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Ask HN: Is Go better off with or without generics? - philonoist ====== coldtea Well, it's 2017 already.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Una Corda, a piano with one string per note - camtarn https://www.klavins-pianos.com/products/una-corda/ ====== Sharlin At first I was confused and wondered whether my understanding of how pianos work is totally inadequate and whether normal pianos have _fewer_ than one string per note (perhaps with some sort of a fret system to allow adjacent keys to share strings). Turns out they have _more_ than one on average; typically two in the tenor range and three in treble, so as not to be overpowered by the massive bass strings. ~~~ GuB-42 Clavichords, which are small keyboard instruments predating the piano, can be fretted. As a result, they can have fewer than one string per note. To my knowledge, harpsichords and pianos are never fretted and need at least one string per note. ~~~ baldfat Pianos typically have two strings per note. It makes the piano louder and helps the tone of the note to sound fuller. This happened when they started making a piano super strong frames. ~~~ Nition That's incorrect. A typical piano has one string on the bass notes, then two strings per note as you get higher up the keyboard, then three per note higher up again. The exact point where the switch is made varies a little. If you meant "typically" as in the majority, the majority of the keys have three strings. ------ weinzierl Pianos used to have a pedal that causes the hammer strike only one string. The pedal is still there and still called _Una Corda_ but usually doesn't do real single string activation anymore. This is also not the same as a _Una Corda_ piano that has only one string per note because in a regular piano sympathetic string resonance is a significant contributor to the sound. ~~~ matt-attack Yep, my piano does just that. The entire keyboard (and hammer assembly) slides over slightly when the press the pedal. ~~~ saghm From playing around with pianos, I've seen that there's a pedal that moves the keys over, and I never knew what it was for. Thanks for explaining! ------ _red Check out the Native Instruments implementation which includes sound demos: [https://www.native- instruments.com/en/products/komplete/keys...](https://www.native- instruments.com/en/products/komplete/keys/una-corda/) ~~~ trishume Oh man I actually really enjoy these audio demos as music. Anyone have good suggestions on more music like them? Piano music but in non-classical style with a touch of electronic editing thrown in. ~~~ sdcooke Ólafur Arnalds is another one to check out! ~~~ baldfat He is my favorite New Classical artist. His actually hired a programmer to control two pianos and has a custom made randomizer. As a Hacker Olafur is the most interesting artist right now. Interesting Read: [https://grapevine.is/culture/music/iceland- airwaves/airwaves...](https://grapevine.is/culture/music/iceland- airwaves/airwaves-2018/2018/08/09/total-transcendance-olafur-arnalds-talks- programming-pianos-subverting-genres-and-his-new-album/) ~~~ pimlottc +1 for Olafur Another artist who has used a specially-crafted MIDI-controlled piano is Dan Deacon. His stuff is not exactly New Classical, though, it's a bit more frenetic and goofy, but quite good. He talks about it quite in a bit in a Pitchfork TV video that documented him working on one of his albums, Bromst: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPg4Vcr56F0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPg4Vcr56F0) ------ yongjik Fun fact: Beethoven once owned a piano that had _four_ strings per key on the higher range[1]. I'm not sure if he used that piano to compose his sonata Op 110, but it has a section[2] that starts with _una corda_ , with a very serene melody, and as it gradually picks up its energy Beethoven instructs the player to use more and more strings... an effect that's not quite possible with modern pianos as modern _una corda_ is not actually one but two strings per key (in the middle- to-high region), and that's the only distinction we have. [1] [https://books.google.com/books?id=q6oZkreoZtQC&pg=PA57&dq=be...](https://books.google.com/books?id=q6oZkreoZtQC&pg=PA57&dq=beethoven%27s+pianos+four+strings&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKr- TR6obgAhWHxFQKHaK8D94Q6AEILDAB#v=onepage&q=beethoven's%20pianos%20four%20strings&f=false) [2] See, for example, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI1viKPG3TI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI1viKPG3TI) starting ~18:32 until the end. ~~~ carlob I remember seeing a piano from the early XX century that had a fourth string, however it was sympathetic (never struck) and there was no fine control of how many strings were being struck. EDIT: found it! [https://www.pianostreet.com/blog/piano-news/bluthner-and- the...](https://www.pianostreet.com/blog/piano-news/bluthner-and-the-aliquot- fourth-string-system-4711/) ------ poof_he_is_gone I have a 64 note piano and love it. It is has one or two strings per note instead of the standard 3. I bought mine at a garage sale for $240 bucks about 20 years ago, and it is my favorite instrument. I love the idea of this but not at that price point. ~~~ timc3 What make is it? ------ jdietrich A sample library of the Una Corda is available from Native Instruments. It's a very useful instrument, providing a lighter and more ethereal alternative to a conventional piano. It has a surprisingly complex timbre, evoking hints of a harp, steel pan or kalimba in the upper register. [https://www.native- instruments.com/en/products/komplete/keys...](https://www.native- instruments.com/en/products/komplete/keys/una-corda/) ~~~ notacoward Some of the tracks sound a lot like a picked guitar, which I guess isn't that surprising. How much that comes through probably depends on exactly which sound banks, strings, etc. are used. Unfortunately, most of the samples are of obscure compositions. I think some tracks of traditional piano standards, especially side by side with a regular piano, would really show off the sound more. ------ TomWhitwell This vertical grand piano - you have to go up a short flight of steps to get to the keyboard - from the same company, is ACE [https://www.klavins- pianos.com/products/model-450i/](https://www.klavins- pianos.com/products/model-450i/) ~~~ knodi123 but.... why not just design it so the keyboard is on ground level, and the strings go up instead of down? is this just a design flex? ~~~ TheRealPomax You don't want to sit in front of strings that loud and sympathetic (meaning one string makes many other strings vibrate along both due to harmonics as well as plain physical vibration travelling into them). It would be super uncomfortaable and players would damage their hearing _so fast_. You want to be out of the path of the sound, not just for the "listener"s benefit, but absolutely also your own. It's why grand pianos reflect sound "to the side". If you used the upright approach of sending it over the pianist, you'd end up with a lot of damaged ears and broken players. ------ TheRealPomax For those unfamiliar with the Michelberger Hotel: if you have the opportunity to stay there, do so. It's like nowhere you've been before, and the fact that this piano was shown off there first is a surprise to no one who ever had the pleasure of spending one or more nights in their hotel, especially if you're multiple people and explore each others' rooms. And I do mean explore. ~~~ brett40324 Do you have a link / reference about this you can post? ~~~ TheRealPomax [https://michelbergerhotel.com/en/](https://michelbergerhotel.com/en/) ------ xchaotic I am all in favour of equality, but the inequality we have now and the one we've had in the past produces these great and bizzare artifacts that people still value after centuries if not wins. We still go to see the sphinx in Egypt - a true homage to slavery and I suspect archeologist in the future would prefer to uncover such a piano as opposed to 1000 more old cars or TVs ~~~ lqet Slightly related quote: "You know what the fella said – in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." ------ auiya Here's a video of the real deal (not NI plugin) - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgtD5mZP8AU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgtD5mZP8AU) ~~~ publicfig This is still a typically stringed piano, just with felt added to dampen the other strings, I believe. The webpage describes an Una Corda piano built with only one string ~~~ misthop One string per note (as opposed to the usual 1/2/3 depending on where in on the keyboard you are talking about), not only one string. The video the parent linked to is the Una Corda - played by the designer/builder ------ dharma1 Nice. It's hard to invent new meaningful, playable acoustic instruments. Respect to anyone who does. Another one I really like is the Array Mbira, up to 7 octave chromatic Mbiras with stereo pickups. [https://www.arraymbira.com/](https://www.arraymbira.com/) ~~~ 52-6F-62 That thing probably belongs in the hands of Johnny Greenwood, if anyone. ------ ngcc_hk Beethoven stage piano is still experimental and in fact you may note the moonlight do not go higher note. But more importantly the sound meadower. Chopin also have a weaker source Piano. Not all are concert pianist. Should have an option ------ WhompingWindows Pricing 64-key Una Corda® Piano……………………………………………………..€ 15,900 net* Including big wheels, tone modulator, and music stand 88-key Una Corda® Piano……………………………………………………..€ 21,900 net* Including big wheels, tone modulator, and music stand Why would any serious musician spend 22k Euros on this piano when they could get an actual grand piano from a reputable maker? If you're super wealthy and you like fun toys, sure, but this is going to be an inferior instrument in volume, tone, tone control, sustain, and pretty much all the features a serious pianist is adept at manipulating. ~~~ RandallBrown They wouldn't. This is a piece of functional art like a Rolex. ~~~ busterarm I don't think that's necessarily fair or accurate. Most gear above a certain pricepoint isn't even really marketed directly to musicians anymore. It's recording studios, live music production companies and backline rental companies who are going to be buying these things and they're totally going to sell. ------ gus_massa Why is this better than a traditional piano (that has ¿3? strings per note)? ~~~ camtarn It's not better, necessarily, but it's a very different sound. For higher notes you need thinner and shorter strings, which are quieter. Traditional pianos have different numbers of strings per note (one for bass notes, two for the mid-range, and three for treble notes) so that the notes sound roughly the same volume across the keyboard. This also gives a very rich tone, as the strings are very very slightly different in frequency. The Una Corda only has one string per note. It's probably a lot quieter in the high octaves, but it has a thin and very pure tone which doesn't sound a lot like a traditional piano, which is very appealing to people who are looking for new and interesting sounds. And the quietness doesn't matter so much with modern amplification technology. ~~~ saalweachter So basically if you want something similar on the cheap, take an old piano, remove the extra strings, open up the cabinet? ~~~ holri No just press the left pedal of a grand piano, called the una corda pedal. It shifts the keyboard so that the hammers hit only one or two strings instead of 2 or 3. And open the lid. ~~~ iainmerrick That’s not quite the same because the extra strings still resonate. But yeah, it has the same name for a reason. ~~~ ivanb The extra strings are dampened IIRC. ~~~ holri Unless you also press the right pedal ------ patrickbolle I love the sound of this. When I was all into Ableton this was the only piano library that I used, ever. It sounds wonderful. ------ sansnomme Can this be tuned precisely? Since each note maps to one string, will there still be the irrational tuning problem? [https://metro.co.uk/2015/09/18/its-impossible-to-tune-a- pian...](https://metro.co.uk/2015/09/18/its-impossible-to-tune-a- piano-5398180/) ------ mortdeus there is a technical reason why pianos have more than one string... equal temperament tuning does not sound right on a piano and the other strings allow somebody to change the notes soft/hard dynamics without changing the notes pitch. this is important when trying to get some chords in equal temperament to harmonize. ------ QuercusMax I love that the piano maker's name is Klavins. I know it means Maple Tree or something like that in Latvian(?), but it's also very close to "klavier", which means piano in various languages. ------ pao73 If you wonder una corda means one string in Italian ------ anjc It sounds like a more refined version of a poorly maintained upright that needs restringing and new hammers ------ xaduha For a moment I thought that Native Instruments actually built it and got into that business. ~~~ romwell Wouldn't be unprecedented after Arturia. ------ hansjorg I guess Nils has a new piano :) ------ ladelfa Some thoughts on this, from an enthusiast, collector, and amateur player of odd and arcane keyboard instruments. On the subject of one string per hammer: while this is novel for a modern acoustic piano, it is not especially so for other members of the family. Smaller harpsichords, for instance, are always strung like this, and even in larger ones having multiple "choirs" of strings, the number of strings being plucked simultaneously by a single key can always be configured, typically through levers or pedals. In the 1970s Yamaha brought out line of single-strung stage pianos (CP-70, CP-80, etc.) that were popular with rock players because they were relatively portable and significantly faster to tune. (Kawai also had an upright of similar design.) These were not loud enough to be played acoustically, but instead were fitted with electric-guitar-style pickups under each string much like the Una Corda has, producing a similar sound. In fact, as I listened to the soundtrack on the video, I was struck by the resemblance of the sound not only to the Yamaha CP-70, but to the Rhodes electric piano, which has rigid steel tines instead of strings, but also one to a key. I like the ability to swap in various felts to modify the timbre; many modern harpsichords have this facility also, with something called a "buff stop." Player pianos in the first half of the 20th century frequently featured a lever that would lower a comb of felt with little metal rivets between the hammers and strings, producing a "honky tonk" or "tack piano" sound; presumably one could fashion something similar for the Una Corda. The open, vertical design reminds me of the beautiful Clavicytheriums produced by the American harpsichord builder Steven Sørli ([http://www.lautenwerk.com](http://www.lautenwerk.com)). Here's a video of one: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL89758D803857A19B](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL89758D803857A19B) Yes, these are quiet instruments, but the late-Renaissance and Baroque music one would typically perform on them is much better served by this sparse clarity than can be produced on the modern grand piano. I suspect that the Una Corda would be similarly friendly to this repertoire. Another benefit of the single-stringing is that, presumably, a capable player might reasonably expect to tune the instrument themselves, permitting the setting of very specific configurations other than twelve exactly equal divisions of the octave tuned to A=440. For acoustic and historical reasons, a lot of pieces really bloom in a certain way when you can do this, but on the modern grand piano it's a time-consuming task usually best left to a professional tuner/technician. (Because of the relatively unstable nature of their instruments, harpsichord players, like harpists and guitarists, have to learn to do this themselves early on in their studies, and thereby gain exposure to various temperaments and reference pitches, e.g. Werckmeister III at A=415.) On the matter of price, 22,000 Euro (~$25K) is about the going rate for a new custom-built harpsichord, so that's not totally unreasonable. Other classical and orchestral instruments of professional quality frequently command similar sums, and new grand pianos easily get up into the six-figure range. I would love to see one of these in person. Anyone spotted one in the US yet?