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Is there any way to see blocked content in my chrome browser? - SabrinaMorris I can't browse youtube and facebook from laptop. there are no problem with internet connection. Can you help regarding this matter? ====== LillieAfleur To unlock all blocked sites in Chrome, you can use the best fastest and most secure option which is a VPN. A VPN is the most secure and fool-proof way to unblock sites in Chrome with AES 256-bit Encryption and OpenVPN. A VPN also masks your original IP and alters it with another fake IP which makes you able to unlock all the blocked and censored sites in Chrome and all other browsers. 1\. NordVPN NordVPN is a Panama Based VPN service best and Anonymous to download Torrents Anonymously. Download from [https://theporndude.com/useful- software](https://theporndude.com/useful-software) 2\. CyberGhost CyberGhost is a comprehensive VPN which is secure and provides fast speed connection. 3\. ExpressVPN ExpressVPN is Top Best VPN Service which has an amazingly fast speed VPN connection, anonymous and Best for Torrenting. I can say this because I use it, so there is no ambiguity in my mind. ------ ferto Did you open the Developer Tools and check what it says in the console ? (Right click -> Inspect -> Check red colored text) b) your location / country is the problem ?

What are some NYC firms which hire low level programmers? - coned88 I am a recent grad and am looking for work in low level system's, but am having trouble finding any in the NYC metropolitan area. Everything seems to be web based these day's, and I have absolutely zero desire to do any form of web programming, im just not a huge fan of it. What I do like is low level systems programming working with C and assembly when needed.<p>I'm looking for any companies in the NYC area which hire these type of programmers. ====== madmanslitany Your best bets are electronic trading at a bank or hedge fund or realtime market data work at a place like FactSet or Bloomberg. I don't know of anything non-finance related though. All the startup people I've talked to around here are Ruby or PHP enthusiasts.

3,000 marketing pros reveal the best conversion optimization tools - mrohrssen http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/19/optimizely-mixpanel-omniture-ga-3000-marketing-pros-reveal-the-best-conversion-optimization-tools/ ====== TheRealSJR Thanks for sharing this. If any HNers have any questions on the report at all, I'll be more than happy to answer. The report this article talks about definitely included some surprises...

Angry Birds cross 500 million downloads - vilpponen http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/11/02/breaking-angry-birds-cross-500-million-downloads ====== technoslut I've never understood why or how Angry Birds had become such a phenomenon. It managed to really separate itself from a plethora of mobile games and seems like it's the modern day version of Pac-Man. I've even saw a Today interview where Dick Cheney says that he plays it on the iPad. I would've thought with the plush toys and Chrome OS commercials that they would soon jump the shark. Congratulations to Rovio for creating a game that's universally loved by people of all ages. ~~~ jschulenklopper > I've never understood why or how Angry Birds had become such a phenomenon See [http://www.mauronewmedia.com/blog/2011/02/why-angry-birds- is...](http://www.mauronewmedia.com/blog/2011/02/why-angry-birds-is-so- successful-a-cognitive-teardown-of-the-user-experience/) for a detailed analysis from a design perspective. Great read. It doesn't explain all the "why and how"-s, but does provide some interesting clues. ~~~ technoslut Thank you for the link. It was extremely interesting. This explains why my two favorite games on iOS (Canabalt and The Impossible Game) were never quite as popular as Angry Birds. ~~~ vorbby Man, I love The Impossible Game. Have you beat all four levels? I'm stuck on the "let's flip all this shit upside down randomly" level. ~~~ technoslut I haven't got past the first level, but that is the reasoning behind the first link. Short-term memory only lasts for so long and there is only so many things you can keep. Angry Birds is something you can play naturally with only your instincts. For a challenge you have to get three stars. At its core, both The Impossible Game and Angry Birds are simple, but one is more successful to past to the next level. If you get one star on Angry By Birds, you can pass. On The Impossible game you have to have timing and be aware of what is coming up. I suspect this is the reason why the original Super Mario Bros. became so popular. ------ nethsix Not sure how many of those were the 'Lite' (free version). My guess is that once Angry Birds started getting rave reviews, lots of people started downloading the Lite version. Still that is a lot of downloads =) ------ startupcto What's the point of these kind of announcement when there is no data to back it up? They could have just as well made this up and there's no third party measurement that can validate their numbers. Rovio is just milking this cow to the max and until they announced or released another hit game, it's all a show.

Slur, a decentralized, anonymous, Bitcoin-based marketplace for information - pervycreeper http://slur.io/ ====== fabulist This is really disappointing and almost seems engineered to proliferate Bitcoin's reputation as a technology to service criminals. I also think that they misunderstand the needs of their potential customers. They are trying to introduce a public, crowd-funded service to a market for covert information without any sense of irony. In broad strokes, a third of the value of a stolen secret is in knowing it; another third is having exclusive access; and the last third is that your competition does not know they've been robbed. When they realize that you have their IP, they will pour money into R&D. Since they are already familiar with their work -- and you are not yet -- they are likely to beat you to market. For that reason I'm skeptical this venture can compete with existing black markets. ~~~ drcode fabulist, I kind of agree with you that this tool has a low chance of success, but... ...all I see is a tool that allows secure communication and protects people's privacy. If we want to avoid living in a future where a police state monitors everything people do and say at all times, we have to somehow allow for people to maintain privacy and communicate privately. Your attitude seems like a really slippery slope: If I write an email to someone and PGP encrypt it, as many people do today, would you similarly say that I'm being "covert" and "dark"? Where do we draw the line? ~~~ mintplant Have you read the linked page? "Trade secrets", "stolen databases", and "military intelligence relevant to real-time conflicts" are listed as examples of types of information they "expect to see on the Slur marketplace". I think "covert" and "dark" can safely be used to describe this service. ~~~ drcode Shoot, I hate having to admit it, but I didn't see the list you're quoting from at the very end of the site- You are correct that they are explicitly targeting covert/dark applications, and I should have seen that before commenting. ~~~ fabulist I missed it at first, too; I saw comments referencing it, and checked the article again. I'm all for having secure, private means of communication; it is essential for our liberty and a healthy democracy. Inevitably, these will be used to create black markets. Freedom is expensive, and that is just another cost. ------ olefoo How are they going to enforce the exclusive sale model? I can think of three or four ways to defeat even a relatively sophisticated attempt to do so in an automated manner. And if you're going to make money off selling secrets, what could be better than selling the same thing to a dozen purchasers each of whom thinks that they have an exclusive on the deal. ~~~ fragsworth They can't enforce it. It's impossible. ~~~ fabulist It would probably be more intelligent for them to give up, and focus on the crowd-funding aspect of their idea. ~~~ MrHyde It looks to me like that's what they've done. ------ runn1ng Judging by their github, they have a _lot_ of work to do. [https://github.com/u99/slur/](https://github.com/u99/slur/) ------ yourad_io How would you arbitrate unverifiable data? How about if I auction "I know who hacked Sony" and the "data" is simply a name and address, without (or with fickle) proof? Or "Identities of 5 CIA agents in $region"? In fact, most military secrets. And - how would you arbitrate misleading data? "0-day Flash Exploit For Windows", "...NT4". Maybe we're missing the irony. edit: more ranting (won't dupe) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8795427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8795427) ------ PhasmaFelis I see comments talking about protecting privacy and fighting the police state. Is it not immediately obvious that the whole point of this service is to facilitate blackmail? I mean, they named the thing "Slur." _" Zero day exploits. For the market defined value rather than a price determined by the corporations under the guise of a bounty with the veiled threat of legal action should the researcher choose to sell elsewhere." "Stolen databases. Corporations will no longer be able to get away with an apology when they fail to secure their customers confidential data. They will have to pay the market value to suppress it."_ This isn't about exposing corrupt secrets for the public good. This is about giving data thieves a way to squeeze more money from their victims (deserving or not) by letting others bid against them. They're not trying to hide it, guys. ~~~ woah There will always be data thieves. The real criminals are the lazy developers that make apps without full client side encryption. This would claim to make that obvious. If you put together an app that professes to send messages that are private to one other user, when in fact they are visible to anyone with access to your servers, you have sold your users down the river just because you are not a competent developer. This is widespread right now, but it doesn't mean it isn't true. However, as other people have pointed out, this particular idea looks like BS. Even so, I think it will be implemented in some form in a few years. It's time to end the "fingers in the ears, la la la" approach to data security that your post exemplifies. ~~~ PhasmaFelis So your argument is that, if Bob scams you into buying an "unpickable" lock and Steve picks it easily and steals all your stuff, only Bob is at fault and Steve is innocent? You seem to think that there can only be one villain in any given situation. I'm perfectly comfortable assigning blame to both of them. And none of this explains why you think a service that helps Steve get top dollar for your stolen stuff is a good thing. ------ krapp They seem to believe they are more revolutionary and disruptive then perhaps they are. We already have darknets and assassination markets and... and places to find scandalous celebrity photos and dox. The amount of ego they throw into their copy doesn't inspire a lot of confidence to me. ~~~ fabulist Rob Graham (@ErrataRob) gave a (joking) talk about the "fail-peen"; it is the measurement of how susceptible an organization is to compromise, and is calculated by taking the inverse of their epeen ("the ego of your online persona", for the initiated). Edited to add: The talk is linked below. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnqyxjtm9RA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnqyxjtm9RA) ------ dantiberian Starting a project like this in C seems like a dangerous proposition. Anonymity would be essential for all parties in the operation, and starting a project in a memory unsafe language doesn't seem like the strongest foundation to build on. It sounds like all of the people involved are experienced, but it still seems like unnecessary risk. Especially as I don't see which part of this would need to be so performant that C is the only option. However the people behind this have been thinking about it far more than I have so I'm sure they have their reasons for doing it in C. ~~~ mike_hearn _It sounds like all of the people involved are experienced_ It says nothing about the people involved or their experience. It claims they are "9 cryptographers" and says nothing more. They also appear to be trying to raise money for this: [http://coinmesh.io/](http://coinmesh.io/) I agree that using C is a really dumb idea for anything security sensitive. _However the people behind this have been thinking about it far more than I have_ I see no evidence of this either. In fact all I see is an attempt to grab money from people for a product that does not exist, has no prototype and quite possibly never will exist. As to their identities, I suspect it's the same people (Amir Taaki and friends) who are doing Dark Wallet, given that they're the only people who use libbitcoin as far as I know, they explicitly recommend Dark Wallet although it has almost no users, and both sites very much match their writing style and general way of thinking. It's exactly the sort of thing that they'd think was a good idea. ~~~ petertodd _I agree that using C is a really dumb idea for anything security sensitive._ It's rather curious the website says it's written in C against the libbitcoin library, as libbitcoin is a C++ library that doesn't even export C headers. _As to their identities, I suspect it 's the same people (Amir Taaki and friends) who are doing Dark Wallet._ I rather doubt that as I haven't heard anything about Slur from that group - as Dark Wallet Chief Scientist they pretty much always run new ideas past me. Secondly they already have a better protocol for paying for information that that I and Amir Taaki developed: [https://github.com/unsystem/paypub](https://github.com/unsystem/paypub) PayPub uses a non-interactive revealing stage to avoid the need for the trusted escrow agents that Slur claims to use. re: Dark Wallet, keep in mind it's still officially an alpha undergoing testing prior to release, but its CoinJoin mixer gets regular usage, mixing what seems to be in the region of a few thousand dollars worth of bitcoins every day on average. It is the only CoinJoin implementation I know of with any usage, other than the known to be badly broken blockchain.info one that doesn't provide any privacy. Recommending people use it to donate anonymously is quite reasonable. ------ altoz I'm not sure how the exclusive sale model would work with information. Some problems I see are: 1\. You can't prove a negative. The seller cannot prove that there's not a copy of the same information elsewhere. 2\. If you prevent the same data from being sold again, the exclusive owner is also prevented from selling. What if that person wants to sell bits and pieces of the information as an arbitrage play? 3\. Doesn't this obligate the police to bid for any child pornography whatever the cost? ------ tlrobinson Also: Bitmarkets [http://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/](http://voluntary.net/bitmarkets/) It uses Bitmessage and two party escrow Bitcoin transactions. ------ rrggrr I wonder if the hardening of cyberspace requires concepts like this? In the absense of sensational threats pervasive vulnerabilities in areas like usb, wireless routers, HDD/SSD microcontrollers, etc. may remain unresolved. It would be nice if some of the same regulatory effort that goes into food and drug safety were apllied to commercial information security. ------ ademarre Is slur really a good name for this type of thing? I generally want my information to be clearly spoken, not slurred speech. ~~~ conchy There are a few different definitions for that word, so I presume they're going for the "to harm someone's reputation by criticizing them" definition, rather than "to pronounce the sounds of a word in a way that is wrong or not clear" ~~~ lotsofmangos That was also my impression. One of my first thoughts was _" They may as well have just called it Libel"_. Personally, I think it is a pretty stupid name given either interpretation. Slur does not denote reliability of information. ~~~ ademarre Agreed. Whichever meaning it invokes, it's not a good name. ------ declan This is a good place to reference cypherpunk co-founder Tim May's email from 1992: [http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto- anarchy.html](http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html) Took the world long enough to catch up. ~~~ kbody It's a bit easier to imagine than create. ~~~ dmix In a product or marketing sense? Sounds like the product side has been figured out... the essay is pretty thorough. ~~~ yourad_io Far from it; it is full of holes. Various issues: C used (huge flag), little progress yet, arbitration can't help in subjective/unverifiable/misleading data situations, anynomity will drag in the trash-sellers by the dozens, entirely unsourced data -even when true- is not as useful as sourced stuff (which you'd call "actionable"), de- duping information is impossible, what's the arbiters' motivation to be honest and not attempt to contact either side for bribes (or vote against "truth" for lolz), etc. But mostly: Just think of the Signal/Noise ratio. Everyone will be trying to abuse this. Even the dumbest, shotgun, numbers-game approach would have returns: Keep listing seemingly interesting stuff that is actually misleading/incomplete/bad/resold/... and eventually some of your transactions will not be reverted by arbitration. And this is anonymous crowd-funding, you say? ~~~ hellbanner Yup, and does Slur take a fee from each transaction.. ? ~~~ fabulist Not according to their website, no. If they're looking to turn a profit, its probably by acting as sellers. ~~~ yourad_io > If they're looking to turn a profit, its probably by ... ...anonymously crowdfunding this half-thought idea with bitcoin. ------ davemel37 With so much skepticism in this thread I am inclined to bet on their success :) I am also very skeptical...but ideas like this rarely get any love until it's actively disrupting. For what it's worth, the potential for the internet to even out the knowledge gap in the business world has barely grazed the surface of where it's headed. I am not talking about getting cokes recipe but knowing the cost basis of vendors so they can't rip you off. Every industry will eventually have a winner that decided to be completely upfront and transparent accept smaller but healthy margins and eliminate the fear consumers have of looking foolish by getting a worse deal than their brother in law. ------ dil8 I wish this was "Slur, a decentralized, anonymous repository for information". Incentivising leakers to leak to agents with the most power and wealth does not make much sense. ------ dlss I wish they hadn't used illegal example use cases (stealing trade secrets, etc). I would have donated :-/ ~~~ programmarchy What Snowden did was illegal, too. Illegal != immoral. Lawmakers do not have legitimate moral authority. ~~~ dlss Completely agreed, hence wanting to donate. There are a lot of cool uses for what's essentially a kickstarter for digital goods... however by explicitly saying the illegal possibilities are a goal, all their funders are (I think / not a lawyer) committing a crime. It's illegal in most countries to knowingly help people break the law. ------ hellbanner Woa, when I visited the link Chrome downloaded a file called FQwWHM735zm and then prompted me "this site is trying to download multiple files". ??? ------ ntonozzi It seems completely wrong that arbitration requires revealing the content of the secret. ~~~ fabulist Well, the ones who purchased the secrets are the ones who can request arbitration; if they do, presumably the information is false and worthless, or they are attempting to cheat the system to have their cake and eat it too. ------ mb0 How will anyone verify that the information being sold is valid? ------ obilgic So there is an incentive for volunteers to decline the content? ------ azinman2 Downvote. This is a waste of energy/time that could be put to making the world a better place than tearing it down. I dont understand how people with technical talent want to do something so negative with their limited time on earth. ~~~ sintaxi I'm not endorsing this project but I take exception with your response. This type of project belongs on Hacker News and if we are going to take the time to respond it might as well provide more feedback than telling someone they are wasting their limited time on earth. Buyer/seller privacy would be a fantastic development but blackmailing people is definitely in scumbag territory. I would like to see this project change its name, messaging, and even reevaluate its motives. That said, I don't see anything wrong with the core principle which is a free market with privacy. Which shouldn't be interpreted as "go break the law!". We need more people developing systems that emphasize privacy. Lets encourage those who are doing so by explaining what aspects we like/dislike. ~~~ azinman2 So basically you're arguing it has merit by containing cryptography, but let's not forget that it was designed specifically for illicit use to VIOLATE people's privacy. And did you even read their bit about how this is geared towards PSYCHOPATHS?! That's their own word choice! I feel like it's hard to reason with anyone who is gearing their product towards the psychopath market! However for arguments sake, let's strip away the reality of what they're encouraging and find merits in non-illicit contexts. What can be productively sold in this way? Source code licensing, music and movies come to mind, but do they offer over iTunes or Shopify? I can only find cons. Let's look at the core principals that they're advertising and see how they apply: "Sellers encrypt, upload and then list their data on the digital market with the ease a user might list an item on eBay. They do so with full anonymity and there are no restrictions on the content of the data." So they let you upload to them, but most legitimate entities don't have storage costs as something that prevents them from entering the market. In fact they might be concerned about losing the control, not just in terms of proprietary nature but also being able to fine control the streaming quality, bandwidth, availability guarantees, etc. Legitimate sales interests also rarely need to be anonymous. Having their own marketplace (iTunes store, etc) also let's them restrict the privacy in the way that best favors them. The exceptions -- journalists or people under repressive regimes -- could benefit from such a marketplace if it weren't for the fact that they can't prevent the enemy from buying the information (they're anonymous, too), let alone sell it to many news outfits or many rebels over time (data can only be sold once). "Exclusive bidders attempt to purchase the data for their own use and / or prevent other parties from acquiring a copy. Should an exclusive bidder win the auction they alone will receive the decryption keys. The same data cannot be auctioned a second time on the Slur marketplace." Media companies and others that sell goods want to sell it in large numbers. This goal runs counter to exclusive bidders. Movies & music are out unless each copy has DRM watermarking which changes the binary enough, but that kind of stuff should probably be integrated into the market somehow (no small feat and runs counter to many "free software purist" ideals). "Crowd bidders pool their funds into a single bid. Should they win the auction the network will release the decryption keys to all users on the Slur marketplace and the information will therefore become public." I'm not even sure I fully understand this -- is this then a kickstarter for information? I thought the marketplace was about keeping things private? What ends up in public? If anything they should better explain what stays private and what ever goes into the public better. "Arbitrators are randomly selected users who agree to weigh in on a dispute should the winner of an auction claim that the decrypted contents do not match the sellers description." Or you could just phone visa and say hey can you remove this fraudulent charge please? Again good for journalists but what about everyday? "Public key cryptography ensures the data being sold can only be decrypted by the winner of the auction." As does SSL and DRM watermarking. \----- Look, there might be some legitimate amazing use that I'm ignorant towards, but it has to fight a lot of restrictions with this premise. It seems really geared towards illicit use in both design and message. I also can't get behind advocating for psychopaths. YES THOSE WITHOUT CAPACITY FOR EMPATHY LETS PICK THEM.

Ask HN: Which Bookmarking software do you use? - julientm Since HN, has the feature to submit via bookmarklet,let&#x27;s hear how you all manage your bookmarks and history? https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;bookmarklet.html<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;del.icio.us&#x2F; is now deactivated for new users. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;VFWtH_3749o<p>What are some good bookmarking providers? ====== navs Email to myself with a tag: [bookmark] Example: Subject: [bookmark] Some cool link that I found online Body: URL + some notes on what makes this worth bookmarking. Sometimes I find a link to a product but I don't care about the product, I care about the landing page design so I add notes specifically about the design. If I want to revisit previous links related to design I'll do a search in my inbox for the [bookmark] tag + any specific words I'm likely to have used concerning design. It's not an instantaneous process but that means I don't bookmark everything I see. I'm picky. ------ darekkay I'm using a mix of browser bookmarks (everything that I'm using daily + a bookmark "inbox" folder) and StaticMarks [1], a tool I have written to manage all my long-term bookmarks. I store the bookmarks in yaml files within a git repository, which automatically generates the web app on every push. I've added the app as a browser search engine, so I just need to type "sm <query>" in my browser bar to search for a specific bookmark. Other people prefer just putting thousands of links into one place and tagging them instead (like Pinboard). [1] [https://darekkay.com/static-marks/](https://darekkay.com/static-marks/) ------ 0x54MUR41 I use Reminiscence [0], self-hosted bookmark and archive manager. I chose this software because it's open source, easy to install, and self-hosted. It works like other bookmarking software, but it has automatic tagging and summarization which is plus. When I bookmark a link from the internet, I just submit the link. Reminiscence will crawl the link later (asynchronous communication). You can also use browser to bookmark. Currently, browser extension is available for Firefox (experimental not official). This software has been discussed on HN [1] a few months ago. [0]: [https://github.com/kanishka- linux/reminiscence](https://github.com/kanishka-linux/reminiscence) [1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942032) ------ skinnymuch No mention that Pinboard archiving has been flakey for a while. As well as the service in general? Lots of bookmarked links with random status code issues. When the sites are fine. I have 20K+ bookmarks and bookmark a decent amount so maybe the worts appear more for me. ~~~ idlewords This should be fixed as of early March. If it's not, and you still see issues, please drop me a line at [email protected]. ------ AKhoo I've found that I don't bookmark for the sake of bookmarking -- What I'm really trying to do is to build a knowledge bank on something; like a blog post formed by snippets of articles I've found over time. Realizing this, I now have a bunch of documents related to topics of interest. Whenever I come across a site of interest, I'll add to the relevant document. I haven't quite figured out the right software to manage those documents. Right now, I use Asana a lot in my personal life so those documents are Asana tasks. Weird or what? ~~~ return0 you might want to check out [https://pinplz.com/](https://pinplz.com/) , which has a blog-like view. Select some text, click on the bookmarklet and your bookmark is auto-added along with the snippet. It also saves the referrer (if available) which comes handy when trying to figure out where you found that page. ------ cabalamat I mostly use the Mozilla Bookmarks menu. For anythink more complicated, and notes on programming i use my CatWiki wiki software, see [https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki](https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki) ------ kentms I use Pocket (getpocket.com). I can access my bookmarks from anywhere. ------ stevekemp I store my bookmarks as a flat file, under revision control. That way I can sync to multiple (desktop) systems. There's a bit of javascript magic to allow tag-views, filtering, or even showing 20 random bookmarks: [https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public](https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public) ------ rasikjain I have used few different bookmarking tools including delicious, pocket etc and gave up on those after a while. I use Chrome as my default browser and I am comfortable using Chrome Bookmarks. My bookmarks are synced across all devices. When bookmarking, I try to add #tags to the title field and it helps in finding the information quickly. e.g #Careers #Profile #AskHN #ReadLater ------ memset I created [https://www.homepagr.com](https://www.homepagr.com) It is meant to replace the "new tab" page in the browser. Nobody seems to feel it's worth $1/month, but myself and my wife use it and we open scores is tabs a day. (If anyone has suggestions to make this more interesting it profitable then I'm all ears!) ~~~ frosted-flakes What does Homepagr offer over the browser's native bookmarks and the ever- present bookmark bar? It's not obvious from the website, and there's not even a registration link. I figured out that the "login" input emails me a magic link, but most people wouldn't. Also, it's not responsive, so works rather poorly on mobile, and doesn't look very appealing. Despite my critique, I love the idea, but I think it needs more polish and functionality before people are willing to pay for it. ------ gvand I'm using chrome bookmarks but i've collected over the years/decades more than 10k links (well categorized, can't say if this is a lot or not) making them a bit hard to search/use. I wonder what is the average size of the collection of those who use one of these online services. ------ bennesvig Big fan of [https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in) ~~~ kasey_junk It’s not close, this is the right answer. ------ superflit For all note taking, rss reading and bookmarking AND webarchiving: DevonThink Pro. -> [https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink](https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink) ------ return0 [https://pinplz.com](https://pinplz.com) ------ deathtrader666 I just clip the webpage using Evernote's Web Clipper addon for Chrome. I can save this to a particular notebook and also tag it. This way I get to have an offline copy of all my bookmarks, fully searchable! ~~~ deathtrader666 I forgot to add --- the biggest benefit for me is I continue to have a copy of the webpage exactly as I see it, and the copy will remain with me even if the original page goes 404. ------ __d [https://larder.io](https://larder.io) The dev team are very open about their business, the roadmap, etc, and the personal touch on support is great. ~~~ skinnymuch Do you use Larder for everything? ~~~ __d I have a lifetime subscription to Pinboard. But ... it irritates me sometimes, and so I tried a Larder trial for 3 months. In the end, I went back to Pinboard. Not that there was really anything really wrong with Larder, and I liked the GitHub stars integration, but ... it wasn't enough to switch. I had only one issue: it didn't cope with tags that weren't URL-safe (eg. I had a bunch of stuff tagged with 'c++' in Pinboard, and it couldn't import them until I munged my import file to change it to 'cxx'). ------ NicoJuicy [http://handlr.sapico.me](http://handlr.sapico.me) ( self made) and has a personal mode ( that needs some performance improvements) ------ pradpk I create a page in Microsoft Onenote and add the name hyperlinked and export it as PDF or Single File Web Page. I just open this page in any browser. ------ tmaly I use a combination of google bookmarks and the HN favorite but I find its hard to find stuff later on. I have a few ideas on how I would improve it. ------ asselinpaul [https://www.are.na](https://www.are.na) ------ overcode Any arguments against storing your bookmarks in your browser of choice? ------ x0x0 pinboard.in well worth the $25/year. ------ Foober223 A text file. Viewed in Emacs with goto-address-mode. ------ 1e10 Http://www.curabase.com ------ dewey Pinboard and it’s bookmarklet ------ sepisoad xBrowserSync, I use it everywhere in chrome at home and office, and on my mobile ------ vkaku Firefox ~~~ lukaszkups exactly, have folders for each type of bookmark I'm interested in and categorize them ------ elamje Pocket is pretty legit.

Man builds giant computer at home - alan_cx http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33237863 ====== alan_cx And there is a link to the site: [http://www.megaprocessor.com/index.html](http://www.megaprocessor.com/index.html) ~~~ teh_klev And was posted here ~6 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755742)

The SEO Dominance of Zillow - gordon_freeman http://priceonomics.com/the-seo-dominance-of-zillow/ ====== programminggeek Clearly Zillow is quite dominant, but I'm not sure that I agree with the final sentiment of all traffic becoming mobile traffic sooner rather than later. Mobile is growing like crazy, but there is a saturation point where your phone is not the best device for certain kinds of activities. Tablet isn't necessarily the best device either. I don't think that an app store strategy is going to be the next big thing for Zillow or Trulia. I think that handling mobile well is important, but I wouldn't bet the farm on mobile when it comes to real estate. It's jut not a foregone conclusion that desktops and laptops are totally disappearing anytime in the next 5 years.

Quora Doesn’t Know What a Contract Is - sneak https://sneak.berlin/20200210/quora/ ====== Nuzzerino I'm very disappointed with how Quora turned out. It seemed to be on a strong trajectory a few years ago, but has now devolved into Yahoo Answers 2.0. There are still good answers here and there. But there are far, far more answers that look like this (with an alarmingly high number of upvotes): > "I read a study once that said <insert thing> was bad for you. <couple > sentences of possibly made up statistics>. Unfortunately, I forgot where I > read it, or I'd post it here, sorry!" I feel like if it were not one of the Silicon Valley TechBro™ companies, Google would have already de-ranked results from this site to the second page by now. ~~~ c3534l I'm amazed at how many people speak nonsense with seeming authority, with bad or unread or irrelevant sources and credentials that are either fake or maybe just don't mean much. Yahoo Answers was clearly just random people answering your questions. Quora is full of people pretending to be experts giving perniciously wrong answers that sound authoritative. That's far more dangerous, in my opinion. When your girlfriend's friend recommends you a crank cure, or your cousin who was in jail once tells you that you can't sue for damages, you're more skeptical of the claims. When that person calls themselves a doctor, or suggests they're a legal expert, but really they're a poorly trained nutritionist or LEO at best and not true experts, then people get seriously fucked over. ~~~ dorchadas Makes me wonder if there's a market for a Quora like site where credentials are manually verified by staff. ~~~ OrderlyTiamat There are subreddits that are more specific that operate in that market, such as r/askscience and r/askhistorians. In these subreddits, anyone can ask questions, but answers are given by people whose credentials is added as flair. ------ baddox > The point of this post is not some legal analysis, simply the common sense > observation that in our society, simply putting some copy up on my webpage > that basically says “if you use my website, you are agreeing to not sue me” > is Not How Any Of This Works. > A contract is a meeting of the minds. This is decidedly not. > Saying that anything I do “constitutes acceptance” short of explicitly and > unambiguously agreeing to your contract and terms is foolish and > disrespectful. At the very least, it’s shady. I sure hope it’s > unenforceable, as well. I couldn't agree with this more. It applies equally well to shrink wrap software licenses and "social contract" arguments. ~~~ thaumasiotes This is a good place to note that a lot of current cookie disclosure popups state that "by using our site, you agree to our use of cookies". ~~~ sneak It is up to the browser whether or not to store the cookies sent by the server, and up to the browser to send those same cookies with subsequent requests or not. By choosing a tool that does that, the user has explicitly opted in to that. The dialog is superfluous. My browser, for example, is configured to ignore all cookie headers sent from the server. Those dialogs appear just the same! ------ ifdefdebug > "Hello, friend. (I'm quite sorry for the interruption—the non-modal popups > didn't fit enough text.)" I was reading your post when suddenly that bullshit popped right into my face, in the middle of a sentence. How on earth can you think it´s a good idea to interrupt my thoughts process in this actively-aggressive way? You pissed me off, I am out and I won't come back. ~~~ sneak I’m sorry if the popup offended you. It’s possible to block such things by using a browser extension such as uBlock Origin, which will allow you to black or greylist 3p requests to services such as Mailchimp that provide that modal. I urge you to consider the alternatives though. Publishing today happens via a very small number of heavily censored services that decide not only what you can say, but who gets to see it, how often, and when. Millions seem unfazed that a tiny handful of people decide what they are allowed to read. Aggressively requesting direct contact information from my audience is one of the few remaining censorship-free ways of communicating with people. I don’t like popups either, but sometimes it is necessary to yell a bit to get people’s attention. I vastly prefer slightly annoying people (exactly once, see below) to having the only push-based method of communication being censored and surveilled systems like most modern centralized social media. I’m sorry it upset you. There just aren’t any other great options that I know of to ensure that people who want to receive push-based communications from me always can in the future. RSS usage died some years ago and the only remaining feeds people look at are their email inbox and censored algorithmic “timelines” (which are anything but). In any case, it attempts to set a cookie on your device, so you should never receive it again in that browser for any page on my site. If you are anything like me, you might wish to browse with uBlock greylisting all third party resources on all sites. It works a charm for de-annoying the web when all you want to do is read. ~~~ Nextgrid I don’t think the problem here is centralisation or censorship. The problem is simply that people don’t like shit-letter popups and not all content has to be push-based. ~~~ sneak Without push, you won’t reach very much of your audience unless you are hyper- mega-famous. I am not and have no wish to be. I don’t like popups either, but you don’t get emails very well otherwise. Ugly high-contrast pancake buttons convert better than slick, elegant ones too. :/ ------ enitihas Quora was a very good site when the userbase was small. All the content was very high quality, and I learnt a lot of stuff reading it back then. Now that quora has a very large number of users, it resembles the real world more closely, as in the average quality of content is very low. I am wondering whether there are websites which manage to retain high quality discussions even with a huge user base (HN certainly is one, but I think HN has way less users than quora, and HN is geared specifically towards certain people looking for intellectual excitement). ~~~ frandroid StackExchange manages to do this, and it's not just the developers of StackOverflow, it's also all the other communities. Set a proper model and see good information flow. ~~~ mr_toad Most of StackExchange is good. The Skeptics site is ironically full of troll posts. ------ manigandham This has nothing to do with Quora and is standard practice for _terms of service_ for all major websites. While it's on shaky foundations right now, the slowly building wave of website consent management platforms due to data/privacy regulations will make these agreements much more solid since you will be actively consenting to them. ~~~ Nextgrid The majority of consent management solutions are absolutely not compliant with the law they’re supposed to help you comply with. ~~~ manigandham Sure, we published a study about all the complications but regardless there's more upfront agreements now than the use-it-therefore-you-agree terms before. ------ tacostakohashi Looks like the author doesn't know what a contract is either - it's something that requires consideration, which is clearly lacking when using a website. Contracts, licenses, and terms of service are all completely different things. ~~~ CPLX Using a website would certainly constitute consideration in a legal sense. Assuming there’s some value to the content of the website then that’s consideration. I still agree with the author that posting something in public and then saying you’ve agreed to a contract by looking at it is not good policy. ------ huzaif Why push the website usage as a middleman? Why not just say "If you are able to read this email, you can't ever sue us." /s ------ nabraham This all started in the US with Judge Easterbrook in ProCD. [https://www.bitlaw.com/source/cases/copyright/procd.html](https://www.bitlaw.com/source/cases/copyright/procd.html) The basic gist of Easterbrook's argument is that in everyday life it is common to buy now and find out the terms later, and under the law and the UCC the sequence of money and accepting terms don't matter. While the case has been stretched to the limit, and lots of research shows that users aren't reading the terms of service, the practice and the law in the US has only strengthened. ------ JohnFen IANAL, but that arbitration clause doesn't sound remotely enforceable to me. Regardless, that they put it in there is more than good enough reason to not use the site. ~~~ Deimorz Why are you using HN then, when its terms include a similar arbitration agreement? > You agree that any and all disputes or claims that have arisen or may arise > between you and Y Combinator, whether arising out of or relating to this > Terms of Use (including any alleged breach thereof), the Site, any > advertising, any aspect of the relationship or transactions between us, > shall be resolved exclusively through final and binding arbitration, rather > than a court, in accordance with the terms of this Arbitration Agreement, > except that you may assert individual claims in small claims court, if your > claims qualify. > YOU AND Y COMBINATOR AGREE THAT EACH OF US MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE > OTHER ONLY ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN > ANY PURPORTED CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION OR PROCEEDING. UNLESS BOTH YOU > AND Y COMBINATOR AGREE OTHERWISE, THE ARBITRATOR MAY NOT CONSOLIDATE OR JOIN > MORE THAN ONE PERSON’S OR PARTY’S CLAIMS AND MAY NOT OTHERWISE PRESIDE OVER > ANY FORM OF A CONSOLIDATED, REPRESENTATIVE, OR CLASS PROCEEDING. ALSO, THE > ARBITRATOR MAY AWARD RELIEF (INCLUDING MONETARY, INJUNCTIVE, AND DECLARATORY > RELIEF) ONLY IN FAVOR OF THE INDIVIDUAL PARTY SEEKING RELIEF AND ONLY TO THE > EXTENT NECESSARY TO PROVIDE RELIEF NECESSITATED BY THAT PARTY’S INDIVIDUAL > CLAIM(S). HN doesn't even offer the ability to opt out of arbitration, so it's even worse than Quora in this aspect. ~~~ shakna For myself, and where I am, I know this clause to be non-binding. And it in fact invalidates the entire agreement because it tries to enforce something that is not considered to be legal (forced arbitration). (Some places may only invalidate that particular section, however the precedent here is an invalidation of the entire contract). I don't really have any interest in going down that particular road, but that's one of the hiccups these sorts of contracts hit when faced with real world legalities. ------ Deimorz I don't disagree with the sentiment of the post, but unfortunately this has been the norm for web service terms for a very long time. As far as I can see, there's nothing unusual in what Quora specifically is doing here. Even HN's privacy policy and terms include both an arbitration agreement and phrases very similar to the ones he's complaining about, like: > By using the Service, you agree to the practices described in this Privacy > Policy. > Your continued use of the Site after the date any such changes become > effective constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms of Use. ~~~ eximius This isn't unique to Quora and somewhat unfairly picks on them. However, just because it is common doesn't mean it isn't utterly ridiculous and unenforceable. ~~~ sneak The practice is bullshit. They are performing the practice. Therefore, they are choosing to engage in bullshit and picking on them isn’t unfair. “Everyone’s doing it” is not a legitimate defense to well-reasoned criticism. ~~~ eximius It is unfair insofar as they are not unique examples of it. Otherwise, I agree. ------ manifoldgeo As a person who has seen Quora evolve over the years, I am truly surprised that it’s respected even nearly as much as it is. By all accounts it’s a glorified content mill that is the slightly smarter consumer’s answer to Yahoo Answers, fielding such important questions as “how is babby(sic) formed?” This is an honest question— how many HN users are relying on Quora as a viable alternative to something like a Wikipedia search when researching? I’ve nearly never found that a Quora answer was sufficient to answer my question. I’ll admit that in terms of SEO they’ve got things figured out; they always appear near the top of DuckDuckGo searches, but as far as real content goes, they leave a lot to be desired. ------ salvagedcircuit This does seem quite sneaky for terms of service on essentially a QnA website. Lately, the Quora results that show up for me in search have been very ad- like. It's as if a team of accounts are trying to direct traffic toward their own individual websites or businesses. It amkes Quora very spammy. Not a fan. ------ cletus I'm going to quote myself from 2012 [1]: > I can't help bit feel vindicated by moves like this because they're a sign > that Quora isn't the Next Big Thing that many inside the bubble that is > Silicon Valley seemed to think it is ... This being about the forced login requirement. I said then and stand by it now that there is limited upside in Q&A sites. We saw this with ExpertSexChange years before. At first some quality content but ultimately the only growth is from low-value content, SEO, dark UX patterns (eg hiding answers, requiring logins, putting answers after a long set of ads) all for something that just isn't that special. Stackoverflow did an admirable job of organizing technical answers but ultimately Google remains their primary source of traffic (~90% was the last figure I heard) and by publishing their answers with a Creative Commons License (a move I applaud) they've insured the community against a later management change that would otherwise decide to enact those same dark patterns as the only viable growth path. And yes I know there's Stack Exchange but none of those sites has hit similar success to SO. As for this post about Quora's attempt to force binding individual arbitration on users, the first comment I have is of course I'm not surprised. The second is that IANAL but this this isn't a contract, it's an updated Terms of Service. That being said, I'm pretty sure this isn't necessarily legal in all (any?) North American jurisdictions and even where that question is unknown it probably just hasn't been tested in court yet. I was going to say that Quora is based in California and CA has generally been pretty user-friendly here but that may not exactly be true. A couple of things I found: \- California law (specifically the California Arbitration Act or CAA) may be preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act ("FAA"). There's a pending case in Federal Court where a stay has been issued against CAA pending that trial. It's not clear to me (being NAL) if this is specific to certain areas (eg employment, construction) or general and whether it applies to updated ToS; \- A California court upheld an arbitration clause in clickwrap ToS on an app as of October 2019 [2] My main takeaway however is I don't care about Quora, I've never cared about Quora, I don't understand why anyone cares about Quora, I've never posted to Quora and I've never understood why anyone else posted or continues to post to Quora so this has net zero effect on me. Quora wasn't (IMHO) relevant in 2012 and is less relevant now. These are the moves of a company in its death throes. Ok, bye. [1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377904) [2]: [https://www.natlawreview.com/article/court-enforces- arbitrat...](https://www.natlawreview.com/article/court-enforces-arbitration- clause-clickwrap-agreement-ganjapreneur-app)

Multiplatform GPU benchmark adds macOS/iOS Metal 2 support - apecat https://www.basemark.com/benchmarks/basemark-gpu/ ====== apecat As a starting point for real numbers, Guru3D has run Basemark GPU 1.2 on 20 GPUs, on Windows [https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/basemarkgpu- benchmark-...](https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/basemarkgpu-benchmark- review-with-20-gpus,1.html)

Show HN: Investy.com - Portfolio Analyzation Tool - thematt Investy is a portfolio analyzation tool that allows individual or professional investors to breakdown a stock portfolio and see financial data across the aggregated investments. Investors can model hypothetical portfolios, leverage diversification and allocation data as well as compare their portfolio against professionals such as Warren Buffett and others.<p>http://www.investy.com ====== dpapathanasiou I like the idea, but my vanilla fidelity.com account (i.e., as opposed to the pro active trader account they also offer) already has similar portfolio tools built-in. Your tools might be better, but it's going to be hard to convince me to sign up and pay for yours when I get something similar for free. Also, since you're not letting me trade out of that account directly (though it might be a feature you're planning to add eventually), that adds more friction, and makes it even less likely that I would consider paying for your service. I hope that wasn't too harsh, but I'm just looking at it solely from a customer's perspective. ~~~ thematt Not too harsh at all, I appreciate the feedback. The integration with external brokerage accounts is definitely something in the backlog. Not the ability to actively trade, but certainly the integration to remove the friction between two services. ~~~ dpapathanasiou In the interim, you might want to have a prominent series of buttons on each analysis page which says: Trade Now [Fidelity.com] [TD Ameritrade] [E-Trade.com] (etc.) i.e., something that has the look-and-feel of the addthis.com widget on blog posts, but each of the icons goes to a different online broker. That makes it easier for me to act on the recommendations; while I'd still need to go to my other account and login, the what-to-do-next part is clear. If you get decent traction with that, then you can call one or more of these brokers and say "Have you noticed how much traffic I'm sending you?" as the basis of doing a more direct deal with them. BTW, another thing that would make it much more appealing is being able to quantify the returns. I.e., instead of "Compare with professionals like Warren Buffett" could you support a claim like: "Make Warren Buffett's Portfolio Your Own and See Returns of 35% or more" ? If you can really show me how to do something like that with specifics, then I'd consider a trial membership at least. ~~~ thematt Great suggestions, thanks! ------ herrherr My 0.02: Screenshots, Screenshots, Screenshots :) ~~~ thematt Excellent, thanks for the feedback. Everything on the feature page is a live shot. There's also the live demo available that will show you exactly what it looks and feels like. I'll look into adding more static content though. ------ thematt Founder here. The pitch behind this is that the current landscape of investment tools isn’t fitting the bill for what I needed to effectively invest. Google/Yahoo Finance are great resources for seeing statistics of a single stock, but they weren’t really built to show aggregate data across an entire portfolio. The aim of this product is to give a point in time snapshot of a portfolio in order to bridge that gap. This initial release is just a small subset of what is planned for the product. There’s a ton of exciting things planned for the next release, which will really catapult it forward in terms of usefulness. Would love to get your feedback HN! Positive or negative, it will all be helpful! ~~~ skilesare If you get some traction we'd love to help you take the visuals to the next level. We just finished a project that enables us to import data(like portfolios) from 3rd party sources. <http://www.aqumin.com/> ~~~ thematt Thanks for the offer, I'll keep that in mind :) ------ porter What does this do that my online broker can't already do for my real portfolio? Or even an invetopedia portfolio? ~~~ thematt Calculation of PE ratios, book values, dividend yields -- across your entire portfolio ratio than an individual investment. Also, ability to compare your portfolio to popular investors using data mined directly from the SEC. Online brokerages will typically stop at the performance data or maybe allocation and not give you any fundamental breakdown of your investments. ------ dagw What is "Advanced Data"? You're charging an extra $20 a month for it, but I can't find anywhere that tells me what it actually is and why I'd want to pay extra for it. ------ cschmidt How many investors only invest in stocks? I personally have more in ETF's and mutual funds than single stocks. How about the bond portion? It seems weird to apply tons of analysis to only a portion of someone's investments. Also, since it seems on the surface to be like Morningstar's portfolio x-rays, you should have a good answer for how it is different. Oh, and "analyzation" isn't a word, is it? How about, "portfolio analysis tool". ~~~ thematt Great feedback, thank you. I agree that portfolios are much more diverse than simply stocks. The tools supports ETF's and mutual funds, it just doesn't break them down into the individual securities -- which is coming. Right now they get analyzed as a whole security. Bonds are slated for the future, so thanks for emphasizing the importance of those. ------ philstrong the demo needs to say click here for instant demo ... I thought try it now was a signup. Once in the demo (dashboard, performance , etc ...) there is too much visual space and not enough concentrated content. The data is important but delivered in this manner makes me think there is not much value here. Also the demo would be better suited if it let me sign up (no CC) and I could add up to 3 stocks to try it out. ~~~ thematt Excellent, thanks for the suggestions. The text on the button has been changed, hopefully it's more clear now. Great suggestion about being able to try out a limited number of stocks, I'm adding that to the to-do list. ------ mu100 First off, congrats on the build, and I think the concept is great. I've used Morningstar in the past and am wondering how your product is different? ~~~ thematt Thank you! Great question, I'm assuming you're referring to their Instant X-Ray product? If so, the direction is this is different in that it's heading towards personalization and scenario based recommendations. I know it's not there yet but the ability to compare portfolios was kind of the first step in that direction, but it will be getting much more personalized down the road. ------ starpilot High fees. The cheapest plan would be $348/year or 3.5% of a $10,000 portfolio. It would have to make that much back to be cost effective. I would emphasize that no subscription is necessary, maybe by changing the wording to "$29 for 30 days" ~~~ thematt Thanks for putting that in perspective. We're working on pricing based on your feedback. ------ sagacity Clickable: <http://www.investy.com> ~~~ sagacity Here is my quick 0.02: You might want to re-think at least the home page colour scheme a bit, that green is not what I'd consider _very_ suited to the target market. Make it a bit more businesslike, may be? But then, of course, it is just my opinion. :) ~~~ makethetick The bulleted list is pretty hard to read too. ~~~ thematt Thanks guys, appreciate the feedback. I'll be exploring some alternative color schemes. ~~~ TuaAmin13 I'd like to see a bit more about the geography thing. If I own funds with multiple holdings geographically, does it chart all those out? It's kind of scant on details and if I had to provide a credit card to try it I probably wouldn't. Also, it's difficult to tell which plans offer what services. You don't have a 1:1 mapping of things on the features to plans page. I can guess performance and diversification, but what's "Advanced Data" and "reports"? I don't want to guess. Feature chart perhaps? Or maybe just a better mapping. Or on the feature page you can say "Available in Premier + Professional". ~~~ thematt Thanks for the excellent feedback! To answer your first question, the geography works at a fund level at the moment. The ability to break down that mutual fund or ETF into individual securities and their corresponding locations is in the works and will surface in the next release. Great suggestion/request. The description of the plans and how they're described is definitely going to be reworked as that's a common theme in the feedback being received. I like your suggestion about mapping feature sets to the plans, apologies for that not being clear. ------ DevX101 Out of curiosity, do you work in this industry? What is your proposed marketing plan? ~~~ thematt I'm a software engineer full time. Investing is done outside of that, but it's almost a second full time job. At this point the idea is to market to individual investors and financial advisors. ------ showerst Do you have permission to use those stock exchange logos? Doing it that way makes it look like they're customers of yours, which is probably illegal without their permission. ~~~ thematt Thanks for the tip. That's getting reworked to make it clear those are the supported exchanges, not that they're customers. ------ lean Great idea. You might want to hire a designer. ~~~ thematt Thanks for the feedback! Alternative designs are definitely going to be explored, that seems to be a consensus.

How teams using JIRA Software and Bitbucket release 14% faster - gitdude https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/04/05/how-teams-using-jira-software-and-bitbucket-release-faster-and-so-can-you/ ====== yowza And it means absolutely nothing.

Microsoft brand in sharp decline - edw519 http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2421/microsoft-brand-in-decline-080328/index.html ====== mechanical_fish I well remember reading Peter Gutmann's "Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" [1], in which he said: "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history." I'd say Peter's prediction is holding up pretty well so far. I mean, Microsoft is not dead, and they're not even near death, but they do look more like an invalid than an industry leader. [1] <http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html> ------ angstrom I think it's a combination of Vista and XBox 360. When Windows 95 came out it used both game support and office applications to become the defacto standard in businesses and homes. XP brought solid compatibility and durability. Vista became Windows ME part deux. There's no need to buy a new computer when the 360 has shifted the hardcore gamers away from the PC. And although Office 2007 is the first significant improvement in 10 years, the fact that you don't need Vista to use it detracts from any tie in possibilities. Now throw on top of this the estimated 33% failure rate of XBox 360s and there isn't much to brag and toot their horn about. ~~~ aston The Xbox 360 has been amazingly successful. Not sure what similarities you see between it and Vista. ~~~ bayareaguy Amazingly successful? Perhaps for the game companies but not for Microsoft. It hasn't turned a profit since it was released 7 years ago (although there is some speculation that it _might_ turn one this year). ~~~ angstrom To be fair, the last I read they turned a marginal profit on the 360 (earnings report from the EDD divsion) in January, but that isn't what gives them a $260 billion market cap. Compared to the profitability Nintendo has raked in through the Wii and DS it's anemic. ~~~ aston You're comparing fundamentally very different approaches to the game console industry. Nintendo _must_ be profitable selling its consoles and software licenses in order to survive. The company ethos is letting people have fun and doing so in the most economically efficient way possible. Microsoft cares more about getting their hardware and software into America's homes. They don't want profit, they want a platform for content delivery. Both companies are doing pretty good right now. ~~~ angstrom I realize they're going about it in different ways. The focus was on the damage to the brand. As a brand, when people think Microsoft products they generally think "hold back and wait for the first service pack, the hardware refresh, or the 3rd product iteration". That's expensive when you rush something to market and the market doesn't bite because the product was rushed and the brand suffers. Under the Microsoft model that works because they have the cash reserves to burn through the flops and deadpans, but it damages the brand each time. In contrast, when people think Apple, Nintendo, Adobe, Google they tend to associate those brands with strong cost/value. ~~~ aston I don't disagree in general. But. The Xbox is one of the few products that actually break the Microsoft trend. The first one was great and the second one was better as far as value provided to the consumer goes. Manufacturing problems make me suspect Microsoft hasn't figured out this whole hardware production thing (and they haven't), but the brand itself would only be tarnished if the Xbox 360 were fundamentally broken rather that just failing more often than the industry average. Hence why I claimed the Xbox 360 is not really comparable to Vista. ~~~ angstrom I can agree with that, both as a consumer and a developer. Of the 3 consoles Xbox is the easiest/cheapest to develop for and the value of Xbox Live is certainly not to be overlooked. ------ noonespecial I think I'm not alone in witnessing Microsoft and the BSA treat my corporate customers very badly over the years. The biggest deal at my biggest corporate customer's IT dept. is the "renegotiation" that happens every couple of years with MS in which they send their people in and see how much more they can grab this time around... When you treat your customers like crap, they don't line you. Now there's a surprise. I think after all I've seen, when the decision finally falls to me, I'm gonna be Ernie Ball'n it, even if it costs more up front. ------ aswanson These guys will mint for as long as corporate America uses office (probably 10+ years) and mom & pop in Peoria buy PC's from Best Buy (probably 10+ years). Will they ever be front and center again? No. But give them credit. From 1981 to about now they _ran_ things. In this business, staying on top for 20 years is unheard of. And they will still be around, at near current revenue levels, for at least 10 more. Name 1 tech company today that you think has a chance of matching their track record. ------ rantfoil Unfortunately it's a slide into irrelevance. The execs and braintrust at Microsoft generally don't "get" the Internet. PG, not BG's "The Road" is absolutely coming to fruition. ------ Goronmon I find this interesting, mainly because personally I'm less hostile towards the company than I was 4-5 years ago. I think that overall, the "evilness" of MS has abated somewhat, and I no longer feel it necessary to scrutinize every action they take to see how it might be screwing over the customer. I wonder how much of the decline is based on the entertainment side of MS, such as their push of the Xbox platform. Perhaps the business-types see this as MS losing focus from what they care about, software solutions for their companies. ~~~ ashu Could it be because MS' relevance has reduced drastically in a lot of places? Its monopoly is going away, slowly but surely. Office is still a killer, but indications are that we will get other powerful choices - one sunny day. (In fact, most light document editing is easily accomplished by Google Docs.) ------ henning This is more of a fluff piece for some market research firm than a story/article. However, I do agree that their brand could be much stronger. Relatively few people know what the Zune is - tons of intelligent (often iPod-using) people have no idea that Microsoft has a music device. When they think Microsoft, they think Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and Xbox. ------ dbreunig Thankfully, Johnny Knoxville will ride to their rescue as Crispin unveils their new consumer facing campaign! ------ TrevorJ They needed a study? ------ kajecounterhack I find I'm less hostile to MS now (note that I didn't use M$, like I used to), because unlike many I feel that vista was a great security update (My family that uses vista has not complained of adware or viruses since), while I use linux. However I must note, even as a person hostile to mac, I live in awe of the might of Steve Jobs and his influence on the masses. "Look, its a thin laptop computer that sony made long ago but I decided to push!" "Look its a phone, but not just any phone, it is an iPhone! You must buy it!" "Look its a decently constructed but sorely overpriced piece of common technology that I decided to work on a little and brand with my company name! You must buy it!" The next 2 years, Apple's stock triples.

For NPCs and robots: Building character AI through machine learning - wbknox https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/building-character-ai-through-machine-learning-7a3159dc4940 ====== wbknox Hey, all. I'm the author of this Medium article. If anyone has feedback or questions, I'd be happy to take them here.

OOP vs. Functional Programming (2014) - ruairidhwm https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/11/24/FPvsOO.html ====== lmm > Objects are not data structures. Objects may use data structures; but the > manner in which those data structures are used or contained is hidden. This > is why data fields are private. From the outside looking in you cannot see > any state. All you can see are functions. Therefore Objects are about > functions not about state. The statements are correct but the conclusion is backwards. The defining characteristic of OOP is that hidden state. Passing functions around is done all the time in functional languages. > The bottom, bottom line here is simply this. OO programming is good, when > you know what it is. Ehhhh nope. The idea that you need "function pointers" to do polymorphism is confusing one particular implementation technique in one particular (frankly, bad) language for some universal rule. You can do polymorphism perfectly well without needing hidden mutable state - and when you do, life is generally better. ~~~ danharaj > The defining characteristic of OOP is that hidden state. Hidden state is the characteristic of abstraction, period. OOP has no special claim to it. ~~~ lmm Nonsense. Most abstraction isn't about state at all (you won't find state anywhere in the definition of a group, say). You can of course abstract over the difference between having state and not having it (as OO does), but that's a virtually useless abstraction because it doesn't preserve any nontrivial rules/symmetries. ~~~ thrmsforbfast Perhaps a better way of saying is is that hidden _data_ is a characteristic of abstraction. Which is certainly fair, and fits the analogy to algebra quite well. But in any case, parent's comment that "OOP has no special claim" to hidden state/data (or abstraction) is sound; after all, ADTs already do that. ~~~ lmm > Perhaps a better way of saying is is that hidden data is a characteristic of > abstraction. Which is certainly fair, and fits the analogy to algebra quite > well. I'd disagree with even that much; I'd say abstraction is much more about parameterisation - factoring out the common structure from different constructions - than outright hiding anything. > But in any case, parent's comment that "OOP has no special claim" to hidden > state/data (or abstraction) is sound; after all, ADTs already do that. ADTs don't hide _mutable_ state. That much is something OO has a special claim to. ~~~ thrmsforbfast "hiding data" and "factoring out the common structure" are almost always intrinsically connected in software systems, because if you can poke at the data then you can violate contracts that give rise to the common structure. This is _particularly_ true of software, but I'd argue it's also true of basically every branch of mathematics outside of a few particular sub-fields of algebra (which are either extremely simple or extremely abstract, and often both). _> ADTs don't hide mutable state. That much is something OO has a special claim to._ How so? Abstract datatypes certainly hide mutable state. Just because a language doesn't have the "private" keyword doesn't mean that internal data can't be excluded from the interface... this was done _all the time_ in e.g. C without the message passing semantics that characterize OO languages. ~~~ lmm > if you can poke at the data then you can violate contracts that give rise to > the common structure. Maybe if you can mutate it, but having it be visible isn't an issue. > Abstract datatypes certainly hide mutable state. ADTs are normally understood to be values i.e. immutable. Hidden structure is not the same thing as hidden state. ------ mlthoughts2018 The article lost credibility with me for the “OO is not about state” section because it misses the point. If all you have are singleton objects with static functions and no private data attributes, then I agree, but it’s also meaningless because such objects are very sincerely unrelated to anything from OOP. They are just stateless buckets of functions, which is more like a module than an object. This is actually quite a good way to program in many cases. You can do it in Scala by only defining companion objects and never the actual class that it would correspond to (except for occasional cases where you need case classes or structural typing). You can do this in Python by just writing modules with no classes, and either use primitive data structures (list, set, dict, tuple, etc) for all your data, or else use absolutely minimal namedtuples. I’d say this way of programming is almost totally FP and has hardly anything but superficial connections to OOP, which I think undermines the author’s point. You can always claim it’s a semantic difference and different people mean different things with certain words. IMO that’d be disingenuous here. Any type of OOP that just uses objects as buckets of functions with no private data attributes is really just FP. As soon as you add private data attributes whose values can break referential integrity of the object’s function calls, then it’s game over for FP and you’re in total OOP land. ~~~ dnautics > As soon as you add private data attributes whose values can break > referential integrity of the object’s function calls function calls, then > it’s game over for FP Technically you can do something like this in fp land if you're using the actor model to encapsulate hidden state and erroneous code in a passed lambda does something strange to the hidden state. It's pretty hard to do since most fps with actor model put all of your interfaces to the state right in front of you. ~~~ chriswarbo Actors are very closely related to OOP, especially the Smalltalk/Self message- passing perspective. The main difference is that message sends to actors are asynchronous whilst objects usually aren't. ------ thrmsforbfast I think the author does characterize a primary distinguishing feature of OOP. That said, the post is a windy road with some dead-ends. Lots of statements that are highly contestable (see other top-level comments for examples). So here is, IMO, the important take-away from the post on what's novel/unique/significant about the combination of abstraction/program design/programming techniques we call oop: _> In most software systems when one function calls another, the runtime dependency and the source code dependency point in the same direction. The calling module depends on the called module. However, when polymorphism is injected between the two there is an inversion of the source code dependency. The calling module still depends on the called module at run time. However, the source code of the calling module does not depend upon the source code of the called module. Rather both modules depend upon a polymorphic interface. This inversion allows the called module to act like a plugin._ This is a particular programming style. The author calls it "polymorphism", but that's far too large a label. The paragraph above is specific way of using polymorphism. This sort of programming style _can_ be done in functional languages, but I think it's fair to say that 1) OOP did it first, and 2) OOP provides the most natural setting for thinking about what's going on in these sort of "plugin architectures". ~~~ jpochtar Can you help me understand the pullqoute? I didn’t understand what he’s talking about at all. Is it about not having to recompile? ~~~ thrmsforbfast See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_of_control](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_of_control) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle) And don't overthink it. You've probably seen this a million times in your work life. The description is indeed not great. It's not always about not having to recompile, but can be (see eg dependency injection) ------ 08-15 There's a 2018 update/rehash here: [https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle- bob/2018/04/13/FPvsOO.html](https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle- bob/2018/04/13/FPvsOO.html) Not that it adds any value, it's exactly as confused and pointless. Uncle Bob is getting old. He tries to find defining characteristics of OO, and ends up talking gibberish: > The behavior [of o.f()] is dependent upon the type of o. i.e. f is > polymorphic. Nope, behavior of a "polymorphic" invocation depends on the _value_ of the 'o' argument. (Types don't exist at runtime.) This happens all the time in FP, where passing around functions is normal. > The mechanism of polymorphism must not create a source code dependency from > the caller to the callee. That's called a higher order function. You pass a function from module A to a HOF from module B. B ends up calling into A without a source code dependency. Big deal. > What is FP? > referential transparency Lispers would object. My take on it is that the essence of FP is higher order functions. If you don't have them, you need Design Patterns instead. If you do have HOFs, you don't see why anyone would bother with OO. Bottom line: OO doesn't exist. It's just pointless jargon that only exists to make a difference without a distinction (e.g. between Smalltalk and Scheme), and possibly to sell books and Clean Code seminars. ------ Animats Progress has come from making immutability more usable. Many of the troubles in programs come from something mutating state that something else is depending upon. This is not really a functional thing. The important concept is "single assignment". This is where values are initialized at creation and never changed. Go, which is an imperative language, favors single assignment. Functional programming is a form of single assignment. Single assignment in an imperative syntax has some advantages over a pure functional form. Values have names, which helps when reading code. You can use the same value twice. It's functional programming without the cult. The downside of single assignment is that you're frantically creating and discarding values. Underneath, the machine is imperative. So you need compiler support for efficient creation and discarding of values. LISP spends a lot of time creating and discarding values, then garbage collecting them. So do Javascript, Python, etc. Vast amounts of effort have gone into making that efficient, and today it's not a big problem. Rust goes even further, handling most of that overhead at compile time. ~~~ aikah > Go, which is an imperative language, favors single assignment. Go doesn't even have final variables. Go doesn't favor single assignment in anyway. Rust does as it is harder to create a mutable variable than an immutable one. ~~~ Animats Go has "=" and ":=", to distinguish alteration of variables. ------ pka > OO is not about state OO is very much about state, and that's the fundamental difference between non-FP languages and FP. a1 = object.f(b); a2 = object.f(b); If a1 != a2 or f performs any side effects at all you've got state. Doesn't matter if it's "private" or "hidden". Your functions are not referentially transparent. It also doesn't matter if your language implements OO in terms of message passing (Smalltalk, Erlang) or method calling (Java, C#, ...). ~~~ millstone This is orthogonal. Many languages traditionally considered functional do not enforce referential transparency, and nothing prevents you from building referentially transparent functions in an OO language. ~~~ addicted Not speaking specifically about this situation, but just because a language considered functional implements a certain behavior doesn’t mean the behavior is functional. The causation usually works the other way. It’s because a majority of the behaviors a language implements are functional that the language is considered functional. As an example, you can write procedural code in Java, which is the poster child of OOP programming. That does not make the procedural code OOP. ------ TheCoelacanth > Indeed, the word “variable” is a misnomer in a functional language because > you cannot vary them. Variables in functional languages are variables in the sense of mathematical variables, i.e. they can take on multiple possible values. They don't need to change from one minute to the next to be true variables. ------ mcphage I do understand his initial frustration. Saying that FP languages solve the Strategy Pattern (say) with functions is correct, but so reductionist as to be useless. It's like saying you solved a problem using objects, or saying you solved a problem using monads. Sure, you absolutely can, but _which_ monad you use is actually _really important_. There are a lot of things that fall under "The Strategy Pattern", and 'how you use functions to implement those' is just as big (and interesting!) a question as 'how you use objects to implement them'. ~~~ 08-15 The Strategy Pattern comprises a single interface with a single method. In other words, the Strategy _is_ a function, so it's entirely appropriate to say the FP equivalent of the Strategy Pattern is "function". Objects and interfaces just obscure that simple essence. ~~~ mcphage See, that’s what I mean about being reductionist. Is your answer wrong? Eh, not entirely, it’s just useless. Plenty of uses for the Strategy Pattern require more than just a function, and even those that a function is sufficient, what the function returns, and when, and why, matters. Reducing it down to a single function offers no understanding, it just sidesteps the point. ------ bcheung I normally like what "Uncle Bob" has to say but I do not agree with a lot of what he says in the article. > Objects are bags of functions, not bags of data. That might be an ideal case, but it is not reality. Pretty much every OO language has both of them combined. > Is there really so much difference between f(o), o.f(), and (f o)? Are we > really saying that the difference is just about the syntax of a function > call? Yes, there is. Try doing a compose function with the OOP / member expression syntax. Here it is in JS using FP syntax: const compose = (...fns) => fns.reduce((f, g) => (...args) => f(g(...args))) It would be even shorter in Haskell. Try doing long division with Roman numerals. Syntax is the structure behind mental representations and mental representations have tremendous power in expanding the physical limits of thought in the brain. > The overriding difference between a functional language and a non-functional > language is that functional languages don’t have assignment statements. The overriding difference between FP and OOP languages is that the unit of composition and abstraction is the function or object, respectively. ------ kazinator > _Objects are bags of functions, not bags of data._ That is just silly. I'd be willing to swallow the following revised version, in the context of immutable programming: " _classes_ are bags of functions, not bags of data." An object (class instance) is then just _a_ datum which serves as a domain value to these functions. Given that domain value, each function in that bag- of-functions class produces a range value: and that bag of range values comprises the properties of the object. Under traditional mutable OOP, those functions are impure in ways that logically require the object-datum to carry a representation of state somehow. And anyway, since functions are data (being first class values), any bag of functions is necessarily a kind of bag of data. ------ jordache I think the point of the two styles not being mutually exclusive is helpful. So often, is the literature treating the two concept like either-or, very black and white.... ------ Avi-D-coder The statement author makes that polymorphism is belongs to OPP is incorrect. Functional languages by design require better type systems that can accommodate more forms parametric polymorphism. OPP traditionally encouraged the use of ad-hoc polymorphism (via classes) over parametric polymorphism (via generics). OPP languages generally also make it easy to perform Ad-hoc polymorphism at run-time with dynamic dispatch some languages even use dynamic dispatch by default. TLDR: FP and OPP both have polymorphism. FP encourages parametric polymorphism. OPP encourages ad-hoc polymorphism. ~~~ joel_ms Ad-hoc polymorphism is interfaces in java, typeclasses in haskell, implicits in scala etc. Classes (usually) enable _subtype polymorphism_. ~~~ Avi-D-coder I would argue that subtype polymorphism is functionally equivalent to Ad-hoc polymorphism especially in the presence of multiple inheritance. The distinction is how polymorphic code is written not what the semantics can be expressed. E.g. rust traits allow for dynamic dispatch. While there is a distinction between ad-hoc polymorphism and subtype polymorphism, I don't believe it is necessary when comparing what semantics FP and OPP languages express. ------ d--b please add (2014) ~~~ ruairidhwm Done! ~~~ d--b thx ;)

The Strange Paradise of Paul Scheerbart - dnetesn http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/16/strange-paradise-of-paul-scheerbart/ ====== reasonattlm Technological utopianism is a great thing and we should have more of it as a thread in the great global conversion. It has a very interesting history if you're prepared to go chase it down, something in every decade from the late 1800s on. Cosmism ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism)), Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil ([https://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/ind...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/index.htm)), and the more recent paradise engineering of the Hedonistic Imperative ([http://hedweb.org/](http://hedweb.org/)) spring to mind among many, many others. People like the author of this article have a way of looking at the early transhumanists and saying "well, then the ugly parts of the 20th century happened," and somehow then discarding the original point, the goal, the wonder of the possible. The point still stands, however: that we can in principle engineer utopia, build technologies to eliminate pain, suffering, and death, and create wonders of macroscale engineering along the way. As a species we continue to move in that direction. Despite the intervening mass upheavals and deaths in the past 100 years, isn't 2015 so very much better to live in than 1915? And the 160 million people who died due to war in the 20th century are a small fraction of the ~3 billion (very approximately) who died in total. War is not a big part of the problem, for all that Serious Thinkers seem ponder little else. More people should be for technological utopianism, with eyes open. It shouldn't be remarkable to sit up and say "we can and should do more to stop suffering and death, and there is no point in stopping until it is all gone." Perhaps it would go faster if it wasn't just the science fiction authors, scientists, and philosophers who gave a little time to appreciate the bounds of the possible.

