing works. But I think you have to look at it from a different approach. Social media is about building human-to-human relationships. That's why ads don't work too well. But there are companies who do get good conversions with FB ads. Depending on the creative, the product and demographic. There are 3 things that I've done to make social media work for me. Actively sharing content - I use a combination of Feedly/Buffer to post content. So it automatically posts 5 times a day. My followers like, re-share, and comment. Be engaging - If people message me or comment, I always respond. I believe having a high quality one-to-one relationship is important above all else. I NEVER ask them to try out my product on the first conversation. NEVER. Most of the time I get turned off when businesses do that to me. Audience building - I think this is the hardest and most important part. If you have no audience there's nobody there to read the content you're posting. And in turn there's nobody there buy the products you're selling. You need to actively find people to engage with. ~~~ AznHisoka I agree with audience building. It's like the huge elephant in the room. Everyone knows you need to share engaging content, blog, etc.. but how do you do so when you have no audience to begin with? ~~~ sherm8n It's quite easy to build your audience. All you have to do is search for conversations you're interested in and insert yourself. So let's say "lean startup" example. Find people who are talking about that now and engage. The hard part is doing this at scale while still preserving the human-to-human relationship. ------ bdunn I've had great luck with retargeting on the FB news feed. Here's my writeup: [http://planscope.io/blog/putting-retargeting-to-work-for- you...](http://planscope.io/blog/putting-retargeting-to-work-for-your- startup/) ------ callmeed I just started using FB ads for a sports trivia app I launched ([http://www.playhattrick.com](http://www.playhattrick.com)). So far it's been surprisingly good. We had a big surge in downloads and usage today. Both news feed in in-app ads are getting about a 1% CTR which I consider good for FB. It's too early to tell if I can make it profitable. Tying ad clicks to installs and in-app purchases (conversions) is also something I'm still getting the hang of. ------ codegeek There was a discussion on that article here earlier [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6635021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6635021)

Workplace by Facebook - cerved https://www.facebook.com/workplace ====== tchaffee My biggest concern about this is that, despite their assurances on the website for this specific product, Facebook is well known for collecting information about you in any way possible and then selling that information. Just for example, Facebook on Android will collect all the names and contact info from your contacts list and then create a shadow profile for your friends that _don 't have an account on Facebook_. That's just one example, and there are others. The only way I might consider using this product is if it were FOSS and I could host the product on my own equipment.

Defense subcontractor posted a job listing for XKEYSCORE 2 weeks ago - steveklabnik http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/01/is-xkeyscore-still-active-defense-contractor-posted-a-job-listing-for-it-2-weeks-ago/ ====== mutagen Also interesting in that the job description 'leaks' another name for a system, SKIDROWE. Some quick searches only turn up the same or similar positions for open for XKEYSCORE. Cryptome is already on it: [http://cryptome.org/2013/08/nsa-xkeyscore- saic.htm](http://cryptome.org/2013/08/nsa-xkeyscore-saic.htm) ~~~ subsystem It's pretty easy to collect large lists of these types of code names from places like linkedin. Search for code name, find new code names, repeat. [https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinkedin.com%2Fpub%2F...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinkedin.com%2Fpub%2F+XKEYSCORE) ~~~ iblaine Ah, I like the guy who lists his databases knowledge to include Excel & XKeyScore. Either XKeyScore is so slick that it is indistinguishable from Excel or this particular person doesn't know what a database is. Either way, that cannot be good. ~~~ rhizome At the end of the day, it's evidence of the NSA having low-skills computer users rifling through your calls and internet. Make of that what you will. ------ jonknee The first thing I did yesterday after seeing Snowden's leaked Powerpoint was search for mentions of XKeyscore in the past and I came across these same job postings (and copied them down since I doubted they would last). I started compiling a database of the different programs, what's known about them, what you can do to stay off their radar, etc. Sound interesting to anyone? Programs/tools I came across include: AGILITY, ANCHORY/MAUI, AUTOSOURCE, CONTRAOCTAVE, WISE, INFOSHARE, TREASUREMAP, TUNINGFORK, SCORPIOFORE, TAPERLAY, MAINWAY, PINWALE, Tripwire Analytic Capability, Combating Terrorism Knowledge Base (CTKB), etc. Quite a few and some of those names are Hollywood quality. Tools that HN readers would know about that were mentioned: ArcGIS, Wireshark, IDA Pro, OLLY Dbg, Snort, Analyst Notebook. ~~~ fsck--off This article [1] also mentions finding lists of program names from LinkedIn profiles, especially this one [2]. [2] mentions: ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV, COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE, PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION, MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN, MARINA The names of the programs aren't classified; if they were they would not show up on LinkedIn. What the programs actually do _is_ classified information. [1] [http://front.kinja.com/job-networking-site-linkedin- filled-w...](http://front.kinja.com/job-networking-site-linkedin-filled-with- secret-nsa-pro-514057863) [2] [http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jason- miller/39/741/a49](http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jason-miller/39/741/a49) ~~~ jonknee Names are the first step though. You can collect a decent amount from them, like when things started, if they are currently in use, which companies deal with which programs, etc. ~~~ salgernon Codenames can also be useful when social engineering. "Oh, it's ok, I know all about FOXYROT, what part did you work on?" ------ zby So - do you guys apply to these jobs? We need more Snowdens! By the way - have you guys noticed the text RMS adds to his emails recently: [ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider [ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, [ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ------ noname123 I've been thinking about making a switch over to working for a defense contractor over start-up. The pay seems to be better in lower cost of living area's (Washington DC metro vs. SF); job security better in BigCo like Mitre, SAIC and Booze and less competition from H1B visa holders that cannot obtain security clearance easily. Get to work on cool technology with big scaling and parallel processing over web CRUD frameworks. Anyone has experience making the switch? ~~~ falk Why would you want to work for a defense contractor after seeing all the awful things they do on behalf of the U.S. government? Is a little extra cash in your pocket and a little more job security worth your selling your soul to the devil? ~~~ bennyg God damn. Not all defense contractors work on the NSA spying technologies. Personally, I think it'd be cool to work on anti-missile guidance systems or fighter jet avionics. ~~~ falk He specifically pointed out Booze Allen which is known for their NSA spying. It's not like you can walk into the organization and say, "Hey, I'd like a job. You guys don't spy on Americans, right?". ~~~ bennyg Not the comment I replied to. He just lumped all defense contractors into soulless assholes basically. And that's just intellectually dishonest. ------ gcb0 And we learn the importance of commas Defense subcontractor posted a job listing for XKEYSCORE, 2 weeks ago Defense subcontractor posted a job listing for XKEYSCORE 2, weeks ago ------ beatpanda Is it legal to deny people employment based on their having worked on projects like this? ~~~ bennyg Meet Bob. Bob got a job working on a random system through an NSA subcontractor. After several weeks on the job, and having gone through rigorous training, Bob was starting to feel uneasy with the work requirements and amount of details he knew. Bob had a TopSecret clearance however, and couldn't tell anyone - not even his wife. After a few more weeks, he decided to try his luck at another employer. Bob was damn good too, one of the best in his field - he was guaranteed a job anywhere for competitive pay. Except word got out about Bob's employer - and specifically the subsystems Bob was responsible for implementing. After the negative press, the NSA didn't renew Bob's company's contract which forced said company to let Bob go. That's okay, Bob thought, he had enough experience in the field, right? Everywhere Bob looked was disgusted at his previous job and the moral choices his superiors' superiors made. But they took it out on Bob. Bob was never offered a job anywhere for close to the amount of money and psychological income he had at his former job. Must suck to be Bob. ~~~ iskander >After several weeks on the job...Bob had a TopSecret clearance. Top Secret clearance usually takes a few months. I'm comfortable with a world in which someone who worked for an NSA subcontractor for several months being stuck with menial employment for the rest of their days. Sometimes it pays to have ethics. ~~~ Balgair My brother got a TS. It took him about a year to get the thing. He had no clue what the TS part of the company was like before 'stepping through the rabbit- hole.' He worked at the job just fine for a few years. One day, he said he knew he had to look for other work. It took him a few months to find a way to leave. Eventually, he just quit without any job at all. He has a job now, not nearly as glamorous but he is employed. Just because they work for a contractor for the NSA, or they have a TS or S or Q clearance, doesn't mean they are not very smart and hard working. Hell, you know they went through the ringer to prove they are trustworthy and loyal. Because they wanted to help out all of us here in the US and then they felt they could no longer, that does NOT mean they should be punished. What did they themselves do wrong? Besides, this is ONE program the NSA runs. Mostly likely the majority of the TS cleared people out there have nothing to do with all this stuff. Those people do make a lot of sacrifices for their job and for the US. A lot are multiply divorced because of the stress, the secrecy, and the unpredictability of the job. "Hey Sugar, gotta go. I can't tell you where, for how long, or if I will be safe, or talk about a really traumatizing experience afterwards so I'll drink hard liquor quietly on the back porch a lot. Pick the kids up at basketball, will yah?" ~~~ peterkelly > "Hey Sugar, gotta go. I can't tell you where, for how long, or if I will be > safe, or talk about a really traumatizing experience afterwards so I'll > drink hard liquor quietly on the back porch a lot. Pick the kids up at > basketball, will yah?" In addition to the potential ethical issues, this is the second reason why I made the decision not to get involved with classified work (the majority of IT jobs in my hometown are at defence contractors). I simply couldn't handle _not_ being able to talk to my family and friends about my work - _especially_ if there were things that were causing me stress on the job. ------ antoinec Am I the only thinking that working on a project like this would be awesome ? From an engineering point of view, they offer an incredible technical challenge. ~~~ wavefunction There's a whole world of problems like that though, that don't involve questionable ethical practices (depending on your own personal beliefs). Math is the language of reality, it's applicable to anything so I don't know why getting involved with these sorts of projects over just about anything else is so alluring from a technical standpoint. ------ hendzen Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6138205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6138205) ------ D9u When I saw the ads in my state for Booz-Allen-Hamilton jobs requiring clearance a few months ago I knew that it was spook work, but thought nothing of it at the time... (I refuse to relocate, it's telecommute or I go freelance) I wonder if Ed Snowden responded to those same advertisements? ------ aswanson A script combing linkedin for skill solicitations that regex match ALLCAPS could probably uncover all NSA job postings. For supposed mastery of encryption/deception these fucks sure seem hamfisted in looking for employees. ------ bazillion XKEYSCORE is just a Java front-end GUI, not servers/backend databases. ------ northwest That's one hell of an opportunity! Anybody with a conscience in here? Please apply and report back! Let's penetrate the Borg. ~~~ mindcrime I'd apply just for an opportunity to be another leaker, but there's no f%!#ng way in Hades that the feds would ever hire me. I've been WAY too outspoken in my radical anti-government / libertarian / anarcho-capitalist viewpoints and have said way too many things that would - I'm pretty sure - automatically disqualify me. Them: "Have you ever advocated for the overthrow of the US government?" Me: "Well... ah, I mean, errm... aah... define 'overthrow', please?" Them: "GTFO out here." ~~~ Balgair My brother has a TS. He said they mostly hire Mormons. They have a clean living background and can speak the languages due to their missions. Also he said they asked a lot about being a member of the Communist Party. ~~~ conover Really? The Community Party? Seems somewhat quaint. I would assume now they ask you stuff like, "What do you think about the war in Afghanistan?" "Have you ever traveled to the PRC?" etc. ------ ToothlessJake SAIC is also running domestic surveillance, currently having a facility in Oakland built[1]. The facility is currently being funded by the DHS, being built while no privacy controls or data retention policies are known. This is an ongoing trend of the names most know as being involved in national level surveillance actively involved on the state and local level too. Another case is Booz Allen Hamilton's processing of digital forensics for local law enforcement via federal funds[2]. Yea, no chance for conflict of interests when firms granted immunity, having access to the world's data, are involved in 'petty' things like domestic surveillance/forensics to assist in prosecutions of the wire-tapped non- immunes. This is an absolutely horrific trend that must be halted, as in halting literal construction. [1] [http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center](http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014168)

Show HN: Log based forms for static sites - sudosushi https://github.com/knowblcluster/log-based-static-contact-form ====== sudosushi Hey guys, looking for as much feedback as possible, to improve not only this repo, but generally as well. Thanks.