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Get a phone call when a stock hits a certain price - TheStockAlarms https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stock-alarm-market-alerts/id1465535138 ====== _____smurf_____ nice! which technology do you use for Phone Calls (is it Twillio)?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What are some ways of proving yourself to a startup? - djsamson I'm a college senior, business development/marketing/sales background with a couple NY based startups and I'll be relocating to the Bay Area in May. I have two favorite startups (both YC funded) that I am extremely intrigued by. These products/services get my heart pumping and I don't want to work for anybody else. I know I can help them grow (I've done it for much less interesting value propositions).<p>I told them both I'd work for low/no pay remotely to prove myself before I relocate. I had a Skype chat set-up for one (which I got blown off) and I gave my cell phone number to the other who hasn't since called me.<p>I'm thinking about doing this: what if I sell/market their product and show them I am capable? Send them a list of customers I found for them, it would be like free lead generation? One company is B2C so this would be a little bit more difficult. My biggest issue is I couldn't approach these prospects as working for the company since this would be unethical. But maybe I can work around it?<p>What do you think? ====== jfarmer Read Tristan Walker's letter to the founders of Foursquare: <http://justtristan.com/post/7696394458/two-years-ago-today> ------ tagawa It might help if you imagine yourself as the startup and them as your target market. What are their needs? Where's the pain? You suggest lead generation but maybe they have enough leads and the bottleneck lies somewhere else. Don't be afraid to be honest and ask them directly, although not in a vague "how can I help" way. The more you research about their needs, the more confident you can be that you really are a good fit for them. If you produce some tangible results, hopefully they'll feel the same way. I'm no expert but in my experience employers value what a candidate has done more than what they say they can do. ------ smit You've got your foot in the door so that's awesome. I think the direction you are thinking of is correct. Try to run a small experiment for the B2C company for customer acquisition. Say spend 20 bucks on google ads and measure the results. Run other types of marketing campaign to get customers. Whether you fail or succeed, send the founders the results(it will help them save time by not working on a channel that doesn't work). This way they see that you actually give a damn about them. Remember: You don't need permission to help. ------ oniTony > I told them both I'd work for low/no pay remotely to prove myself before I > relocate. Interns get paid more than "low/no pay". I can't know this for sure, but that point might have came across as "desperate for experience" rather than "excited about [company] in specific". Don't undersell yourself; and as others have pointed out -- build something to show to the founders (prototype, experiment, or just something they would find neat). ------ Vaismania I think you're choice of actions are perfect. I wouldn't worry much about not having an official company name behind you - I've done this type of product validation a few times for my own ideas. In many cases, the customer is so focused on the value proposition that the company name is irrelevant. Again, it depends on the size of the transaction and whether its a B2B or B2C. Should be fun, good luck! ------ Mikosia A good way to get their attention might be to build a complementary offering, perhaps even competitive offering yourself. If you are so passionate about the product, you should be able to hack it up quickly. These days pretty much anything can be built for a pittance of $ and time!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
I co-founded Vine. Here's my advice for TikTok on how to stay on top - gmays https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/28/perspectives/vine-tiktok-microsoft-innovation/index.html ====== lovefeature You could try the snapfeel web app.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ObjectBox: Fast object-oriented database for Go - thomaslewis https://github.com/objectbox/objectbox-go ====== zydeco I don't like how it's a closed source binary that's downloaded as part of the install process. Realm used to be like this too, but they open sourced their core later, I wonder if ObjectBox has similar plans. ~~~ lawlessone Looks like it [https://objectbox.io/faq/](https://objectbox.io/faq/) " We will open source more components later, but first we need to figure out some things with ObjectBox. Please give us time on this. We’re currently putting all our efforts in advancing the product. Please contact us if you have questions about this (email contact [at] objectbox.io.). Thank you." ------ whalesalad The docs are so light on details. The example code is weak. The website doesn’t share any examples on how this is used. ~~~ greenrobot Do you refer to [https://golang.objectbox.io](https://golang.objectbox.io) ? Check [https://docs.objectbox.io/](https://docs.objectbox.io/) for what is available for Java. ~~~ sdinsn Are you affiliated with ObjectBox? ~~~ greenrobot [https://github.com/greenrobot](https://github.com/greenrobot) ------ trevor-e A bit off-topic but it's interesting to see the name greenrobot pop up again after all these years. :) Early Android developers may remember greenrobot/greenDAO and greenrobot/EventBus libraries from back in the day, both very helpful at the time. ~~~ greenrobot Good old days... :) ------ znpy How does this compare to, say, Versant OODBMS ? ~~~ greenrobot Not sure if Versant supports Go. Anybody knows Versant's pricing? Don't think they come for free. ~~~ znpy Definitely not free and definitely no support for go. I was actually wondering how objectbox compares to versant but I quickly answered myself: objectbox is designed for low-end loads and iot stuff while versant is more geared towards big databases (ie millions of objects) and concurrent, networked access. Anyone willing to correct me or add to this is welcome (and please do). ------ sdegutis > ObjectBox object oriented database - up to 10x faster than SQLite How does it achieve this? ~~~ Strom Most likely by not providing data safety and a bunch of features. The classic example with databases is that the super fast ones will report your writes are finished even before the database starts thinking about writing the data to disk, not to mention flushing it. ~~~ bobwaycott According to this comment[0], it is ACID-compliant. What other data safety features are you thinking might be sacrificed? 0: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569031) More info on ACID & transactions here: [https://golang.objectbox.io/transactions](https://golang.objectbox.io/transactions) ~~~ Strom Based on safety research [1][2] I’ve read on numerous databases, I’ve learned that there is almost always a big difference between vendor promises and reality. Thus when reading claims of order of magnitude performance gains against one of the most well tested databases in the world, I lean towards the assumption that the gains are due to shortcomings, whether intentional or not. — [1] [https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen](https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen) [2] [https://jepsen.io](https://jepsen.io) ------ asdkhadsj Does this use the FS or is it purely in memory? I've got GBs of CSV data that I'm managing manually and due to response times, need solutions that reduce wire trips. This means that traditional databases have proven difficult due to the distance between process and DB. Something designed for local usage (SQLite/etc) is an area I want to research, so ObjectBox sounds interesting on that front as well. Though, it looks like its goals are mainly IoT, so I'm not too hopeful on this front. ~~~ module0000 SQLite is pretty bulletproof and tested in this area. Lots of examples for your project to take advantage of, and very high performance for in-memory data sets. ~~~ greenrobot SQLite is a very nice embedded DB indeed. If you like SQL. ObjectBox enables you to work with Go structs and gives you additional performance. ------ wmu Are there any benchmarks that show how fast this db is? ~~~ thomaslewis There's some general info here, including a comparison to SQLite: [https://objectbox.io/dev-get-started/](https://objectbox.io/dev-get-started/) For Android, there's even a repository to test it yourself: [https://github.com/objectbox/objectbox- performance](https://github.com/objectbox/objectbox-performance) ~~~ b2ccb2 Comparing a RDBMS with an object database is pretty useless for benchmarking. I'd be more interested to see comparison to, for example, Realm[1]. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realm_(database)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realm_$database$) ~~~ greenrobot There's a open source benchmark here: [https://github.com/objectbox/objectbox- performance](https://github.com/objectbox/objectbox-performance) \- last time I checked ObjectBox was several times faster than Realm. ~~~ ken I only see Java source code here. Is ObjectBox Java the same database code as ObjectBox Go? EDIT: I see the 'objectbox-go' repo has a separate set of perf tests, but only for ObjectBox Go -- not either of the unnamed "NoSQL" competitors, nor for SQLite. ~~~ greenrobot The initial question was about Realm, thus the link to Java. The core of ObjectBox is the same on every platform (C/C++ for maximum speed). We haven't finished the other benchmarks yet. Sorry for teasing with those. We'll be done with those soon and they will be open source. ------ polskibus Is this something like couchdb/couchbase? ~~~ greenrobot Not really, ObjectBox is an object DB and emphasizes performance (no JSON but FlatBuffers for example). ------ networkimprov If this uses os.File.Sync, it's not safe on MacOS. Also it would benchmark artificially fast on MacOS. [https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26650](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26650) Many storage libraries are affected, including Bleve. ~~~ greenrobot Interesting. ObjectBox does NOT use os.File.Sync. This stuff is done by a low- level C layer. We'll verify next week, thank you! ~~~ networkimprov The method used in the fix to the bug above is easy to apply in C. ------ oldgregg I serialize into grpc and dump into badger.. excellent performance, no cgo kludge ~~~ greenrobot You probably don't do a lot of queries? Badger is a K/V store and has no knowledge about the value. Thus querying sucks and if you want indexing, you are on your own. Relations? Anyway, for simple caching that's probably fine. ------ CyberDildonics What does 'object oriented' database mean? A relational database is already an interface to data. Is it just storing serialized binary data with a key? ~~~ greenrobot The FAQ covers this: [https://golang.objectbox.io/faq#how-is-objectbox- different-f...](https://golang.objectbox.io/faq#how-is-objectbox-different- from-boltdb-bolt-bbolt-or-badger) ------ erulabs “Fast”, “database” and “Go” are three of the scariest words to put together when viewed thru SRE eyeballs...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How does a parent with a day job participate in Y Combinator? - dpritchett A share of $15-20k should certainly cover one's expenses for a YC season but at the end you're jobless and likely not yet profitable with your fledgling startup. Does a founder in the aforementioned situation have to set a personal deadline of "by the time YC ends" to either raise more funding or go back to a regular job?<p>Obviously things are easier for singles with little to no personal expenses or for folks with some personal seed money, but I'm sure there are creative solutions for people like myself with more responsibilities keeping them from diving headfirst into YC.<p>Please share if you have some tips. ====== mbrubeck If you save some money in advance, you should be able to add at least a few more months of self-funded runway before you need to find outside investors. If you have a spouse, their salary (and group insurance!) can pay the bills, especially if you can reduce your expenses. ~~~ dpritchett Saving money is certainly a good goal - perhaps after hours contracting with related technologies is the efficient way to build up a cushion for your startup.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Sound of Code [video] - BobbyVsTheDevil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEI0wBkgf1w ====== dsyko This reminds me a lot of the sound of sorting algorithms [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg) ~~~ DonaldFisk Fascinating. Some early computers, such as the Elliott 803, had a built-in loudspeaker which received a pulse every time a jump instruction was executed. This meant you could tell which part of the program was executing, or whether it was in an infinite loop, just by listening. See, and indeed listen to, [http://www.survo.fi/demos/#ex88](http://www.survo.fi/demos/#ex88) ------ homecoded Here is a thing I built a while back: An 'HTML to 8-Bit-music' converter. This transforms a URL to a Bytebeat formula and uses the HTML of the page behind the URL as input. [http://lazerbahn.com/soundof.html?url=https://news.ycombinat...](http://lazerbahn.com/soundof.html?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182635) ~~~ ArekDymalski This is absolutely amazing. Are you planning to release it as open source? Does pull down menu for style mean that you are planning other styles? [imagine me jumping in excitement] :) ~~~ homecoded Thanks!! Yes, I have planned a couple more. The code is not obfuscated, so you can have a look that them. It's heavily based on my audio-experiments which are open sourced here [https://github.com/homecoded/js- synth](https://github.com/homecoded/js-synth). I'll add the "sound of html" there, now that you mentioned it!