Who owns copyright to Deep Dream images? - somerandomness https://plus.google.com/+AndreasSchou/posts/hspwf3iTqx8 ====== kolme This is just a neural network fed with some dog pictures, it's not really "thinking", it doesn't "create" anything. In other words, it's not (yet) artificial general intelligence. As I see it, it's just some software which creates an output given an input. In essence, a tool. So I guess, unless otherwise stated in the license of said software, the ownership lays on the operator. Maybe, one can argue that the engineers who "fed" the NN do have the rights of the output. But the software is not clever enough for me to see here a similar case to that of wikipedia, the photographer and the monkey. ~~~ rtkwe It is affected by that case though because of the policy and guidelines it spawned. > “Because copyright law is limited to ‘original intellectual conceptions of > the author,’ the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines > that a human being did not create the work,” said the US Copyright Office in > its latest compendium of practices published Tuesday. “The Office will not > register works produced by nature, animals, or plants.” and > In new guidance the USCO has ruled that only works created by a human can be > copyrighted under US law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by > animals or by machines without human intervention. Source [0] This feels like it falls into the 'by machines without human intervention.' There's no meaningful contributions from a human. All that said this will eventually be an issue (hopefully) when machine intelligence actually takes off or human uploads become a viable operation. Though maybe by then we'll be less obsessed with every idea having to have an owner, but that's neither here nor there. [0] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/22/monkey- bus...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/22/monkey-business- macaque-selfie-cant-be-copyrighted-say-us-and-uk) ~~~ jsprogrammer >There's no meaningful contributions from a human. Humans provided the training data. Humans wrote the source. Humans compiled and ran the program. ~~~ Houshalter So the copyright belongs to google, even if you run it on your own photographs on your own machine? That doesn't seem right. ~~~ sparkie Consider if you took two copyrighted pictures and combined them in some way in photoshop. We can lay claim to the combined work, but we may not have consent of the original authors works to distribute thier work. Now consider if you trained the NNet with the same two images, such that it was highly overtrained and basically produced a combined replica of the inputs. This is essentially the same as doing it manually in photoshop. That a computer done it does not take ownership away from the creators of the two images. A NNet isn't trained with two images though, but millions. Do we abandon copyright because of scale? Should the NNet operator not be required to keep the entire training set such that copyright can be traced? Do we invent an entire new industry on determining the probability that a particular image was used to train a NNet (and by how much it affected it), such that it's owner can claim royalties on anything the NNet produces? The question isn't about google versus operator, it's about whether or not we're going to continue investing in the madness of copyright for machines designed to mimic human brains, and if so when will it apply to ourselves - for we can't archive our own training set. ~~~ swhipple > Do we abandon copyright because of scale? This is an interesting question. I wonder if, due the number of items in the training set and the minimal impact of each individual creative work, it would be considered fair use. If your training set significantly consists of images from someone else's training set in the same domain, you might have a conflict. But for arbitrary images, it may be analogous to search engines indexing (and learning from) copyrighted material, which is generally protected. ------ michael_storm The article (or the parts I've read so far; it's long and dense) assumes two things: 1) "An AI" should be considered a person. (This one is more subtle; I don't believe the author says it outright.) 2) "An AI", being a person, should be considered the author of its output. Both of these suppositions are quite debatable, but the article doesn't bother to debate them: The law as it is currently configured cannot vest ownership of the copyright in a procedurally generated work in the work’s author-in-fact, because the work’s author-in-fact—a generative software program—has no legal personhood. Intuition and the principle of transitivity both suggest that the programmer of generative software is the logical owner of the copyright in the works generated by his or her software. Whose intuition? Not mine. My intuition says that Deep Dream is a tool, and that by running the tool, I am the author-in-fact of the work. Or maybe that doesn't require enough human creativity for a court, and if not, fine -- the creators of the images that my instance of Deep Dream sourced to create its nightmare-scape are the authors-in-law. But Deep Dream is not the author, and the programmers of Deep Dream are not the authors. That's _my_ intuition (possibly quite wrong!). The article would do better to distinguish intuition from fact. ~~~ eridal > "An AI", being a person, should be considered the author of its output. I guess "copyright holder" is a better term. I can think of Music records, or Hollywood companies, which are not human but are definitely "persons" that hold tons of copyrighted material, and even some of those created that material. I can't see why not a program that creates digital works couldn't hold the copyright of its output ------ aaronbrethorst FTA: Q: So, Andy, who owns the copyright to DeepDream images? [...] A: Basically, "no one does," because AIs don't have legal personhood. Meanwhile, William Gibson 31 years ago: "That's a good one," the construct said. "Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI." Gibson was very, very right when he said "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." He just neglected to mention that the future is also really friggin' weird. ~~~ mhink Where is that Gibson quote from? I'm intrigued. :) ~~~ primaryobjects That's from Neuromancer, when the hologram (like a chat bot) is having a conversation with the main character. ------ SilasX >Q: And [who owns the copyright to DeepDream images], according to [my law school mentor]? >A: Basically, "no one does," because AIs don't have legal personhood. Wait, what? So if you build a tool that helps you build the final product, the tool counts as the creator, since the tool doesn't have legal personhood? Do we argue that easels and spirographs don't have legal personhood so if you use that stuff in your work then no one has the copyright? Reminds me of the quip: "Dismissing a graphic artist's work because it was computer-generated is like dismissing Michaelangelo's work because it was brush-generated." ~~~ FigBug If you used a spirograph to create art, you would own the copyright. If you created a spirograph that was robot controlled and could automatically create art then nobody would own the copyright. I don't see how an easel count create art on it's own. ~~~ blintzing If I write a computer program (say a Processing sketch) that generates an image, who owns the copyright to the image? ~~~ Retric Unless your directly influencing the output you own the copyright to the program not the output. Basically, if your code generates a random image you don't get copyright, which _is_ useful as generating say every English haiku is actually possible. It's under ~(15,831 syllable candidates) ^ 17. ------ imh I think it's a much more interesting question to ask who owns the output if it is trained on copywritten data. It works by iteratively tweaking the image to look more like whatever it looks most like. It's not hard to imagine that a simpler model that has only seen one picture of a dog might iterate a mildly dog-like image into exactly that dog training image. Clearly that should belong to whomever the original photo belongs to. So then what about the grey areas beyond that simple thought experiment? ------ jfoster In the eyes of the law, wouldn't the images be considered derivative works of all the data the Neural Net was trained with? ~~~ tantalor And the input image. ------ rl3 Obviously presuming Deep Dream images to be the output of a strong AI or an otherwise sentient being is absurd, but it does raise a very good point. That being: where do you draw the line in terms of what constitutes electronic sentience? The short answer is nobody knows. We only have vague ideas, and for all we know those may be completely wrong. It becomes difficult in that the cognitive architecture of artificial intelligence is not bound by biological limitations, and thus may be quite alien in nature relative to mammalian cognition. As such, our existing ethical frameworks may be completely unsuitable if applied to artificial beings. What I personally find unsettling about the Deep Dream images is their striking visual similarity to that of what a human sees on hallucinogenic drugs. The underlying algorithms utilized are themselves are heavily rooted in biological intelligence. It's not a huge leap of logic to say that if you were somehow able to excise part of a living human's visual cortex and hook it up such that it could receive input and generate output, you might see similar results. It's also worth noting that attempting to grow human brain tissue to any large degree of scale or complexity within a laboratory environment would be considered a highly unethical horror show, despite the fact that we almost certainly have the technology to do such a thing today. By the same token, one could do the exact same thing in digital form and the perception would be entirely different. This brings up a lot of issues, including the possibility that artificial agents of the future could potentially suffer in silence on unimaginable scales, double standards with regards to artificial versus biological intelligence, as well as fundamental questions about what constitutes artificial suffering and sentience in the first place. ------ vernie Do blur filters have legal personhood? ~~~ jtmcmc Exactly. Calling this NN AI (as in general / strong AI) is ludicrous. ------ visarga A neural net is just software, like Photoshop. Who owns the images created with Photoshop? The one who is paying for the electricity. ------ rm999 I tried reading that article, but for a topic that I find interesting (especially as someone who has studied AI and machine learning) I hoped it would be more approachable and easier to read. Can anyone explain the last few sentences for me? >The increasing sophistication of generative software and the reality that all creativity is algorithmic compel recognition that AI-authored works are less heterogeneous to both their human counterparts and existing copyright doctrine than appearances may at first suggest. AI authorship is readily assimilable to the current copyright framework through the work made for hire doctrine, which is a mechanism for vesting copyright directly in a legal person who is acknowledged not to be the author-in-fact of the work in question. Through this legal fiction, the machinic creativity of generative code can be recognized for what it really is—something other than (but owing to) the human creativity of its coder ~~~ sp332 AI should be considered legal "persons". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_personality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_personality) This is not treating them like humans, but for example businesses can be legal persons as well. It's an entity that can own things and enter into contracts. Instead of making some new, complex law about AI owning copyrights, we can recycle the "work-for-hire" doctrine. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire) That's where a person makes something (e.g. a book) as their job, and the person who hired them ends up owning the copyright. That way, the AI is "hired" to produce images for the operator, and the operator owns the images. ------ dlss This analysis is insane. It's just a very advanced photoshop filter. ------ visarga And this comment is copyrighted by my "Left and Right hands", because it was them that typed, letter by letter. You know, my hands are so smart, they have lots of sensors and neural networks in them.

Breaking the Seal on Drug Research - gruseom http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/business/breaking-the-seal-on-drug-research.html?pagewanted=all ====== tokenadult The previous submission [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5970873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5970873) received minimal attention from the HN new page earlier today. My thought on the overall implications of this article is that the scope of the new era of transparency will be much broader than discussed in the article. Any product or service claim that purports to be based on research may eventually have to be based on TRANSPARENT research, lest consumer fraud be suspected. That would apply as much to "alternative" treatments [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/sense-and-nonsense- about...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/sense-and-nonsense-about- alternative-medicine-in-usa-today/) as to prescribed treatments ordered by licensed physicians. It would apply to the claims of automobile manufacturers and to the claims of ergonomic keyboard manufacturers. It would apply not just to claims by established big companies, but also to claims by Soylent or DropBox or any other startup that promises benefits from a new product or service. And that would be a good thing, on the whole. If the economy continues to operate on a free-enterprise basis, companies new or old, large or small, might continue to be able to puff their products and services, and consumers continue to be able to buy most that aren't actively harmful. People aren't likely to be required to be rational and evidence-based any time soon. But if consumers decide to only buy drugs, transportation vehicles, foodstuffs, or other products or services that have reasonable evidence demonstrating their safety and effectiveness, that is an exercise of freedom too. I'd be glad to have a lot more data about what data are out there about how well products and services I might pay for actually work. All the startup founders who read Hacker News might well devote some thought to how their business model will develop in a world in which nearly all product and service claims can be tested by independently gathered and analyzed evidence. ~~~ Alex3917 Research into alternative medicine is generally less problematic in terms of transparency because most of it is government funded. So you don't have pharma companies hiding data they don't like, bribing journals to publish data they like, etc. Occasionally you'll get supplement makers funding small trials, e.g. with zinc, but most of these you'd already be ignoring for other reasons anyway. ------ VengefulCynic To my mind, this sort of thing is a lot like crypto research. As a workman programmer, I know next to nothing about crypto algorithms so I can read the documents, but I can't provide much in the way of meaningful research. That said, I know that there are lot of interested crypto researchers out there who can provide meaningful analysis and who have an incentive to speak up if they find something. But on government-funded closed-source crypto algorithms, I have to take the NSA's word for it... ------ gwintrob "results of only about half of clinical trials make their way into medical journals" Sounds like an incredible problem not only for bringing new drugs to market, but also for all of the medication that's currently prescribed. ~~~ kvb Journals are typically interested in publishing novel results. Why would it be a problem if studies which find that a drug works as expected are not published, as long as they are still submitted to the FDA and assessed there? ~~~ gruseom Because it's bad both for science and for the public interest to keep this data secret. Also, many of the studies that have been suppressed do not "find that a drug works as expected". Nobody's saying that journals have to publish every study, just that the data should be available for review. That's so bedrock a principle of science that it's hard to imagine a credible argument against it. ~~~ cup I think the problem is the fact that pharmaeutial companies are trying to turn a profit to ensure their survival. If you invest a billion dollars in a new drug (which is the average cost these days) and its a flop, are you going to adverise it or is it in your inerest to be silent and hope another drug company makes the same mistake as you and suffers the same opportunity costs, therefore minimising your losses. This is a quintessential problem between public and private research. ------ Fomite While as an epidemiologist I wholeheartedly endorse the push for making corporate research data more open, this sentence: "they relied too heavily on the assumption that the articles published in journals accurately represented the results of all clinical trials that had been conducted." Is a little misleading. Meta-analysis, which is what Cochrane reviews are, are very conscious of the "file drawer effect", and looking for evidence of non- publication is a rather fundamental aspect of doing meta-analysis.

PolarSSL is now a part of ARM - fcambus https://polarssl.org/tech-updates/blog/polarssl-part-of-arm ====== _stephan Congratulations! Who knows, maybe a part of the "exciting plans for 2015" is to release PolarSSL under a liberal open source license... ~~~ edent It's GPL 2 - [https://polarssl.org/how-to-get#open- source](https://polarssl.org/how-to-get#open-source) I'm not saying that's the nadir of licenses - but it's pretty good, no? ~~~ feld GPLv2 crypto will never dethrone OpenSSL ~~~ rurban Who should care if GPL is bad for a SSL library? First of all it needs to be correct and PolarSSL is the only one in this field. It is trusted, and it is fast enough. I would never trust GnuTLS, NSS or OpenSSL over PolarSSL. ~~~ getsat > Who should care if GPL is bad for a SSL library? An entity which actually ships software? ------ nly I would have expected Facebook or Google to do this ages ago. Particularly Google, rather than pursuing 'BoringSSL'. Still, it's nice to see new and different flows of investment in to TLS. I hope this is a sign that at least one British company is taking our privacy and security seriously. ~~~ tptacek Why exactly would Google want to buy someone else's SSL library? ------ shanemhansen Clearly ARM sees an opportunity for synergy with PolarSSL. I've built a few services on top of ARM based SOC and being able to fully utilize on onboard cryptographic coprocessor for file serving applications can be a performance challenge. There are some options [[http://www.altechnative.net/2011/05/22/hardware- accelerated-...](http://www.altechnative.net/2011/05/22/hardware-accelerated- ssl-on-marvell-kirkwood-arm-using-openssl-on-fedora/)] for getting openssl hardware accelerated on common arm boards, but it could be made much easier to get a performant configuration if PolarSSL and ARM worked together. I hope that this acquisition will pave the way to an encrypted internet of things. ~~~ ChuckMcM Exactly! A common SSL that works on all ARM SOCs that you can get for 'free' from ARM is critical to the security of distributed smart devices. If done well, this can be a huge win. ------ clopez What exactly it means that PolarSSL (a crypto library) is now part of ARM (a CPU architecture) ??? ~~~ Tarang It probably means ARM will create ASIC type encryption on their chips. May be helpful saving battery life. ~~~ notacoward It _might_ , but I wouldn't say _probably_. It might also mean more resources devoted to ensuring that PolarSSL runs well on the ARM architectures/chips that are (or will be) out there anyway. That's probably more interesting to most people, except for those making dedicated network hardware. ~~~ xgbi I don't see the problem, PolarSSL runs on ARM very well! ~~~ notacoward Who said there was a problem? I'm sure PolarSSL runs very well on ARM already. However, it's also extremely likely that it could run even better if the PolarSSL developers were more fully plugged into what the people who work on the ARM crypto hardware know. It's amazing what one can do if one knows _exact_ details of what's going on within each functional unit, between them on the internal coherency bus, etc. ARM probably saw an opportunity, not a problem. ~~~ bravo22 I don't think it is that. ARM doesn't make the crypto. The SoC makers put their own crypto cores so it wouldn't help ARM that way. I think just like they bought Keil (a dev tools maker) this is a strategy play to make it easier for end devs to add SSL or other crypto to their products. One shop solution. ~~~ notacoward Actually ARM does make crypto. It's part of ARMv8, licensable as an option for at least the Cortex-A53. [http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ddi0500e/DD...](http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ddi0500e/DDI0500E_cortex_a53_r0p3_trm.pdf) (section 2.1.4) There are undoubtedly other bits as well, as part of their "trusted computing" blahblah. Even if that weren't the case, knowing more about the internals of current and upcoming ARM IP could help optimize even an all-software implementation of PolarSSL. You could be right that it's mostly about "one stop shopping" but that doesn't mean there won't be other benefits. ~~~ bravo22 You are correct. However, Trusted Computing crypto is different than the crypto accelerators you find as peripherals in an SoC. I should have been more clear that I meant crypto peripherals. There are crypto instruction extensions but don't require a separate library implementation -- just asm code optimization in something like openSSL. PolarSSL is also targeted (mainly) towards much lower power than A53 or Cortex-A. It is targeted towards Cortex-M where you are dealing with KB of data and often don't have an MMU. You can't just port OpenSSL to those platforms and run it at will, hence their optimized libraries. ------ ctz I guess this is part of ARM's IoT push. ~~~ errordeveloper It's funny how in issue #1 users are asking for DTLS. I'm pretty sure this is what's finally going to get implemented and probably will appear in mbed OS soon too. [https://github.com/polarssl/polarssl/issues/1](https://github.com/polarssl/polarssl/issues/1) [http://mbed.org/technology/os/](http://mbed.org/technology/os/)

Lyft ends electric scooter operations in Oakland, Austin and San Jose - MilnerRoute https://news.yahoo.com/lyft-ends-electric-scooter-operations-171711550.html ====== jay_wild What happens to all the old / retired scooters when something like this happens? I'd love to buy a "project" scooter and refurb it back to my satisfaction ------ sieabahlpark Oh my God, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. You may have the opportunity to drive through a green light and not have a scooter run a red light or stop sign. ------ danielfoster This is great news for everyone. I’m a big fan of expanding mobility options, especially if we can take cars off the road, but I’m sick of tripping over scooters. ~~~ kylebenzle I'm a big fan of electric cars, but I'm sick of everyone having one.

The cost of messaging - rayvega http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/02/09/the-cost-of-messaging.aspx ====== CalmQuiet No: topic is actually about demands of _writing_ message objects: [http://codebetter.com/blogs/gregyoung/archive/2009/02/09/cos...](http://codebetter.com/blogs/gregyoung/archive/2009/02/09/cost.aspx)

Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution - vrdabomb5717 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/bitcoins-lightning-network-a-deep-dive/ ====== lalaland1125 Lightning appears to add more problems than solutions. It has a whole bunch of critical issues. Here is a short list. 1\. You need to have a computer constantly online or your counter party can easily steal all your money. This leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. 2\. The lightning network works by routing payments through a network to your destination. The issue here is that the routing for the lightning network is extremely complicated and is currently an unsolved (and probably unsolvable) problem. The core issue is that you have to route money though a network where channel capacities are changing with each and every transaction. Imagine trying to route internet packets if the size of the links changed thousands of times per second. 3\. It's relatively expensive to create and destroy channels at about two transactions per channel. Lightning proponents claim that this will be rare, but that can only be the case if there is minimal net flow of money. This is trivially not the case because users will be sending bitcoin more than they recieve and the reverse for retailers. 4\. Lightning has huge capital costs. You need to lock up large amounts of bitcoin in these channels for significant amounts of time. There is a real cost for this in terms of the lost interest. Channels are certainly not anywhere close to free. ~~~ Klathmon 2 isn't true at all, routing isn't nearly that complicated and I don't know why everyone thinks it is. Most routes are expected to be under a few hops. But regardless we will find out soon as the number of nodes on the live system is very rapidly growing. 3 doesn't really apply, as channels can be used as middle hops to rebalance. If I give money to you for a good/service and drain my channel. Then I buy more Bitcoin from coinbase, coinbase can route that BTC to me through you to rebalance our channel so it is all on my side. 4 isn't true, as "locking the BTC up" is basically making it available. Would you consider depositing cash into a checking account "locking it up"? Because that's the equivalent here. But also locktimes are normally a few days. ~~~ lalaland1125 2\. Where is the evidence of this? Sure, routing can be easy and short if it's centralized and the number of hops is small. But, if it's centralized, then what's the point of using Bitcoin? Where is this mystical routing algorithm that will work in the presence of constant capacity changes over a decentralized network? 3\. The issue here is that the flow for all channels across the entire network needs to be about balanced for things to work out properly. Once someone starts either net accumulating bitcoin or net dispersing bitcoin, then there will be problems somewhere on some link. 4\. I can take money out of my checking account at any time at no expense. ~~~ Klathmon About 2, like I said we should know soon if it will work. I just don't think that most channels will be updating as quickly as you think, and even if they are, a channel will know of someone is trying to route through it, so it can avoid trying to route another tx for the duration of the first. 3\. Fees can and will help balance things out. If a channel is really unbalanced, negative fees can strongly incentivize rebalancing in many cases. If it starts to get unbalanced again, fees can increase to help reduce the speed that it unbalances. 4\. You can also take money out of LN at any time (assuming your counterparty I cooperative). Only in the case of non-cooperation do you need to wait for locks to expire, and in that case you get ALL money from both sides of the channel, and need to wait for the lock to expire. Id love it if my bank could give me 2x my money if it takes more than 3 days for me to get my money... ~~~ JumpCrisscross > _You can also take money out of LN at any time (assuming your counterparty I > cooperative)_ This isn’t what people mean when they imply liquidity. Needing consent and being able to unilaterally demand cash are different domains. The former is _e.g._ a holding in a fund or coins in a LN, the latter is a consumer checking account. > _Id love it if my bank could give me 2x my money if it takes more than 3 > days for me to get my money_ Or lost 90%. We had this in the era of free banking, _i.e._ pre Federal Reserve. We then split the speculation and transfer functions of our financial system and ended up better for it. ~~~ Klathmon >This isn’t what people mean when they imply liquidity. Needing consent and being able to demand cash are different domains. I don't understand what you are trying to say here. You don't need "consent" if you want to wait the 3 days, but if you get "consent" from your counterparty you can get it instantly. 3-days is about as fast as ACH. But if you want, you can feel free to open channels with shorter locktimes if needed. >Or lost 90%. We had this in the era of free banking, i.e. pre Federal Reserve. That history is one Bitcoin is presently replaying. But you can't lose money if LN is working correctly. The whole idea is that you sign the transactions saying "if this is broadcast under these conditions, you get all of my money" when you open the channel. It's literally not possible to fractionally lend on LN, because all money MUST be there, and signed, for you to use it. I've had conversations with you before, and I'm fairly sure you don't understand the basics of Bitcoin as you keep repeating these things as fact, so I'm going to stop replying here. Please make an effort to understand it before you start denouncing it. Or at least explain why you think these apply to the conversation in ways that someone like myself who isn't well-versed in traditional banking systems but understands Bitcoin technically will understand. ~~~ JumpCrisscross > _if you get "consent" from your counterparty you can get it instantly. > 3-days is about as fast as ACH_ You said, like a checking account, one “can also take money out of LN at any time.” I clarified that when people say “take money out at any time,” they mean unilateral liquidity. You can unilaterally demand cash or an instantaneous Fedwire transfer, the latter which costs 3 to 69 cents [1] (though some banks heftily upcharge this service), against your checking account balance. It takes a good deal longer to settle a LN balance (theoretically). TL; DR The Lightning Network has some neat features, but pitching its liquidity as analogous to a checking account’s is disingenuous. > _you can 't lose money if LN is working correctly_ This applies to anything. In finance, things never work correctly because someone, somewhere, can be trusted to be an arsehole. > _It 's literally not possible to fractionally lend on LN_ The number of Americans who have lost a single U.S. dollar to this threat since the FDIC was formed is basically zero. The number of Americans who have nuked substantial fractions of their net worths speculating on Bitcoin is significantly greater. [1] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_corep...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_coreprinciples.htm) ------ DennisP Here's a shorter explanation of Lightning, with Solidity code: [http://www.blunderingcode.com/a-lightning-network-in-two- pag...](http://www.blunderingcode.com/a-lightning-network-in-two-pages-of- solidity/) ~~~ jxub Nice article, thanks! ------ marsRoverDev Or perhaps replacing bitcoin with something that doesn't have fundamental flaws in its design. Hence why a lot of us think it has no inherent value into the future. Of course, those in on the ponzi scheme will disagree with this sentiment. ~~~ jxub Nano previously called Raiblocks is an amazing candidate for fee-less, instant transactions. The block-lattice approach is a fundamental breakthrough that overcomes the limitations of blockchain in terms of cost and speed. Stellar is also a worthy contender although it wasn't designed with the purpose of payments, but decentralised currency/crypto exchanges. The Lightning Network daemon codebase on Github is a beautiful well commented piece of Golang code though. ~~~ gruez >The block-lattice approach is a fundamental breakthrough that overcomes the limitations of blockchain in terms of cost and speed. Not really. DAG/lattice based cryptocurrencies offer different security guarantees compared to blockchain based ones. ~~~ buckie They also have different scaling tradeoffs as they scale really well (the graph can be arbitrarily wide as tx's can run in parallel) when most transactions are causally unrelated but hit bottlenecks with every "killer app" that gains traction (graph narrows as more and more transactions become causally related). I'm not sure what domains see this problem crop up but I've seen it in quant finance strategy execution. Say you have 1k strats that you want to run in parallel but risk needs to bound the bank's per-equity positions globally. When the strats work on different subsets, DAG approaches aren't a problem, but when most of the strats trade APPL/IBM your once very wide (parallel execution) graph narrows significantly (becomes more sequential) as the strats need to check with risk w.r.t. AAPL/IBM sequentially. NB: for this reason, causal approaches are pretty rare to see today (though it depends on the domain as high latency contexts don't really care). ------ amluto I think that the end game of Lightning is very bad. Imagine that Bitcoin remains relevant and continues to have huge market cap for several years and that Lightning takes off to the point that most transactions use Lightning and the cost of an actual on-chain transaction drops to a few tens of cents. The reward for mining a block will drop significantly (as originally planned in the Bitcoin design), and the transaction fees per block will also drop significantly. On the flip side, with Lightning, it's possible to steal quite a lot of money if you have the ability to prevent transactions from being mined (i.e. if you can mount a 51% attack). In particular, you can prevent any penalty transactions against yourself from ever showing up on the blockchain. In other words, Lightning will drive the profit available from 51% attacks up and will drive the profit available from honest mining down. What happens when they cross over? ~~~ JumpCrisscross > _the cost of an actual on-chain transaction drops to a few tens of cents_ "In 2014, the volume-based transaction fees [for Fedwires] range from 2.8 cents to 69 cents per transfer" [1]. They charge an extra 15¢ if the quantity is over $10 million and another 36¢ if over $100 million. These transactions settle instantly and almost every bank gives consumers access to them (albeit with varying surcharges). [1] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_corep...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_coreprinciples.htm) ------ haolez Bitcoin Cash seems to be doing just fine with on-chain scaling. There are concerns about centralization on miners with it, but in my understanding the incentives planned in the original Bitcoin paper account for that. ~~~ freejulian Bitcoin Cash can’t even scrape together enough transactions to form 100kb blocks. It’s rather disengenuous to say it’s scaling better when it has a fraction of the users. Furthermore, larger block size is directly related to centralization. The bcash crowd hopes people forget decentralization is important. ~~~ r3demon It's a common misconception that block size is somehow related to decentralization. In fact you don't need a whole blockchain to verify transactions securely, you only need a few last blocks at max. Also full nodes add nothing to the network, they have no vote, only miners and actual users do. ~~~ lrns_ Did you forget [http://www.uasf.co/](http://www.uasf.co/) ? ------ ericb Lightning involves an always-on, networked, machine holding your private key. Your bitcoin is a bounty for 0-day exploits. Brilliant! ~~~ masterjack And if you go offline for a few hours, your peers can steal your balance (unless you entrust somebody else to monitor it for you, which has its own tradeoffs) ~~~ kyledrake So basically, it turns into a ridiculously complicated bank. That requires 42tWh of power waste (and growing) to function. I'm sorry, but I'm not impressed. Let's build a solution that scales better on-chain and uses a more power efficient mining algorithm. ~~~ wtfstatists > _uses a more power efficient mining algorithm_ Thats axiomatically impossible. Its the amount of energy required, not nhashes/etc, that disincentivize an attacker from rewriting history. ~~~ DennisP Well, it's the financial cost required, which in PoW is a combination of energy and capital cost. ------ wanda For a moment I thought this was an article about how mining groups could try to power their ASICs by waiting for lightning to strike and storing the energy in giant capacitors or something. (Not because this is a good idea, but because I didn't know anything about the Lightning network.) ------ znpy I honestly dislike how the author abuses terms like "lots" and "a handful". For example: « That means you can use a single payment channel to make lots of payments to many different people—all while generating just a handful of transactions on the underlying blockchain.» I am no bitcoin expert, but AFAIK the bitcoin network can currently process in the order of tens of transactions per second, and that is a low number compared to the 50-100k transactions per second that VISA et similia are currently capable of processing. So, many are "lots"? How many are "a handful"? ~~~ marcandre No, the processing capacity is about 7 transactions per second. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem) ------ lambdadmitry I was wondering recently, why Bitcoin is even needed for a Lightning-like network? Just settle the channels in cash (or even bank transfers), it won't be any more traceable than Bitcoin. Moreover, there is a successful precedent of such network: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala) Seems like a large enough "overlay network" over cache reserves and bank accounts can be made barely traceable and pretty efficient. ~~~ binarybits Lightning's core innovation is the use of the Bitcoin blockchain as a cryptographic backstop for payment channels. If the other party in a payment channel stops cooperating, you can broadcast the current commitment transaction to the blockchain, which effectively refunds the current balance back to each party. There's a similar mechanism for enforcing the hashed time lock contracts that make Lightning payment chains possible. I don't know how you could do anything similar with conventional bank transfers. ~~~ lambdadmitry Well, it can be solved the way current banks deal with fraud and chargebacks: rely on a very small number of parties misbehaving and set off a small percentage of money in the system to offset fraud. Another (complementary) way is a reputation system for "nodes" (as is the case in hawala). Both imply some sort of centralization, but so do Lightning incentives (see the discussion around "payment hubs"), so not much difference there. ------ grondilu Bitcoin is both a currency and a payment method. Everybody knew right from the beginning that it's not a great payment method. The 10 minutes delay is a long time if you want to prevent double-spending. For fast payments nothing beats a server with credit accounts. Naysayers will say that it defeats the purpose of bitcoin, but nobody thought bitcoin would entirely make banks and their fractional reserves system disappear. If anything, people will still want to borrow money. Banks could function on top of cryptocurrencies, the difference would be that their clients would be able to withdraw their funds out of the banking system alltogether at any time, that is not just turning one credit into an other. ~~~ r3demon 0-confirmation transactions were working excellent before Bitcoin Core added SegWit and other useless stuff. You don't need to wait for a new block if your signed transaction is in the mempool, and it's secure enough for small payments. ~~~ freejulian 0 conf transactions are incredibly insecure. If you accept one you are putting a great deal of trust in the person paying you. Bitcoin transactions are suppose to be trustless. ~~~ makomk They are. Some context might help: when it originally launched, Bitcoin Cash was slower and more unusable than Bitcoin if you needed even a single confirmation, because the forker fucked up the difficulty adjustment algorithm so badly that blocks were every hour or so most of the time. So the Bitcoin Cash community pushed the idea that zero-confirmation transactions were safe there, unlike on the evil SegwitCoin chain, so they could claim it was still faster than Bitcoin since this was the whole selling point. There was no actual foundation for this claim, but it became vital to marketing the coin. ~~~ r3demon OK. So 0-conf are not secure because you read it somewhere, good argument. ------ Kagerjay Savjee has a great 5 min video breaking down bitcoins proposed lightning network [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrr_zPmEiME](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrr_zPmEiME) ------ mdimec4 What is your oppinion about that: [https://youtu.be/UYHFrf5ci_g](https://youtu.be/UYHFrf5ci_g) ------ neximo64 It's a mistake of course though to think some technical change is going to suddenly make bitcoin go up again. ------ rdlecler1 Thinking of an analog system — maybe this is like short term vs long term memory systems. BTC being the later. ------ r3demon Lightning will become centralized into services like banks and Paypal since it's too difficult to use for an average person, which completely defeats the idea of Bitcoin as P2P cryptocurrency. ~~~ notsrg 1\. Banks/exchanges/Paypal have KYC regulations - fulfilling these are impossible due to Onion routing provided by the nodes. 2\. My mom does not know how HTTP works and she uses the Internet just fine. It's naive to think that users are going to be explicitly opening and closing channels, finding best path, etc. These can be built into wallets and abstracted out. Besides, Bitcoin of today is already too complicated for the "average" person. ------ grillwork Lightning is the solution and it's going to be great for making micro transactions w/ bitcoin again. Lightning network is actual innovation and the next evolution in making Bitcoin easier to use for the masses. One step at a time.

How Is Today’s Warming Different from the Past? - randomgyatwork http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php ====== randomgyatwork People always talk about the last 100,000 years as though that is a good scale to talk about this issue. Reality is, current global warming is part of a cycle that has existed way longer than us. Our real problem is that we are speeding up a process, not creating it. ~~~ WorldMaker Whereas reaching to greater than 100,000 year cycles is a giant red herring at this point as well. We're dealing with an unprecedented rise within less than a 100 year period, regardless of whether or not this is some "ancient cycle", it's a very frightening thing and we should very much be doing something about it. Playing a blame game at this point about who "created it" versus "sped it up" seems a bit like playing hot potato with a live grenade. Edit to clarify: unprecedented - in our species' history, in our species' survival to date. That's a part of the focus on the last 100,000 years. ~~~ randomgyatwork That could be part of it, though there is the potential that we couldn't stop it even if we tried. ~~~ WorldMaker We might have to at least try, won't we? What's the other option, roll over and accept mass extinction?

100M Creative Commons Flickr Images for Research - kneth http://yahoolabs.tumblr.com/post/89783581601/one-hundred-million-creative-commons-flickr-images-for ====== GrantS One of the most incredible parts is that they've already run feature detection on all 100M images/videos and extracted 50TB of: "SIFT, GIST, Auto Color Correlogram, Gabor Features, CEDD, Color Layout, Edge Histogram, FCTH, Fuzzy Opponent Histogram, Joint Histogram, Kaldi Features, MFCC, SACC_Pitch, and Tonality" The good part about this for researchers is not only that this saves dozens of CPU-years of computation (back of the envelope, it would take 15 years for my laptop to extract those SIFT features alone), but that any differences in learning/recognition performance on the dataset can be attributed to the algorithms in question, uncomplicated by which researcher engineered the best features for the dataset. On the other hand, it's a challenging dataset to work with because you can't just download it and process it locally as has been traditionally done. I'll be interested to see how many take advantage of it. ~~~ kastnerkyle Why the heck would you do MFCC on images? Mel filters try to replicate the perception of human ears on audio. This looks like buzzword soup to me (SACC_Pitch, Tonality? What the heck?!? These seem like audio features - where are the formulas!). I also don't know about your other conclusion, there is no reason you couldn't download this dataset given enough time/bandwidth/storage to process locally. Most people who will work on this could reasonably store a large chunk locally, if not all (~10 TB). This also assumes that you can't reduce/compress the info any further than what flickr provides and that you require access to the entire dataset - if any of the images are 1024x1024 or larger most feature extractions do not need that kind of fidelity. Heck, you could probably make use of grayscale only to reduce the size by a factor of 3 - ~ 17 TB is feasible (though still pretyt insane) to store locally. ImageNet (~1.2 TB) only took me 45 days on a residential (<20 MB connection), and I wold assume that this dataset would be downloaded by entities with much higher download b/w. I would also assume that many algorithms, like the type that attack CIFAR10 et. al., would also be willing to reduce the dimensionality and recompress, further reducing storage overhead. How big is each image? Also, where are the hyperparameters they used to calculate all of these features? Extracted features aren't really that useful without context/reproducibility. All that said, I think most of these features are decent and the dataset is amazing, but I would rather see them release the raw data set and its PCA/ZCA/other transform - maybe Gabor filtered etc. as well. Lower level preprocessing is more useful for doing representation learning IMO - these higher level features are not that useful for ML algorithm developers. SIFT is patented for heaven's sake! How are we supposed to build algorithms on top of things like that... I am excited about the dataset but feel that there could be more done to truly enable researchers. This feels like a "look how much data we have/look how awesome and used flickr is" thing to me. ~~~ DanBC > Why the heck would you do MFCC on images? Mel filters try to replicate the > perception of human ears on audio. First page of Google hits. MFCC Based Face Identification [http://www.img.cs.titech.ac.jp/~akbari/pmwiki/uploads/Site/S...](http://www.img.cs.titech.ac.jp/~akbari/pmwiki/uploads/Site/Sangeeta- rep.pdf) Identification of satellite images based on mel frequency cepstral coefficients [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=538327...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5383270&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D5383270) ~~~ kastnerkyle Frankly, both papers you linked give no justification for using the mel filterbank instead of any other filtering/frequency reduction before doing the IDCT to get the cepstrum. This is what I mean! Why take a filterbank designed for audio and apply it to images except to use the buzzwords? In any case, at least I know it is used by researchers (even if I don't agree with the why). Thanks! ------ clickok It seems like Yahoo is a little bit worried about possible exploitation. From the Terms of Use: _2.3. You may derive and publish summaries, analyses and interpretations of the Data, but only in a manner where it is impossible to reconstruct the Data from the publication. Small excerpts of the Data may be displayed to others or published in a scientific or technical context, solely for the purpose of describing your research and related issues and not for any commercial or anti-competitive purpose. Unless Yahoo! expressly requests no attribution, all publications resulting from research carried out using the Data must display an attribution to Yahoo!. This attribution must reference &quot;Yahoo! Webscope,” the web address [http://webscope.sandbox.yahoo.com](http://webscope.sandbox.yahoo.com), and the name of the specific dataset used, including version number, if applicable. This attribution should preferably appear among the bibliographic citations in the publication. If Yahoo! expressly requests no attribution, you agree not to mention Yahoo! in connection with the Data. Yahoo! invites you to provide a copy your publication to Yahoo!._ This[0] seem fairly restrictive, considering that I can just crawl flickr and get all that data and more, were I so inclined. Also kinda interesting, in this passage and the rest of the TOU: they repeatedly use `&quot;` interchangeably with actual quotation marks ("), suggesting that _nobody at Yahoo has proofread their own live TOU_. Still, the dataset seems really cool. [0] ...and other parts of the agreement, but I don't want to spoil it for you, nor post its entirety as a comment. ~~~ kastnerkyle If you can crawl flickr and get 50TB of data, do it.... it is more than a "were I so inclined" situation. I have had a very hard time crawling and indexing large datasets like this - companies tend to protect their data! ------ spingsprong "Yahoo is hosting a contest to build the system best capable of identifying where a photo or video was taken without using geographic coordinates." Does this strike anyone else as being a bad idea? ~~~ fancy_pantser I can't think of any general reasons this is bad, just very narrow cases on the individual level. What are your fears? ~~~ spingsprong Because of the inevitable photolocationfinder dot com that will immediately come into existence if they ever succeed. Then everyone who hates someone or likes someone way too much, will only need a couple of photos from twitter or wherever, to know where to look for that person in real life. ~~~ Houshalter It's not likely that a computer vision system is going to be that much better than humans at the task. Maybe it will be able to guess your latitude by the color of the sky or something crazy like that, but not give you an exact address. ~~~ kastnerkyle It is not unreasonable to believe that an algorithm could key in on architectural peculiarities of a given region. On top of that, if there are any people who _are_ in the photo who share their address on facebook, twitter, foursquare et. al. it is game over. ~~~ Houshalter I didn't consider that. Reminds me of _What Makes Paris Look Like Paris_ : [http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/whatMakesParis/](http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/whatMakesParis/) ------ cclogg "From the old world of unprocessed rolls of C-41 sitting in a fridge 20 years ago" Hey I still do that! :( I wonder if my (or anyone's) film photos on Flickr are completely useless metadata-wise. Because they are all scanned so they just say "NORITSU KOKI EZ Controller". There seems to be a large portion of people (on Flickr) shooting film still but I wonder if it's only a small percentage overall. ------ jitendraag Just when I was happy using Flickr's API for creative commons image search - [http://www.outreachpanel.com/free-images/](http://www.outreachpanel.com/free- images/) They gave me this huge data to play with :) In past, I have had issues with CC images that were also tagged with 'getty'. I hope they have taken care of that issue. ------ chatman No access to non university based researchers. Useless for me. ------ liminal The data is only available to university researchers. ------ raphar Isn't this on torrent yet?

Ask HN: Do you have ADD/ADHD? How do you manage it? - vumgl Also, how has it affected your CS career? I feel that transitioning to management would help, as it does not require lengthy periods of concentration, but rather distributed attention for shorter periods. ====== westurner Music. Headphones. Chillstep, progressive, chillout etc. from di.fm. Long mixes from SoundCloud with and without vocals. "Instrumental" Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Less sugar and processed foods. Though everyone has a different resting glucose level. Apparently it's called alpha-pinene. Fidget things. Rubberband, paperclip. The Pomodoro Technique: work 25 minutes, chill for 5 (and look at something at least 20 feet away (20-20-20 rule)) Lists. GTD. WBS. Exercise. Short walks. ------ oldmancoyote It has been a struggle every day of my adult life for 50 years. Getting Things Done was a major improvement. Focusing on tasks that allow for non-linear editing (writing, painting, and programming) has worked for me. I have misgivings about management. Management requires developing and sustaining a long-term view.

Ask HN: Examples of things that are MORE successful due to coronavirus? - andrewstuart Some businesses&#x2F;events&#x2F;organisations have discovered they are MORE successful as whatever they morphed into due to coronavirus.<p>It would be great to read a list of them.<p>Here&#x27;s an example:<p>Melbourne International Film Festival numbers way up as digital-only festival proves a huge hit.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theage.com.au&#x2F;culture&#x2F;movies&#x2F;miff-audience-numbers-way-up-as-digital-only-festival-proves-a-huge-hit-20200820-p55nqh.html<p>Do you know of any business&#x2F;organisation&#x2F;event that has found that its new Covid&#x2F;isolation&#x2F;remote configuration works better than the old? ====== schappim E-Commerce, Shopify, Apps, Home Improvement / Hardware (Bunnings), Consumer Electronics & TV Sales (JB Hi-Fi, Amazon) Acceptance of Government Authoritarianism and reduction of privacy to aid the fight against COVID-19. Nationalism, de-globalisation (closure of borders, lower interstate and international travel). ------ zanecraw Amazon, and other online businesses for sure. Netflix/Hulu because everyone has more time now at home. Gaming platforms and video games. Even those "meal boxes" services like hello fresh and blue apron ------ rdtwo Camping and outdoor activity, real estate prices, new housing starts. Sales of gym and excercise equipment, playgrounds, video games, really all the hobby sectors boats I think. ------ markus_zhang mobile gaming, e commerce, pornographic websites, basically everything addictive and online... ------ markus_zhang Another one, real estate...

Ask HN: Application Security. - hislaziness I drew the short stick and have to develop a security strategy for an application my company is developing. Where do I start? The application is a web based J2EE application. ====== mh_ OWASP (The Open Web Application Security Project) has a host of resources (local & linked) Try: <http://www.owasp.org> and: <https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Java_Project> ~~~ hislaziness thanks mh_4

Highly Scalable LDAP, Alternatives - rishikeshg Folks, Any experience related to implementing a highly scalable (let's say directory has billion records), high performance( in terms of read latency) LDAP server? What other alternatives should I be thinking of? ====== rishikeshg Hi, I do not have a use case as such. I have used LDAP years ago and was curious if there are any better products now in the market and what the challenges with LDAP servers are. ------ staunch What's the use case? Why LDAP? And really, a billion records?

Ask HN: Are Branches (SVN/Git) Evil? - tylermauthe Recently, I had a discussion with two colleagues (who are far more experienced than I am and whom I respect a great deal). The topic of the discussion was Branching Strategies and when to use them. They made the argument that good developers do not need branches, if I recall correctly the statement they made was &quot;If you need branches, your development process is broken.&quot;<p>Their reasoning for this statement is that all code changes can be made in small increments and be done in such a way to preserve existing behaviour while allowing new development to occur. This can be achieved in a number of ways, for example if&#x2F;else statements where the else branch contains the new feature but is not executed (except when the dev changes the expression to return false). By this line of reasoning, it follows that any new or dev commits which lower the quality or reliability of the code will be in some code-path which is deactivated and so they won&#x27;t <i>actually</i> lower the quality.<p>In summary, my argument for branching was you can use branches to help to ensure release quality (ie: have branches for master, release and development) by segregating changes in SCM according to whether they are under active development, ready for release or currently in production. Their counter argument was that ALL changes in SCM should be production-quality and be ready to release at any second (and if not, you should change your dev process).<p>What do you think HN, are branches indicative of a &quot;broken development process&quot;? ====== oxalo Simple answer, no. If you're using if/else all over the place instead of a branch, what's to stop you from forgetting to remove one when you decide your new work is 'production ready'? At the easiest level, I'd suggest using branches for new development. Bug fixes, new features, etc. Keep the work small; branches are cheap. Once its reviewed or tested merge it back into the master branch. This way 'in development' and 'complete' are abstracted to a level above code. Also, imagine your project has 30 developers, or more. Would the strategy of if/else everywhere still work well? ~~~ tylermauthe Thanks a lot for this answer. Good point about keeping the branches small and about having only two. The team I work on is quite small, so I can see how not using branches can work. I've worked on larger teams and I can't imagine how we would have managed those changes without an excellent branching model (git-flow). ~~~ oxalo And that's the other thing: use what works for your team. If you have an idea on how to make it better, try it. If something isn't working well, change it. ------ tylermauthe I thought I'd throw and update on this. [http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html) After reading this article, I now realise why having only one branch is desirable for a small team using CI. The development style should use things like feature toggles to ensure that code paths are not activated. Branching, as I've thought of it, relies on the SCM to segregate features instead of developing robust and modular features that can be swapped in/out willy nilly. ------ cratermoon With svn, maybe. With git, pretty much everything _is_ a branch. ~~~ tylermauthe I do miss git -- for exactly this reason ;)

Artificial intelligence program that learns like a child - ryan_j_naughton http://www.gizmag.com/artificial-intelligence-program-imitates-child-cognitive-development/33972/ ====== guardian5x This sounds interesting. Is there any technical or in-depth information available? The idea itself doesn't strike me as new. ------ cylcon I've seen a documentary on tv that deals with this topic. Its called "Extant".

Visual Rust 0.1 is out - wspeirs http://blog.piston.rs/2015/05/14/Visual-Rust-0.1/ ====== MichaelGG I can't wait to try this. If it can just get to the level of the first F# plugin, I'll be so happy. If MS picked up interest in Rust that'd be even more amazing. And it'd actually solve their security problems, unlike the more and more convoluted codegen they're doing for C++. Edit: to be clear, I mean the security problems that their C++ codegen is trying to solve, like stack cookies, ASLR, or the new stuff they were boasting about at build in the ObjC VS2015 codegen video. (Some special function call thing that stores a map of legitimate function call targets and checks before calling.) All that stuff is eliminated by having a sound design in the first place. ~~~ pjmlp It is much more likely that the way forward lies in .NET Native than picking up Rust. According to the C++ code generation talk at Build, their new C2 compiler backend appears to evolve into something like how Apple is using LLVM for. ~~~ cwyers Microsoft has put effort into extending C# for systems programming: [http://joeduffyblog.com/2013/12/27/csharp-for-systems- progra...](http://joeduffyblog.com/2013/12/27/csharp-for-systems-programming/) ~~~ pcunite Would love this. I know it's not "easy" but would love to have a "delete" keyword. ~~~ MichaelGG Offering manual memory management would be a huge win. Even if it's just hints. For instance, if a function was pure, then we know the arguments to it can't escape. So suddenly we can safely allocate many things right on the stack. This can be a huge win in high perf scenarios. I'd also love an arena system, so I could provide a context and allocate objects in it and enforce they never leak. (Say, per request in an HTTP app.) Then the GC could just free that chunk in one go, no matter how much garbage I've loaded in it. I know that generational GC is supposed to handle this in general, but it isn't free, plus fails when some requests take a long time (and thus all their stuff gets promoted). ------ steveklabnik This thread may also be interested in this PR, which adds MSVC support to the compiler itself: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/25350](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/25350) Windows + Rust has come a long way. It's still not perfect, but it's getting there! ~~~ fithisux Hopefully they do not kill mingw support, since this was their intention some time ago. ------ xilec Here [https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c6075d2f-8864...](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c6075d2f-8864-47c0-8333-92f183d3e640) Your can see features, download and try ------ inlinevoid It's a nice start. I installed the plugin and was able to create a Rust project and run it from Visual Studio Community 2013 without any hassle. Although, there are a few issues holding it back from being a pretty sweet Rust IDE... \-- (Major) The indenting for braces isn't handled properly. Try creating a function you'll see what I mean. \-- Errors in the Error List are too vague. \-- Would be awesome if the rustc build output was displayed in the Output window. \-- Syntax highlighting could be greatly improved, it's pretty basic atm. ~~~ xilec We will be very appreciative if you add your notes in issues of project [https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/VisualRust/issues](https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/VisualRust/issues) ------ osense I would prefer a cross-platform solution much more... like an IntelliJ IDEA plugin, for example. ~~~ tauchunfall I think a Visual Studio plugin is a very good start, since the IDE already supports C/C++ and I guess these users are a very important target audience for Rust. There is also a Rust extension for the IntelliJ platform [0]. It supports some basic IDE features, but the last commit was in February. The Rust extension could fit really good to Jetbrains' new C/C++ IDE CLion. [0] [https://github.com/Vektah/idea-rust](https://github.com/Vektah/idea-rust) ------ coldnebo Does this use the rust ast? Ala llvm? I keep hoping for a new age where editors can simply use the language itself to define structure. ~~~ Manishearth Racer, the autocomplete engine, does. I'm not sure if there's more plugin usage since I haven't looked at the source yet. Rust has great support for hooking in to the compiler and/or creating drop-in replacements. I'm hoping this pans out well and leads to some excellent tooling! :D ------ k__ What are the features? ------ fithisux It is a pitty I do not use visual studio. But anyway, congratulations. Any other Rust ide suggestions on MSWindows? ------ orf Is this using the Roslyn project to do intellisese stuff? ~~~ josteink Roslyn is a C# compiler, so I would assume no. Nitpicking on that technicality aside, I'm curious about the same thing. Does it offer intellisense or not? ~~~ xilec Visual Rust has simple autocompletion based on Racer ------ josteink The Emacs-crowd is usually pretty crazy about supporting anything under the sun. But if this[1] is the best Rust-support the Emacs crowd can conjure up, this Visual thingie here actually looks like a better package for people looking into rust for the first time. Not bad. [1] [https://github.com/toshok/rust-mode](https://github.com/toshok/rust-mode) ~~~ hvis There's also [https://github.com/phildawes/racer](https://github.com/phildawes/racer) (haven't tried it myself, I've yet to get into Rust). ~~~ filsmick I use Racer with Sublime Text 3, it works pretty well! ------ wspeirs Sadly doesn't work with Visual Studio Code: [https://code.visualstudio.com/](https://code.visualstudio.com/) ~~~ callumjones Because Visual Studio Code isn't like Visual Studio at all. It doesn't support any of the VS extensions (because it's a completely different product). ~~~ thescrewdriver Perhaps they shouldn't have given it virtually the same name then. I can understand that he had an expectation given the naming choice. It also means that this support is Windows only.

Why it's better to be hardworking than smart - kn0thing http://www.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/comments/e4ejp/dae_feel_like_being_labeled_a_smart_kid_set_them/c158f4b ====== jamesbritt "Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising." -- Cyril Connolly

Skype down? - transburgh http://www.centernetworks.com/skype-down ====== transburgh Reports from US and Europe of outages.

FreshDirect neglects to renew its domain - bobinator30 http://gothamist.com/2012/12/26/fresh_direct_fiasco_company_critici.php ====== bobinator30 and why wouldn't they just publish the IP address, so I can order food?