Italian doctors successfully transplant a kidney in the place of the spleen - vanni http://www.thelocal.it/20161214/italian-doctors-transplant-kidney-for-spleen-in-world-first ====== carbocation I just want to point our that the title, "Italian doctors transplant kidney for spleen," remains misleading, to my eyes. This isn't as interesting as it sounds. The patient had renal failure and needed a transplant. Due to vascular anatomy, it sounds like the lower abdomen was not an appropriate place for a new transplanted kidney. The innovative technique was to sacrifice the spleen to create a space for the kidney, then to use the intact splenic vasculature to hook up to the transplanted kidney. The spleen is a lymphoid organ that people can live without. Many people with sickle cell disease are "functionally" asplenic. It can be removed after injury. Etc. It's a highly vascular organ and has a robust supply via the splenic artery. In no way does the kidney perform the function of the spleen. ~~~ sctb Thanks, we've updated the title again to help clarify. ~~~ matco11 The current title is still misleading as it overcorrected in the other direction: now it sounds like the doctors made a mistake. If the word "innovative" sounds like inappropriate - which I am not sure why that would be the case, given this was a "first-ever" technique, at least "successfully" should be added in the title to avoid it sounding like there was a mishap. ~~~ sctb Yes, thank you. We've added "successfully". ~~~ niels_olson I would change it to "Italian doctors graft kidney to splenic vasculature, sacrificing immune function for intra-abdominal real estate". ------ vanni Other sources: [http://www.thelocal.it/20161214/italian-doctors- transplant-k...](http://www.thelocal.it/20161214/italian-doctors-transplant- kidney-for-spleen-in-world-first) [http://torino.repubblica.it/cronaca/2016/12/14/news/torino_t...](http://torino.repubblica.it/cronaca/2016/12/14/news/torino_trapiantato_un_rene_al_posto_della_milza_e_il_primo_intervento_al_mondo-154081884/) [ITALIAN] ~~~ gus_massa The Italian link has more info. Thanks. Autotransaltion: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftorino.repubblica.it%2Fcronaca%2F2016%2F12%2F14%2Fnews%2Ftorino_trapiantato_un_rene_al_posto_della_milza_e_il_primo_intervento_al_mondo-154081884%2F%3Frefresh_ce) ------ emilecantin As a French-speaking person, I was a bit confused by the word "Spleen", as it means something akin to "Melancholy" in French (it was mostly used by Renaissance poets like Beaudelaire), but I always assumed it was an anglicism or something so I really wasn't expecting it to be a body part. What's kind of funny is that the French word for this organ, "rate", is used in the idiom "Se dilater la rate", which means laughing a lot. So the same organ's name is related to both sadness and laughter, depending on the language. I now realize that I still don't know what a spleen is or what it does in the body; time to fire up Wikipedia! ~~~ jessaustin I didn't know until I looked at a dictionary just now that "spleen" can mean "melancholy" in English too... The more common emotional meaning would be something more like "spite" or "anger"; hence the adjective "splenetic". One gets the impression that each different emotion associated with this word corresponds to a different idiosyncratic medieval theory about the emotions originating in the viscera. ~~~ Thnboi666 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen#Contributions_to_medicin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen#Contributions_to_medicine") Galen and Hippocrates vital humors theory ------ noobermin And I was expecting a malpractice mix-up. Can any biologist folk explain how this is possible? ~~~ gus_massa Weird. IIUC, it looks like they removed (partially?) the spleen to get some room to put an additional kidney, not to replace the functionality of the spleen. Do someone has a link with more info? Can any biologist/medic folk explain more??? ~~~ mikecsh I don't think this can be the whole story. Normally when a kidney is transplanted into a patient, the defective kidneys are not removed (adds unnecessary risk). There is plenty of space to add a kidney without removing the spleen so there must be more to this! ~~~ jessriedel Yep, and in particular it's not difficult to get sufficient access to circulatory system. [http://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments_and_procedur...](http://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments_and_procedures/kidney- transplant/hic-kidney-transplant-procedure) We definitely need more info. EDIT: Actually, looks like it was in fact an issue of space and blood vessels. From the Google-translation of the Italian article linked elsewhere in the comments: > The particular malformation of the baby made it impossible for the kidney > system donated by the classic conventional technique. The only option then > was to use another way of connecting to the bloodstream....In order to > create the necessary space for the new kidney, a revolutionary surgical > technique which involved the removal of the spleen and the installation of > the kidney on splenic vessels of the spleen itself along their course behind > the pancreas was applied. The ureter of the transplanted kidney was then > implanted directly on the bladder. [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftorino.repubblica.it%2Fcronaca%2F2016%2F12%2F14%2Fnews%2Ftorino_trapiantato_un_rene_al_posto_della_milza_e_il_primo_intervento_al_mondo-154081884%2F%3Frefresh_ce) ~~~ mikecsh Oh how interesting! Thanks for the link! ------ randogp Intentional. Both kidney and spleen filter blood, although spleen is not essential and can be removed (splenectomy). Sacrificing the spleen, the surgeon used the spleen vessels to connect the kidney to the blood circulation. Reading the Italian news, the vessels of the other kidneys were in bad shape. ~~~ Raphmedia Does that mean that we could implant a third kidney to people in the future? ------ kingkawn Since the transplant recipient requires immunosuppression anyway it's probably a good trade off. ------ mentioned_edu This is incredible. ------ georgespencer To be clear: this was intentional. ~~~ erelde Should there be a renaming here? It's not intentional clickbait, but my brain did catch that title very quickly and proceded as fast as it can to make assumptions. Both titles here[1] are better in my opinion. [1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13176066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13176066) ------ duiker101 Being in Italy, just by reading the title there was 50/50 chance that it wasn't. ~~~ alemhnan quite racist ~~~ bkmartin That's not racist. Italy is not a race. It is an indictment of the medical competency in Italy based on his perception of their system. I wish people would stop throwing that term around so loosely. If you don't like what he said, then actually form a coherent rebuttal. Not that his comment was much better than your own... just making a point here. ~~~ tigroferoce As an Italian whose wife is working in the public health care system my views might be a little biased. Not that Italian system does not have its problems, but we have quite high life expectancy [1] and our system was ranked second in 2000 by the WHO [2] and apparently is still quite efficient [3]. And, by the way, it cures just anybody the same, from super rich people to illegal aliens. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_rank...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranking_of_health_systems_in_2000) [3] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/u-s- healt...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/u-s-health-care- system-ranks-as-one-of-the-least-efficient) ~~~ bkmartin I was not making any claims of the Italian medical system. I have no idea how they stack up. I was taking objection to the parent post claiming that the grandparent post was making a racist statement. If you guys are doing great in Italy, then awesome! :) Maybe you guys could share some notes with the United States, particularly when it comes to cost... we need serious help. ~~~ tigroferoce I totally agree with you. I'm not the best person to ask for advices, but this guy [1] knows tons about how to run hospitals on budget. The only problem is that he is perceived as very leftish in Europe, so I guess that in the U.S. his opinions will never ever be acceptable. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gino_Strada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gino_Strada) ------ intellix your leg bone's connected to your........ hip bone

How Jos. A Bank Makes Money By Selling One Suit And Giving Seven Away For Free - ayers http://www.businessinsider.com/jos-a-bank-business-model-2012-11 ====== xmodem Thank you, captain obvious.

Unix and Object-Oriented Languages - nkurz http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/unix_and_oo.html ====== tedunangst "For example, a+a+a+a can become a*4 and even a<<2 if a is an integer. But if one creates a class with operators, there is nothing to indicate if they are commutative, distributive, or associative. Since one isn't supposed to look inside the object, it's not possible to know which of two equivalent expressions is more efficient." But it is ok (expected even?) to look inside the implementation of every function in a non-OO language? Explain how I am to know which to choose from the equivalent C code of add(a, add(a, add(a, a))) or multiply(a, 4)? There are reasons to dislike aspects of C++, but the "omg operators are hard" meme is the biggest dumbest straw man around. ~~~ dasil003 The whole article has a whiff of bullshit even if it seems truthy at times. Yes, OOP is a great fit for GUI programming which helped it rise to prominence, however the rest of it is spoken like someone who has never really done any serious OOP. I think it's fair to say that OOP is not significantly different from procedural programming, and certainly can't be considered universally better. It just provides some additional tools for structuring the code and data, however it doesn't offer any deep and powerful benefits like functional programming or s-expressions provide. ------ dkarl What's the clinical terminology for this? Projective collective delusional narcissism? I'm a Unix programmer, and I disavow this rant. Reading this makes me ashamed of every time I've thought and spoken this way. (At least I can thank the author for providing that clarity.) Unix programmers rarely tackle the kinds of problems that OO approaches are best and most necessary for. When they do, they usually aren't acting as "Unix programmers" or "systems programmers." I occasionally write performance-critical code that talks directly to hardware, and I have written embedded code that runs on that hardware as well. Of course I wrote lean code without layers of goopy abstraction. But I don't walk around with my chest puffed out just because I've written low-level non-OO code, because I've also written GUI applications using Eclipse RCP, which is plugin-based Java abstraction-on-steroids that makes architecture astronauts giddy. I would use Eclipse RCP again in a heartbeat if I needed to produce another heavyweight, complex GUI application. Looking down on somebody because the best way to do their job is not the best way to do your job is stupid. ~~~ hvs I would argue that he does point out that OO is good for certain types of applications, specifically GUI applications. I do agree with you that the application paradigm is often overly touted as the epitome of good design, but that doesn't change the fact that the original design ideas behind Unix were good ones. On the other hand, I would also argue that modern Unix software (at least in the Linux world) rarely follows that paradigm. Most desktop applications in Linux follow precisely the same methodology (and inherit its flaws) as Windows applications. They are often big, bloated, and slow. ------ hvs I hoping the resurgence of functional languages will drive this point home, but I'm certainly not sure that it will. I've worked on large, well-designed OO systems, and I've worked on awful, convoluted morasses. OO languages are a tool, but they are no replacement for competent software engineers. Conversely, I've worked on both types of systems written in imperative languages as well (that's where we get the concept of "spaghetti code"). OO just seems to make it easier to make a big mess. ------ TallGuyShort >> [OOP] can backfire badly if coders end up doing simple things in complex ways just because they can. Very true. I'm taking several courses where the vast majority of students have only been exposed to Java, where as I've come from a C background with experience in several other languages. I'm shocked at how the other students have no sense of efficiency or simplicity - everything has to be about making other classes do the work, and it ends up being a horrible project. ~~~ javanix I think the trouble with teaching mostly Java-only courses early on in CS curricula is that it makes it difficult to catch the subtle middle ground where OO actually makes code more readable/maintainable instead of more bloated. Granted, a lot of that comes from experience in OO languages, but I think using C or another language helps people see that middle ground a lot easier. It helps make it more obvious where OO would help and where it would just be needless obfuscation.

Moving AWS Glue jobs to ECS on AWS Fargate led to 60% net savings - cloudfalcon https://www.taloflow.ai/blog/aws-glue-to-ecs ====== cloudfalcon Hey HN, we had this question pop up about how we moved our AWS glue jobs from Fargate to ECS on our last post, so wanted to follow up to answer that question. This might be helpful for anyone thinking about a similar migration. If you have any questions / comments let us know.

What Explainable AI fails to explain (and how we fix that) - alvinwan https://towardsdatascience.com/what-explainable-ai-fails-to-explain-and-how-we-fix-that-1e35e37bee07 ====== alvinwan tl;dr We made models as accurate as neural networks and as interpretable as decision trees. This work focuses on image classification for computer vision. You can also find out more on our project page [http://nbdt.alvinwan.com](http://nbdt.alvinwan.com) or arxiv submission [https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00221](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00221)