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Kevin Rose regrets dropping out of school too early - rockstar9 http://www.inc.com/ss/6-ceos-share-their-biggest-regrets#3 ====== jmtame I think the real part of regret comes in the last quote: "Sometimes, I’ll be sitting around on a weekend and think, it’d be fun if I could just write up a software app really quickly." I doubt it was the school that he misses. It was probably the free time to build whatever he wanted. ~~~ crs i'm not sure its the free time he is missing. i would guess he assumes that if he had completed his degree he would have the knowledge base to pick up a language and build quick utilities. ------ maximumwage According to Professor Neal Roese's research, regrets related to education are the most common form of regret: <http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/9/1273> He also wrote a book about regret and counterfactual thinking titled "If Only": Delivering a reassuring, groundbreaking message, If Only describes two types of "counterfactuals," as these thoughts are known in psychology, and both "if only" thoughts can lead to a better understanding of yourself. One variety allows us to improve performance and learn from experience by comparing what we actually did to what might have been better. A second kind asks how things could have been worse, which makes you feel a whole lot better. Dr. Roese also reveals Americans' top regrets and shows you how to avoid them. And he shows how our brains erase regrets of actions (stuff you did that didn't work out) but let regrets of inaction linger. So his advice? Just do it. ~~~ ahoyhere I love that research, but one has to consider whether the people regretting education-related things are just saying "I should have finished my education" as an excuse for everything that's wrong with their life. E.g., if only I had my degree, I wouldn't be stuck in this crappy job -- while, of course, there are many avenues to pursue for people who will make the effort, degreed or otherwise. ------ auston Why can't he learn how to code? Instead of Rock Climbing or getting blasted for DiggNation or going to tea houses/spots he could mess with coding until he "gets" it. ------ newacc101 I started skipping school at 13, and left permanently at 14. At first it was just black and white: I hated school, I didn't want to go, but it soon turned into severe anxiety (that's another story.) I'm 17 now. I wish I could say it's not affected me much, overall I think I'm pretty bright, so I don't fear I'm not going to be technically qualified for the career I want, however it's the paperwork I'm worried about; I have no exam results to speak of, and when I finally get over the anxiety, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Collage? University? I have no idea where I stand, I just hope things don't go completely pete tong, and I'm still in the same situation at 30 or something, when I have far more responsibilities and cannot afford to complete my education. We'll see... :-) Btw, this is a new account. ~~~ brandnewlow Suck it up. Go back to school. Suffer a little to save yourself a big headache. ~~~ newacc101 I know, but easier said than done... By "severe anxiety" I mean I've distanced myself from everyone I used to know, and I never go out much anymore. And a few years ago I woke up to 2 shrinks and 5 cops in my room at 9am, which ended in me being taken off in hand-cuffs under a mental health order. Thankfully they concluded after a few days I wasn't in fact mentally ill, but at that point it struck home, and I started to loose the weight I put on over the years, which is step 1 to "recovery" (so far, so good!) Excuses, I know, trust me, if I could go back in time, I'd go back and "suck it up" earlier, to save myself a ton of headache thus-far. :-) ~~~ TJensen Having a teen-ager of my own who has severe anxiety when it comes to school (so much more than the typical "I hate school."), I can empathize with the "easier said than done." Honestly, I'd look at talking to a counselor and making a plan for moving forward. You are obviously bright enough that you can over come the challenges, but you don't have to do it on your own. Good luck! ------ SteveC Somtimes I start to regret dropping out of education early, until I really think about it and realise that dropping out was the best thing I ever did. I have no student debt, a profitable start up, interesting work, and gave myself a better education than I would have received had I stayed in fulltime education. I was also very bored and unhappy with it by the time I left so I probably kept my sanity too. Yet I still sometimes find myself regreting it. ------ jskopek While Kevin's regret is pretty valid, I think the most interesting is definitely Gauri Nanda's - regretting going at the business totally alone. I refrained from applying for YC funding in the past because I couldn't find a good partner, but now that I'm working on something with a good one I really notice the difference. ------ ahoyhere Sounds like a confusion of cause and effect, to me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective - whalesalad http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem.ars ====== nailer BeOS and QNX remain to this day some of my favorite OSs, in terms of being designed rather than grown (people often say this about BSD, but BSD is based on Unix, and Unix was grown) and complete (ie, packaging, window management, all tools implemented with accompanying control panels, etc). ~~~ Perceval BeOS and QNX both featured work by Dominic Giampaolo. He now works at Apple on their file system and Spotlight. ~~~ jacobolus And I’m frustrated every day that several years after he started at Apple, BeOS still does a much better job w/r/t user-extensible metadata than OS X does. ------ zppx The history of filesystems produced by Ars in 2008 is a good read: [http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/past-present- fu...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/past-present-future-file- systems.ars) ------ viraptor > _Even though it was written at a time when systems typically had only 8MB of > RAM and a mere 9GB of disk storage_ Is that right? I remember upgrading to 8MB with a 120MB disk which cost a fortune (and using hundreds of floppies for programs... well games :) ) Wasn't something around 2GB a bios-level limit for disk space in those times? ~~~ zppx In 1997, when the article says BFS was created, I had a Pentium 100 with 8mb of RAM and a 8gb disk. EDIT: For comparison, the iMac G3 that I bought a year later had 32mb of RAM and a 4gb disk ~~~ gloob The computer my family got in 1996 had 8 MB of memory and (I believe) 512 MB of disk space. Some IBM beige box running windows 3.1, if I recall correctly. Edit: I also remember that upgrading it to 16 MB of memory cost us a couple hundred dollars. Fun times. ~~~ zokier While we are are looking back, my first computer was 166 MHz K6 (I think), 32 MB of ram and 1.6 GB HDD. Probably wasn't that good of deal even then. ~~~ nailer Mine was an Atari 520ST. First DOS computer was a 286-12, which we upgraded to 286-16. Yes, 4mhz was an upgrade! I sometimes wish I was about five years younger (I'm 29) - when I first got into making stuff on computers the languages were too much effort for even the tiniest result. ~~~ rbanffy Mine was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone made by a Brazilian company called Prologica. I was about to jokingly say "beat that" but someone here must have had a vanilla ZX and this one came with a whooping 16K.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Did a Big Bet Help Trigger 'Black Swan' Stock Swoon? - grellas http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704879704575236771699461084.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews ====== rfreytag "Instead, the picture is one of a highly rare confluence of events, some linked, some unrelated, that exposed weaknesses in the stock market large and small." Please can we stop calling these "highly rare"? When market crises happen every few years - they aren't rare. Here is a list off the top of my head: \- Nixon Wage and Price Controls of 1971 (coupled to floating the dollar see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_freeze>) \- Oil Crisis of 1973 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis>) \- Third World Default (hit major US banking hard in the mid 70's. I remember Walter Wriston then head of Citibank [then First National City Bank], lobbying a great deal in the press on this subject at the time, see: ). \- The Sterling Crisis of 1976 ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling#The_1976_sterlin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling#The_1976_sterling_crisis)) \- Stagflation Crisis last 70's(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation>) \- Farm Debt Crisis of late 70's (tied to Carter Grain Embargo in 1980: <http://www.socialistaction.org/news/199910/farmcrisis.html>) \- Reagan/Volker Recession of 1981-1982 ([http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/03/volcker_...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/03/volcker_recession)) \- Latin American Debt Crisis of 1982: (triggered by too much lending by major 1st-world banks to 3rd-world nations see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_debt_crisis>) \- Japanese Asset Price Bubble of 1986-1991 (mostly property producing the lost generation: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble>) \- Black Monday in 1987 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)>) \- US Savings and Loan Crisis of late 80's (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_Loan_Crisis>) \- Black Wednesday (Sterling leaving the ERM with Soro's help in 1992, see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling#Following_the_Eu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling#Following_the_European_Currency_Unit)) \- Swedish Banking Crisis and Run on Swedish Currency of 1992([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Sweden#Crisis_of_the...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Sweden#Crisis_of_the_1990s)) \- Mexican Peso Collapse of 1994 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_economic_crisis_in_Mexico>) \- Euro collapse (late 90's) \- Asian Financial Crisis of 1997(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_Financial_Crisis>) \- Russian Financial Crisis of 1998 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Russian_financial_crisis>) \- LTCM in 1998 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management>) \- Peregrine Fund Collapse in 1998 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrine_Investments_Holdings)>) \- Argentine Economic Crisis of 1999-2002(there are so many Wikipedia finds it necessary to put a date on this one see: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_(1999...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_$1999%E2%80%932002$)) \- Dot Com Crash starting in 2001 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_com_crash>) \- South Korean Crash of mid-2000's (reading the Buffett bio _Snowball_ he enjoys learning about and finding good buys in the Korean market, see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snowball> I cannot find a more specific reference to the South Korean Crash at this time) \- Argentina devaluation of 2002 (<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/arg-j08.shtml>) \- US Real Estate Collapse of 2006 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble>) \- Flash-Crash in 2010 (tied to potential Greek Debt Default and possibly some financial hacking: see: [http://theweek.com/article/index/202769/The_Dow_Jones_flash_...](http://theweek.com/article/index/202769/The_Dow_Jones_flash_crash_5_theories) and [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870487970457523...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704879704575236771699461084.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews)) Order is likely off and I am missing a few. I am finding a lot more but welcome your suggestions and reorderings (email me, see profile, of you don't want to post). This Flash-Crash sounds just like a 0 day exploit to me. The solutions and vulerability just like trying to keep an OS stable while running untrusted code. As long as it is more profitable to destabilize our economic "OS" rather than support it we'll see even more such snatch-and-grabs. One solution: put all profits in interest-earning escrow for a week or so. That will slow down the rate of an attack allowing it to be identified and for an exploit to be closed. P.S. Black Tuesday and Black Thursday commonly refer to events leading to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929>). And Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year i the U.S. falling after Thanksgiving Day on Thursday and the Weekend - so another important financial day. ~~~ borism judging by your list, late 2000s were the most stable market we had in decades... ~~~ rfreytag The Real Estate Collapse has taken a lot of players to the sidelines along with their empty pockets. Note that Buffett has been very busy lately. NOTE: \- I could not find specific dates for the California Real Estate Crash (coupled to DoD funding cutbacks, maybe early 90's?). I remember finding entire high-end strip malls empty in La Jolla, CA. \- Also forgot to mention the Texas Oil and Real Estate Bust - mid 80's (I met a realor from TX who was doing foreclosures back then that told me in 2005 that it wasn't going to happen again: [http://books.google.com/books?id=http://books.google.com/boo...](http://books.google.com/books?id=http://books.google.com/books?id=DaIEl3w5EbMC&lpg=PA29&ots=L2ATVbIx3G&dq=texas%20real%20estate%20and%20oil%20crash&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q=texas%20real%20estate%20and%20oil%20crash&f=false)) \- Enron Scandal of 2001 (tied to Dot Com collapse, see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal>) ------ brown9-2 I have an issue with the description of such a fast and swift decline in stock prices as pointing out "that there is a structural flaw" or that this was something that was devestating. The article closes with: _Around 3 p.m., the selling pressure abated. Just as swiftly as the market fell, it recovered ground. One factor behind the swift recovery, traders say, were funds that use computers and formulas to sniff out bargains in the market. These funds swooped in on hundreds of cheap stocks, helping push the market higher._ So at the end of the day, the market (investors, algorithms, traders, etc.) saw bargains in under-priced assets and took advantage, making prices rise back to something near the original level (but a few percentage points off). In the end, the market still worked. ~~~ steveplace Sort of. If you were cognizant enough to "sniff out bargains," and you placed an order to buy, odds are you didn't get filled. In fact, I call BS on anyone that said they "bought on the dip" because it happened so quickly even if you put a market order in on your Etrade platform (nearly all retail brokerages locked up BTW) you wouldn't get the price you wanted. The structural flaw existed on both sides of the market. Everyone's focusing on the lack of bids on the way down, but there were lack of offers on the way up as well. I would've expected more volume on a capitulative move like that. ~~~ brown9-2 Well I think if the rise was too fast too take advantage of, the opposite must be true of the way down, no? I remain very doubtful that very many people were hurt by this action in the market. ~~~ yummyfajitas Many retail investors stupidly placed stop loss orders which hurt them on the way down. Very few people placed "don't miss out on a gain" order. ------ lutorm I don't know much about trading but would there really be any real harm in artifically slowing down trade, like only executing trades once per day? These events all seem like mass psychosis to me, it's not like anyone can objectively evaluate the condition of the economy in the two minutes that is "a lifetime of trading". I thought for a market economy to work well, the actors need to rationally evaluate the consequences of their actions given all possible information. That's going to take some time for everyone, if trades happen faster then it's just basal instincts like fear that will govern the action. The market is supposed to reflect the state of the economy, but somehow it's all backwards and more like the economy reflects the state of the market. ~~~ chasingsparks People experiment with things like that often. Search JStor for market structure or market mircostructure (especially O'Hare). Even in conventional markets there are periods of auctioning and alternative pricing structures. I studied it a while back, but the gist is that single day trading does not nullify panic or mania. At best, it is identical to continuous trading but it is most likely worse. Continuous trading works very well. The problem that is increasingly causing damage is the strong interdependence. Isolated manias and panics may actually be a good thing; when it represents a global tide however... ------ johnnyg When I first heard of this I thought "well, bugs in software are like