Search Engine for Crypto Trading - shakks https://www.tradeplan.co/ ====== shakks Hi Everyone, I am working on creating a search engine like app for crypto traders. In crypto, traders have KPI called as technical indicators. I am working on making those Technical indicators used as a search query. I myself have been trading crypto for a year and needed a tool to help myself track and filter the markets. I just got the landing page live to see if people like the idea. Feedback's welcome/ ~~~ mania_d That seems interesting. I have some understanding of technical indicators; any good reading material, you suggest? ~~~ shakks I have a little on medium to help explain how few indicators can be used. check them @ [https://medium.com/@shakks](https://medium.com/@shakks) Also, check out [https://www.barchart.com/education/technical- indicators](https://www.barchart.com/education/technical-indicators) for details of most of the indicators. Thanks ------ rameezhabib Now this looks some top end tool which I was looking for. Love the work this team has put in. Hoping to see a lot of success for you guys. ------ nightwalkerx96 Love the UI. Looks so neat! ~~~ shakks thanks, A awesome friend of mine helped us out. He is really talented designer. I will convey your message.:-)

Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money - edwincheese http://torrentfreak.com/its-time-to-debunk-the-myth-that-copyright-is-needed-to-make-money-or-that-it-even-makes-money-121007/ ====== vibrunazo Imagine if, before intellectual property, you put 20 smart people in a room, and tell them to come up with solutions to add incentives for creative works. None of them would have come up with "Hey! Why don't we grant inventors monopolies over inventions! We could increase the ammount and quality of inventions by limiting what others can invent!". No one would ever think that's a good idea. It's completely backwards and counter intuitive. They would come up with things like y-combinator, angel funds, startup incubators. Or straight up government money investments. These are the obvious ideas that come up when you're trying to figure how to incentive ideas. You incentive ideas by investing in them, not by limiting them. And of course, as most people here probably already know, that's not how IP was invented. It was not a conclusion from trying to come up to a solution for investing in ideas. No sane human being would have thought that was a solution. IP was invented as a monarchy monopoly to give power to the king. The "but it's good for innovation" meme was an excuse invented later when they figured they could actually make a lot of money from it, so those who were profiting off monopolies had to find an excuse to keep it. It's so mind boggling to watch so many discussions where people ask "the ultimate hard question" of "but how else could be possibly incentive ideas without copyright???". C'mon, it's so straight-forward and we've been doing it for centuries. YC alone has done much more for promoting innovative creative works than copyright has done since it's invention. Do you really care about investing in ideas? Then put your money where your mouth is, become an angel investor, and stop pretending it's a hard problem to solve. ~~~ rayiner Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation. It's about preventing free- riding. You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft? As for YC, etc... What a ridiculous bit of self-important exaggeration. Scribd, AirBnB, Discus... Oh my god all the innovation! More innovation than has ever been made possible by the patent laws or the copyright laws over the course of history! Seriously, I think YC, etc, is great, but let's not forget that there is a whole world of technology out there, and internet startups are one small niche. In most technology fields, all the money YC has ever handed out would barely make a dent in the capital requirements of bringing a product even to the prototype stage. Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist. ~~~ AnthonyMouse >Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation. It's about preventing free- riding. Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation? If half the world can free-ride on something with no marginal cost that will be produced regardless of the free-riding, the result is greater economic efficiency. >You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft? I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like. >Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist. The text below was written by Thomas Jefferson -- it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices. ~~~ rayiner > Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation? Free-riding is a narrower concept than simply reduced incentives. There are lots of different incentives and lots of different ways to increase or reduce incentives, but free-riding addresses the specific case of where the ability to copy a design cheaply and easily and thus undercut the inventor reduces or eliminates the incentive to invest in new designs. > I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive > with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real > question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there > would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like. That's not really the full extent of the question. It's not just whether there would be operating systems, but would the market be served as well by those operating systems? BSD was a university research project that arose in the context of a major DARPA project. That's a viable and popular model, but do we want to rely on the Department of Defense for an even larger fraction of our technology? I used to work for a DARPA contractor. They're not the world's most efficient way to develop technology. We use DARPA for blue-sky things the market doesn't invest in naturally, not because it's a great way to develop new technology. Linux started as a personal hobby, and the incentive structure has always relied heavily on people scratching their own itches. Would either have served the home computer user market like Windows did? An incentive scheme that relies on government funding or personal hobbies results in very different software than one where a customer can pay a vendor for a piece of software. And I think there is much to be said about how the latter incentive model incentivizes the creation of software that the public wants rather than say what is most useful to the military. It's interesting to see how recent developments built on Linux have been monetized. Nobody can make money selling Linux directly to cell phone vendors, like Microsoft did selling Windows to PC vendors, so what you have instead is a platform, Android, based entirely on the perpetuation of Google's search/advertising empire. Instead of paying cash for an OS, people pay in the form of their privacy, because that's something that can be monetized in a world where software cannot be monetized. Is that better? ~~~ icebraining I disagree with your Android example: \- It's not technically true that you can't make money selling Linux, but even if it wasn't, it's a red herring; Google could certainly sell _Android_. The reason they don't has to do with their business model, nothing else. \- It's not true that you can't make money selling it to cell phone developers. What you do is not charge for _current_ software, but for future development. As an employee of a company which sells GPL licensed software, I can tell you it's a very viable business model. \- Google could also charge for access to their services, including App Store. Secondly, the idea that you are spied upon because it's free is very naive; how do you think Apple's Ad network (iAd) can target Demographics, Application preferences, Music passions, Movie, TV and audiobook genre interests and even _Location_? Guess what: the consumer is paying with cash _and_ their privacy. ~~~ rayiner > What you do is not charge for current software, but for future development. > As an employee of a company which sells GPL licensed software, I can tell > you it's a very viable business model. It's a viable business model in the small, not when you're developing software for a huge market where a handful of customers can't bankroll future versions of the software. > Secondly, the idea that you are spied upon because it's free is very naive; > how do you think Apple's Ad network (iAd) can target Demographics, > Application preferences, Music passions, Movie, TV and audiobook genre > interests and even Location? Guess what: the consumer is paying with cash > and their privacy. The point is that when companies cannot sell the software directly, they need to rely on alternative monetization models. A lot of those monetization models involve privacy-invasion through advertising, etc. Paying for software doesn't eliminate that obviously, but rather when software can't be sold as a product the equilibrium moves to a very different place. ~~~ apotheon > It's a viable business model in the small, not when you're developing > software for a huge market where a handful of customers can't bankroll > future versions of the software. That depends entirely on your apparent assumption that only high-overhead organizations can produce software for broad use. This is clearly not the case. > The point is that when companies cannot sell the software directly, they > need to rely on alternative monetization models. It's lucky, then, that nobody has credibly established that copyright is necessary to be able to sell software directly -- or that things that are bad for the nominal customers are the only options for alternate revenue models. ------ linuxhansl Personally I am torn on this topic. We now have this thing "information" (software, music, books, whatever) that can be useful for us, and which has the property that it can be copied infinitely without cost; but then we turn around turn it back into something that behaves like a "physical thing" by means of copyright. On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live. Copyright is interesting even if artists were to sell their own music independently of the labels. Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit. Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work _because_ of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license. (Note these comments are true to copyright, but not for patents, which is a completely different story) ~~~ jkn _Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license._ Open Source is bigger than copyleft software. Without copyright, BSD/MIT/etc. licensed software would thrive. Also without copyright, closed source software would not generate the kind of money it does now, so there would be less incentive to invest in it vs. investing in open source software. One could say that Open Source gets a competitive advantage when all software can legally be copied for free. ------ whiddershins Please ... this article is trolling copyright holders. Each point is weak, easy to dismantle, and unsubstantiated. I started to write a long response and decided perhaps this isn't the forum, but I am surprised to see this on the front of hacker news. ------ njs12345 That 2% figure is quite interesting (and the study beautifully typeset), but I can't read Swedish. Can anyone find a translation anywhere? ------ Silhouette How about a little full disclosure? The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source. Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. I don't know anyone who supports copyright and believes it to be the _only_ way for creative folks to make money. The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are. Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. There's an entire world of creative industries and bazillions in cash going into those industries, so finding more than an occasional study and isolated success story shouldn't be that hard... _if_ their position is actually correct. ~~~ AnthonyMouse >The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source. Source bias is a concern when the source is supplying unverifiable facts. When a source is supplying reasoning, it can be evaluated for consistency and validity independent of the source and attacking the source is just the ad hominem fallacy. Incidentally, who do you think would be making anti-copyright arguments, Christopher Dodd? >Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation. Perhaps there are stronger arguments in favor of copyright than the ones the industry has been putting forward, but then let's hear those in the halls of Congress and stop hearing the ones that are so ridiculous that you think they're strawman arguments. >Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain? (And hey, if we try not having copyright for a decade or two and it turns out badly, we can always put it back.) ~~~ Silhouette _A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation._ Really? You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no- one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive? Lobbyists say some pretty silly things, and distort reality to absurd degrees, but even then I've never heard anyone making such a black-and-white argument before a legislative assembly. _The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain?_ That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet? It seems plenty of people are willing to try disrupting Big Media, given the number of people who are self-publishing books instead of relying on traditional publishers, putting their band's music on-line via their own web sites, and so on. But why does almost every success story seem to stop there? One possible explanation is that the only legal barrier between those self- publishers and an Amazon-scale operation redistributing anything good via a much better known web site and taking most of the profits is copyright... [Edit: Clarified the wording in the last paragraph.] ~~~ njs12345 _That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?_ That's pretty easy - the return for the creator is higher with copyright than without. Hence, in the current system, there is no incentive for alternative models to really develop (outside of some niches --- software is maybe a limited counterexample, with licences like the GPL demonstrating what might happen if copyright did not exist). Also, your argument does not take into account the fact that without copyright derivative works would be utilized to a much fuller extent. ~~~ Silhouette _Hence, in the current system, there is no incentive for alternative models to really develop_ I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, if, as self-confessed pirates have frequently argued on sites like Slashdot, the advertising side- effect of sharing works freely ultimately generates more revenue for the creator than copyright-controlled distribution, then the logical move even with copyright is to put those works into the public domain and invite donations to support the creator. However, that risks the alternative possibility that the "advertising benefit" agument really is just another pyramid scheme, and without enough law-abiding (with copyright)/donation- giving (without copyright) people at the end of it to support everyone else, it's just rationalising freeloading. _Also, your argument does not take into account the fact that without copyright derivative works would be utilized to a much fuller extent._ There are definitely valid arguments against copyright based on greater use of derivative works. The problem is that it is also possible that derivative works would become dominant if it were easy to make them and much harder to create something original, with little incentive to do the latter. ~~~ njs12345 _I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, if, as self-confessed pirates have frequently argued on sites like Slashdot, the advertising side- effect of sharing works freely ultimately generates more revenue for the creator than copyright-controlled distribution, then the logical move even with copyright is to put those works into the public domain and invite donations to support the creator. However, that risks the alternative possibility that the "advertising benefit" agument really is just another pyramid scheme, and without enough law-abiding (with copyright)/donation- giving (without copyright) people at the end of it to support everyone else, it's just rationalising freeloading._ Indeed, and plenty of artists nowadays (both big and small) have experimented to a certain degree with this model. It has its benefits and downsides but largely your argument is not particularly relevant to the topic of the article: the question is not 'Would content creators be better off without copyright?', it is 'Would society be better off without copyright?' The economic optimum is for creators to make the fixed costs of producing the work and nothing else; there is little incentive for them to support changing the current system which gives them an essentially unlimited monopoly on their work. The article is merely meant to outline some ways in which creators could get their fixed costs covered without copyright. _There are definitely valid arguments against copyright based on greater use of derivative works. The problem is that it is also possible that derivative works would become dominant if it were easy to make them and much harder to create something original, with little incentive to do the latter._ Why is this a problem? Modern popular culture demonstrates pretty conclusively that most people have no problem with works that are essentially derivative.. ~~~ Silhouette _The economic optimum is for creators to make the fixed costs of producing the work and nothing else_ I don't think economics works the way you think it does. You just removed not only the incentive to make a better (but more expensive to produce) work but also the financial incentive to create any work at all. _Why is this a problem?_ Why is it a problem to replace a system that supports the creation of original, innovative works with a system that pushes heavily toward creating endless derivative works and minor variations of the same tired ideas? Are you really asking that question seriously? I think, contrary to your suggestion, that plenty of people are already fed up with the same old movie sequels and annual releases by the same computer game franchises and so on. But that's what happens when the system doesn't effectively support those who would create more interesting alternatives, which typically aren't as profitable on a first outing but cost more to produce. Coming soon: Cloned Sports Franchise 2013 edition, with ads shown every five minutes during your favourite fly-on-the-wall reality TV show. ~~~ njs12345 From the Mark Lemley paper quoted elsewhere on this page: _Economic theory offers no justification for awarding creators anything beyond what is necessary to recover their average fixed costs._ I think I'm fairly happy putting my faith in him knowing how economics works. _I think, contrary to your suggestion, that plenty of people are already fed up with the same old movie sequels and annual releases by the same computer game franchises and so on. But that's what happens when the system doesn't effectively support those who would create more interesting alternatives, which typically aren't as profitable on a first outing but cost more to produce. Coming soon: Cloned Sports Franchise 2013 edition, with ads shown every five minutes during your favourite fly-on-the-wall reality TV show._ Do you think Notch would have problems raising funding on Kickstarter? How about Quentin Tarantino? How about Amanda Palmer, of the Dresden Dolls? How about the XX? Stuff which has a cult following seems to fare well under the patronage model. Most of the really high budget stuff turns out to be fairly derivative. There are exceptions, but they're rare. ------ tzs So articles about creationists chairing major science committees in the US get killed for being politics, but an article FROM A POLITICIAN pushing his political agenda is fine??? ~~~ apotheon Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this is very relevant to matters such as business models and software development.

Success with vpslink.com? - voidfiles This looks like a great deal 28$ every three months. They have a clone option so you can clone working hardware. Has any body had any experience with these guys. ====== rms That's a low monthly fee, yes, but it's a very small amount of RAM. By the time you get up to 256 megs it is more expensive than Slicehost. ~~~ voidfiles no I meant 28 dollars every 3 months, or 7 a month. Their 256 plan goes at 20 a month. It looks competative, What I like is that allow me to start small so that I can test some things. ~~~ rms So what software setup were you planning on running on a 64 meg Linux server?

Facebook rolls out its Offers deals and discounts globally - lvalverde http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/09/21/facebook-rolls-out-its-offers-deals-and-discounts-globally?cid=FB-Article-2012 ====== impostervt We'll see if this actually turns into a viable revenue source for them. We aggregate every Facebook Offer at <http://www.foibly.com>, and there there's been less then 1,000 since they started promoting them in March. ------ jonursenbach I thought they discontinued this last year? <http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/08/26/discontinues-deals/> ~~~ impostervt Deals were similar to Groupon coupons - the customer pre-paid for the coupon and the business got a cut. Offers are more like normal coupons - they don't cost the customer anything, but the business has to (now) pay to advertise the coupon.

Why antitrust lawsuits fail - tristan_louis http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/10/13/why-antitrust-lawsuits-fail/ ====== zapdrive I think Apple is the new Microsoft.

Matter – Beautiful UI - rhyco https://www.matterkit.io ====== je42 isn't this just some CSS design or am I missing something ?

Ask HN: What's an inspirational pop book about Computer Science? - pgbovine A friend of mine just asked me: There are many popular non-fiction books addressing the harmony/beauty/philosophy of physics that really stir up the curiosity and imagination of readers. What's the best example of such a book for Computer Science?<p>My friend is looking for a popular book on computer science that:<p>+ is understandable by a freshman.<p>+ shows the beauty of computer science.<p>+ gives an overview of main streams in computer science research and applications.<p>+ gives some visions, e.g. imaginative perspectives and/or philosophical thoughts, on computer science in the future. ====== wyclif Clifford Stoll's _The Cuckoo's Egg_ comes immediately to mind. ------ mindcrime I don't necessarily know of any one book that meets all of your friends requirements, but... Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ might be good for your friend. [http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy- Kidder/dp/03164...](http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy- Kidder/dp/0316491977) Another good option might be _Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software_ by Charles Petzold. [http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware- Softwa...](http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware- Software/dp/0735611319/ref=pd_sim_b_6) Or, how about _Coders at Work_? [http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft- Programm...](http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft- Programming/dp/1430219483/ref=pd_sim_b_3) Another one that I have (but haven't had time to read yet) is _Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software_ by Scott Rosenberg. It _might_ have something that your friend would find interesting. [http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers- Transcendent...](http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent- Software/dp/1400082471/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_a) Another one that may be inspirational, although it's more about personalities than computer science per-se, would be Steven Levy's _Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution._ [http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven- Lev...](http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven- Levy/dp/0141000511/ref=pd_sim_b_36) ~~~ pgbovine thanks for the references! i really appreciate you taking the time to reply to my question. btw "Dreaming in Code" is the only one of those that I've read, and I don't think it's a good fit for my friend because it's basically the story of software project management gone awry ... hardly inspirational for someone aspiring to learn about the beauty of CS :)

Show HN: Base 60 Clock, a new date/time format - shinkarom https://shinkarom.github.io/clock60/ ====== nealpatil Where can it be used ? ~~~ shinkarom I have not given it much thought, but it's very concise.

Rod Johnson leaving SpringSource/VMware - ExpiredLink http://blog.springsource.org/2012/07/03/oh-the-places-youll-go/ ====== andrewcooke that was corporate blandness personified (how far you've come, spring). any idea why he left or what he's doing?

Single-atom transistor discovered - prakash http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091206085833.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29 ====== scottw It was also discovered on Saturday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979559> and again yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978074> ~~~ prakash sorry, didn't see those links.

Show HN: US Hospitals Pricing Comparison - Immortalin https://github.com/PraecantatioLabs/Asclepius ====== pascalxus Getting pricing information on hospitals is a good start and encouraging lower prices is good thing as well. In addition, what we really need to get those insurance premiums down, is insurance programs that can selectively only cover cost effective treatment programs as well as legislation that protects people from overzealous hospitals that try to provide overly expensive treatment options. ------ _salmon Is there a reason this project isn't just an open-source website as opposed to a Python project? ~~~ Immortalin Because you have to scrape all the hospitals in the US? ~~~ _salmon [https://data.medicare.gov/data/hospital- compare](https://data.medicare.gov/data/hospital-compare) ~~~ Immortalin Ooh thanks! ------ viyu Good start, but we need more (and deeper) initiatives like this. ------ Immortalin Just started the project, please feel free to send a pull request for your hospital. ~~~ singron Why have a custom contribution agreement rather than just using the contribution agreement built in to the apache v2? ~~~ Immortalin Company policy

Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow? - kuro-kuris Hi HN, I enjoyed volunteering teaching children to code back at university and during the holidays I like gathering food for homeless people. What kind of volunteering has helped you grow the most? What kind of volunteering do you find the most fulfillment from?<p>Discussion about volunteering software skills online: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13678952 I am looking for something more physical or personal in London. Feel free to get in touch to chat more about volunteering, we can grab a coffee if you are in London. ====== awjr I’d accidentally ridden into a Critical Mass Cycle protest ride in London around 2010. Ended up setting one up in Bath, that ran for a bit and started attending the local cycle campaigning group. A respect ride held in honour of a young man that was killed in a hit and run however became something bigger than a Friday night protest ride, and I was the main speaker at a large ride held in his honour. It was rather humbling. After that I was asked to be chair of Cycle Bath and over the last 3 years I’ve taught myself about transport, helped the council win millions in funding, and made cycling a key agenda item locally. I’ve learnt a lot about social media, public engagement and how to work with councils. My proudest moment was cycling along a towpath I’d fought hard to have upgraded to a 4 season wheel friendly surface, even having police protection at a meeting, and seeing people in wheelchairs using it. It brought home that much of the cycle advocacy is just about making public space easier for people, particularly kids and people with mobility issues, to get around independently. Recently I created a transport tube map for Bath and this resulted in a national series of workshops teaching people how to make this key campaigning tool for cycle advocacy groups and even some council officers. I’ve begun to apply my IT skills to analyse UK Census 2011 commuter flow data and model modal split flows within the city. This piece of work might go national in the next couple of weeks due to some of the analysis I’ve been able to do. (Cycling and Walking can be hugely under-represented in the stats that councils use for transport planning.) I’m now thinking of running for council in 2019 and hopefully getting the transport brief. It’s considered a bit of a poison chalice but personally I cannot see a better way to help improve the city which has been my home for the last 16 years. If somebody had told me in 2010, that that one cycle ride home would have lead to this, I simply would not have believed them. What I will say is that I almost wish I could get paid to do this full time, but thankfully IT consultancy seems to give me the time to do this for now. [edit] A lot of what I've written on the subject can be found here [https://cyclebath.org.uk/author/awjreynolds/](https://cyclebath.org.uk/author/awjreynolds/) ~~~ CalRobert That's fantastic! I recently joined the Dublin Cycling Campaign and we want to do things like this - as you mention, the map at [https://cyclebath.org.uk/map/](https://cyclebath.org.uk/map/) is an inspiration. ~~~ awjr The tutorial is really useful [http://www.cyclinguk.org/guide/make-tube-map- cycle-network](http://www.cyclinguk.org/guide/make-tube-map-cycle-network) but it does use the colour scheme before I switched to something that matches IAN 195 [http://www.standardsforhighways.co.uk/ha/standards/ians/pdfs...](http://www.standardsforhighways.co.uk/ha/standards/ians/pdfs/ian195.pdf) You won't believe the amount of time it took to get the wording right on the legend :D Spent hours with Jonathan from GMCC and Cycle Nation coming to the right wording. Colours are also colourblind safe. ~~~ awjr Oh one other thing. Currently working on a simplified Bath map focused on Travel Time comparing bicycle to eBike. [https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1ZH9cEOlb9BcYADH3SSf6X2lo...](https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1ZH9cEOlb9BcYADH3SSf6X2loVPFzi3TiuDGMUcOzMzY/edit?usp=sharing) Going to be released as part of an article I am writing for the local paper on the impact buying an eBike has had on my life. TL;DR Was able to go from a two car family to one, no longer use buses or taxis. ------ yogesh_sp Let me share my story how volunteering has changed my life! I was studying BE(Four Year Study) at a college in India before 2 years. I was not impressed by studies and I am a lazy guy too. I just want to do something which makes me happy. (During my third year of study) I started going to hostel library to read newspapers (only to read current news, cinema, politics etc.., especially not something useful). I started liking reading as it gave me a good feeling and something which feels good inside. I started observing that there is the only librarian who manages the entire library and he makes more than an hour every day after the working hours to arrange the newspapers in shelves and the books. Something struck me to help the librarian after the working hours. I just started helping by arranging the newspapers and magazines regularly. The librarian started becoming my friend and I was able to get new friends and every evening we started to make debating on current issues and a lof of stuff like that. I started feeling happier and some responsibility in myself.I started reading books and magazines. I was feeling I was growing by inside. Finally, the day came for applying for the post of "Library Secretary". Librarian asked me to apply for that but I had hesitated. But I applied. I was interviewed by the college principal committee and got selected as a "Library Secretary" Things to note from my story 1.You should not be in a profit oriented mindset. That is against volunteering I feel strongly. 2.Volunteering will increase the responsibility and provide a nice platform to learn the environment especially people. 3.It will groom you without you noticing it 4.You will make a network which may or may not be useful. 5.Finally you end up something good ------ vowelless I personally don't find any fulfillment from volunteering, nor do I really grow in any direction. But that doesn't bother me. I have a few hours per week usually dedicated to tutoring kids from schools that are not so great. It seems to help them and I have a few hours to spare. ~~~ franze think this is a great statement in this ego driven world! it is not always about "us", it is ok to do things for someone else, even without any direct benefit. ~~~ eeZah7Ux I volunteer in a large, well known organization. We always try to filter out people that want to join for selfish reason as they usually turn out to be bad volunteers. E.g. people try to work on something to gain exposure and then drop everything when something more interesting comes up or they receive criticism. ------ jansho I'm one of those people with loads of ideas stewing at the back of my head. They come and go (out of fashion) but one idea stuck around for more than five years. It's an edtech for children, so by the end of last year, I decided that maybe I should take the plunge. Plus I was getting bored of freelancing for corporations. First step is to find out whether I actually _like_ to work with children - because I think that's important even though it's edtech - and whether the assumptions I made were sensible enough. My dream is to make reading (English) as universal and enjoyable as possible, particularly for disadvantaged children. So off I went to South East Asia. I volunteered at a semi-Montessori school for poor and refugee kids for three months. To talk about the experience will take much more than a single post, but let me just say that without it, I would still be feeling that I'm so clever of thinking about this idea when I was actually faffing about. The reality of poverty and hardship came down like a ton of bricks. I saw clearly the barriers that the children had, for just being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the usefulness of books and the Internet stuck out like ... they're essential, they're the only fair chance these kids can ever get. (One thing I also learnt is that mobile phones are practically universal, poor or not.) So that made the idea all the more urgent. And another thing that I never expected to pick up was that I gained a lot more confidence - I'm the shy type who would shake and get sick just thinking about presenting in front of my team - but in those classrooms, man, it's merciless, and plus you love those kids and have the ultimate responsibility to manage them ... I wouldn't say that this fully prepared me for the CEO job but it's definitely a strong stepping stone for me :) And those memories really stay with you forever. So if anyone's thinking about volunteering - because this feeling doesn't occur but in specific times - I highly recommend you to go for it. It will at the very least teach you how to give without expecting anything back in return. ~~~ dummyvariable Would like a detailed blog post on this! I am just starting out my career and would want to do something like this. ~~~ jansho > detailed blog post When I'm actually churning the product, yes that would make sense! I'm currently sharpening my skills, I thought I had it still in me (art-making) but apparently not. Well they did say that edtech is a long game - that's my half-full cup anyway! Good luck with finding the right pathway. Since it's early stage (I'm assuming that you've just graduated?) just follow your instinct. Even if you turn out to be wrong it's OK, plus you can always adjust course :) ~~~ dummyvariable Thanks! Been working for an year now (graduated last year), just want to try out new things! :) ------ wskemper Until recently, I volunteered as a coach for my local school district's Science Olympiad, in the middle school division. My first year they asked me to work with one of the aviation events. I'd never really had an interest in flight, and certainly not to the extent that I could teach others about it. First lesson: middle schoolers (think 11 - 14 years old) will test your patience in new and completely unimagined ways, if you don't have kids of your own. They will also surprise you in a bunch of wonderful ways too. I had to learn how to corral their attention, navigate their relationships with each other, and motivate them to actually get stuff done. Turns out it was great training for being a supervisor later on :) Second lesson: I had to learn about flight, more than I'd ever before, and figure out how to teach it. I don't think I did this very well, to be honest, but five years after graduating school it was nice to teach myself something that wasn't tech-related. Final lesson: I had to learn to accept there were things I could not fix. As an engineer and inveterate tinkerer, this is hard for me to come to terms with. Even in the affluent area I lived in, and with kids who had all volunteered for this after-school activity, we had kids with serious home issues, kids whose friends were dealing with hard personal problems, and at least one violent outburst. I saw the kids for ninety minutes a week; the best I could do was make a welcoming and safe environment for them. That has never really sat well with me. My job changed, and now I travel too much to coach anymore. It's my biggest regret about the change. I miss working with those kids. ~~~ clairity yes, coaching (and teaching in general) has great bang for the buck and tends to return as much as you give. it helps to have a good understanding of the subject (not necessarily expertise), but if not, in many cases, you can (re-)teach yourself the subject a little ahead of the students. but the more important lessons come from learning how to manage a team. managing (much less leading) is _hard_. it develops your empathy muscles. it forces you to be nimble and creative. you'll feel a sense of failure and accomplishment at the same time. but children are so forgiving and watching them learn and grow fills you with a sense of pride (i volunteer coach basketball and i love it). this sense of pride and self-esteem is a hidden benefit that not many people talk about since it seems so selfish, but it's real benefit to consider. ------ thaumaturgy I'm a search and rescue volunteer for Nevada County, near Tahoe, and I love the shit out of it. I've been fairly active in my community in one way or another, mostly because it's a good way to meet good people and to offset the regular disheartening misery of online interaction, but search and rescue people are some of the best folks I've ever met. Nevada County does an excellent job of training its SAR members and is generally well-equipped, especially for a rural county, and respected, so I'm fortunate that that's my first exposure to SAR. Whether it's 3 a.m. Wednesday morning or 10 p.m. Saturday night or 6 a.m. some other morning, in town or 30 miles into the woods, a bunch of people will show up with smiles and coffee and bright uniforms and do whatever needs to be done to get the job done. I spent three of the last five days putting down a pile of miles by snowshoe, searching for a missing aircraft. We had air national guard, civil air patrol, CalOES, and SAR crews from counties around the state (and one from out-of- state). There's all the usual stuff that I benefit directly from -- I've received a lot of training, including medical and specialized skills but also in incident command, and SAR in our area pretty well checks off my "regular physical exercise" box -- but the greatest benefit to me by far is the time I've spent with those good folks. It's the perfect counter to all of the shitty cynicism that's so rampant everywhere these days. Bringing the lost, sick, and injured back home, locating evidence in difficult cases, and even retrieving the deceased are all rewarding of course too. ~~~ aggie Is this something that would be compatible with a typical 9-5 job? Sounds like you need to be somewhat on-call. Can you be a weekend on-call volunteer? ~~~ thaumaturgy You can, and a lot of folks do just that. It can be exhausting though -- put in a full work week, then put in 12 hours on a weekend call-out (12 hours is not atypical for larger searches, depending on your area), then back to work again. Some employers are good about allowing time for this sort of thing. I recently sold my business and went back to a part-time grownup job. I can generally run off to a search as long as I clear it with my supervisor and make up my time later. ------ cdubzzz I did Peace Corps (US overseas volunteer program) a few years ago in my mid-20s. I spent three and a half years living and working in Burkina Faso in West Africa. I was teaching basic computing (think kids who have never touched a computer) and training other (Burkinabe) teachers to do the same. I helped to build two computer labs using funding from various French groups and trained one teacher intensely to the point that he was able to run the curriculum himself. I know that it lasted at least a year after I was gone but unfortunately haven't kept up since then. Anyway, life in Burkina taught me a hell of a lot about myself, patience, culture, language and communication, community and a whole range of other things. It has deeply defined who I am now and was incredibly valuable for me. I still, however, struggle with the question of whether or not I recommend such programs to others. ~~~ inaglasshouse Can you elaborate on why you're not sure on giving the recommendation to programs like the Peace Corps? ~~~ cdubzzz Apologies for the delay getting back. I started to respond to this a couple of times yesterday but it's kind of tough to answer and I kept getting sidetracked. Basically, I feel like my time in Peace Corps did more for _me_ than for the people I was there to help. I struggle with that a bit and it makes me wonder if the PC approach is truly valuable. On the plus side, I introduced hundreds of kids to computers, provided more advanced training to 50+ adult professors and left at least one person with the necessary tools to run a computer literacy class. I did the most in my third year (an extension of the normal two year stay) largely because I finally had a decent grasp on the culture and understanding of how to do things in a more sustainable way. In fact, my decision to extend was mostly because I felt like I hadn't really done "enough". But even that felt like so little in the end. I remember at one point discussing with PC leadership in Burkina implementing a program to teach IT to university students training to be teachers and when I think back I really wish we could've worked that out. Unfortunately it never came to fruition and I heard a few years ago that PC Burkina shut down the whole IT program. Likely many of the labs we maintained and lesson plans we built are collecting dust (we were only the second wave of IT volunteers at the time). PC is very different from country to country and it seems like kind of crap shoot whether or not one can really have a sustainable impact on anything. PC provides a very good structure _for the volunteer_ , but it is ultimately all on the volunteer to figure out how to execute programs. This can be absolutely great for some people and terrible for others. I fell somewhere in the middle and knew volunteers everywhere in between. Without really knowing a person (and other country PC programs) it's difficult for me to decide how to judge the overall program and mission. ------ gdfer Volunteering has taught me a lot about being a servant and a leader. I've spent a lot of time -probably thousands of hours- volunteering, so it has been a significant investment of my time, but I'd do it all over again. Not only is it very rewarding, but it can develop your character and leadership abilities in all kinds of positive ways. I started my volunteer experience at a homeless shelter in the Chicago area. It got me out of my comfort zone and challenged me to face difficult, often confusing situations that I was very unprepared for. At the end of the day, it constantly challenged me to simply be a servant of others without expecting much of anything in return. Since then I have volunteered a lot at churches, in the foster care system, crisis pregnancy centers at and other non-profits in my community. This has given me a ton of experience working with people and dealing with people issues. I'm a programmer by trade, but a people person at the end of the day. I have found this invaluable in the business world. Most of my leadership experience has come from volunteering in non-profits. Much of my leadership style has also been developed from that experience. I've been recognized as a very uniquely skilled leader at my company and there's no doubt I owe it to my volunteer experience, so I'm thankful for that and would highly recommend finding meaningful ways to give back to your community. ------ mindcrime I was a volunteer firefighter from about 1992-2002 or so. During that time I attained my NC Fire and Rescue Commission certification as Fire Instructor II with qualifications to teach Firefighter I&II certification classes, LP Gas Firefighting and Incident Command. I held ranks from probie to Assistant Chief and was acting Fire Chief for a few months at one point. So, how did I grow from all that? Well, I got a lot more comfortable operating in front of crowds, teaching and delivering content, as a result of teaching FF classes. I also became generally more stoic and mentally "tough" if you want to call it that, since on the fireground you don't really have the luxury of freaking out and being super reactive to things. You learn to become very pragmatic and adopt a mindset of "this is the situation as it is, now let's figure out what to do about it". And on a related note, it taught me the importance of what firefighters call "size up" which basically just means doing a quick, but reasonably thorough, assessment of a situation at the earliest possible moment, in order to avoid surprises. Example: on a house fire, if a crew go in on an attack line to do interior attack, and nobody does a 360° sizeup, you may miss the 500 gallon propane tank next to the back wall, which is being impinged on by fire. Result: BLEVE and possibly injured or killed firefighters. And while in the business world you're not usually dealing with anything where people's lives are on the line, sizeup and those kinds of things are still important. Anyway, I did that for about a decade, but then I moved and got into the meat of my "proper" career and don't really have time for firefighting anymore. I haven't been doing a lot of volunteering lately, but the one thing I'd like to find time to get involved with is the Literacy Council. My mom was a volunteer tutor when I was a kid and I kinda always wanted to do that. ~~~ cableshaft I was touring High Voltage Software once that had a team working on a firefighting educational simulator (looks like it was called FLAME-SIM) that I got to watch for a few minutes. The 360 degree sizeup was one of the first things they had you do when you arrived on the site of the fire in the simulation, IIRC. Apparently they thought it was important enough to include as well. ------ bitL Not to be too cynical, but in my case volunteering resulted only in troubles and no growth at all. What I ended up beside some singular cases was fighting with people that internally resigned on something, accumulated bad habits but still narcissistically viewed themselves as perfect. The most brutal outcome was that the people I helped for free and dedicated a lot of time to improve their life, changed for much worse once they "saw the light" and their life improved - from a resigned person turned into a self-confident predator, throwing away most of human decency, trying to outright buy me or boss me. I really started to be cynical that perhaps there is a reason they were down and it was for the better... Then there are a few romantic, pure souls that are taken advantage of by everyone around them, ending up in the bottom - those are rare pearls that make it somewhat meaningful. ~~~ ardit33 Interesting. What kind of volunteering did you do (homeshelters, recovery...)? My experience has been that you can only help people that really want it, (but don't know yet how to achieve what they want, but at least know that they need change). As the old saying: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink", you can't help somebody that really doesn't want to change themselves. ------ imjustsaying Open source development, editing public wikis, and making useful Youtube videos don't ever seem ever seem to be mentioned or recognized as volunteering, even though its beneficial impacts on society can be much larger per time spent. Why isn't this form of volunteering recognized or promoted as such? Are the people who trumpet the benefits of volunteering (often teachers, academic administrators) simply behind the times, or is this simply not the kind of volunteering that these kinds of people themselves enjoy? I am led to believe that it's not just that they're behind the times, but that it can be explained by a personality preference. After all, publishing research papers that provide a public benefit has been around a long time, but this is never mentioned as a form of volunteering. Is volunteering in the visible social sense simply more tangible and understandable, hence its broader adoption than behind-the-scenes volunteering that can provide a greater benefit? Society's tendency to pressure smart people to undergo visible demonstrations of virtue rather than undertake activities that provide a net greater good has bothered me for a long time. ~~~ kahrkunne I think people tend not to think of editing Wikipedia as a long term time investment. YouTube videos don't feel like volunteering to me because more often than not it's a job. And open source development probably just wouldn't occur to most people because most people aren't developers. ------ beadoer As an American from an immigrant family, I owe so much to the volunteer mentors, teachers, coaches, and community activists that volunteered in programs I was in growing up in New York City. It eventually led me to go to college, then on to work as a NASA engineer and for many startup companies afterward. I've personally volunteered in NYC, LA, Spain, Brazil, mostly in the homeless, substance abuse, and prostitution/human trafficking related causes. I believe we exist to give to others. Now more than every people are looking to make a real difference. That's why I've quit my day job and started [http://BeADoer.IO](http://BeADoer.IO) A place to connect with other like-minded people, and rally support around social causes. We're making it super easy to get involved with shaping policy, volunteering, and fundraising. I'd love it if you join the list in anticipation of our launch since anyone on here is the kind of person that can help us shape this thing and make a huge impact. ~~~ davidjnelson > I believe we exist to give to others. Absolutely! This is a great mindset. Many successful people advise this. One example is Tony Robbins. Any ideas on what prevents more people from trying it out? ------ wwarner I loved volunteering at an overnight shelter for homeless men, which I did for about 5 years. After the very first night, I realized that I had done more to address my anxiety about homelessness in this single gesture than I had achieved in the prior 30 years of giving spare change to panhandlers. Most homeless people are not panhandlers, and lots of panhandlers aren't homeless. A lot of homeless people were injured on the job an can no longer work, and a large portion of them are veterans, and of course there are a huge number of severely mentally ill people. Maybe the thing that left the biggest impression on me was the loneliness of the homeless. ~~~ davidjnelson Wow, bless your heart. Such an uplifting story. What did you learn that could be an insight applied to helping address the issue of loneliness? ------ mattparlane I'm from New Zealand and I'm currently living in Thailand volunteering for an anti human trafficking organisation, rescuing children from the sex trade. I was thrown in the deep end and had to quickly become a Salesforce administrator and developer, I'm now running two Salesforce orgs, as well as all the other stuff we have going on. I've found it an amazing exercise -- I've grown in patience, understanding of other people, time management, etc... as well as all the new technical skills I've learned. I was amazed at how doable it is as well. My wife and I have two young girls (5 and 3), and although we were hugely daunted to begin with, we've coped pretty well. As long as you (the reader) have some ability to roll with the punches, I'd give it a go, you'll probably surprise yourself. ~~~ eevilspock Working to stop human trafficking, especially of children, is on top of my list of things I'd want to work on. Can you provide more information about this org, and how effective they are? What kind of roles are available. I'm natural talents are technology and working with children (I've worked in preschools). ~~~ mattparlane The org is called Destiny Rescue -- [https://www.destinyrescue.org/](https://www.destinyrescue.org/) We've rescued just over 2,000 children since we first started in 2011. I've been involved for about a year now. There are all sorts of roles available, have a look at the positions on the site. ------ techbubble My main volunteer effort is Walkstarter ( [https://www.walkstarter.org](https://www.walkstarter.org) ) a free platform to help public schools raise money more efficiently through walkathon fundraisers. I built, support, fund and maintain the platform and my goal is to have it in use by every U.S. public school. The platform is on track to hit $1 million in funds raised in the next 30-45 days. It's very gratifying to work on code and features that result in a tangible benefit -- increased funding for education. It has taught me a great deal about the vast disparities in education funding between affluent school districts in the Bay Area versus struggling school districts in other parts of the country. It is sad that we spend so much more on weapons than education. Soon, I will launch GoalStarter, a variant of Walkstarter for schools that have all kinds of other -athons for fundraising such as Spellathon, Musicathon etc. I am also working on integrating RFID tags so when kids walk laps, the arduous task of recording laps walked per kid can be automated. ~~~ Danihan Very impressive, on multiple levels. ------ ensignavenger Not something just anyone can do, but I was a full time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for two years. I became much more outgoing during this time, and developed a greater love for other people and a greater understanding of those in different situations and with different viewpoints. My appreciation and admiration for diversity was increased. I was in Utah and southern Idaho, a place that as it turns out is very different from where I grew up in Southwest Missouri. I interacted and discussed religion regularly with former Mormons, preachers in other Churches, atheists, and others. I tried to find ways to serve and help them, we would frequently see someone moving or working in their yard and just stop and ask if we could help out. I was also involved with coordination of efforts across many different groups and areas. This was a great experience for someone as young as I was to learn about leadership and working together with many people of different backgrounds to accomplish a larger goal. ~~~ brookside That is an amazing personal experience. I had similar when younger on Christian-organized "Medial Missions". Reflecting on these trips now however, I must say I am ashamed to have participated in the spreading of...to put it the most bluntly...superstitious nonsense. It's becoming even more evident to me recently how non-harmless the mystical beliefs I was condoning are and the role large role they play in the social climate and political outcomes in both our and other countries (for example: Trump and the first FARC peace initiative failing in Colombia). It was hard to reconcile the life-changing nature of those trips for me with what I now see as their counterproductive aims. ------ edw519 I started a prayer group for people dissatisfied with mainstream religion and hosted it in my conference room on weekends. The response was overwhelming. Although it was a group effort, I ended up doing every job at one point or another: scheduling activities, speaking and writing, leading services, teaching classes, preparing meals, doing the website and communications, printing all the materials, arranging the furniture, even playing the piano. It was just like running a business with all its ups and downs, with profits paid to the heart, not the wallet. There were no "metrics" to this endeavor so I really don't know how others' lives were affected, but I imagine and hope that they're still paying if forward. Biggest surprise: how much I grew by giving. My people skills got so much better that they (almost) caught up to my tech skills. Now I feel like I can handle just about business situation. My favorite night ever was when my mother came and said, "I'm so proud of you." Best "job" I ever had. ------ xamuel In high school I coded for some MUD games for fun. I wasn't thinking anything like "This will look great on my resume" or "Wow, C, so elite". More like, "How can I add this new fireball spell? Which similar code can I copy?" Before you know it, things like pointers and memory management were second- nature. Skip ahead a decade and a half, when I left academia for industry, suddenly those silly gaming days are more important than my university years!! ------ theluketaylor Every summer I spend a week volunteering at a summer camp for kids. The camp is structured to be extremly low cost, so they hire a minimal skeleton staff for the summer and rely on volunteers to run each week. I started when I was 16 and have gone every summer. I credit my volunteering with nearly every one of my soft skills since it's a lot of work to entertain 85 11-13 year olds for a week. I'm very good at presenting because I have spent years public speaking to particularly hard audiences. If you don't captivate an audience of 13 year olds they will let you know. I am much more patient and flexible from years spent working with kids. I'm a pretty introverted guy and don't usually want to be front and center, but I have developed a whole camp persona I can slip into anytime I need to command a room. Sometimes it rains and you need to spend a few hours inside. Sometimes an activity you think was going to be really fun just doesn't work. No point in getting frustrated about the weather or an idea that didn't pan out, just change to the next idea and keep the fun going. 11-13 year olds can be extremly cruel to one another and these kids haven't learned to control their emotions and responses yet. Calm, patient listening goes so much further than just trying to fix whatever problem they are bringing to you. My time at camp has been hugely rewarding and I'm certain I wouldn't have gotten my current job without the skills I learned there. To my dying day the best idea I will ever have is plunger olympics, which is tons of olympic events performed with toilet plungers. There is plunger toss, plunger lacross, and plunger luge where you lay on a skateboard and pull yourself along with plungers to name a few. The crowning events are synchronized plunging and the plunger regatta in the pool. The kid who wins each event keeps a plunger as the prize and we open and close with lighting the campfire with a burning plunger. ------ fruzz I am currently on a table with local health care organizations to improve trans-related health services in the area. I also give workshops to trans/non- binary/gender-diverse individuals as well as cisgender individuals that work with them (HR, psychotherapists.) Right now this amounts to about an evening's worth of work every week for the last 5 months. Last spring I mentored young women (high school age) who were interested in getting into STEM. Teams of students were basically making a mini-startup, including coding an MVP, business plan, etc. The work I get most fulfilment from is working with trans/non-binary/gender- diverse individuals directly, in particular with workshops that discuss normalized attitudes that have a detrimental effect on well-being. Has it helped me grow though? No, I wouldn't say so. It's just things I do because it has to be done. ~~~ wolco That experience hasn't changed you at all? It must have informed you in some way that could have led to some internal growth or least changed or re- enforced existing beliefs ~~~ fruzz Oh yes, I'd agree - it's improved my understanding of where HR / mental health professionals / emergency department / health care workers are at. I personally define growth as emotional growth, and in that way this hasn't done that. For me personally, personal growth has come from processing unfortunate experiences (getting beaten, being harassed on the street, having loved ones be beaten, having a partner overdose, being there for friends who deal with loss by suicide, etc.) ------ feralmoan I volunteer at the local park with events, gardening, maintenance and cleanup and generally try to be useful. I'm there 3 times a day walking my dogs anyway so its pretty much my back yard and a good way to show my appreciation for it because it really changed my experience of New York for the better. The best part is I've had to deal with a lot of people from all walks of life, especially during large events and it's helped me become a much better and present communicator. I've never had a knack for small-talk but this has really changed since forcing myself into situations where I have to get out from behind my computer, chat with people and build a rapport with the community. This has translated into professional benefits too and I've become much more comfortable giving presentations and speaking to audiences - something I couldn't have imagined a couple of years ago! I'm also part of a dog rescue organization and am regularly trying to find forever homes for abused, neglected or death-row dogs. Animals don't have a voice of their own and i'm very particular about placement so its been fulfilling to know these doggos have ended up in a better situation after often cruel starts by human hands. ------ ocdtrekkie Several years ago I started doing computer help/repair for seniors. Eventually people insisted on paying me a little for my time. Now, with no formal training, I've been working in IT for over five years. Some of the neatest tricks I use day to day I figured out while trying to fix a particularly vexing problem on some little old lady's desktop. I also feel like it's given me a great perspective on how non-technical users interact with PCs. ------ yamalight Last year I've started a course on youtube about building products with javascript [1]. The initial idea was to make a free open source course for people who are already comfortable with language, but don't know how to start building things. The coolest (and unexpected) part was the questions I got from all sorts of people - they made me go into the details a whole lot more than I ever did just working on things. And, of course, all the gratitude from people is quite satisfying too :) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_gX69xPLi- ljVdNhspjZ...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_gX69xPLi- ljVdNhspjZUlPmBNjRgD2X) ------ ChuckMcM Volunteering with my Church at the community service centers that help the homeless allowed me to interact with a large swath of the homeless population around where I live. Not only did this give me a better understanding of the challenges they face it turned many of them from 'that guy on the corner' to actual people I know and know me. Having that level of understanding helps dispell myths about what is, and what is not, possible in terms of helping these people. It also gave me an idea of how cruel and debilitating mental illness is on an individual's ability to function. ------ renegadesensei I did a year of remote CS teaching for kids in Kentucky with Microsoft's TEALS program. Great experience. I actually used to be a teacher so it was nice getting back in that mode. Teaching is also a great way to practice breaking down technical subjects and making them understandable. It really helps with soft skills - communicating with non techies, constructively criticizing people, making complicated ideas simple - all those things improved for me after a year of working with those kids. ~~~ bambielli I was a volunteer with TEALS last year, and I agree with the improvements in soft-skills, particularly the constructive criticism piece. It is a careful art to give a student constructive feedback while simultaneously keeping them motivated to continue with the course material. I have found this skill to be invaluable in my day-to-day, and I credit my time with the TEALS program for developing it. ------ aerovistae I taught a class in Boston on how to program with python, just kind of basic introduction to the language and making simple programs for people who had never done it before or needed help learning. It deepened my own understanding of python substantially as I prepared for each class by making sure I understood things _completely_ so that nobody could surprise me with any questions like "Why was `self` designed to be implicitly passed but not implicit in declaration?" etc. ~~~ foo101 So why was `self` designed to be implicitly passed but not implicit in declaration? ~~~ jszymborski That is a divine mystery of python, child. We are not to understand it's meaning, but to understand it's glory. ------ nathcd I spend my Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at a parrot rescue/sanctuary. It's a lot of work, but it's great de-stressor and counterbalance to staring at computers all week. A couple weeks ago a guy accidentally drove his car into the side of our building. He hit and collapsed a couple cages, and hit a gas line, but by some miracle none of the birds were seriously injured. Things have been pretty hectic lately, there's been no shortage of work to be done since the accident. [http://www.twincities.com/2017/04/05/avian-sanctuary- trying-...](http://www.twincities.com/2017/04/05/avian-sanctuary-trying-to- rebuild-after-driver-strikes-its-st-paul-building/) I'm not sure how it's helped me grow, aside from the common things like making some friends and helping me feel a sense of meaning and service. Mostly I do it because I love birds and hanging out with birds. Lately I've been really interested in [https://techsolidarity.org](https://techsolidarity.org) and wondering how to get involved in that (or something like it). If anyone in the Twin Cities area is also interested in such a thing and wants to team up, send me an email at nated at posteo dot net. ------ gopalakrishnans I helped file taxes during the tax season here in the US, for the past four months. It was specifically targeted towards low income families. I was definitely able to learn some of the economic effects of the current healthcare system, especially from the penalties. It was definitely out of my bubble, and wouldn't have known a lot about how many ways the low income families are trying to earn to make ends meet, even at a very old age. ~~~ marmshallow How can I find a similar type of volunteering effort in my area? ~~~ gopalakrishnans There are a few organizations which do this, including United Way, Goodwill. I did this through United Way. Here is the link to find volunteering opportunities near your area, [http://www.unitedway.org/get- involved/volunteer](http://www.unitedway.org/get-involved/volunteer) ------ ctdonath Panera deals with leftover breadstuffs by donating it to charities. Just walk in and ask about their "Dough Nation" program: sign up under a recognized organization and pick a day of the week you can _reliably_ pick up leftovers at close of business. I've been doing it for years, taking about an hour a week to pick it up, keep it overnight, and deliver next morning to a local church's public food pantry distribution. Personally, it's a way to (in a sense) donate hundreds of dollars of food weekly with just an hour + $2 gas per week; the food is otherwise wasted if not for someone merely transporting it. I also get to teach my kids about charity; easy to take them along to see and "help". A real "bang for the buck" volunteering job; not sure it helps _me_ grow so much as help others grow with little effort on my part. Another is randomly volunteering at "Save The Horses" locally. In a high-tech world, helps one to stay grounded by working on a farm; this being a volunteer-run farm rescuing unwanted farm animals, they need people for unrelenting litany of feedings, cleaning, walking, brushing, repairing, decorating, collecting, ... ------ dopeboy I've been volunteering since 2013 for a non-profit that teaches high school students in underserved areas how to code [0]. Here's what I've gotten out of it: * I'm having an impact: there are people pursuing CS in university because of me. I (along with my coteachers) managed to make programming fun and rewarding for them so much that they saw it as a future. That feels good. Makes me feel like I'm making a difference. * I'm a better communicator: distilling somewhat complex concepts into engaging lessons has made me a better talker. I'm more precise and efficient with my language - oral and written. * I get to network: the non-profit I volunteer for is a magnet for all the kind of people I want to hang out. The volunteers that I get to serve with are talented developers & designers who care about the world around them. They work at awesome places and solve interesting problems. Most of all, they're just generally nice people. * I'm a better programmer: teaching forces you to know your stuff. Even though I teach the basics of HTML, CSS, & JS, that foundation is a lot stronger for me. [0] - [https://scripted.org/](https://scripted.org/) ------ timpark The most fulfillment would be where it actually gets results. The first hackathon I went to, I made a simple app according to specifications. I was willing to polish up some features after the event and put it into production, but multiple emails to the organization's contact went unanswered. I almost didn't attend the event again, but the second time, my project went into production and is still going. The organization was manually copying data from their donation site into SalesForce, and I wrote a small script to do it daily. (The donation site has a "connector" for SalesForce, but apparently it didn't work for them) I'm currently doing something longer term with an organization I found on UN Volunteers. I was expecting to add features according to specifications, but they wanted ideas for how to improve the app. How about more content? "We don't want to add more content." How about multilanguage support? I was thinking I'd be adding one or two languages, and suddenly he has 19 translators lined up. _sigh_ ------ kalleth I volunteer, but not for anything related to software development. I'm an ASL (Assistant Scout Leader) for a scout troop in London. I enjoyed my time in the scouts as a kid, and i figured if i was only able to enjoy it as others gave up their time, perhaps it's time I pay it forward. Turns out, it's been incredibly rewarding. In our career we tend to spend loads of time inside, and this has got me out doing active things (camping, canoeing, even skiing.... lighting fires, hiking, etc) that I'd never do off my own back. But even greater than that, it's started to teach me how to be a leader -- not through exercising raw authority, but through coaching and mentoring young people together as part of a team. Sometimes i don't know the answer and i have to work it out with them! I think that's a direct mapping to being a good senior/lead developer there -- it's helped me immensely, and sometimes I've felt less challenged by my Scouts than I have by my dev team! Thoroughly recommend it to anyone considering volunteering. ~~~ c0wb0yc0d3r Did you start as an ASL or at a lower position in a troop? Any tips for someone who wants to do that same? ~~~ pbhjpbhj Not OP but, in the UK ASL is the lower position. This [https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A17719527](https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A17719527) is a good summary of all the structures. Some groups have "adult helpers" but generally that's avoided as it suggests the parent will only be there fleetingly in which case spending the training resources (mainly time) is not efficient. ~~~ kalleth Yep -- you can help out, but as soon as you figure out if it's for you, your first "appointment" is ASL. It's essentially what you want from it -- don't consider them "levels" but different roles. They're all volunteer after all! I don't want the added responsibility of having to lead the entire section so as an ASL, I'll plan and lead 1/3rd (ish) of the weekly meetings, and do some of the day to day with the young people on camps, but my SL handles the longer term planning, balanced programme prep, and so on. ------ brightball When I was in college, I spent 3 years building a site for an organization that I was in which was active on campus. By the time I graduated after having served as a director of 3 different committees and president once, I'd built the site into a tool that ran the entire organization. My entire career and employment came from that experience. ------ BjoernKW I used to volunteer as a paramedic. I learned a lot about medicine and I got to see quite a few, mostly not so happy facets of life. It definitely was a worthwhile experience and a fulfilling task. It also still pays off in everyday life. Medical emergencies in public are surprisingly common and it's good to be able to help. ------ jonkiddy I volunteer as a FIRST robotics mentor, specifically as a programming mentor. I find it incredibly rewarding to see students go from zero to programming hero (from their teammates' perspective). Also, as a web developer, I like the challenge of writing code for a robot. ~~~ chambo622 +1 for FIRST. I'm hooked for life. ------ pvaldes Not the same kind of volunteering, A&E (car crashes, domestic abuses, etc...). Will push you several planets far away from your comfort zone and teach you how develop a strong sense of empathy and respect, make the most of your resources, stay creative and cold, split complex problems and order it by priorities, and find an aceptable solution (fast!) in extreme and often psychologically complicated sceneries. Not easy. Very frustrating often, very tiresome and depressing (You will feel often like a superhero that do not have any useful superpower to show; balancing in the frontier with impostor-syndromeland...) but is a real, ruthless, teacher and can be incredibly rewarding (not to mention the nice adrenaline rush at 4am, also). ------ jimkri I volunteered through high school and some college, roughly 5 years, as a firefighter. It really changed me, I learned so much about responsibility and teamwork. It was and still is the only job I would do for free and put 100s of hours into for free. ------ bruce_one I somehow fluked my way onto a pro-bono project at my previous employer which was a UI/design-ish project. (To claim/highlight the volunteer-ness, I'll highlight that I worked many optional (read: unpaid) hours... :-p ) Now I'm considered primarily a UI dev (big fan of full stack though...) and I love it all :-) (I'd not done any UI before.) That's a very concrete example, but I love volunteering, in particular finding something I love that I can twist to help others... eg I now design and maintain a few websites because I now UI better than I ever did before. Personally, I like to find "volunteering" that aligns with my day-to-day life/interests/passions :-) ------ ianaphysicist Scouting binds together a broad range of educational and community service opportunities worldwide. Both youth and adult members of Scouting develop leadership skills. Among these worldwide opportunities is the Wood Badge, whose curriculum varies country to country. Here in the states, Wood Badge includes training on servant leadership, mentoring and business ethics -- concepts that help the adult leader better serve Scouting youth, but also offering broad practical applications in the workplace. You'll need to check locally, but many Scouting programs also include opportunities in skills training and career exploration for youth. ------ siegel I spent time volunteering at a community service organization in San Jose, California, specifically focusing my time on their rental assistance program for local low income residents. The gist of the program was providing assistance with one month's rent to people who encountered some sort of emergency that would otherwise have left them homeless. My responsibilities included meeting with applicants for the program, understanding their emergency, working through a monthly budget with them to ensure they could pay their rent going forward, and verifying their story. Having grown up in an upper-middle class family, I gained a whole different perspective on the struggles people face making ends meet. I've always been politically liberal, but my ability to empathize was categorically different after spending time volunteering at this organization. Equally important, though related, was getting a better understanding of the needs of people in my local community. I raise this issue here because many people on this site are transplants to tech hubs throughout the U.S. and worldwide and we often live in our little bubbles in our respective communities. I cannot stress enough the importance for all of us to learn about the communities in which we live, outside of our little bubbles, and offer our talents to improve the lives of residents of our local areas and make these communities better places to live. ------ ALee Before I entered the tech space ten years ago, I had won some scholarships because all I wanted to do was public service either through the government or non-profits. For me volunteering was initially a way to increase the CAS credits (an IB requirement in high school), but eventually morphed into probably the BEST way to feel good and to recharge. I don't know what it is, but being community-focused activates something in the brain that is different from the more hedonistic side and helps re-center all my efforts at work. I'm weird I think though - most people don't actually care about helping the least among us and I can understand why. It's literally all cost, but somehow if you do it, you get this great sense of accomplishment and if you do it with friends, it's even better. For me, the following volunteer activities are great: 1) Group activities, like building housing in the bay area - Habitat for Humanity cannot keep tech from at least literally building housing for San Francisco despite the local community not wanting us to. Other group activities include meal preparation, food bank help - I strongly suggest organizations like OneBrick 2) mentorship/tutoring - it's quite rewarding when you can teach someone something. You know that it'll live with them for a while and you've literally touched a human life 3) Donating - I know people hate this, but if you do it, it's probably more important than you just putting a little bit of your time. In general, I think of volunteering as really a form of consumption actually which benefits society ------ rmccoy6435 I'm on the organizing committee for a yearly STEM event for high school students in the local area. We host a day long event every spring with a bunch of local businesses and colleges. It's a rather successful event that leads to a lot of networking and makes a lot of students stand out to local businesses, so it opens the doorways for internships and job opportunities, as well as opens a dialogue between students and prospective colleges. We are by no means a large city, but we are a decently sized Midwest town with a lot of companies that fulfill a lot of different roles. Students don't know about many of these businesses, so they learn about what exists in the immediate area and it fosters an organic growth between schools and business. Some students are already locked into Ivy League schools, and others aren't sure what they want to do in life, so it's a great opportunity to meet students from all walks of life and see what their interests are, as well as were students are headed. I personally got my foot in the door at the event a few years ago with a company solely because I asked about internship opportunities for high school students, and although I have since moved on from that place, I still help organize the event because it is such a good opportunity for students. ------ alblue I've been a First Aider (on and off) since University days. I've been a First Aider at Work for quite a lot of the time as well. Never had to treat anything too serious but it's a good skill to have. The change to my life came when I met my wife, whom I taught in a first aid class. One thing led to another, and a couple of decades on we're still happily married with kids. Speaking of kids, I went in and helped get a CodeClub up and running at their school a couple of years ago. It is insanely gratifying to pass on my passion for technology to the next generation, and the quality and variety of what they come up with is amazing. It helps it was a lesson/club that they were all interested in attending (it was an optimal club after all) but any time I've done that it has been so rewarding. CodeClub has now merged into the Raspberry Pi foundation and is going from strength to strength - if you're interested in getting involved as a parent or a teacher then check them out. Finally I also founded the DocklandsLJC user group, with the support of my prior employer. This was a great way of organising technical speakers to head over to the Docklands and lend their time for the benefit of attendees for free - I owe them a lot of gratitude, because if it weren't for those speakers we wouldn't have had anything. It also led to me being a representative on the JCP and ultimately giving a presentation at JavaOne last year, which was well received. My advice is to be passionate at what you do and do things for the enjoyment of yourself and others. You'll never be able to predict where it will go but the outcome will always be beneficial in the long run. ------ oceanghost I volunteered a lot when I was young. It honestly taught me that need is infinite and I am a finite being, and just because someone is blind, disabled, etc DOESNT mean they won't take advantage of you. When I volunteered for the blind, they'd always ask if I could come around several times a week, "it would make such a huge difference" When I volunteered for the disabled, the disabled folks would literally hand me a list of tasks to do by the end of the day, and then micromanage the repairs I was doing. When I volunteered for schools writing software (25 years ago) it was "make this 8086 with 512k of ram do magic!" When I help people now, it's on my own terms, and the rule always has to be the the help provided is _effective_. You need mentoring"? Great. You're blind but you don't wanna live with your family so you think I should come over several nights a week after work to help with things? That's your families job, not mine. You're broke and need money buy your baby diapers, but your babies father has a nicer laptop and newer phone than I do? Stuff it. As f __*ed up as it sounds, most of the people I dealt with felt ENTITLED to my time. ------ enraged_camel Here is the thing to know about volunteering: you get out of it only as much as you put in. Back in 2010 I founded a local volunteer organization[1] for young professionals. The idea was to go above and beyond regular volunteering (although we did plenty of that too) and use our professional skills to organize and run larger projects. It was an avenue for personal and professional growth as well as scalable positive impact. I worked non-stop getting this organization off the ground for over two years, to the point where it became a second job on top of my day job. In the end it seriously burned me out, but I'm proud to say it was a huge success and is alive and well today, despite the fact that the original leaders (including myself) have moved on. I also learned a lot about the challenges of starting something from scratch, and it's how I originally got interested in startups and ended up joining HN. I apply the lessons I learned from that experience seven years later, in areas that are often completely unrelated. [1]rotaractlb.org ------ joshrotenberg I've been involved in volunteering both in schools and at local community theaters in various capacities, mainly because my kids have become involved in theatre. I've done a lot of different stuff: front of house/ushering, some fundraising, food service, and set design and building. Given that my real job has me sitting behind a screen, the thing I've loved the most is just doing something completely different, working with people (both adults and kids) of very different walks of life with different interests and goals. The set building has probably been my favorite overall. Lots of hard, manual work, using power tools, driving the truck, sourcing various items (props and sets often fall under the same team), learning how to make something come alive from just a pile of 2x4s and plywood, and coming together with people who are also just there to help as well as people who do this for a living is really fun in addition to being fulfilling. ------ JustinGarrison I volunteered to start/run a podcast for the Linux Mint community[1]. I helped host, edit, and hosted the site from 2009-2011. I stopped at episode 50 because I had a kid and went back to school. Near the end of 2010 there was a call for writers for a website I was reading at the time[2] and it even paid money ($20/article). I had no writing experience except for random posts I put on my personal blog at the time. I was told later that a main reason they hired me was because of my podcasting experience. Because of the podcast I got plugged into more of the Linux community and started attending and occasionally speaking and volunteering at my local Linux conference[3]. A couple years later I was looking to make a jump from low level manager to sysadmin. I had no professional sysadmin experience but I had these two "hobbies" I put on my resume which ended up landing me the job. My first year at the conference (2008?) I met some people who I got along with and saw them almost every year at the conference for ~5 years. In 2014 they asked if I was looking for work (I was) but I had only been a sysadmin for ~10 months and had no other professional experience outside of helpdesk roles and manager. They hired me because of my pitiful 10 months of experience and all the additional areas where I showed expertise (podcast, writing, speaking). I've been at the new job for 3 years now and my name is in movie credits for Oscar winning films which is something I would have never expected. I've grown a lot in every new opportunity I've been lucky enough to have. [1]: [http://mintcast.org](http://mintcast.org) [2]: [https://www.howtogeek.com/author/rothgar/](https://www.howtogeek.com/author/rothgar/) [3]: [http://socallinuxexpo.org/](http://socallinuxexpo.org/) ------ Mister_Snuggles I have two volunteer gigs that I work. In one, I'm a member of the board of directors for my condo association. There is a certain amount of growth involved, but ultimately there are a lot of politics and personalities that affect how the board works. We've accomplished a lot, but you can really see who's in control and who's just there because they thought it would be cool or something. In the other, I volunteer as a stagehand (jack of all trades, master of none) for a community theater. I've learned a ton about the world of theater and have a new appreciation for the effort involved in putting on a production. There is a huge culture of making do with what you have, and the things that we've accomplished are incredible. Everyone involved is willing to teach the volunteers new skills, provided that they're willing to learn. This is definitely the one that's given me the most growth. ------ sandworm101 Formal volunteering is for resumes and networking. I recently stepped down from four years "volunteering" to run a group within the ABA. I call that work without pay ... same too for the legal clinics i ran during law school. It is only true volunteering when your name isnt on paper. Once things become formal, once power structures develop, then different mental states take over. Watch for "volunteers" who are only there for thier ego. They may get the job done, but are not growing in any good way. (See wikipedia and most f/oss efforts.) Watch for this within yourself whenever you volunteer your time. You may be helping, but not always growing as a person. The best volunteer work is done anonymously and totally without power structures. Pick up some trash on occassion. Babysit so a stressed-out young parent can get some sleep. Dont organize something so a crowd will clap for you. ------ jacquesm The first five years of my career could be called volunteering. I worked like a demon, got paid peanuts and in return learned lots and made a couple of people very rich. The work I liked most was working with artists on installations. But that paid $0. Retrospectively, I probably learned more than I would have if I had enrolled in CS at the time and met a lot of interesting and capable people (quite a few of those I'm still in contact with). Even if a good part of this was probably better termed as abusive relationships instead of volunteering there are few ways in which I could have gotten the exposure to technology that I did. And even if I only supplied the brains they still had to get me the toys to do the work with and those I would not have been able to afford for at least another decade. So, from an income perspective this was wasted time, but from a learning perspective it was fantastic. ------ throwaway9875 I wanted to bring a different perspective to what everyone else has been sharing. I volunteer with a program assisting refugees from Syria. I met people who have had to undergo the worst that humankind has to offer. I met men, women, and children who have been shot, amputees, children suffering from PTSD, etc. I learnt of stories of 10,000 missing children, some of whom were taken from the beaches of Greece by smugglers. Some of them would put themselves in the human chain of people assisting refugees disembarking boats. I had to come to terms with refugees who acted selfishly and had learnt to hoard everything they could get their hands because that's how you survive living in refugee camps. I judged them, then felt guilty about judging them. I am yet to find anything positive coming from this experience. It screwed me up. I went through panic attacks and had to get therapy. ------ cernelco I am bachelor student now and I have started volunteering with food raising for homeless in my home city, but the thing that learned me the most was student union - i was chair of student union at my department - (i'm not sure if it counts as volunteering - in my country -Poland- student unions do a lot, too much in my opinion). What I have learned: leadership, how to motivate others, how to negotiate with authorities, how long it takes and how many rooms you have to visit to get funding for some event, how to run events, promotion, even some graphics (or rather - where to find cheap tools to create fancy leaflets or posters ). Before I was quite shy and of course at some point I still am , but I have really exceeded my interpersonal and time management skills, I got some experience in law issues- stipends, for example ( at my uni it was student union who was responsible for that ). Though it's not as rewarding as helping homeless or children, and in my opinion we were doing the donkey work , I am glad I have spent this time there, because it have me experience , contacts and sometimes satisfaction of organising something that other student enjoyed. Also, I was volunteering at international classical music festival in my city - it was really great - you get tickets for free for almost every concert, the atmosphere is amazing and it's also experience for interpersonal skills. Once I was a pilot for small orchestra and I had amazing time going there and back by bus talking with musicians about their experience and basically everything, we even had a little party on the way back. In the bus ;) these types of events lets you get into fancy banquets, meet some famous people (i talked to really great director ) and also - contacts. Now I am volunteering in hospital to get some experience as patient assistant - we help patients find themselves in our big and messy hospital. To sum up - it is really rewarding, but it costs time. A lot of it. I think you might learn most of these things somewhere else, where you are paid, but also you have more responsibilities and it is harder in the beginning. And of course - poeple you volunteer with are usually really interesting and become good friends ! ------ bbody I volunteered overseas in a developing country as an IT consultant. I was responsible for building a new website for a school, looking at their IT costs (I was able to stop 50% of costs by removing unused services) and training of staff. It was an amazing experience which allowed me to learn a lot. I grew a lot as a person, but I noticed two areas professionally/semi-professionally grow. One was that I noticed was outgoingness, I become a lot more outgoing because of my experience and better at socializing. The other area was being in an environment with severe limitations on bandwidth and availability, taught me to take a lot of problems like page size, etc. seriously. ------ mjevans In theory, volunteering should help with growth. I would love to say that volunteering has improved my social skills, and has helped me network with others. I think in an ideal world I should be able to say that. This has prompted me to think about where I am expending my energy and time. Presently I'm happy with one of two things I am putting my time and energy in to, it provides me with unique challenges, and should, in theory, allow me to improve my social skills and networking. Sadly the latter parts seem to require extra effort on my part, but I recognize that it /should/ be providing that opportunity. The other... not so much. ------ mark_l_watson I offer an hour of mentoring time to anyone who has a school project, is thinking about changing the focus of their computer science career, or wants to talk about the tech they are using in their projects. I have a web page on my site with directions for getting in touch with me, and what information to provide up front. Many more people have taken me up on the offer than I expected when I started doing this a few years ago. In my career, several people really helped me with advice, sometimes just listening, etc. and I want to do the same thing for other people. ------ cafard Grow, I can't say. I did find it instructive helping out as a baseball coach when my son was young. There I learned (I thought) why the American school system puts the cutoff for a passing grade somewhere around 60: if you give a child something he can do 2/3 of the time, he may remain engaged in the task; 1/3 of the time, he will be bored and frustrated. I guess it did teach me something about teaching. These days I teach ESL to adults one night a week during much of the year. I wonder at times whether academic tutoring of children might be more useful. ~~~ JediWing > if you give a child something he can do 2/3 of the time, he may remain > engaged in the task; 1/3 of the time, he will be bored and frustrated. Ironic considering you volunteered to coach baseball, where _failing_ 2/3 of the time at the plate is considered a high achievement. ~~~ cafard Ah, but how many outs are actually on balls put into play? A strikeout per inning is a pretty good ratio for a pitcher. Also, batting averages tend to be a lot higher at lower levels. But mostly I was thinking of fielding here. ------ Blackthorn I'm a computer science teacher for a prison on occasion. It's a degree granting institution. My fellow professors do it for money, but I work at a megacorp so I just do it for free. You'll really hate the prison system when you're through with it, but it's better in my state at least since there aren't any private prisons. I find the way the inmates can't get internet access to be crazy and it makes teaching rather interesting. It's not personally fulfilling, I'm just happy to help give people a second chance. ------ Dowwie tl;dr: I took a month leave of absence without pay from a highly coveted position in a competitive workplace to volunteer in Louisiana for the American Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. I risked a hard-earned position in the company to do what I felt was the right thing. To this day, it remains one of the most important decisions of my life that I've grown from ever since. In 2005, I was two years into my career from university as a programmer in a highly coveted position for a company, in the American northeast, that was at its peak. something profound happened that began a new.. dimension.. in my life that hadn't existed before but since defines an important part of who I am today: Hurricane Katrina devastated the American gulf coast. I worked incredibly hard to earn my position in the company and dedicated myself entirely to my career. Yet, the country was dealing with a major catastrophe and I felt that I could contribute in a positive way to the effort if I were to get involved. I could have easily donated but chose not to. Donating felt like an excuse not to do something more meaningful. Instead, I decided to volunteer for the American Red Cross. This is a long story that isn't suited for a HN comment but is one I've wanted to share for a long time. If anyone would like to read this story, please let me know as it will give me the incentive to finally blog it. ------ akulbe Volunteering has helped me to better understand there's more to life than money. I knew it already, academically. But having the opportunity to actually do it... it made the idea more real, more concrete. ~~~ davidjnelson That's a really beautiful way of putting it. Do you experience more happiness when you help others? I've found that to be the case personally. ~~~ akulbe I have a pretty umm... interesting... history. MANY folks were a good influence in my life. My hope in my particular venue of volunteer work is to help affect some of the same change in the lives of others. It's most _definitely_ rewarding. ------ narag A long long time ago I watched a TV program asking for money and volunteers to go to 3rd world countries. At the moment I had nothing to lose so I called. It turned out that they didn't really want volunteers and asked me for money that I had not. Later I offered free services to a couple NGOs as a programmer or system admin. Again I was asked for money instead. So actually I don't know about growing with that kind of volunteering, but I surely learned some lessons. I was a mentor for a year in Coder Dojo, that was different and much more satisfying. ------ davidgerard I started editing Wikipedia, rapidly got drawn into about 1000 volunteer organisational jobs and was one of the earliest press contacts. This taught me valuable lessons about how to do PR that turn out to be directly applicable to talking to users and business units as a sysadmin, and surprise that my beep- boop techy job can reasonably be described as about 50% PR and that emails to users are best written like you're writing to a friendly but skeptical journalist :-D ------ fsloth I helped organizing stuff for student's union waay back in university while studying. Great environment to make mistakes and learn from them. You have skin in the game because you don't want to screw up and make your friends mad, yet the risks for all stakeholders are fairly minimal - all the while the scale is large enough for all sorts of scale and communication based maladies kick in that really don't appear in a small tight knit group. ------ monk_e_boy I volunteered to as a parent governor at my local primary school. Now I'm 3/4s the way through my teacher training year -- new Comp Sci teacher in the making. ------ fredley I volunteer for my nearest Parkrun regularly. It has helped become part of a local(ish) community, something that is otherwise difficult to do in London and other big cities. Due to the local demographics, it's well populated by people who are in tech anyway, but it's a good way to branch out of that a bit, and get to know people from different walks of life too. ------ willyt You could join the RNLI. You would learn seamanship and paramedic skills. It would be pretty tough in London though, I think you would encounter quite a few dead people in and around the Thames so you should think about how this might affect you. [https://rnli.org/what-we-do](https://rnli.org/what-we-do) ------ johnchristopher I have been volunteering on and off for some years in shelters, local ONG active in environmental field. I can't say it helped me grow personally but it sets me apart in some conversation. It's more like a badge of honour or some cheap way to get recognition from my peers and others. Quite sad but that's not why I entered volunteering anyway :). ------ Spooky23 Not technology related. I started volunteering as a little league coach when my son started playing tee ball. Despite knowing almost nothing about baseball or coaching, it's been really rewarding and a big learning experience for both the kids and I. It puts things in perspective. ------ mcarrano I currently try to volunteer as much as possible for Coalition for Queens ([http://c4q.nyc](http://c4q.nyc)). It is so awesome seeing people will little to no tech background learn to program and see the things they develop. ------ RobDukarski With regard to volunteering in general, I grew up as part of the BSA always volunteering my time when I could and it helped me grow my teamwork skills alongside my ability to openly speak with others, eventually earning the rank of Eagle Scout!! ------ duiker101 I volunteered one year in a school with CodeClub in the UK. I loved every second of it and working with kids is both extremely rewarding and challenging. It can test your patience but it will teach you to work with other in a unique way. ------ tetraodonpuffer I spent about 3 years volunteering at a mentally disabled people charity: its mission was to try and help through sports, basically leading workouts at different levels in a large gym in the winter, and at a track & field track in the summer, in order to help them burn some energy and feel better in general. It gave me a much stronger appreciation from having been lucky enough to be born without genetic impairments, and exposed me to a lot of very harrowing situations. The one I remember most is probably one where the son had some sort of progressive genetic condition where when he was young he was fine, but over the years he was losing more and more functionality (speech regression, physical control regression) he was in the mid-late stages of the disease when I was there and you could see his father remembering how he was earlier, and trying to cherish the current state of his son, while knowing what was to come and that he was going to lose him. I think everybody who talks about "pulling oneself up by their bootstraps" and "anybody can do it via hard work" would benefit from seeing that unfortunately we are not all born equal, and that you can work as hard as you want but if you're not lucky enough to be born with the right body, in the right place at the right time, it won't mean much. I remember there was a friend of a friend that came by sometimes, he didn't have a mental impairment at all (he was super super sharp, and wrote amazingly well, I think he was actually published) but he had little control over his body (stuck in a wheelchair, drooling, could not talk at all) and was able to communicate via a jury-rigged typewriter since he was able to more or less move one hand. He definitely understood very well what was going on and his predicament, but he was still able to make something of himself and (mostly) have a positive attitude. When I see all the sports people that say "I succeeded because I wanted it more than my competitors and I worked super hard for it", it makes me think that quite a few of the people I volunteered with worked super hard to run with significant impairments that made their gaits anything but normal, and week after week they would train to get better, but obviously they would never win a marathon or anything. Every elite athlete when asked first thing should say "I am so extremely lucky to have been born with my genetics, I worked hard, yes, but so does everybody else" And dovetailing on what I was saying above: I also was shown time and time again that just because two people have the same disability, it doesn't mean they are the same, or that they want the same things, or that they need the same things, a significant disability sometimes makes you not see the rest of the person, but they are still there. It definitely was a very important experience in my life, and definitely very recommended for everybody. I made quite a few friends while I was there and many years later I still wonder what happened to them. ~~~ mailshanx Thanks for taking the time to describe your experiences, i found them very touching to read. It reminded me of my own recent volunteering experiences, which also happen to be with disabled children. ~~~ tetraodonpuffer no problem and thanks for your volunteering! ------ Taylor_OD I've met diverse groups of people working with non-profits or charities. I hope to work in that industry later in my career so it's helpful for building connections. ------ keithyjohnson I did Peace Corps and it was the most valuable experience I've ever had from a personal growth perspective, and others too. ------ orschiro If I really feel a connection (hard to describe) to a project, or to its people, I do not mind the money and do it for free. ------ j45 I have benefitted from being a volunteer for a long time, the great degree of transferrable skills: ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTITUDE DEVELOPMENT: Volunteering is great in that the barrier is incredibly low to make things happen. Want to see something happen? Go do it, or better yet, learn to do it with others. You generally don't need permission to start your own thing and make a difference if you don't see something happening. LEARN TO ALWAYS ADD VALUE, FIRST: Volunteering taught me to add value first, unconditionally. Volunteering is a habit that can be practiced to the point of it being second nature, and that's when it gets really special. ORGANIC NETWORK DEPTH: Through adding value always, a side effect, volunteering gradually grew my network through similarly practicing people who over time think of you as you think of them. I genuinely have an interest in people and curious enough that I can be sincere about giving a shit about others. Most people think of networking as primarily a professional thing. Networking helps you volunteer much better too, when you have a track record of getting things done and successes under your belt with a group of people - if need arises, a group of you can move into the realm of community organizing and not just volunteering. COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: When you learn to work with people that can't always work with others - this is a highly transferrable skill. Beyond this, creating approachable opportunities for others to volunteer who can only see their time as x hours a month is very powerful, if you find this something you want to do. Direct and transferrable parallels to startup growth. LOOKING BACK (and forward).. you get a track record. You know you can learn anything, build and direct towards things. An odd thing to look back and see that you start to forget the things you have work on because you get the real gift of volunteering - an ability to be a doer and use it in other areas of your life. My volunteer experience is as odd as it is varied, and I get to be able to use a lot of it in my professional life, from the small things of helping where needed at a table, whether it's event planning it's starting a tiny conference and growing it to 300 people for many years, or learning the logistics of organizing a parade for over 20,000 people for a decade, and recently organizing tens of thousands of meals for volunteers during a disaster fire, I have picked up valuable skills such as being a driving force in raising funds (totalling in the hundreds of thousands) for universities, food banks, and other disasters. It doesn't matter if the volunteering role is big, or small. Small things that are meant to click, do, and you get to serve something that hopefully will out live you for 5-10-20 years. I'm studying what's different about the positive volunteer movements that seem to last a very long time (and outgrow the founder and continue on for 50-100 years.) So far, I sense it's about the ability for future volunteers to have the experience of depth and quality of connections, not quantity. You have nothing to lose but your time volunteering, and it's often a better way to spend it than to do nothing at all with it, or expose yourself to a little wider world. ------ Pica_soO No. I drove some refugees around in germany, to bureaucrats and back home. No warm and fuzzy feeling. No lvl up on kharma. No everlasting friendships. Just strangers, going to strange places and then home (which is now germany)- basically another day in germany. Very anticlimatic. Just humans. In the end it where just wasted days, in which i could have done open source stuff. Build something. Created anything. ------ Danihan It made me much more cynical about non-profits in general, and grant writing specifically.