Hedge Funder Who Bet $100 Million On Facebook IPO Is Furious - xtiy http://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-q-hedge-funder-bet-184159786.html ====== nl I love this story on so many levels. Firstly there is the irony of a "blue collar hedge fund manager" There's the fact the lack of an IPO bump means Facebook equity holders are the people who made money out of it, instead of the investment banks buying at the opening and hoping to sell at the bump price. Then there's the whole "HN thinks Facebook is worthless and has the satisfaction of seeing the stock drop on the opening day." thing. Now it turns out all the self-congratulation over people's "insightful analysis" was probably misplaced - Facebook may or may not be overvalued, but the stock price probably doesn't reflect the market consensus yet. Finally, in an ironic twist Shakespeare would have been proud of it turns out that it was probably the NASDAQ's _computer system_ that meant Facebook missed an IPO bump. Silicon Valley loves talking about how Wall St over-hyped IPOs during the dot-com bubble and blaming it for the lack of a significant IPO exit strategy since. Now it was a _computer system_ that failed Silicon Valley's great hope of reigniting the IPO market. ~~~ to3m This particular man presumably understands class as the English do - that in many cases, it's as much (or more) to do with your upbringing and background as it is to do with your current social status. Perhaps "blue collar" isn't quite the term for this, though. I can't imagine there are many blue collar workers in a hedge fund. Maybe the cleaners... ~~~ ticks I guess he's trying to say that he feels like he shouldn't be there, a pretender to the throne. Happens a lot when you are working class and join a department/division that attracts people from more affluent families. ------ dangero I bought Facebook with a limit order when it went on sale to the general public last Friday, and I can confirm it was a terrible experience. Here's basically what happened: I put in a limit order through tdameritrade the night before with a max price of $44. I'm in front of the computer that morning to watch my order when the IPO starts. The price spikes up to 45, then treads around low 40s. I refresh my account. My limit order has not gone through. I wait AN HOUR. Still, it has not gone through so I cancel it. Now it says, "Pending Cancellation." It remains "Pending Cancellation" for over an hour, so I try to call tdameritrade, but their lines are completely backed up with calls. Finally, the system suddenly reports that my order was accepted and I bought Facebook at 42. It's only an hour from market close by the time I see this. What this meant for me and most everyone else was that I was locked out of the market for the first 2 hours after IPO and my assets were frozen. I could neither buy nor sell. I don't think we can really know what the impact of this was on the market, but it certainly didn't instill short term confidence in the Facebook IPO and I think it definitely decreased the volume on the stock. I'm not going to defend everything the guy said, but I do believe that NASDAQ botched the IPO badly and it may be a few months before we know what the market really values Facebook at. There may even be permanent damage done to Facebook's reputation. ~~~ grey-area _There may even be permanent damage done to Facebook's reputation._ Any permanent damage done to Facebook's reputation will purely be because they overvalued the IPO, overstated earnings, bought out other internet companies at inflated valuations pre-IPO, and burned those who bought at the inflated initial valuation. As to whether the trading system damaged confidence in Facebook - it's not always possible to get the deal you want on a stock-market, and anyone placing a limit order should know that they might get a vastly different price than the one they expected - there are disclaimers in trading systems specifically for this situation. Trading is stopped all the time by circuit breakers (see Zynga that same day for example), depends on both willing buyers and sellers at a given price, and of course depends on the trading systems not going down for whatever reason. If you're buying as a long term investment of a stock that you believe in this won't affect you. If you're speculating, particularly short-term, you should recognise that the casino is rigged against small investors - the stock market is not, and never will be, rational, fair, or efficient; it's just the least worst option we have. However I don't believe that lack of access to the stock or prices on the first day of trading has anything to do with the current price ($31 last time I looked) - that's just down to a bubble deflating and confidence evaporating as people start asking questions about the true valuation. Frankly I think this sort of talk of the technical issues is really a way of avoiding talking about why people bought Facebook at the initial irrational PE/price which (IMHO) has farther to fall before it becomes a reasonable valuation based on their projected earnings. That's the real issue here, but one which raises hard questions about the very high valuation of many social media companies like Instagram, Facebook etc. ~~~ theorique _anyone placing a limit order should know that they might get a vastly different price than the one they expected_ If you place a _limit_ order at (e.g.) $100, your order should be filled at or below $100 - no exceptions. The order will stay around until it is either filled, manually cancelled, or expires (at end of day or at a prescribed time). A _market_ order can be filled at an arbitrary price because you are communicating that you are willing to cross the bid-ask spread and meet the market price, even if it's moving rapidly. ~~~ grey-area Sorry this wasn't very clear. I meant that you might not get what you expected (though it will conform to the rule you set, if it completes). Stocks can be very volatile and a limit order only controls movement one way, so it doesn't protect you from (say) a huge drop in stock price just after your order. ~~~ uptown What does what happens after your order is filled have to do with your limit order execution price? If you want protection from price decreases after a buy, also put in a stop order (which will turn into a market order) or a stop limit order (which ensures execution at the specified limit price) but which may not execute if the price movement is highly volatile. ------ zackzackzack "Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager: No doubt. But this should have been a blockbuster. This should have traded to $60 or $70. This should have launched a wave of tech IPOs." I think Facebook just deflated the tech IPO bubble for a year or so. No average Joe is going to invest, because, "Well fuck, if Facebook didn't explode, why would any other new tech company? No thanks." The bubble is still there, but it isn't looking like it will be rapidly expanding like people expected it to after the fb IPO. ~~~ waterlesscloud I think it's longer than a year. It'll take something really huge to overcome "Well, if Facebook couldn't break out, who can?" That will ripple back through all investment phases since the ipo is the dream payoff day for many investment rounds. ~~~ tibbon I agree with you. For all the startups that wanted to be the "Facebook of X"... if Facebook couldn't do it, why could they? ~~~ malandrew Mos' def. They now have a reason to start looking at a revenue sources that aren't based on ads. Every time I hear about a startup trying to shoe in an ad-based business model where you could make money selling directly or via high value _intent-based_ referral fees to complementary businesses I cringe a bit. A lot of the time ads as a revenue stream are a total cop out that demonstrate a total lack of business sense an ability to spot value. Google is successful in ads because they are a generalist intent capture platform. Unless your business also happens to capture generalist intent, you should be thinking about referral revenue based on _focused intents._ ~~~ tibbon I just thought we learned years ago that the ago model really wasn't a good one. ------ powera This guy is a moron. Anybody who believes the stock would be at $70 if "the market" worked better doesn't understand how markets work in theory or practice. If there are people who really believe the stock is worth $70, there would have been buyers the past two days. Expecting "hype" around the IPO to support ONE HUNDRED BILLION dollars of extra valuation is beyond stupid. ~~~ mbreese There very well may have been buyers on Friday who thought the stock was worth $70. If the market had been able to handle the volume, then we may very well be seeing FB at $70 today. However, since we know that the market couldn't handle the volume, it most certainly _did_ affect the share price on Friday. Now, you let people sit and think about this over the weekend and they may have different feelings about that supposed $70 valuation. Next, if you assume his story about selling on Monday was true, you have additional downward pressure put on FB as a result of NASDAQ itself. So much so that it closes at $34, eroding everyone's confidence in the $70 valuation that they had in their minds on Friday. Markets only work if they operate efficiently (can handle the volume). When they don't work efficiently, they become harder to predict. And if an investor can't even be sure of what their position is, they can't participate in the market at all. It isn't at all out of the question that glitches in NASDAQ could have caused FB shares to plumet. It most certainly took away any possibility of an IPO bump. The real question this beings up is what did NASDAQ know, and when did they know it. If they knew their system wasn't going to be able to handle the volume, as bad as that might have been for them, they should have aborted the IPO (if that's at all possible). ~~~ jlarocco Well, honestly we'll never know for sure, but if a weekend of "thinking it over" cuts the price in half, did it _really_ deserve the $70 valuation? After the hype, people are going to think it over at some point, right? Maybe it's better that it happened right off the bat. ~~~ sneak > Well, honestly we'll never know for sure, but if a weekend of "thinking it > over" cuts the price in half, did it really deserve the $70 valuation? You are confusing "should" with "is". Don't do that. ------ DigitalSea My favourite part was when the hedge fund manager called himself "blue collar". I couldn't care about the rest, boo hoo there were technical issues, NASDAQ had a clause covering them in the event of technical issues and Facebook stock didn't balloon into the $60 or $70 per share price range. I don't feel one ounce of sympathy for anyone who can freely gamble away $100M then have the audacity to complain about it, if the situation were reversed the hedge fund manager wouldn't care if I lost out because I invested $100M into Facebook stock either. Don't get me started on the fact this disillusioned guy thinks the stock should have been in the $70+ range. It doesn't sound like the guy should be handling money full stop, he obviously has a lack of understanding when it comes to the stock market. ~~~ antonioevans To plenty of us in the tech field a successful Facebook IPO would have opened up a path for other tech business to IPO in the near term. On top of that a successful IPO would have opened up some funding in our hacker space (Paypal Mafia/Google Mafia..etc). We want them to be successful. ~~~ malandrew Kind of true, but I'm wondering if there is more to be gained in Silicon Valley by deflating and delaying the pop of the bubble a year or longer or by prompting a string of tech IPOs that will line the pockets of engineers that can fund many startups several years later after the pop. As someone working on a startup now and looking to move from bootstrapped stage to seed stage, I'd rather see the bubble deflate now. Lining the pockets of a Facebook Mafia and several other "mafias" doesn't do me and others like me a whole lot of good in the near to medium term. ------ joezydeco There has to be some sweet, sweet irony in the idea being explored that high- frequency traders may have caused the NASDAQ breakage. From an HN post earlier today (<http://www.nanex.net/aqck/3099.html>): _"...In brief, the problem was that the system took two extra milliseconds to calculate the opening price. Because of a decision before to allow continuous order placement during IPOs, cancellations kept “fitting in between the raindrops”, in the words of Bob Greifeld, Nasdaq’s chief executive, in the five milliseconds it was taking to determine a price."_ ------ stewartbutler I still don't understand why Facebook has such an overblown valuation to begin with. The entire business is a house of cards based on the possibility that it might make someone else some money someday. Sure, there are some vultures like Zynga that make out like bandits preying on people with addictive personalities who shell out cash, and I'm sure there are a few success stories regarding successful social media advertizing campaigns, but I count the former as resulting from a lack of morals and the latter as unpredictable anomalies that happened to tweak something in the hivemind. I don't perceive any value in Facebook. It is an enormous time sink with rapidly diminishing returns on time investment, and I feel it is only a matter of time before the average user experience is more noise than signal. As soon as that point hits, I can easily see Facebook going the way of MySpace and its ilk. Facebook has some amazing talent on their team, so maybe someone there can see a way forward, but as far as I can tell the end game for all social <insert something here>s appears to be an exodus to a more specialized or sparsely populated network. As an outsider my opinion is of limited utility, but I also think that Facebook is a poison on the tech industry as a whole. I don't see that they have created anything innovative, useful, or even substantial aside from this enormous echo chamber. I'm very glad to see that Wall Street isn't gorging on this IPO, even if it was an accidental fuckup that has spoiled the appetite. With any luck, this flop will convince investors to put their money onto things that create something useful. If anyone has counterpoints, please post them. I write this in frustration, since I just really don't see where this "105 billion" valuation is coming from. Where is the potential in Facebook? What is being produced? Why should I give a damn? \- They missed the boat if they are trying to compete with the Google advertizing empire, so that can't be it. \- They admit that they aren't having the success they hoped for in the mobile arena. \- The only thing going for it is that it is the single largest repository on information about individuals, but that information cannot be ethically or legally used to its full utility, and most of it is white noise anyhow. \- The company has repeatedly shown that it doesn't give a damn about its users or small developers. What makes this a sound investment? ~~~ olefoo Facebook has the biggest and most metadata rich direct marketing list ever created? Facebook has not even begun to do the things they could with the knowledge they collect every day. In theory you should be able to go to one of Facebook's ad sales pages and order an ad that will be shown exactly three times to every left-handed piano player in Ohio. That you can't do that in the next ten minutes means that Facebook is leaving money on the table. They don't need to compete with Google, they need to compete with Experian and Transunion, or they need to come up with a way to provide a compelling "We manage your online data for you." offering that a majority of their users would pay for. Facebook is, right now in a fairly enviable position; there are many things that they could potentially become, they are not hamstrung by the need to keep a cash cow fed and they have enough resources to try multiple experiments at scale. I wouldn't count them out as a driving force on the web just yet. ~~~ shock-value I think you overstate the amount of useful data Facebook has on people. Just to take your example: Facebook may very well know which state I live in, but they definitely don't know whether I'm left handed, for example. On the other hand, Google might very well know this, if, say, I have searched for left handed golf clubs. Amazon would also know this, if I have bought said clubs through them. Google and Amazon almost certainly also know which state I live in (hell Google might know exactly where I am at any given moment if I have an Android phone). So really I don't think Facebook is in an enviable position at all compared to companies like Amazon and Google. "[...] they need to come up with a way to provide a compelling "We manage your online data for you." offering that a majority of their users would pay for" What data? Dropbox and now Google back up all your files and documents, for FREE, now! How could they compete with this with a free service, let alone a paid one? And from a privacy standpoint people trust Facebook far less than Google or Dropbox. There is an implicit assumption that anything shared with Facebook will some way or another be shared with one's Facebook friends. (People aren't ignorant of the way Facebook has tried to trick them into accepting more liberal privacy settings over the years.) Facebook would have to work very very hard to change this perception before a data storage service would ever take off. ~~~ sfall ok facebook may not know if your left handed, unless your in a left handed appreciation group, but think about all the information facebook does collect on you. where you or others check in, likes, people you chat with, what you chat about, who tags you in posts and photos and who your with, not to mention all the tracking facebook does with other sites ~~~ shock-value Well, it remains to be seen whether that data can actually generate revenue. I personally don't think it has much potential, at least not compared to the extremely specific data Google has on everyone, or the purchasing data that Amazon possesses. Also, I just don't think people use Facebook the way you describe. Most people I know don't "check in" wherever they go, nor do they "like" different brands (except for ones that make them do so in order to be eligible for a contest or something sketchy like that--I've definitely seen that before). But people do search on Google for anything and everything, including purchasing decisions. And of course people do make real purchases on Amazon. The widgets that Facebook litters over the web which it can use to track user's browsing habits may be the wild card here, but I'm still skeptical that this has that much value compared to Google's search data. Plus those widgets seem to be mostly limited to news sites anyway. ------ SODaniel What he really should have said: "We were all betting on millions of small traders shoving $5,000 into this bubble to push the share price north of $70 so that all the large hedge funds could cash out and get rich off the backs of the average Joe. A technical malfunction prohibited us from exiting with 100% profit on intro day and now we are stuck with a bunch of shares we know are worthless. Dammit, how am I going to pay for my next summer houses? Damn you NASDAQ!" ------ apaprocki For context, direct link to NASDAQ rule 4626: [http://nasdaq.cchwallstreet.com/nasdaq/main/nasdaq- equityrul...](http://nasdaq.cchwallstreet.com/nasdaq/main/nasdaq- equityrules/chp_1_1/chp_1_1_4/chp_1_1_4_1/chp_1_1_4_1_8/default.asp#nasdaq- rule_4626) EDIT: Also, "NASDAQ Equity Trader Alert #2012-21: NASDAQ Proposes Policy for Unfilled Orders in the Facebook Inc. (FB) IPO Cross": <http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/TraderNews.aspx?id=ETA2012-21> (Their website fails to work in Chrome if you click around -- alert bubble states only IE and Firefox are supported. Tsk tsk.) ------ brown9-2 This is a crummy headline, the article/interview focuses on problems with Nasdaq's systems, which is far more interesting than some trader whining about a loss (which happens every day). ------ _delirium I suppose as a hedge-fund manager he isn't an investor valued towards fundamentals, but if he really thinks Facebook should be valued at $60-70, then I'm not sure some NASDAQ crapping out on one day would change that. If Facebook turns out to be the next Google in terms of ever-growing profits, its stock will get to $70 (and higher) as a result anyway. ------ SODaniel Do we need anymore proof that the concept of 'stock ownership' is irreparably broken? Basically his entire point is that because a trading system was delaying orders for a few hours over $100 BILLION in value was potentially lost? Yeah, that seems like a sound market with long term owners that trade because they believe in a company.. Right? ------ donaq "Then it was holding at $42 for whatever reason. $42. $42. $42." 42 is the answer. He's just not asking the right question. Sorry, couldn't resist. ------ jroseattle Given how tight and controlled the shares distribution was by Morgan Stanley, how eff-ed up the orders to NASDAQ went, and the resulting decline in value over the last few days -- basically it seems that Wall Street bankers are the ones who were screwed. All I can say is -- what goes around, comes around. They finally did it to themselves. For all the complaints about future regulatory needs, the Street never once considered that it might actually protect someone they're interested in -- themselves. Trust in the market has never been lower, thanks to the very folks that benefit from it. Now, not only are government agencies pissed off and investigating, but the traders are going to start pointing fingers at each other. Tsk, tsk Wall Street -- prepare to hunker down. Karma's a bitch, boys. Who knows, when it's all said and done, maybe Facebook will end up actually helping Main Street. ------ tibbon If he admits that it never had a shot, why did he invest in the first place? Additionally, would we be feeling bad for Facebook if they had underpriced the IPO and the trader had made 25% profit on day one (and Facebook lost out on a potential 25% of fundraising)? ~~~ helmut_hed I'm glad to hear someone say this. Facebook the company did amazingly well on this transaction. A stock that pops is one that has left money on the table. FB did the opposite... ------ damncabbage "Gambler Who Lost $100 Million on Roulette Wheel: Boy Was He Furious" ------ hnwh Here's my favorite part: " The question is will NASDAQ do the right thing. They made $400 million last year and could pay out some." what the everloving...ffuuu.. I hear whine whine whine from the 99%, and now I hear whine whine whine from a freakin hedge fund manager who BET $100m on FB. IS this the state of affairs now? Country full of WHINERS?? ~~~ joezydeco That's the free market! Oh wait, that only applies to when you're winning. You ask/beg/sue for relief when it goes the opposite way. ------ kzahel Interesting supposition, that the IPO might have gone down much differently if somehow NASDAQ had been more prepared or messed something up. But the last statement - that it could have been trading at $60 and $70, that is hard to believe. ------ prawn Blue-collar? I think he means middle-class white-collar. You're not blue- collar if you're sitting at a desk in an air-conditioned office tapping at keys in a suit, even if you wish you were paid more and want to complain. ------ joshu I'm gonna call fake on this. ------ galfarragem If I would have the money I would buy it for $25 a share. Personally I don't believe it will go under this. Facebook is a good business, just not by the price people were told. I don't believe FB will grow much more. A P/E=100 ($31) is still too high. $25 corresponds to P/E=80, high enough in my opinion. I believe that one Buffet wouldn't pay more than P/E=25, around 8 bucks.. Google right now as a P/E=18, Microsoft less than 11.. ------ tazzy531 "Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager" -- could be a kid in a dorm room or PM at SAC... HF Manager is an inflated title... ------ Jach Yet another screw-up involving "real" money/assets and a "real, tested" financial system to add to my collection of "See, it's not just Bitcoin's youth or digital embodiment" rebuttals... I'm looking forward to seeing how all this plays out. I still think the stock price will go up past $38 over the next 6 months, but we'll see. ------ thisismyname Why did't he buy class A shares before the IPO. Idiot. ------ cpatrick B ------ dos1 I have a hard time drumming up sympathy for these guys. They're mad because they couldn't make a quick buck. Isn't a hedge fund just gambling? It's high time Wall St. learns that it's never a good idea to put more in the pot than you can lose. The part that is most striking to me is that share price and a company's intrinsic value are seemingly in different galaxies. This guy is talking about decisions based on _hype_. I'm floored. Do these guys really trade based on public opinion? ~~~ veyron He is complaining because he was sandbagged. He didnt know what his position was, and NASDAQ and MS both dropped the ball here. You can vilify hedge funds till kingdom come, but it sounds here that this guy played by the rules and lost due to a circumstance that he didn't believe was fair. If the opposite happened (price spiked) yet the same technology problems happened, you'd have a bunch of people complaining that they were over or under filled. The complaints would not be justified if there was no confusion on his position. ~~~ AznHisoka Problem is there's no rules. Noone got in any legal trouble over at NASDAQ. People do insider trading without getting caught. It's a rigged game. ~~~ marshray I'd say former Nasdaq chairman Madoff got himself in a little legal trouble, though perhaps that was after he left Nasdaq. ------ BiWinning I have a lot of sympathy for those guys, their ability to artificially pump stock prices brings a lot of value to the economy. Anyways my heart goes out to them. ------ ohffs "This should have been a blockbuster." Karma! ------ smcguinness Not a pro investor, but can one infer that possibly FB is at an artificial discount?