asymptotes, you can always close the distance by half but never get there". I read that a few of the gray haired market geniuses were blasting the exchanges for failure to correct "basic electronic errors" and had to chuckle. No one can understand even the basic functions of everything! Now its been days and no specific mechanical/process culprit has been identified. As trades are interconnected, it seems impossible to cover something like this up. Everyone wants to point a finger and be done. Perhaps the answer isn't a "Black Swan" but that confidence is really that low and things are really looking that bad. Buy Gold? ------ URSpider94 I'm disappointed that the exchanges have decided to nullify the trades conducted during this period. If hedge funds and quants are going to put semi- autonomous trading programs into the market, they need to have accountability for their actions. Eliminating the consequences for this kind of out-of- control trading creates moral hazard, in the same way as bailing out housing speculators who now can't pay their mortgage. If we declare a re-do every time the computer trading systems create an automated melt-down, then there's no real incentive to put buffers in place to prevent recurrence. ~~~ yummyfajitas People engaging in program trading generally want the exchange not to nullify trades. Trade nullification is unpredictable, and program traders want the markets to obey a set of predictable rules. The main beneficiaries of the broken trades are retail investors who placed stop loss orders. Many high frequency firms are actually hurt by this, namely the ones who bought at the bottom and sold near the top. Their buys were broken, but their sells were not. ------ ivenkys Another theory of why the Yo-Yo effect happened on the Stock Market , the reality though is no-one really seems to know. These are all conjectures, there is no proof. ------ VBprogrammer This feels a little like trying to figure out which butterfly caused the hurricane. ------ lrm242 Finally, a decent, well research piece of what might of happened. ------ joubert What do people think of the Black Swan theory? ~~~ retube I think it's a good concept. Taleb has built a career off of this one idea, and although I find him generally conceited and quite smug, he is definitely on to something with this. Just look at recent events: BP oil spill, the meteoric rise of twitter from nowhere, Iceland volcano etc. The trouble is, of course, that you never know when/where the spike event will occur. He made a lot of money by holding far out-of-the-money options. You bleed a small amount of cash in time-decay, but when the event happens, you make a lot back. You could do a lot worse than putting 5 - 10% of your portfolio into such a strategy. Edit: I believe taleb lost money several years running doing this. He made it all back and more when the market crashed in 87. ------ borism QOTD: '"Black Swan"-linked fund may have contributed to "Black Swan" moment' talk about self-fulfilling prophecy...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Cellphones, Tablets, Fitbits Could Be Banned from Pentagon Under Mattis Review - smacktoward https://taskandpurpose.com/ban-cellphones-pentagon-mattis/ ====== sharemywin wouldn't the lack of data leak the same kind of information? sound like they'll eventually need to create false signals. maybe from some kind of AI generative network. We could call it systematic kinetic yielding network.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Steve Jobs can't stand Adobe - anderzole http://www.hardmac.com/news/2010/02/05/apple-and-adobe-the-roots-and-reasons-behind-today-s-situation ====== rodyancy I would love Apple to create a Photoshop competitor. As powerful as Photoshop is, there is a ton of room for simplification. You know there is a problem when software provides five different ways to perform a task, yet users have to have 5 years experience, or Google, to remember how to implement it. ~~~ ilovecomputers You don't need Apple to implement this, there is already a software product for the Mac that is slowly evolving into a full-featured photo editor: <http://www.pixelmator.com/> ~~~ luckyland A closed source product built upon exploited open source code. Can Pixelmator to do unto others? ~~~ luckyland If you're inclined to downvote this sentiment, at least have the testicles to comment why. ~~~ potatolicious 1 - You are being inflammatory and immature. You are welcome to raise your own opinions without questioning the testicular fortitude of everyone on this site. 2 - Pixelmator is reliant on ImageMagick, which is governed by the ImageMagick license. This license in no way prohibits commercial use of the library, and requires only attribution. By all accounts Pixelmator has respected this license. 3 - Not only has Pixelmator respected the letter of the license agreement, but it even widely advertises its use of open source components. How this is a bad thing for open source in general, only you seem to know. 4 - To pre-empt any Stallman-esque tirades about the evils of commercial exploitation of open source software... remember that no developers are in any way forced to allow others to commercial exploit their open source work. ImageMagick has done this out of their own accord, and it would be presumptuous to assume that people _following their license_ are exploiting them in a way they did not intend. Furthermore, from what I can tell Pixelmator has added _extremely_ substantial functionality to ImageMagick (a top-end GUI app instead of a command-line app, really?), and is deserving of whatever commercial success they may derive from this work. ------ pavs How about the fact that Flash (besides having performance issues) would more or less end the reason of having an app store and apple's one large source of revenue? Do you think if iphone had flash, developers would go through the trouble of app betting process by apple? Every streaming music service, video service and flash games and applications would make Appstore irrelevant. That, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason why we will _never_ see flash support in iphone of ipad no matter how fast and secure flash becomes in the near future. Not that I care about flash in mobile device. But, using performance as the main reason for not supporting flash is silly. It can be one of the several reasons, but definitely not the main reason. ~~~ philwelch Apple's three large sources of revenue are selling Macs, selling iPods, and selling iPhones. Everything else--from music to TV shows to movies to iPhone apps--is a complementary product rather than a major revenue driver for Apple. ~~~ grinich "iTunes and App Store are still running a bit over break-even." — Peter Oppenheimer (Apple CFO) (via <http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/25/apple-q1-2010-results/> ) ~~~ evgen For a company whose main product lines throw off massive amounts of cash "a bit over break-even" is SEC-speak for "loss leader." If they ran for too long as money-losers then Apple would be more vulnerable to predatory pricing attacks based on the closed nature of both products, as long as they barely make money then Apple has better protection. ------ GeneralMaximus Flash is doomed. I'm more interested in what would happen if Apple _did_ write a Photoshop competitor. ------ hga Hmmm, another detailed and specific list of Apple's discontents with Adobe which pretty much doesn't intersect with this on submitted yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102512> ~~~ radley First sentence: _For some absolutely shocking reason some people wonder why the Apple iPad comes without Java and Flash support._ Fair to say it's basically a biased rant. ~~~ hga Yeah, definitely a rant (there's nothing to be happy about in this situation, unless you think Flash is evil per se (e.g. its not well known cookie system)), but it seems to be backed up with hard facts. ------ Tichy Still, for the longest time the main target demography of Mac users were designers who were primarily using Photoshop. Maybe Apple should present their Photoshop replacement asap. ~~~ jwhite Or perhaps the relationship is more complex than that. Despite his antics, Steve Ballmer was right about developers. Apple might be irritated by Adobe over some issues, but I don't think they would want to cut Photoshop's lunch like that. ------ tszming looks like MSFT would benefit from conflicts between apple/adobe, apple/google etc. ------ cookiecaper Once again, every single issue listed in this article would disappear if Adobe freed Flash. I don't know how they can't see the necessity of this. They should do it soon, before serious HTML5 adoption gets underway, if they want Flash to last. ~~~ dreyfiz Supposedly, the swf specification is already available to anyone who wants to implement it, without restriction: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alter...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alternatives) ~~~ dreyfiz Wil Shipley (the Delicious Monster guy, formerly of the Omni Group) tweeted that they wrote their own Flash player for Rhapsody, and it wasn't hard: <http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/8404153085> ~~~ freetard I doubt it was full featured, given how huge is the spec and how many technologies it embeds especially nowadays (video streaming, p2p etc). ~~~ hga And doesn't the video streaming include payments to e.g. the H.264 rights holders? Freeing the whole thing still wouldn't give others the right to distribute it with those codecs. ------ guelo The part about Adobe being slow to fix bugs had me laughing, I've seen apple take years to fix obvious annoying bugs that had developers banging their heads against their desks. Apple is so annoying to work with with their insane secrecy and arrogance, if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX and talk Microsoft into pulling their Windows licenses for Parallels. ~~~ ryanwaggoner _if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX_ This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why you're not Adobe. ~~~ statictype It's not a completely outrageous point. There is a not-insignificant group of Apple customers who are using their Macs for design purposes with Photoshop being their primary tool. If Photoshop ceased to be available on the Mac (or performed below standard) then which is more likely? They find some other tool? Or switch to an Operating System which lets them run their tool of choice? For casual photo editing, you would probably try a different tool. For professionals who live in Photoshop, they'll probably just switch to Windows. ~~~ wvenable If Photoshop ceased to exist for the Mac, that's a huge opportunity for a 3rd party developer or Apple themselves to fill the gap. While most Mac OS users can now simply boot into Windows, I'm sure they wouldn't all be happy about it. ~~~ jacquesm You buy your hardware because it runs your software, not the other way around.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Planet-sized 'waves' spotted in the Sun's atmosphere - okket http://www.nature.com/news/planet-sized-waves-spotted-in-the-sun-s-atmosphere-1.21704 ====== sqeaky That is pretty cool. Are we just now learning about these because the sun is hard to observe? I understand its distance and brightness are both impediments. ~~~ sp332 I don't know why it took so long to look at the data collected "from June 2010 to May 2013". Maybe brightpoints are just not that interesting compared to other features, and it took a while for someone to take an interest? ~~~ sqeaky Sometimes astronomical data sits around for years before academics and amateurs get the time to use their preferred techniques on it. Each pass over the data has another chance of finding something and sometimes people learn new things from 40 year old data. Somehow I guess I thought waves the size of a planet on our home star would be faster finds than more distant things.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Starting An Airline - rickdale http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/startup/index.page ====== fosk If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline (Richard Branson). ~~~ lutorm That's a variation on an old aviation proverb: "How do you make a small fortune in aviation? Start with a large one." ~~~ dfc And countless other industries, eg architecture, casinos, farming: [http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/small_fortune/](http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/small_fortune/) ------ dsr_ This reminds me of a vendor of networking products that we could call L. They ended up with a portfolio of machines that were almost perfect for handling all the dial-up traffic an ISP could want, with good management and reference designs and consultants ready to show you how to start or grow your ISP with many many points-of-presence. And they sold their expensive equipment and made lots of money, only it turned out that many ISPs couldn't really afford all this upfront, and it made sense for L to operate a financing company itself and finance the purchases of the expensive hardware. There was a huge and growing demand, and if an ISP defaulted, well, L could take back the equipment and refurb it and sell it to the next company that came along. Only when the market actually saturated, there was L holding all these valuable financing agreements backed mostly by the hardware that nobody new wanted to buy. ~~~ dfc I am curious why you used the mysterious _L_ in your comment instead of referring to Lucent by name? None of what you wrote was libelous. For people not around at the time it will not be obvious who you are referring to. As a result only the "cool older kids" know who _L_ is and it makes it hard for newcomers to learn about the history of the industry. Personally I do not think hacker news comments should be written in such a way as to reinforce boundaries and segregate "people in the know" from the unwashed masses. For anyone interested in learning more: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent#History) ~~~ dsr_ Because it doesn't really matter which company L was: the point applies across markets. When you finance all of your sales with only the products you make as collateral, market failures come easily. ------ jayzalowitz Anyone else want to kickstart an airline that operates with as few humans as possible? You aren't allowed to check luggage at all...(all the underbelly goes to companies like fedex and ups) just attacking it as an engineering problem? ~~~ balls187 I'd go for the opposite. An exclusive airline that is basically 1st class through out the entire cabin. * No carry-on suit cases * Free alcohol * Free meals on all flights Membership required, and can be revoked by: * Talking on your cell phone * Not following crew member instructions * Trying to prevent the person infront of you from reclining * Trying to jump the line and board when your row isn't called * Not being able to actually lift 40lbs but requesting an exit row seat anyway * Trying to smash your carry on into an already full overhead bin * Listening to music loudly etc. ~~~ iLoch You said: * No carry-on suit cases And then you said: * Trying to smash your carry on into an already full overhead bin Are you sure this isn't just a list of your air travel pet peeves? :) ~~~ batiudrami I assume you'd be allowed a small bag of carry on (with a laptop/book/whatever in it), just not a 'maximum allowable size suitcase with everything you need', specifically to avoid paying the checked baggage fee. ------ gumby Boeing should know: not only do they sell to a lot of airlines, they founded United Airlines [0] until they were forced to divest. [0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_Airlines#Begi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_Airlines#Beginnings) ------ danieldrehmer With all this wealth of information available at my fingertips, it is now 10,000% more likely that I will start an airline. Yet, the probability this will ever happen still is very close to zero. ------ dmitrygr Prices for current boeing jets: [http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/commercial/startup/pdf/busi...](http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/commercial/startup/pdf/business/prices.pdf) ------ mermoose Warren Buffett: “If a capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk back in the early 1900s, he should have shot Orville Wright. He would have saved his progeny money. But seriously, the airline business has been extraordinary. It has eaten up capital over the past century like almost no other business because people seem to keep coming back to it and putting fresh money in. You’ve got huge fixed costs, you’ve got strong labor unions and you’ve got commodity pricing. That is not a great recipe for success.” [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2774088/Buffett-My- elepha...