The infernal semicolon (2012) - tilt https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/the-infernal-semicolon/ ====== samatman I never tire of comparing Lua with Javascript, and this is another one of those cases. A semicolon in Lua is simply a character which is illegal to place anywhere but the end of a statement. There is no insertion stage, the language parses just fine on a single line, or any whitespace you choose. Semicolons are vanishingly uncommon in Lua code, but if you want to compress a couple statements onto a line, they signal your intention. Lua is like what Javascript would be if it were: based on Pascal, written by resource-constrained Brazilians, and capable of making backwards-incompatible changes. Though with the de-facto fork between Lua and LuaJIT, the latter has become much more difficult, as it should at some point in the maturing of a language. ~~~ tedunangst I'm not sure Lua is that different than Javascript here. What is a semicolon in Javascript if not a character you can only place at the end of a statement? There are some similar ambiguities in the Lua parser if you insert a newline into the middle of a statement. The difference is that Lua is quite a bit fussier about statements versus expressions, and won't allow things like "x() or y()" as statements. So the Javascript example, translated to Lua, wouldn't compile with or without a semicolon. ~~~ samatman There are no such ambiguities. Here is the complete Lua grammar. You may confirm for yourself that semicolons are always optional and that newlines have no semantic meaning. [http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8](http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8) ~~~ tedunangst x = fn (y) Insert a newline: x = fn (y) Syntax error. What happened? The newline has no semantic meaning. ~~~ samatman Your problem is not what you think! Quite.... print(foo) ("x"):len() This creates the same error. Deleting the newline gives you a new, different error. A semicolon give the correct behavior. It's the edge case that the Lua grammar can't resolve, and it does the sensible thing, by refusing to compile. Also note that it is a compile-time _error_ that is described as an ambiguity. It isn't a silent thing that bites you later, as in Javascript, and the difference is huge. [added] I'm not sure what you mean re "x() or y()" the following compiles fine: function t() return true end function f() return false end if t() or f() then print "logic" end and does indeed print "logic". ~~~ tedunangst Complete example: function fn(y) return y + 1 end x = fn (1) print(x) Works. function fn(y) return y + 1 end x = fn (1) print(x) Doesn't work. The only difference is a newline; clearly newlines do matter. (And I specifically added the space to show that it's not simply whitespace that matters.) This is, of course, documented in the manual. For the original example, I meant that expressions are not valid statements. true or false On a line by itself does not compile. It's an expression, but not a statement. This is one of the things I like about Lua, that it prefers explicit over clever, although sometimes the difference between statements and last statements gets annoying. I'd like to do function fn() return nil -- more code, stubbed out for testing end But you can't have code after return. Instead it needs to be wrapped with if true. ~~~ samatman Quite so. I didn't consider this aspect in my first post because it's a syntax error, not an ambiguity; unlike Javascript, Lua won't resolve your ambiguity for you. I share your feeling about Lua being a bit more statement oriented than I'd like. Have you checked out Moonscript? ------ ScottBurson Somewhere, Alan Perlis is looking down on this and laughing his head off. (For those who don't know the reference: [0], #3.) [0] [http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis- alan/quotes.html](http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html) ------ tel OCaml's approach to semicolons is nice—they are clearly nothing more than sequence markers between side-effecting expressions. a ; b (* a THEN b *) a b (* a APPLIED TO b *) You also can basically just desugar them to let bindings a ; b == let _ = a in b a ; b ; c ; d e == let _ = a in let _ = b in let _ = c in d e Due to static typing it's vanishingly unlikely that a forgotten semicolon will properly check. let this = x ; y (* if x : 'a and y : 'b then this : 'b *) let this = x y (* if x : 'a -> 'b and y : 'a then this : 'b *) So forgetting a semicolon only check if `x` is an unapplied function of type `'a -> 'a` which the value you intended to completely ignore. ~~~ DonPellegrino The desugar'd version should be let () = ... instead of let _ = ... ~~~ tel Huh. Certainly true stylistically, although OCaml accepts things like `1 + 1; print_endline "hello";;` with just a warning. ------ marijn The real surprise here is that people still use JSMin, written by an opinionated grump who apparently does not understand the concept of using a real parser. Several superior alternatives exist. UglifyJS is better in every respect. ------ implicit Is ASI really worth the amount of time that has been spent discussing it? It would be nice if it were deleted from the language entirely. ~~~ pcwalton Can't do that. Web sites rely on it. ~~~ implicit Even as a pragma, a la "use strict"? "use stricter"? ~~~ BrendanEich No, because: 1\. Modes are bad for implementations (this feeling was strong from V8 folks such as Erik Corry, but the new crew in Munich may not feel the same way), due to code branching burdens in testing and optimizing while keeping the complexity down. 2\. Worse, what you propose would fork the language to double the testing burden for web devs (apart from engine implentors, item 1), since older browsers would ignore the useless expression statement. This already happened with ES5 "use strict", and created real world bugs (e.g., [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631043](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631043), there are more like this). Developers do not test all the combinations. Notice how a tower of M modes implemented via these string-expression-statement prologue directives can make a 2^M-fold testing burden. ~~~ stupidcar Aren't Google now proposing a bunch of new pragmas? [http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/soundscript.html](http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/soundscript.html) ~~~ BrendanEich As noted in item 1 ("new crew in Munich"), but these may both throw early errors, not let code get to runtime with different semantics (as ES5 strict did, due to arguments object and a few other changes), _and_ use real pragma syntax, which will fail in old user agents. How can real pragma syntax work on the Web? Only by using a compiler such as Traceur or Babel, otherwise old browsers would choke on the `use types;` unquoted directive. Note how this can still complicate VMs, but it doesn't fork the test load for web developers. And if the type system results in early errors, plus better optimization with unforked runtime semantics, then the only burden on VM implementors is in the parser and type checker. We shall see how this experiment works, but in no way is it like `"use stricter";`. ~~~ matt_kantor > use real pragma syntax, which will fail in old user agents > We shall see how this experiment works, but in no way is it like `"use > stricter";`. I might be misunderstanding your comment, but stupidcar's link ([http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/soundscript.html](http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/soundscript.html)) mentions `"use stricter;"` and `"use stricter+types;"` as mode flags, although it also contains a big disclaimer ("The final version of SoundScript may look and work completely different"). Has the syntax been changed since February? If so, I'm interested in reading about it (but my Google-fu is failing); got a link? ~~~ BrendanEich That talk on which Axel Rauschmayer reported had some info from a presentation given by Andreas Rossberg of the V8 team to the last TC39 meeting. Here's the PDF: [http://www.mpi- sws.org/~rossberg/papers/JSExperimentalDirect...](http://www.mpi- sws.org/~rossberg/papers/JSExperimentalDirections.pdf) There are two ideas: 1\. A `"use stricter";` (originally "use sanity" :-/) prologue directive that would not change runtime semantics for code that passed all of static checks, (control flow dependent) dynamic exception-throwing tests, and runtime restrictions on object behavior. 2\. A "SoundScript" mode, perhaps enabled by a `use types;` opt-in, or expressed some other way (per module?), that enables gradual type checking based on optional annotations inspired by TypeScript, but with TS-incompatible differences. Mode 1 _might_ fly with TC39, because it does not fork semantics for code that passes all checks. But for real-world code, there will be divergence when run on old vs. new browsers, so I expect push-back in TC39 on this mode being expressed by a useless string expression statement. Mode 2 cannot be enabled by a fake-string-expression-statement "prologue directive". ~~~ matt_kantor Thanks! This looks promising. Gradual typing is something I've been wanting in JavaScript ever since ES4 got my hopes up. ------ TheAceOfHearts Every time someone brings up semicolons I think it's worth posting Isaac Schlueter's blog post on the topic: [http://blog.izs.me/post/2353458699/an- open-letter-to-javascr...](http://blog.izs.me/post/2353458699/an-open-letter- to-javascript-leaders-regarding) You can get by perfectly fine without semicolons. Going further, if you're using a linter like eslint, I think you can even configure it to give you a warning when the missing semicolon could cause problems. ~~~ lbotos The biggest problem I have is the "leaders" forgetting the beginners. The whole semicolon thing took JS from "end a statement with a ;" to: THE RULES: In general, \n ends a statement unless: 1\. The statement has an unclosed paren, array literal, or object literal or ends in some other way that is not a valid way to end a statement. (For instance, ending with . or ,.) 2\. The line is -- or ++ (in which case it will decrement/increment the next token.) 3\. It is a for(), while(), do, if(), or else, and there is no { 4\. The next line starts with [, (, +, *, /, -, ,, ., or some other binary operator that can only be found between two tokens in a single expression. You have a junior dev now that's 2 steps behind because he's worrying about self-imposed "beatifying" edge cases instead of getting his code to run. ------ rgrannell1 Not using semicolons has never be a problem for me. Just like everyone else I put them where they are needed. I don't put them where they aren't needed, because they aren't needed and adding pointless syntax noise is dumb. If I forget to put them in somewhere they are needed, as anyone might do, I add them. No problems. ~~~ IshKebab The problem is that the rules for remembering where they are needed are hard to remember and error-prone. ~~~ BrendanEich See [http://inimino.org/~inimino/blog/javascript_semicolons](http://inimino.org/~inimino/blog/javascript_semicolons), hope it helps. The minimal semicolon style has only a few rules and many people find it easier to use and remember. I've used it but my C hacker habits go against it. It's a fine style. /be ~~~ aikah Wow neat,yeah, js devs are going to call anyone out that doesnt use semicolons. Question : If you ever wanted 1 breaking change in the language, and somehow it would be possible (I know it wouldn't) what feature would you change ? Again just 1 feature. ~~~ BrendanEich I would undo the implicit conversion madness around == and !=. ~~~ cozuya Is that really a big concern today where == is heavily frowned on by just about everyone due to the above and its slowness? ~~~ BrendanEich == is not slow when types of operands (in typeof sense) match -- then it's equivalent to ===. You'll find a lot of == out there, or would if only Google code search were still up. Hey, I got to answer with the one thing I'd change. There are more than a few, and I had to pick. Losing the equivalence relation I had in the first ten days (apart from NaN != NaN of course) was my pick. ------ panic Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3844302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3844302) ------ cpeterso Which programming language first used a semicolon as a statement delimiter? Did they choose the semicolon because it was easy to type on a QWERTY keyboard? Why not end a statement with a period like a sentence? ------ WorldWideWayne A while back I think there was a github issue where the authors of some popular library refused to use semi-colons and it was causing all sorts of problems for people. I can't remember what library, but it was funny watching hundreds of people comment on the issue to say "Just use the damn semi- colons!" ~~~ tedunangst The first link from the article in question? ~~~ WorldWideWayne Haha, yeah I guess should have followed that link :) ------ serve_yay I see these warnings a lot, but I work on a team that does not ever use semicolons, and hasn't for years. It is simply not a problem, I don't know what else to say. And I have come to really dislike the syntactic noise the semicolons add. ~~~ BrendanEich Do you start files with a leading ; just in case (of concatenation, where the file otherwise would start with one of `([+-/`)? Do you use ; at end of var declarations? If not, beware; if so, do you use comma-first? Thanks for answers, just curious. ~~~ b_hell_t I use var foo = 'bar'; but at my place of work they insist on no semi-colons and comma first. I want to tell them this is stupid but I need solid facts. anyone care to expand. ~~~ BrendanEich If you happen to write var foo = 'bar', baz = 'bletch' (function (global) { //module pattern code here ... })(this); then you have trouble. Semicolons are _not_ optional (meaning always optional, you can leave them out at will). Please read my blog post. ~~~ jedschmidt I wish `void` would get more love for IIFEs instead of just sitting there in a dark corner of JS, unloved. var foo = 'bar' var baz = 'bletch' void function (global) { //module pattern code here ... })(this) ~~~ Havvy Almost perfect, but you left an unmatched close parenthesis before the call operator.

Stop telling people to vote - fogus http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/11/stop-telling-people-to-vote/ ====== geuis I take a diametrically opposed viewpoint to this. Everyone should be _required_ to vote. In Australia, among other nations, if you don't vote you pay a fine. Voting in the U.S. should be as mandatory as jury duty, if not more so. When you are _required_ to do something, and when all of your peers, family, and friends are required to do the same thing, it generates a much greater discussion around it. There's this view in the US that voting is a right, not a privilege. When you treat something as non-valuable, then its much easier to take that thing away. Thinking of something as a privilege like borrowing your parents' car when you're young or having the freedom to worship your religion of choice or not makes it much more valuable to you. (Yes, I know that freedom of religion is a right. Don't be pedantic and quibble. People treat the issue like a privilege, whether its a Constitutional right or not.) In the US, the right to bear arms is considered sacred by many. While its referred to as a 'right', millions of Americans treat it like a privilege. When someone threatens to take that away, people are rather vocal about protecting it. So you're right, I won't tell you to vote. But I will do everything in my power to _force_ you to vote, and to care about what you're being required to do. This is one time that telling people to have and care about an opinion is better for everyone. ~~~ jacques_chester > _When you are required to do something, and when all of your peers, family, > and friends are required to do the same thing, it generates a much greater > discussion around it._ I'm Australian. Compulsory voting does no such thing. Australians begrudge voting (and that we must fully enumerate our preferences). The pragmatic reason for having compulsory voting is to provide a better sample of what the population wants. In effect, to dilute the crazies. Voluntary voting is dominated by the question of _motivation_ and _ability_. Those who are motivated and easily able to vote set the agenda. Ever wondered why US politics is dominated by so many basically tangential issues? Because whether you are pro or contra, abortion / marijuana / the death penalty / public health etc are classic issues to Get Out The vote. And the consequences continue. Ever wondered why US politics is about soaring rhetoric and heart-crushing negativity? Because the basic strategy is: inspire your own voters so they turn out ("Yes we can!", "America is at a crossroads") and make the other guy's voters disillusioned enough so that, while they won't vote for you, they'll just stay at home. Australian politics is more about transactional than transcendental issues, simply because the great bulk of people are required to vote whether they want to or not. To summarise: it does not greatly improve the quality of _voters_. It improves the quality of _outcomes_. ~~~ geuis Whether you begrudge it or not, the majority of Australians go to the polls when required, I assume. Generating discussion about something doesn't at all mean its something people take joy or pride in doing. That isn't a requirement in the equation. Transactional voting is perfectly adequate. Its the minimum requirement you need to have a successful democracy. It still leaves room for the politicians that want to inspire people, or try to make them fear the other candidate, etc. But it also makes people talk about the day to day business of getting by. We _sorely_ are lacking that here in the US. I don't care about improving the quality of voters implicitly. That is a side effect of mandatory voting. Improving the outcome is the primary target. Overall, I appreciate your comments and take the view that they illustrate and expand on my points, rather than refute them. ~~~ jacques_chester My point was that requiring people to vote doesn't make them discuss voting. Most people simply aren't interested in politics in this country, unless it's the machinations of the local footy club. ------ dllthomas " _Corrolary: You should vote "NO" on every Proposition unless you actually know what the fuck you're talking about. The California Proposition system is asinine, and the way to do least harm is to reject by default._ " This is half correct, and that half is very much my policy. If the proposition is for something the legislature can and should be doing, I vote no; we are paying people to give these issues more time and attention than I can afford to. There are three places this differs from the above, though. 1) If the proposition deals with something that hugely favors incumbents to the point that the legislatures won't touch it for fear of job security. 2) If the proposition is for something the legislature can't do (Constitutional amendment that really needs to be a Constitutional amendment). 3) Most significantly, there are places (raising taxes, mostly) where we have tied the hands of our legislature with previous propositions, and require a proposition. For 3), my default position is yes; vote for decent legislators and let them do their jobs. For the first two, I try to make a point of learning enough about propositions of that nature that I can make an intelligent decision. If I can't, however, my default is to not vote on those measures. On propositions for things that the legislature can and should do, I agree whole-heartedly - vote no. ~~~ paupino_masano No! I'd rather people don't vote than vote no on something they don't understand... Unless you understand what you're voting for: don't vote. No vote is better than a misinformed one... ~~~ dllthomas > No vote is better than a misinformed one... I precisely contend that, for certain categories of questions, that is not the case. If we want to try to pin this down with numbers somehow, it'll have to wait 'till morning though... ------ josnyder jwz's thesis, that uninformed people shouldn't vote, is overwhelmingly correct. I consider myself to be well-informed, politically speaking. Yet I voted in only 7 of 17 races on my ballot. I am not, for example, equipped to make informed choices for my jurisdiction's school board. All ballots should come with a "No vote" option. What would the difference be from just leaving it blank? Nothing, except that it would give uninformed people a box to tick so that they don't have to stray towards the more important ones. With that said, his stated corollary (to vote against propositions by default) is unhelpful and perhaps harmful. Many ballot proposals are stupid. Some aren't. As a voter, if you don't have an informed opinion, the right move is to leave it blank. Don't vote. Leave the job to those who have done their homework. ~~~ bmelton It's worse than that even. Having served as an election judge (and hence been obliged to assist those who needed it), many people needing help will ask "Which of these is the Republican option?" (where Republican = their party affiliation), even on issues that weren't particularly partisan, or national, or that even made sense. The tact there being that party affiliation was more important than expressing their own choices, which isn't something that I understand in the slightest, especially as how centrist most candidates are. ~~~ saraid216 It's pretty basic tribalism. "I am a Republican. Therefore, I will vote for the Republican option, unless I have an actual reason not to." In front of that, there's probably, "My parents were Republican. My family is Republican. My friends are Republican." And so on. %s/Republican/Democrat/g This isn't actually wrong, per se. It's a basic affirmation of trust in one's close network. Some people go to church without bothering to believe in God; they go because they've always gone and their parents go and their friends are there and they discuss the football game or whatever. They're passionate about things because all of their friends are passionate about it. ------ kevinh It's amusing that jwz brings up the California Proposition system and says that you should vote no on everything when that _itself_ is an uninformed statement to make. Even if you want to keep the status quo, simply voting no on every is not necessarily the correct decision. In California all referendums (still named propositions on the ballot) are flipped. That is, voting YES means that you want to keep the status quo and voting NO means you want to change it. I think uninformed people voting no across the board is what caused Proposition 40, a referendum dropped by those who originally proposed it, to get 27% voting no, despite absolutely no one being on the no side. ------ brennenHN The implied supremacy and paternalism in the post is pretty problematic. What is your threshold for informed? Should we have tests at the polls to make sure people have researched before they vote? Do you really want to make a case for an "informed" electorate instead of a more representative one? I know this post isn't saying to deny the vote to the "uninformed", just not to encourage them, but that sentiment implies a) that those people and their opinions are less valuable and b) that the atmosphere of excitement around civic duty which accompanies those posts is itself a problem. I would reject both of those premises. ~~~ gojomo Actually, the implied threshold is self-assessment. JWZ is suggesting: if you don't feel like you know or care enough to vote, feel free to not vote. That's actually pretty fair and efficient. ~~~ jkn Looks like a very bad idea to me, since people who know more are more likely to think they don't know enough (e.g. Dunning-Kruger effect). ------ jiggy2011 Ok, so please define "informed". Political opinion seems to suffer from an especially savage form of Dunning–Kruger. Often are the most steadfast and vocal in their opinions and the least objective. Let's say for example, the economy. Maybe one party suggests lowering taxes on the "middle class" to stimulate spending and the other guy wants to make sure we don't tax the "job creators" so that they don't move overseas. How am I supposed to know which is best? Do I need a degree in Keynesian economics or can I just listen to a few talking heads on the local news? ~~~ dobro > _How am I supposed to know which is best? Do I need a degree in Keynesian > economics or can I just listen to a few talking heads on the local news?_ You're not supposed to vote for what is "best". You are supposed to vote for what you WANT to happen. It could be the worst thing for the country but very good for you. That's OK too, if a tad selfish. Now, if you don't know what you want or what is good for you, you still get to decide. Anything major that will be legislated, like taxes, WILL affect you. So, what would you do if you don't know which option is the best? What you do in every similar situation in life: a) User your direct knowledge. b) Use your experience. c) Try to learn for other people that know that stuff. d) Discuss it with others in general. e) Read up on the issue. d) When everything fails, just your gut. You'll have to suffer any consequences anyway. And it's not like you can just have people with "degrees" and experts to make your opinion, or have the only right to vote on an issue. 1) For one, because those people also have biases, personal interests and hidden agendas. And even the non outright lying ones can be partisan, deluded, dogmatic, ideological or simply idiots with rich dads that bought them a good education. 2) Second, YOU'LL suffer from the consequences of any law, so it's YOUR decision to make, not theirs. ------ libovness There are more sophisticated arguments than this one for not voting. Among them, even if you believe in a particular cause, you can probably accomplish more for that cause in the hours it takes to vote by doing something other than voting: <http://www.artoftheory.com/the-ethics-of-voting/> Another reason: Those who are not merely voting among party lines are childish, superficial, and even reptilian, when it comes to picking candidates: <http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S19/28/30C37/> ------ LVB This is a non-issue, because they're clearly not listening (at least in the US). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout#International_dif...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout#International_differences) ~~~ corin_ 48% turn-out doesn't mean people are listening, it could be that if so much effort didn't go into persuading people to vote that far fewer people would. ------ gojomo I'm happy to see someone take a stand against rampant, patronizing Non-Voter Intimidation. Non-voting can be a sign of a healthy system: "Everything's working pretty good; I'm OK with either choice, or whatever my fellow citizens select." ------ dreamdu5t Better yet: Stop voters telling me to obey whatever they voted on. ------ antidoh "Fuck you." Oh, OK then. ------ Aloha I'm quite fond of requiring people to take the citizenship test before being granted their rights as citizens - including voting. ------ readymade News Flash Corner: there is always somebody who thinks your electoral opinion is line noise in the system. ------ johnny22 i always got the implied "we dont' care who you vote for" not just vote without being informed.

Fully Abstract Compilation via Universal Embedding [pdf] - mpweiher https://www.williamjbowman.com/resources/fabcc-paper.pdf ====== nickpsecurity Alright, I have a hard time following some of these papers because of the wording. Does this basically mean the language is immune via the compiler to failures or attacks from abstraction gaps between what high-level language shows and what low-level target actually does? Or something else entirely? ~~~ mafribe Full abstraction (FA) simply means two things: 1\. That any two source programs are equal exactly when their translations are equal. So FA is parametrised by two notions of program equality, one for the source, one for the target. 2\. That the source and target language are substantially different. Requirement (2) is vague and is supposed to rule out "term models", eg. translations from a language to itself. There have been many FA results since the concept was introduced in the 1970s (I think). It's close to soundess / completenss of logic. ~~~ imh When you say equal for 1, do you mean equal under a simple "their representations match" sense, or under something more abstract? ~~~ mafribe I mean equal w.r.t. a chosen notion of equality. So for any pair (==s, ==t) of notions of equality, there is a different notion of full abstraction. Here ==s relates programs of the source language and ==t relate programs of the target language. ~~~ imh Cool! Thanks for the clarification! ------ dang Url changed from [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5364](http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/5364), which points to this.

What is Software Engineering? - stablemap https://research.swtch.com/vgo-eng ====== Jedi72 If your life really depended on the ok outcome of the nxt program you wrote, you would make SURE it worked. You test, re-test, try alternatives and compare outcomes, run experiments about what happens under certain conditions. Then you take the level you've tested it at and release it saying that your system is capable of 1/10 what you tested it at. The application of the scientific method to the act of building stuff so that you really _know_ the outcome, at least within known bounds of uncertainty - thats engineering. I'm sure this kind of work does go on throughout the world, but not in 95% of the software that gets written. Just like how engineers aren't involved in 95% of construction jobs, except when writing some guidelines 20 years ago. Most programmers are plumbers and brickmakers building houses, not engineers designing skyscrapers. "When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much more interested in Ada !" — Robert Dewar, President Ada Core Technologies. ~~~ biggc > Most programmers are plumbers and brickmakers building houses, not engineers > designing skyscrapers. Conversely, most mechanical engineers don't end up designing a new production motor, they design a door handle. ------ jasode _> Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers._ To preface, I think there's room for a wide variety of meanings people assign to words and nobody has a monopoly on what "engineering" means. That said, I offer an alternative: _Software engineering = programming that accounts for real-world _constraints_ such as performance goals, technology limitations, monetary budgets._ Whether engineering a bridge or engineering a circuit board, they share a common theme of optimizing multiple constraints (materials, cost, maintenance, durability, etc). An advantage of this view of engineering is that it can also be applied to _solo programming_. The single programmer weighs the _tradeoffs_ to a possible solution. The other concept of _" add time and other programmers"_ that the blog author is talking about is also important but in my opinion, I'd prefer the industry find another catchy label for it. I've seen others call it "software factory design" instead of "software engineering". The "factory" of optimizing how multiple programmers work together is what books like Mythical Man Month, Peopleware, etc talk about. To apply my concept of engineering (constraints) back to the Go language... let's say I interview a candidate and ask what his favorite language is and he says "Go". I then follow up and ask _" Ok, Go is good. What is Go not good for?"_ If he responds that he can't think of anything negative, _it means he can 't do engineering with Go_. Engineering means you know the stress weaknesses of concrete, or corrosion properties of steel, or the warts of programming languages. If the candidate then tries to answer with the universal _" well, good and bad programming can be done in any language"_, that's just a restatement of the Turing Tarpit[1] and you can't do effective _engineering_ with that view. Assembly, C/C++, Haskell, Lisp, Javascript all have weak points that work against particular engineering goals. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit) ~~~ varikin > If he responds that he can't think of anything negative, it means he can't > do engineering with Go. I have used this tactic for interviews for quite a while. Though working primarily with Java and the JVM, every good programmer already has a long list of complaints. Regardless of preferred languages, frameworks, etc, everyone should know when their tools are not sufficient. I never care what the answer is other than they are able to articulate an answer. ~~~ waisbrot My ability to talk at length about what's wrong with a language corresponds directly with how well I know and love the language. ~~~ twothamendment Yes - or how well I know and hate the language. ~~~ adrianratnapala Only C++. I simply don't know enough to make an intelligent argument about why, say, PHP is a bad idea. But I have used it, and I don't want to do it again. ------ k__ I had it at university and was thinking "Well, programming is just a start, software engineering is where the bacon is!" Whelp... I learned a bunch of UML and SE methods (Rational etc.) and thought I'd go back to programming. Same went with all senior programmers I worked with, they all said "I was a programmer for the longest time! Now I want to become a software engineer!" Just to come out of a certification course and asking "That's it?!" I think the core ideas and principles are right, but after you learned what can be done with code, like infrastructure etc. you don't want to meddle around with stuff that is so far away from code as these methods. It just slows things down too much. The only thing I really liked were class and call diagrams to find out what's going on in legacy codebases. ~~~ wolfgke > Same went with all senior programmers I worked with, they all said "I was a > programmer for the longest time! Now I want to become a software engineer!" > Just to come out of a certification course and asking "That's it?!" Semi-relevant: [http://programming-motherfucker.com/](http://programming- motherfucker.com/) ------ jhpriestley I don't think that this post really explains much about how to judge the fitness of a feature for software engineering. From the article, `gofmt` supports automated tooling around source code, which is good for software engineering; but scattering import paths throughout the source tree instead of centralizing them in something like `package.json` obviously makes automated tooling around import paths _harder_ , so why aren't local import paths bad for software engineering? The whole viewpoint seems to just add a sort of high-handed argument from authority to your typical subjective arguments over programming features. ~~~ skybrian I agree that it's not explained clearly. One possible reason: import statements in source code can be analyzed regardless of which build system you're using. In the case of Go, there are at least two important build systems ("go build" and bazel), so analysis tools would need to support both. On the other hand, if a package.json file were just as universally used as Go source code, it would effectively be part of the language. ------ Joeri The difference between programming and software engineering is the difference between cooking for yourself and cooking in a restaurant kitchen. Similar outcome, radically different methods. ~~~ AnimalMuppet To put it slightly differently: software engineering is about efficiently producing working programs at scale. It's like chemistry and chemical engineering. Chemistry is about atoms and molecules, and about chemical reactions. Chemical engineering is about building and running chemical plants that efficiently produce the desired chemicals without blowing up. Though I guess that's the difference between computer science and software engineering, not between programming and software engineering. Maybe in the chemical analogy, programming is pipe-fitting in the chemical plant. ------ panda88888 I think software engineering, similar to other engineering disciplines, is applied computer science. It means taking the theory (algorithm, data structure, etc) and create a product (software) that does useful things in the real world. This means the software have to perform functions needed by its users, under real world constraints (time, space, power, cost) while being sufficiently robust to handle noisy inputs and variances. This also means the user will play a large role in driving the evolution and direction of the software and that the scope of software engineering encompassing beyond the theory but to the entire lifecycle of he software product including development, deployment, support, and iterative improvement. ------ nudpiedo Software engineering is a whole discipline with several stages, it is mostly technology agnostic for most of the process. There are even people who say that all technology choices are just implementation details, and I do believe the same if I need to think abstract and formulate/define the larger patterns in area domain to work at. That was quite empty article... what’s that? A sales pitch for the next article? The only comment related to design was an _implementation detail_ : the Go modules are git urls. Even at speaking an implementation the article fails: the article does not comment the pros, cons, consequences, problems or typical pitfalls, and evolution in time of this decision; it even does not compare with any other existing choices out there. I believe these kind of articles should not be part of HN since it just aims to exploit the audience. Edit: format ------ AnimalMuppet It seems to me that computer science is really not programming, but _thinking about_ programming. The problem is, it should _also_ be thinking about software engineering. ~~~ twothamendment I think CS on its own can be so theoretical and perfect that it is only a part of software engineering. A software engineer who can program can also put that programming and CS to use within business constraints. Hand a strong theoretical CS person a steaming pile of a project and ask for the smallest tweak and it will take forever - that is if their head doesn't explode or they decide to re-architect it. Task a good software engineer with the same thing and they will get the change done with the understanding that they also hate the steaming pile of a project, but it isn't worth any more time. ------ nathanaldensr Software engineering is the art of learning to lie to the technically-ignorant around you to satisfy "business requirements."

Show HN: Our alternative to recruiter spam - bitsweet https://trypitchbox.com/ ====== bitsweet Hi HN. We were tired of recruiters so we built this because it was something we wish existed. We had "satisfying" jobs and liked who we worked with but we were not naive and knew there could be a better job out there. Either building a product more aligned with our personal interests, making more doing something we enjoyed even more, or work with a team that challenged us further. It was too time consuming to actively look for jobs and the thought of dealing with incompetent recruiters turned us off so we built Pitchbox. We link to think of it as a talent agency for developers so only personally relevant jobs are pitched to you... think of it as "Here's what I'm looking for, if you can provide it then let's talk" Is this something that you want? ~~~ navyrain Good work! However, there is no mention of telecommuting/remote positions. Even as a US worker, I prefer remote work, and it baffles me that us "internet folk" are not working hard to fight the industrial-era assumption that software has to be written in a central office. ~~~ xxpor > it baffles me that us "internet folk" are not working hard to fight the > industrial-era assumption that software has to be written in a central > office Have you considered that some of us LIKE working in an office? ~~~ navyrain Of course, some people like working in offices; that was never disputed. However, there are an increasing number of organizations which have caught on that offices are not "software factories", but rather, an optional luxury. ~~~ xxpor I just think that we're not fighting for it because not that many of us really care. Not that I would be opposed to the option of course. ~~~ rhizome Maybe it seems like not many care because when someone mentions including the option they are shouted down like they're saying _all_ workers should WFH. ------ DavidAdams I'm currently hiring developers, and I also hate recruiters, for the reasons you outline. I was interested to learn about your flat $25K fee in the comments here, and I can tell you that I'd be unlikely to pay it. I have other ways to find developers that aren't so expensive. If I'd bothered to sign up after reading "It's free to get started" then learned later about the hefty fee, I'd be disappointed at best. Since I didn't sign up, I don't know how much bait there is before the switch, but if you talk about the fee right away after the signup I guess it's sort of okay, since you didn't waste much of my time but you did receive my contact information under false pretenses. I'll be interested to see how many takers you get at that fee level. ~~~ bitsweet Hey @DavidAdams, Our intentions are not to bait and switch and so far responses have been very positive. I believe most developers share your surprise when they hear about the overhead to hiring, I did. I appreciate that using outside help to build a team is not right for every stage company. After looking at the dismal state of recruiting and the enormous typical placement fees that well exceed $25K on avg across the US for developer positions, we feel our pricing is comparatively low and the experience and results, superior. We found that matchmaking developers and companies may seem like simple quick transactions, and many recruiters treat it that way, but the reality is it is a time intensive process to do it right. (EDIT: typo) ~~~ 3825 >the overheard to hiring Did you mean overhead? Moreover, it seems like you don't validate your form input at all. (Sorry about the entry. My email address is not really aa.) ~~~ Lewisham Validating email addresses via anything but verification links are a road to hell. ~~~ mlarratt True, but it's not a bad idea to check for an @ in the string as a sanity check, in case the user has accidentally put their username/password/other in the field. ------ clebio Sorry, but what part of 'Stay anonymous ... 100% Private & confidential - Learn your market value without your current employer ever knowing' involves me giving you my name, current employer, current title, and email address in step 2? That's just down-right cognitive dissonance. The landing page doesn't give me enough assurance, but to get any more details, I have to click through. Or do you expect a curious candidate to read the two pages of legalese (Terms of Service, Privacy Policy)? Not saying we wouldn't, but that's sort of a slow, boring sell. ~~~ bitsweet It is anonymous to the point that others don't know you are on Pitchbox. Your name isn't shared with anyone until you are matched with a company and you like the pitch and agree to sharing it. It would be just to hard to send you personally relevant pitches without a little background information to incorporate in our matchmaking. ~~~ awakeasleep Names aren't the only personally identifying information. Many of us with specific skills working in small companies are easily recognizable based on title and company alone. For the record I'm not looking at the moment, but I know I'm the only one with my title at my current and previous job, and they're both the sort of tech companies that will find your service. It'd give me _much_ more confidence in your site, and other recruiting sites as well, if you outlined exactly how my info was presented to interesting parties, and how those parties were selected. ------ liberatus Our solution to recruiter spam: Become a recruiter. I'm sorry but how is your business model any different from that of a recruiter? (Other than claims of human or AI filtered quality.) I just don't see how you will not run into the exact same problems that existing recruiters run into. What makes you different than a normal recruiter building profiles of companies and employers and soliciting both? This just looks very familiar, abeit drop dead gorgeous. :-) I guess if good design and AI are enough to solve the recruiter problem, then count me in, it's just not clear to me how you are really different from your landing page. (Other than of course it is beautiful, seriously fantastic work.) ~~~ bitsweet There are a few things I dislike about recruiters that we aim to fix: * They nearly all are technically incompetent, e.g. thinking Java is the cool word for Javascript and such. We know the difference between interfaces and inheritance, being developers ourselves, we are better at understanding the needs of companies and matching that to the desires of developers. * Recruiters hide information, almost always. We're fully transparent with each pitch and include details about salary, team, etc upfront. * Recruiters are about quick turn and will place you at any role that matches their keywords. We're more interested in long term relationships. In Pitchbox, this manifests itself in many ways...for example, just because you signed up today, doesn't mean you'll start getting job pitches tomorrow...instead we focus on relevancy and quality over quantity so you hear from us only when we think its particularly suited for you. * The recruiting experience is horrible for companies too. The recruiter typically spams that hiring manager with resumes forcing the company to sift through it all. We provide simple useful tools for the companies connecting with Pitchbox members. * If you liked our homepage for its simplicity and design, then you'll be happy to know we have built our entire product with similar focus. Interacting with it should be easy, purposeful, and enjoyable - pretty much the opposite of every interaction I've had with recruiters. (BTW - Thanks for the kind words about our design) ~~~ Peroni Whilst I don't agree with the practice, the reason most recruiters are cagey about disclosing too much info on the company they represent is because they don't want the candidate to go to the company directly and saving the company $25k. How do you deal with that challenge? Look, I'm incredibly vocal about the need to disrupt the recruitment industry but from what I understand based on the discussion here, the difference between Pitchbox and agencies is that you're developers not recruiters and you charge a flat fee. Am I missing something? ~~~ jim_h They may have an exclusive contract with the company for that position, for a certain period of time. Or maybe the company name (or contact details) is NOT part of what they will expose to the candidate. ~~~ icambron Generally they have a contract that says something along the lines of "if your initial contact with a candidate is through me, then you'll have to pay if you hire them". I think the caginess part is just an extra precaution. ------ electrograv As a developer, I love the concept - obviously, a tool that filters for great jobs and pitches them to developers is really appealing. However I'm curious about a few things: 1) It sounds like companies are hand picked. On the other side: How do you filter for great developers? I'm sure you can't assume every prospective employee signup is a top-tier developer. Do you have some algorithmic, human, or other process? 2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships? 3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.) Thanks! ~~~ bitsweet _1) It sounds like companies are hand picked. On the other side: How do you filter for great developers? I'm sure you can't assume every prospective employee signup is a top-tier developer. Do you have some algorithmic, human, or other process?_ It is a combination of all of the above. All companies are screened so we know what makes them unique and what type of developers excel there. We do the same for the developers. Everyone is happy only when we make appropriate matches...since we are developers, we think we can do this better then anyone else. _2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships?_ Yes, right now we pick that up from your goals and by looking at your background. At times we may reach out for more information so we can understand your unique situation. _3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.)_ You can supply your GitHub profile and/or Resume...ideally both. We'll look at improving the sign up process though. We just wanted to make it super simple and easy for developers to start. ------ decadentcactus Aw man, am I the only one who doesn't have this terrible problem of everyone wanting to offer them a job? I'm sure I'm not doing 100% of what's possible to be able to sit back and pick and choose whether I want the 150k job or the 180k job, but almost all of these "recruiters suck" posts apply to a small minority of people, those near the top of their profession. Maybe I need a "Do you make shitty weekend projects that end up going nowhere? Let us know" site. ~~~ cupcake-unicorn I'm nowhere near the top of my profession, so I'm baffled by it. I'm actually glad to read about it, since my non-dev friends don't understand it and get angry at me for bitching about people trying to offer me work! I am however, a minority in the field (a woman) so I sometimes think that this fact MAY have something to do with it :/ It really gives me even more reason to hate the recruiting spam - when I'm called "Mr." or when they tell me that "We're looking for a couple of great dudes like you!" ~~~ rooshdi Ha! Definitely can relate (except for the great dudes part lol), but I wonder what kind of deals these recruiters have with companies? Do they really care about finding the right people for positions, or do they just want a quick cut of whatever commission they're making? It's flattering sometimes to see a voicemail full of recruiters, but one has to wonder if their intentions are optimally in line with what companies need. ~~~ icambron Mostly the latter (the quick cut). They're basically like realtors in that sense. I've worked with a few recruiters on both sides of the fence (hiring and behing hired). They're are a few really good ones out there and a shitload of noise. The trick is to find one you trust and just run with them (or, increasingly, just use your personal network). ------ andy_adams The salary ranges seem very high from my experience. I've been developing for a few years, and I know a handful of excellent developers working for big-name companies...and I know they're not making the numbers listed here. I want to believe $180k is doable for a software engineer, but I've yet to meet a salaried programmer over $110k. Am I keeping the wrong company? I should note I don't live in a major city, but even amongst devs I know in San Francisco, $180k would be very high. It seems most of the programmer salary estimates I see online are similar. Are these numbers real? Or are the numbers I see coming from software fantasy land? ~~~ chrislloyd They are very real. Perhaps you should sign up :P ~~~ andy_adams If you are correct, I've been working for absolute peanuts the last few years :X. ~~~ bitsweet These salary brackets are very real for US based developers. ~~~ andy_adams If you could be so kind, could you clarify exactly who could expect these salaries? Are these entry/mid/senior level? 1, 5, 10 years experience? Top- tier developers only? I ask because there are plenty of companies hiring at sub-$70k salaries and they're having no trouble filling their positions with decent programmers. Are the programmers I know selling themselves short, or is $140k for extraordinarily experienced and talented programmers only? ~~~ graysnorf I can only speak for web application development, but $140k is definitely not for "extraordinarily experienced and talented programmers only" in San Francisco for someone doing js/rails. Are the people you know working in startups where part of their compensation comes in equity, or the prestige of working at a well-known "great" place? ~~~ recursive I'm working in the midwest where the average experience level among developers is "several" years. (I don't know exactly, but it's probably at least 5). I'd be surprised if the average engineer salary here is as high as the lowest pitchbox bracket. ~~~ graysnorf Then I expect the average developer could get a big bump in salary working for an SF company. But it's not a free lunch: cost of living is high here and some things like commuting are terrible. I know developers who moved back to Minnesota so they could waste less of their lives in their cars. Hence the appeal of "work from Ohio". 100% remote seems to be an ever more realistic option, but I expect it's still harder to find work, although work is so easy to find this may not matter much. A bigger issue may be finding a 100% remote job at a company with a remote culture. Working remotely with a company whose culture is centred around an office can be an exercise in a thousand little tediums. The different social dynamics of working remotely can be a challenge as well. I feel as though my post reads a bit like "don't try to work for an SF company", but that's not really my intent. I mean more to convey that the pitchbox salaries are perfectly real, but it's not too good to be true. Moving to SF to work, or working remotely are options, but salary isn't everything and these choices won't be right for everyone. ------ codva Interesting - kind of reminds me of a site a friend built a few years ago. It was a resume site with contact info hidden. In order to contact you the recruiter had to pay you - at whatever price you put on a contact (usually a buck or two). If you didn't respond in a reasonable time the money was refunded. But he was trying to solve the same problem - recruiter spam. Unfortunately he launched right in the deepest pit of the financial meltdown and he was unable to get any traction with the site. ~~~ MichaelApproved If I'm looking for a high paying job, a few dollars isn't going to interest me. Your friend probably had to create a ton of code to allow for the applicant to store and eventually withdraw his few bucks. If I'm really looking for a job, how many recruiters could possibly contact me? 10-15? at $2, that's $30 at the end of the process. Seems more like a distraction from my job hunting. It seems more like a distraction from core development (having to manage the cash accounts for applicants) and not enough money to be interesting. I can see charging the recruiter to email people (sites like Elance do that) but that's where it should end. The money will never be interesting enough for an applicant to care and it confuses the process. ~~~ randomdata I expect the intent was really the other way around. To someone who is truly interested in what you have to offer, a buck or two is just a rounding error on the salary they will eventually pay you. To someone who is harvesting contact information to fire spam your way, $2 * n-number-of-contacts starts to add up very quickly. ~~~ MichaelApproved But that's the point. It's supposed to be a no brainer for someone who actually wants a real contact with the applicant but prohibitive for a spammer. A recruiter who is genuinely interested in you for a job opportunity wouldn't mind paying the $2 but a spammer who is emailing hundreds or thousands of people just trying to build an interest list would suffer. Still, this hinges on the person actually responding so the spammer wouldn't suffer in this case. They'd be happy to pay for a $2 lead and not suffer any expense if the person doesn't respond. I think you'd have to pay regardless of the lead responding for this to have a chance of working. Again, that's how a successful system work with Elance. You pay regardless of getting your bid accepted. ~~~ codva I see your point. He really didn't ever get enough usage on the site to know if the refundable upfront fee would have been a sufficient anti-spam tactic or not. Several sites with the same basic idea all launched around that time. His was bootstrapped, at least one of the others had millions of VC behind it. I don't think any of them made it. ------ Tichy I'd prefer it if I could see the possible "goals" before entering my contact information. At the moment it is the usual: no information before signup. (I didn't proceed past the contact information tab, so can't comment further). ------ PedroCandeias Just went through the signup process. There should be a textbox for those of us who don't maintain great github profiles to say a few words about ourselves. ~~~ gdilla I just submitted, but I'm a product manager - looks like you're focusing on engineers only? We're useful too (sometimes). ~~~ bitsweet Our focus has been developers because we are most familiar with how messed up the status quo is for us and how we can improve it. That being said we have also seen an overwhelming response from those that don't write code. We are figuring out how to expand the product. ~~~ basseq I feel like you could emphasize your DEVELOPER-ONLY focus a little better: it's not clear who should be filling out the form a) unless you scroll down the page and read _all_ the content or b) until you get to the github handle input and think, "Hmmm..." ~~~ bitsweet thanks for the feedback! ------ brown9-2 I think the signup flow could use more handholding as far as telling the prospective developer why you need the information you are asking for and what you plan to do with it (i.e. how it will help you find them a good opportunity). As an example, I got as far as the second part of the form where I am asked for my name, current company, location and title, and became hesitant because I have zero idea what you are going to use this information for specifically. ~~~ bitsweet Thanks for the feedback. We'll certainly to address that and be more clear. ------ martythemaniak Looks pretty sweet. It's been a few years since I've done the job-search thing, but this looks like what I'd want to use. Now that I think about it, this reminds me a bit of Feynman's pickup technique [0] - why waste your time with the whole song-and-dance routine if what you want was never on offer to begin with? Anyway, good luck! [0] [http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2010/9/16/richard- feynm...](http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2010/9/16/richard-feynmans- pick-up-technique.html) ------ esharef Seems like a great idea. I recommend making the "what do you want to do" a bit more explicit (e.g., more multiple choice, asking me to give examples of jobs I'd leave my current position for, etc). When I completed this, I wasn't sure how you'd know what my "dream job" was. I know you're probably trying to keep it short, but I think I'd be more of a believer that this was going to yield good results if I were asking for slightly more info. ~~~ bitsweet Thanks @esharef - we really are focused on making the experience very simple and painless. For developers, we can extrapolate a lot from the basic information provided (GitHub/Salary/Goals/Location/Resume)...the goals in particular are often revealing. It may take one or two pitches to calibrate but overtime pitches get more relevant. ------ drcongo I made a collaborative Gmail filter up on GitHub. I no longer get any recruiter spam at all. <https://github.com/drcongo/spammy-recruiters> ------ hnwh A little sketched out about putting my real name on here.. how do I know my current employer won't see it? ~~~ bitsweet Every single developer is reviewed by a human before we begin any matchmaking and we also screen every employer (this means names are in a predictable format). ~~~ skeletonjelly Ah this clarifies something for me. I was just wanting to try it out but didn't want to put my details, can't go to the next step, but down the bottom it says "stay anonymous". ------ ig1 I used to run a software developer job board startup for several years and I came the the conclusion that what the market needs is a better way of reaching passive job seekers. While I think this approach is along the right lines, the big problem is that it's incredibly hard to get passive job seekers to sign-up, so mostly you'll get active job seekers signing up and then you'll essentially just be another curated job board / CV database. I think your key to success will be if you can figure out someway of getting lots of passive job seekers to signup. Personally if I was doing it I'd go the route of making hyper-targetted mailing lists. So like a reverse groupon catering to specific niches. So have one for developer evangelists, one for flash games developers, etc. with the idea being that the niches are specific enough that people want to be on the list not because they're job hunting but because they want to keep their finger on the pulse of their niche. (feel free to email me if you want to talk more about the developer recruitment space; I've spent a lot of time thinking about it!) ~~~ freyfogle > I think your key to success will be if you can figure out someway of getting > lots of passive job seekers to signup. If you want people to do something there is way that often, but not always, works: pay them. Why not share the fee you charge the companies with the people on the list? Obviously there are issues to be worked out to stop people from gaming the system, they need to be legitimate candidates, but I'm suspect there is a way. Basically it's the same as cashback on credit cards - they charge the merchant and share some of that with the consumer. Just some food for thought ~~~ ig1 You want to incentivize the best developers, not those who want (a relatively small amount of) money. By replacing intrinsic incentive with monetary incentive it may end up making the situation worse. Someone might happily sign-up to a mailing list for interesting jobs based on the inherent incentive, but offer that person $10 to do the same and they'll think "my time is worth more than $10" and just walk away. You'll almost certainly better off just putting that same amount of money into traditional marketing channels. ------ demosquared I think this is much needed service. However, I did not see anywhere mentioned - how long I might have to wait after I said I am interested in, lets say $100+ job. What I am asking is how exactly does your process-timeline work? (i.e. Roughly how long do I might need to wait? Is there some sort of strategy/rational that helps me set some realisting timeline expectations? ~~~ xur17 My understanding of this service is that it is meant to be used for people that currently have jobs, but would consider offers above a certain amount. Basically a way to say "only contact me if I get an offer that matches my interests above $XX". ------ arscan Recommendation: go niche if you have trouble building a critical mass of employers and prospective employees. Be known as the "go to" place for getting jobs in obscure but important technology/programming language <X> (for example). Brand appropriately, and manually reach out to companies and developers that use those technologies and try to kickstart the process. Get on the first page for "X jobs" in google. Then build out from there. ~~~ bitsweet Hey @arscan, thanks for the feedback - totally agree. We did this at first and was able to build relationships connecting developers and companies around ruby/python/js roles. With this we HN post we wanted to guage the appetite of the broader tech community. ------ kirinan I applied, it will be interesting to see what kind of jobs you have in mind. Although one way to improve is to be able to tell you where I would be willing to relocate. Id love Seattle for instance, but wouldn't consider a job in Colorado or Austin. Other than that, it is a very cool service and look forward to finding out what you find for me. ------ sarhus Nice and interesting idea! Out of curiosity, are you also working on Coderwall? Your email ( from your HN profile) matches the twitter username of a Coderwall founder. In your privacy page, you have "Appdillo, Inc. [..] provides this Privacy Policy" and the domain <http://www.appdillo.com> has a coderwall email address in it. ------ donretag One item to pay attention to is location. If someone currently works in San Francisco and choose to remain there, will a Palo Alto company be able to contact them? Is there a default radius? Perhaps someone wants to relocate, but only to specific cities. Expanded options would be nice. ~~~ bitsweet Yeah, we understand there are unique situations like this so we typically reach out for more information when someone says they are willing to relocate. ------ fatalerrorx3 For me I would do it if the salary field was optional, I think the employer should decide what value to place on a specific candidate based on his or her past experience. Companies who can afford to pay for someone with an expansive background will do so, but certain candidates might also be more interested in working with local startups who don't have Silicon Valley or NYC budgets, but allow for more flexible positions (i.e. Telework, like others have mentioned). Not to mention certain people thrive in a small team environment versus a large corporate culture, and there's a chance to get meaningful equity to build something new and exciting. ------ ssebro I noticed you guys used the same form UI as Barack Obama's donation page. I like it! ~~~ baseh I was about to make the same comment. @kylerush, the developer with Obama posted the A/B testing of Barack Obama's donation page. Its a great design (apparently well-tested design) glad you guys are using it. ------ jsmeaton Have you considered adding StackOverflow as one of your "Resume" links? That's, personally, where I keep my most up-to-date information. And now I think it's time to update that information. ------ chockablock Maybe my liberal arts major is showing, but I keep reading your URL as 'triptych box'. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych> ------ swalsh I understand you're trying to create an alternative to spam from say Linkedin, but that really is what I use for my resume these days. Can I use that for my "application" ~~~ bitsweet Putting your resume online, on a resume board, or elsewhere is sure to send many unsolicited jobs in to your inbox. You'll then have to engage with each individual to determine if its interesting work, good pay, etc...That works if you are actively looking but it can be time consuming and you can be overlooked by great companies. This is meant to be a filter, we'll spend the time filtering out the junk jobs for you. ------ DGCA $25k is ridiculous, unless you make some guarantees, which you don't seem to do (wouldn't know, there's no relevant info for employers without signing up). ~~~ jpatokal It's not $25k upfront for every potential hirer, it's $25k to the company that _actually hires somebody_. ~~~ DGCA I know, it's too high. ------ benblack86 I can't fill out the form as I have two major problems. I am legally entitled to work in the USA, but only for my current employer. - there is no option for this. The salary I expect depends on the type of job and total compensation (equity) - there is no way to specify this. ~~~ bitsweet 1% at one company vs 1% at another company can vary so drastically we thought it was almost meaningless to ask...we instead prefer to present the whole pitch and let you determine if that equity and everything else that comes with it is interesting. It is preferable if you let us know you want in the goals...something to the effect of "small startup where X, Y, and Z" or something. ------ connor Good idea. Does that Cinema Display on their homepage also look odd to anyone else? [https://d2221r371oqwhn.cloudfront.net/assets/feature- image-b...](https://d2221r371oqwhn.cloudfront.net/assets/feature-image- bd723f3eda6ad77ccfb6584ae4da89ba.jpg) ------ chris123 Quick design comment: I like the clean look, but I find the home page a bit long (i.e., a lot of scrolling is required), even if that's the style these days. Best wishes with your project. I look forward to updates. Cheers. ------ cuttooth I submitted my information; it doesn't hurt to give it a try. I live in the Philadelphia area, but I'm open to relocating if the position is right, so a service such as this may be able to work for me. I'll have to see. ------ gunmetal I stopped at entering my name, company and position. Why can't I try this out anonymously? The stakes are too high for most people to willy nilly add their personal info to a conduit for recruiters. ~~~ bitsweet We don't share your information with recruiters, that's part of the proposition as we are a conduit to companies that you decide who to share your information with. We match jobs to your goals AND to your relevant experience, if we didn't collect information about who you are we couldn't accurately do our part. ------ evan_ Do a lot of people click the lower "what do you want to make?" options? ~~~ vizon And, I'm guessing all the jobs are going to be in the Bay Area, judging by the salary levels... ~~~ hodgesmr I would assume so. Living in Ohio, I nearly choked when I saw the lowest was $80k ------ syassami Nice and clean/simple. Also great use of filepicker, just joined! ------ abahgat I'm curious: in "Every pitch received improves our personalized matching algorithm, making pitches get even better over time." how would you distinguish a "good" pitch from a "bad" one? ~~~ bitsweet It is part of our secret sauce, but when you receive a pitch, your very basic interactions with it feed back into the system. ~~~ abahgat I was asking because if you optimize for pitches response rate, you end up with better pitches but not necessarily good matches between candidates/companies. ------ contingencies Re: Your overboard filepicker thing on the last page, if it's blocked by noscript, enabling causes a total back-to-step-1-hassle for the user. ~~~ bitsweet thanks, looking at improving that step...will address the bug ------ derwiki This reminds me a lot of Developer Auction (<http://www.developerauction.com/>). ~~~ bitsweet They are doing something also interesting, albeit different. They timebox the offers which is clever but the "Auction Price" that is non-binding is confusing and people I've talked to felt it was sorta gimmicky for that reason. We feel compensation is _very_ important but so are the problems you'll be working on, who you'll be working with, and the culture fit. ------ zeynalov I don't know why but the font on your website appears as times new roman. I'm on Mac OSX, Firefox 12.0. On Chrome looks ok. ------ scrumper Can we make changes? I have submitted, but would like to amend my resume to include some of my relevant side projects. ~~~ bitsweet You should receive a welcome email shortly if not already, respond to that with any updates. You can always email [email protected] too ~~~ scrumper Cool cool, thanks. ------ romeonova Just a small ui thing. When the info icon is clicked the layout flicks everytime. Can get annoying for some people. ------ reinhardt Is it US only? How about telecommuting? ~~~ justincormack I presume "I want to make 80k" means USD80k, no choice of what currency I would like to earn. ~~~ bitsweet It is USD. Right now we are only hiring for US companies and a few in London. ------ webbruce Awesome, any plans for designers? ------ draftable I didn't realise it was a requirement of a dream job to be earning over $80k a year... ------ mehulkar I may have missed it on a quick glance, but how does this stop recruiter spam? ------ Lenad It reminds me of jobdreaming.com ------ michaelochurch Nice site. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem; have you thought about an "allocate <number> points" solution? I've had the thought that an "allocate 20 points" resume / requirements list might be superior to the traditional, cluttered approach. ( [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/why-i- wiped-m...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/why-i-wiped-my- linkedin-profile/) )