Ask HN: Any war and economy based online games that allow automation via APIs? - nstart A long time ago, I used to play oGame. One of those browser based multiplayer games that has both elements of space warfare and economics. Loved it. Eventually left it behind. I tried Eve Online next, and fell in love with it. Left that behind too. Recently, I&#x27;ve been watching the hype of Warframe from afar and wishing I could play.<p>But I really don&#x27;t have the time for any of these. And none of the games allow for automation. Even basic macros are sometimes considered bannable offenses.<p>What I was wondering though was, is there any game similar to oGame or Eve Online that allows or even encourages players to automate their gameplay via scripting&#x2F;API usage? So I could have a Rasperry Pi playing the game for me 24&#x2F;7. And build apps for myself to make assisted decisions in the event of something non automatable coming up (eg - Respond to an alliance invitation). The two major mechanics I&#x27;m looking for in the game are territory based economics and warfare. Cooperation is an optional thread to look for.<p>I&#x27;ve searched the internet for this for a while and it hasn&#x27;t turned up anything just yet. Either this market doesn&#x27;t exist or it&#x27;s under-served or my search-fu needs to improve :D.<p>Do any HN&#x27;ers know of games like this? ====== duiker101 If you find one let me know! I love games like that. Currently, what I found myself playing that scratches my itch the most is Path of Exile. The game requires a minimum amount of actual playing but once you get going you can just play the economy if you want without actually playing the game. Let me give you some details. The game is playable in Leagues, there is a Standard League that goes on forever and then there are Challenge Leagues that reset the whole game every few months (4/5 I think). Most of the player base plays the Challenge Leagues so you get to start from zero every so often. I actually like that because this stops people from taking over too much and it's not frequent enough to be boring. The game plays as a Diablo game, top down, you go around, kill stuff and collect randomly generated items. You can then sell your items to other players. Buying and selling is done with intentionally limited GUI/Automation. GGG (the devs) want to keep the experience as "pure" as possible. Which means that to buy an item you have to actually send a message to the person you want to buy it from, then go to their hideout, send them a trade request and then trade whatever you want. There is no real currency but there are some "currency items". The whole economy is player-driven. To find items there isn't even an official website. There are however a few officially endorsed third party websites like [https://poe.trade](https://poe.trade). Now, why do I like this? Because it gives you a lot of freedom and interesting challenges. Botting is not allowed but it's very common (and not excessively frowned upon) with certain items that people tend to buy in bulk or currency items trade. There are also many opportunities to create tools that make the whole game experience better. There are many different ways of generating currency and the game itself is very fun. I would encourage you to give it a shot! Ultimately, I do not know of any games that allow automation, the moment you make it legal to automate, the game will be taken over by bots and no human player will enjoy playing. ~~~ nstart So I managed to dig up just one game that looks promising. It's this game called screeps [1]. You program your own fleet of "creeps" using Javascript (or other languages compiled to WASM). There's a fair amount of depth to the game and there is a marketplace and alliances exist. I'm not a fan of the whole CPU model or the pathfinding model either. Those two are a little too complex for my liking, but there's no doubt that this game is mostly everything one could want in a programmable game. Overall, I still feel like this market is underserved. But I'm probably going to give screeps a try myself and see what I can learn from it :). [1] [https://screeps.com/](https://screeps.com/) ~~~ duiker101 I'll check it out thanks!

Aspect-Oriented Programming in Ruby using Combinator Birds (revised extensively) - raganwald http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master/2008-11-07/from_birds_that_compose_to_method_advice.markdown#resubmit_reason_major%20revision ====== raganwald ...and reposted. Please let me know if it is indeed worth another look. If not... moderators may want to kill it.

Entrepreneurship to get out of debt - pr0active Hi HN,<p>I've been very silly and managed to rack up around £16,000 worth of debt.<p>I'm a reasonably well paid developer mainly working in Java web and enterprise stuff at an ecommerce consultancy.<p>I've always wanted to start a business online as a side to my job (the bingo card creator story amazes me!) in order to earn extra money so I can afford to give my girlfriend the big wedding she deserves.<p>Given the amount of debt I have found myself in (interest free though!) I've decided to go for it and try to create something online that generates income.<p>The question is, I'm seriously stuck for ideas but I'm very hard working and have what it takes to follow through and execute.<p>Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions for me?<p>Thanks ====== sc0rb Would it be possible to freelance with your ecommerce skills as an aside to your day job?

Show HN: Set OS X files and folders to self-destruct based on tag - turtleofdeath http://scottmw.com/463/os-x-set-file-self-destruct-based-tag/ ====== derefr If this was based on atime instead of mtime, and was coupled with Time Machine backups, it'd actually make an interesting form of Hierarchical Storage Management. Files would "expire" from your local disk, but still be restorable. On a tangent, that's really what I (and I think most people) want from HSM—not "files canonically being on slow media but being cached on faster media", but rather "files canonically being on small/fast media, and then migrating to slower media when you stop caring about them, as if a garbage-collection pass had occurred, leaving your disk with more space." Basically, HSM should do automatically what people do manually when they e.g. burn files to optical disks to clear up space. ------ drhayes9 For easy-to-use OSX automation I'm a big fan of Hazel: [http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php](http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php) I bet you could set up something similar in it. ------ kolev This is a pretty good idea. Add the ability to tag a file/files with TTL from the CLI as well. Source code: [https://github.com/tdlm/os-x-self- destruct](https://github.com/tdlm/os-x-self-destruct) ~~~ scott_karana > Add the ability to tag a file/files with TTL from the CLI as well. You can use the OS's standard facilities to do what you want: see `xattr` and `mdfind`.[1] There's also `tag`[2] 1 http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/93979/are-the-osx-mavericks-tags-visible-from-the-command-line 2 https://github.com/jdberry/tag ~~~ kolev I'm using tag, too, but it's in C, so, I suggested xattr to the author. I submitted an issue already (first!): [https://github.com/tdlm/os-x-self- destruct/issues/1](https://github.com/tdlm/os-x-self-destruct/issues/1) ------ alexisnorman This is awesome. I've been waiting for Yosemite's JS Automation so I can do some similar things with my downloads (Moving into folders based on tags, etc.) so this is going to be fun to play around with. ------ bithush It mentions it uses srm, is that any use with an SSD with wear levelling etc? ~~~ scott_karana Probably not. Hopefully you're also using FileVault, though it doesn't totally alleviate recovery risks (from undelete scripts, etc) ------ jason_slack Interesting idea, can anyone give me ideas for specific use cases in everyday use? ~~~ johndavi I use Hazel (mentioned by drhayes9 too) to monitor various folders and take action regularly. On the delete side, this includes: * clearing out any items in Downloads > 1week * clearing out any items from my "Temp" folder > 1 day, unless they have an explicit "save" tag ("Temp" is my go-to alternative to the Desktop and is where I stash anything, well, temporary-ish) * automatically moving screenshots into my Temp folder (where they will soon be deleted) ~~~ hk__2 Why not using /tmp? ~~~ scott_karana 1 Workflow: you can put the files _anywhere_ this way, and still have them get deleted. 2 Time granularity (though you could, I suppose, set up subdirectories in /tmp/ with associated hourly/daily/weekly/monthly cronjobs) ------ Lai0chee Is there no at(1) on OSX? ~~~ alayne Yes, you could queue an at job for every deletion. If you moved the file that approach would break. Also, you'd have to remove that at queue entry if you changed your mind.

Google to Launch Chrome Web Store and Chrome OS - Uncle_Sam http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/google-to-launch-chrome-web-store-and.html ====== mattew I have been looking forward to checking out Chrome OS, but haven't had time to download one of the installers out there right now. It will be nice to have an official, easy to install version, if they release one. Do they plan to make it easy for people to download and install the OS, or are they mostly going to market it to device manufacturers? ~~~ cryptoz Chromium OS is the open source version and is available for download in source form right now. You'll have to compile it yourself, I think. I'm pretty sure things will stay that way. Chrome OS is the closed-source version that is sent to vendors to be installed on computers. I'm pretty sure Google won't make Chrome OS available for download, since there will be no single "Chrome OS" image; it'll be customized for each hardware option. (I think.) ~~~ mattew That makes sense. I will just have to take the initiative and compile it or download one of the unofficial builds.