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2774088/Buffett-My-elephant-gun- is-loaded.html) ------ leorocky Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437831) ~~~ dang Thanks; burying as dupe. ~~~ rickdale I submitted this story. Honestly I submitted to hn because after stumbling on the site I thought I had seen it on hn before, so I figured submitting was the fastest way to find discussion. Is there a reason that the submission didn't get flagged from the get go? ~~~ dang The duplicate detector is deliberately left weak so that good stories get more than one crack at the bat. But if a story has had a significant discussion within the last year, then we bury it as a dupe. The best thing to do is check HN Search to see if this is the case. ------ elwell One of the situations when the V in MVP has to be taken very seriously. ------ djyaz1200 Before anyone goes out and does this research supply of planes. Locked up for many years to come from Boeing and Airbus. CEO of American Airlines outlines this in details and suggests fairs will go up and stay up as a result. Not sure if he's right but he seems pretty sure of it. ~~~ dbloom There's a healthy market for used planes. Allegiant is a great example. They fly slightly less fuel efficient MD-80s which can be bought at bargain prices from the legacy carriers (MD-80's are those narrow body jets with the engines in the back and the 3-2 seating arrangement). They make it work by flying nonstop flights from smaller airports (without competing carriers on those routes), with low frequency. The low frequency also gives them longer until they have to do a heavy maintenance check -- which, for an older MD-80, usually costs more than the plane is worth. [http://www.fastcompany.com/1325762/heard-allegiant-air- why-i...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1325762/heard-allegiant-air-why-its- nations-most-profitable-airline) . ~~~ dbloom > The low frequency also gives them longer until they have to do a heavy > maintenance check -- which, for an older MD-80, usually costs more than the > plane is worth. By the way, that's why we have this phenomenon: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_boneyard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_boneyard) ~~~ sliverstorm What do you mean? The only way to not have a boneyard is: a) Never take any planes out of service b) fly every plane until it crashes No manmade machines have infinite service life, so a is out. No airline passengers will accept b. ~~~ dbloom The point I was making is that many of the planes in the boneyards are in working condition (assuming you gas them up and do some other trivial un- mothballing work). It's not like a car, where it can be driven until the wheels fall off. Planes are flown until they need an expensive scheduled maintenance check, even if they seem to work just fine. (To be absolutely clear: I don't think this is a bad thing. Maintenance checks are good. Falling out of the sky is bad.) ~~~ djyaz1200 I know absolutely zero about this industry but I'm not sure this fits the CC model. What's the plan to move up market? I just think there isn't any easy money, especially not in airlines. You gotta just be awesome at everything... ~~~ livestyle That article was written in 2009. Go look at their route schedule. Looks like penetration to me to more established areas. ------ sytelus Air travel is a commodity which means razer thin margins and fight for shaving off every last cent. In this type of markets, usually way to succeed is provide upscale product but with only slightly higher margins. In other words, instead of fighting for margins at the bottom, you fight bit above. In airlines case this strategy would translate in to providing all business class plane but with only 15% extra prices, for example. Lot of customers who are extremely unhappy about nickling and diming would flock to this model. ~~~ mattmaroon The problem is that first class takes up much more than 15% more space per person than coach. You'll notice there are three chairs per side per row in a standard 787 coach, but only 2 first class. That's 50% more right there, plus there's more leg room so it's worse. Their margins are already thin even packing it as they do, so at only the equivalent of 2/3 current capacity that would be a recipe for failure. They'd have to charge probably twice as much. ~~~ neom I agree with this, whenever I think about the airline industry (and I do often as I travel 100% of my time for work) - I believe the only way we can really re-invent it, is to change the plane, not the airlines.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Pololu - Three and a half months to plug in our machines legally - wisesage5001 http://www.pololu.com/blog/26/three-and-a-half-months-to-plug-in-our-machines-legally ====== RLG_RLG This is a horrible situation for your business. I hope you get everything worked out soon. I won't explain the details, but I have extensive experience with bureaucracies and base my advice below on this experience. 1\. Adopt the Socratic method. Answer questions with questions. Do not commit to any description of reality made by others (as much as possible). 2\. Understand that the highest levels of leadership are political appointments and they promote their patron's interests. eg: Does your brother- in-law know the dept. mayor's wife? Explore your network of friends and family for political influence. 3\. When you write: "Now, I do not know about the titles and hierarchies involved in the county organizational chart," I very much feel you need to hire a lawyer that specializes in these kinds of disputes to advise you. Not necessarily take legal action, but to explain your options. The bureaucrats will know the rules well. You need an expert on your side. 4\. Use these words, "What would you do if you were me?", when you find yourself at a road block. Also ask questions like "has your office ever issued a waiver for [problem]?" and "who has authority to issue the waiver?"; naturally followed by, "may I speak with this person of power?" The answer will be no, so you should ask questions like "whom does the person of power report to?" You won't get instant solution, but things will start moving behind the scenes. The bureaucrat's goal is to get you to accept their 'no' or 'wait and see', so you will go away. Your goal has to be acting nice and reasonable, but persistently questioning the management of the process. It will become easier for them to get you in compliance than continue to deny you. Sadly, this adds much delay and expense. Best of luck to you. ------ officialchicken Hire an architect. All of these problems would have been conveyed to the business owner, avoided altogether, or could have been mitigated some other way. It's a shame, because usually a competent building owner/manager will usually inform a new tenant that they should or demand the use an architect (especially when poking holes in roofs).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mixtape of the Lost Decade (2011) - DiabloD3 http://boingboing.net/2011/10/11/mixtape-of-the-lost-decade.html ====== rsync A boingboing content piece _without_ an absolutely shameless amazon affiliate link ? That's incredible. Truly amazing. ------ pronoiac Oh, the 19A0s. I'm surprised jwz doesn't have a tag for them; he's definitely labelled bands befitting that era. Here are some relevant computer GUIs: [http://visualpunker.tumblr.com/post/49438567333/retro- user-i...](http://visualpunker.tumblr.com/post/49438567333/retro-user- interface-06-primitive-computer) ------ danidiaz Cool, reminds me of a R. A. Lafferty short story with a similar premise, titled "And Read the Flesh Between the Lines". ------ fao_ fnord. Hmm, this seems very well thought out and interesting; I wonder what the rest of HN thinks. ~~~ jsnell To me it appears to be completely incoherent conspiracy theory babble mixed in with a pretty random looking selection of music. Must be some kind of a joke that I'm missing. ~~~ rspeer It's not meant to be _funny_ , it's meant to be artsy and surreal. ~~~ TheOtherHobbes Consider the past as a continuum of psychological accessories. And drum loops.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bidirectional Replication is coming to PostgreSQL 9.6 - iamd3vil http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/bdr-is-coming-to-postgresql-9-6/ ====== ukj Holy crap, I am scared! Please, please, please read the fine print and ensure you understand the design tradeoffs as well as your application's requirements before blindly using this. The moment I heard multi-master I thought Paxos, Raft or maybe virtual synchrony. Hmm, nothing in the documentation. Maybe a new consensus protocol was written from scratch then? That should be interesting! No, none of that either - this implementation completely disregards consistency and makes write conflicts the developer's problem. From [http://bdr-project.org/docs/stable/weak-coupled- multimaster....](http://bdr-project.org/docs/stable/weak-coupled- multimaster.html) * Applications using BDR are free to write to any node so long as they are careful to prevent or cope with conflicts * There is no complex election of a new master if a node goes down or network problems arise. There is no wait for failover. Each node is always a master and always directly writeable. * Applications can be partition-tolerant: the application can keep keep working even if it loses communication with some or all other nodes, then re-sync automatically when connectivity is restored. Loss of a critical VPN tunnel or WAN won't bring the entire store or satellite office to a halt. Basically: * Transactions are a lie * Consistent reads are a lie * Datasets will diverge during network partitioning * Convergence is not guaranteed without a mechanism for resolving write conflicts I am sure there are use-cases where the risk of this design is acceptable (or necessary), but ensure you have a plan for dealing with data inconsistencies! ~~~ jeffdavis Do you know of any relational products which offer high-throughput, low- latency, high-availability transaction processing using perfectly synchronous multi-master replication? ~~~ nine_k Doesn't Oracle offer such an option? ~~~ vidarh You _can 't_ guarantee low latency and consistency without setting geographical boundaries on the distribution of the servers, unless you have very generous definitions of "low latency", as the speed of light (and more realistically: the speed you can transmit a signal via the internet, which is substantially lower) between the servers will place lower bounds on latency. This is the case as you can't guarantee consistency without coordination between the servers (or you won't know what order to make operations visible in the case of multi-master, or whether a transaction has even been successfully applied by a slave when replicating master-slave), which at a bare minimum involves one round-trip (sending a transaction, and waiting for confirmation that it has been applied; assuming no conflicts requiring additional effort to reconcile). You can pipeline some stuff to partially avoid actual delays, but you can't avoid the signalling, and for many applications it has disastrous effect on throughput when certain tables/rows are highly contended. ~~~ nine_k Yes, I meant a strictly one-cluster solution for machines within the same datacenter and preferably the same rack. Synchronous replication across such a cluster can give much more read performance with write consistency and durability guarantees even when hardware failures occur. I don't know if any potential write performance increase would be worth the increased complexity, compared to a standard single-master setup. ------ aembleton Some info from 2nd Quadrant on what BDR is: [https://2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/bdr/](https://2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/bdr/) Bi-Directional Replication for PostgreSQL (Postgres-BDR, or BDR) is the first open source multi-master replication system for PostgreSQL to reach full production status, developed by 2ndQuadrant and assisted by a keen user community. BDR is specifically designed for use in geographically distributed clusters, using highly efficient asynchronous logical replication, supporting anything from 2 to more than 48 nodes in a distributed database. ~~~ iLoch > anything from 2 to more than 48 nodes in a distributed database Why specify a range if you're going to leave it open-ended? ~~~ pgaddict Yes, it means it was tested with up to 48 nodes. There's no hard limit on the number of nodes, but at the moment BDR uses full mesh topology (each node has connections to all other nodes), which becomes an issue as the number of nodes increases. ------ craigkerstiens While indeed very exciting, it's important to note that this makes the BDR extension from 2ndquadrant compatible with stock Postgres. This does not include BDR shipping with core Postgres. This continued improvement with the core code and extension APIs will make more and more extensions feasible which will mean more are able to plug-in and add value without things having to be committed to core. Though in time this is one that has a good chance of actually being in core much like pg_logical. ~~~ pgaddict Not exactly. It means that enough infrastructure was moved into PostgreSQL 9.6, making it possible to run BDR on unmodified PostgreSQL. Before 9.6 it was necessary to use patched PostgreSQL packages. ------ _Codemonkeyism The title is misleading, the replication is not coming to stock Postgresql 9.6. A replication extension got the patches it needs to run into Postgresql 9.6 so you can use the extension without patching Postgres. ~~~ simon2Q The purpose of extensions is they allow you to run stuff without including it in core database. What language should be used for this case to avoid confusion in future? ~~~ _Codemonkeyism "Bidirectional Replication extension no longer needs patches in PostgresSQL 9.6" ? ------ oliwarner As the developer who also manages the servers we deploy on, and not a full time PgDBA, things like multi-master replication scare the hell out of me. They really make me worry about what happens after downtime. And latency. Could anyone here recommend good reading material for scaling out your first database on to multiple servers? How do I know which scheme is the best for me? ~~~ pgaddict The answer really depends on what you mean by "multi-master" \- particularly whether you're looking for synchronous or asynchronous solution, what consistency model you need (strongly consistent cluster or nodes consistent independently), and what are your goals (write scalability, read scalability, disaster recovery, ...). BDR is meant to be asynchronous multi-master, i.e. a collection of nodes that are strongly consistent on their own, but the changes between the nodes are replicated asynchronously. Great for geographically distributed databases (users access their local node), for example. ~~~ oliwarner We're dealing with a