How a Bug in My Ruby Code Cost Code School $13,000 - dyogenez https://www.codeschool.com/blog/2015/06/04/how-a-bug-in-my-ruby-code-cost-code-school-13000/ ====== shanemhansen I'd add an additional safeguard. When retrying failed jobs, make sure to have exponential backoff. Numerous queueing systems have this feature built in. ~~~ dyogenez Good point! Delayed Job actually has an exponential backoff build in. It'll run 25 times, with an increasingly large time between attempts before it gives up. The issue comes in when it doesn't know a job actually failed, as was the issue in this case. Since the process was `kill -9`'d delayed job wasn't aware the job failed and attempted to run it again as though it was the first attempt.

Ask HN: Encouragement as a Service? - bambax Does &quot;Encouragement as a Service&quot; exist?<p>It would be a number that you can call as an entrepreneur, when you feel a little down or discouraged.<p>It would not offer advice per se, but &quot;quality listening&quot; (relevant questions) and comforting&#x2F;encouraging words.<p>You would subscribe to it with a monthly payment.<p>It would work via phone and email, with maybe different price tiers.<p>Does this exist already? Does anyone want to try and build it? ====== FiatLuxDave In a way it does exist. A lot of people get this kind of encouragement and "quality listening" from psychological counselors. This means that there is an opportunity here, because psychological counselors are usually overqualified for the simple encouragement an entrepreneur may need, and thus tend to be more expensive than what I expect your price point would be. In short, I think that re-framing the service as an "entrepreneur's counseling service", including such things as a guaranty of confidentiality, has potential. The thing to remember is that counseling requires a human touch, so any technological contribution is going to be of the nature of putting entrepreneurs in need of encouragement in touch with counselors. Having a ready source of inexpensive, entrepreneur-specialized counselors is definitely a service. How much demand there is for it, I don't know. If you get it together, tell me your rates. Cheap enough and I might use it myself. ------ jacquesm One HN'er has done something like this, look for Zachary Burt and 'awesomenessreminders.com'. [https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+awesomenessreminders.com) ~~~ bambax It's not the same thing but it's close, thanks for the info. ------ J_Darnley Does an insincere "you can do it" really help? They know nothing of your situation.

New medical procedure could delay menopause by 20 years - HillaryBriss https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/04/medical-procedure-delay-menopause ====== teslabox There used to be a paper from a Harvard Law student on the school’s website about the Estrogen scam. As I recall, the paper told of how a drug company figured out they could get estrogens from the urine of pregnant horses. They put the estrogens into a pill and called it PREMARIN (PREgnant MARes urIN) [0], and told women their premenopausal problems came from not having enough estrogen. Horse piss was a big business for big pharma. Then one day a doctor said, ‘we ought to do a study to see if women are actually benefitting from their estrogen supplementation’. This was the Womens Health Initiative. The study was stopped early [1] when the preliminary results found that women were actually getting cardiovascular problems and cancer from the horse urine. This is as should have been expected. Estrogen is the end of the chain in the steroidogenesis [2] pathway... steroids are made from cholesterol, they are transformed, used then disposed of by the liver. Supplementing the tail end of the chain (estrogen) instead of the start of the chain (pregnenolone) causes all sorts of problems. Progesterone supplementation is supposed to also delay menopause for aging women, but it’s not as profitable or fancy, and doctors tend not to start with simple treatments. (edit1: references) [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_estrogens#Contraind...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_estrogens#Contraindications) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Health_Initiative#HT...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Health_Initiative#HT_component_findings_and_ensuing_events) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#Steroidogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#Steroidogenesis)

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Lectures) (1986) - tosh https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8FE88AA54363BC46 ====== tosh """ These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television. These videos are also available here under a Creative Commons license compatible with commercial use. Note: These lectures follow the first edition (1985) of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Many of the programs discussed were rewritten for the second edition (1996) of the book, and new material was added. These video lectures will still be useful for students using the second edition, since the overall themes of the course and order of presentation are unchanged. These videos are courtesy of Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, and are used with permission. """ [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- compu...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs- spring-2005/video-lectures/)

The Appalling Stance of Rand Paul - d4vlx http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/opinion/blow-the-appalling-stance-of-rand-paul.html?hp&rref=opinion ====== rthomas6 This is off topic for Hacker News per the guidelines. [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) ~~~ drhayes9 Standard reply to those posting about going against the guidelines: "...Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups." It got voted up to the front page. Why do you feel it's off topic? ~~~ rthomas6 Because a NYT op-ed about how heartless Rand Paul is is not part of an interesting new phenomenon, or even interesting at all in a hacker sense. I feel like people upvoted it because they agree with it and feel strongly about the issue, but it's just partisan politics. Politicians say crazy things all the time and I enjoy being able to go to HN and NOT see politics plastered everywhere. ~~~ d4vlx FWIW I posted it for the social commentary on the perception of the poor in the US. IMO the personal attack on Paul was a minor aspect, more of an inspiration to give commentary than a personal attack. Social commentary frequently shows up here.

Senior Software Developer Syndrome - dlagillespie http://www.flock3.com/personal/senior-software-developer-syndrome/ ====== adziki When I started my job as a fresh-out-of-college SW Engineer, one of the more senior guys there suggested I read The Psychology of Computer Programming (I later went on to find out that this co-worker had some editor credits in it), which talks about ego-less programming. I did adopt a lot of the message in my work style, though I feel it goes a little far by suggesting an engineer not say statements like "I believe that..." or "I think this is better". I think that there's some amount of ownership, excitement, and conviction in an engineer's approach that adds to the project's success. There's definitely the chance that this goes over the line, and then I see examples such as in the article above ("oh, I've been here before so I know why this approach is the best so I don't need to value your opinion). Good read.

On open-sourcing existing code - luu https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-03-19-cant-even-throw-code-across-the-wall/ ====== stormbrew I think a lot of the time when people at companies look at this sort of thing they get trapped in a somewhat unnecessary chicken and egg problem. Yes, that project is full of cruft and only one guy knows how to build it, but if you've got people on the outside actually willing to do the work to carve it out into something useful, and you have no issue beyond embarrassment to not let them, you should just jump on that _opportunity_ and make it happen. Do a source dump, cutting out the proprietary bits you can't release _without fixing them_ and give it to the people who claim they can make it happen. Make someone available to spend an hour every now and then answering questions they have as they figure it out. If they succeed at re-modularizing it into something useful, open source that and look at how you can 'bring it home' into your original project. There are people out there who excel at these kinds of de- and re-integration work. The reality is that no matter how much work you put into open sourcing that thing yourself before it's 'ready' and no longer embarrassing to you, you will never have any guarantee it'll pick up a community and be useful to people outside your company. This is why you _shouldn 't wait for that condition_, because the cost of that work will never meet the average return on investment to open sourcing. But it may be worth the work to someone else. ------ maaaats Having the possibility of open sourcing your project in mind when writing it, is a bit like having unit tests. It forces you to think about how easy it would be for others to reuse or deploy. An example from my organization: Two big projects, one OSed and one private. The private one has configuration values hard-coded (passwords, ldap url's etc.), a setup that is impossible to run ("it works on my machine") and the deployment is a secret that no one really knows (not prepared for someone being hit by a bus). The OSed project, while not perfect, has separated these concerns and always had re-usability an easy-setup in mind. We can't just push some code that works, the thought of it being public makes us put more pride in what we write, so the QA is good. Of course, there is some overhead in all this, but it wins in the long-term. ~~~ bsimpson Making it modular also makes it repeatable, which is a huge internal benefit. eBay has been pretty liberal in letting me open source the things I've asked to. The only requirements that I know of are that it: 1) Isn't sufficiently complex to be considered proprietary, 2) Doesn't presume on eBay-internal infrastructure, and 3) Has a name that doesn't infringe any public trademarks. Whenever I start working on a new feature, I design a generic library and then test it by writing a proprietary implementation. There are many benefits to working this way. Most importantly, I can share an exact replica of my environment modulo any project-specific code, which makes reporting dependency bugs or soliciting architectural feedback trivial when it would usually be nearly impossible. It also means I'll always have access to the tools I create here, regardless of what happens to my projects, my team, or my relationship with eBay. Even if no one else ever found the stuff I've released useful, it's been beneficial for me to be able to share it. ~~~ angersock Does eBay own all of your code at any time, or just while working on the clock there? ~~~ bsimpson For salaried employees in California, your employer can claim ownership of any IP you create that's related to one of their current or reasonably anticipated products (e.g. _anything_ if you work for a tech borg). There's an exception for things you can prove you were working on before they hired you. The law is actually designed to product employees (so your ad network employer can't sue you if you work on fitness apps in your spare time), but modern large companies have their fingers in every pie. ~~~ eropple The good news, such as it is, is that most employers I've run into will be understanding and will work with you if you ask to redline problematic clauses before you start. (If they won't, that's a sign not to work there.) ~~~ angersock I've found our company, once concerns we're articulated, to be pretty open to addressing these sorts of concerns. ------ sbegaudeau My company has open sourced a lot of code (80% of our products) and finding people outside willing to contribute is actually quite difficult if you don't do things properly. We actually spent quite some time to improve the build and the branding, to check the intellectual property of our dependencies etc. If you want real contributors, building a community often require a good documentation, examples, etc. ~~~ babuskov From my 10+ years of experience: if you want contributors, build something that people really need, that is not available on the market. Build it just enough to solve the main problem it should. Make it really open and easy to contribute. People will chip in to scratch their own itches with the software. Also, make sure you keep developing it yourself further in the open. Discuss features and architecture with community. Nobody wants to work on a code dump of commercially failed project. You can get a lot of help, if you show leadership by example. ------ perlgeek I made the same experience. If there's no reason not to, code you write tends to become optimized for the environment it's in. Maybe all software developed in-house in your company uses a specific tool for configuration, or there's a naming scheme for OS- level users. Or people want all tools to integrate with the ticket system, or ... the possibilities are endless. Without a pressure to keep code clean of such influences, it'll slowly morph into something that can never be reused outside of the organization it was developed in. So when a new tool or library needs to be developed, I can usually fit it either into the "might be interesting for others" or the "purely internal glue code" category. If it's in the former, I make it open source from the beginning. (My employer is very supportive of Open Source).

How the Bitcoin protocol actually works (2013) - dsr12 http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/ ====== elcapitan This is a good addition to the original Bitcoin paper ([https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) [pdf]), which is already very concise and readable. The contribution of the post is going into the details of how the concepts actually play out in reality and how stuff just looks like. It's interesting that there are so many other articles and talks that try to explain Bitcoin with a high effort of metaphors and examples while avoiding technical details. You can consume all of them and still have no idea. But then again this is probably similar in other fields with high levels of internal complexity (i.e. where you'd have to read recursively all of the science behind it to get even superficial understanding). ~~~ lohengramm I found this page: [http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw- bi...](http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw- bitcoin.html?m=1) to be the most technical in the subject. I appreciate similar links if they exist. ~~~ kens Thanks, I'm glad you liked my writeup. I also did a similar article on Bitcoin mining: [http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoin-mining-hard-way- algori...](http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoin-mining-hard-way- algorithms.html) ------ s_dev This is the best (concise + clear) explanation of Bitcoin I've come across: [http://alecb.me/blog/how-bitcoin-works/](http://alecb.me/blog/how-bitcoin- works/) It's shorter and simpler than the OPs which seems to be a bit more comprehensive.

Show HN: The Shanti Fund is investing $200 per project in startups - sbraford http://theshantifund.com/ ====== jordancampbell This is cool - well done to you. Even more than the money, just having someone tell them that their idea isn't terrible will be a great help. ------ sbraford Hi. Shanti here from The Shanti Fund. I'll just leave this here for more visibility. I've always been passionate about startups and working with founders. Wanting to get involved but not having "Angel VC" type of money has been my issue lately, so, I decided to start The Shanti Fund. I know $200 isn't much (to you and I). But it IS to some people. They may be down on their luck, or they may just live in a part of the world where $200 goes a long way. I know some might criticize my efforts here, so I'm 100% open to feedback. Please tell mw how I can improve The Shanti Fund. Thanks. ------ dollar This is either a really funny joke or the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. I really can’t tell which, but I’m hoping for joke. ~~~ jordancampbell There will be people for whom this literally decides whether or not they start / keep working on a side project - it's a great idea. ~~~ sbraford Thank you. ------ matt_the_bass This is a cool idea. $200 is probably not that incentivizing to most us/Western European based entrepreneurs. However it may be a big deal in other regions. Perhaps you might want to consider marketing in geographic locations where you think $200 would make a difference to the entrepreneur. ------ cjbenedikt Congrats, great idea. Not too dissimilar from Yunus' microloans or his Social Business concept. ~~~ sbraford Thanks. I'm actually a huge fan of Muhammad Yunus' microloans program. I've had ~ $400 on a loan rotation at kiva.org for some time now. ------ antoinevg Nice. $200 is eight raspberry pi's or a really nice FPGA development board. Love this idea! ~~~ sbraford That would be cool if that's all a project needed to get off the ground. Also wouldn't be surprised if someone just needed it to buy ramen noodles or hosting for a few months.

How to Stop Checking Email on the Evenings and Weekends - dpapathanasiou http://lifehacker.com/357666/how-to-stop-checking-email-on-the-evenings-and-weekends ====== jdueck Another useful trick I've found is to automatically delay my email responses. Rather than replying right away, I purposely let email sit for 48 hours or so. If people get an instant response, they'll send more useless emails. Of course, this doesn't apply in every case. If I get something that I know is important, and the person isn't wasting my time, I'll respond instantly.

A Newly Discovered Memory In Which People Remember Every Day Of Their Lives - jamesbritt http://singularityhub.com/2011/09/29/hyperthymesia-%E2%80%93-a-newly-discovered-memory-in-which-people-remember-every-day-of-their-lives-video/ ====== wallflower I remember a hypnotist at our college orientation taking an audience member and having them recall who they sat in homeroom with (their names, what they looked like). Supposedly we retain almost all memory but lose recall to it over time.

Startup hustle: Why two men decided to sleep together in a van for months on end - playhard http://pandodaily.com/2013/05/13/startup-hustle-why-two-men-decided-to-sleep-together-in-a-van-for-months-on-end/ ====== bobisme Unfortunate headline wording. ------ spacecadet I lived out of my VW Vanagon while starting my business.. good time. ------ mr_spothawk Blatant PR spam. ------ shupp ... down by the river?

Blogger, With Focus on Surveillance, Is at Center of a Debate - uvdiv http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/business/media/anti-surveillance-activist-is-at-center-of-new-leak.html ====== doe88 I think Glenn Greenwald is a damn good writer, I used to read his articles a lot when he was writing for _Salon_ , he really read a lot, has an extensive knowledge of this area and knows how to use all these excerpts and quote extensively to prove his point. Think of a kind of _The Daily Show_ segments but for written articles. As I'm actually busy myself in my work I must say I'm not able to read all his writings since he started working for The Guardian, but I am both happy and worry that this is him that brought this proof to the public knowledge. I hope the US Gov will have the decency to admit it was fair game and not try to retaliate, but I must say based on past outcomes I'm not optimist about that. And this article insisting in calling him a _blogger_ , I don't know their motivations maybe to separate him from _real journalists_ but it makes me sick, typical from NYT though. ~~~ rpgmaker Seriously, that's an insult to Glenn Greenwald. The Daily Show is good as far as entertainment goes but Greenwald writes about serious stuff in a very concise and substantive way. ------ davidmr It wouldn't be unprecedented for him to be held in contempt for refusing to reveal a source, but the article doesn't make clear that it is not illegal for a journalist to leak classified information as long as they're not the one who holds the clearance. It is very illegal for someone who holds a clearance to provide that information to a reporter, but if you happen to stumble across it without breaking the law, you can publish it. Mark Klein, the AT&T engineer who found the NSA wiretaps in the AT&T colo was never prosecuted for this reason. He was just doing his job, sans clearance, and stumbled into the blueprints. ------ grandalf There is a game of chess going on and the NY Times just played an interesting move. It wrote a story that appears to flatter Greenwald but in fact gives the reader the lexicon to dismiss/ignore him. Clearly if the NYT wanted to be doing investigative journalism to challenge government overreach, it would be. ~~~ darkarmani Yes. Why did the put all those smear (slander) quotes at the end of the article? ~~~ grandalf Also the bizarre photo in which he looks stressed out. ------ chrisgd He is a lawyer that practiced with one of the most prestigous firms in the country and has written several best selling books, including a NY Times bestseller or two. Calling him a blogger is the NYTimes attempt to discredit him to a certain extent in the eyes of their readers. ------ ibrahima I'm really glad he did this, took a lot of bravery I'm sure. I almost get the feeling that he's happy to be in the crosshairs of the US government. ------ mtgx They are not even hiding they are going after journalists who expose their crimes now, are they? ~~~ lostlogin Ask an Al-Jazeera reporter what its like getting into the US. I don't read Al- Jazeera stuff very often, but I've never found anything that didn't seem to be good quality reporting. Yet their reporters are held for hours at the US border and questioned at greater length than actual terror suspects who've gone on to bomb stuff. It's bad. ~~~ jebeng I've found Al-Jazeera to be the best news network out there. It seems to be only one that's not ridiculously biased and ratings driven. ~~~ ihsw AJ is in an interesting position: * most news networks in the middle east are state-run (and very obviously oppressive with heavy censorship), however AJ operates distinctly independently * as such people in the middle east are exposed to news they wouldn't normally be exposed to, for example controversial news stories or other news stories that require strict objectivity * western news networks are increasingly rebroadcasting AJ footage, most interestingly because AJ acquires exclusive interviews that other news networks aren't privy to * AJ provides live feeds of their news channel _for free_ online * they are growing, and have plans to offer[1] Turkish (Turkey), Spanish (Latin American), and Urdu (Pakistani) channels It's exciting to say the least. [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera#Plans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera#Plans) ~~~ cinquemb Not being state run does not mean it is not under the influences of the state and the position its leaders take. _" First, it is home to al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language news network that has transformed how Arabs get their news. Many give the television channel more credit for spurring on the Arab Spring than Facebook or Twitter. By bringing the revolutions into the homes of every Arab, al-Jazeera drew regional attention to early events in Tunisia and helped boost the number of Egyptians on the streets from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Al-Jazeera gives Qatar “soft power” well beyond its size."_[0] Kinda like the history between the CIA and many news organizations that "operate distinctly independently".[1] [0]: [http://www.cfr.org/qatar/tiny-qatars-big-plans-may-change- mi...](http://www.cfr.org/qatar/tiny-qatars-big-plans-may-change- mideast/p26143) [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_the_media#Use_of_mass_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_the_media#Use_of_mass_media) ------ Alex3917 Bradley Manning leaks classified information after learning that he was going to get kicked out of the military for being gay. Greenwald publishes this article after basically getting kicked out of the country for being gay. Anyone starting to see a pattern here? ~~~ ihsw Glenn mentions this and specifically points out that there is a pattern: > When you grow up gay, you are not part of the system, it forces you to > evaluate: ‘Is it me, or is the system bad?’ One has to wonder whether the government considers gays and lesbians high-risk dangerous individuals, and furthermore whether they should establish inclusive policies for gays and lesbians to deter any anti-establishment tendencies (or to establish exclusive policies discouraging or preventing gays and lesbians from holding sensitive government jobs). ~~~ darkarmani > One has to wonder whether the government considers gays and lesbians high- > risk dangerous individuals, It used to be a security clearance risk. The idea that you might be blackmailed with the threat of being outed. ~~~ tomjen3 I could see that be an issue with that today too (as would extra marital affairs, gambling debts, etc) but I doubt they would care one way or the other if you weren't in the closet. ------ flooyd If the U.S. prosecutes Greenwald, then it's time to prepare for a revolution. ~~~ KNoureen Considering NSA and other three letter agencies apparently have quite plenty of surveillance equipment installed, I think your revolution will be met at the door step by two gentlemen in black suits. ~~~ flooyd 1\. I never claimed to be a part of any revolution. I'm not. 2\. This is a burner account and I'm logged in via tor. ~~~ swombat You're not taking into account the invisible, microscopic swarm of nanocameras that have been hovering around you since fifteen years ago, when, aged 12, you posted a comment that now strongly correlates with later activities that are not condoned by the government, especially since the new laws passed 2 years ago. ~~~ shrikant This thread is ripe for a Slashdot-esque comment: "I think revolution is the only way for@#�%((((#*;;;";!@ NO CARRIER" ------ uvdiv _"The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers."_ ------ danso It's doubtful that he will be prosecuted. What's much more likely is that his source will be the target of a hunt and subsequently prosecuted as have other leakers recently ------ Vivtek Hahaha! Greenwald would love that... ------ jellicle It's a nice hit piece the NYT whipped up. Do they normally publish biographies of journalists who write leak pieces? No? Only when it's time to smear someone. Here's what the NYT was asking: [http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.hk/2013/06/nytsullivan-email- exch...](http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.hk/2013/06/nytsullivan-email- exchange.html) Is he a weirdo loner biased advocate gay blogger? Just say yes! Really sad to see the NYT fighting against transparency in government. ------ einhverfr Will the US prosecute Greenwald for the leak? No way. If they do that, it will be harder to say anything about free speech or freedom of the press in this country, and that is not the American way. What is, unfortunately, the American way, is to try to find something else to charge him with (see Assange for example), not only to silence him but also to discredit him. Do not be surprised if allegations of pedophilia or other crimes are made. Many decades ago my mother's uncle ([http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/caughlan_inter...](http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/caughlan_interview.shtml)) began to build his private legal practice on defending people from Smith Act prosecutions due to involvement with the Communist Party USA (ironically he never really considered profit much of a motivator for him, and he left a high powered law firm to defend the Community Party), distributing Marxist literature, and the like. Did the government come after him? Yes. With the Smith Act? No. They didn't want to come right out and say "we don't want these people to have good legal representation." Instead they came with a variety of unrelated, and eventually sent him to prison for a year. Unusually he was reinstated to the bar on his release (which is somewhat unusual). (Listening to the interviews with him, I hadn't known he was kicked out of the ACLU for defending civil liberties of Communists.) The goal wasn't to throw him in prison but to take away his voice. It didn't work with John. He went on to fight, fight, and fight some more, eventually winning significant victories for political freedom in this country. With someone like Greenwald, though I don't know. It does seem to have been fairly effective at discrediting Assange. I harp a lot on "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime" and certainly we are not at the same level the Stalinist USSR was, but I can tell you that it is something that has roots in the US as well. ~~~ tome Assange hasn't been charged with anything by the US. ~~~ madaxe But, but, he's a rapist! So we should all denounce him. This is the view now held by most about Assange, sadly. On the note of Greenwald, it looks like it's already started: Gabriel Schoenfeld, a national security expert and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is often on the opposite ends of issues from Mr. Greenwald, called him, “a highly professional apologist for any kind of anti-Americanism no matter how extreme.” They'll be calling him a terrorist within the week. ~~~ einhverfr I still stand by it, they will pay someone to make accusations of pedophilia or something. Calling him a terrorist is too close to the controversy. The approach taken to Assange is far more effective. ~~~ jlgreco This time around, I wonder if some "rogue" politician will suggest that a drone should airstrike him. ~~~ einhverfr Still too close. Far better to find something to tarnish his character. ------ Buzaga Apparently, he doesn't live in US but in Brazil(where I'm located, also), the irony is that since he's not in US it's they can probably run PRISM all over his stuff... I mean, he's american so maybe there's some little safeguards, but at this point he's probably already considered an enemy of US or aiding it so this can be bypassed, and even if not, since invading ALL PRIVACY of foreigners, me included, seems to be cool, they can run it through everyone near him and 'accidentally' get what they want, lawls... ------ madaxe Absolutely they will, as they have in other similar cases. They may or may not succeed, but they already have a track record of going after journalists, so I don't see why this should be any different. If they don't push for prosecution, he'll probably have an "accident" at some point in the not too distant future, like has happened to plenty of other whistleblowers, or at the very, very least, they'll turn his name to mud through aspersions and insinuations of sex crimes and so-forth. ------ prollyignored Where is Sam Lowry ?

Dates and Times in JavaScript – A New API for Dates from TC39 - 98codes https://blogs.igalia.com/compilers/2020/06/23/dates-and-times-in-javascript/ ====== tzs I'd like to see the JavaScript people, the Java people, the PHP people, the Perl people, the Python people, the C people, the C++ people, and the people for every other significant language that supports functions (either directly or as methods on objects) to get together and once and for all agree on how the heck we are supposed to deal with times and dates. Then all of them should implement that in their standard library, so that going forward we've got one sane conceptual time handling system everywhere. I tire of dealing with the quirks of everyone having their own approach. ~~~ mattwad It's not just that. Timezones are the real bugger. Microsoft has their own list of names separate from the standard IANA timezones, for example. If it weren't for timezones, IMO dates are pretty damn trivial. It's just a matter of storing and transferring them properly (in UTC, always!) ~~~ frenchyatwork Timestamps are damn trivial. When people use dates, that's all they want 90% of the time. The remaining 10% is where all the hard problems are. For example, lets say I have a store that opens from 8:00-17:00 every day, and it's currently 22:00. How long is it till it opens next? ~~~ noja Three days and an hour more than you think, because it's the weekend, and an extra day because the public holiday for tomorrow may or not be a working day. Oh and there was a timezone change. ~~~ aarong11 There was a leap second too, you forgot that one! ~~~ reggieband People joke, but I worked on a calendar application (well, it was a time series graph) where a leap second caused a rendering bug. ~~~ yxhuvud There was this bug in Java related to a leap second that broke all Java servers in the world one summer.. ------ jasonkillian I think this is a great proposal and a huge step in the right direction for JS. I am curious though, is there a reason not to just essentially duplicate the Joda[0]/Java[1]/ThreeTen[2] API? As far as I understand, they are generally considered a gold standard as far as datetime APIs. Is it too Java-y that it wouldn't make sense to port to JS? Are there copyright implications? The JS Temporal proposal _does_ as far as I can tell, share many of the underlying fundamental concepts, which is great, but then confusingly has some types, such as `LocalDateTime`, which mean the exact opposite of what they do in the well-known Java API [3]. There is still discussion going on about these details, but from my perspective it seems like the best thing would be to just copy the Java naming conventions exactly. [0]: [https://www.joda.org/joda-time/](https://www.joda.org/joda-time/) [1]: [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/time/package-...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/time/package- summary.html) [2]: [https://www.threeten.org/](https://www.threeten.org/) [3]: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- temporal/issues/707](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-temporal/issues/707) ~~~ TheCoelacanth This. They already copied the crappy date API from Java. Why not copy the good one too? ~~~ eropple I don't usually laugh at HN comments, but this is pretty good. And it's true. Joda-Time and its near relatives are just genuinely _good_. So much effort has gone into addressing so many edge and corner cases that it seems like a shame to not just tuck all that work under one's arm and steal it. ------ leothekim So glad to read that the core objects are immutable. This is probably my biggest gripe of other date/time manipulation libraries, eg moment.js. ~~~ kcorbitt [https://date-fns.org/](https://date-fns.org/) is the most popular alternative to moment-js, has an intuitive functional API and treats dates as immutable. I migrate every project I touch over to it since it has so many fewer footguns. ~~~ eropple Huh - thanks for the link. The Moment folks also have Luxon, which I've been using, but there's quite a lot more momentum behind date-fns. ~~~ Drdrdrq Or give day.js a try. It is basically moment.js without its problems, and pretty popular too. I tried date-fns but found it cumbersome to use... Ymmv. ------ moralestapia A comment on the side, >JavaScript Date is broken in ways that cannot be fixed without breaking the web. I really dislike the arrogant tone that many "new" people employ when talking about some "old" thing they are trying to "improve". (Quotes are there to indicate sarcasm). Date is not 'broken', it may just not do whatever the author wishes it did; it is not 'broken' in the sense of failing to perform its intended function adequately. I hope people could change their ways and be a bit more decent in general. Aside from that, I welcome the new API as I think it would be an improvement over what we have now. ~~~ ryzokuken Date is "broken" in that it aged pretty poorly, has a very non-ideal API surface and exposes developers to a number of footguns, that could, ideally, be avoided. The fact that a vanishingly small percentage of JavaScript developers use Date for non-trivial applications is a great indicator of these failures. ------ pininja Very excited about the timezone improvements here! Their cookbook has great examples [https://tc39.es/proposal- temporal/docs/cookbook.html#preserv...](https://tc39.es/proposal- temporal/docs/cookbook.html#preserving-local-time) ------ ABoldGambit Great proposal, but Temporal is a poor name. Why not, in the age of the import keyword, finally just have a standard library, and import Date from std like a proper programming language? ~~~ hyperpape I agree Temporal is an odd name for the object representing an Instant. But it shouldn't be Date either. A Date does not have a time associated with it. Java really did a good job here: Instant, LocalDate, LocalDateTime, ZonedDateTime. (If they hadn't already had java.util.Date, they probably could've replaced LocalDate/LocalDateTime with Date/DateTime, but that ship sailed). ~~~ cwp Temporal is just the namespace. It has classes called DateTime, Date, Time, TimeZone, Duration etc. ------ oefrha TL;DR: Actual spec: [https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/](https://tc39.es/proposal- temporal/) Less formal docs: [https://tc39.es/proposal- temporal/docs/](https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/) Examples: [https://tc39.es/proposal- temporal/docs/cookbook.html](https://tc39.es/proposal- temporal/docs/cookbook.html) You can try Temporal in the JS console on a doc page. ------ renw0rp And people used to complain about Java development being slow and behind other languages... Regarding JavaScript temporals - better late than never I guess. ~~~ ryzokuken It's been WIP for a few years now! It's easily one of the largest changes to the stdlib of JavaScript recently, and things like these take forever to standardize. ------ jeffmcmahan This is one of those glaring problems that _somehow_ was passed over the last 10 times people got together to decide to improve JS. Remarkable that it has taken so long. ~~~ ryzokuken It's been WIP for years now. Just takes a lot of time to standardize something like this, you know... ------ typescriptfan1 Date is actually pretty good. * If you're reading UTC dates from the backend and displaying them in local time, new Date(year + 1900, month, day, hour, minute, second) works great. * It's also easy to calculate repeating intervals in local time by using that constructor with getYear(), getMonth(), etc. * Send it back to the server with .toISOString(). Add a .replace('Z', '') on that so .NET binds a DateTime with the right Kind. ------ SigmundA So can I round trip it to JSON yet, no, bummer... ~~~ chrismorgan JSON has a deliberately limited vocabulary, and is never going to be extended. Objects, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans and null, that’s all you’re ever going to get. ------ flipchart Does this mean I can get rid of moment.js now? ~~~ wyattjoh I've switched most of my work that used to use moment over to Luxon[0] now. It's still written by the same authors, but fixes a lot of the drawbacks[1]. [0]: [https://moment.github.io/luxon/index.html](https://moment.github.io/luxon/index.html) [1]: [https://moment.github.io/luxon/docs/manual/moment.html](https://moment.github.io/luxon/docs/manual/moment.html) ~~~ flipchart I'm using React Widgets[0] and I prefer moment over Globalize (been through so much pain with this). Maybe it's time to either write a localizer for Luxor or find a new date time picker [0]: [https://jquense.github.io/react- widgets/localization/](https://jquense.github.io/react-widgets/localization/) ~~~ WorldMaker Depending on your specific needs [0], a lot of date localization can be done (painfully, but possibly) directly with Browser Intl [1] calls instead of a library. [0] Current user's current locale is easy. If for some reason you need to show some other locale than what the browser is using you'll likely still need Moment or Globalize. [1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl) ------ noiv Asking for uni-time ignores physics. It just doesn't exist. It can already be measured clocks separated by a meter in altitude run differently. We might have something that works for daily human stuff, but if you leave the planet or ask for Pico seconds, no standard can help... ~~~ vore Anyone doing specialized calculations with time at that level of precision is going to be using specialized code and not any built-in time handling code. ~~~ noiv That just proves my point, uni-time is a dead end. ------ jchook Reminds me of the incredible Time on Unix[1] article. 1\. [https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2020/05/02/time-on- unix.h...](https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2020/05/02/time-on-unix.html) ------ LittleDan It would be great to hear feedback from everyone on the Temporal survey: [https://forms.gle/iL9iZg7Y9LvH41Nv8](https://forms.gle/iL9iZg7Y9LvH41Nv8) ------ petepete So long as months are indexed by 1 I'm all for it. ~~~ ryzokuken They are! ------ tlhunter I'm excited to see this land in Node.js! Currently there are only hacky solutions for calculating nanosecond-accuracy wall clock time. ------ benatkin I think it's quite nice! It tries to be as unopinionated as possible, and does a good job at it. ------ sunseb Why not using a namespace like stdlib/datetime instead of this weird named Temporal thing? ~~~ ryzokuken because Temporal is not currently used anywhere (as far as we noticed) and it won't break anything while still being descriptive. ------ lxe You will still need libraries to do nicely formatted time strings like "next week" or "3 hours ago" ~~~ josteink > You will still need libraries to do nicely formatted time strings like "next > week" or "3 hours ago" If you want those formatted values to be consistent with the rest of your app, you will need this anyway. You app _does_ support localisation right? Also: there’s no guarantee a browser would have the same localisation as your app (for instance German-language browser, English website). You really have to do this 100% yourself in your app if you want the result to look right. ~~~ runarberg Apps are seldomly translated into my native language, but I do have my browser configured to use my native language, so I often see date values in a different language from the rest of the app, and it doesn’t bother me at all. In fact I hardly notice it. ------ himinlomax Will it allow for using TAI? ~~~ ryzokuken Not the core API, but a simple custom timezone can be used to implement TAI. I worked on a POC for it, but you can totally test this with the polyfill right now. [https://github.com/ryzokuken/temporal- tai](https://github.com/ryzokuken/temporal-tai) ~~~ deathanatos Kind of, but not really? The proposal's Absolute represents time in the POSIX timescale, so it is inherently incapable of representing all of TAI, the same as it is inherently incapable of representing UTC. I attempted to test your library's behavior in this regard, but I do not think you are correctly implementing the proposal's TimeZone. TimeZone.getDateTimeFor() is supposed to take an Absolute and return, in your case, the time that absolute represents in TAI (that time, in the TimeZone). But this: var one_before = new Temporal.Absolute(915148799n * 1000000000n); console.log(one_before.toString()); console.log((new Temporal.TimeZone('UTC')).getDateTimeFor(one_before).toString()); console.log((new TAI()).getDateTimeFor(one_before).toString()); emits, 1998-12-31T23:59:59Z 1998-12-31T23:59:59 1970-01-01T00:15:15.148768 That last timestamp being the output supposedly in TAI; but that POSIX timestamp, 915148799 represents 1999-01-01T00:00:30 in TAI. That is, the second line, 1998-12-31T23:59:59 in UTC == 1999-01-01T00:00:30 TAI. The other direction (getPossibleAbsolutes) is similarly effected. ------ miltonlaxer Just gimme epoch time and we're good. ~~~ ryzokuken Temporal.now.absolute().getEpochNanoseconds()

Germany Takes the Lead in HVDC - EEGuy http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/germany-takes-the-lead-in-hvdc ====== EEGuy Until recent news such as this, I didn't know it was the "conceptually simple" but practically difficult ability to switch (interrupt) a GW or so of DC energy flow preventing the implementation of better than point-to-point HVDC (i.e. multiple access point) power grids. Evidently interruption's easier with AC because of the zero-crossings of current every half-cycle. Three alternate solutions to HVDC circuit interruption are described in this article. Two are electronically integrated with the output circuitry of the bidirectional AC-DC converters (bidirectional energy flow AC-DC converters being an interesting, but off-topic subject in their own right). I find it an ingenious use of an IGBT bridge surrounding a capacitor to throw the cap's charge into reversed polarity so as to stop the current flow -- effectively opening the circuit. This tells me the cap would seem to be in series with the DC side somehow. Were it in parallel, well, it wouldn't make much sense to reverse the cap's polarity as you'd only get to do it once. I also find it fascinating that the mathematics it takes to describe AC circuits is far more complex than for DC -- one has to accept that there genuinely exists a square root of negative one, "imaginary" though we may call it. As in programming, good nomenclature is often late to the table. I wouldn't try (and I'm certainly not qualified) to "refactor" centuries, maybe millennia [1] of mathematical terminology. \----- [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_number> ~~~ kken Very interesting article indeed! >I also find it fascinating that the mathematics it takes to describe AC circuits is far more complex than for DC Why? The math is exactly the same as for DC once you substitute complex numbers for current, voltage and impedances. Things get more complicated in the time domain, which becomes relevant once you want to look into problems like switching HVDC on and OFF. The nonlinearities of the switching devices lead to differential equations that can only be solved numerically. ~~~ EEGuy Thank you kken for your clarifications. I don't know the physics modelling switching devices or arcs, but I do recall reading long ago that once an arc starts, its resistance drops dramatically, continuing to drop as more current flows through it (within limits). So an arc becomes a runaway situation if current flow isn't ballasted or elsewhere interrupted. But if current flow is controlled, an arc has practical application in fluorescent lighting and arc welding. ~~~ caf A visual demonstration: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S64r-MjBN4> ------ troymc Germany also stores some energy by pumping water uphill for storage behind dams, but there's only so much capacity (only so many dams). That will change if other low-cost grid-level energy storage systems become available. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage> ~~~ igravious Why mothball nuke plants when they are not in danger from tsunamis seeing as how they are miles inland in Southern Germany? Was there a public outcry after Fukushima? Seems like keeping the nuke plants running locally would obviate the need for this high euro spend on HVDC as cool and all as the tech sounds. ~~~ claudius > Was there a public outcry after Fukushima? Yes. Originally, the social-democrat/green government of 1998-2005 planned to shut down all nuke plants until 2020 or so, but the conservative/liberal democrats government that took over in 2009 stopped that, mostly against the will of the public. After Fukushima, there was such a huge backslash that our dear chancellor decided it might help her popularity more if she changed her mind. And while tsunamis are rather rare in Stuttgart, the upper rhine rift is an active earthquake zone, and since we unfortunately are not allowed to just sell the waste to Russia to dump in Siberia, we also have to dispose of it somewhere in Germany. If you look at a population-density map, you will find few places with few enough people to accept highly radioactive nuclear waste. You are right, however, that it is economically somewhat senseless to shut down the nuke plants basically shortly after the subsidies/initial costs paid off, but, well. ~~~ eurleif >You are right, however, that it is economically somewhat senseless to shut down the nuke plants basically shortly after the subsidies/initial costs paid off, but, well. How is it more senseless than shutting them down any other time before the end of their useful life? Sunk costs are sunk. ~~~ InclinedPlane You answer your own question. The amount of useful life they have left that goes unused is an opportunity cost. The earlier they are shut-down the larger that cost (which necessarily must be taken up in providing power through some other means). ------ junto Germany has a problem. It has a desire to increase renewables (mostly from wind), which is found in the north. The primary consumers of the energy (manufacturing) are not in the north, in fact many are in the south. They need to master the transmission of that energy from north to south. ------ throwawayyyyyy a couple of schematics of the various configurations of IGBT based converters in the article would have helped a lot.

Show HN: Open-source project management system for small teams and startups - leantimesystems https://github.com/Leantime/leantime ====== shivawu I'm curious about why you chose to open source it. For me personally, I would be happy to pay for the hosted version if it's useful, and not worry about hosting my own. ~~~ leantimesystems Thanks for asking. There are three drivers towards that decision: 1\. Project Management Systems should be flexible. We can offer tools to get you started and we can advise on "best practices" but in the end teams need to be able to adjust the system to their custom needs. This caters to the experienced PM crowd. 2\. On the other spectrum we have project owners/teams that need better project management processes and may not know where to start. Their budget usually reflects that. We want to enable startups and small companies to manage their projects effectively. 3\. Data security and privacy. Some companies can't or don't want to send their sensitive data into the cloud. We have goals and aspirations to commoditize project management. The industry has been stagnant for too long. ------ saverio-murgia Seems really cool and we are going to test it. Do you plan on releasing a ready to use docker image? If not, we might do it as soon as we find the time. ~~~ leantimesystems Follow Up: We now have a docker image available at [https://hub.docker.com/r/leantime/leantime](https://hub.docker.com/r/leantime/leantime) ------ gjvnq That's cool! Two things I would like to see: * EBS (Evidence Based Scheduling) * i18n (just the support for it, as I can provide the translations myself) Also, thanks for including screenshots in your readme.md! Xx ~~~ leantimesystems Thank you. Support for i18n is in the works and will come within the next month. EBS is a great idea! ------ jonnydubowsky Looks really cool I would totally try it out do you need to put a credit card down for the free trial? ~~~ leantimesystems No credit card needed. 7 day trial for the hosted version.

The Point of Laziness in Programing Languages - gus_massa http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/the-real-point-of-laziness/ ====== ScottBurson _variables in a lazy language range over computations, including the non- terminating computation, whereas in a strict language they range only over values_ This is a very interesting comment that I am not sure I believe. Let me acknowledge up front that I am aware that the author is a Haskell expert, and I am not anything resembling one. So this comment is definitely from an interested-onlooker perspective. Still, from what little I know, it seems to me that variables in Haskell still range over values, not over computations. For instance, the expression "x == y" is not true when x and y are the same computation; it is true when those computations yield the same value. I understand that operationally, those values may not be computed until needed for the equality test, and I understand that the computation of one of them may not terminate; but I still don't see how that means that the variables range over computations. What am I missing? ~~~ Periodic Let's say you have a type that's a value of a typeclass Typeable that has a function "a -> String" (the real Typeable class has the signature "a -> TypeRep) which tells you that type of the argument. Let's now say I define some data type: data Foo = Foo and make it an instance of typeable. instance Typeable Foo where typeOf _ = "Foo" Note that the function doesn't actually care what's in it. The following is all valid: > typeOf (Foo) "Foo" > typeOf (undefined :: Foo) -- making an bottom value of type Foo "Foo" > typeOf (let f y = if y then Foo else f y in f False) -- not terminating computation. "Foo" All three of these are valid variables. They may be stored as thunk, and only when you try to extract the value of the thunk do they cause errors. It is still perfectly valid to pass them around as values and store them. ~~~ ScottBurson See my reply to happy4crazy. Your examples are interesting, but I still think that to say that _bottom_ is an element of every Haskell type is to commit a level confusion. It would be more accurate to simply say that expressions and variables in Haskell don't always have values. What your examples show is simply that the language is not strict: an expression can have a value even if one of its subexpressions does not. In mathematics, we don't have this notion of a variable with no value, so to write a formal semantics for Haskell we have to make up this "meta-value" _bottom_. But it should not be confused with a value in the language, as it is not one. Again, this is all my intuition and I'm not an expert. But so far, I don't see what's wrong with this view. ~~~ Periodic In comparison to math, I think bottom is very close to the idea of an undefined value. What is the value of 4/0? What is the derivative of a step function at 0? Mathematics often goes out of its way to make sure things aren't undefined by defining domains that exclude the undefined values. In programming we do the same thing most of the time. I think what I missed is that bottom in Haskell is really an exception. It's a value that doesn't really exist. Trying to force it gives an exception. The real results of a computation are concrete values, non-termination and exceptions.