At Least 37M People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror - chishaku https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/magazine/displaced-war-on-terror.html ====== phobosanomaly The degree to which ordinary Americans are isolated from the violence of these conflicts is mind-boggling. The notable absence of car-bombs alone is telling how privileged we are to be able to lead our lives without fear of getting murked on the way to Starbucks. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_car_bombings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_car_bombings) ~~~ ardit33 Mass shootings (either, school shootings, shootings in church, shootings in clubs, that vegas shooter, the occasional incel shooter, etc.. etc..), are a form of terrorism, albeit not necessary with political motives. Most of the world do not experience them either. ~~~ sharkweek I can say we have been effectively terrorized by mass shootings when things like this hang in kindergarten classrooms: [https://i.imgur.com/ztiYy9R.png](https://i.imgur.com/ztiYy9R.png) ~~~ phobosanomaly It's terrible, right? But, it's important to contextualize it with the level of violence occurring in these countries destabilized as a result of US foreign policy. Much of it makes the violence in the US (as horrific as it is) look like Sesame Street: "On 9 August 2018, Saudi Arabian expeditionary aircraft bombed a civilian school bus passing through a crowded market in Dahyan, Saada Governorate, Yemen, near the border with Saudi Arabia. At least 40 children were killed, all under 15 years old and most under age 10." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahyan_air_strike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahyan_air_strike) "MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — Four attacks across Afghanistan on Saturday night and Sunday killed at least 26 government security officers, while two schools were also set ablaze, according to Afghan officials." [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/world/asia/afghanistan- at...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/world/asia/afghanistan-attacks- schools.html) "BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber detonated a truck filled with explosives on the playground of an elementary school in northern Iraq on Sunday morning, killing 13 children and the headmaster, the police said. Shortly afterward, another suicide truck bomb struck a police station in the same village, killing three officers." [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/world/middleeast/deadly-b...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/world/middleeast/deadly- bombing-at-elementary-school-playground-in-iraq.html) "HELMAND, Afghanistan/KABUL (Reuters) - At least 40 civilians attending a wedding party were killed by explosions and gunfire during a raid by U.S.-backed Afghan government forces on a nearby Islamist militant hideout, officials in Helmand province said on Monday." [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack/at- lea...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack/at- least-35-people-at-wedding-party-killed-during-nearby-afghan-army-raid- idUSKBN1W80MI) This stuff just goes on...and on...and on... But, compare it with the death tolls from school shootings in the United States within the last 20 years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_by_death_toll) Consider that our foreign policy can have the effect on others that school shooters have on our own children. ------ sudoaza "War on Terror" is newspeak, it's well known that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 nor had they WMD as claimed to invade them. ~~~ thrwway34 You conveniently forgot about 5000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs that US troops found in Iraq. ~~~ manicdee Oh you mean the caches of weapons sold to Iraq by the US that had been buried for decades? As opposed to the rationale for the invasion which was Iraq building stockpiles of WMD from their own factories? Or are you talking about a different cache of chemical weapons? ------ onepointsixC This seems to imply unfounded causality placing the blame at the feet of America. If ISIS wasn't fought then there would have been millions of people displaced all the same. There has been a decades long ongoing civil war in Somalia. There's nothing which suggests that things would be peaches and roses in Somalia if only the US hadn't been fighting Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda there. If anything there could have been greater displacement of people fleeing the more successful and bolder Islamist forces. ~~~ sudosysgen The creation of ISIS is a direct and predicted result of the catastrophic US policy in the Middle East. The conditions for ISIS to exist were not there before US involvement, and wouldn't have arisen. Al Qaeda themselves likely wouldn't have been an issue if it was not for US meddling in the Middle East. ~~~ onepointsixC That's just not true. It's precursor, Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, predates the Iraq war. It is true that the downfall of Saddam gave them opportunity, you can't definitively say similar opportunity wouldn't have come about in an Arab spring uprising just as there was in Syria. Islamist and Jihadists groups are all throughout the region and sub Saharan Africa. To claim that these are just American reactionaries is a self centered western view. ~~~ sudosysgen It's precursor would never have been able to pose any challenge to the Syrian military if it wasn't for the weapons the US and it's allies pumped into them. The Syrian Army would still have been able to destroy the Jihadists if it wasn't for the US waging war against the Syrian Army, by the way of airstrikes and missile strikes. I can definitively say that Iraq would not have collapsed into a failed state if Saddam had been deposed organically. Hell, if it wasn't for the occupation of Iraq by the US up to and including this very day its possible the Iraqi state would have been able to rebuild itself, one way or another. That being said, a large amount of terrorist groups in the Middle East find the roots even earlier, in the US support of jihadis against the Soviets. And wouldn't you know it! The founder of Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, was financed and trained in order to go fight against the USSR in Afghanistan. Financed by who exactly? By Bin Laden, of course. Which himself got his money and material for who? Wouldn't you believe it, it's the old red white and blue again. ~~~ onepointsixC Your story is nonfactual. The first US airstrikes in Syria were in 2014[1], the first US airstrikes against the Syria Government were in 2017[2]. Both long after the Syrian Armed forces had lost control of the situation. The mass defection of Syrian Army soldiers and officers to the Free Syrian Army guaranteed that the conflict was going to a bloody mess with arms falling into hands of all parties, long before the US started supplying arms. And no, you can't for certain say that Iraq would have fared better, as Iran would have fueled Shia sectarianism all the same in Iraq as it did post US invasion. Iran in fact was Sadam's greatest concern before his WMD bluff backfired. [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American- led_intervention_in_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American- led_intervention_in_the_Syrian_Civil_War) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_attacks_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_attacks_on_Syria_during_the_Syrian_Civil_War) ~~~ sudosysgen >Your story is nonfactual. The first US airstrikes in Syria were in 2014[1], the first US airstrikes against the Syria Government were in 2017[2]. Both long after the Syrian Armed forces had lost control of the situation. Yes, and that has contributed to make the ISIS mess even worse. In that way the US is responisble for that. >The mass defection of Syrian Army soldiers and officers to the Free Syrian Army guaranteed that the conflict was going to a bloody mess with arms falling into hands of all parties, long before the US started supplying arms. The Free Syrian Army, which was also incidentally funded and armed by the US. >And no, you can't for certain say that Iraq would have fared better, as Iran would have fueled Shia sectarianism all the same in Iraq as it did post US invasion. Iran in fact was Sadam's greatest concern before his WMD bluff backfired. In which case either he would have been overthrown or the country would have fragmented. In both cases, the state or states would have been able to crush ISIS. ------ Proven That's why a foreign policy should be non-interventionist (aka isolationist). In this case Trump's America first or Ron Paul's call to end foreign wars would have helped. Is Trump the only president since the 90's who hasn't started new wars? ------ beervirus > While the United States is not the sole cause for the migration from these > countries, the authors say it has played either a dominant or contributing > role in these conflicts. This makes the scary-headline conclusion pretty worthless. ~~~ sudosysgen It really isn't. US actions made it possible for the problem to become what it is. If it wasn't for US involvement Iraq would have been a strong state and would have destroyed any force like ISIS, Al Qaeda wouldn't be much more than a reading group, Syria would be peaceful, Libya would still exist, and so on. It can be true that you have had a strong contributing role and that it wouldn't have happened if you weren't there - that's just how multicausal events works. ~~~ beervirus That's all awfully speculative, especially the part about Al Qaeda being just a reading group. ~~~ sudosysgen And yet, it turns out that every single major terrorist group has had the US implicate in their origin and rise. Isn't it funny how that turns out? ~~~ beervirus “Implicated” as in they hate the US and wouldn’t exist without us as their enemy. ~~~ sudosysgen No, as in were founded due to direct action and were allied with the interests of the US.

Looking for co-founders - hunterx Hi all,<p>I&#x27;m looking for a co-founder for my startup as my current co-founder is leaving the company to invest full-time in crypto. There has no been any bad feelings or anything, he is just not interested in the industry.<p>Matter is, we&#x27;re very close to some deadlines and there are 3 clients waiting to try it out (which is good, as long as we deliver). Also, there is some more good stuff.<p>So, I&#x27;m looking for someone who has built real, bullet-proof react + node.js apps. The better if you&#x27;ve build a chat used in production before. But hey, that&#x27;s not etched in stone.<p>Anyone who wants to give it a try will need to work with me for a couple weeks before accepting and transferring the shares and all that stuff.<p>(company is based in London)<p>If anyone is interested ----&gt; please, reply below: ====== raooll Hello, I have past experience working on high volume chat systems. I have build a number of systems from scratch in the past and I work on nodejs as well. Here is link to my profile:- [https://angel.co/raooll](https://angel.co/raooll) Would be nice if we can have a quick chat. :) ~~~ hunterx Hi Rahul, sounds good to me! What time zone are you in? I'm available today from 19 p.m. onwards, London time. ~~~ raooll Hey Hunterx, Could you share you Skype so we can setup a time ? I'm in GMT +5:30 IST. ~~~ hunterx Hey Rahul, Sure! Skype is isaacalbets. Are you avail tomorrow around between 1-3 p.m London time? ~~~ raooll Hey Issac, Send you a request on Skype Let's do the call at 1pm london time. ------ amingilani If I'd seen this post a few months ago, I'd have applied. I found my team, though. Good luck with your hunt! I'm also watching this thread to see if asking for cofounders on HN works :) ~~~ hunterx What a pitty! Well, we'll find out soon :)

Applied Category Theory (2019) [video] - Kinrany https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwvl0tBJhoM ====== jmount Unfortunately in mathematics "application" is often a synonym for "prove a lemma or theorem." David Spivak told me Peter Freyd once said, “Perhaps the purpose of categorical algebra is to show that which is trivial is trivially trivial.” This will only work for those who already find category theory trivial (a hard thing, as it is so general) and the target domain novel (so they are not yet confident what is trivial and non-trivial in that domain). If done wrong it can look like the art of making the easy hard. One good use of category theory is: admitting there are composition patterns other than function composition. For example: in scikit learn the fit_transform interface has composition. When you wire up compatible classes in a pipeline they lash together the fit, transform, and fit_tranform methods in a simultaneously useful and consistent manner. With category theory you can say this is a nice form of composition, even though it is not mere composition of functions. Another idea that can be made clearer is: separating a function's identity from its action. This lets us claim code optimizations are correct. That is f1 := x -> 2.0 x can be thought of as doubling every real number. Now for real numbers (unfortunately not for mere floating point numbers!) we have an inverse f2 := x -> x/2.0. Under a very narrow view of composition we might force f1(f2(x)) to be realized by code such as 2.0(x/2.0). If we think of composition as different than action, we might say f1(f2(x)) is just x (though again, this is true over the real numbers- not over the floating point numbers). ------ ssivark The concepts are intuitive enough, and make sense. But I don’t see what non- trivial insights this gives us. I found the talk frustratingly vague. After all the hard work of setting up categories/operads in an example, the talk moved on without using them to do anything interesting. ~~~ lidHanteyk Here is one non-trivial insight: Every formal logic corresponds to a category. When we do logical deduction, we have facts and rules. We can apply rules to facts to get more facts. More specifically, formal logic is built from situations where we have some fact P, some rule P => Q, and some conclusion Q. In a category, we have objects and arrows. We can imagine arrows as mapping one object to another, or sending one object to another. We might have objects P and Q, and an arrow f : P -> Q relating them. The connection continues. We can take multiple rules in logic and apply them sequentially, building a proof tree; we can take multiple arrows in a category and compose them sequentially, building a _path_. In some logics, there is an idea of ex falso quodlibet, or from the false fact, anything can be proven; similarly, in some categories, there are _initial objects_ , which come with arrows from the initial object to every other object. Just like how logical formalism eventually removed the possibility that logic is non-mathematical, category theory removes the possibility that logic is unstructured. Logic is actually incredibly highly structured, and those structures happen to coincide with structures in other parts of maths and physics. ~~~ jiggawatts Again though, how do I _use_ this to solve everyday problems? I've seen some vaguely cool stuff done with Category theory in Haskell, e.g.: composable tree parsing and traversal, but I've never seen anyone actually use any of this stuff to make a deliverable piece of software that is notably better than what developers can readily produce using traditional procedural languages. I mean sure, I suppose it would be nice if the C# team added some sort of category theoretically "pure" tree processing sub-language akin to some bastard child of LINQ and XSLT, but... meh. I don't think it would see a lot of use in practice. ~~~ lidHanteyk A few months ago, while employed at a shop, I wrote about a hundred lines of Python which performed a basic katamorphism on some XML, outputting a PNG. Nobody else on my team could conceive of this, and were mystified by the fact that I could just sit down and do this. It wasn't too hard, though, because I could imagine the entire katamorphism in my mind. The traditional approaches weren't just stymied by this problem, BTW; the other developers wanted to go shopping for off-the-shelf components which transform XML to PNG, as if that would get us the specific katamorphism we desired. The nature of your everyday work will inform what you can do with category theory. I personally use category theory to design programming languages; it's something for which category theory gives a turn-the-key recipe: * Pick some objects of interest * Define a relatively free Cartesian closed category whose objects include your objects of interest * Enrich the category with interesting arrows * Extract a combinator basis The MarshallB programming language [0] is a good example of this recipe in action. [0] [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341703](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341703) ~~~ auggierose But the real interesting part here is the use of exact real arithmetic, not the category theoretic part. Category theory is just used as scaffolding. I would also say it is dangerous to see things only through the category- theoretic lens, because no doubt, as with any generalisation, there will be plenty of situations where it does not provide the right generalisation. ~~~ lidHanteyk Better scaffolding leads to bigger, better buildings. Don't knock the auxiliary and ancillary techniques; they're still necessary for this sort of work to be understandable. Also, from my perspective, the exact real arithmetic isn't super-interesting because it's not new; Turing was doing this sort of thing when he first got access to computers. Legend has that one of Turing's first recreational programs was computation of zeros of the Riemann zeta function, and ever since, there's been a tradition of exploring exact real arithmetic with computers and programming languages. MarshallB is one more incremental step forward in a big research programme of overcoming the inconvenient fact that we can't test real numbers for interesting properties with computers alone. At no point have I advocated _only_ category theory. Categories are always composed of some collection of arrows (and objects, but I prefer object-free presentations!), and those arrows are always homogeneous, if not homoousios, composed of a single substance. We can study that substance on its own. Perhaps an analogy to materials science would be appropriate. We ought to study both each building material, be it sets, vector spaces, relations, graphs, or type theories; but also the architectural principles used to make buildings, like abstract algebra and category theory. ~~~ auggierose Yes, nothing against better scaffolding, as long as you recognise it for what it is. Arguably exact real arithmetic is older than inexact real arithmetic ;-) But that's not the point, I think the point is that it becomes interesting now to actually do computations with it. It helped me program solid modelling operations for triangle meshes, when I was despairing doing it with normal floats. Switching to exact real arithmetic allowed me to see things clearer, and once I had what I wanted running with exact real arithmetic, I could switch back to floats to make it faster. ------ dang Url changed from [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5581](http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/5581), which points to this. ~~~ Kinrany I initially decided against posting the video because the thread has a small amount of discussion. Mainly the link to related work: Seven Sketches in Compositionality, [https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05316](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05316) Edit: previously on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20376325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20376325)

OO Design Classic - Abstract Class vs Interface - RohitS5 http://javarevisited.blogspot.in/2013/05/difference-between-abstract-class-vs-interface-java-when-prefer-over-design-oops.html ====== cynwoody ts; dr Need to unlearn the font-size attribute!

Google Maps pulls cupcake calorie counter after backlash - pwg http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/17/controversy-over-a-cupcake-google-maps-pulls-cupcake-calorie-counter-after-backlash/ ====== CharlesDodgson I feel sorry for whoever came up with feature, I bet they thought it would be a simple easy way to make the app a little quirkier and fun ... oh how wrong they were :( ~~~ oudimara I thought the same thing. It looked like more of a cute way to tell people that they did great by walking and that they can have a cupcake if they want without having to feel bad about eating unhealthy stuff. instead people got mad like always

Why is there no SaaS asset management service? - dankohn1 I&#x27;m looking to manage application software on about 50 Windows PCs to ensure that we have bought all the licenses we need.<p>Almost every company in the space has a 100 or 500 seat minimum. I&#x27;ve looked at Dell Kace, Express Metrics, Scalable, Snow Software, TrackIt, iQuate, and Front Range. All of these sites include Products, Services, and Partners in the top-level navigation but never Pricing.<p>All I want is a link to an installer I can get every person in the company to run, and then a web-based dashboard where I can see what they have installed. Remote install and uninstall would be great but is not essential. I want to be billed a small amount per user per month (a buck or two?).<p>I&#x27;d forgotten how much I hate enterprise software. Hasn&#x27;t anyone come along to disrupt this space? ====== johnmurch Ah - I guess you want something more like [http://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/help- desk-...](http://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/help-desk- features.html) then ------ johnmurch Have you seen [http://www.sohoassets.com/](http://www.sohoassets.com/) or [https://assetbox.io/](https://assetbox.io/) ~~~ dankohn1 Am I wrong in thinking that those are basically online spreadsheets? What's missing is the software agent that would track software installs.