booking system so sync is important. But so is redundancy and throughout. ------ Zaheer Some more information for anyone trying to understand this better: [http://bdr-project.org/docs/stable/overview.html](http://bdr- project.org/docs/stable/overview.html) Sourcecode: [https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/bdr](https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/bdr) ------ booleanbetrayal Would love to see this land in Amazon RDS's list of supported extensions! ------ anthony_franco Looking forward to playing around with this. Native master-master replication is the only thing keeping me on MySQL. ~~~ dcosson Just curious, what Postgres features are you missing on MySQL? I had only used MySQL until a year or two ago, and wondered what I was missing since Postgres seems to get more love/hype from the developer community for whatever reason. Now using Postgres in production, there are few if any features that I notice our team using which don't exist in MySQL (maybe Json landed in Postgres first is one big one?). One thing I have noticed is I find the user/permissions model for Pg less intuitive. It's as if it's designed for use in a computer lab or something where there's one human who is the owner/dba and some things can only be done by them, which doesn't map well to a web app trying to follow "principle of least privilege". This combined with the fact that we're on RDS where MySQL/Aurora is the clear first class citizen makes me wish we were using MySQL. ~~~ allan_s transactional DDL => if your application often has schema update and you use a tool like Doctrine for PHP / Alembic for python, when a downgrade or upgrade fail on MySQL in the middle became the create index was already taken by someone who "hot-fixed" the database and that now you're in an inconsistent state and you have to clean stuff by hand you will regret to not be on PostgreSQL where it will have simply rollback the transaction, leaving you in a consistent state, you fix the migration, you hit again the command and you can go back home hstore/jsonb/array/composite types [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/rowtypes.html](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/rowtypes.html) : array is often a good option to implement tag system partial index: imagine you have a lot of "soft deleted" rows (i.e with a flag deleted turned to true), you can create an index that ignore them index on expression: you often do request like "where date = today" , but you store timestamp precise to the second ? and you don't want to run date_trunc(your_column, 'day') , which it also a function not present in mysql..., everytime, nor you want to create a dedicated column for that only for the sake of performance, index on expression permit you to do that. integrated full text search: you have a smallteam, and you don't feel like maintaining one more service for indexing and keeping in sync your search engine, here you are (of course it's not perfect but better than the option provided by MySQL) table inheritance for partionning: you create one table "orders" , and you can easily partion them into "orders_2016" "orders_2015" etc. while still simply selecting things out of "orders" constraints: your column "event_start" must be before "event_end", you can enforce that at the table level in PostgreSQL text columns: in PostgreSQL don't worry with varchar(XXX) with XXX being the subject to flamewars (256 ? 500 ? 1000), the type "text" in postgresql is up to 2Go and as efficient as varchar() uuid support: postgresql support uuid natively as primary keys (without needing to resort to a varchar ofcourse...) And I've only talking about the advantage of PostgreSQL, not the strange defect of MySQL: for example that you can only have 1 column with a default timestamp, that your autoicrements will overflow silently taking back previous ids , a lot of things are only "warnings" (value not in an enum, fine I will insert null) that you will not see in your application code except if you really look hard for it. Edit: I've used MySQL extensively and only started for now 2 years to use PostgreSQL, and though I have more knowledge in MySQL optimization and internals, and I don't consider it "bad", it's just 'so so', you will definitely be able to do whatever you want with it and it will not betray you hard, but PostgreSQL is just from an other league and will actively help you. ~~~ evanelias A few things from this list are out of date. For example, MySQL 5.6 (GA release 3.5 years ago) added support for multiple columns with default timestamp. MySQL 5.7 (GA release 1 year ago) added generated virtual columns, which can be indexed, basically supporting index on expression. And for an extreme example, table partitioning was added in MySQL 5.1, 8 years ago. The default SQL mode also changed to be strict in 5.7, preventing silent overflows and other oft-complained-about write behaviors. Using a strict SQL mode has been recommended best practice for quite a long time anyway. MySQL certainly has its flaws, and there are a number of useful features that are present in pg but missing in MySQL. But the gap is smaller than many people realize. ------ elevensies Here is a rationale for multi-master from James Hamilton's "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services". _Designing for automation, however, involves significant service-model constraints. For example, some of the large services today depend upon database systems with asynchronous replication to a secondary, back-up server. Failing over to the secondary after the primary isn 't able to service requests loses some customer data due to replicating asynchronously. However, not failing over to the secondary leads to service downtime for those users whose data is stored on the failed database server. Automating the decision to fail over is hard in this case since its dependent upon human judgment and accurately estimating the amount of data loss compared to the likely length of the down time. A system designed for automation pays the latency and throughput cost of synchronous replication. And, having done that, failover becomes a simple decision: if the primary is down, route requests to the secondary. This approach is much more amenable to automation and is considerably less error prone._ ------ no1youknowz I look forward to when this lands on PostgreSQL 9.7 without the need for an extension. But more so when I can also include the Citus DB extension. Running CitusDB with just 1 master made me nervous. They did talk about having multi-master replication as a belt and braces solution, but I don't know how far they got. Thinking about this. Both being used may give you a 100% fully fault tolerant solution? ~~~ atsaloli After 9.6, the next version will be 10.0. [https://www.postgresql.org/message- id/flat/CABUevEzT3RqJZR2i...](https://www.postgresql.org/message- id/flat/CABUevEzT3RqJZR2ioSePD7JQ_datTLNgS_v2GAwQMRWODc02jg%40mail.gmail.com#CABUevEzT3RqJZR2ioSePD7JQ_datTLNgS_v2GAwQMRWODc02jg@mail.gmail.com) ------ asdf742 Please make sure you understand log replication and go through fire drills for the list of things that can go wrong with bi-directional replication. The last thing you'll want to do is deploy this into production and wing operations as you go. ------ idorosen BDR is a nice building block to multi-master PostgreSQL. I'm looking forward to parallel aggregates in 9.6 being added to core. Using the agg[0] extension for something as core as using more than one core per (aggregate function) query felt strange. (I wonder if the time has come to decouple connections from processes/threads in postgres, as well...) [0]: [http://www.cybertec.at/en/products/agg-parallel- aggregations...](http://www.cybertec.at/en/products/agg-parallel-aggregations- postgresql/) ------ StreamBright Now that is something very interesting. I would love to use this ASAP! :) ------ imaginenore Can someone explain to me the point of BDR? Since the writes must happen on all servers anyway, why not just have a master-slave? ~~~ jsmthrowaway It means you can write to any master, so your application need not be aware of "master" or anything. That's master/master anything, really. It just makes replication strategy transparent to applications and is far simpler to reason about. It's also far harder to implement on the server side, which is why most software you see that handles master/master (especially cross-DC master/master) comes with severe caveats, probably this included. Distributed systems are extremely difficult and come with lots of corner cases. There's no reason you can't hang slaves off such a setup for various purposes either, I would assume, though I haven't used BDR and I'm not sure if that's supported in this software. The best replication strategy I've played with _in general_ is a master/read slave setup in each facility with master/master between each facility. A lot of stuff is built that way, but most people never worry about datacenter failover so it's not the sort of thing you find on StackOverflow. If I give you the knowledge that your Gmail inbox "lives" in one datacenter, imagine how you'd architect a backup for when that facility fails. That's where stuff like master/master starts to come in handy, because then you start thinking about things like "why would we build a backup facility and never use it? The user's latency to the backup is lower today." ------ rgacote Do all nodes need to be up 100% of the time? If not, how long can a node be down without replicating (perhaps because a server is under maintenance). Does BDR have rules for primary key insertion conflicts? I have a (perhaps odd) situation where identical data is already being written to multiple servers. Currently handling with a custom replication mechanism. ~~~ pgaddict The nodes don't need to be up 100% of the time. Thanks to replication slots, the WAL on the other nodes will be kept until the node connects again and catches up. So it really depends on how much disk space you have on the other nodes. Regarding the PK conflicts - I'm not sure I understand the question, but it's possible to use global sequences (which is one of the parts that did not make it into core yet). Otherwise it'll generate conflicts, and you'll have to resolve them somehow (e.g. it's possible to implement a custom conflict handler). See [http://bdr-project.org/docs/stable/conflicts.html](http://bdr- project.org/docs/stable/conflicts.html) ------ sargun Is there some sort of consensus mechanism at work here, or is it closer to circular replication a la MySQL? ------ jtchang I have not used 2ndquadrant's BDR extension. Anyone comment as to how easy it is to setup? ------ ex3ndr Does anyone know good replication for psql in dynamic environments like kubernetes?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
German Leaders at Odds with Industry Over Electric Cars - davidiach http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/german-government-at-odds-with-industry-over-electric-cars-a-1123436.html ====== LeanderK German here. My Problem with the German Car Industry is that they still see the car as a product, not as a platform. A car is a major investment and one that sticks to me for a while. I must rely on the car manufactures to continuously push updates and improve the lane-keeping assistant etc. (Maybe even the style of the UI?). I don't see this happening, at all. The lane keeping assistants get shipped and then forgotten, everybody is working on a new integration that is maybe coming out in years (crazy to think about if your only used to software-cycles). I don't want to be in the situation that i can't pair my smartphone with my car next year because mercedes doesn't bother updating it's software. Tesla does OTA updates and sees it's car as a platform, at least in my perspective. Software is all i know and they don't understand software yet. Softwares lives, unsupported software is dead. I don't think that they are completely missing the electric car trend. They are being cautious, but everybody is at least getting it's feet wet. I hope they can then "just" scale their production. I don't think this is enough, but i hope they can turn around quickly enough when this gets serious. But overall the future doesn't look too good. Besides, i don't have the money right now to buy a car (also i don't want to). ~~~ Matthias247 As someone who worked at one of the OEMs in the german automotive industry I can second this. However the big problem is that the complete engineering process that many of those companies have does not allow for any updates and a car platform. The process is mostly: You write dozens of specifications for specific components of a car and then get contracts with external suppliers that develop and produce those. After the development cycle for a specific model is over (~3-4years) all these components have been integrated into a complete car that gets sold. When the next development cycle starts basically everything is done from the beginning, since the components may be developed and produced by completely different suppliers. So no chance to update anything, since the component might have not only different hardware, but also completely different software - even though it might look the same from user perspective. One way to solve this would be to develop more software and components in-house in order to continuously improve them. But as this is against the established engineering process it will only be very slowly introduced - if at all. In addition to that these companies mostly don't understand software (and software development), so the results won't be great in the beginning. ~~~ blumentopf BMW has a subsidiary in Ulm (BMW Car-IT) working on the next head unit. This will be designed and engineered in-house, at least to a large extent. Any opinion on that? The current head unit generation is apparently sourced from a 3rd party. I interviewed there once, it was almost funny how much they stressed that they're a software company, not a car company, kind of like self-hypnosis. (Disclosure: I didn't get the job, neither wanted it after seeing the situation on-site; didn't fit into their culture.) (Fun fact: Company is full of ex-Nokians who they apparently scooped up when the local Nokia subsidiary had layoffs.) ~~~ LeanderK A bit off-topic. I recently had to endure an azure evangelist telling me on literally every slide that they are now open (they had a big blue "open"-rectangle on the upper-right edge). A moment later i got very, very frustrated because a feature i had to use didn't work with the java-library ([https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for- java/issues/465](https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-java/issues/465) open since February!), the node.js library and the Rest interface lacked critical features so i was unable to authenticate programmatically (i think). Since i am working on a Mac and don't have windows, i couldn't use the C# library because it required dlls. In the end I had to code a simple proxy server in C# in a text-editor on my mac and then push it to a azure server running windows, compile it there and run it, just to get the data to my program. It was really a horrible experience. Since then i just assume that somebody that really has to stress something has in reality big problems/deficits in dealing with it. ~~~ xorxornop Huh? But you can use C# on a Mac... I should know, I just came home from doing that all day at work. .NET Core works great on Mac, and imports many dlls just fine. That being said if it was quite an old dll, and never compiled under PCL or netstandard, maybe not. There's still Mono, but, well, I can definitely understand reluctance in this case, and indeed would choose a different way in a different language myself, if that was my only option left that way. ~~~ LeanderK if i remember correctly the DLL was responsible for the library to not be portable. It might be that i don't remember this correctly, but