Kotlin 1.1 Released with JavaScript Support, Coroutines and more - lynfogeek https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/03/kotlin-1-1/ ====== WkndTriathlete A few weeks ago I wrote the same application four times in four different JVM languages: Java, Groovy, Scala, and Kotlin, with a particular focus on the application using functional techniques and types as well as being reactive. I also included as goals complete test coverage with a preferred test framework from each language and complete build tooling, all within a single Gradle project. The only significant sources of variance were the following: a) Groovy's support for functional programming is starting to show its age. It worked with everything, though. b) The Scala 2.12 compiler has at least one bug that appears to affect its interaction with Java 8 lambdas (in particular, in at least one case expr.method() and (expr).method() will not pass the compiler's typecheck, but { val x = expr; x.method() } does. (All three pass IntelliJ's typechecker for Scala.) Outside of this (aggravating) issue and slower build times, it did work. c) Java works well with everything but ends up being quite verbose, especially in regards to a functional programming style (no surprise there). d) Kotlin (1.0) works well with everything and is relatively succinct except for Mockito due to everything defaulting to 'final' \- but it appears that Kotlin 1.1 fixes this with a compiler plugin. Based on my experience with all four languages, I would definitely try adding Kotlin to projects. It seems to be surprisingly mature and stable given how much less time it has spent in development (relative to the other three languages.) ~~~ Scarbutt Curious, if you were aiming at writing in a functional programming style, why didn't you try Clojure? ~~~ tormeh It doesn't have compile-time type checking. When many people say functional code they really mean code that can be and is strictly type checked at compile time. Clojure is functional, but it's not what most people want when they say "functional". ~~~ mlmlmasd Type-checking doesn't really have any bearing on weather a language is functional. Functional languages can be statically or dynamically typed. ~~~ Sammi It's one of the big differences between the lisp and ml types of functional languages I would say. Other than the parentheses that is of course :) I've never been comfortable doing big projects - multiple files, more than a few hundred lines of code - in a dynamically typed language. It's the same reason were seeing the big uptake of typescript. Statically typed languages give us so many superpowers when we need to do refactoring or any changes at all to an existing codebase. Just changing a function name in a dynamically typed language can be hell. Rearranging the parameter order is even worse, cause you have such trouble finding all of the function uses and where you need to update. With statically typed languages you get editor support for simple stuff like this and it becomes automatic and a push of a button almost. ~~~ mlmlmasd Static typing is great. My point is that whether a language is statically or dynamically typed has no bearing on whether it is functional. ------ vbezhenar Kotlin for me is Java made right. It's not complex, it has awesome interoperability with Java, it uses JDK, not reinventing its own wheels and it has everything I need from modern language. But it seems that Jetbrains has its own vision for Kotlin being a completely independent language. So while it works for me right now, I'm not sure if it will work in the future. They are going native and it'll bring a lot of changes, for sure. Honestly I would prefer it to stay as Java enhancer, as I'm not interested in Native and I need very little JavaScript interoperability, if any (probably just translating some common code between backend and frontend). But we will see, I don't want to sound too pessimistic. Kotlin is the best language I've used so far. ~~~ afastow I completely agree. Kotlin is close to the ideal language for me because it is just Java done right. If they want to go native and can do it without impairing any of the JVM usability, I guess go for it. But I don't see the point behind it. I don't develop native apps so maybe I just don't know enough, but it seems like Go and Rust have already satisfied the desire for modern natively compiled languages. I feel the same way about the Kotlin compiling to Javascript ability. I write both the frontend and backend of web apps so I theoretically should be the exact target market for Kotlin to Javascript but I have no interest in it. ES6 and/or Typescript work better there and have an entire ecosystem around them. And even if they didn't work for me I'd prefer Dart which targets the frontend first instead of being an extra like Kotlin Javascript. My advice to Kotlin: Stick with what you do best. Kotlin is on the exact right track on the JVM but I think all these different modes are going to make people more cautious about adopting it in any of them because they'll worry it's a jack of all trades but master of none. ~~~ meddlepal Personally I'm intrigued by Kotlin Native as a replacement for Python and Go tools without requiring the JVM. I find it's a fundamentally better language than both and so being able to write CLI tools and other smaller stuff in it would be nice while still being able to leverage Kotlin + JVM on the backend would also be nice. ~~~ jug Same - a common language for JVM, JS, Native is both unique and intriguing to me. These are three really big targets. It's not that it would be unique in being a higher level compiled language or a language making Java development more fun to me, but being a common languge for among the most popular targets besides .NET today. ~~~ tutanchamun Scala already does that with scala.js (production-ready) and scala-native (don't know if production-ready, probably not since it's only at 0.1 and they want to implement a better GC instead of relying on boehm like now). Just wanted to point that out in case you didn't know that already. ------ sandGorgon Kotlin is not just for android apps. Kotlin is getting first class support on next generation Spring web framework with functional programming support - [https://speakerdeck.com/sdeleuze/functional-web- applications...](https://speakerdeck.com/sdeleuze/functional-web-applications- with-kotlin-and-spring-5) it's almost done with first class support for vert.x which is a high- performance reactive webframework [https://github.com/vert-x3/vertx-kotlin- common](https://github.com/vert-x3/vertx-kotlin-common) The reactor project (erlang for the jvm?) is building first class support for kotlin [https://github.com/reactor](https://github.com/reactor) I think its going to be a great year for building backend systems on jvm. ~~~ asitdhal Kotlin is the best option for Android apps. There are many languages for backends and tons of libraries. But there is hardly any substitute of Java in Android(if you don't consider JS solving every problem in this planet). If JetBrains only concentrate on building an ecosystem for android, it can become "the real Swift for android". I built a dummy app for android in Kotlin. It was great. The same thing I tried in Scala(it didn't go very well). ------ grabcocque What I like about Kotlin is it's what you might call a "pragmatic Scala", and could find a sweet spot between Java and Scala where its added expressiveness allows it to shine, but Scala's complexity and performance issues aren't in evidence to scare the development managers into staying with Java. ~~~ Scarbutt _Scala 's complexity and performance issues_ Is Kotlin really faster than Scala? ~~~ grabcocque Scala's build times are legendarily horrible. Kotlin has similar compile times to Javac. ~~~ pjmlp They are working on improving them though, specially with Dotty. In any case they aren't as bad as C++ (at least until modules arrive). ~~~ smitherfield _> In any case they aren't as bad as C++_ Speaking as a fan of Scala, I find that scalac takes a noticeable amount of time even to compile trivial Hello World-type programs. Huge C++ codebases like Chromium or Boost take ages to compile, but I seriously doubt a comparable Scala codebase would be faster. ~~~ pjmlp I only dabbled a few times in Scala, but I do regularly use C++ on some side projects. Do Scala compilation times get measured in hours? Just the other day I gave up compiling Cocos2D-X, after it crossed the one hour threshold on my humble dual core, 8GB. ~~~ smitherfield I also haven't used Scala at scale enough to say; the incremental compilation story is much better than templated C++ but I think compiling a large codebase from scratch would be quite slow, and slower than templated C++. I think any design for generics that provides the same guarantees as C++ templates (type-safe, resolved at compile-time, value types aren't boxed) is necessarily going to cause long compilation times. The only other implementation I know of that checks all three boxes is Rust's, and so far generic Rust is even slower to compile than templated C++. ~~~ pjmlp > I think any design for generics that provides the same guarantees as C++ > templates (type-safe, resolved at compile-time, value types aren't boxed) is > necessarily going to cause long compilation times. This isn't true of Ada, Modula-3 or Eiffel generics. As for Rust, yes their compilation story still needs some improvements, but they still need to enable incremental compilation and cargo is yet to be able to handle binary dependencies across projects. Where I suffered more in C++ compilation times was building the latest versions from either Swift or Rust, LLVM just takes ages to compile. Thankfully I mostly use C++ as helping hand for Java/.NET. ~~~ smitherfield _> This isn't true of Ada, Modula-3 or Eiffel generics._ I'm not familiar with those languages, but it appears that Eiffel and Modula-3 generics only work with boxed (implemented as pass-by-reference) types, and Eiffel doesn't have pass-by-value types at all. It does look like Ada generics fulfil those three conditions. ~~~ pjmlp In Eiffel, a value type is known as an _expanded_ class and it can be given as default class attribute, or when declaring a variable. So generic instantiation will do the right thing depending on the class attributes. Modula-3 supports value types just like any Algol language, you just need to provide the types you want when instatiating a generic module interface. Modula-3 generics work at module level. Here is an example for numeric types, with a generic module for all numeric operations: [https://github.com/modula3/cm3/blob/d31f6ca184c66755317ba990...](https://github.com/modula3/cm3/blob/d31f6ca184c66755317ba990a2bd6fb2f0af7f0c/m3-libs/m3core/src/word/GenWord.ig) Specialized to LONGINT. [https://github.com/modula3/cm3/blob/d31f6ca184c66755317ba990...](https://github.com/modula3/cm3/blob/d31f6ca184c66755317ba990a2bd6fb2f0af7f0c/m3-libs/m3core/src/word/Long.i3) [https://github.com/modula3/cm3/blob/d31f6ca184c66755317ba990...](https://github.com/modula3/cm3/blob/d31f6ca184c66755317ba990a2bd6fb2f0af7f0c/m3-libs/m3core/src/word/LongRep.i3) It is a bit convoluted, but it isn't easy to track down a simple example. ------ mwcampbell I wonder how Kotlin's JavaScript backend compars to Scala.js in Li Haoyi's list of fundamental reasons for betting on Scala.js: [http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/FromfirstprinciplesWhyIbetonScal...](http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/FromfirstprinciplesWhyIbetonScalajs.html) I have a few concerns about Kotlin's JS backend: How much can the complete JS bundle be optimized by an advanced whole-program optimizer like the Google Closure Compiler? Kotlin for JS has no reflection, and I think JetBrains should _not_ look into that as they said they are. But is there powerful compile-time code generation instead, e.g. through annotation processors? Is there, or will there be, a healthy ecosystem of pure-Kotlin libraries that can be used with both the JVM and JS? ~~~ bashor_ > How much can the complete JS bundle be optimized by an advanced whole- > program optimizer like the Google Closure Compiler? JavaScript backend generates code understandable by static analyzers so it can be optimized. Anyway, we going to continue works in this area in near future. > Kotlin for JS has no reflection, and I think JetBrains should not look into > that as they said they are. But is there powerful compile-time code > generation instead, e.g. through annotation processors? Why do you think that reflection is a bad idea? Honestly, we don't have a final decision about it, it requires investigations and discussions. Note it's very important for us to have an ability to provide good tools (e.g IDE support) for features. > Is there, or will there be, a healthy ecosystem of pure-Kotlin libraries > that can be used with both the JVM and JS? We will work on it. ~~~ mwcampbell > Why do you think that reflection is a bad idea? OK, reflection isn't necessarily a bad idea. Clearly development tools need it, including future tools that run in the browser (e.g. an in-browser IDE). But I think that applications that are not development tools should not use reflection, because it interferes with static optimization, as the article that I linked in my original comment explains. So most libraries should probably not use reflection either. That means we need an alternative to reflection. For example, chapter 10 of _Kotlin in Action_ uses reflection to implement a serialization library. I think it would be better to use build- time code generation for that, even outside the JS use case (e.g. reflection interfers with optimization of Android app packages with ProGuard). Edit: By the way, thanks for taking the time to respond. ------ danneu For fun, I've been working on a simple hobby web server in Kotlin that wraps Jetty: [https://github.com/danneu/kog](https://github.com/danneu/kog) I think Kotlin is the statically-typed language I've been waiting for, especially with the team's interest in native and JS targets. ~~~ Scarbutt Do you have any opinions on Kotlin vs Clojure? are you liking Kotlin more? ~~~ danneu I think static typing + solid IDE support is too useful to pass up, and that's what Kotlin has. But Kotlin also has simplicity that, for example, Scala doesn't. I tried Clojure after spending a couple months with Scala and giving up, and then I used Clojure fulltime for 3+ years. Eventually, I felt like I was hitting a ceiling with Clojure since it lacked good static analysis. I moved to Node because I felt like, if I'm going to use a dynamically-typed language, I might as well use the ubiquitous one. Also, Clojure was a hard sell to other developers I would meet. What Clojure does have is an ecosystem of simplicity that I hope the Kotlin ecosystem will adopt. For example, compare ztellman's [http://aleph.io/](http://aleph.io/) (Clojure) to Java's Netty or to the somewhat mind-numbing [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/concurre...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/CompletionStage.html). And compare Clojure's Ring to any Java web framework. Even Spark, Java's simplest option afaict, doesn't have real middleware, just before/after "filters". That's why I went with the `(Request) -> Response` signature over the `(Request, Response) -> Unit` signature. There's also ClojureScript's integration and tooling which are pretty impressive these days while Kotlin's JS support is still fledgling. Though these are the impressions of someone who has only been using Kotlin for a few months without a Java background. And it's not like anyone should be using my lil framework in production, it's just a hobby. ~~~ cutler Clojure and Kotlin are, for me, the brightest stars in the JVM sky. However, I fear Clojure adoption has peaked at its current low rate probably because it was never aimed at the corporate Java world as Kotlin is. Clojure appeals more to the software artisan which is a valuable niche in itself but its syntax, which is its strength, is so different from Java's that I think it is rarely seen as an alternative to Java. ------ dep_b I wouldn't touch Java if I could write something in Kotlin instead. I'm using Swift on a daily base and while it still has it's issues (compile times, breaking changes) it's a great language to work in and extremely similar to Kotlin. Better type safety means less crashes. ------ meddlepal I've been very happy writing Kotlin backend code for the last fourteen months or so. Definitely excited. It's an awesome JVM language. ~~~ agumonkey I'm investigating Kotlin. Do you have references, blogs etc to suggest ? ~~~ Larrikin Through this blog [https://antonioleiva.com/kotlin/](https://antonioleiva.com/kotlin/) And his book I was able to become fairly productive in the language in only a few weeks. I was familiar with Scala however. The automatic conversion of java to Kotlin in Intelli J's IDEs also helped immensely. ------ afastow The post specifically mentions using Kotlin Javascript to develop React applications. Are there any simple examples out there showing this? I'm not seeing any after a quick google search and look through the docs. Developing a modern frontend app is complex enough with Javascript or Typescript. It's pretty hard to ask people to figure it out from scratch in Kotlin by just saying that it's possible but not showing how. ~~~ Teedee753 It was mentioned on the Kotlin slack that Jetbrains would make some examples available within a few weeks on using Kotlin JS including using it with React. ------ netcraft kotlinjs is very interesting to me - anyone have experience with writing kotlin and typescript and can compare? ------ curyous Why couldn't they have used "func" for functions, like so many languages do, instead of "fun"? ~~~ richard_todd I don't think of 'func' as a standard. Off the top of my head, you can see "defun", "fn", "def", "function", and on and on in various languages. I don't see much agreement across the board. ~~~ netcraft does anyone know of a place that compares syntax like this across languages? I've found myself often wondering if there is consensus for certain features or syntax. ~~~ chocolateboy [http://rigaux.org/language-study/syntax-across- languages.htm...](http://rigaux.org/language-study/syntax-across- languages.html#FnctnFnctDfnt) ------ jbmorgado Does this mean we can now build a full React Native app using only Kotlin? ~~~ bashor_ We going to publish more materials about JavaScript in the next few weeks. Including with using React. ~~~ swsieber Will there be anything about angular? Also, is it possible to set up kotlin source code in gradle to compile both to JS and the JVM at the same time? I'm specificially thinking that it'd be nice to "share" code between front and backend for some logic and data model definitions.... I think that'd be a killer feature. ~~~ vorg If you can, make sure you write your Gradle build scripts in Kotlin also (possible since Gradle 3.0 was released 6 months ago) instead of Apache Groovy, then Kotlin will be the only language you need for anything!

Is it time to return to the medieval way of life on college campuses? - quinndupont http://chronicle.com/article/Getting-Medieval-on-Higher/126008/ ====== granite_scones I think there's some merit to this proposal, but it's too riddled with an infatuation with a certain brand of Christian monasticism for me to separate out what is good and what is bad. _"As we all know, for the virtuous student, college life has become a variation on The Temptation of Saint Anthony—a never-ending assault by the demons of gluttony, envy, sloth, lust, and pride."_ That's confusing "virtue" with something actually relevant to academic involvement. I agree there's a lot wrong with the current system, but it's not that students are having too much sex and sleeping in on. _"Members should cultivate nonviolence, humility, and ungrudging obedience to just authority. Speech should be used in moderation, and only for some purpose. Instead of gossiping at meals, edifying books are read aloud. There are no private possessions, only two meals a day, and vegetarianism is the norm. Clothing is simple, utilitarian, and uniform."_ That's not going to happen. Once again, we have some confusion between this weird form of self-denial with caring about education. It's perfectly possible to be committed to learning/research/etc. while still wanting to talk to your friends during dinner. This isn't even getting at the daily ritualistic prayer, the claim the current academic zeitgeist is "decadent", the fact that a lot of research requires expensive equipment, something unaccounted for under this scheme, the suggested "withdrawal" from the rest of the world, etc. EDIT: Not to mention, there's the problem of people with families. Does the rest of the family have to join in also? What about children? If they don't, how does the member provide for them? Are only single people allowed to join? What? ~~~ stcredzero _I agree there's a lot wrong with the current system, but it's not that students are having too much sex_ From what I saw, it's not that students were having too much sex. It's the combination of a lot of undirected lost souls who are not committed so something substantive (like learning/research) with a pervasive atmosphere of bacchanalia. I saw people go through many emotional wringers in school. _Once again, we have some confusion between this weird form of self-denial with caring about education._ I agree. I think it's perfectly possible to have an atmosphere which is contemplative without going towards asceticism. What's really needed is a shift in emphasis. _the fact that a lot of research requires expensive equipment, something unaccounted for under this scheme_ There's a lot of research and substantive work that doesn't require expensive equipment. For one thing, I would love some monasteries to become hosts for Google Summer of Code work. ~~~ joshkaufman The positive aspect of asceticism: such a place would have far less overhead. ------ icegreentea ...good luck? Engineering school makes even the most dedicated student wonder why they're even bothering at times. And now you'll take away getting laid, fucking off, bitching, and Starcraft. And you'll have them do additional manual labor on top of that. I think part of the reason these monasteries have such sterling reputations is cause we never hear about the failures. No one really bothered recording the number of people who joined, and then ran away, or even the number of successful for which monastic life was actually an improvement. I mean sure, you gotta read all these books, and plow a field, but at least you have a bed (albeit hard) and roof, and the lord isn't out to tax you all the time. ~~~ sskates "What would it be like if college students felt that they were called to a vocation rather than simply getting their tickets stamped so they can get middle-class jobs, if they are lucky?" You're not going to spawn Zuckberg, Obama, or the next cure for cancer and you'll fall behind China and India, while your kids wonder why they never got a shot at being the world leaders of tomorrow. Now I don't mean to say that there isn't value in learning for it's own sake- there is. You don't need to reshape education to do that though. Every student today has the ability to make these choices- like icegreentea said, they choose not to because they don't think it's valuable. ------ atgm I think that a more ascetic way of life would be good for many people, myself included -- when I get away from everything, it gives me time to think and refresh myself. On the other hand, the article seems to be going in a more insular direction, which I absolutely cannot agree with. Universities and colleges need to teach as a part of the world, not from ivory towers. The biggest problem with my alma mater is that it's very isolated geographically and that created a "bubble" where outside events didn't really penetrate beyond sports or a few political interest groups. ~~~ Alex3917 I think the ideal solution would be to adopt the deep springs model, where students do two years of monastic liberal arts education as described, and then finish off at a research university. I would have greatly preferred this over the actual college experience. ------ cma <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem> ~~~ arethuza One thing that the Cartasian maths did in Anathem was to effectively provide a civilization insurance policy by preserving knowledge, and a scientific mindset, through extended dark ages. In you look around and wonder what would happen if there was a general collapse of civil society you do have to wonder who and where the bodies of knowledge that we have collected over the last few thousand years would be preserved (right back to things like the Homeric epics - which have made it through two long dark ages). ~~~ prodigal_erik It reminds me of Hillis' observation that relics like the Dead Sea Scrolls are safe while lost but endangered by being found and put in a museum. <http://longnow.org/essays/millennium-clock/> ~~~ gjm11 Well, of course the relics _that we've discovered_ were safe while they were lost. Because otherwise we wouldn't have discovered them. That doesn't mean that being lost is safer than being in a museum. (Perhaps it _is_ , but where's the evidence?) ~~~ pbhjpbhj >(Perhaps it is, but where's the evidence?) The relics that were safe through social meltdowns and other problems are the evidence. There are pretty safe assumptions that lead to that position too - museums will get destroyed just as other municipal buildings would in a period of societal collapse. Imagine you're uneducated, living in what was a museum and need to build a fire ... If the artefacts are still safely ensconced in a not yet rediscovered cave then they're relatively safe. We get a lot of our historic information from ceramic and stone artifacts - I wonder what durable items we might pass down through the millenia? ~~~ allwein "If the artefacts are still safely ensconced in a not yet rediscovered cave then they're relatively safe." His point is that if a colony of insects happened into that cave a month after they were "safely ensconced" 500 years ago, then they wouldn't be there for us to find. Basically you're falling for survivorship bias. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias> ~~~ pbhjpbhj >Basically you're falling for survivorship bias. Yes some artifacts will be destroyed in caves. But we also know that artifacts won't be preserved in museums. Hence I said relatively safe. Clearly not all artifacts survive but we're sure that no artifacts remain in the Library of Alexandria (whether scrolls from there were saved or not, they weren't saved in the library). Yes I see that you can also argue that items in caves/other caches are also eventually removed or destroyed in situ but it is the preservation against rampaging hordes and systematic destruction that I was targetting. >That doesn't mean that being lost is safer than being in a museum. (Perhaps it is, but where's the evidence?) Obviously this is circumstantial evidence but I think that museums are simply too obvious to protect against certain things like looting in war or social collapse scenarios. ------ jhamburger I think we can all agree at least that the current 'college experience' goes a little to far in the other extreme. I'd argue that at this point its actually a step backward from adulthood. High school student: -Wakes up at 6am, Juggles school, extracurriculars, home responsibilities, social life, holds a part-time job college student: -Doesn't change out of pajamas until it's time to go to the bar. ~~~ arethuza Actually for me university was exactly where I learned self discipline because the opportunities to go off the rails were just so available - after coming with a hair's breadth of being thrown out I turned myself around and ended up with excellent marks and a first. In some ways the very availability of distractions is part of the strengths of a traditional university education. ------ aphyr When would I have had _time_ for significant manual labor in college? Ask a grad student working 72 hours a week in the lab to grow their own food instead of snarfing down ramen at their desk, and see how much research gets done. :/ ~~~ jrmg Part of his proposal is that people would never be forced to leave. I suspect that many grad students would trade a year or two longer researching at a more relaxed pace, combined with some less intellectually intense manual labor, for how things work now. ~~~ aphyr Ah yes. Five to eight years of phd and another three of postdoc was just getting me to the nonexistent job market for scientists _too darn fast_. ;-) ------ bd_at_rivenhill _Another corrupting influence—anxiety over college costs—could be removed entirely by making our institutions self-sustaining through productive labor._ The author is ignoring a significant advantage that actual monasteries and convents have on this point: they are exempt from taxes by law and longstanding tradition. It's not clear that an institution lacking this advantage could really become economically self-sufficient. ~~~ rdouble Colleges and universities are also exempt from taxation. Harvard University pays no tax on its endowment gains or property. ------ brendano <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College> ~~~ waterlesscloud I got a mailing from them way back when I was graduating high school. I looked at it over and over, but was never bold enough to actually apply to such a non-traditional school. I think that was a big mistake on my part. Still think about that choice on a regular basis, many years later. ------ hugh3 I have, on occasion, wanted to start a monastic order of really well dressed physicists. So many scientists are so poorly dressed, I just want to start an order where you _must_ be impeccably dressed in an expensive suit and tie at all times. ~~~ pbhjpbhj >you must be impeccably dressed in an expensive suit and tie at all times Why? What is it about this attire that makes you want to do that. All I can see is that such dress is an attempt to feel superior over others and that your belonging to such a group would allow for the feeling of superiority without the effort of intellectual advancement? ~~~ hugh3 Not really, I just like nice clothes. And I like to wear nice clothes. And I feel silly wearing nice clothes when surrounded by others who aren't wearing nice clothes. One could, however, think of it as a discipline thing. If you wear a perfectly pressed suit you're less likely to slouch. And if you're less likely to slouch, maybe you're less likely to be sloppy in your thoughts, so your research might be better. Then again, maybe your research would wind up being worse because a suit feels so conformist. Who knows? But it would be a worthwhile experiment. ~~~ pbhjpbhj >Then again, maybe your research would wind up being worse because a suit feels so conformist. Who knows? But it would be a worthwhile experiment. Or maybe it wouldn't matter because you're just you with different textiles covering (or not) your naked body. ------ kd0amg This whole thing feels like a solution to a problem that's already been solved. If students want to decide where to go to school based on academic strength rather than the gym facilities and sports teams, they are already free to do so. I know a lot of students who would rather stay home and read than party all night, so that's what they do. Attaining the mind-oriented domestic life described later is mostly a matter of finding the right people to live with. ------ bd_at_rivenhill _...college life has become a variation on The Temptation of Saint Anthony—a never-ending assault by the demons of gluttony, envy, sloth, lust, and pride._ Hell, I thought everybody already understood that this was actually the point of college, but I will defer to Frank Zappa on this one: _If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library._ ------ cafard Are we talking about the nominal regulations, or the way things actually ran? Cf. Chaucer, Rabelais, and the Goliardic poems for some information on the latter. Gutenberg's version of Rabelais is a very old translation, but I append a sample anyway: Going from Bourges, he came to Orleans, where he found store of swaggering scholars that made him great entertainment at his coming, and with whom he learned to play at tennis so well that he was a master at that game. For the students of the said place make a prime exercise of it; and sometimes they carried him unto Cupid's houses of commerce (in that city termed islands, because of their being most ordinarily environed with other houses, and not contiguous to any), there to recreate his person at the sport of poussavant, which the wenches of London call the ferkers in and in. As for breaking his head with over-much study, he had an especial care not to do it in any case, for fear of spoiling his eyes. Which he the rather observed, for that it was told him by one of his teachers, there called regents, that the pain of the eyes was the most hurtful thing of any to the sight. For this cause, when he one day was made a licentiate, or graduate in law, one of the scholars of his acquaintance, who of learning had not much more than his burden, though instead of that he could dance very well and play at tennis, made the blazon and device of the licentiates in the said university, saying, So you have in your hand a racket, A tennis-ball in your cod-placket, A Pandect law in your cap's tippet, And that you have the skill to trip it In a low dance, you will b' allowed The grant of the licentiate's hood. ~~~ blahblahblah Very good point. This article fits quite well in the category of "nostalgia for a simpler age that never really existed." ------ raghava I studied in a JNV (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawahar_Navodaya_Vidyalaya>), from class 6th till class 12th; those were the best days of my life. All that I am today, is because of my stay in the vidyalaya. I guess the article linked above speaks of a similar life in an institute, but for higher education. Such a model would only work if the students in that place are of such ideological disposition that they do not find all the fancy stuff fun. I was once asked what I'd do if I had a 100 million, by some sheer luck or something. My answer was that I would anonymously buy a huge stretch of land in a remote area somewhere near the Western Ghats/Himalayas (India) and start a zen monastery type of institute for sciences; frugal(with Internet/infrastructure) in nature but strict in admissions, with no age limit for members. No fee whatsoever for the students, boarding and lodging included. A centre for higher education in science and technology, modeled after JNVs. And I would try joining that institute as a student, taking admission tests. ------ dspeyer _Bring together a core group of serious-minded but underemployed academics—who already have adopted a life of poverty ... instead of preparing students to leave the institution, we encouraged some of them to stay, joining us in work and reflection._ Sounds like a typical grad school. ------ wisty Why would anybody want to copy an education system that arguably set Europe back 1000 years? ~~~ jonah Well, how about the one that preserved knowledge through the dark ages then? ~~~ NickPollard Isn't a lot of modern academic opinion turning against the idea of any kind of significant 'dark age' actually having occurred in Europe? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages> ~~~ arethuza They seem to be avoiding the term "Dark Age" but there is no doubt that there was a huge collapse in the infrastructure of civil society and technology after the Western Empire ended. Note that there was also an earlier Bronze Age "Dark Age" in Eastern Europe: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_collapse>

Ask HN: What's your preferred method of learning something completely new? - rxsel ====== giantg2 I like to have a useful goal. It helps me find purpose and complete the task. Then I might do some reading or other research to learn the basics. Then I try to do whatever it is. I evaluate how it went and do more research to make improvements. For example, I want to grow mushrooms. First I start with a grow your own kit. Then I read a book by an expert. Then I bought mushroom plugs for logs. Now I built some equiptment, learned sterile techniques, and I am culturing mushrooms to create my own mushroom plugs.

Business Insider Is Losing Money but Growing Fast - jhonovich http://recode.net/2016/03/05/business-insider-is-losing-money-and-growing-fast-thats-why-axel-springer-valued-it-at-over-400-million/ ====== jhonovich "Business Insider lost $11.9 million on $42.4 million in sales last year. Despite the loss, Axel says BI’s revenue rose 41 percent from the previous year" A $400 million valuation for this. Axel will need a miracle for this deal to turn out to be financially positive.

Learnings from having Mailchimp ask me to kindly leave. - mise http://www.eteanga.ie/mailchimp-asked-me-to-leave/ ====== nopassrecover Sounds like there should be some recalibration of those figures for small lists. Typical on-target mailouts for small businesses (1000-3000) are usually accompanied by at least a couple opt-outs based on the content no longer being relevant / changed interests, but I'd hardly call the list spam. ------ gus_massa There is something strange in this story. Despite the double opt-in nature of mailing list subscription, it may not have been clear enough that ebook == mailing list. Perhaps some of the people didn't want to subscribe to the mailing list after all, ~~~ mise Yes, that's what I thought. They were told "Sign up for our mailing list and get a free ebook" in the text. The header was "Ebook - [title]". And then a big email input box with a submit button. But after that, they still had to double-confirm their subscription by clicking on an email link sent by Mailchimp.

Apple Sues Nexus One Maker HTC - budu3 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/technology/03patent.html?ref=technology ====== invisible The problem is Apple didn't really INVENT[1][2][3] the concept and technology for multi-touch. They just implemented the first realized product (in a phone). So what if they filed a patent for that product? It doesn't mean it wasn't an obvious technological concept. 1) <http://www.macworld.com/article/49738/2006/03/interface.html> 2) [http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html) 2) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface> ------ michaelkeenan Paul Graham wrote an essay on software patents in 2006. I found it helpful to get an overview of the wider issue: <http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html> I wonder whether this part is relevant: "When you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller ones, it's usually a big company on the way down, grasping at straws. For example, Unisys's attempts to enforce their patent on LZW compression. When you see a big company threatening patent suits, sell. When a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign they've lost the real battle, for users." ~~~ loganfrederick Paul's thoughts are in the right direction. To extend his writing (to apply to this situation), if a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign they've lost the battle for users or fear that they will and are attempting to preemptively kill the competition. ------ kgrin Among the more absurd patent claims being litigated: "Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image" Seriously? I'm not sure if it's a step above or a step below one-click, but it sure as hell ain't far from it. ~~~ stse Also Neonode did this back in 2004/2005 with the N1. Apple's patent is a month old. Demo @ <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-KS2kfIr0#t=4m00s> Edit: from question to statement. ~~~ vaporstun The date Apple received the patent is very different from when they filed the patent, or even when they first came up with the idea. So in spite of the fact that it's a bit absurd, it is inaccurate to claim that anyone who had a lock screen more than a month old constitutes prior art. ~~~ ZeroGravitas However if you read it (though, IANAL) you'll see that it is a direct translation of lock screens from standard phones to those with touchscreens. It's on the same level as a patent for "standard thing X but with a computer", or "X on the internet", now it's "X with a touchscreen". ------ jsz0 Looks like a straight forward patent money grab. Apple just has to win on a few of these patents to negotiate a license fee with HTC. With one win under their belt they can extend it to other handset makers without too much trouble. All the sudden Apple is making some money off every cell phone sold as dumb phones disappear and get replaced by SmartPhones (or they just get smarter and infringe) Obviously Apple would never license iPhone OS to third parties so this seems like an attempt to simply license some of the technologies instead. I don't know the math but just based on the huge volume of cell phone sales alone it's gotta be worth a ton of money. If Apple loses in court other handset makers just continue to use these technologies and nothing changes. Unfortunately that's how the system works. Apple share holders were probably not too happy about the prospect of leaving all that money on the table. ------ Batsu My curiosity is who declared war on who in the Google v. Apple nonsense. Just a little over a months ago, Steve Jobs took some jabs at Google, calling them out on their motto ("Don't be evil") and saying they want to kill the iPhone with Android.[1] Now we have Apple suing HTC over Android devices - glancing over the documents[2] "HTC Android Products" is mentioned over and over and over, though WinMo phones are cited as well. In the past, Google has intentionally removed features from Android in respect to Apple's patents, even at Apple's request[3]. This isn't exactly the case now, which is why I'm asking the question... did Google start adding in these patent infringing features first, or did Apple feel threatened first? I don't think it's a coincidence that HTC is the largest manufacturer of Android handsets. Is it possible that Apple foresees a significant loss in market share over the coming years and wants to stem the flow? [1]: [http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be- evil-...](http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be-evil-mantra- is-bullshit-adobe-is-lazy-apples-steve-jobs/) [2]: [http://documents.nytimes.com/apple-patent-lawsuit-against- ht...](http://documents.nytimes.com/apple-patent-lawsuit-against-htc#p=1) [3]: [http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/02/09/apple-asked- google...](http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/02/09/apple-asked-google-not- to-use-multi-touch-in-android-and-google-complied/) ~~~ jkincaid I believe that Apple 'declared war' first, when it began rejecting Google's iPhone applications last summer. First it rejected Latitude, then it rejected Google Voice, which is when things really started to get nasty. Google has been slightly more subtle with its shots back. It released Navigation for Android, which I strongly doubt will be making it to the iPhone any time soon. It acquired AdMob before Apple could. And then it launched its own phone (less subtle, that one). I'm curious how early Jobs found out about Google's plans for the Nexus One. I'm sure such devices take a long time to make, and if he heard last spring/summer that Google was making its own phone, that might have sparked all of this. That's just speculation though. ------ sofal I don't understand this patent world. From everything I've read, it is obvious to me that I could get about 5 patents out of every casual conversation I have with my fellow grad students each day. Is everyone in the judicial system completely oblivious to this insanity? ~~~ dagw Accepting patents is a lot less paper work for the patent office than rejecting a patent. You need to give a good reason to reject a patent, but no reason to accept a patent. Their basic operating theory seems to be accept them all and let the lawyers sort it out. ------ Auzy It seems to be more of an attempt to attract attention. Synaptic were working on Multitouch sensors before Apple Patented, and researchers have been for years before Apple too. And looking at the patents, they are obvious. Hopefully Apple don't win this. ~~~ danudey The issue is that Apple hasn't patented multitouch; they've patented heuristic algorithms to determine gestures based on multitouch input (the '949 patent'). That's why all Android phones (and the Palm Pre) shipped with multitouch- capable screens, but no multitouch-capable software (until the recent Nexus One update). ------ greenlblue Nobody wins in these things except the lawyers. Also, at this point Apple is starting to look like a 5 year old baby throwing a temper tantrum. The negative publicity with the app store combined with taking jabs at google just makes them look really bad. ------ ortusdux Would it be smart of Google to buy HTC? Many people speculated that YouTube would have been sued to oblivion had Google not bought them. ~~~ rbrcurtis its funny you say that, because I remember everyone saying that youtube was going to get sued into oblivion as soon as it was obtained by a company with deep enough pockets to make it worthwhile. ~~~ romland The deeper the pocket is, the further away the oblivion is. ------ sofal Earlier conversation on this topic: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161467> ------ nikils Reminds of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation) ~~~ mark_h That was about copyright though, this is about patents. ------ j23tom As we see it's not true that corporations buy patents 'just in case'. It's nice tool to axe the enemy :)

Why does programming suck? - stepanhruda https://medium.com/@luisobo/why-does-programming-suck-6b253ebfc607 ====== icambron Here's the thing: everything sucks. Every industry, profession, even hobby is full of seemingly arbitrary limitations, poor tooling, quirky hacks you have to work around, little bits of required know-how that seem ancillary to the central goals. Ask your friends in other engineering disciplines, politics and public policy of all kinds, finance, medicine, and energy. Everything sucks because the world is complicated and path dependency calls the shots. The question to ask is whether things are getting better or worse. And things in programming are getting emphatically better! For all the incidental complexity and pointless thrashing about [1], almost everything about writing software is better than it was just _10 years ago_ , which is not a very long time. The people who say things like "nothing ever changes" or "we're just reinventing old technology" have some seriously rose-tinted glasses. It's _so_ much easier to do just about everything. The tools are better, the hardware is better, the quantity and quality of information is better. And we have better, bigger software doing more important things, which is why the industry is doing so well. The sky is doing the opposite of falling. That isn't to say there isn't room for improvement, or that complaining about broken things is wrong. That lets us keeping fixing things. It's more that "everything is broken and stupid" isn't a very useful lens, and leads to fool's errands like this: > It’s time to kill the aimless, bottom-up, ad-hoc incrementalism in > programming in favor of purposeful, top-bottom and planned innovation. I'll stick to my massive pile of working software that solves real problems, warts and all. And I'll continue to help improve it wherever I can so that it works better. [1] I joked recently that Javascript library developers would be more efficient if they had their CI servers deprecate their APIs automatically before releasing them ~~~ acqq > leads to fool's errands like this: >> It’s time to kill the aimless, bottom-up, ad-hoc incrementalism in programming in favor of purposeful, top-bottom and planned innovation. Agree. Let the author put his money where his mouth is first, then we can discuss where he's right. He wants programming to be "easier." Well everybody wants everything easier. It's easy to have just one thing easy scarifying other dependencies. But the limitations exist everywhere. And it was damn hard to even come this far and maintain the state we are here now: Louis C.K's take: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E) ~~~ q-base Loved the Louis C.K video! Are any of his shows based somewhat around this topic or is it only on this talk show that he talks about this? ~~~ acqq > Are any of his shows based somewhat around this topic Not that I know. It wouldn't be appropriate for a general audience he targets. Anyway, there's a pattern, as soon as almost every stand up comedian becomes reasonably successful he starts to travel a lot by plane and the gags start to revolve about that. We just got lucky with his take to make it meta enough, recognizable and hilarious at the same time. ------ ghodss One of the premises of this article - that "competing standards" exist primarily because of political reasons or shallow decision making - demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of software engineering. Sure, some engineers (especially junior ones) enjoy reinventing the wheel more than using something that already exists to solve users' problems. We all like to trick ourselves into thinking we're unique snowflakes (this problem extends into our personal lives as well). But more often than not, when multiple popular standards emerge, it's because there are _legitimate engineering tradeoffs_ that are being made. JSON vs. XML? XML is far more capable but complex. JSON is far simpler but less capable. Sometimes when you're delivering value to customers, you need that extra complexity, so you use XML. Other times you don't need it so you use JSON. It has nothing to do with ego or politics. Multiple different JSON libraries? One may prioritize ease of use to get up and running, the other may prioritize strong typing for serialization speed. One may prioritize strict compliance with the spec, the other might prioritize speed above all else. JSON vs. a binary format? JSON is more readily compatible and easier to debug. Binary is faster but more complex to setup. It goes on and on. Again, sometimes competing standards or libraries or languages emerge because of political or capitalistic concerns. But usually when you're talking about competing open standards, there are multiple because there are legitimate engineering tradeoffs being made because engineering is not a one-size-fits- all science. (Few sciences are, otherwise they wouldn't still have people working on them.) When an open source project rejects a contribution, or five projects exist to solve the same problem, they're often making legitimate engineering tradeoffs that are in no way arbitrary, and any one project would suffer to try to be every thing to every person. The article in question doesn't even point out a single example of a set of standards or libraries that are entirely arbitrary in their differences or could be collapsed into one solution, which further highlights how this is a theoretical argument, not a practical one. ~~~ luisobo author here. Thanks for your comment. I clarified that "Sometimes" the causes are political, it used to say "Usually". But if after a 30 minute read you picked up on a stupid example and you started a discussion on XML vs JSON you are just proving my point. The expectation in the 60s was that machines will figure out protocol, even make protocol, on the fly, by asking about each other. Yet, you want to have another discussion about XML and JSON. ~~~ icebraining Machines do figure out the protocol on the fly by asking each other; see the Accept and Upgrade headers in HTTP, for example. Of course, HTTP is itself a protocol, because you can't "ask each other", or do any kind of communication at all, without a common protocol to start with. As for making protocols on the fly, that makes roughly as much sense as two people inventing their own language to talk to each other. ~~~ luisobo And of course, since it doesn't make sense to you, it is impossible. Turns out that people invented their own language by talking to each other. ~~~ icebraining I never said it was impossible. ------ rl3 It's worth mentioning that Chris Granger wrote an excellent blog post[0] that's similar to this one, but far more succinct. While I don't use Light Table, I'm still a huge fan regardless. > _What would programming be to you in an ideal world?_ More visual, especially when observing execution. When you're debugging anything non-synchronous—be it events, messaging, distributed systems—it usually sucks, even in the rare case that you do have good tooling. I'd like to create, view and debug my code in an almost entirely visual fashion. I want to see events and messages perfuse through the structure of what I'm building, with complete temporal control of the view. [0] [http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/03/27/toward-a-better- prog...](http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/03/27/toward-a-better-programming/) ~~~ arethuza By "more visual" do you mean diagrams? ~~~ rl3 Pretty much. One ideal might be for a flow chart to come alive and actually be the structure of your application itself, rather than just a reference or an aid. I suppose that while visual programming excels at conveying topology and structure, it can be weak at a low level due to the tedium involved. Traditional code is arguably better suited for low-level grunt work, at least for most people. A hybrid solution might be best. For example: a message travels from one high- level visual entity to another, and you'd easily be able to drill down into the code comprising those entities, locating the exact lines responsible for emission or receipt. ~~~ acqq This is the most famous big attempt for visual approach up to now (first time standardized 1997), and the recent (2013) results are: [http://oro.open.ac.uk/35805/8/UML%20in%20practice%208.pdf](http://oro.open.ac.uk/35805/8/UML%20in%20practice%208.pdf) "Even if UML is viewed as the ‘de facto’ standard, it is by no means universally adopted. The majority of those interviewed simply do not use UML, and those who do use it tend to do so selectively and often informally." "They also highlight some of the fundamental tensions within UML, resonating with arguments [8], [25], [17] that UML’s intended strengths (i.e., generality, accommodating different levels of abstraction) are intimately associated with its observed weaknesses (e.g., latent complexity, issues of transformation and coordination between views) and arise from fundamental properties of UML (e.g. lack of formal semantics, separation of expressions of structure and behavior)." Whatever we do next, we have a nice set of examples and case studies of "what can go wrong." The specific software tools based on UML are especially good examples of the problems. ~~~ rl3 While I'm not terribly familiar with UML, I was under the impression that it's primarily a modeling language, not necessarily a visual programming implement. As far as I'm aware, most visual programming today is actually implemented in the form of node-based editors, which gained popularity in the film and visual effects industries well over a decade ago. The best modern examples I can think of are probably Nuke[0] and UE4's Blueprint[1] system. [0] [https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/](https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/) [1] [https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/E...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/Editor/index.html) ~~~ acqq I've tried this, some two decades ago: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software) "The development of Rose 2.0 combined a Windows-based Booch notation editor called Object System Designer (acquired from Wisconsin-based Palladio) with a new intermediate representation, and with new semantic analysis, code generation, and reverse engineering capabilities. The latter, which allowed prospective customers to analyze existing C++ code to produce "as-built" navigable class diagrams, helped overcome Rational's late re-entry into the market for object-oriented modeling tools. Rose 2.0 ran on Windows PCs and on several Unix-based workstations." It wasn't usable, except to be used in the projects doomed to fail. Or spend a lot of money. Which is something a goal of the managers. But it still can't be named a success. ~~~ luisobo Author here. Thanks for the discussion. UML didn't pick up for whatever reason and visual programming fell into the valley of deception. I expect that with more UI/UX research we can get to the plateau of productivity in the next decade. Btw, there is a variant of UML that is executable. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_UML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_UML) ~~~ acqq > there is a variant of UML that is executable. If you believe it's a good way, you should certainly go that way. Please write about your experiences afterwards. Rose 2.0, I've mentioned and quoted explicitly, produced the code from the diagrams (that's the "code generation" from the quote). And it was tragedy. Maybe you find somebody's experiences on the web. ~~~ arethuza "And it was tragedy." That sounds quite positive compared to my experiences with code generated from UML. ------ bonobo3000 In the ideal world, i would program purely at the level of a sugared lambda calculus, free of trivial things like runtime,memory use,network latencies,serialization,platform incompatibilities,dependency management,string encoding/decoding issues <so many others>. Basically everything that makes programming different from math. However, programming may be lambda calculus at a theoretical level, but execution is a turing machine. All these little real world things that can be abstracted away in abstractions(!!), have to be unabstracted to meet a bunch of very real NAND gates somewhere, limited memory, resources etc. Thats one reason it "sucks", but thats why its engineering and not math. Maybe one day computers will just be so powerful that we can afford to treat memory as infinite, runtime as infinitesimal, and build all the abstractions we want for free - then programming will be done :) In this fun world, when i want to build something ill just draw a bunch of squiggly boxes and describe an alarmingly underspecified thingy i want done. Then the program will automatically figure out all possible inputs, quickly perform a "32 questions" kind of thing and resolve any ambiguity, then produce code. Managers will once again be confused why "adding this textbox is so hard", but this time they will be right - i will just tell lambda to go make a textbox. ~~~ luisobo author here. Thanks for your thought, I love it. ------ gldalmaso I would say that everything the author describes as facts that have led us to this "mess" are actual testments to how fucking amazing human ingenuity is. Look at everything we built out of arbitrary conventions of boolean logic that has real impact and is shapping the modern world! >> _The computer shifted the complexity of our solutions from the world of atoms to the world of ideas._ And that's fucking awesome! Thanks everyone that was part in making that a reality! Complexity can pile up in this new world, sure, but we are only starting to get our feet wet. Outside the boundaries of processing and storage, we are our only limitation. We can create things as complex as we can logically describe them. It's also incredibly difficult to create something that will acomodate everyone else's solutions. Software development is in its infancy. The fact that we can create absurd structures that still work is great because we can use them even if our skills are not mature enough to make truly elegant structures. Saying programming sucks and wishfull thinking does not help anyone. Not happy? Start hacking on the next thing! ~~~ luisobo Hi, author here. Thanks for your comment. >>The computer shifted the complexity of our solutions from the world of atoms to the world of ideas. >And that's fucking awesome! Thanks everyone that was part in making that a reality! I glad you are entertained with programming. I am too! but we should judge a tool like programming by its productivity, not by it's entertaining powers. > We can create things as complex as we can logically describe them. One of my points is that we can't. To make a single app facebook needs hundreds of engineers and it is still buggy. Humans are, yet again, the weaker link in software engineering. I believe we need fundamentally better tools. > It's also incredibly difficult to create something that will acomodate > everyone else's solutions. Agreed. I'd very happy with a tool that is not general purpose that could churn though CRUD systems (vast majority of systems our there) in a matter of hours without errors. If you want to something else like AI, or games or whathaveyou, use other tools built specifically for that or a programming language if none are available. That CRUD tool (gross oversimplification) could be expanded with new capabilities as long as we understand those new capabilities properly. > Saying programming sucks and wishfull thinking does not help anyone. Not > happy? Start hacking on the next thing! I am, thanks for the encouragement. ------ TurboHaskal Taking the creativity out of an inherently creative process. Imagine you're a painter and then comes some moron (who is probably not a painter) yelling at you: \- Why are you holding the brush that way? Also, I don't know that brand. \- You should make thinner strokes, and always start coloring the surroundings so you don't go over by mistake. \- Do not bother with the first brushes until you have a clear pencil sketch. Actually, here, use this one that I paid someone else to make. Limit yourself to add these colors. \- The painters at X draw ultra realistic portraits, that doesn't even look like a cow! Programming sucks because we need to eat. ~~~ wereHamster In pure software engineering there is much less creativity needed than most people want to admit. While the UI/UX people gather requirements and work with the client to work out how the app should look and behave, sure, they can use their imagination. But once the requirements are set then in many cases a software engineer can sit down and build the software. There is no creativity needed to decide whether to use a vector or a double linked list if you need to prioritise fast append and prepend. After all, if you break down software to its basic building blocks, it's all mathematics and logic. And there is no creativity in Mathematics. ~~~ cuillevel3 I think you confuse creativity (to create something new) with self- actualization and visual art. Programming is a craft, often used to create things which are really boring. Coders often like their craft, they like creating things, even if the final product is not important to them on a personal level. ~~~ wereHamster The result of the work is not boring (hopefully, for the sake of its users). But the process of getting there is rarely creative (in the sense of inventing something new). Most software engineers rarely need to come up with new data structures or fancy algorithms. Most of these things are already there, we just need to know which ones to pick in a particular situation and how to glue them together. ~~~ cuillevel3 It's perfectly fine to produce boring products. Data entry has never been fun, but it's needed. Creating new algorithms or data structures may be scientifically creative. I don't know, maybe it's boring for the scientists and they think reasoning and writing about these is much more fun and creative than implementing them. Anyways it just one kind of creativity. But there is creativity in 'just gluing' stuff together. It's not that simple and there is more choice involved than you suggest. ------ acqq The article is a long rant, but wrong on more premises and conclusions. And yet, by quoting the people who were actually right in the cases they wrote about, it appears more correct than it is. There are too many wrong "conclusions" and premises in the text, just an example, here's the author writing about Babbage's and his Analytical Machine: "he was focused on doing math fast and without errors. He didn’t care how complex the machine was as long as it accomplished that." Of course, not true, Babbage had to care. He was designing a purely mechanical machine for years at the time when nobody had electrical logical circuits. He designed the simplest "universal enough" machine in the limits of the technology of his time. And the design was never built. But to claim that his design was "too complex" the author would have to design a significantly simpler one under the same limitations and goals. The whole article is, unfortunately, like this. Uses something that actually happened or somebody did say, "concludes" something else. And the claims that aren't that kind of "conclusions" also sound like from somebody who only very partially understands what he writes about. This doesn't mean that the author shouldn't attempt to write more articles, he can learn something from it (although I'd suggest him to base his writing on his own, specific, experiences) just that this article as it is is a quite bad potential basis for a serious discussion, IMHO. He asks "Is there another hardware, general-purpose or not, that would fit our needs more precisely while being cheaper to program?" The answer is a simple "no." The author just doesn't understand how much of everything was invested up to now for him to pay so little for the CPU's he uses: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants) Note just the "plant stat-up costs in billions" column. And that's just a piece in the whole puzzle. There are big gains for those who'd improve a current state, so the humanity as the whole is much more motivated for the real improvements, where they are possible, than the author assumes. When we remove wrong conclusions after quoting others, the rant can be summed up to just a few claims, one of major being "I'm confronted with different frameworks and libraries, "everybody" solves similar problems, it "sucks" to work this way, maybe the hardware is the main problem." No. ~~~ luisobo author here. Thanks for your comment. > Of course, not true, Babbage had to care reference? In any case, the main point is that he was making tradeoffs for his math machine, not for modern software development. Not blaming him, just pointing out it was suboptimal for us. > The whole article is, unfortunately, like this I'd love more examples. I have definitely a lot to learn about writing. > The author just doesn't understand how much of everything was invested up to > now for him to pay so little for the CPU's he uses I don't see how "a lot of money was invested" proves how there is no alternate hardware that would make programming more productive. ~~~ acqq > I don't see how "a lot of money was invested" proves how there is no > alternate hardware that would make programming more productive. Couldn't maybe the reason for not understanding be not knowing enough about the theoretical and practical aspects of the hardware development? How about suggesting any reasonable direction for improvement? Practically everybody who's involved with hardware and software constantly tries to make something better, somehow you posit that all of them are wrong for doing what they are doing? It's simple: people propose, sometimes also implement the "alternate hardware." Hardware evolves to the demands, what we have is a result of the evolution. Unsuccessful fail, successful survive. Success is measured in people being ready to invest billions just to be able to produce a new generation of the CPUs, because that's how much it costs. There's no cheaper known way. If you invent something better than the existing state, and it's provably and significantly better, it is going to be accepted. That's how we have today ARM, that's how we don't use Itanium, that's why Intel uses some technology developed by AMD. The leading position of Intel x32 and AMD x64 architectures on the desktops and servers was decided exactly because it was "easier" to program them compared to some other solutions (and the computations were also faster). ARM dominates for having some specific other advantages. All aspects, including these you recognized as important, are actually factored in the success of the current hardware. > the main point is that he was making tradeoffs for his math machine, not for > modern software development And this doesn't mean that people just blindly reproduced what he did during the following 150-something years. Instead, just like he did, people constantly questioned what they did and decided based on the limitations they had, just like he. His design was more "mentioned" than actually used. It's the opposite, once more or less independent development recognizes which ideas are the "best" in the given time and the given limitations, people who study the old research recognize that the same ideas were considered or even followed in some older designs. Now we have enough experience that we can study the failed and successful attempts that already answer some questions somebody new to the field can have. > I have definitely a lot to learn about writing. If you write about the possibility of a "better hardware" familiarizing more with the computer hardware and the theoretical and practical basis and limitations would help not sounding uneducated. Rules are to be broken, the "well known truths" are to be questioned to make a change, but the questioning has to be based on some knowledge, when it's in the field where so much is dependent on the knowledge. ------ xiaoma It's depressing to see how much effort was put into the presentation of this blog post compared to the effort in clarifying its ideas. The author's ideas aren't novel. Programming isn't something that can be "solved" any more than math or writing is. There is inherent complexity in building apps and there are an infinite number that could be built. The fact that it hasn't been "solved" is no indication that we've "never asked ourself this question!" ------ mobiuscog Programming sucks if you're not interested in programming. ~~~ wsc981 I agree. I haven't read the article, but the first thing that came to my mind was: "it doesn't suck". Rather, I find it a fun activity. There's so much creativity one can put into programming. Especially when programming for oneself and not for Super Evil MegaCorp (not the actual game dev company [0]!). Sometimes it feels to me like art, for example when creating games. My older brother, at some point in his live, he thought programming sucked as well. But then he stopped doing programming professionally and now just as a hobby and it became fun for him once again. I will read the article later today :) \--- [0]: [http://www.superevilmegacorp.com](http://www.superevilmegacorp.com) ~~~ henrik_w Regarding programming as art, I like the quote from Fred Brooks comparing it to poetry: _" The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of imagination ... yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself"_ That's one of the reasons why I still love programming (after programming professionally for almost 25 years): [http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i- love-coding/](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/) ------ aikah [meta] The title of this article sucks, really, it's a bait, which is sad because the article is actually interesting. Why do blog post titles about programming have to suck in order to attract readers ? > Lots of rework happens because of miscommunications with the user. Other > times, the user doesn’t fully understand their problem (there’s not much we > can do about this) Agreed. That's where "lean programming" comes into play. If you have the capacity to make the code change as requirements change then I think the issue is pretty much solved. However, not all languages/solutions are equal in that matter. Obviously TDD, Agile techniques help. > If we assume that typing code is the way to program, we will never look for > better alternatives. Typing code is a medium. The fact is, for an engineers it usually the most convenient way to create a program. > But without an end goal, of course you have millions of developers releasing > Javascript frameworks every day How many of these are still maintained 1,2,5 years after? [https://www.nczonline.net/blog/2015/12/why-im-not-using- your...](https://www.nczonline.net/blog/2015/12/why-im-not-using-your-open- source-project/) So I don't think that is really a problem, there is an handfull of well maintained frameworks and libraries in the JS world. Most are not. Most are flashy with a nice "flat" page then you never hear about them again. It's easy to produce shitloads of code, it's harder to maintain it and build a real community around it. > Building software is 90% a human problem Agreed, but like everything humans do. > What would programming be to you in an ideal world? There is no general answer to that question. That's why we have all these languages, frameworks and libraries yet we keep on creating languages,frameworks and libraries. What drives me as a "programmer" isn't the medium, but the goal, the product. Creating something useful. Languages, frameworks and development methods are the necessary constraints. ~~~ luisobo author here. Thanks for your thoughtful comment. > [meta] The title of this article sucks, really, it's a bait, It was not intended. The title just tries to summarize the post. Still, so much to learn about writing! >> Lots of rework happens because of miscommunications with the user. Other times, the user doesn’t fully understand their problem (there’s not much we can do about this) > Agreed. That's where "lean programming" comes into play. If you have the > capacity to make the code change as requirements change then I think the > issue is pretty much solved. However, not all languages/solutions are equal > in that matter. Obviously TDD, Agile techniques help. I have a note on Agile. As I mentioned, I believe Agile or lean programming to be solutions. They don't question anything about the status quo, they just try to cope with it. It's good, it's an improvement. But an incremental one from the perspective of the stack of poker chips. >> If we assume that typing code is the way to program, we will never look for better alternatives. > Typing code is a medium. The fact is, for an engineers it usually the most convenient way to create a program. Turns out that the medium has an huge effect on our understanding. [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2976-bret-victor-thinks- math-...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2976-bret-victor-thinks-math-needs-a- new-ui) >> Building software is 90% a human problem >Agreed, but like everything humans do. The first rule of the tautology club is the first rule of the tautology club. Of course! the idea is to make programming something that humans don't do, or at least, reduce how much human involvement you need. Humans are the weaker link in software development, we should do like with other things that humans don't do _anymore_ , figure out a solution and put our time to do something else. ~~~ mobiuscog > Humans are the weaker link in software development, we should do like with > other things that humans don't do anymore, figure out a solution and put our > time to do something else. WALL·E would disagree, and so would I. ------ edem This reminds me of the talk given by Rich Hickey named "Simple made Easy": [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made- Easy](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy) ------ kh_hk Some contradictions I found: > Of course we have never questioned any of this. We don’t have a direction, a > path or an overall goal for programming! > Let me ask you this: What would programming be to you in an ideal world? > We don’t know! We’ve never asked ourselves this question! When at the start of the "essay": > Turns out, we are horrible at predicting the future and we end up discarding > that extra complexity. Too bad outsiders think (and will for a long time) it's a done thing. Society thinks software is the best thing since sliced bread so it's all around us. It's both a curse and a blessing. Compared to other fields, CS or engineering is relatively new. It's exciting, it will keep breaking and evolving. And that should be it. It should keep going places without restrictions, precisely because we don't know. Similarly to scientists ripping open humans on anathomical theatres in the 17th, we are having fun. ~~~ luisobo author here. Thanks for your point. You hit the spot. Yes, who is it to say that we reinvent programming tomorrow and it useless by next week. Great point. My answer is, don't look at it from a black and white perspective. I'm not aiming for a 100% future proof solution, that is impossible as you pointed out. But we can make something much more future proof that what we have right now. ------ arethuza If you think writing code sucks then contemplate what it would be like to write legal contracts for a living.... [No ability to execute, no debugging, no compilation step, no unit tests....] ~~~ estefan Dude that's an awesome idea. Semantic analysis of legal documentation to find and highlight contradictions, etc. Whoever does this - how about sending a percent or 2 my way when you exit for billions :-D ------ pjc50 _We don’t have a direction, a path or an overall goal for programming!_ We (who do we mean when we say "we", anyway?) don't have a direction, path or overall goal for life, society, the human race and so on. I don't even have a plan for what I'm going to have for lunch next Tuesday. Programming is contingent and incremental because rationality is bounded and the future is uncertain. We don't know what will be successful in the next few years or how the world will want to use it or what it will be prepared to pay for. We can build jewel-like systems that are perfectly adapted to their use case using technology to the utmost. This nearly always results in a stranded evolutionary dead-end. The BBC Domesday Project (live video database on an 8-bit micro using PAL laserdisc!) is my favourite example, but there are many. ~~~ luisobo hi, author here. Thanks for your comment. Personally, I don't think we could reinvent programming and make it 100% future proof. But if we reinvented programming it will be much more future proof that what we have now. The reason is that our current stack was not invented in the first place, kind of evolved upwards organically. If we did something it will at least be purposeful. ------ perlgeek I think we just push our requirements until they hit boundaries where programming/tooling/whatever sucks. These days it's trivial to create a CRUD web app that is even save against CSRF when you use a framework like Django. But of course, nobody wants a simple CRUD web app anymore. It has to do business logic, it must have responsive design, usable on mobile, incrementally load pages, and be an enterprise integration framwork that checks with the credit card processor, the warehouse software etc. It's just that we don't talk anymore about the things that have become trivial, because we don't spend much time on them. So of course, in our perception, programming and tooling suck. And they always will. And that's OK, because if everything was breeze, we'd be bored. ------ espinchi > What would programming be to you in an ideal world? Very interesting thoughts about this. I wouldn't think programming sucks, until you think about how it could be in an ideal world. I'd love to see a follow-up article about what the OP thinks about that question. ------ tracker1 I really don't think that programming sucks. I think some software sucks, and this is usually because of a number of reasons. * There is always a deadline and pressure to deliver that exceeds quality controls. * Software development shifted from engineering to crafting a long time ago, mostly because of the prior pressure to deliver. * Poorer quality code that works and building new features on top are easier to sell, than rewrites and paying off technical dept. I think it comes down to building in pieces that you don't mind throwing away when a better piece comes along. ------ Udo This article more than anything underscores my feeling that there are too many people in programming who should not be doing it in the first place. It's a skilled profession, but it's increasingly dominated by people who despise the craft aspect of it. This results in both, suckage and bloat on the one end, and unrealistic expectations on the other. > _Hiring developers is an extremely difficult task. Learning to program is > ridiculously difficult as well._ If programming was a solved thing, that would mean problem solving itself was a solved thing. It has by nature to be difficult. The question is more whether we manage to avoid additional difficulty on top of that. He's talking about the cost of bugs, but I posit the cost of burdensome frameworks and artificial bureaucracies in software development processes is by far bigger and harder to come to terms with, both of which exist in part to manage this inherent difficulty (often achieving the opposite). > _Lots of rework happens because of miscommunications with the user. Other > times, the user doesn’t fully understand their problem_ This is not unique to software development by any means. Every organization that deals with end users has to negotiate this interface. > _anywhere from 50 to 90% of the cost of building software goes towards > maintaining it after the first release_ Whether that figure is real depends largely on the type of software you're writing. If this fits what you're doing, the assumption that at some point the program is supposed to be "done" and every bit of time spent evolving it further must be a sign of inefficiency is simply unproductive. That kind of program is more usefully viewed as an evolving organism, and the sooner management recognizes the nature of this the better it will be handled by the organization. > _Our tools don’t make a good separation of essential and accidental > complexity[2]––we are forced to crystalize the essential parts of our > programs in a programming language and make them coexist with irrelevant, > usually platform-specific code (accidental complexity)._ This too depends on the nature of your chosen ecosystem. On the whole, interop has steadily improved throughout the history of computing. We have meaningful universal data formats now, and many options for moving code between platforms. Where interop troubles exist, they mostly exist on purpose (like the iOS example you made). You can absolutely solve most of this problem by throwing computing power at it and choosing an interpreted or cross-compiled environment if you want to avoid writing glue code. ~~~ spacecowboy_lon Learning Programming is not "ridiculously difficult" my first language in a UK School at 14 was a Cutdown Machine Code CECIL. And this was in the CSE stream which was for the less able children. ~~~ Udo That's the word choice made in the article, it's not mine. I agree with you, I've been programming since I was a child, too. Learning is hard, and it never stops, but that is not a problematic aspect at all as long as you enjoy doing it. ------ chippy Programming is a form of technology making. We may be programming in our different teams, companies, organisations and countries, but the stuff we make makes an impact and affects the world around us. This impact is an input into future similar projects and, given time, the technologies that results from wherever will be better for it. Please note that this idea does not mean that any group now is going to make these technologies, but what we do now will influence the future. The same pattern has been observed in the industrial revolution - many tinkerers, manufacturers and inventors were all sort of learning from each other, all improving. This happened over decades. The main difference with programming is the time dimension. We've only really been doing it at a cultural level for the last twenty years - we're only just getting started in discussing and sharing what we are doing. ------ ThatMightBePaul "Back in the day math was slow and error-prone and we created the computer. Now, it’s software development that is slow and error-prone." I'd argue Math is still slow and error-prone. Ask any math PHD candidate. Computation is fast, but Math itself has more layers, and more branches than ever. Sound familiar? That said, some smarties are trying to remove unnecessary layers in programming. I feel like rump/Uni-kernels are looking to simplify the stack. [1] The clear linux project is removing some pieces from the stack. [2] TL;DR Math is about as noisy as programming :/ I don't buy the premise. But, I enjoyed the read! [1] [http://rumpkernel.org/](http://rumpkernel.org/) [2] [http://clearlinux.org/](http://clearlinux.org/) ------ dsfsdfd We are what normal people rely on to get the computer to do things that they find difficult. Things are getting so complex for us that we find it difficult to service the requests. Solution: We need someone to help us to solve the problems. Or more practical - we need intelligent tools which attempt to guess what we are really trying to do. Far more intelligent autocomplete: "This looks like you are writting a postcode splitting regex, here is one that has been used by many programmers.". "Looks like you are adding a new business layer class - do you want to create an entity as well. Oh also it looks like this is going to part of the new view model you have been working on - do you want me to add a projection in for bl Class, mapping to the un populated properties on the vm?" etc. We ------ dsfsdfd No one is going to listen to this - but what the hell: The solution is totally obvious. The code we write has a form defined by it's input->output mapping over all possible inputs. Write a function and you immediately define this input output mapping. All you have to do at this point is search through all previously written functions to find the one that most resembles the one you are trying to write. Trying to write a nested for loop to pull out pixel values from a jpeg? Start writing it, shit you get it wrong - but the input output mapping is close enough to the cluster of previously written solutions that the correct code pops onto the screen. Structure aware code search across all open source code would make a lot of the pain just go away. ~~~ akvadrako Good idea but I expect that the hard part is getting the UI right, because instead of just writing the function you need, you need to: 1\. specify with enough precision your requirements 2\. search through all code for matches 3\. vet those matches 4\. incorporate it into your code-base and in the end you don't want a bunch of spaghetti - you want a consistent and digestible architecture. But I do think this type of coding will become mainstream within a few years. As you say, it's obvious. ------ anvay Shouldn't the title refer to Software Engineering or Software in general instead of Programming? The word programming (for me) represents a more abstract meaning, like getting your thoughts in the physical world. ------ danso I'd be sympathetic with someone saying that software development sucks...in the same way that writing doesn't "suck", but having to be a published writer, e.g. someone who has to churn out something that people notice and will pay for, could be a sucky existence (until you're JK Rowling) But programming? It's an expression of the mind, and as a nice side benefit, the ability to communicate explicit commands to tireless machines to act on our behalf. There have been a couple of long, recorded speeches that I need to transcribe (for searchability and research purposes) and so I've been checking out the various speech-to-text APIs (Watson and Oxford) as a first step (e.g. before sending it to Mechanical Turk) in automating the process. The APIs are so easy to tinker with that I thought it'd be fun to pass in clips of Malcolm Tucker to see how well the APIs did. Then I remembered the IDEA project (a collection of audio of people all around the world with various accents attempting to read English) and thought it'd be interesting to gauge which accents are the hardest for machines to figure out...and all it takes is some scripting to automate the feeding of these recorded clips into the APIs (the analysis is tricky because of the high variance in audio quality, never mind the accents themselves). All of this is useful in figuring out a solution to my original problem, except it's a lot more fun and I get to think a lot more about how language works. If I weren't a programmer? I'd set aside a day, brew some coffee, and manually do the tedious work of transcription by re-listening to those speeches several times over just to get them into a text format. How boring. Yeah, programming can be difficult, but it is completely the right level of difficulty for the power it gives us. Even the things that make me nearly throw my laptop into the wall -- such as string encoding -- are a result of something kind of wonderful...the attempt at having an automated, standardized way to translate every squiggle among the hundreds of human languages, and cultural quirks, too, such as a pile of poo. I don't think I've said anything the OP would disagree with. But I kind of checked out after he got into ranting about JavaScript, as if the world needed more bundles of words that insinuate that programming == web development. Things could be smoother, and they are getting that way because of how programming coordinates the flow and storage of information and assertions...but a lot of the OP's essay is not much more useful than someone ranting about how literacy sucks because we all can't agree what makes for great literature these days. ------ ghostcake Most of the pitfalls that the author identifies can be avoided by simply subscribing to the TDD workflow. A little peace of mind actually makes programming pretty fun. ------ barbs > _Before we dig into the “whys”, we have to agree that programming sucks._ No, you have to present your reasoning before I agree with you. ------ lolo_ I see this kind of article posted regularly, and it has been for at least the past decade (if not longer.) Worse, it's often accompanied with 'but profession X is so much better and they are all certified and do things properly unlike us awful cowboys!'. In the worst case you get the whole 'in the future everyone will program and programmers will become totally redundant'. I have a feeling the developers writing these posts don't have a huge amount of experience, and have a natural tendency to want to turn the table up side down and start afresh to get rid of all this cruft. I understand it, but it's frustrating But what they perceive to be the cruft isn't just cruft. In programming the possibility of starting afresh is there, and has been done several times - haskell, erlang, go, rust, clojure, etc. etc. etc. on the programming side. In the web world the front end is filled with the latest great solution that just pushes aside all this terrible accidental complexity, and this happens in other realms too, yet we still see these articles. I think there are a number of things at play here: 1\. Programming is hard and often in annoying, frustrating, and painful ways. Nothing you do can change that, and blaming it on tooling or legacy or whatever doesn't change the _intrinsic_ complexity at hand. People like to imagine it's hard in challenging and enjoyable ways, and sometimes it is, but more often it's just frustrating. 2\. Abstractions won't save you. They help, but always involve trade offs of one kind or another. Something that is declarative enough hides imperative details which eventually leak in horrible ways unless you come to understand how they work, and something too imperative invites duplication, complexity and bugs. Having seen giant T/SQL stored procedures, Microsoft Access queries that take hours to run and excel sheets that are so complicated nobody can vet them, I have seen my fair share of collapsed abstractions which started wonderful. 3\. Programmers are needed. A great example is excel - some people point to it as the philosopher's stone of the 'everyone is a programmer' world, but as soon as you start doing things it's not good at, or exceed a certain complexity, it explodes into horrible pieces and fails in all kinds of terrible ways. Then the programmers need to step in. It's not something special or conceited, personally I think only a certain % of the population are capable of thinking in a sufficiently logical way to understand what a computer needs, whether employed as 'programmers' or not, and these are the only people who can help beyond the simplest case. Nothing to do with intelligence, just a kind of thinking. The power of software + the rarity of this way of thinking combined with people actually using it is why programmers are expensive, it's not an anomaly imo. 4\. Real world work is largely boring and/or painful. I think particularly here people miss this point, in fact PG wrote a great piece relating to this ([http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)), but it's so important - even the most interesting problem involves a great deal of schlep to get things _nicely_. No matter how wonderful programming could possibly be made, there is no avoiding this. It's true not only of programming but any job. I think there's too much of a delusion sold by many that work can be nothing but a joy if only you pick the right one - no. It can _net_ be wonderful, but in that net are wins and losses. If you love programming, the kick of solving problems and seeing an application do something for somebody easily outweighs the pain of schlepping to that point. 5\. Other professions aren't magically better. I did a civ eng degree at arguably the top civ eng school in the world, and worked in a practising office for a couple of years and believe me the insight I got from both the theory and practice of engineering made it incredibly clear that the kind of abominations and messes you see in programming are nothing compared to that. You think you lack freedom in programming (you don't btw), ha! At least in programming things can be fixed only conceptually and not risk lives :) 6\. Programming is actually wonderful. Despite the schlep and pain, you can build things that are actually useful using only 'thoughtstuff'. Everything that is broken can be fixed, and a great idea and a decent community around it can be enough to change anything that really is broken out there. That is totally counter to most industries out there. Problem solving in such a pure fashion, even in the compromised and often boring ways commercial programming causes you to do it is still an amazing privilege. 7\. The possibility for shifting your area of programming are huge. In how many other industries could you change your specialisation by doing hobby work on a project open to anyone? You'd usually either have to 'start again' or simply not have the opportunity to change what you work on. I feel like I have a blog post in me about this that refines and expands on the points above, but these are my thoughts on this perennial and understandable pattern of articles. As a final note, a sad aspect is that this kind of article (not necessarily in this case) seems to downplay programming skills as just knowledge of the mess we have, or suggest it is not a nice job to have, or whatever else, which can have real world consequences. I think we have a lot to improve in programming, but to suggest it's some terrible sucky mess is a mistake, and a fatal one if you think that in the cases where in fact there is something wrong, they can't be fixed. I remember entering a long and painful depression after reading an article by a well known author (who will go unnamed) who talked about how programming utterly sucks but if you do a real job and use programming then it's amazingly useful, just avoid the former. I think that was not a well thought out point to make and reflected more on the author than reality, including the grass is greener imagining of how somebody in another job could use programming and how great that could really be. These kind of discussions have real world impact, let's not leap to 'X sucks' before we really know that it does. ~~~ estefan > In the worst case you get the whole 'in the future everyone will program and > programmers will become totally redundant'. Yeah, not going to happen because not everyone can think in the level of detail required to program. Some people just think programming is like waving a magic wand, but when you keep asking them "so, what should it do if this happens? What about if that happens?" they slowly start to understand... ~~~ lolo_ Yeah this is exactly what I mean by a certain kind of logical thinking. It's made worse by these tasks seeming a lot more simple than they actually are, before you even think about accidental complexity. What's frustrating is when programmers mistake inherent complexity for the accidental kind and therefore label the whole enterprise a terrible mess. In fact overall I think this distracts from ACTUAL accidental complexity since if you think programming is generally terrible you'll probably not be too interested in some small details of that :)

Advantages of monolithic version control - eadmund https://danluu.com/monorepo/ ====== erik_seaberg > Since atomic cross-project commits are possible, the repository can always > be in a consistent state – at commit #X, all project builds should work. At Google this regularly failed. We spent hours unable to commit changes (unless a disaster could justify ignoring build and test failures) because someone we'd never met had broken the world and the fix was still making its way through the enormous backlog of projects to retry. Every project needed people taking turns in a "build cop" role diagnosing this stuff and demanding rollbacks as quickly as possible. It's essential to pin known-good version of your dependencies and upgrade when you can handle it. You can't expect _every commit anyone ever makes_ to be production ready. ~~~ eadmund > You can't expect every commit anyone ever makes to be production ready. Of course not — but surely that's what branches are for. Does Perforce not have a concept of branches? It seems absurd that Google would let folks merge untested commits into master. ~~~ erik_seaberg Generally Googlers edited and reviewed a changelist (which is like amending a commit that hasn't been pushed yet) and then submitted when it's considered ready to deploy. You're expected to run your project's test targets (which might include a few critical dependents) before you submit, but if you have a huge set of dependents there's no way to be certain none will break—their tests might be flaky or fail for reasons that aren't your fault, and there will be hundreds of new changelists submitted (including changes to your own dependencies!) while your tests were running. ------ eadmund I'll actually go further than Dan here: I'm beginning to believe that the default should be one repo per company or team-of-teams, and that creating a second repo should require _extremely_ good reasons why. ------ w4tson I wonder how far you could get at a startup just using git as the monorepo. That is, before it became too painful.