Dhall – A Distributed, Safe Configuration Language - KirinDave https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang ====== ff_ Dhall was such a godsend to make our infra configs more safe & modular (we jointly configure Kubernetes & Terraform with it). If you need some example of use cases to see if it might help you, check out "Dhall in Production" [0] So far I'm a maintainer of dhall-kubernetes [1] and we'll soon open source some of our integration with Terraform. And because it's absolutely safe to distribute Dhall code I'm toying with the idea of making some kind of Dhall-Kafka pubsub, in which you can safely distribute Dhall code and data, with automatic version migrations (check this out for more info on why this is possible [2]) [0]: [https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/wiki/Dhall-in- produ...](https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/wiki/Dhall-in-production) [1]: [https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall- kubernetes](https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes) [2]: [http://www.haskellforall.com/2017/11/semantic-integrity- chec...](http://www.haskellforall.com/2017/11/semantic-integrity-checks-are- next.html?showComment=1511801973283#c6412191866661551590) ~~~ openasocket RE: Dhall-Kafka pubsub Dhall seems to be safe in the sense that it will always terminate and will never crash or throw some kind of exception, but I don't think it's safe in the sense that it is safe to execute potentially malicious Dhall code, unless you restrict the allowed imports to a whitelist. At the very least that could be used to DDos some target by having the script try to import something from a victim domain. And you _might_ be able to read data on local files and transmit that information back, I'm not sure. It depends on if imports are evaluated lazily, and the data of interest would have to be stored in a file on disk that can be imported. EDIT: Actually, it looks like you can import raw text, so it doesn't matter what format the on-disk data is that you are trying to extract. EDIT2: Actually, it doesn't even matter if imports are evaluated lazily or not, you can specify that a network import be made with given headers, so you could just set a header in the HTTP request to contain the sensitive data. ~~~ Gabriel439 Author here: You might be interested in this post on safety guarantees: [https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/wiki/Safety- guarant...](https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/wiki/Safety-guarantees) The main risks in executing potentially malicious Dhall code that is not protected by a semantic integrity check are: * Using more computer resources than you expected (i.e. network/CPU/RAM) * Unintentional DDos (as you mentioned) * The malicious import returning a value which changes the behavior of your program If you protect the import with a semantic integrity check then the malicious import can no longer return an unexpected value, which eliminates the third issue (changing program behavior). Also, upcoming versions will cache imports based on the semantic integrity check, which would mitigate the second issue (DDos) for all but the first time you interpret the program. There is also a `dhall freeze` subcommand which takes a program and automatically pins imports to their most recent value using semantic integrity check. Regarding exfiltration, the import system guarantees that only local imports can access sensitive information such as file contents or environment variables. See: [https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/wiki/Safety- guarant...](https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/wiki/Safety- guarantees#cross-site-scripting-xss) The only way that a remote import can obtain that information is if a local import supplied that information via Dhall's support for custom headers. In fact, this is actually an intended use of that feature (i.e. a local import fetching a Dhall expression from a private GitHub repository using an access token retrieved from an environment variable). So in other words the threat model is that as long as you can trust local imports then you can transitively trust remote imports because they cannot access your local filesystem or environment variables unless you explicitly opt into that via a local import. I think that's a reasonable threat model because if can't trust the contents of your local filesystem then you can't even trust the Dhall interpreter that you are using :) Imports are not computed and the set of imports that you retrieve is static (i.e. does not change in response to program state or input), so the set of imports or their paths cannot be used as an exfiltration vector. ~~~ openasocket I had missed that wiki section on safety guarantees, my bad. It seems all of my proposed attacks wouldn't work. There's just one other that I thought of, and looking through your documentation I'm not sure if it would work or not. What if the host executing the script had access to some intranet site with sensitive data? Would I be able to do a network import of such a URL, load it as raw text, and provide that as a header to another import? Seriously great work on this, by the way. A total configuration language that allows some form of network access while still being secure against malicious input is a really really impressive tool! ~~~ Gabriel439 > What if the host executing the script had access to some intranet site with > sensitive data? Would I be able to do a network import of such a URL, load > it as raw text, and provide that as a header to another import? Yes, a local import would be able to access an intranet site and re-export that information via custom headers supplied to another import. This is allowed because it falls under trusting local imports. Local imports have access to environment variables and your local filesystem, too, which are equally sensitive, which is why they need to be trusted. This rule is called the "referential transparency" check, which can be summed up as: * Only environment variables, absolute paths, and home-anchored paths classify as "local" imports * Only local imports can retrieve other local imports * URLs can import relative paths, but they are relative to the URL, not relative to your local filesystem The reason it's called the "referential transparency" check is because this security restriction also leads to the nice property that import system is referentially transparent. That means that every import evaluates to the same result no matter you import it from. For example, if you have a directory of Dhall expressions that refer to each other and you rehost them on a file server the language guarantees that they still behave the same whether you import them locally or you import them via their hosted URLs. Also, thanks! :) ------ KirinDave Dhall's really cool because you can use it even if your tooling doesn't support dhall. There is direct JSON/YAML support with dhall-json: [https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-json](https://github.com/dhall- lang/dhall-json) If you wanted to generate something like an NGINX config (or, for example, TOML or Terraform) you could use dhall-text: [https://github.com/dhall- lang/dhall-text](https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-text) Oh, did I say terraform? Someone's already on supporting that directly: [https://github.com/blast-hardcheese/dhall- terraform](https://github.com/blast-hardcheese/dhall-terraform) Dhall is very unique among configuration because it's "distributed", meaning that Dhall can load any file as a dhall expression, and has builtin URI resolvers to make even remote endpoints part of local configuration. This is excellent for, say, CI integration. Dhall has "semantic hashing" so that if someone does change a dhall dependency in a surprising way, the dhall script will refuse to continue (and give a very clear error about what changed, where it was looking for the change, and why it's stopping). Dhall is a secret superpower for project configuration. Especially as of the 1.14+ releases, it's become an increasingly go-to tool for me. Even in just one-off JSON generation scripts, I find it to be a lifesaver. ~~~ nv-vn Dhall is really similar to Nix in that regard, though in practice I've never seen Nix used for real configs (sadly). Usually trying to do so in Nix ends up being really ugly because the Nix features don't translate directly to concepts in the config language. ~~~ chriswarbo I dabbled in using Nix for this sort of thing, but it's rather painful to invoke the "Nix language" itself. In Nix 1.x we can evaluate a Nix expression (e.g. a templated string) like this: $ nix-instantiate --eval --read-write-mode -E 'Nix code goes here' That Nix code could be a file, or an import, or whatever. This is slightly improved with Nix 2.x: $ nix eval '(Nix code goes here)' Still, it's not particularly well suited to string processing from the commandline like this. We're closer to Nix's comfortable territory if we use it to build a config file, e.g. $ nix-build -E 'Nix code goes here' Or, more likely: $ nix-build myConfigFileDescription.nix In my experience this is more useful than trying to use Nix as a string processor. Still, if we're using Nix in a project or system, we might be better off using it to build the whole project (e.g. with a 'default.nix' file) or system (using a NixOS module or something). From what I've seen, Guix takes compatibility with non-Guix systems a little closer to heart, e.g. for generating standalone packages that don't require Guix to install/use. ------ Cieplak Gabriel gave a great presentation on Dhall at Bayhac this year: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih9Ngu7FlCc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih9Ngu7FlCc) ------ jdc0589 is there a single example Dhall config file anywhere that has more than a couple feature examples? It's a lot easier to grok new stuff like this if there's just one big example to look at to get an idea of what it does rather than having to navigate tons of granular documentation (which is also great, though) ~~~ dwohnitmok Since the author's already responded, this might be redundant, but perhaps expanding the example at [https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang#case- study](https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang#case-study) might be a helpful look at a running example of Dhall. I feel like I've seen multiple people completely skip over and not realize there was already an example in the README as opposed to just the detailed reference docs. Perhaps you're looking for something with even more features and applicability (e.g. an example of a Kubernetes config as Dhall's author points out), but hopefully that example gives at least a self-contained example of how to gradually start using Dhall. ~~~ jdc0589 oh wow, I totally missed that since it was minimized and I was skimming. thanks! ------ jarpineh This discussion here and Dhall's Github Readme seemed promising, so I went through the tutorial. I've recently had to write a lot of YAML like language with custom templating (think Ansible), so naturally I felt there was a way out with Dhall. I was hoping the author could perhaps point me towards explanations to what I noticed bothering me by this (admittedly short) experience that left me puzzled. I saw that lists can have only one type of elements without annotating their types. With type annotation list can have differently typed values, but only if each element is explicitly stated (note: this is my understanding that might not be correct) meaning there's no dynamic content in a list. In same vein a map of maps needs to have all its keys stated by type annotation. To me this seems too restrictive since the structure of data gets lost in the more verbose annotations. Not to mention the work of writing this annotation or the functionality to produce the same. In TypeScript I'd write something like this { [string] : [ Number | String ] } and I'd have my string keyed object with values of lists containing numbers and strings. Having a language like Dhall to help with creation of correct configuration code seems really useful instead of this messy combination of declarative and template language. I would like to understand things that can get better by using such an type system. ~~~ Gabriel439 Dhall's lists are homogeneous lists, meaning that every element always has the same type of value. This is true whether or not you annotate list elements with a type or you annotate the list with a type. You only need to annotate the type of an empty list. Lists with at least one element don't require a type annotation because the type can be inferred from the type of that element. Dhall does not have buit-in support for homogeneous maps. Dhall does have statically typed heterogeneous records (i.e. something like `{ foo = Bool, bar = "ABC" }` which has type `{ foo : Bool, bar : Text }` for example). If you want to store different type of values in the same list you wrap them in a union. For example, if you want to store both `Text` values and `Natural` numbers in a list you would do: let union = constructors < Left : Natural | Right : Text > in [ union.Left 10, union.Right "ABC", union.Right "DEF", union.Left 4 ] The closest thing to a homogeneous map in Dhall is an association list of type `[ { mapKey : Text, mapValue : a } ]` but even that is still not an exact fit since it doesn't guarantee uniqueness of keys. However, Dhall's JSON/YAML integration does convert that automatically to a JSON/YAML homogeneous map (i.e. a JSON record where every field has the same type). In general, Dhall's JSON/YAML integration has several tricks and conventions that translate to weakly typed JSON idioms (such as homogeneous maps, omitting null values, and using tags). ~~~ jarpineh Thank you for your response. This Left and Right declaration style was a new one for me. Also, homogeneous map wasn't exactly a familiar concept. I don't remember meeting these when learning TypeScript and dabbling with Elm. I fear I don't quite grasp the type structure here yet. I can go forward with my testing based on your example. ~~~ KirinDave By the way, it's entirely fair game for you to create config/domain specific things and not simply (Left|Right) dichotomies. And by the way, TypeScript DOES have a form of Sum typing like that as of 2017! You can say something like this from the manual: type Shape = Square | Rectangle | Circle | Triangle; function area(s: Shape) { switch (s.kind) { case "square": return s.size * s.size; case "rectangle": return s.height * s.width; case "circle": return Math.PI * s.radius ** 2; } // should error here - we didn't handle case "triangle" } (You can see more about it here: [https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced- types....](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced-types.html), search for "Discriminated Unions".) You can also make these ad-hoc ,and they're useful for harnessing underlying functions that might return null from stdlibs. E.g., function strToInt( x: string ): number | null And then you're required to check for nulls and the compiler will complain if you don't check for them. Pretty useful! ------ totalperspectiv Is there a tutorial that isn't predicated on me already knowing haskell? I feel like Dhall is exactly the tool I've been hoping for. It feels like a non- hacky version of make + m4. ~~~ totalperspectiv Answering my own question, the README says that eventually the tutorial will be language agnostic. ------ hiccuphippo I don't understand what the word "distributed" means here. Is it that it can load the configuration from multiple servers? ~~~ klibertp Apparently any, or almost any(?), element of a language can be replaced with a file path, which is then transparently read and used as if typed directly in that place. It works even for type annotations and is type-safe. This allows for easy factoring of the code into many files, and - by extension - to files on remote hosts as long as they're accessible via a (built-in) HTTP support. ------ nojvek I tried to read Dhall manual and figure out if I could make sense of it. I couldn’t. Looks a bit too complicated for me. Jsonnet strikes a great balance of json but with some nice template syntax so you can be DRY. Also what’s wrong with being Turing complete. I love for loops. ------ shoo if there's anyone here who has used both dhall and jsonnet in anger, can you comment on your experiences? ------ ofrzeta What about those special characters like the lambda or the universal quantification? How to you type them? ~~~ Gabriel439 There are ASCII equivalents. You can type `\\` instead of `λ` and `forall` instead of `∀`. Also `dhall format` will automatically translate ASCII to Unicode for you. However, if you do want to type them then see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input) ... and the relevant code points are: * `λ`: `U+03BB` * `∀`: `U+2200` ------ slyrus Remind me again... what's wrong with common-lisp:read? ~~~ js8 I interpret it as "What advantage Dhall has compare to CL:read?" So for example, in your configuration, you can define a common expression into a variable (or even parametrize it in a function). CL:read cannot do that without resorting to read macros (technically it doesn't have to be read macros, you can reinterpret it later, but then we are getting outside the realm of CL:read), which are Turing complete and can have bugs that can lead to security exploits. Dhall guarantees that the functions you define in your configuration cannot be exploited. This has interesting implications, for example, you can read configuration safely from semi-trusted source. With CL:read, you can do that only if you give up read macros, but then the semi-trusted source cannot define their own function. So where with CL:read you have to choose between little and total power, Dhall gives you a little bit of both, a medium power of sorts. ~~~ slyrus Thanks for the explanation! ------ lifeisstillgood Look, I'm sorry but this is beyond 99% of the world's IT services right now. This is of course biased, unresearched anecdata but roughly speaking \- 50 % of all IT installations cannot be rebuilt from scratch in an automated fashion if you have them the new hardware,plugged in. A further ten percent could be rebuilt with mostly automated scripts and a wiki page that's out of date by two months of the remaining 1/3 of the world's IT, 1/6 has dependencies it does not know about - the DNS server that "just works",the production routers that should not serve that subnet, the database that is "owned" by a different team whose configuration you have no control over. Good guy d.b. has its secret passwords on the wiki page, or stored on a seperate importable module, in source control, base64-encoded And the rest - the rest rely more on bash than ansible. Just get the world's enterprise services over the line and into "run this python script with these parma's and you get a complete rebuild across databases and routers" and then we can talk. ~~~ klibertp That's completely beside the point. Are we supposed to shed a tear for each of that 50 %? I can do that, but it won't help me, at all. On the other hand, I can use Dhall to generate Kubernetes/Helm configs, which will be more DRY, less duplicated, and not a pain to work with. I know that _this_ would help me quite a bit, not only because I hate my current "DevOps" team members with burning passion and I'd enjoy watching them try to figure out what is happening (well, I'd at least add the source files to a repo, that's already more than they do). ~~~ lifeisstillgood You are travelling in a worldwide convoy - a convoy across the globe travelling to the future. Those 50% are not just in pointless fortune x000 companies, but governments and charities trying and failing to do useful things with their infrastructure. The convoy has wagons with broken spikes, no horses and people berating them because they are not travelling as fast as the well maintained ones in front Shed a tear for those being carried by such wagons - they could reach the future so much faster if best practises were common practises And this from someone who believes in Schumpter ~~~ KirinDave I still don't understand why so many of your comments here are, "People are too stupid to..." This is an excessively negative argument, and has been used many times to push back against technologies that have subsequently shown to actually have huge traction. A great example of this that the Python community _still_ makes: lambdas are too complicated.