some crucial part was not available so i could not use it. ------ julianpye I worked together with many Japanese CE companies during the transition to MP3. At first I was surprised why they were so slow to adapt and were happy to work with the music industry who tried to ban unprotected MP3s and planned to sell MP3s for $5. It went against everything that consumers wanted at the time. But... once you saw that these companies employed so many terrific engineers who could build tiny miniaturized drives for tape decks, laser pickups that could withstand vibrations, etc... it was understandable. All these engineers, of which many were in their 50s were about to lose their value and their expertise. The company tried to retrain quite a few of them to S/W engineering. It was heartbreaking how ashamed many of them were about their struggles. The German ethos is quite similar to Japan. A prime responsibility is employment and valuing their workforce. That is why they are so fearful of a change in the entire eco-system of the internal combustion engine. ~~~ woodpanel German here and no offense taken, but: What are your grounds for assuming that it is a nation's work ethos that is keeping companies from innovating? How is a multinational's German work ethos keeping it's Indian or US-American employees from innovating? Why aren't German Ford-Workers failing in Germany because of their american work ethos? It is a rather cajoling prejudice. But in my experience of working in big multinational companies (DAX or DJI enterprises) change isn't prohibited by management's guilt or a society's taboo of layoffs. Instead it's the sheer number of employees, responsibilities and added layers of business-structure. What's adding to the complexity of business structure is that with every country it operates in, new regulations and country specifics are to be dealt with. No new merger or acquisition will result in equilibrium of efficiency. You may have to - out of the most ridiculous reasons - work with a team that's located in another company, city or time-zone - or complete different culture, which means more overhead. I think this work ethos cliche stems from a misconception. Yes, in Japan as in Germany old employees are guarded like infants. But that's often due to the old contracts that they got [1]. Those were granted seldomly since. Instead most of these companies (or rather their work pipelines) are filled with temp staff, external contractors and suppliers. There is no "ethos" protecting those people from being fired immediately. [1] Contracts of war-torn countries. Contracts of countries that just years before believed that they would rule the world and now had to beg for glimpses of sovereignty. Rebuilding the economy was more than about jobs. It was about the gaining back sovereignty. That's why firing those 50 year olds is more expensive than keeping them. And thats why the companies at the same time try to dodge the necessity of having to employ someone just because some external market demand. ~~~ luckydude Forget the ethos part and read the first two paragraphs. He's saying that there are a bunch of older people who know one domain and they aren't ready for the transition to the next. Then he says that he sees a parallel in where Germany is today. Frankly, so do I. VW bet on diesel and gamed the system. It's not the cheating that is the big problem, it's the investment in diesel when cities are full of smog and the world is moving to electric. In 10 years, heck, maybe in a year or two, that is going to look like a really really bad idea. ~~~ kriro On the other hand, Daimler is pretty well established in autonomous driving (specifically trucks). I don't think any of the German car makers are incapable of providing a good electric car but I think Tesla is way ahead of all of them due to their culture and "software mindset" for lack of a better word. From my outsider looking in perspective I'd say BMW is the furthest along the engineering-software spectrum as they are very active in Usability/UX and some other areas. ------ maxxxxx I have been around for long enough to see how the German car industry reacted to safety belts, crash safety requirements, catalytic filters and tighter emission rules. Every time they claimed that it would hurt business and cost jobs. But they did perfectly fine or even used the new features as selling point eventually. It's pretty safe to ignore objections from industry. Most of the time they just don't want to adapt and keep doing business as usual. ~~~ ams6110 Um, the Germans invented and pioneered all those safety things. Mercedes had crumple zones and collapsible steering columns in the 1960s. They were among the first with seat belts as standard, ditto airbags. They probably did object to the emissions stuff because that reduced performance. ------ breatheoften Quite interesting -- German government wants to keep the valuable parts of future manufacturing processes in Germany whereas the companies don't care where their future manufacturing value comes from and will remain more interested in optimizing for their current revenue stream for some amount of time in terms of how they deal with the German governments. That revenue will eventually disappear though ... I wonder if they could put a hefty tax on the gas powered cars but offer a rebate for that tax for every electric car sold that is proportionate to the amount of the electric car value that was domestically produced. Investment in domestic electric car production would then become a direct mechanism for preserving their existing revenue stream while forcing them to set themselves up for domestic production of electric cars in the future ... ~~~ tanto I am pretty sure that would violate a lot of international trade agreements. ~~~ Brakenshire Unfortunately China seems to be engaged in exactly the same sort of behaviour. 1 in 7 cars has to be electric (fair enough), but the electric car has to be manufactured by a company owned by Chinese citizens. It's a pity that Donald Trump is going to dismantle the multilateral attempts to make China play by the same rules as everyone else. ~~~ wavefunction If that's all the TPP were about, it wouldn't be so dreadful or maligned by so many people. That would be something I could support. ~~~ Brakenshire Yes, fair enough, there were a lot of problems with it. The issue is I think Trump is opposed not just to the detail of the proposed deal, but to multilateral deals in general, presumably because he feels it means the US is bound by globalist institutions. But the US or Europe, or Japan, or any of the other countries involved in these deals, cannot accomplish a goal of preventing something like this on their own. They have to join together, and joining together means being bound by jointly created rules. In order to meet these goals, the US has to accept a role not just as a leader but also as one member among many (a role commensurate with a population and economy perhaps 15-30% of the total rather than as a hegemon talking to a minor ally). ~~~ luckydude I'm from the midwest (originally). The problem with any trade deal is that the middle class was told that it was going to be good for them and it wasn't. Yes, you can say they should have thought about it and they could have seen that trade deals even out labor costs but nobody told them that. So today, any trade deal is viewed as "here we go again" no matter what the actual content says. ~~~ Brakenshire I think that's a fair point. There needs to be a lot more thought put into how trade deals can benefit the whole of society, and what social and political structures you need to help ordinary people prosper under those circumstances. Worth pointing out that there are also a lot of benefits for them as well. And I'm not sure we have a choice, global trade is clearly more efficient, individually countries will just be routed around if they isolate themselves, and if we managed a global shift towards protectionism we would serve to reduce global growth and probably increase conflict as more people struggle (in our own countries as well). ------ Animats VW made a bad bet on bad Diesel technology, and Toyota is making a bad bet on hydrogen technology. (The Toyota Mirai hydrogen-powered car, at California Toyota dealers now.[1] As of September 29, 2016, 641 cars have been sold. $57,500, including three years of liquid hydrogen.) The German car companies have a problem. They have all that investment in the technology of making precision power machinery. But electric motors just aren't that complicated mechanically. Their edge over China disappears. GM seems to get it. Chevrolet is shipping Chevy Bolts to dealers right now. [1] [https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html](https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html) ~~~ kuschku > GM seems to get it. Chevrolet is shipping Chevy Bolts to dealers right now. All the German car makers are also shipping electric versions of their cars, just no one wants an electric Golf or up!. > They have all that investment in the technology of making precision power > machinery. But electric motors just aren't that complicated mechanically. > Their edge over China disappears. This is something that can be combined with a lot of other tech – there’s so much technology that can be precision-produced. ~~~ spaceflunky > just no one wants an electric Golf Speak for yourself. I have 28k miles on my e-Golf and I think it's a great car! The problem is most people are shocked SHOCKED, when I tell that it's fully electric. They've never heard of such a thing until I told them because VW doesn't actually want people to buy the e-Golf, not the other way around. I still have yet to see an extensive tv or billboard campaign for the e-Golf. It's a compliance car and VW is only selling it because they have to. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my perfectly capable and affordable electric car. ~~~ kuschku It’s what, 20%? 30%? 40%? more expensive than the normal version. I’m not sure that the market for that exists. ~~~ spaceflunky That's really comparing apples and oranges, but the se and sel gas models are $26k and $28k respectively. The sel egolf is $35k with $10k in discounts. So technically you get more for less. ------ GoToRO Ever wondered why electric cars from established manufacturers are all ugly? that's why: they develop the technology but they don't want people to buy them yet. They are too good for the customer and they would not be able to make money off of them, after the initial sale. ~~~ plandis Teslas Model X is ugly? The BMW i8 is ugly? I'd be very curious to see what a none ugly car is in your opinion. ~~~ GoToRO BMW i3. Just look at that line under the window of the rear door. It's like the designer forgot how to draw for a split second and he never reviewed the design. Oh, and I never understood why you have to change the design for an electric car? Just use the same design. The electric motor and batteries save space, they don't need more. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/BM...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/BMW_i3_$19939421151$.jpg/220px- BMW_i3_$19939421151$.jpg) ~~~ robterrell I agree with the GP and parent, and yes the i3 is awful (i3 driver here), but there are many EVs now that look like normal cars: Fiat 500e, VW Golf, Kia Soul, various Fords. ~~~ BoorishBears They look like normal versions of not- _that_ -normal looking cars (I mean, the Kia Soul is pretty far from normal in my book). I'd like to see EVs that just blend in with the average midsize sedans like Camrys and Accords. But obviously these EV designs have to meet some divergent design requirements from those, so maybe it can't be done (cheaply enough?) yet. ------ gumby The key to electric vehicles is a shift to buy-by-the-ride (since you can get one that will take you wherever you want without worrying about range issues). That shift is also bad for most of the existing car manufacturers ~~~ oblio This assumes most people don't want car ownership. ~~~ rplst8 The comment you replied to is the typical "city-dweller" POV. What few people realize is that there are millions of people that live in rural areas where the taxi/uber/shared asset model just does not work. ~~~ mark_edward Why do people pretend that rural people are a majority or even close to it. In the US it's 20% of the population. Edit: No these services aren't suitable for everyone but they're suitable for a huge and growing amount of people, urbanization and civilization are the same thing. ICEs filling cities like Beijing carrying 1-2 people is literally killing people. ~~~ wavefunction Rural people are incredibly important to the other 80%. ~~~ usrusr The combine harvester is incredibly important for everybody, yet nobody considers them a mainstream mode of transport. ~~~ gumby This was down voted so I upvoted it. It sounds flip but is insightful. ~~~ gumby Huh, minus 3 for this comment as well. Are the differing needs of rural people really not important to the average HN commenter? ------ digikata It's interesting that the article implies that the German manufactures are so intent on keeping the 'value add' from the internal combustion motors. For the electric vehicles, value add is shifting, and if you look at Elon Musks strategies with Tesla, he's made a bet that it's shifting a significant portion to the power generation, and batteries. ~~~ rsync "It's interesting that the article implies that the German manufactures are so intent on keeping the 'value add' from the internal combustion motors." Enjoy that. Enjoy that _right into the grave_. I bought two successive Audi A8s ... and then I saw a car that had derived AWD from two different motors and had a ridiculously low center of gravity due to the "skateboard design" and had faster acceleration than a supercar. Since that moment, German auto manufacturers have missed 2 new car (flagship cars, even) sales from this consumer, and counting ... ~~~ BoorishBears Your anecdotal experience doesn't really mean much. I'm sure short term Audi is of the opinion that if you'd settle for a Tesla's definition of luxury and refinement from their flagship, you weren't really their target to begin with. Longer term they probably realize they can't depend on Teslas never getting better and will need to compete or other luxury brands will eat up the segment (and probably wish they had just "done it right" for luxury EVs first) Audi also probably comes from the school of thought if someone wants supercar acceleration, they'll get a supercar (or a proper S-line) ------ B1FF_PSUVM > "counting on the idea that the government has no interest in creating a > crisis" Yeah, that's what they've been doing with the software cheats in VW cars (aka Dieselgate). It's a total shame for the undeniably brilliant German engineering, and they're handling it - collectively - by pretending it did not happen. The silence is deafening. I doubt it will profit them in the long range. ~~~ petre Well at least they got busted for it overseas. I won't be buying a VW anytime soon. ------ rplst8 I wonder if anyone has thoroughly considered the impact of tens of thousands of gas stations closing their doors as the demand for petroleum goes down. ~~~ knieveltech That may not happen. According to various sources fuel sales are not where gas stations make their money. On average they are only bringing in 3 cents of profit on a gallon of fuel. They sell fuel primarily to attract customers and then make their profits on sales of snacks, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and the like. Disrupting the cycle of impulse buys by individuals lured to the store to buy fuel is likely to have a measurable impact on business, but it is unclear if this would drive any/some/most/all convenience stores out of business. ~~~ rplst8 The gas gets them in the door. People are a lot less likely to stop if they don't have to. Since electric cars take a lot longer to charge, they