Show HN: AI programming game - kronny https://www.bomberbots.com ====== mey [https://www.bomberbots.com/#/match/202081](https://www.bomberbots.com/#/match/202081) is very interesting to watch ~~~ starshadowx2 It seems like the bots have a self-preservation strategy when they start out trapped. They will stay stuck until another bot comes near, even though they could escape at any time. ------ Maome If the game server communicates in json why are bots limited to c#? ~~~ kronny It's limited to .NET since it was easier for me to sandbox those bots. I've planned support for more languages in the future, but anything that compiles to .NET should be fine at the moment ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CLI_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CLI_languages)). ~~~ Maome I look forward to seeing this support additional languages. I wonder if you have considered creating a remote interface for bots? If they are just sending and receiving json maybe something like websockets would allow for a language agnostic server without the need for you to worry about sandboxing different languages?

Drone Hobbyists Angered by Congress Ending the Aerial Wild West - antr https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/drone-hobbyists-angered-by-congress-ending-the-aerial-wild-west ====== FundThrowaway Almost every time we have a BBQ or other outside event someone buzzes a drone overhead and just sits there watching us. Almost every time I go out hiking I hear the high pitched whine of a drone flying around the country park. It seems no matter where I go there is someone flying one. They are a total nuisance, create tons of noise pollution in areas that are usually quite tranquil, invade privacy and just annoy me all around to be honest. ~~~ mashgin where do you live? I'm in the Bay Area and have never seen any drones flying overhead! I'm myself a drone enthusiast, and I take great care not to make anyone feel uncomfortable (at least not intentionally) when I'm flying a drone ~~~ iancmceachern I live in norcal (sacramento) and spend a lot of time outdoors here, in the bay area, and near Tahoe and we see them consistently nearly every time were out, even when we're paddling on the water. ~~~ MisterOctober Phoenix area here - drone nuisance an occasional but non-negligible problem here too. Sometimes they're a minor annoyance [e.g., 4th of July fireworks viewing], and sometimes genuinely creepy [hovering over backyards in my neighborhood, sometimes at night] I observe that the majority of drone owners use them with a mind to avoid making others ill-at-ease, but y'know, tragedy of the commons and all that ~~~ Jedd Not really tragedy of the commons. ~~~ andybak If the resource is peace and privacy then "tragedy of the commons" seems like a reasonable metaphor. Can you post in a little more detail as just prefixing the bit you disagree with with "not" isn't terribly useful. ~~~ Jedd If resource was peace and privacy (those aren't resources), and they were zero-sum, then it'd arguably be tragedy of the commons. People being dicks and drawing unwanted regulatory attention towards themselves and other people ... is just people being dicks. I appreciate that 'tragedy of the commons' is a very hip phrasing these days, but its usefulness benefits from not being misused. ~~~ ken "Resource" (Merriam-Webster), definition 1c: "a natural feature or phenomenon that enhances the quality of human life". I would say silence does indeed meet this definition. ~~~ Jedd > If resource was peace and privacy (those aren't resources), _and_ they were > zero-sum Not to say I agree with your dubious attempt at bringing 'silence' into the fold of 'resource'. When you start mining silence by the barrel from deep space, then we can start treating it as a commodity resource. ~~~ andybak A resource can be locally limited despite being globally (or universally) unlimited. Energy for example (to a certain degree) Also I'm not sure "zero sum" is the same thing as "limited". The former imposes stricter requirements. I'm sticking to my guns on this one. ~~~ Jedd I can't consume all the available quiet and therefore prevent you from having any. ~~~ andybak You can consume all the quiet in specific area at a specific time. If that's not a limited resource then nothing is. ~~~ Jedd > You can consume all the quiet in specific area at a specific time. If that's > not a limited resource then nothing is. a) I don't know how you'd measure 'all the quiet' to determine that I'd consumed all there was. b) even if I did, it doesn't prevent you from consuming as much (up to all) of 'the quiet' as you wanted, too. Which brings us back to why it's not a tragedy of the commons, and why the analogy doesn't work either. ------ bjt2n3904 Calling the state of drones the "wild west" pretty much puts the conclusion at the start. How about, "Drone hobbyists angered at pointless laws that treat their hobby like it's a problem" ~~~ MBCook What about the part of the article where the FCC gets 100 complaints a day, including from pilots seeing drones in dangerous areas? ~~~ gorkish 100 reports per month. The relatively small city I live in gets this many or more animal-at-large reports on a daily basis which likely constitute a larger public safety threat than people flying their quads around throughout the entire country. Where is the regulatory capture on leash laws? ~~~ poof131 Animal populations aren’t growing at exponential rates. The future scale of drones and autonomous airborne vehicles is going to be huge. The growing possibility of midairs with drones is more significant than bird strikes or deer on a runway. Hobbyist drone pilots are going to lose the safety battle. Just as you can’t drive however you want on public roads, class G airspace is going to resemble class A airspace. [1] [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspace_class_(United_States)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspace_class_\(United_States\)) ~~~ freeone3000 Really? There are more drones than _birds_? ~~~ CleaveIt2Beaver More unaware drones/flying objects with greater mass than birds, maybe? ------ asynchronous13 The article is talking about the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018. [https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house- bill/4/te...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4/text) The problematic portion for drone hobbyists is "S.2836 - Preventing Emerging Threats Act of 2018" that was attached to the FAA Reauthorization bill. [https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate- bill/283...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate- bill/2836/text) In it's current form, it has some really vague wording and definitions. For example, the bill frequently refers to "threat" without a solid definition. It basically says that "threat" will be defined by the Secretary or Attorney General at a later time. ~~~ iamdave _THREAT DEFINED.—In defining the term ‘threat’ for purposes of carrying out paragraph (1), the Secretary or the Attorney General, as the case may be, shall take into account factors, including, but not limited to, the potential for bodily harm or loss of human life, the potential loss or compromise of sensitive national security information, or the potential severe economic damage resulting from use of an unauthorized unmanned aerial system in the vicinity of a covered facility or asset._ Well no, 'threat' is not being defined by the Sec/AG at a later time, it's right there. Where I will concede to your point is that in the context of unmanned aerial flight, _actions by the pilot_ that satisfy the above are not well enumerated or defined-but I'm only partially through reading the text of the bill. ~~~ asynchronous13 Please read that definition more carefully. Here's a paraphrase: In defining the term _threat_ , The Secretary or the Attorney __shall take into account __factors such as potential for harm, loss of life, national security, and economic damage. That is not a definition, that is a list of things that must be taken into account when making the definition. ~~~ wahern "Eiusdem generis: Of the same kind, class, or nature. In statutory construction, the 'ejusdem generis rule' is that where general words follow an enumeration of persons or things, by words of a particular and specific meaning, such general words are not to be construed in their widest extent, but are to be held as applying only to persons or things of the same general kind or class as those specifically mentioned." [https://thelawdictionary.org/ejusdem- generis/](https://thelawdictionary.org/ejusdem-generis/) "Noscitur a sociis: A latin term for 'it is known by the company it keeps', it is the concept that the intended meaning of an ambiguous word depends on the context in which it is used." [https://thelawdictionary.org/noscitur-a- sociis/](https://thelawdictionary.org/noscitur-a-sociis/) ------ iamdave I'm mildly incredulous on the actual scope of the bill compared to what's being reported (it's a learned behavior), does anyone have the name of the bill or the full text that I may go read for myself? Mostly because as as a remote pilot, I have a feeling the proposals may be much less onerous than we're being lead to believe by Bloomberg here and what hobbyist groups are complaining about. Stated as a Licensed Part 107 operator. I think _everyone_ should be required to undergo _some_ kind of training, with tiers for educational, hobbyist, and commercial. I learned a lot more in those classes than just how to fly a Phantom DJI and found the regulatory knowledge alone to be HIGHLY insightful. ~~~ ransom1538 Ugh. _Everytime_ I fly a micro drone ($40) I get some "Licensed Part 107 operator" lecture me on how I need to "undergo some kind of training". I think these guys should shift their energy to firearm laws and stop harassing children at parks. ~~~ stevecalifornia You should have to undergo some kind of training. It's wildly routine to see drone pilots flying at the end of a runway because they didn't realize the runway was there and they didn't know aeronautical charts exist and/or how to read them. Buying a flying battery pack doesn't entitle you to circumvent airspace rules and endanger lives and property. ~~~ diego a $40 micro drone _is_ training. It's a completely harmless toy, even less harmful than a soccer ball. This is not a $1000 hobby grade drone (for which you definitely should undergo training). A $40 drone typically has extremely weak brushed motors. You don't need training to operate a frisbee but you definitely need training to operate a discus. This comment is an example of how the general public does not know enough about the subject matter. ~~~ dmitrygr So nice of you to decide that is it ok for you to endanger my life because _you_ think that something is harmless. Thanks. Your quad _will_ break my windscreen on short final (since i am doing 80 knots or so), distract me, and possibly make me crash on landing. ~~~ jsjohnst A $40 drone is usually an under 2” device that fits in the palm of your hand with an operating range of under 100ft and barely can be used outdoors (due to wind). I’ve had similar size devices fly into me (including in the face) and I didn’t even get scratched, let alone remotely hurt. If it hits your windscreen, you were more likely driving where you shouldn’t be rather than someone with a literal kids toy doing something wrong. ~~~ donarb Windscreen refers to that of an airplane, not a car. The clue is the reference to 80 knots, which is never used to measure vehicle speed. ~~~ jsjohnst Thanks. I meant to say flying, not driving. Swap out the two words and you’ll realize what I said makes sense as written otherwise. ------ cmurf As a pilot and former flight instructor, I'm not terribly sympathetic to the recreational drone complaints. There are recreational kite fliers too, and they have FAA regulations that apply to them, I don't hear them complaining. There are model airplane pilots, they have FAA regulations, they have a community that is very serious about education, training, mentor-peer relationships and self monitoring and reporting. I do not see this at all with the drone pilot community. It's a community of individuals. And even if it's less than 1% of the total drone pilot population, there is a real problem with this bizarre demand that they have a right to do what they want. They do not. This is shared space. Ham radio operators have more rules, testing, peer review and community than recreational drone pilots. ~~~ orclev Interestingly much of the (hobbyist) drone hardware also requires a Ham license to operate, so there's quite a bit of overlap there. There are at least 3 distinct groups potentially impacted by this. First there are the non-commercial, "toy" users that are flying around cheap little "smart" drones using phones. Most of this class are using drones under 5" and that weigh negligible amounts. The second class are the non-commercial hobbyists that mostly build their own drones and use them either for recreational freestyle or racing. These drones can be anywhere from 3" all the way up to 12" on the extreme end, and similarly have a very wide weight and performance envelope. Much of the equipment in this class requires Ham licenses, or in some cases other federal licensing. Lastly there are the commercial operators that are mostly using drones for aerial photography. These tend to be medium to large sized drones (everything from 6" all the way to multiple foot wide monstrosities) which most definitely require FAA licenses to operate. Part of the problem here, is that each of these groups has different expectations. Little Timmy getting the 4" plastic drone he flies with his iPhone for Christmas shouldn't really be required to pass a FAA license to fly it around his backyard. The professional across the street with access to the 5 foot wide 150 pound hexacopter with the gyrostabilized 4k camera mount and an effective range measured in miles probably should have some kind of license. The guy who built his own 5" drone out of parts and tools around the local park probably falls somewhere in the middle. Lumping all drones under one single set of regulations really isn't going to work because not all drones are the same. It would be like trying to cover unicycles, bicycles, segways, and motorcycles with a single set of regulations just because they all had less than four wheels and required you to balance on them. ~~~ jsjohnst > The professional across the street with access to the 5 foot wide 150 pound > hexacopter with the gyrostabilized 4k camera mount and an effective range > measured in miles probably should have some kind of license. 1) that category of person already had to have a license (a license I hold) before this new bill and does require testing. 2) that size drone weighs nothing near 150lb. I have a commercial grade 5 foot octocopter with advanced gyro and a professional grade dSLR and fully loaded (drone, battery, comms, gyro, camera and lens) it’s under 25lbs. ------ gaahrdner Long gone are the days of needing only a Technician class radio license to operate FCC uncertified radio and video transmission gear, strapped onto a cheap foam RC plane from China, piloted by a human with nothing more than a controller, video goggles, and an antenna to achieve mile-long distances and thousand foot heights. THAT was the wild west. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfzBiZUPSo0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfzBiZUPSo0) ~~~ zrobotics Plus, we still have part 103 ultralight aircraft. As long as it weighs < 254 lbs and is slow enough, you don't even need to register the darn thing. Edit: to clarify, these are 'real' aircraft that humans can fly in. [https://www.eaa.org/en/eaa/aviation-communities-and- interest...](https://www.eaa.org/en/eaa/aviation-communities-and- interests/ultralights-and-ultralight-aircraft/getting-started-in-ultralight- flying/about-faa-part-103-for-ultralights) ~~~ carapace OMFG so if I can build a thing within these constraints I can fly it? (1) Weighs less than 254 pounds empty weight, excluding floats and safety devices which are intended for deployment in a potentially catastrophic situation; (2) Has a fuel capacity not exceeding 5 U.S. gallons; (3) Is not capable of more than 55 knots calibrated airspeed at full power in level flight; and (4) Has a power-off stall speed which does not exceed 24 knots calibrated airspeed. God Bless America! ~~~ Merad It's been done: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNSN6qet1kE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNSN6qet1kE) ~~~ jcims Peter has become some kind of guerilla youtuber. I have seen him on at least six different channels in as many months (most recently [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEZCxxKp0hM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEZCxxKp0hM)). The funny thing is he's about the only one I'd actually like to meet in person. Nothing against the other folks (Mark Rober from above seems really nice), Peter just seems like he'd be fun to hang out with and build something. ------ samstave What year will we see the following scenarios actually happen: * Someone flies a drone into a government facility with an explosive | camera | contraband? * Public figure/celebrity or official assassinated by drone * Drone causes infrastructure damage or transportation accident * Drone used for spying /financial gain \--- Honestly, the lack of the above happening in any large scale, notable or meaningful way shows that there arent a ton of people out there looking to wreak havoc with drones. What I am surprised by is there are not yet a range of security services based on drones - i.e. a swarm of autonomous drone cameras which patrol a given asset/area where they autonomously recharge themselves and fly around - coupled with motion sensors/proximity sensors that being triggered are dispatched to investigate. ~~~ valarauca1 Someone flies a drone into a government facility with an explosive | camera | contraband? Yemen, Syria, or Iraq (any time within the last 1-2 years) Public figure/celebrity or official assassinated by drone Attempted assassination attempt of Nicolás Maduro earlier this year. Drone causes infrastructure damage or transportation accident Yemen, Syria, or Iraq (more then 2 years ago) Drone used for spying /financial gain Shit everything has already happened (outside of the US), so I assume this has as well. Just we aren't going to hear about it until the statue of limitations is up. \--- Seriously the asymetic warfare from relatively cheap drones is a massive problem. The US has fired patriot missiles are little more then ~$300 hobbyist drones carrying hand grenades. ~~~ samstave I meant within here in the US. I am perfectly aware of military use of drones. I was referring to the hobbiest movement's potential use of drones for 'domestic terrorism'. ~~~ KirinDave Most folks think drones as in the US military's absurdly heavy and old- fashioned style, though, so it's good to point out these antics were all with light duty quadcopters, often custom built on site. ~~~ samstave Good point. I fully expect that this ___WILL_ __happen here in the US, and I am surprised that it has not happened _already_. ------ dragIo This is just to clear the airspace and sell licensing fees to Google, Amazon and the like in a few years. ------ Kiro Why are HN so keen on defending drones? Serious question. Is there any altruistic reason or do hackers just like drones? What about privacy issues? Drones seem much more intrusive than the CCTVs people here normally are against. ~~~ jsjohnst Generally because the folks attacking don’t have the first clue anything what they are talking about. Those opposed are buying into pure FUD. Just read through the comments here alone, we have folks talking about regulations didn’t exist (they do), that licensing/testing isn’t required (it is, for the categories generally needing it), thinking a palm sized drone endangers their life (it doesn’t, unless they were being stupid), that commercials drones weigh 150lbs (almost none are remotely even close, 99% are under 25lbs, 99.9% are under 50lbs), etc etc. ------ jakobegger Some time ago I wanted to see what kind of videos people make with drones, and the top result on Youtube was a compilation of videos of nude girls sunbathing who absolutely did not want to be filmed. When I saw that, I realised that there are too many assholes in the world to allow unregulated drones. Some people will invade the privacy of others without any thought, and the only course of action is to require registration of drones. It's a shame -- I'm sure there are plenty of responsible drone pilots out there. But the jerks ruin it for everyone. ------ LinuxBender Ending the Aerial Wild West implies that the wild west is no more. There are plenty of places to buy drone parts, controllers, etc... that do not require any registration. Would it perhaps be more accurate to say, that the wild west is slightly limited to true hobbyists and terrorists? Would such regulations just limit the average person from buying their "toy" drones? The drone hobbyists that I know are not impacted by this. They use 3d headsets and race their drones through buildings up to 6 miles away. ~~~ superkuh > race their drones through buildings up to 6 miles away. This is a pretty incredible claim. I think your friends may have been exaggerating things or you misunderstood. ~~~ LinuxBender Not at all. They are actually working on methods to extend even further by creating a network mesh in the air. This involves multiple RasPi's and multiple drone blimps and multiple quad drones. ~~~ superkuh Alright. That's a little more plausible. At least that would give them line of sight. Now it's just incredible and unlikely instead of completely infeasible. ~~~ LinuxBender There are companies deploying commercial solutions similar to what my friends are doing. There are a couple companies in the EU that will send an AED drone to emergency callers for heart attacks. The drone's wings collapse and it converts into an AED. It can fly to locations minutes before first responders get there. They are also being used to deliver medicine to remote camp-sites in the mountains and some jungles. ------ upofadown The eventual value of low level airspace for drone use vastly exceeds the value of any current use. If we wait long enough we will get to read lurid articles about reckless people in manually controlled aircraft blundering through drone space, putting the lives of themselves and others at risk for no good reason. The governments of the world have entirely dropped the ball on anti-collision systems for small aircraft up to now. I anticipate them doing no better now that there are even smaller aircraft added to the mix. ------ CitizenTekk I think it's fair enough that there should be law to choose out fly zone only for drones to still preserve privacy, tranquility and lessen the noise pollution, some people might think that drones are also hobby for people, but not all people don't have the same exact common things to enjoy. City of LA is now issuing permits for this kind of issue Excerpt: The city and the county of Los Angeles have issued nearly 60 permits for drones on film and TV sets in the last year, according to data from FilmL.A., which handles permits for the Los Angeles region. In addition to the permits, applications for drone waivers have poured in, with more than 200 companies and individuals requesting authorisation from the FAA to operate drones for film production, per the FAA website. full article: [https://beth.technology/drones-over-hollywood-an-aerial- view...](https://beth.technology/drones-over-hollywood-an-aerial-view-of- video-security/) ------ EGreg While I think many of the provisions for drones are too restrictive, one provision is crucial: _The law also weighs into the controversial issue of whether drones should have radio beacons that identify their position and registered owner. It would grant the Federal Aviation Administration the authority to require that. The agency is drafting such a regulation at the request of homeland security and law enforcement agencies and has signaled it may require retrofitting millions of drones already in use._ Autonomous drones are far cheaper to produce than automobiles. And what if an autonomous drone drops grenades in a public area? Who do you blame? How does the law prevent further issues? We better crack down on unidentified drones. ~~~ kxrm If someone wanted to launch such an attack disabling identification would be fairly trivial. ~~~ EGreg That’s the only way we can catch the drones early. Drone flying without a radio beacon would be instantly shot down by laser or emp or whatever. We would need tons of those. Otherwise there are huge dangers. ------ xchip LOL it will be harder to own a drone than to own a gun ~~~ krapp Put guns on all the drones and they'll be protected by the 2nd Amendment. And the guns. ------ abledon About time. I'm F*ing amazed this has gone on so long! As if no one has duck taped some github computer vision human recognition AI's with some strapped on Pistol/Semi automatic hooked up to an onboard arduino. ------ trhway Ultra light aircraft don't need test/license while drones would be required to have it. ------ draugadrotten Terrorists are already using Drones to attack people[1]. ISIS are buying and perhaps using drones in Europe[2]. Unfortunately, this means drones will need to be regulated like they are weapons, because they are used as weapons. 1- [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/world/americas/venezuelan...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/world/americas/venezuelan- president-targeted-in-attack-attempt-minister-says.html) 2- [https://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Two-arrested-in- Denmark-...](https://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Two-arrested-in-Denmark-for- attempting-to-smuggle-drones-to-ISIS-568039) ~~~ learc83 People use all manner of electronics to build detonation devices for bombs. Do you want to regulate cell phones and alarm clocks like weapons too? Drones are too easy to build and conceal to effectively prevent determined attackers from getting them and using them. Regulations are aimed at preventing accidents and nuisance incidents, not terrorism. ~~~ reaperducer _People use all manner of electronics to build detonation devices for bombs._ Explosives are also used in bombs, and those are heavily regulated. ~~~ learc83 Which is why I referenced detonation mechanisms. The drone attacks the OP is referencing also used explosives. ~~~ draugadrotten Your line of thought is interesting, that cell phones (should not) be regulated despite their use as detonation mechanism. If I think along those lines, the drone attacks are using drones as the delivery mechanism for the explosives, and whatever they are using for detonation mechanism is not interesting here. The explosives are regulated. So should the delivery mechanism be regulated? I think yes-- other delivery mechanisms for explosives to a target are guns, cannons, rockets... all regulated. ~~~ trhway >The explosives are regulated. given that fireworks and powder are easily available (re: Tsarnaevs) or relative availability of ANFO (re: McVeigh) and similar stuff or that just one visit to Home Depot allows you to buy components making for a pretty good explosive, i think the explosives are regulated mostly to avoid them lying freely around under the kitchen sinks and in the garages and to avoid being handled by clueless people, not to protect from terrorists. ~~~ reaperducer _just one visit to Home Depot allows you to buy components making for a pretty good explosive_ It also gets you a visit from the feds. Those sorts of purchases are tracked very closely since Mcveigh. ~~~ philipkglass Buying explosive precursors together does not automatically trigger any sort of investigation. I bought acetone, hydrogen peroxide (in the form of a wood bleaching kit), and hydrochloric acid together in 2002 at a Home Depot and never got the slightest bit of attention. I also bought an 80 pound sack of ammonium nitrate from a fertilizer dealer in 2002 with cash. I didn't show ID. The employees didn't grill me at all. I was pretty surprised, actually. I thought there would be _some_ sort of tracking in place six years after the OKC bombing and 1 year after the 9/11 attacks. Maybe they only start tracking when you try to buy it by the tonne. Maybe my appearance (clean shaven white guy with glasses, no tattoos) gave me a pass where other sorts of buyers might need to show ID or explain why they're buying. ~~~ trhway just googled - you were 9 years too early :) [https://www.businessinsider.com/oklahoma-city-bombing- ammoni...](https://www.businessinsider.com/oklahoma-city-bombing-ammonium- nitrate-sales-regulated-2011-8) " the new legislation will require anyone buying more than 25 pounds to register, be screened against a known terrorist list, and require any thefts to be reported within 24 hours. " ------ swingline-747 This is bureaucratic nonsense. For 50 years, RC planes have been fine. This is a knee-jerk overreaction to take out their frustrations on convenient bystanders, eg hobbyists, when they can't defend against terrorists with flying bombs whom aren't going to register anything. Plus, how will it be enforced? Going to put FAA goons in park trees to catch those felonious dads shooting Estees model rockets and buzzing RC planes (aka "drones") around?

A Sampling of Anti-Decompilation Techniques - swalsh https://blog.ret2.io/2017/11/16/dangers-of-the-decompiler/ ====== DogestFogey I'm surprised the Movfuscator hasn't been mentioned yet. It compiles C code into unconditional MOVs, and if you watch the author's Derbycon 2015 video there are ways you can scramble the MOV instructions, truely making it a decompilation nightmare. 1\. Movfuscator page [https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator) 2\. Derbycon 2015 video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7EEoWg6Ekk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7EEoWg6Ekk) ~~~ akanet This is because "movfuscation" isn't a practical option for people actually trying to ship binaries that still perform well for customers but resist reverse-engineering. One of the battlegrounds for this sort of thing is the tug of war between game developers and cheat developers, and games still need to perform very well. Things the author mentioned, like address-rewriting at runtime, don't incur a performance penalty. ~~~ doctorwho Just rebuild the sensitive portions of your code using movfuscator and leave the performance critical stuff alone. As long as everything is statically linked and you don't do anything stupid like "if (check) unlock()" that can be easily patched, it would make life pretty miserable for the RE crowd. ~~~ ttoinou What's wrong with "if (check) unlock()" ? x) ~~~ emiliobumachar It can be modified to "if (true) unlock()" relatively very easily, even in binary. No disassembling needed. ------ krylon As someone who has only ever written about 20 instructions worth of assembly, I am kind of torn. The kind of cleverness needed to thwart the decompiler's efforts is _very_ impressive. A part of me wishes I had been around at a time when assembly was an acceptable "language" instead of the last resort it is today for most scenarios. Getting this close to the metal (or silicon) and being able to pull off such a stunt must be exhilarating. At the same time, another part of me is very happy I do not have to deal with such low-level details. Debugging code written in assembly (with assembly being the main language, not just inline assembly in a C/C++ program or something like that) must have been exquisite torture. ~~~ Someone One can also claim that today’s programming is torture. Back in the microcomputer days, all you needed to write a program was a desk with a single computer, one or two tools that you knew through and through and a few reference books. Nowadays, we sometimes spend days or even weeks choosing our tools and libraries of sometimes questionable quality and getting them to work together before we can even start thinking of the problem we want to solve, and even then, we still spend half our days googling, and being lucky if we get semi decent answers. ~~~ thaumaturgy It's six o' one, half-dozen t'other for me. My most formative years as a programmer mostly involved 68040 assembly on the pre-PowerPC Macs. Back then, I used CodeWarrior a lot, and if there was a head-scratching bug in my software (as there often was), I could launch it from a fully-featured debugger, set breakpoints, skip ahead to a block of code, step through it line by line, see every single value that existed in raw hex on the heap, see exactly what was on the stack. If I was wanting to flip bits in someone else's software, I had MacsBug, which was a stop-the-world OS- level debugger that did all the same, but even better. [1] Back then, there was a very definite sense that I _owned_ the computer, that it was my tool, that it would do precisely and exactly what I wanted it to. In a way, whether something was open source or not didn't matter; I could modify it anyway, and often for less effort than it takes to crawl through a modern over-architected codebase. However, now I can glue some really impressive libraries together, written by other people and available on massive centralized code repositories, and deliver an application to as many people as I want, all running different hardware or operating systems (within reason) but still all getting the same software experience (...mostly...), and even charge some money for it without having to worry about somebody cracking the license check on my shareware. The effort required to make complicated new software has gone way down. The effort required to troubleshoot and fix complicated software has gone way up. Nowadays, when I'm doing the former, I'm happy, and when I'm doing the latter, I'm not. I think that might be part of why there's so much churn in the software industry today. [1]: MacsBug did this in real-time. Start up an application, drop into MacsBug, set a breakpoint on a function call, switch back to the OS and application, trigger the function call, then step through the code in MacsBug. If you were careful, you could even "rewind" code under certain conditions, so you could, say, change a branching opcode, back up, go back to the OS and see if the change did what you want. ~~~ krylon That is a _very_ insightful reply. Thank you so much! I wish I could upvote this more than once. ;-) ------ glandium I don't know if decompilers are able to do something about it, but there's a "neat" technique where your machine code can be interpreted as two different sequences of instructions depending where you start instruction decoding. For a simple but artificial example of what I mean: The following sequence of bytes: b8 50 83 ec 10 Decodes as: mov $0x10ec8350, %eax if you start at the first byte, and, if you start at the second byte, as: push %eax sub $0x10, %esp Here I essentially hid an instruction in the mov'ed data, because that's the easiest way to create something like that, but I've seen mind blowing examples of this technique. I unfortunately don't remember where. ~~~ psykotic That's an issue for static disassembly, which is step one of decompilation. Your snippet is a classic example that can throw off naive linear-scan disassemblers. Recursive disassemblers can handle it easily if (and it's a big if) they can identify the basic block entry points. If you have top-level entry points (which can also be a problem), the main problem for a recursive disassembler are indirect jumps that don't fit standard patterns like switch jump tables. All of this gets easier if you can augment your static analysis with control flow traces from program executions with coverage of the relevant branches, so you don't miss basic block entry points. ~~~ munin > All of this gets easier if you can augment your static analysis with control > flow traces from program executions with coverage of the relevant branches, > so you don't miss basic block entry points. That's only true if the traces you can generate do a reasonable job at covering the states the application can find itself in, which is a big assumption. ~~~ psykotic Yes, that's what I meant by coverage of the relevant branches. But the good news is that all these partial, heuristic sources of information can be combined. E.g. for detecting function entry points, you can combine information from ELF/PE export tables (if present), function prologues detected by a linear scan, vtables, static CALL targets, dynamic CALL targets from run-time traces, etc. ------ tptacek This is a really cool post. You can also target IDA itself directly, rather than the decompiler, making it difficult to even view the disassembly. It's been awhile since I did any of this kind of work (it's relevant to software security tokens, games, and content protection), but within the last few years people have published IDA RCE memory corruption, so I imagine it hasn't gotten too much harder to hopelessly confuse IDA. ~~~ rjzzleep Well, same here, it's been very long since I've seen that. But wasn't what got scrambled imports, polymorphic code nasty anti debugging the shareware packers? Asprotect and whatnot. ------ munin There's an interesting vein of research work here in making software reverse engineering more difficult, and measuring how much more difficult. A precursor to decompilation is control flow analysis, the production of the control flow graph you see in the "before" stages in all of the examples in this post. You can go one step further, on a good day, and make it very difficult (perhaps very very difficult, perhaps impossible) to recover a _precise_ control flow graph for a function. There are a few different ways to do this, and I like these approaches more than targeting specific heuristics in IDA/Hexrays because, on a good day for the obfuscator, you can make a theoretical statement about the work effort required to un-do the obfuscation. If you can make that work effort large, then you start to have a security guarantee that is a shade of the security guarantee you get in cryptography. The methods outlined in the parent blog post are great because you can start using them today, but if they annoy Ilfak enough, he'll fix them and they'll stop working. ------ amenghra Reminds me tricks people used to crash debuggers. E.g. [https://reverse.put.as/2012/01/31/anti-debug- trick-1-abusing...](https://reverse.put.as/2012/01/31/anti-debug- trick-1-abusing-mach-o-to-crash-gdb/), [http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/12/striking-back-gdb-and- ida-d...](http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/12/striking-back-gdb-and-ida- debuggers.html) and [https://xorl.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/more-gdb-anti- debuggin...](https://xorl.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/more-gdb-anti-debugging/) ------ kccqzy There are also undocumented instructions and prefixes. For example at this year’s DEFCON someone presented a particular kind of e9 jump prefixed with 66. That instruction is incorrectly disassmbled by all hitherto known disassemblers (IDA, gdb, objdump, VS, etc). And since that will change the length of the instruction, effectively you can make the disassembler produce garbage. ------ krylon There is an interesting PowerPoint presentation you can find on the internet on how Skype used to evade debuggers. [http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pdf](http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pdf) The techniques described in that document are different, but in a way they are alike - both use dirty tricks to shield themselves from people trying to reverse engineer them. The only difference is that one takes place "at compile time", in way, while the other works in a dynamic program as it is executing. ------ ttoinou What about using UPX ? [https://upx.github.io](https://upx.github.io) Can it make harder for software crackers to achieve their goal ? ~~~ TACIXAT upx -d packed.exe UPX is fairly easy to defeat, but many malicious samples will have their own packers / loaders.

What You Can Learn from How Warren Buffett's Investment Process Evolved - gmishuris https://www.forbes.com/sites/garymishuris/2018/12/07/what-you-can-learn-from-how-warren-buffetts-investment-process-evolved/ ====== afrodc_ Interesting article. Thanks for sharing. > Buffett considered it exceptionally rare for a business with a strong > competitive advantage and the resulting high return on capital to be able to > redeploy capital back into the business at similar rates of return. If such > a business could be found it would be the perfect business: strong > competitive advantage with accompanying high returns on invested capital, > high returns on incremental capital that can be redeployed back into the > business, and a large amount of capital that can thus be redeployed over > time. The result would be a compounder – a business that could both generate > sustainably high returns and grow at above-average rates for a long time. In the article they mention Geico as a good investment, which it was, but we could extend the same sentiment to his heavy purchase of Apple securities as of late. Apple has a lot of cash on hand, ready yo be put back into the company for further growth, as well as incredible profit margins and a huge "moat" in the brand name.

Valve working on 'Steam Box' gaming console with hardware partners - Kynlyn http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/2/2840932/exclusive-valve-steam-box-gaming-console ====== fufulabs Here is what i hope will pan out: 1\. Steam OS will be powered by Linux + OpenGL 2\. It will have unparalleled gamer-bias and developer-bias instead of revolving around publishers (meaning its truly gamer focused as what has been Valve's MO) 3\. It will be just good enough in the graphics department but will instead lower the friction in the assets pipeline department, virality and player- analytics 4\. Graphics will now take a backseat to story, AI, art-direction and pacing (due to the hardware spec being fixed and player measuring tools) 5\. crowdsourcing features will be baked in thru APIs (Team Fortress hats as a precursor) 6\. social multiplayer features baked in thru APIs 7\. a standard controller will be mandated 8\. optional accessories like bio-measuring gadgets (measure opponent's sweat, heart-rate and track gaze) will be sold online. If any of this comes to pass then it would have made PC gaming much much more evolved. ~~~ pwf I don't think the hardware spec will be fixed. The article seems to think it will be Android-like. Valve will give guidelines like 'must support OpenGL' and 'needs at least HDMI output and 6 USB ports', but if you want to spring for the Alienware Mega-'Console', then you'll have a bit more power. And the more I think about this and type my response, the less exciting this sounds... All of this is possible on a PC. What they'll be offering us is basically a pre-loaded, locked-down Linux based OS. ~~~ nextparadigms Speaking of Android, I think Google should either either Android or Google TV to turn it into a "console platform" rather than the usual "console-device" we have now. Graphics on ARM chips are getting good enough for enjoyable 3D games in HD, and soon we'll be able to just hook our phones to a TV and play all the Android games there anyway (some phones already do this). But Google could encourage manufacturers to build special cheap $100 boxes that are meant only for gaming, too. Then it would just be able to gain market share over the Xbox 360 and PS3 in the same way it gained over the iPhone - by getting all manufacturers to make such devices. ------ citricsquid This article doesn't mention a very important and very relevant point (maybe they assume everyone is aware): Valve are also the developer and publisher of some of the most popular video game titles around. This puts them in an exceptionally good position to build something like this because with the backing of some of their own titles (For example releasing Half Life 3 as a "Steam Box" exclusive) would immediately encourage sales. Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Half life and Team Fortress 2 are all hugely popular Valve games and their platform "Steamworks" is again used by some huge names, Call of Duty, Football Manager, the list goes on. They have their platform directly integrated with a large amount of popular games and a lot of new releases go with Steam for their PC releases. There are some interesting Steamworks and Steam statistics and information in this PDF: [http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/SteamworksBrochure201...](http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/SteamworksBrochure2011.pdf) ~~~ davidconnell Valve games currently require Steam (on PC) but can be bought anywhere. Making HL3 a Steam Box exclusive would alienate the vast majority of their fan base and kill all the good will they've built over the years. ~~~ citricsquid That's true and I don't believe they ever would, I was using it as an example of the position they're in and the _power_ they hold to make something like this work and be successful. I should have clarified. ------ mortenjorck Well, this clinches it. The next generation of home consoles from Sony and Microsoft are going to, of necessity, run on minimally-customized, commodity hardware, with the end-user experience as sole differentiator. It has seemed like an obvious choice following the diminishing returns of Sony's adventures in exotic supercomputing architecture, but with a competitor at last combining a stationary-target PC with existing vertical integration and massive mind share and market share, they'll have no choice if they want to remain competitive. This industry is in for interesting times. And heaven help them all if Apple brings apps to the Apple TV. ~~~ Steko "with the end-user experience as sole differentiator" Does Kinect not count as a hardware differentiator? For this reason alone MS has the be the favorite among dedicated game boxes. Nintendo's been the most innovative historically but they've already shown their hand and sadly for them it's holding a ginormous controller that I'm 97% sure is a refurbished Sega Gamegear. The only question left about Nintendo is who wins the exclusive rights to Mario/Link and co. It's probably worth the most to Microsoft but Apple has a lot of cash overseas they don't know what to do with. ~~~ rapind Apple purchasing nintendo would be interesting. I don't think Apple has anything to offer in terms of gaming, but they know how to manufacture great hardware (and for less than competitors), and they know how to market and distribute content. ~~~ jiggy2011 I'm not sure that apple itself has nothing to offer. I have a feeling it is only a matter of time before apple releases something that is of serious interest to gamers. It may not be a games console as such but think something with a large screen , an app store and some new input method that lends itself well to gaming. ~~~ phren0logy Apple's announcement of what will likely be the iPad 3 coincides with GDC. I would think an iPad 3 + 1080p AppleTV is a compelling console replacement. I bet that is their move: to make your TV a monitor for the iPad. That solves the interface issue with TV in one fell swoop. ~~~ jiggy2011 I think this could work well for some categories of games, for example strategy games but there are still many popular games this wouldn't work so well for at all(driving games, fps etc) So either they will focus on a different category of gamer/games or there will have to be some other more game specific input device such as a controller. ------ farhanpatel There were rumours a while ago that Valve was working on Linux support for their infamous source engine which powers most if not all their games. What if it wasn't just support for linux but Steam running on a Valve tailored Linux kernel. Obviously most games would still need Windows for DirectX but all of Valves games and many others could work on this super thin Linux kernel. * [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE4M...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE4Mw) ~~~ tapoxi The Source (and Goldsrc) engines support a Linux dedicated server, which explains the job listing. As far as using Linux goes, unlikely, since people won't be able to play any of the games they already own. ~~~ stonemetal Haven't they already ported most of their games to mac? It doesn't seem like going to Linux would be that big an effort. Valve's games make up like 10% of steam sales though so they would need to work on pressuring the other 90% of the market that they don't control. Releasing a dedicated box that doesn't work with 90% of the content you have sold doesn't sound like a winner to me. ------ Revisor This sounds interesting and all, but who is going to be their customers? The 30 or so millions of their users obviously already HAVE their own hardware. So is it going to target the current console owners? And persuade them how? "It's like your box, but you can install mods. It's like a PC but with less freedom."? Anyway I'm looking forward to the development. The three big console manufacturers need a kick. Edit: Also Steam doesn't have their own OS obviously. So is every box going to need a Win licence? ~~~ bryanlarsen How many of those 30 or so million users are looking to upgrade their video card or buy a new computer? That's your target market. potential markets: \- people looking for a computer to hook up to their television. I bet there are lots of people out their who would like a nice HTPC but want modern gaming performance as well. \- people with laptops as their primary PC but who also game. How many people have a desktop and a laptop because gaming sucks on most/all laptops? Probably the vast majority of PC gamers. Every single one of these is a potential customer. Use a MacBook Air for work & facebook & casual gaming and get a SteamBox for serious RTS gaming or flight simulators or whatever other kind of games don't work well on consoles or on laptops. You'll no longer have to worry about anti-virus or any of the other crap involved in maintaining a Windows box. You'll just have an OS X box that "just works" and you'll have a Linux box that "just works". \- people who want to buy a PC without paying a license fee to Microsoft. Some of these will install Ubuntu or a pirated Windows on their later, but then support is no longer the Vendor's problem. I suspect it will be much easier to persuade vendors to sell "SteamBox OS" boxes than Linux boxes just because it should reduce support costs. To summarize: cheapskates and gamers. I think that covers about 99% of the home desktop PC market -- everybody else buys laptops. ------ nwmcsween Am I the only one that sees this as a bad move? Microsoft had os development, directx, intel this is why they pivoted into the console market. I think valve should expand steam even more - bring steam to xbox, ps3, wii make buying games cheap easy and fast. ~~~ redthrowaway Thing is, Valve has mindshare and love amongst gamers that MS couldn't hope to match, and Sony had none of when it brought out the PS. There will be many gamers (myself included) who will buy this simply because it's Valve and we trust them not only to make it awesome, but to bring awesome games to it as well. ------ sbierwagen I wrote a post about this a year ago[1], and concluded that it was unlikely that either Microsoft or Apple would sell them OS licenses cheaply enough to make such a product viable. The third alternative is Valve using Linux, or something, which isn't enormously plausible. 1: [http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/05/08/valve_isnt_going_to...](http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/05/08/valve_isnt_going_to_make_a_console/) ~~~ bryanlarsen Why is Linux not plausible? 1) There have been several leaks indicating that Steam for Linux exists, or at least has been prototyped. I imagine that pretty much the only reason why it hasn't been released is because it's a small market with large support requirements. 2) Porting games to a Linux with decent video drivers is no harder than porting to the Mac. Once you've done one, you're 95% of the way to doing the other. The largest task is porting to OpenGL which you have to do to port to PS3 or to Mac anyways. 3) The largest problem game makers have with Linux is supporting a large variety of hardware along with a large variety of distributions. If you can say "We only support SteamLinux on SteamBox", that problem completely disappears. ~~~ potatolicious > _"Why is Linux not plausible?"_ Short answer: DirectX. Scream all you want about OpenGL, but MS has honestly created a superior product. Between the hand-wringing over specs and the massive fragmentation via vendor-specific extensions, OpenGL doesn't hold a candle to DirectX. Even old OpenGL stalwarts like Carmack himself have bailed from that wagon. There's a reason why Mac ports are still relatively rare in the industry, and more importantly, where they do exist, they are universally _horrendous_ in quality and performance. ~~~ Arelius It should be noted, that while there is agreement that DirectX is a better API. Portability is becoming a much larger concern, especially with mobile gaming. These days, just about every major game engine has the capability of running on OpenGL. Carmack has acknowledged that DirectX is better, but Rage, for instance, still supports it for systems that don't support DirectX. ~~~ potatolicious Correct me if I'm wrong (written lots of OpenGL and DirectX over the years, but never worked on a console), but doesn't the PS3 use PSGL, an OpenGL offshoot that's not directly compatible with other OpenGL implementations? Which is to say, porting effort to PS3 does not also give you a PC/Mac OpenGL port. This is the big problem I see - UE and idTech both support OpenGL, though in reality only UE has any significant licensee base to speak of. There is, however, an _awful_ lot of home-brewing even at the AAA-levels: EA's gone and thrown a lot of weight behind the Frostbite engine, Ubisoft seems quite fond of their Anvil engine (Assassin's Creed + more), and the big massive CoD franchise runs a proprietary engine too. An OpenGL-only platform might automagically include all UE and idTech licensed games, but that's hardly an impressive snapshot of the gaming industry, particularly the core gaming demographic (as compared to say, the mobile gaming demographic, where OpenGL already reigns supreme). This hypothetical platform won't just leave the vast majority of Steam's existing titles in the cold, but will also have the unenviable task of forcing many devs to provide cross-platform support where none currently exists. Valve is a juggernaut in the industry - but even that's a very, very tall order. There's certainly a renaissance of interest in OpenGL thanks to the mobile gaming side of things, but I'm _extremely_ skeptical of claims that any player, even someone the stature of Valve, can get a majority of existing Steam devs to sign up to support OpenGL. ~~~ __alexs Frostbite and Anvil run on DirectX and OpenGL-esq systems. IW engine even has games out on Wii. I kind of suspect that all the major engines out there have pretty decent cross-platform support these days. The publishers don't like to be locked into any one console unless they are getting an exclusivity kick- back from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. It might require Valve to get people to recompile their games and tweak some stuff, but like you say, Valve are a juggernaut. ~~~ maximilianburke I think you're mistaken, Frostbite doesn't run on any OpenGL-esque systems. ~~~ __alexs The PS3 is OpenGL based. Specifically it's OpenGL ES with some extra proprietary Sony stuff. The important point is that the engine is not directly tied to any low-level rendering API and clearly has enough abstraction to be ported to multiple platforms with a reasonably low cost of development. ~~~ Arelius Your first comment isn't entirely accurate. While the PS3 does support PSGS, which is the library you are referring to, engines like FrostBite use the LibGCM interface, which has very little similarity to OpenGL. ------ lucaspiller I'm not a hardcore gamer, but I still have a Windows box I keep up to spec to play the latest COD et al when they come out. I still also enjoy playing a few old school games that aren't available for consoles, hence I don't have one __. The only use I have for this box is gaming, as I do everything else on a nice portable 11" MBA. I would prefer to be able to use the MBA for gaming too, I can connect it to a monitor, mouse, gamepad, etc but it doesn't have the graphics power. I've used OnLive a few times which has been great, but their catalogue is rather limited. Personally I would rather see Valve buy (or build) something like this so I can game anywhere. (N.b. If you haven't tried OnLive give it a go, they have trials for most games, Just Cause 2 is pretty fun and is a good example of the graphics it can do) __*I also don't have a HD TV which I guess is another reason. ------ akahs If this is true, maybe that's why Valve has been working on Steam on Linux for so long. People over at Phoronix have been talking about it for years, but nothing official has ever been released. After all, it doesn't make sense to pay Microsoft the Windows tax for every console, and they couldn't use OSX. ~~~ angrycoder They would have to pay the windows tax, that is where 90% of the games are. ~~~ TazeTSchnitzel What about WINE? ------ sandGorgon I recently bought a 1.7GB game for my Android phone (Modern Combat 3), that you can optionally connect to a HD monitor using a HDMI out cable. Quad core mobile chips are already in production and PS3 capable mobile GPUs are 6 months away (ARM Mali T-658). Why is a console, a console and not simply a power/cooling/connectivity dock for a suitably powerful mobile device ? Id's flagship game, RAGE, has been supremely playable on an iphone for ages now. Consoles like PS3 and Xbox already lag desktop-grade video hardware by 5-6 years, yet have a large market - so why cant the same be true for mobile hardware ? ~~~ archangel_one Rage on iPhone is a rail shooter, it's not the same game as the PC/console version. It's been stripped down to the exact minimum it needs to support that predefined path through the game, and while that's great fun on a mobile, I don't think everyone would be totally impressed if that was the direction the next generation of consoles took. ~~~ ConstantineXVI It's a rail shooter because of control issues, not power. Drop your phone in a dock attached to a gamepad, and those issues disappear. ~~~ mgcross According to Carmack, it's on rails to reduce file size (texture LOD):<http://toucharcade.com/2010/11/19/john-carmack-on-rage/> ~~~ teamonkey And then some. On the 360 Rage comes on 3 8GB DVDs. The megatexturing method that Carmack favours is intensely data-heavy. ------ ChrisNorstrom Hmmm. They must have something special planned because I doubt it's another console. [http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/creation-the-steam- cons...](http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/creation-the-steam-console-no- its-not-another-set-top-box/) (above) What I predict Big Picture mode is suppose to be. But seriously, how is a $300-$600 console suppose to compete with a $800-$2,000 mid to high end gaming pc? And shouldn't Valve be working on bringing movie and music to steam first before taking this on? I don't know, but I'm dying to find out. ~~~ Lewisham Why would Valve be interested in selling this to people with a gaming PC? Those people already play games on a PC, and are unlikely to give up their keyboard/mouse setups. Your scenario is highly unlikely. ~~~ ChrisNorstrom Thanks for the downvote and not understanding the concept. Many console games outsell their PC games, PC and Console games can both reach the same graphical qualities. A lot of poeple play PC games with a controller because it's so much easier than with a mouse and keyboard (except for sim games, strategy games, and first person shooters). In many cases the only difference between console gaming and PC gaming is the setting. Console gaming takes place in a living room with a big screen tv and nice comfy chairs with room for others, PC gaming takes place in your home office or personal room and it's not as relaxing or natural feeling nor is there room for others. So by streaming a PC into the living room instead of buying more hardware to maintain and take care and hook up and make room for. Just stream your $1,000 PC to the living room. ------ msie If they are too loose with their hardware specifications then writing software for it will be a nightmare. Ideally it would be a rigidly specified but open platform. Actually, I wouldn't mind if it was a locked down platform like the iPhone but I wouldn't have to buy an expensive dev kit to develop for it. I've always wanted to develop something for the XBox or PS2/3 but couldn't because I would need the big bucks for the dev kit and approval to be a part of the developer program. Apple's proven that their model of development works. ------ bitsoda Ha, about five years ago I thought about how I wanted Valve to compete with Alienware in the gaming PC business, and how they would brand their rig the "Steam Box". Interesting to see something happening here. Also, I bet a Valve- branded "SteamBook" laptop computer would be spiffy. ------ ekianjo A bold move but it makes perfect sense. Manufacturers bring no value in the games business, its now all about contents and distribution. Apple and Valve will have growing power over the old business models. ------ mdonahoe I want Steam OS on my desktop. Optimized for gaming and little else. ~~~ mwill Semi-related on Win7 (Pro/Ultimate/Enterprise only) you can use the group policy object editor to launch something other than explorer.exe as the shell. In the past I've used this to launch directly into Steam. My friend has a spare PC in his living room mean for games with an open invitation for anyone to use, but didn't like people abusing it/his internet (We have data quota here, iirc his is 75GB a month then he gets throttled to 65Kb/s), so he asked if I could make it for steam games only. Now when you turn it on, you get a steam login prompt, and basically nothing else. All the installed games are available to anyone who owns them on steam, and work normally. Hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del, opening the task manager, hitting File->New Task and running explorer.exe gets you the start bar back, so its not locked in or anything. In general its pretty useful if you have a Windows box that's used for basically one thing, like XBMC or Steam. ~~~ mdonahoe Is there a noticeable performance difference? Sounds cool ------ 2mur KB+M and user mods please. I'll drop xbox in a heartbeat.