Ask HN: Do you feel you are mostly writing glue code? - xstartup Lately, we are writing glue code to connect a bunch of services which finance department pays for. Writing any service which can be acquired from the market is forbidden. Anyone else feels like this? ====== indogooner Yes I have done that most of the time. I have thought a bit about this and feel that it should be true for most of us for software industry to scale. If you are in a solid tech company this will always be the case. Anything which can be used generally will be made into a framework and then most engineers will be expected to use that. This helps the company immensely as it can now hire top 1-2% who are extremely good at making these frameworks or guard-rails and the rest can be lesser quality devs who will do the plumbing. An example: writing multi-threaded programs and reasoning about them is hard so why not make a framework which takes care that developers only write business logic and integrate with various APIs. This is now true in most companies now as Open source projects are doing the same thing. Look at Apache Spark for example which makes writing distributed programs for Machine Learning, ETL and Analytics much easier for developers. ------ cimmanom There's an argument to be made that that's a sign of an engineering organization that has its priorities straight and is serving the business well. ------ CM30 Sometimes, though I suspect in a lot of cases that's probably for the best. I mean, if a product or service exists and does what you need it to, isn't it better to take advantage of that rather than reinvent the wheel every time? Sure, you could create your own inhouse CMS for those client websites or what not, but it's likely not worth it given the effort of making your updates, fixing security holes, etc. Same with anything really. You could in theory try and go all the way back to the start on your own, but where does it end? Eventually you'll be doing ten times more work for little extra benefit. Are there examples where doing the extra work could be better? Of course, I know that one from experience. All that time trying to integrate a CMS and a forum script and a bunch of other standalone things was a nightmare, and in that case I definitely wish I'd just rolled the whole thing myself instead. But in many cases, it's probably better to use pre-existing solutions rather than spend all your time reinventing the wheel or falling victim to not invented here syndrome. That way, you're relying on well tested solutions with a decent amount of support available online and a guarantee it'll still work when most of your team has moved on to pastures new. ------ justaguyhere Yes, many jobs are like this. Nothing wrong with it, it just depends on individual devs if they are okay with it or not. We are just 5 devs in our team and our manager spends a good amount of time optimizing dev hours so he can get the most useful features out. If this means using external services then that choice always wins (assuming we can afford it). ------ dallbee Every team I've been on has had it's majority of engineers doing exactly that. Honestly, many are happy in that role. Usually theres a handful of people that tend wiggle their way into more backend, architectural things (libraries, in-house tools, etc.). If you're bored, try to be that person. ------ ClevelandCoder I understand the business interest in separating concerns. Focusing your talent on solving only the most unique problems is kind of charming, IMO, but the part where we write the glue code for third-party services can definitely feel soul-sucking. ------ mcintyre1994 I think that most code that is well defined and I understand well I can reason about as basically transforms of dictionaries. It's often but of course not always a red flag if I can't reason about it in that way. ------ psyc That’s the nature of some jobs, and it can be a sound strategy. I’ve mostly managed to avoid these jobs, personally. ~~~ nickthemagicman Can't agree more. Why self roll your own code when you can use a tested, somewhat proven, piece of existing code. ~~~ err4nt I used to match patchwork quilts out of plugins, different HTML widgets, and try to make use of pre-made frameworks for CSS in the past. I always felt like I was 80% of the way finished before I started.....but the hard part was building the other 80%. A few years ago I flipped the way I built stuff, preferring small, self-built pieces of code only I had authored, and not only was our code smaller and easier to maintain, it also significantly dropped the amount of bugs and conflicts we were having. The problem that often happens with pre-built, well-tested solutions, is that they often only partly solve what you need to do. Edge cases might be the only cases you have, it's often better to get the one tailor made for solving your exact problem. ~~~ nickthemagicman I've found the exact opposite at every job I've had. Typically pre-build solutions do WAY more than you need from them, and you can make wrappers for any very rare edge cases they don't solve which Ive found to be few and far between. Dependency managers go a long way toward making the patchwork nature of diverse libraries..manageable. Also, I've found solutions custom rolled under pressure have more bugs and issues and theres never enough time to correctly debug, test, and QA before you're on to the next project. However, CSS and HTML widgets may not lend themselves to libraries as easily as imperative programming languages. You also, may just be solving more complex problems that require much more specialized libraries! Just glad you found a solution that works! ~~~ err4nt Ah see what I end up doing is solving the problem and thinking deeply about what I need our solution to do, and more importantly, figuring out exactly what we don't need our solution to do. Once I've solved the same problem about 4 or 5 times, I end up 'standardizing' the solution into a prototype plugin, which usually goes through 1 or 2 total rewrites, and by the time I've got the plugin resulting from that process, usually it's precisely what we need, and had all the kinks worked out. I realize the irony here, but I release these solutions into open source and re-use them. And I know they're available for others to use and benefit from, and I fully understand why somebody like me might not actually use them directly haha. I hope people at least read my solutions in a literary sense and consider them while rolling their own solution that directly meets their own needs. ~~~ nickthemagicman Glad you have the free time to do that! I work for an extremely fast moving biz and don't! And thanks for your contributions to OSS! ------ dozzie It's no big wonder if one extrapolates from how many trivial questions you ask here. ~~~ xstartup I like to keep difficult one for myself. ------ farnsworthy Longer than lately. It's "assembly" (not the other one). ------ jitendrac yup, That is pretty common thing, In the days of api-for-everything gluing is written more than api itself!!!

Evan Czaplicki's response to “Why I'm leaving Elm” - myth_drannon https://twitter.com/czaplic/status/1248696174401458177 ====== tester89 Ignores the important question of why certain packages like elm markdown should be whitelisted. From what I can tell, this is the fundamental issue for a lot of people. I don’t think removing native modules was in it of itself a bad thing, but I think having this whitelist was incredibly shitty when it includes modules which are obviously not “kernel” modules.

Ask HN: How much do you pay software engineers? - baconface What type of compensation is fair for a technical first hire?<p>What about subsequent technical hires?<p>Please give a range. ====== steventruong 1\. It depends heavily on location. 2\. It depends on what stage the company is at. Have you raised capital or not (and do you intend to) or are you planning on scaling without capital. Equity, if any, is directly tied to this which can influence pay. 3\. Depends on the experience. Without knowing the above factors, the range can be anywhere between $20k and $250k (albeit, the $250k side is usually not going to happen) ------ dasil003 This totally depends on the location. Within the US it seems somewhat tied to cost of living, but across the pond in Europe they pay significantly less even when rents are much higher (I'm looking at you London). Anywhere from $30,000 to $70,000 for someone fresh out of school might be normal. For 10 years experience the range could be $50,000 to $250,000. ~~~ spooneybarger in nyc, 30,000 a year will get you an untrained monkey with no skills at all... or someone with no concept at all of what they can get paid. ~~~ kls Right I would say that is the same for most of the US. If I had to venture to guess, I would imagine the national average for entry level is around 50-60k and senior developers are north of 100k in most major metros. ------ pbreit In the Bay Area, pre-funded: $0-30k; seed-funded: $30-70k; series A: $60-140k. All: plus equity. ~~~ baconface What are the equity ranges for seed and series A? I've heard up to 4% for seed, but not sure if that was correlated with a high-end salary or not. ------ donniefitz2 This kind of question tends to be a bit taboo. ~~~ dazzer That's a taboo I don't understand. What's wrong with talking about what you earn? I can understand if it was pride/ego preventing people from talking about it. But from the workers' perspective wouldn't it be better to know what the going rates are to make sure you aren't getting ripped off for your work. ~~~ rawsyntax It's more about negotiation tactics than being taboo. Employers don't list salaries on job ads.

Apple Ruined iTunes – What Now? - dewey https://blog.notmyhostna.me/apple-ruined-itunes-what-now/ ====== mikece Why isn't VLC considered as an alternative? And why re-encode files from FLAC to ALAC? What is gained when doing this other than iTunes support (or is that the entire point)? ~~~ dewey The re-encoding was done when I was still using iTunes, now I don't need it any more (which is another benefit but I the conversion was so painless that it's not really a reason for the switch). I love VLC and use it a lot as a media player, but as a media library where I want to browse, sort, tag things it's not really working that well (for me).

App store discovery problem. a different take? this looks interesting... - stephenjames http://www.useacorn.com?kid=1WBAS ====== pedalpete I'm not sure I understand who this is for. The copy reads "Acorn allows you to piggy back off the market leader and give you much higher visibility. With Acorn, the results of a query are shortened to just those apps that do what yours does." So I can use it find competing apps. That's fine, cut why would a consumer do that? They don't want apps, they want to do something. Seeing a map of a bunch of other apps that are similar to something they already use I think is somewhat useless. Do people want new apps to do the same thing their existing apps do? Or do they want new apps that change their lives and do something new?? I suspect the later. ~~~ stephenjames I am guessing that as a consumer you may want to find a better option to what you are already using or thinking about using. ------ stephenjames anyone know what this is?

How Linux is being subverted. - nickb http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/linux/locutus/archives/how-linux-is-being-subverted-18960 ====== mechanical_fish I can't even figure out what this article is about. I think it's about Microsoft's attempt to use the threat of patent litigation to insert itself into the corporate Linux market and thereby gain influence over open source software projects, but the article never uses the word "patent"! It reads like an outtake from the 47th minute of an hour-long private meeting. It assumes that the audience already knows the issues, the players, and the buzzwords by heart. It's a textbook example of how _not_ to write for the public. The irony is that there's a really good chance that I agree with this guy, but I just can't tell.

Facebook rolls out code to nullify Adblock Plus’ workaround - bko https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/11/friendblock/ ====== r721 Current discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12274224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12274224) ------ laurent123456 Facebook response is incredibly stupid: "We’re disappointed that ad blocking companies are punishing people on Facebook as these new attempts don’t just block ads but also posts from friends and Pages. This isn’t a good experience for people and we plan to address the issue.". Ad-blocker can be easily uninstalled so how can they "punish" anyone. Facebook should just silently block ad-blockers and not act as if they are working in their user's interest. ------ CM30 So, how long till the adblockers get past Facebook's new work around and it all repeats again? This sort of cat and mouse game is going to accomplish nothing in the long run. ~~~ Touche The sidebar content should be blockable, but the inline content... they can make that indistinguishable from user content, can't they? ~~~ detaro Which will get them in trouble with FTC and local equivalents for not making it clear what's an ad/"sponsored content". ~~~ amyjess FTC, actually [0]. I have to wonder if Facebook's anti-adblocking games are going to, at some point, get the FTC to stomp them flat. [0] [https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/ftc...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking) ~~~ detaro fixed, thanks. to many TLAs... ------ seibelj FB shouldn't even bother, it's their company vs millions of extremely motivated people who hate their ads. My bet is on the adblockers ------ atom_enger And so the cat and mouse game begins. Users of Facebook are using the service free of charge(unless you're advertising or paying for something). I think if fb can detect that a user is a paying customer they should disable ads but for the majority of users this isn't the case. Couldn't one just add fb ad server dns entries to their host file as 127.0.0.1? What could facebook do in that case besides bring up ad servers on new domains? Could we set up an ad blocking DNS service? (Again..another game of cat and mouse.) In either case, you are playing a losing game on a ball court owned by Facebook. If you don't like the ads, don't use the service? ~~~ Eric_WVGG I was just wondering about that — does this only affect ads in Facebook, or does it affect those embeds strewn everywhere? I couldn't care less about what they do within their own garbage heap, but if this enables to their junk across the rest of the web, it's a problem. ------ mtgx Facebook's plans to circumvent adblockers is illegal (in EU): [https://www.privacy- news.net/news_article/57ab2d7184f6fd5f5a...](https://www.privacy- news.net/news_article/57ab2d7184f6fd5f5ad2ddcd) [http://news.softpedia.com/news/blocking-ad-blockers-may- be-i...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/blocking-ad-blockers-may-be-illegal- in-the-eu-thanks-to-the-cookie-law-503359.shtml) ~~~ mdasen It depends on how it is implemented. Those articles are about invading the privacy of the user by detecting what software is on the machine. However, you don't need to detect that someone has an ad-blocker to circumvent it. First, you can simply disguise your ads. You can disguise them for everyone. That doesn't require you to peek into what software is on the machine. You've simply made it difficult for an ad-blocker to detect the ads. Second, you don't have to peek into the software on a machine to determine that content isn't loading. Let's say that someone is blocking my ad server via /etc/hosts. I shouldn't be able to write code that tries to read a user's /etc/hosts, but I can load content via AJAX, see that the content isn't loading, and then take action based on that (maybe loading from a secondary source, maybe not displaying the page if not all content can be loaded). I'm not saying that Facebook is circumventing ad-blocking in this way, but you certainly can attempt ad-block circumvention without reading a user's local configuration. Facebook can install the ad-blockers like anyone else on their own machines and see how they can disguise the ads as content so that the ad- blockers don't detect them. ~~~ corobo If you disguise it so that a constantly updating piece of software can't recognise it that means you've disguised it enough that the ad blocker creators can no longer tell it's an ad - Which is illegal in at least the UK, EU and US. ------ SixSigma Just use F.B. Purity, it is far superior [http://www.fbpurity.com/](http://www.fbpurity.com/) ~~~ corobo That site looks like it will try to steal something. Dodgy as hell scam site feel to it. ------ RRRA Quick Batman, to the rendering engine!

Ask HN: YC Interview tomorrow. Help us improve our interview notes - vinrob92 Hey guys,<p>My company, Manypixels, is interviewing tomorrow at YC offices (link of my startup website in my bio)<p>We applied late and got the interview confirmation on Sunday and flew the very same day to San Francisco.<p>We prepared those interview notes in the last two days, what do you guys think? https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;d&#x2F;1iyv_sxpmdFg8EZV7vuRbvhcHltZj3cZ3iUukMTPPRhQ&#x2F; ====== vinrob92 Here are the interview notes: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iyv_sxpmdFg8EZV7vuRb...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iyv_sxpmdFg8EZV7vuRbvhcHltZj3cZ3iUukMTPPRhQ/)

Lab-Grown Diamonds Come into Their Own - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/2016/12/01/502330818/lab-grown-diamonds-come-into-their-own ====== ericfranklin I've been running a lab-grown diamond company since 2005. I'd be happy to answer any questions in the morning. ~~~ SideburnsOfDoom How cheap can good quality diamond get? If you're buying raw carbon in the form of coal, it costs about $40 per ton. The rest is manufacturing details. I know there's a _lot_ of manufacturing details, but the cost of the inputs suggests that diamonds in bulk could be much much cheaper. ~~~ ericfranklin If a large enough production facility (no R&D) had nearly every growth cycle yield large enough, colorless, flawless diamonds (or close to it), the retail prices could come down more than they currently are. However, that does not reflect the current reality and all producers today are basically in R&D mode with mixed success rates and mixed finished quality. If someone showed up tomorrow with a check for several million dollars, I believe we could "disrupt" the current diamond pricing within 3-5 years. However, as I mentioned in another post in this thread, raw cost of production will still keep those "disrupted" non-R&D diamonds much more expensive than moissanite, CZs, sapphires and other gemstones. Diamond is a form of carbon, and its growth is more-or-less determined by nature. The cost of production over time will be more similar to an industry like steel, than assembled goods like TVs or computers. There are improvements to be made, but they are more linear over time, than exponential breakthroughs. For raw carbon, we use a highly refined and purified form of graphite. If you used the $40/ton coal, you would not be successful in growing jewelry-quality diamonds, and even if you did, the other costs wouldn't really change your ultimate price much. Another analogy is gold. You can buy a 1 Troy-ounce bar of 24 karat gold for a bit over $1000. However, a solitaire engagement ring with much less actual gold content can cost more than $1000. People ask why the jewelry is more expensive, but don't include the cost for refining and alloys, design, 3D printing or molds, casting and investments, polishing, setting, shipping, ring boxes, and all the other overhead associated with turning that gold bar into a sold, ready-to-wear ring. ------ mistermumble In addition to created diamonds, there are other stones that are different from and in some aspects better than diamonds. The best one seems to be Moissanite, which also has the rather pedestrian name of silicon carbide. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite) Here's a strong opinion about why diamonds suck and you should go with alternatives: [http://diamondssuck.com/](http://diamondssuck.com/) Lastly, a more dispassionate analysis: [http://www.doamore.com/diamonds-vs- moissanite/](http://www.doamore.com/diamonds-vs-moissanite/) Moissanite can be 90% cheaper than equivalent diamond, not just 30%. ~~~ yougotborked Yep, my now fiance loves her Moissanite stone. I actually got it from AliExpress and then had it appraised by a jeweler to check it's authenticity. Saved a bunch of money and got a great product. ~~~ kwhitefoot Pictures? ~~~ lisivka Diamon vs Mossanite: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZE3Vkb85Z4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZE3Vkb85Z4) ~~~ kwhitefoot Thank you! Both pretty but I can't see myself spending much on either. ------ mojoe The fact that there is so much concern over how to differentiate mined diamonds from grown diamonds seems like insanity to me. I understand that the diamond trade has a vested interest in differentiating, but why would end consumer care? They're the exact same product to the unaided eye. This is a purely emotional response. I guess the thing that bothers me the most is that it's a misguided emotional response -- it seems clear that it would reduce human and environmental suffering to purchase the grown diamonds. ~~~ curun1r Because the purveyors of diamonds, and you could argue jewelry in general, have positioned themselves as proxies for love and sex. Those are the things we value and the reasons we spend money, but we're not allowed, either by societal convention or law, to spend money on them directly. But we're allowed to spend exorbitant amounts of money on a glittery status symbols that serves as a measure of devotion. It's not the rock itself that's important, it's the willingness to sacrifice a substantial amount of money. So if the point of buying a diamond is to show your love for someone by sacrificing a meaningful amount of money, it becomes important to distinguish between stones that someone actually sacrificed a substantial amount of money to purchase and stones where someone didn't sacrifice as much. We'd do better to address the insane custom of needing an expensive proxy for love. Think about it...if the custom were for a man to take two months salary, withdraw it from the bank in $100 bills, drop to one knee and present it to his girlfriend while asking her to marry him, we'd find that insulting. It would be like he's paying for love/sex, which our society deems dirty or objectifying to women. But substitute a glittery rock mounted on a hunk of metal, both largely obtained by heaping further misery on various third-world locations, and we somehow find that acceptable? Accepting the money would make her a whore, but accepting the ring just means her boyfriend loves her? It's illogical and hopefully more women start making it known to their boyfriends that the ring isn't necessary and all that extra money, if it needs to be spent on something impractical, can be spent on making the wedding just a bit more lavish. ~~~ nwellinghoff Very wise. It's going to be up to the women to tell their men they don't want this crap. At the end of the day us men are just going to get you what you want to make you happy. ------ cmsmith I shopped for created diamonds a year or two ago, and like others was disappointed with the cost savings. It seems awfully odd that on the spectrum from $0.01/caret to $1,000,000/caret, that created diamonds ended up costing exactly the same as a mined diamond, less maybe 30%. It's clear that there are only a couple players in the clear created diamonds market, and no one is too eager for a price war and to stop printing money. In which case it doesn't sound all that different from the mined diamond market ~~~ Teever It's different in that there are a lot less slaves and warfare involved in the production of these new products. ------ salmon30salmon This is wonderful! I can't comprehend the need to mine for diamonds any longer. Such a dangerous, dirty, damaging practice. It is sad to see that the industry is trying to paint these as inferior. I would love to see some sort of tariff or sanction placed on mined diamonds to make them restrictively expensive. There is simply no need for them any longer. ~~~ sandworm101 Not all diamond types/classes are being manufactured. Synthetic diamonds will always be different from natural stones specifically because they lack natural imperfections. Not everyone wants perfection. ~~~ imaginenore Imperfections can be added ~~~ ThomPete Imperfection are naturally formed, you cant naturally create imperfections that just become by definition artficially created imperfections. ~~~ xorxornop Well, what if it's done randomly? (like, by software that controls the machine that grows it) Or, modify the growing process so that it has a greater element of chance to it? (this is likely multi-dimensional) ~~~ ThomPete Whatever randomization isn't natural (and it can't be completely random as it needs to look natural). But it's not really the point. A diamonds primary value is the history of it's making. People are unfortunately always going to be paying more for a diamond which has been digged out by hard labour than created in a lab. Keep in mind the value of diamonds is mostly a perceptive one. I am pretty sure if you only did synthetic diamonds it would soon fail to be valuable as the "womans best friend" ------ jpmattia > His lab can tell the difference — they use microscopes and other instruments > to look for subtle features that reveal a diamond's origin. Wild guess as to why anyone can tell the difference: Lab-grown diamonds are more perfect than mined ones. It's probably pretty trivial to introduce impurities to degrade the color, or change the deposition temperature in order to create faults in the lattice. Hell, throw in a microparticle or two for inclusions. I'd love to know more though, anyone got a reference? ~~~ ericfranklin Diamond growers try their best to keep out impurities and imperfections. Elemental impurities do add color (nitrogen=yellow, boron=blue), same as mined diamonds, and faults and inclusions do naturally happen in the process. However, at an atomic level, they are different than inclusions and imperfections in mined diamonds. As a producer, I don't see any incentive to make them imperfect on purpose, yet still distinguishable from mined diamonds. All larger diamonds intended for gemstones come with independent grading reports, which will still identify it as grown regardless of presence or lack of impurities and imperfections. While not technically correct, some of the advanced detection equipment can be thought of like looking at growth rings on a tree. You (probably) can't replicate the growth rings of a 200 year old tree in a 5 year old tree, yet both are perfectly valid sources of wood (sustainability, etc. aside). ------ daeken It's funny to see this pop up now. I've spent the past few days researching my big experiment project for next year: an open design CVD reactor for artificial diamonds. I don't intend to commercialize it at all, but if I can 1) learn a lot, 2) make an open design that others can build on, and 3) (the long shot) make small diamonds for my wedding ring at the end of the year, I'll be a happy man. If anyone is interested in working on this (particularly if you have experience designing systems dealing with pressurized gasses), my email is in my profile. ~~~ fizixer I would love to get into hacking/tinkering based on processes like MBE/CVD etc. Does anyone know where to get started in terms of reading, what are the options for a hobbyist? ~~~ daeken I can't speak to MBE, but for CVD I mostly just googled around and read any papers I could find. However, IIT Madras has an entire course on the subject, all of which are on youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsDO7gUBYjg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsDO7gUBYjg) I've been learning a lot from that, though it's focused on laying down semiconductor layers; most of the info on CVD diamonds seems to be locked away in proprietary processes for various manufacturers. I foresee a lot of failed experiments in my future! ------ vezycash Let's give Moissanite a new catchy, less complex name. Else, it will remain unknown. I propose the name Moon Stone. Star fire would have been great but it'll be confused with Sapphire. See ffg for effect of company name pronunciability on market share, stock price, brand value... [http://m.pnas.org/content/103/24/9369.full](http://m.pnas.org/content/103/24/9369.full) [http://russelljame.com/Fluency_JFE_2013.pdf](http://russelljame.com/Fluency_JFE_2013.pdf) ~~~ mb_72 "Sanité" \- it's related to 'moissanite', the 'é' makes it sound classy, and of course it's pronounced 'sanity' as that is what it brings to the whole ridiculous diamond situation. ------ ipqk At some point in the near future, maybe 1 year, maybe 10, anyone with a spare couple million dollars will be able to buy a machine to grow diamonds indistinguishable from mined diamonds, defects and all. No one will be able to tell at all, and the market will be flooded. Prices for mined & manufactured alike will crater. There is no future for mined diamonds. ~~~ jghn at some point 15-20 years or so ago De Beers started laser etching logos on the diamonds for exactly this reason. ~~~ RcouF1uZ4gsC Wasn't the public reason for laser etching to prevent conflict diamonds from having a market? ------ grondilu The largest diamond in the world still is natural, isn't it? Will it ever be synthetic and if so when? ~~~ undersuit >The largest diamond in the world still is natural, isn't it? It's most definitely a natural diamond, and it's also most definitely undiscovered in some incredibly rich diamond deposit. ------ cowardlydragon Only 30% cheaper? I once heard a dollar a caret from one of the startups a decade ago... ~~~ giblfiz Without actually knowing anything about the subject my guess is that the very cheep synthetic diamonds you heard about were / are intended for tools, (Where all that they care about is the hardness, so they can be small, yellow, and messy) Also, I do know that you can get synthetic ruby for ~$1/carat on ali-baba. (I actually bought a few) ------ epx Aren't pearls cultured for decades now? They are still sought for, nothing is more beautiful in a woman's neck than a pearl collar. ~~~ 13of40 Not that it really matters at the end of the day, but there's probably some charm in knowing that your "cultured" pearl was still formed inside a bivalve living in the ocean, versus being made in a machine like a porcelain gobstopper. That said, check out this cool picture: [https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAA...](https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAZTAAAAJDVmNWFlMzJmLWU0ZWYtNDM5OS04YzAxLWIzYmRjZGQzNDY4ZQ.jpg) I didn't realize it was so industrial... ------ jzig > And larger stones get laser-inscribed, so that the manufactured stones > literally have words like "lab-grown" written right on them. Why? ~~~ ISL Manufacturers want their product to be accepted for what it is, rather than a vehicle for defrauding others. If someone bought a manufactured stone expecting it to have been mined (and paid the premium currently accorded to mined stones), the buyer might direct a fraction of their disappointment at the manufacturer, instead of the deserving fraudulent seller. Adding a nigh-invisible mark makes it trivial for a jeweler to tell the difference, and stops all but the least-informed fraudulent sellers before they begin. ------ jvandonsel Is it true that it's actually illegal to pick up a diamond off the ground in South Africa? ------ Synaesthesia Are these also going to be artificially inflated like mined diamonds?