Startup Founder Required - joelennon https://medium.com/@joelennon/startup-founder-required-635cd816b51d#.megt22xa0 ====== nickfzx lol

Ask HN: What is your programming training schedule? - muzani Like athletes, there needs to be some time allocated to training yourself to perform faster, better. Time needs to be allocated to resting too, so it might not be optimal to learn more on weekends and nights.<p>Good training usually involves something tough, that strains you to your limit. A big part of it is scheduling that training properly so that you can keep improving, and yet aren&#x27;t too exhausted to get work done.<p>How do you keep improving yourself? Learning new languages &amp; libraries, shortcuts, better tools, etc? ====== marktangotango Here are some things I've down over the years in no particular order. Work on algorithm problems during slow times at work, or when I know I'll be interviewing soon. I'd just search google for tech interview questions, then implement so that I really understood the solution. I used to write 2d games as a hobby, I made Tetris, the most ambitious game I completed was a jump n run with a simple level. This taught me 2d graphics, animation, simple physics, and managing state of a lot of interacting entities. I implemented software 3d with flat shaded polygons and used that to make a demake of an old game. This taught a lot about 3D, matrix math and modeling. I've implemented parsers and interpreters for simple languages multiple times. I personally think this is the most bang for the buck type of project, you learn a lot about working with text, recursion and tree data structures. I wrote an emulator for an old architecture. This taught me a lot about assembler and how machines operate. I wrote a couple of simple games for gameboy color and ran them on an emulator using homebrew tools. This taught me a lot about assembler programming an old game consoles. I wrote client server library kind of like zeromq. This taught me a lot about socket programming and threads. There was other stuff. Note all these projects were for my own edification and amusement and were never released anywhere. It was all basically an excercise in "ok that's how that all work", then moved on. There was never a goal or schedule. These were just things that interested me. ------ oblib I spend a lot of time learning new things. For the past couple years I've been focused on learning Javascript but also boning up on CSS and HTML5. I do most of this on a "need to know" basis most everyday, and on a "curious to know" basis when I'm curious, which is pretty often. As for improving, first I labor on getting my code working and that, for me, can be a pretty messy process. Afterwards I look for ways to improve it and clean it up. I generally learn a lot doing that. Aside from that, I read "How To" articles (a lot), and also spend time browsing APIs, and as soon as I need to figure out how to do something I do a web search on it and go read up on it. For example, I saw a link about "Learning Javascript" here a week or so ago and went and read the article. It was pretty good and I learned a bit from it. It had an exercise to find numbers in a "fibonacci" sequence which was fun. It was pretty simple exercise in logic but since I'd never played with it I found it interesting and kept poking at it a bit more :D ------ muzani I decide what to learn mostly from looking at job requirements of similar fields. Most companies usually adopt things that work and save them time. This was also how I picked up on the Kotlin wave before it went mainstream for Android. If something makes me uncomfortable, I try to look at it. Usually it's things that seem really powerful, which people hate, but don't really justify why. React and MongoDB are prime examples. I find that most of the "fun" and interesting tech isn't really that helpful to work with. The best tech is tiresome to learn, especially in Android. I freelance, so usually I would allocate a couple of days just to grind up programming skills in certain things. I used to do something like 30 mins a morning to warm up my typing speed, but it doesn't stick when I have to deal with deadlines. ------ jpamata I prefer to learn from books as I find it easier to pace oneself. Every day, I check out what book packtpub is offering for free. Aside from that, I also subscribe to safari books (they have a free trial - no credit card required, check it out). Every now and then I see something that interests me and I spend at least a week or two going through the book. If a topic interests me enough, I'd check out another book, look at online courses, spend my time on the forums delving deeper, and maybe start a project. Link: [https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free- learning](https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning) ~~~ muzani Do you have any particular way of reading? Like just read the same book in your spare time, or flip between books as long as they hold your interest? Or even a way of choosing which books to read? ~~~ jpamata Most of the time, I flip between two books. The trick is to pick books that complement each other. Like say maths and machine learning, or a book on JavaScript and a JS framework. I usually read on the mornings & weekends and then spend an hour or two doing the exercises/projects at night, after work. ------ itamarst These days I only practice at work, because it's the best place to practice if you can manage it: more time, better motivation, specific tasks in mind, help more available, realistic problems, and so on. E.g. as an example, learning a programming language: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/09/09/learn-a-new- programm...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/09/09/learn-a-new-programming- language/) ------ sotojuan Feel free to ignore/downvote me - just wondering: is this a thing people do? I certainly understand and support it, but I have never seen it happen at work (and I work in a start up, not some old boring enterprise shop). After eight hours, if I want to program at all I'll probably mess around with some new language or whatever, not "train". Same with my coworkers. Maybe I am lucky, but the things I do at work challenge me such that I learn something after every project. Anyway, I did ask a similar question one time, check it out: [https://lobste.rs/s/uu6v1o/what_is_deliberate_practice_for](https://lobste.rs/s/uu6v1o/what_is_deliberate_practice_for) To give you a direct answer, how about doing LeetCode exercises, starting from the easiest and building up? If you take your time and note down how you solved each problem, you will start to notice patterns and can apply those at work to solve stuff quicker. But IMO, if we are talking about performing "better" at work programming, it's more about the skill of taking business specs/feature request and fitting them with the existing codebase :-) ~~~ muzani I think it's less likely to happen at a startup, because there is more work to be done. Larger companies often have some kind of official training (even the boring enterprises). I know this, because I freelance with a training company and often do things like training courses to teach a bunch of companies how to do Material Design. It takes a lot of time and error to mess around, and some libraries have such immense productivity boosts that it's a waste of time not to do them. In my case, I once bought an ergonomic keyboard and realized that I was typing the wrong way for years. My typing speed halved for about a week, so I did some 30 min/day training routine until I got it back up to an acceptable rate. But I think that I could actually be typing a lot faster if I bother to practice with it. There are some other things - debugging tools, keyboard shortcuts. And there are some major things like learning RxJava, Kotlin, Butterknife, or some architecture, which isn't always possible with 30 mins/day, but may cost productivity if delayed and something you want the whole team up to date with. ------ thiagooffm I read programming websites and whenever I read something seem to be useful and get excited about it, I try it out. Has worked well so far. Been reading HN since from the very beginning and tested most of the stuff which was added here, some of them snatching me a job in Europe(I'm from a third-world country). And also has been able to keep me pretty much well on the market. I could have had better results if I just sat down in one tech, but I find it boring. ------ jetti I have an hour and a half commute (each way) and majority is spent on the train. I have a hotspot and do all my fun programming on there. Learning a new language, learning a new framework or just creating something. It's a great way to pass the time on the long commute. ------ androidrobo You would like to understand user experience (UX) and DevOps, or want to make sure you’re designing secure databases, Global Knowledge has a course that will teach the latest technology trends and embed lifelong application development and programming skills.

Calendar Era - peter_d_sherman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_era ====== peter_d_sherman Look at the list of different calendars on the right hand side of the page... i.e., Gregorian calendar, Ab urbe condita, Armenian calendar, Assyrian calendar, Bahá'í calendar, Balinese saka calendar, Bengali calendar, Berber calendar, British Regnal year, Buddhist calendar, Burmese calendar, Byzantine calendar, Chinese calendar, Coptic calendar, Discordian calendar, Ethiopian calendar, Hebrew calendar, Hindu calendars (Vikram Samvat, Shaka Samvat, Kali Yuga), Holocene calendar, etc., etc. I didn't know (prior to reading the article) there were so many calendars! Even includes Unix time, at the end! Opinion: Needs Star Trek's Stardate!

Freud and Cocaine - gnosis http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/cocaine/ ====== xijuan Freud, Freud, should I love you or hate you? ------ johndlafayette <http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud03a.html>

Ask HN: Does anyone read those O'reilly animal books from cover to cover? - alg0rith ====== phillipseamore Back when I still spent time reading books, definitely. There's still a lot of knowledge I have from those books. Keep in mind I was reading those book some 20+ years ago, times have changed, and I get everything online today. ------ yesenadam Yes! Quite a few, anyway. ------ gladiatr72 Yes.

Show HN: Vespene – My new Python CI/CD and automation server written in Django - mpdehaan2 http://docs.vespene.io ====== markovbot > Unlike some other CI tools, pipelines in Vespene are easily and graphically > configured, and there is no custom DSL (“Domain Specific Language”) to learn > and debug. Does this mean that the CI config cannot be checked into some sort of version control? That was one of my biggest issues with Jenkins. Someone would change something somewhere and suddenly my builds would fail, and even if I track down what setting is causing the problem, I have no idea why it was changed, who changed it, what will happen if I put it back, or even what it's previous value is. Additionally, it made duplicating a given workflow an extremely tedious, manual process. ~~~ pytester Second this. I really would rather have something I can configure fully with YAML or JSON. ~~~ ergo14 I think [https://concourse-ci.org/](https://concourse-ci.org/) is something you want to look at then. ~~~ Aeolun Concourse has a really weird resources philosophy that makes it almost impossible to easily work with. ~~~ jacques_chester I'm a notorious Concourse fan, I'd be interested to understand why you think it's almost impossible to work with. ------ peterwwillis > When organizations start to have too many projects, they need an easy way to > share values and code snippets between those projects. To support this we > have Jinja2 templating of build scripts I would implore everyone implementing CI/CD to do the opposite. If you have a small project, maybe use a build script to get it off the ground quickly. If you have a large organization with complex, disparate tech projects, do not use build scripts. Use CM or orchestration tools. Use pre-rolled containers/images. Use configuration options for existing solutions/plugins/deployment tools. Write only open source, composable, extensions/modules/plugins, with yaml/json/xml configs to control them. The open source bit is actually crucial. By making all your build/test/deploy plugins open source, you force yourself not to include proprietary information, which is always a dark pattern. Hard-coding IPs/hostnames, credentials, product names, regions, etc just makes your work less composable/reusable. Open source all your pipeline code except for your configs. Then everyone in your business can find everyone else's work simply by going to GitHub and looking up a tool. Because they won't be scripts, they can be picked up and used immediately by any team, and not have to be forked by every team that needs a modified build script. To do all this properly requires discipline and training and research and time, which big companies have. The point is not to be fast, but to be reliable, to prevent muda from sapping your productivity. ~~~ mpdehaan2 Compiling C code with puppet or whatever seems a little weird to me, to be honest :) If you want to keep your data externally, there are some good options for this. I'd read the plugin docs about variable plugins, that can easily source variables for things like etcd or Consul. A script for a given repo could be _nothing_ more than "make go", and that actually is a pretty good practice, to keep that in source control. Still, you need something to build your code, and to have a good place to see the status. Ultimately, code still needs to be built, and orgs do want to avoid images they cannot easily recreate. That's the role of a build system and making sure the _process_ to create those artifacts is in source control. I should also mention that your build script CAN be sourced from source control. In your .vespene file, just say "script: <path>. However, the variables in that file can be evaluated by Jinja2 variables, so for instance your security team could set up a snippet everybody could use or your feature flags could be defined from there. Another cool feature of Vespene is in each project build root all those variables appear as vespene.json files, so it can be a good tool to use to launch all kinds of automation from a web console where you want to record results. ------ mpdehaan2 Hey folks, this is my new project. You might possibly remember me from creating Cobbler and Ansible. I thought I'd share and if you have any questions, let me know! ~~~ df24g3t36 Id strongly recommend adding the ability to implement pipelines as code -- ie: you check in the CI/CD configuration into the repo (or another repo, containing CI/CD configurations). Having to configure the pipelines manually is nasty, and often builds are caused by misconfigured of the pipeline. having this checked it allows easy versioning. ~~~ PopeDotNinja I also like the idea of pipelines as code. I'd love to see it go a step further and become pipelines as testable code. I've yet to see a pipeline of non-trivial complexity that stays easy to reason about. I predict the next wave of CI/CD (or pipeline anything) will make pipeline testing & sanity checking simple as heck. If this already exists, please tell me about it, because I don't see people using it ;) ------ ianamartin This looks really great to me, and I can't wait to try it. I've been using buildbot for extremely light-weight CI/CD server that basically just triggers Ansible scripts on git changes. Not at all the way buildbot was designed to work, but very quick and easy to manage. This looks like a tool that could be a lot closer to what I want to do and designed to do it that way. Also, is the repo being moved somewhere? [https://github.com/vespene/vespene](https://github.com/vespene/vespene) is 404. ~~~ cbcoutinho That's someones personal repo - you're looking for this one: [https://github.com/vespene-io/vespene](https://github.com/vespene-io/vespene) ~~~ morenoh149 this is what's linked to from the docs so I think it's official ~~~ mpdehaan2 [https://github.com/vespene-io/vespene](https://github.com/vespene-io/vespene) is the one! ------ p1necone Good thing you didn't write this on top of Etherium instead. I suspect you would quickly run into a situation where you... needed more Vespene gas. ------ cjbprime Does every machine running a worker have to be a full node with Django? Workers in a complex CI setup can often be e.g. raspberry pi machines, iOS emulators, Windows machines without admin access deep inside a firewall that make outgoing connections but not incoming, etc. So, you might consider a protocol for builders to report their results (e.g. over SSH) without being a full node, if that doesn't exist. Looks good! ~~~ mpdehaan2 Hey! Any node _typically_ would run the webserver because it's not that heavy, but doesn't technically have to. It could just run one worker process. Right now the workers do need database access and I suspect that will stay that way for the short term. Windows needs to happen, but I'm not sure when it happens. (Also a good list discussion). I'm a bit curious about your raspberry pi use case - maybe a good topic for the forum? [http://talk.vespene.io/](http://talk.vespene.io/) ------ caleblloyd How do you manage normalizing webhook events from each source control provider, i.e. GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc? I have been interested in building a general purpose CI/CD tool but this part seems like the most "grunt work". Is there an open source library that standardizes webhooks? Or would you be interested in publishing that portion in a library? ~~~ dsumenkovic Hey Caleb, if you are interested in using GitLab webhooks, this documentation may help you [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/integrations/webhook...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/integrations/webhooks.html). ------ michaelmcmillan Cool project! It strikes me that Django might not be the ideal for this project, have you thought about that? This logic [1] looks shoehorned into the framework. [1] [https://github.com/vespene- io/vespene/blob/master/vespene/mo...](https://github.com/vespene- io/vespene/blob/master/vespene/models/pipeline.py#L82) ~~~ mpdehaan2 While you're welcome to that opinion, Django has been freaking awesome. This whole thing got written in 3 months, not even working full time. I wrote pipelines in like a _day_. It seems like you're saying I should have used a many-to-many there rather than 7 FKs. Probably, but shrug... it can be fixed later if it ever becomes a problem. ~~~ michaelmcmillan I would expect it has been easy, I’m talking about the way forward. I wish you the best of luck anyway! ------ ensignavenger This looks cool. Unfortunately it is Common Clause licensed and therefore not Open Source. My organization would never consider a Commons Clause licensed tool. ~~~ mpdehaan2 I'd argue the definition of what is open source is up for debate, but I had some reasons for this and thought about it for weeks. I hope people know my history and how I've run projects in the past. But what this does for me is keep me from releasing anything open core. With ansible, ansible was open source but the GUI was _not_ , and we had to hold something back. The traditional alternatives to OSS are to make a support business, which somewhat encourages making buggy or hard to install software, or a consulting business (IMHO, same) and all of those detract from building a product, collectively, with some of your favorite people on the internet. So basically Vespene is going to be like a pseudo-foundation. The structure for this is described here - [http://docs.vespene.io/partnership.html](http://docs.vespene.io/partnership.html) \- which keeps consulting and support totally free for small shops, and encouraging larger ones that could potentially make millions form Vespene to give back a very small amount. What normally happens is large companies close six figure contracts supporting open source, and they don't give back a dime, and my goal here is to essentially make a developer's salary off of this project by having those who make _more_ give back a very small amount. This seems pretty fair to me, but I also recognize that some people don't agree with it. That all being said, it's not a "no-commercial" clause in any way, and still free for small consultancies, so I'm not anticipating any major problems. Most of the time, software gets installed in a place of business _for_ that business. For some of my previous thoughts on this, I'd refer folks to [https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/why-open-source-needs- new-...](https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/why-open-source-needs-new- licenses-d2d9d819a10) and later my current thinking [https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/going-with-the-commons- cla...](https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/going-with-the-commons- clause-1bdab4c15e5d) It's not something I've considered lightly, but this keeps MORE software open, and for a small one-person shop, I think that's more noble than trying to hold some code back and not release it at all. Some people just want 100% free, gimme gimme, etc - and fine - you're entitled to pick one of those things. That's ok. I personally view this a little more pragmatically, under the view of fairness, and also have taken steps (in the CLA, etc), to guarantee that trust is never going to be abused. For instance, the license reverts to pure Apache if Vespene were ever to change hands. On the downside, I can't get screwed over by IBM or Amazon while I'm trying to crank out free software for everyone. That seems fair too, seeing the time investment running an open source community and working on the code takes. ~~~ Sir_Cmpwn You have a lot to say here, but I'd like to respond to just this: >I'd argue the definition of what is open source is up for debate It's not up for debate. It hasn't been up for debate for years. There are two generally accepted definitions of FOSS (each addressing the F and OS respectively): [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html) [https://opensource.org/osd](https://opensource.org/osd) _No one_ disagrees with these who isn't trying to sow discontent in the open source community. Disagreeing with the OSD or FSD is akin to denying climate change. ~~~ Nacraile > No one disagrees with these who isn't trying to sow discontent in the open > source community. No. Everybody who disagrees with these has been driven from your ideological bubble. "Open source" has become a general term that is part of the natural language; nobody has the right to demand everybody use their preferred definition. Many people who use the term will never have visited gnu.org or opensource.org. Many others will have, but will have concluded that the strictness of those definitions is silly. It seems quite reasonable to disagree with a definition of "open source" that makes it practically impossible to make a living off of your work. If you want to have a debate on the merits, fine, but running around telling people they're using English wrong because they disagree with you is just foolish. ~~~ Sir_Cmpwn No, it hasn't. This is a lie which serves the interests of those who would harm open source. This language is important. You can't take the argument of "every word means what I want it to". The burden is on you to be understood, and by misusing terminology like "open source" you are either ignorant or deceitful. I wouldn't expand the definition of decongestant to include adderall because the former sells better and I'm a pharmacy that needs to get rid of my stock. You might disagree with the principles of the definition, or think that the definition isn't useful. But that doesn't make it any less of the definition. If you want to do something different, you need to call it something else or you are lying to people. ~~~ Nacraile > You might disagree with the principles of the definition, or think that the > definition isn't useful. But that doesn't make it any less of the > definition. If you want to do something different, you need to call it > something else or you are lying to people. This argument can be applied to your definition just as well as it can to my definition. Which underlines the pointlessness of arguing over the definition of "open source", and therefore the pointlessness of telling somebody that their thing is "not open source". ~~~ mkesper If you follow your logic everything becomes void. ~~~ Nacraile Not so. I'm just saying that it's valid to disagree on the definition of a thing, and that when that happens you need to have debate about the real underlying disagreement, rather than making a pointless and foolish declaration of your correctness by your definition. Although I'm not sure why I bothered typing that, given the current readings I'm getting on my troll detector. ------ cagenut I like how ansible was really func 2 and now vespene is _the real_ ansible 2 ~~~ mpdehaan2 ha, totally not going to write another CM layer. That is one of the fatal blunders, up there with fighting a land war in Asia and all that. ------ bribri needs declarative syntax ~~~ mpdehaan2 There's a fair amount of that available in [http://docs.vespene.io/importing.html](http://docs.vespene.io/importing.html) ... if you have more ideas can you stop by [https://talk.vespene.io/c/ideas](https://talk.vespene.io/c/ideas) ? ... I don't want to make the syntax more complex than the YAML that is there now, but I think we can add other fields if there is something you want or a capability that might be missing.

Python Performance Tips - dhotson http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips ====== sophacles These tips are ok. Particularly the ones about profiling. I have a few more that I have found over time. First tho, as always a good algorithm improvement can help over any of these. Trick 0 is about that, the rest are more about performance. 0\. Generator comprehensions and list comprehensions are you friends. Sometimes one will make things like woah fast -- generators are lazy evaluation at its finest (if you don't follow that find a Haskell fan and ask them), this can be a real boon to your app. Sometimes you need the list comprehension. If you can't reason out which would be better for you, or reasoning suggests it shouldn't matter, try both anyway, just to be sure :). 1\. Function calls are expensive. Sometimes when you call a function a lot (on the order of 1000's of calls in a normal run) its better to bite the bullet and just unfactor it. I have seen improvements of 50% from just this. 2\. Dictionaries are fast. Classes are great, objects make life easy on programmers, but when dealing with large datasets, sometimes nested list/dict combos is way better than Objects (which are just dicts, but the syntactic sugar of objectness can eat up quite a few method calls, see #1 above). Also, sets are extremely useful and based on dicts (therefore also fast), so if the semantics of a set are ok with your needs, use them. 3\. Python regex is fast. It is usually frowned upon, but sometimes a complex regex is way better than pyparsing or python string methods. This saved my butt on one very memorable occasion -- #1 and #2 above didn't really do enough, so I replaced the core processing bits with a very complex regex and got the speedup. 4\. The gc module can really do a LOT of good. Short running scripts with lots of data can really be sped up by turning off gc (if you have the memory capacity). Even tuning generational parameters can really affect performance -- almost shockingly so. 5\. Any type of bit twiddling sucks. Take the time to do it in C and make the extension. This includes most IP ops -- if you are working with large lists of addresses look into dnet. Similar libs exist for a lot of other projects. 6\. __slots__ prove very useful sometimes. So does the struct module. Learn about both, they can really do wonders for your code in both readability and performance if used carefully. 7\. All of the above are wrong in some contexts -- they are not hard and fast rules, but guidelines, in some cases they work great, in others they don't help at all. ~~~ bbb _5\. Any type of bit twiddling sucks. Take the time to do it in C and make the extension._ I recently had to do something like this and ended up using SWIG to generate the glue code. However, I noticed that my code had to spent considerable time (many iterations) in the C++ library to reduce overall execution time (but then it did by a factor of 20x-40x). Do you happen to have some advice on how much speedup could be gained by replacing SWIG with handwritten wrappers? ~~~ sophacles My personal preferences are: Boost.python for C++[1], and Pyrex/Cython for C wrappers. Both make things pretty nice. I never really got into swig, so I'm not sure if there is noticable speedup betwen any of these. As for handwritten wrappers, I have not had any personal experience trying to eke the extra speed from not using a code generator type wrapper. hth ~~~ dagw Swig solves a somewhat different problem than Boost.python/pyrex. Swig works better when you have an existing C++ codebase you want to call from python while making as few changes to the C++ side as possible, while Pyrex/Boost work better when you are writing a C or C++ module from scratch to be called from python. ------ pkrumins I wonder if any of them still are current. "At the time I originally wrote this I was using a 100MHz Pentium running BSDI." ~~~ utku_karatas2 Most of the tips here seem to be based on "do stuff in such a way that less Python C API calls making lookups get involved". Python API is the same Python API more or less so I'd assume most of the tips are current. ------ jparise The timeit module (<http://docs.python.org/library/timeit.html>) is an invaluable tool for taking and comparing performance measurements. ------ admn_is_traitor Python performance tip #1: don't use it if performance is a design goal. ~~~ dhotson I wouldn't go that far as to avoid it altogether. Python makes a great glue language even in applications where performance is important. You can write all the performance critical stuff in C and then glue it together in Python. It's a pretty common approach and it works really well. Game engines often do this where the main engine is in C++ with scripting in Lua.

BadgerDB Implemented AES Encryption - mrjn https://blog.dgraph.io/post/encryption-at-rest-dgraph-badger/ ====== sneak > _A user provided AES encryption key, called the master key, is used to > encrypt auto-generated data keys. Data keys are used to encrypt and decrypt > data on disk. Each encrypted data key is stored on disk along with the > encrypted data. The length of your master key must be 16, 24 or 32 > characters. This determines what version of AES encryption is used (AES-128, > AES-192, and AES-256 respectively)._ It will be difficult for me to trust a crypto implementation written by people who don’t seem to know what a PBKDF is. ~~~ mrjn (author of Badger) Keeping things simple. If you can break it (decrypt data without knowing the master key), we'll be happy to pay you a bounty. We can extend it from data loss to also include "breaking encryption." [https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/issues/601](https://github.com/dgraph- io/badger/issues/601) ~~~ sneak > _Note that you should never use a predictable string as your master key. If > you have a password manager (such as 1Password, LastPass, etc.), you can use > its built-in password generator to generate a strong encryption key._ Reducing the keyspace to only ASCII/printable is a pretty big deal, although judging by the article and not the code, I doubt brute force is the way to break your system. The method you are employing (cracking contests) is another thing that projects commonly do that makes people trust their implementations less. Inventing a cryptosystem is a pretty big task. I haven’t looked at your code. How are you sure that you got it reasonably right? Furthermore, why do you believe it’s better to do this in the application than, say, with LUKS?

Improving CSS text decorations - joxie http://blogs.adobe.com/webplatform/2013/02/19/improving-css-text-decorations/ ====== bbx It's always hard to get excited by such new 'fancy' CSS features when the examples (espcially the gradient and pattern ones) look like Word Art renderings. But I recall such kinds of post flourishing when people were discussing box- shadows, text-shadows and background-gradients a few years back. Examples also tended to exaggerate the effects for the sake of demonstrating the capabilities. Anyway, these CSS features ended up being useful for designers like me. So I'm trying to overlook the visually strong examples of these CSS properties and envision their future implementations in a more subtle way. ------ melling Using gradient seems to be key in a lot of design. Does anyone have a few resources that explain in detail how to design them to get the various effects? Choose the colors and offsets? For example, the raised look in text or buttons. From looking at many examples, it seems that there's always a transition after the first few percent (e.g 3%). ------ JCraig I've been looking at exactly this issue this last week. I have a logo with a gradient and a small border outline for increased legibility. I'd much rather do this in html/css than as an image, but I'm going with an image for now since these text features are a moving target. I agree the examples are a little garish, but if you look around, most logos are some mix of these attributes (font, stroke, fill). And it would be much easier (for me) to resize and update logos in html/css than to have to supply 3 or more versions every time I need to create or update a logo. ------ kmfrk The strokes look like they'll mess up the kerning something fierce. Word Art for web indeed. ~~~ Daiz Proper kerning in browsers is still "work in progress" anyway - there's the text-rendering[1] property, which when set to optimizeLegibility enables kerning. However, there's some bugs with how it behaves, and only Firefox enables it by default (to fonts over 20px in size). Anyway, proper outer stroke should not affect the actual text positioning, so it shouldn't really do anything to the kerning. If some people want to use huge stroke sizes and widen the gap between letters, they could always mess with the letter-spacing property. Here's an example[2]. 50px Constantia, with kerning and ligatures enabled (using text-rendering: optimizeLegibility), with the bottom having a thick 5px outer stroke (example produced with HTML5 Canvas). As the article mentions, Webkit has prefixed text-stroke CSS properties, but these _suck_. The reason? They use centered stroke, not outer stroke. This means that a 4px stroke renders 2px inside the glyph, and 2px outside the glyph. On larger stroke sizes or with thin glyphs, the results look _awful_. Just take a look at this second example[3]: It has 3px centered stroke on top, 1.5px outer stroke in the middle (to demonstrate how much of the 3px centered stroke is actually outside), and 3px outer stroke on bottom. A world of difference, no? Ideally, you should be able to control what kind of stroke you want (inner, centered or outer), but it should most definitely default to outer or be outer-only if there's to be just one option. [1] <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/text-rendering> [2] <http://puu.sh/2776P> [3] <http://puu.sh/277nM> ------ TazeTSchnitzel I love how Adobe are contributing to web standards. They're doing great things for CSS and its support for beautiful typography. ------ PavlovsCat Between the Adobe proposal and this, the future of stylish typography on the web seems very bright: [http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/svg-in-opentype-new- appr...](http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/svg-in-opentype-new-approach-to- svg.html) I can hardly wait for either, not to mention both, to become widely supported. ------ Bjartr It looks like Word Art

Show HN: Weekend project: Sticklet: A simple, HTML5 sticky notes application - azylman http://www.sticklet.com ====== prknight would make a nice replacement for what is shown on an empty new tab in Chrome.

Linux plus CP/M plus assembly equals LASM - erickhill http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/259/linux-plus-cpm-plus-assembly-equals-lasm ====== userbinator A brief discussion on the differences in syntax would've been nice, so we can see exactly how different they are (my guess is, not that much.) Microsoft M80 can be found easily enough through a Google search, but not LASM since there seem to be at least 3 other assemblers sharing the same name... Interesting to note that the executable for M80 is around 20KB, while a statically-linked Windows "Hello world" in C compiled with default settings is already 40KB. ------ gravypod Holy business logic batman! [https://github.com/FozzTexx/lasm/blob/master/lasm](https://github.com/FozzTexx/lasm/blob/master/lasm) I wish this was cleaned up a bit more to make it easier to see what's going on. ------ uudecode The AS Macroassembler by Alfred Arnold (1992) still compiles on the unpopular OS I'm using, with a quick edit to sysdefs.h.

Ask HN: Interesting (offline) iPad apps for hackers? - ssamuli Going to travel away for a 2½ weeks soon, and I'm going to take only an iPad with me for my basic computer needs (+ an android phone). But what if I get an itch to hack something? Any suggestions on apps that I can get my daily fix of hacker/geek life with?<p>One option I've been thinking about is setting up some kind of minimal Linux dev environment on the Android phone and SSH'ing in from iPad to get a better terminal/keyboard than I would have on the phone.<p>Another option would be to just SSH to my home box and do whatever I usually do on it, but it is probable that there's no internet connectivity where I'm going, or it will be painfully slow.<p>Third option of course would be to force myself to do something else :)<p>Maybe HN has some other options or suggestions? ====== earle Pro-tip: Forget about an iphone app -- get out and enjoy your life while you're traveling! ~~~ ssamuli I know, I will. But just in case! :) ~~~ pierrefar My experience with "just in case" things I take on trips is that they become a distraction. The best trip I ever had was one in October where we went to a hotel on a remote island without any internet and absolutely no phone reception. It's called relaxation apparently. I liked it. ~~~ ssamuli We had almost the same experience month ago, when we traveled to Cape Verde. No internet and calls were so expensive that I only did one phone call during the trip. It really was refreshing! ------ rossriley Not actually coding, but I did read that Apple have just released all their iOS / Objective-C books for free on iBooks. ------ binarymax jsanywhere is pretty good: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/javascript- anywhere/id3634522...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/javascript- anywhere/id363452277?mt=8) ~~~ tzs It looks good on the store, but instantly crashes on every attempt to create a project on my iPad. ~~~ binarymax Strange - I've been using it for awhile on my iPad with no issues, perhaps its only certain iOS versions? ------ fsiefken * Jailbreak your ipad (be careful with iOS4), install OpenSSH through Cydia and connect to localhost with iSSH. There are for example apache, vi, ruby, python, grep and awk. Can that scratch your itch? * Not really hacking but you can install Frotz for text adventuring in interactive fiction. * Buy an apple bluetooth keyboard and connect it to Android or the iPad for easier typing. ~~~ ssamuli This is something that I've already tried, I mean using iSSH to connect to localhost running OpenSSH, but in the default system there's really nothing to play with. And I haven't found how and from where to install any UNIX- utilities, editors or applications for iPad. Any pointers on where to get these? ------ davidjhall Hmm...lacking internet connectivity is a pain. I love using zingersoft iSSH and the Apple wireless keyboard ($69) -- I connect to my remote Linux servers and am coding in Python right away. ------ gte910h You can actually jailbreak the iPad and have a fully functioning unix environment there. Python scripting environment on the Android phone isn't half bad. ------ meursault If you like hacking in Lua, I've been enjoying Luna. It's a little IDE with an embedded Lua interpreter. The interface is weird but it works. ~~~ ssamuli Thanks! Will have to check that out. ------ joeld42 This is one of the rare cases where bringing a netbook is a better idea than an iPad.

E-Book Price War Has Yet to Arrive - iProject http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/technology/e-book-price-war-has-yet-to-arrive.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1356382553-nDwmZT11xS/9qZqgGxJmRw ====== johnrgrace The price war will come in 2013. Contracts have only just been put in place under the DOJ settlements. Also I suspect that Amazon may be holding since they've done a boatload of TV ads and I can't see that they raised prices. I would guess that there is a reasonable chance they'll lose money in Q4. ------ mtgx I would rather pay more for the hardware, and get cheaper content, than get cheaper hardware, but then expensive content.

Ask HN: Will software engineer salaries go up, down or stay the same? - ngngngng Recent shakeups at large companies going remote first and the ensuing discussions have me thinking about this. I&#x27;ve mostly heard that &quot;we are paid too much&quot; in my career and this is in a lower cost of living area where we aren&#x27;t paid anywhere close to silicon valley salaries.<p>Are my skills going to be more or less valuable ten years from now? ====== codingdave Within 10 years, all kids will learn basic computational thought in school, and some will continue down that path to apply that knowledge to specific use cases. Coding in and of itself won't be so special, which will drive down the salaries for entry-level pay. However, being good at it is different than just having the ability to do entry-level work, and the best engineers still can deliver extremely high value to a company. I personally believe that the salary ranges will follow a shallower bell curve, with lower starting pay, a lower median, and a much smaller group at the top making huge bank. As to where any specific individual falls on that curve... that will depend entirely on your talent. ~~~ Ancalagon They were saying this ten years ago... ~~~ codingdave But we didn't have school districts actually incorporating it into their curriculum and standards 10 years ago. 5 years ago is when the efforts really got rolling, and I remember talking to many district leaders who were excited to see change coming to education... the first new core subject area in decades. More school districts are bringing the programs online every year. It isn't just talk anymore. ------ jenkstom Probably a better question is "Will the demand for software developers outpace the supply over the next 10 years?" Perhaps the looming failures of universities I keep reading about will mean less degreed professionals. I think the demand will increase as more industries become automated, but the supply is the big question. ------ thecleaner I will say it will go up. Software Engineering will end up meaning different things. For example, couple of years ago web dev was all the rage but these days web dev has a certain band of salaries with great people being paid a lot and others just scraping by. I believe software creates a lot of value when applied properly and I don't see this going down anytime sooner. Whether the field itself become easier is a different thing. Maybe people who work at a skill level where a bootcamp is okay to start a job will face a pay cut simply because barrier to entry is low but that will just be one end of a spectrum. ~~~ runawaybottle This is probably the harsh truth. The lower tier is having an influx, and real wages will reflect that. While some aspects of the work can seem arcane or even complex, the results are not out-sized, so business will optimize costs there continually. ------ s1t5 The "we are being paid too much" sentiment is mostly a US thing. In Europe the salaries are nowhere nearly as high. ~~~ hondadriver You cannot compare EU and US salaries easily. The protection of employees, heath care system, pension, holidays, the social safety net and cost of living, to name of few are too different. In general you need to multiply your EU salary x2 to get a comparable US salary. ~~~ badpun > pension In many European countries (e.g. UK), the pension contributions are a form of income tax (i.e. proportional to income), while the pension is a fixed sum that barely allows you to survive - regardless of how much you've paid in contributions. I don't know how SS works in the US, but it's hard to imagine a worse system. > cost of living I've compared two random third-tier cities in US and Western Europe: [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/El- Paso](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/El-Paso) [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/in/Bordeaux](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Bordeaux) The costs of living are actually really close within each other. ~~~ s1t5 And it's similar for big cities - local purchasing power in London is lower than New York, San Francisco and LA. ------ RNeff It depends on supply and demand for skills. If you have average skills that a hundred thousand other people have, then your skills are less valuable. If you have expert skills in a high demand area, then up. So building websites and most apps is flooded with people. Autonomous cars, some AI/ML security, VR / AR, vision, even COBOL, have fewer people, high demand. Just become very valuable to your potential employer. (Think about debugging autonomous cars, what would you make if you were great at that!) There are online courses, some free, for those topics. There are open source projects on many of those topics. ------ runawaybottle It depends on the standard software users have. Salaries went up because the standard for software went up in a few places - user experience, scale. If we’re fine with the same shitty technology 10 years from now, then salaries will stagnate. But what do I know, game developers continually make amazing stuff and somehow that industry found a way to squeeze them. Tough to say how it all will play out. ------ ThrowMeAwayOkay It depends on your skills. Focus on more than just hard engineering skills. If you position yourself as an effective remote engineer who deliver value consistently, then you can command value. ------ sirmoveon The only risk in my opinion is AI and the possible automation of development. The curve to being an efective software engineer is too steep. ------ probinso They will hopefully go down

Why I'm working for the man and not doing a startup - RandallBrown http://fredandrandall.com/blog/2012/04/01/why-im-working-for-the-man-and-not-doing-a-startup/ ====== BadassFractal After working for several years in a similar environment to the one the author is in right now, I had the exact opposite experience. Wrote soulless boring enterprise software for a customer I never met, using some of the most ancient development techniques, while having the department boast about innovation and "spearheading engineering excellence" every other day. Shared buildings with hundreds of other ninetofivers who couldn't care less about the quality of their work, all they wanted was the great health insurance, the chance to get a green card in a decade or two, and the option to buy a nice home in the area for their 2-3 kids. Clock in, clock out, occasionally play office politics for that sweet principal position in 10-15 years. Experienced every agile aberration known to man, including predicting down to the hour every single thing I would be working on, and then have the boss breathe down your neck when you're off. The best part is when he tells you that he cannot "trust you" anymore due to the latest estimate being off by several hours, and you should multi-task more to get things done quicker. How about keeping your reported work hours purposefully low, even if you're working weekends? Your boss will think that you were good enough to get it done in a couple of days, and will promote you over the guy who's honest with his hours. Happened ALL THE TIME. When I left, the few good friends I had while there asked me what my best memories were after half a decade. Not a single one, everything I enjoyed (including software projects) was outside of work. If I never have to hold a lowly corporate job again, I'll die a happy man. I'd rather make a third of what I was making there, but at least I'll be proud of the work I'm doing and I will look forward to doing more of that every time I wake up. Randall, you're in your mid 20s, brother, what is this comfort you are talking about? What do you have to lose? Go fuck up a couple of businesses, give it your best shot, get a few battle scars, and then maybe we'll talk about wanting comfort. You're way too young to settle down, it's sad to see someone like you waste his talents. ~~~ nodemaker Thanks for that. I have been questioning myself for deciding to never work for the man again and your words reassured me. No amount of money is enough for mediocrity to be forced upon you. ~~~ BadassFractal I try to be very conscious and grateful of the fact that mine is a privileged position. I do not (yet?) have severe pre-existing conditions, children, or a sick spouse that would pretty much force me to have to find a corporate job with the right kind of health insurance. There are some things that were under my control, such as making sure my partner was on the same page with not wanting to have children and was ok with having a very humble lifestyle, but there are thousands of other variables which are pure luck. There are plenty of people out there for whom to drop out, stay afloat on savings for a few years, while rolling the startup dice, is simply not conceivable. If I were in that situation and had to take a soul-crushing enterprise job just to be able to afford the right medications, I would probably not enjoy people telling me that "I could do more with my life". If that's the author's situation, then I'm sorry, mine was an inappropriate conclusion. I digress, however, don't think this thread is the correct place to discuss US policy :) ------ zavulon "Stability is a huge benefit of a regular full time job" That's a myth. While being an employee, there's no stability whatsoever. You can get fired any time - get laid off, become a victim of corporate politics, or get fired for whatever other reason. Just last month, someone I know got fired on the spot after 15 years at a company for not reporting some personal stuff between other employees.. something he wasn't involved with, at all. I'm sure everyone else heard stories of people being thrown out after 10-20-30 years of loyal service to the company for bullshit reasons. At the same time, when you run a business, you can't ever get fired, and everything depends on you. Whether you make money, or lose money - it's for the most part, your doing (market circumstances nonwithstanding). That's why running a business is a lot more of a stable job than working for the man. ~~~ patio11 "When you run a business, you can never get fired" This is objectively untrue for anyone who takes money from others. A significant portion of my income as a business owner can get pink slipped at the decision of any one of seven people, and they wouldn't even endure the minimal social awkwardness of pink-slipping me! All they have to do is not respond "Yes" to an email asking for something that I have no socially durable expectation of "yes" from. ~~~ AznHisoka If you also run an online startup, chances are you rely on SEO or search engine marketing. If Google bans your Adwords account, or penalizes you to oblivion, I'll say that's pretty much the equivalent of getting fired. ~~~ jaredmck True story, although once you're spending enough on AdWords you'd have to do some pretty egregious stuff to get your AdWords account banned (and to some extent you're much less likely to get a major, lasting ban in organic search). ------ DaniFong "But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn’t that important. If I forget to log my task estimation hours my manager might send me an email. If I forgot to pay my companies electric bill the consequences are a little more severe." Huh. Maybe this is just a difference in outlook, but if I were forced to log my hours it would probably either send me into a fury or the depths of despair. Actually, more likely, I'd quit. Or be fired. It's happened before. Yet I have basically no problem having no safety net, and taking responsibility for my employees, millions of dollars, and the fate of the planet. Weird. The only discriminating factor I can see is that being forced to log hours makes me feel like a kid unworthy of trust. Any others? I feel like I've learned something about myself. ~~~ RandallBrown I was talking about doing estimations for tasks. It's a pretty normal "agile" thing to do. There's no trust issues, it's just a project management thing. ~~~ michaelochurch It's still a ridiculous waste of time. It makes work about gaming the system and your boss (is it better to underestimate so he lets you do what you want, or overestimate so you don't get yelled at later?) rather than moving forward and getting shit done. It's inane, stupid stuff designed to make unimportant people feel important. A programmer who can't be trusted to control his own time shouldn't be hired in the first place. ~~~ imechura I personally would not want a builder to home build a home with my money without a time and cost estimate. This is not about startups or established companies. If you don;t know what needs to happen for your vision to come to fruition and how much it is going to cost then you are leaving a lot chance. I just don't get why people are always complaining about estimates. ~~~ kamaal Because they don't work. Even if you are out to build your home, the estimates given out to you are only going to good enough to win the contract from you. Nothing more. If you have ever built a home, you would have realized that the project generally went way out of budget and time. You can go back and look at what you had planned and estimated. You will also see that your execution was pretty close to the plan. But a lot of other things went wrong. It rained and all the sand got washed away. The cement company suddenly increased their prices. Something new came in, and suddenly you though a new bath fit was better than the old one. Things slip out of your hand one thing at a time. Workers get sick, attrition happens and all other sort things go wrong. And this is with things like construction, where not much thinking effort is required. Programming is more harder, The iterations of analyse, build, test, feedback, analyse... Take time, mistakes happen, you need to read, research etc. Unless you are a robot and work without any intelligent inputs and outside dependencies. No estimate ever has made sense. ~~~ imechura I think your point lends itself more to a general misunderstanding of the purpose of planning and estimation rather a lack of value in the process. There is a reason it is called a plan and an estimate instead of a fact-sheet and a contract. I am in a position now where I provide architectural review and software delivery estimation on a full time basis. If we did not provided these estimates the VPs and directors would not have any way of justifying where and when to spend the investors' money to achieve the best return for the company. IMO, spending someone else's money (read investment) without a plan and estimate should be considered irresponsible. ------ dmor You say that you know if you worked on someone else's idea you wouldn't be able to find the passion to sustain you. I would challenge you on that - how can you be so sure? I joined Twilio very early and it wasn't my idea. However, I took my passion for making software developers happy (and my even more fundamental professional passion for helping people be productive) and connected it with their specific idea. I never would have thought of Twilio, but I'm so happy to be part of making it exist. Don't ever stop prospecting for other people and ideas that you could get behind, because when you find them it is magical. ------ benjaminwootton _If_ you can find a good company and a day job where you have lots of freedom and control, potential to build something great, minimum corporate politics, and the ability to concentrate on building interesting stuff, that does indeed sound fantastic and in some ways more tempting than a startup. However, I think that if you are operating in an environment like that, with that level of independence and creativity, you almost may as well go a step further and grab at least some element of ownership in what you are doing. It sounds like it would be a pretty small jump. ~~~ sliverstorm _However, I think that if you are operating in an environment like that, with that level of independence and creativity, you almost may as well go a step further and grab at least some element of ownership in what you are doing._ You mean climb the technical ladder? Because if you're already in a great company environment, that's exactly what the technical ladder is for. ------ imechura I often hear people complaining about "corporate politics". What do people think that really means? As if you won't have politics in your startup, with your V.Cs, clients, partners and competitors. Everything in business is politics if you cannot handle your co-worker jockeying for position prior to performance reviews, good luck dealing with a partner or investor who wants to edge you out of your startup. One more note, working for a corporation can provide a technical person with a lot opportunity not available at a startup and vice-versa. For instance, at a startup you will not likely get the valuable and lucrative experience removing and replacing a mainframe application that has been a core business system for 30 years. There are hundreds of companies out there at this very minute who are spending hundreds of millions attempting (and struggling with) this very feat. So while RoR and Django developers are a dime a dozen, others are building a skill that commands a premium at fortune 1000 companies across the nation and builds relationships with Sr. Architects, VPs, CIOs, and CTOs to boot. ------ moocow01 Eh - I know there are an endless number of conversations on here about startups vs. corporate jobs but I'd say the conversation is way too generic to be at all meaningful. Ive flip-flopped from startups to corps and places in between. There is the same shit (or potential for shit) everywhere just in different packages. \- Startups can have just as much politics as corps - it really just depends on the actual folks you interact with \- Big corps can have incredibly interesting problems due to their scale and impact while startup work can be exciting because of the progressiveness of it - and in actual practice about 90% of what both groups do is usually pretty boring. \- Soulless work - I've found writing enterprise business software to be pretty much equivalent to building VC-powered social/local image-sharing flavor of the month apps in terms of being personally exciting. Mileage will vary. Etc. - I could go on. Point being that if you take averages Id say startups are similar to big corps - the problems are just disquised in different packages. The real trick is trying to find unique scenarios/jobs that minimize the crap. ------ korginator Did we ever stop to think this is just one person's point of view that's completely influenced by his personality, and that you could be 100% the opposite, before passing summary judgments for and against the poor guy? I've had mixed experiences in both sectors, and it doesn't make sense to generalize here. I've worked in a small-ish department in a large company where we had lots of flexibility with the backing of a large corporate. I've worked in startups with zero creativity and the momentum of a third-world government org. I've also worked in a startup that was run by a maniacal CEO who was so out of touch with engineering that even after 6 years of development the company was unable to scale volumes or make good stuff. ------ mmj48 Minified: Why I'm working for the man and not doing a startup? Stability and lack of passion. \--- Two good reasons, however, not too insightful (subjective). ~~~ imechura lack of passion... IMO, That is a narrow view. What is the goal here, start-up or business? If the goal is startup you may find that it never stops trying to start. There are great established companies to work for and great startups to work for. There are also terrible established companies to work for and terrible startups to work for. I would also like to note that at good, established corporations there are two kinds of technical staff. The passionate kind with a decent mix of technical skills, business acumen and communication skills who work hard,are presented with interesting opportunities and are rewarded for their hard work, and the other kind who seam to always be complaining about the corporate environment and how it is holding them back. Often the "other kind" possesses adequate technical skills but has not taken the time to develop the business acumen and communication skills necessary to be proficient in a high-stakes business. The first type will strive at any business whether established or start-up. The second type will likewise exhibit similar performance no matter the established date stamped on the business's letterhead. ~~~ mmj48 Are you replying to me or the article? ------ jonmb It really all depends on what you feel happy doing. There's no one-size-fits all. Some people are meant for startups, some aren't. I think it's best to always see yourself as self-employed. You yourself are your product. You can sell your product to a company for 40 hours a week, or you can run a startup (where you still have a boss btw -- they're called "clients" or "users"). Or a mix of both, which is what I do. ------ AshleysBrain Microsoft was a startup once. When does a startup transition in to being "the man"? ~~~ jakejake I don't know at what point you become "the man" but it's an interesting question at what point you are no longer considered a startup. There's probably several paths that lead to loss of your "startup" status. Being bought out, going IPO, becoming profitable, being in business 3+ years, etc. ~~~ randomdata > being in business 3+ years And if you're been in business for 3+ years, but change direction (like from consulting to products as many in the industry do), are you considered a startup again? ~~~ jakejake Good question. 3 years was an arbitrary number. Maybe you could say that you're a startup as long as you're still relying on venture capital? ------ tucif You can also start without an idea, if what you really want is creating a startup. <http://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html> Yet, I think you might want to develop more abilities before that so you have better resources and a wider perspective. ------ cageface The real sweet spot I think is a company of about 200-300 people. It's big enough to provide real stability but not big enough to develop a lot of the pathologies of bigger companies. ~~~ rdouble That's actually the worst size. There are all the pathologies of a startup combined with all the pathologies of a bigger company. ------ michaelochurch _But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn’t that important. If I forget to log my task estimation hours my manager might send me an email._ People actually work for companies where they "log [...] task estimation hours"? I'm afraid of what throwing up in my mouth on a regular basis will do to my throat. I'll pass. Here's why your job in a TPS labyrinth _isn't_ stable: your boss might only be sending you the email because his boss made a point of it. It might be a one- off that he thinks about once and never again. Or he might actually care. You just don't know. He might fire you when you stop doing that shit (either because you forget, or get sick of it). He might consider you not to have done any work unless you log it in the system, and you might be too busy actually _doing_ work to log that shit. Or, you might get along great with him and be just fine. If you have decent social skills, you can get a 90% guess at which way things are going to go, but that's far from certainty, and the boss who won't throw you under the bus for his own benefit is very rare. Big companies are only a better option than any other job (in terms of job security) if they subvert manager-as-SPOF and that's really hard to do. What seems to work (perversely) is bureaucracy and obfuscation: if you make it very, very hard for a manager to bad-mouth reports to the managers they want to transfer under (in large part, this requires transfer talks occurring without the original manager's knowledge) you can actually create a culture in which managers don't hold all the cards. Big-company vs. startup is a hard question. There are really great _parts_ of big companies, and there are shitty startups. There are even startups that have those kinds of inane processes. The whole gamut exists. But I would rather be eating clay than work at a company where people are micromanaged down to "task estimation hours". ~~~ RandallBrown By task estimation hours I simply meant estimating how long tasks will take. It's a pretty normal part of most software development practices. I don't work at a TPS labyrinth. ------ kbronson Most unsubstantial article ever, with 69 upvotes and counting. ------ briandear Cool shit? Working for Microsoft? I must have missed something.

The Algorithmic Is Political - lilrhody https://bostonreview.net/science-nature-politics/annette-zimmermann-elena-di-rosa-hochan-kim-technology-cant-fix-algorithmic ====== mtmail Please keep the title as in the article "Technology Can't Fix Algorithmic Injustice" unless it's linkbait or misrepresents the content.

iPhone logs my complete movement profile - ladino http://board.protecus.de/t42771.htm#360301 ====== tsycho That's how the iOS core location API works (and it has been this way since iOS 5 atleast, if not earlier). In particular, there is a |startMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges| method ([https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLo...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLocation/Reference/CLLocationManager_Class/CLLocationManager/CLLocationManager.html#//apple_ref/occ/instm/CLLocationManager/startMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges)), which "callbacks" into apps that have registered with the Core Location framework for significant change updates. The update is provided generally only when cell towers change, so it is not a battery drain (or not a significant one). Hence, your mobile operator definitely has this data, and is most likely already tracking it and/or piping it to the NSA etc. Significant change monitoring is used by Google Now among other apps (I believe Facebook also does this, I find that more sneaky since they have no obvious need for it). Google Maps _navigation_ does not use this, since it needs more granular and accurate data hence it uses the more battery-intensive location APIs. If the complaint is that it's okay for Apple to collect this data for apps to use, but there is no need to log it, especially since the user might choose to not allow any apps to access their location data, then that's a fair point. I don't know if iOS shows these logs only on the beta versions, or whether they are stored persistently on release versions as well. Source: I am a iOS dev, and have built location based apps. ~~~ eddieroger One _really_ important bit of information to add to the first full paragraph is that when the app tries to use startMonitoringForSignificantChanges: for the first time, the user is asked whether or not they want the app to. If they select "Don't Allow", then it's game over for that app until the user changes the setting in Settings. This doesn't stop iOS from doing what it's doing, but should quell fears that random apps are just logging all kinds of user data and sending it to who knows where. ~~~ rismay Very true. I wasn't even aware of that part of the Settings app until I started developing. Apple should at least allow developers to "deep link" into the settings screen to remove that friction. ~~~ 6chars Apple used to allow that (well, developers figured out the right URIs to use), but they broke it in iOS 5.1.1 or 6 IIRC. ------ julianpye If you want to build transparent context-aware services, your system will need to create this information. Nothing new to do with the iPhone, since Telcos already have had this information for ages (and could use them anonymously) - it's good at least that in this system you see how the data is being analysed and associated with Work/Home, etc... and not that it is hidden in the background. ~~~ Eduard Given current affairs, it's bad that this system doesn't inform the user about a new feature being activated on default. It is hidden in the background. ~~~ nicholassmith Actually when you setup your iPhone (including these betas) it _does_ ask you if you want to have the feature enabled. It certainly wasn't on by default for me, I agreed to it. Granted it doesn't go into incredibly great detail of exactly what it was tracking but it does give you the gist. If the NSA wants to track you, there's far simpler ways than asking Apple to build a new product feature than can be disabled. ~~~ deveac _> If the NSA wants to track you, there's far simpler ways than asking Apple to build a new product feature than can be disabled._ I don't know...letting a plethora of private entities collect and aggregate user data for easy access with (or without in many cases) a court order seems almost like the epitome of simplicity. Most of the hard work (both resource- wise and legal) has been done for you or is easy to do. Just cause one could design a simpler system of acquiring user data doesn't mean that features like this aren't profoundly simple and useful to them. I take your point though, that the NSA doesn't need to direct a company to code features that collect data...because so many companies already do. It's a waste of their breath. They just need to concentrate on grabbing what has already been grabbed. We've been the product for a long time now, and we're either being sold to the government, or the government is taking what they want under (il)legal cover. ~~~ nicholassmith Which is why there's an off switch for the feature. Of course we don't know if the offswitch is an offswitch or a 'hide this from the user' switch but then we have to start mistrusting all the technology around us. ------ Watabou Android does this too with Google Now. iOS7 uses frequent locations, pretty much like Google Now, to provide the travel times, with traffic, between your frequently visited locations. Here's a screenshot: [http://cdn.macrumors.com/article- new/2013/06/location2.jpg](http://cdn.macrumors.com/article- new/2013/06/location2.jpg) ~~~ raverbashing Yes Google Now is bordering scary Here's what happens on Google Now when you travel 1 - Search for a place (this is usually the hotel you're going to) 2 - Get there 3 - Google Now will give a traffic alert "xx minutes until $PLACE" (the place you searched for in n.1 ) ~~~ eddieroger I didn't even mind that. What really freaked me out about Google Now is when it started showing package tracking cards based on having shipping notices in my email. Of course Google has access to all of that, but it weirded me out the first time I saw it. ~~~ pwelch Agreed. Most of the times I check invoice emails I am looking for the Tracking Information. This is what makes it tough to move away from Google. Yes they give the NSA access to my data and border on scary by analyzing all of my usage but they offer some really handy options. ------ rsynnott You mean that thing it asks you for permission to do when you set up the phone, and gives you a slider to disable? It actually does it? Well, I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked. ------ thejosh Atleast they will show you the data, unlike phone companies who hold all this data anyway. Once you have a phone device with an active signal you are tracked, and that's just not being paranoid either. ~~~ donquichotte But how much of the collected data do they show you? IMO services like this should be opt-in, rather than opt-out. ~~~ ladino it's currently ios7 beta, i really hope they do it opt-in in the future. ~~~ pilif The difference between ios7 and previous versions is not that ios7 is logging. It's that ios7 is telling you that it's logging and what it is logging. Location Services always worked this way - it just wasn't exposed to the user. ------ BitMastro The same happens with Google Maps [https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/](https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/) unless you disable location history. I think it's naive to suppose that your location information is not stored anywhere. Moreover, your location can be determined also if you're using a dumb-phone using cell towers triangulation. ------ willvarfar A long time ago, when the first iphone location logs got attention, we made a little web-page for people to visualise this: [http://markolson.github.com/js-sqlite-map- thing/](http://markolson.github.com/js-sqlite-map-thing/) Blog post: [http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15210221400/visua...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15210221400/visualising- iphone-tracking-data) > It turns out people have no squirms dragging and dropping their private > backup files - often all their files, and not just picking out the files we > ask for even - onto a webpage running code we wrote. ------ antonID I have been using the iOS7 beta since it came out, and before doing this, it had asked me for permission. This is opt-in, so if you don't like it you don't have to use it. ~~~ ladino yes on install it asks if it is allowed to use location services at all (for all apps) but not for this tracking feature. ~~~ Terretta Both iPad and iPhone iOS 7 betas asked me separately about this feature. ------ jbrooksuk What's wrong with this? Apple are openly providing this information for you to view - rather than others who don't even warn the user. Plus, it's improving their services which you more than likely need. Why complain? You can opt out. ~~~ _ak > Why complain? Because the person in the article is German, and Germans love their privacy- by-default and opt-in. Datenschutz über alles. ~~~ aw3c2 Germany has the "benefit" of having experienced the Gestapo and Stasi so there is knowledge how dangerous omniscient parties are. ------ digitalengineer Why do our European leaders even plan RFID in licenceplates? With this in the default 'ON' position on all smartphones they can already keep an eye on everybody. [http://www.autoblog.nl/images/wp2013/tweet-2.jpg](http://www.autoblog.nl/images/wp2013/tweet-2.jpg) ~~~ philjohn Stop being paranoid - they can already track you from cell tower data. ~~~ rogerbraun We should stop being paranoid because we are already being tracked? ------ 37prime It is nothing new. In previous iOS, this data was not presented to users at all. Android does this too. At least you can turn this off in iOS 7 beta 5. ~~~ ladino \- It was invisible to the normal user! \- It collects these exact data since iOS 7 beta 4 and shows it since beta 5! ~~~ reaperhulk This is just flat untrue. It has collected this data since b1 and I found the screen that showed it in b2 or b3 (but it was probably present in b1 as well). It also explicitly asks you if you want this feature (separate from the location services opt-in). ------ octo_t It also does analysis, similar to Google Now, that tells you how long it will take to get home from where you are now. ------ northwest Society has accepted to be tracked all the time/everywhere with the introduction of mobile phones. If we don't like this, we should start to talk more proactively to people about the dangers our technology brings. ~~~ greyman In my opinion, "accepted" is not the most precise word to describe it. If telco companies would say at the beginning: "You can buy mobile phone from us, but the part of the deal is that you will be tracked. Do you accept that?" If most people say Yes, that would be accepting it. The reality was, that it was slowly revealed over time that the tracking is being done, and most people realized it only after mobile phones became a norm and very hard to get rid of. ~~~ northwest True. I'd say that it's the responsibility of those familiar with technology to reveal what possibilities it opens up. And of course it's the responsibility of the Press to give these points the visibility they deserve. And one problem of the past was probably the disconnect between tech people and Press people (tech was not understood by the people behind the presses). Today, we have tech bloggers and social media. Let's hope this will make up for something. ------ lukashed Since this is a developer preview, there are plenty of other logging options as well. For example, if you got to the Settings -> Developer -> Logging menu, you can dump all your network traffic. You can also do this on (some) application-levels, e.g. if you go to the iMessage preferences, you can enable "iMessage Logging" and "Registration Logging", same for FaceTime (though I'm not sure why any developer would need this, it looks more like this is an Apple-internal thing that they forgot to disable for the public). ------ ltcoleman I'm pretty sure this is completely against the NDA...No respect. ------ wsr Wow, this is an amazing find. I can understand that Apple/govt would love this information. But anyone has guesses on why this would be a public facing feature? ~~~ julianpye Four years ago I led a project like this. In this slideset you can see on page 4 what we wanted to build and on page 5 whate we would need: [http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/slides/vodafone- pye.pdf](http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/slides/vodafone-pye.pdf) ~~~ ronaldx This is a super-interesting project, but not something I would be interested in using. If I arrive at Piccadilly Circus, I don't want my phone to tell me what service I [should need/should be using] - I want to easily and consistently access any service that I want from my phone. I want to be in control of my phone, not for my phone to be in control of me. ~~~ julianpye Even then people were overwhelmed by the phone functions and could not navigate the directory when they needed something quick. With people having installed tens of apps nowadays, this problem is even worse... ~~~ ronaldx I feel that the correct solution to this is approximately the one that now exists: allowing people to control how the navigation screens look, and control for themselves how to access the apps they use. ------ eknkc BTW, it asks specifically if you want to share the information with Apple to improve maps data before activating that feature. ------ rumbler What depresses me is, I see how this information could be used in many kinds of amazing ways, but since I cannot control who gets it and what they will do with it, I refuse to use it for fear that it will be used against me. It is the tragedy of the modern connected world, one that Stallman and others saw coming years ago. And it will keep getting worse. ~~~ voodoo123 iOS let's you choose: \- Whether this information is collected at all \- which specific apps can access it \- whether apple can receive an anonymized copy of it to improve their maps The data is stored securely on your device and you can see it delete it. What more control do you want? ------ andrewingram Looks like they're just making visible what they've been doing for years, hardly a new controversy. 2011: [http://www.pcworld.com/article/225845/Why_Apple_Tracks_You_V...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/225845/Why_Apple_Tracks_You_Via_iPhone_It_Not_Why_You_Think.html) ~~~ fnl True, but we all know from marketing/propaganda lessons that frequent repetition is the only way to drive a point home in most cases... :) ------ incanus77 This was covered in The Verge this week: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/5/4590794/ios-7-will-ask- user...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/5/4590794/ios-7-will-ask-users-to- help-improve-maps-by-sharing-frequent-locations) ------ joering2 Im not related to this project, but I thought its worth mentioning here: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/offpocket/off- pocket?ref...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/offpocket/off- pocket?ref=category) ------ yalogin I thought this only happens with your permission. I remember this is in the first few screens after you update. Also in the screen shot of his it clearly shows he gave permission to remember location. Why is this news? What am I not seeing? ------ ladino a bit scary to see exactly how often and when i was where with my gf... nice to see they added a microphone privacy setting. Anyway imho it's close to a perfect surveillance system. ~~~ northwest I don't think it's wise to trust any such "privacy setting". What devices really need is a hardware switch allowing us to physically disconnect cameras and microphones. I've never understood why this was not introduced as a standard when laptop cams/mics started being built-in. ~~~ bruceboughton How can you trust a hardware switch any more than a software switch? Granted you can take your hardware apart to inspect it, but: \- can you put your laptop together again? (especially tablets) \- will you be able to see the switch innards to ensure it is disconnected? \- who will bother? ~~~ teddyh Someone could take apart such a switch once and verify that it works, and then tell everyone else who owns such a device. With software, this is very hard, and when software can be updated at any time it is impossible. ------ blizzard30 This does not exist :)) looked for it, and I have the same beta. ~~~ M4v3R It does. Maybe you didn't look very closely, or maybe it doesn't exist on older devices (I have iPhone 4S and I have this feature). ~~~ blizzard30 iPad mini here A1455 ~~~ taspeotis If anybody was wondering, A1455 is the cellular model. So it should be able to collect this information accurately. Although, let's look at the title: > iPhone logs my complete movement profile (iOS7 screenshots) (protecus.de) We're not talking about iPads here.

Show HN: Arima – A Q&A site for mass opinon - winstonl http://arima.io/?utm_source=hacker%20new&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=hn ====== diminish correct the title, "opinon".

Caddy – The HTTP/2 web server with automatic HTTPS - joshmanders https://caddyserver.com/?hn ====== bketelsen I use caddy for everything I serve on the web now, and have been for roughly a year. It's an amazingly stable server -- fast and easy to configure. The team has continuously updated Caddy, and been extremely responsive to any feature requests and support questions. [https://www.gophercon.com](https://www.gophercon.com) and [https://blog.gopheracademy.com](https://blog.gopheracademy.com) are both served (with Let's Encrypt!) from Caddy. ------ mchahn I wish the website had some bullet points comparing features to nginx, my current go-to server. ------ Apreche But does it support WSGI? ~~~ mholt It can proxy to uwsgi