don't mesh well with the convenience store model. More like restaurants. I think convenience stores will go through quite a huge change in the next 20 years. Small mom and pop gas stations without much of a "store" to speak of will probably disappear entirely. ~~~ HeyLaughingBoy I honestly can't think of the last time I've seen a gas station that only sells gas or diesel. At least around here, they just don't exist. The "gas station" _is_ the convenience store around here. I doubt their patronage would drop off much if they stopped selling gas. Gas stations around here sell anything from the usual cigaretter, pop & snacks to really good "home made" food. I can think of one that had a small, very good, Mexican restaurant in the back and another that made gyros, falafel, etc. to order. I would go out of my way to stop at those. But gas only? I simply can't remember seeing one in the last 10 years. The closest is the ones that are service stations that happen to have a few gas pumps. ~~~ WorldMaker "Mostly" gas only pumps started reappearing in the last 10 years as a part of big supermarket chains. From one point of view they are mostly just gas pump islands floating in a sea of parking, but from the other point of view the nearby supermarket is simply an absurdly large convenience store. ------ garyclarke27 Problem I think is still range. Tesla model S is no doubt a great, albeit very expensive, car, but it's real world range on European motorways, is still pathetic. At 100 mph, range is is measly 100 miles, my BMW 535d does 500 miles at this speed, even in the UK averaging 110 mph is quite common, when not too busy. In Germany one regularly sees cars travelling at 140+ mph for long stretches, which would be impossible for a Tesla. ~~~ macns _At 100 mph, range is is measly 100 miles_ Where did you get those numbers? Tesla's range calculator claims different[1]. Can you also point to a similar calculator from BMW? All I found is for electric; why is there not one for gas fueled cars? EDIT: forgot the link[1] [https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/models?redirect=no#range- calcula...](https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/models?redirect=no#range-calculator) ~~~ kuschku The calculator doesn’t even allow setting the value to 100mph, so it can’t claim different? ~~~ macns Good point. I just discovered it doesn't allow you to go more than 120km, and at 100km/h the speed to range ratio is 4.5 whereas at +20km/h ratio drops to 2.9 on the 75 model, and to 3.76 on the P100D model. So, the 160km/h to 160km makes more sense now. ------ wallace_f I know HN has a large fanbase of Tesla and Elon Musk, but yet I'm still surprised to see no one address the problem of the supply side of renewables before moving towards a larger consumer base of electric cars. I would be a very happy man to be able to own a Tesla Model S, but gasoline just has some advantages, especially so if we still are powering the majority of our grid with fossil fuels: 1) it has extremely high energy density relative to lithium ion batteries, 2) IC technology is very well-developed, 3) it is low cost in the near-term, and 4) no energy loss through transmission over the grid. Depending on where you live, most of the juice you put in your Tesla (or other EV) is generated by fossil fuels, anyways. It seems to me that we're putting the cart before the horse. We need to solve the problem of powering our grid with renewables first before we should pressure the car makers out of economic equilibrium. ~~~ greglindahl How about people with both an electric car and solar panels? How about people who pay for carbon offsets and own an electric car? Or people who voted for renewables minimums and own an electric car? I'm also unsure what you mean by "pressure the car makers out of economic equilibrium"? Are you referring to the economic equilibrium with negative externalities paid for? California started down the path of encouraging electric cars because of smog, which has a large negative effect on LA and the SF Bay area. ~~~ wallace_f Like I said, I would be very proud to own a Tesla, and to have resources to send funds towards renewable energy resources. However, while that is great to be able to make those purchases, let's not conflate 2 separate economic choices. I can obviously buy renewable energy certificates without buying an electric car, and I can buy an electric car without buying RECs. The question I posed was: should we get more renewable energy on the grid before forcing EVs onto the market? That is in the context of the article which discusses government influencing public policy -- if made those aforementioned individual choices that's great, I think well of you for doing that. > I'm also unsure what you mean by "pressure the car makers out of economic > equilibrium"? No worries. Here is the Wikipedia definition: > In economics, economic equilibrium is a state where economic forces such as > supply and demand are balanced and in the absence of external influences the > values of economic variables will not change So take that and put it in the context of the article. From the article: > The government in Berlin fears that German automobile companies are lagging > behind as electric cars pick up speed around the world > The Chancellery and the Economics Ministry have spent years trying to > persuade German manufacturers to establish their own joint battery-cell > manufacturing facility. Does that make sense? Since the German car manufacturers are for-profit corporations who exist to make profit, their profit-maximizing strategy is to produce at market equilibrium the products which consumers demand. What the article discusses is that they are "lagging behind." You should place your null hypothesis on their products as responding to market forces, not that successful corporations do not produce what their markets demand. You bring up negative externalities, which are a prudent factor to account for, and is a reason why free markets don't always lead to optimal outcomes. So that's a perfect example of a reason to have a government which can effectively regulate, if you care about human welfare and economic prosperity. In this case, is it the right call for the government to force electric cars into the market? There are pros and cons, and it depends on a number of given factors. If our effort is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, do we produce less or more by switching to electric cars? It's a complex question, but if renewable energy production remains constant, the increased load on the grid will come from fossil fuels, so the answer could actually be more. Counter intiuitive, but generating and transmitting electricity over the grid and storing it in relatively very heavy batteries that most be moved with the vehicle all create inefficiencies. It's not such a simple yes or no question, either. Like you pointed out, residents of LA and SF may wish to effectively relocate their pollution from their respective urban centers to remote areas where energy generation occurs, and that appears to make sense: less people live in remote areas. ~~~ greglindahl No, what you say doesn't make sense. I will point out one thing that requires renewables and electric cars to be encouraged together: electric cars that charge when solar or wind energy is available can help smooth consumption to match output. This works easiest when cars are long-range (i.e. don't have to charge every day) and can plug in at both the solar peak and wind peak (day and night, respectively.) ~~~ wallace_f Well if something doesn't make sense, I'd appreciate if you were able to point out exactly what it is that doesn't, since I took the time to write you a detailed response. Otherwise it just comes across as dismissive and honestly a little bit insulting. What you are talking about here is what is called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) load balancing. That is actually a technology that is really interesting and exciting possibility for the future, but is just that. So I guess that irony is that you're requirement that these two things be encouraged together is the one thing I can see that doesn't make sense at the moment - V2G is still honestly in development. There is a lot of scepticism about how practical it will be in practice, i.e. IIRC the efficiency of each grid->car->grid cycle is only about 60%. ~~~ greglindahl I am not talking about grid->car->grid, I'm talking about a slightly more advanced version of time-of-day charging for cars: grid->car. That's a smartphone app, not rocket science. Tesla's API is already capable of supporting it. All studies of "what happens when electric cars are a significant % of electricity consumption?" involve this. It's super-useful because it's storage with no cost: it only cycles batteries that would have been cycled already, just at a different time of day or day of week. The key thing is that a long- range car doesn't have to be charged to 100% by morning, every morning. As for your complaint that I didn't respond to your entire rant, sorry. You started by claiming that "no one" was doing something, which really isn't true except for some bizarre combination of things that appears to only exist for you. You seem to think that the German government is wrong for pointing out to German car-makers that it's stupid to ignore California's mandate, even though you admit that California has a reasonable smog-based reason for having a mandate. Next time that you think that "no one" is doing the right thing, consider that you don't agree with most people about what the right thing is. ~~~ wallace_f Your misdirection of this topic to discuss a moot point (renewables and EVs being encouraged together) is interesting. I don't think anyone is arguing that both aren't good, but it doesn't have much to say about the question I posed..? It's great if you're willing to charge your vehicle at off-peak. That's not much of a game-changer, though. The rest of your post is unnecessarily inflammatory, i.e. dismissing my explanation as a rant. I'm not sure what your problem is but you haven't addressed what at all was incorrect, and all you've done is ignore the question raised and as for a matter of fact, rant on a tangent about something we already agree on. Your final argument makes no sense. Here was my problem: > no one address the problem of the supply side of renewables before moving towards a larger consumer base of electric cars. You don't think increasing renewable energy production is an issue, at all? Oh wait, but you just did! In fact, you actually tried to argue with me about something to do with renewables and EVs being encouraged together. Why..? The fact is you're clearly confused and going in circles, which doesn't add anything to the conversation. All you've accomplished in this post is to show that you're disagreeable in terms of facts and attitude -- you've posted blatantly wrong information (some nonsense about Tesla's battery production, which many corrected you on immediately), and you write this crap with a condescending attitude. > You seem to think that the German government is wrong for pointing out to > German car-makers that it's stupid to ignore California's mandate, even > though you admit that California has a reasonable smog-based reason for > having a mandate. Are you sure you are thinking clearly right now? What I said had to do with localized pollution, and do you see the irony in your post -- you're accusing me of being naive for disagreeing with what (ostensibly, at best) "most people" think is the right thing, yet you're over, and over again suggesting that you know better than the German automakers how to run their business. Further, you're not taking the time to think about what it is I am addressing as a problem: it's not that EVs are bad, but that we need renewables capacity to support EVs (again, why did you seem to want to argue with me on this???). I don't think you really read what I wrote -- I think you skimmed it and some words aroused your emotions and you are responding emotionally. Anyways, since you didn't respond to my question, I have another one for you: Why do you need to respond like such a smug jerk? Not just here, but in your post history as well. My favourites are the smug hints that you own a Tesla. The fact is you can disagree with someone without insulting them, and I don't think you even took the time to read what I wrote and understand where I'm coming from (afterall, there are a great number of economists saying these same very things, you can start reading here: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2014/12/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2014/12/economist-explains-18)). ~~~ greglindahl I can't answer why you think calling me names is going to help, sorry. Maybe you've mistaken HN for a different kind of forum? ~~~ wallace_f Any sane and unbiased person can freely read what is written here and draw their own conclusions. I never called you any names. Everyone here is free to see that you wrote some unnecessarily inflammatory and condescending comments yourself. Bring your negativity elsewhere, like I said, it's possible that you can disagree with someone without insulting them. ------ sickbeard The article makes it sound like electric cars are everywhere and manufacturers are still making gas vehicles. ~~~ bluehawk I liken it to the time period when Kodak had made the first digital camera, but allowed other companies to surpass them and eat their breakfast, and now Kodak is bankrupt. The german (and american) auto companies will either need to drastically alter their composition or other companies will take their place. ~~~ mc32 I think it's a somewhat apt comparison in that if the ICE money-making portion does not use those profits to develop good EV alternatives, newcomers can leapfrog them. On the other hand, Kodak was a little different, they feared selling digital would eat into their "film" business. But EV does not eat into the manufacturers' "petro" business because most MFG are not selling fuels. So it's not like they have a perverse incentive is what I'm saying and Kodak suffered from perverse incentives. ~~~ gyjvdf It's not about perverse incentives, it's about "the secret sauce". Traditional car manufacturers perfected the ICE and dealership network, while the "secret sauce" of electric cars is batteries and network of charging stations. Practically, GM is right now at a disadvantage relative to Tesla ~~~ mc32 I don't see much disadvantage. It's not like Tesla is designing and manufacturing the batteries they use all by themselves. Sure, they have input --as Boeing has input w/re GE engines. Given that Tesla will be charging for their networks, it's not an advantage over other charging networks, so overall it'll be a non-issue. Having dealerships does grant the traditional MFGs some advantage but that may erode in the future if dealerships become less necessary in helping the sales of cars (ie. become more on-demand fleets). ICE car MFGs also have _capacity_. Tesla does not have the capacity right now. ~~~ greglindahl Tesla designs and manufactures battery packs. GM is on record saying that it took them a long time and a lot of money to develop the battery pack for the Bolt. ~~~ dangrossman GM didn't develop the battery pack for the Bolt. The battery cells, battery pack, charging systems, motors, computers and infotainment systems in the Bolt are all designed and manufactured by LG Chem. ------ wslh Too big to compete. ------ coldcode Subsidies in the US will probably vanish next year as well, but I think the benefits still make them viable. ~~~ greglindahl Subsidies for fossil fuels will vanish?! Bold prediction. /s ------ mathiasben Are there any German start-ups building an electric car? ~~~ kuschku No startups, but there’s other companies that have never been involved with cars before that are now building electric vehicles. Deutsche Post DHL (Germany’s federal mail service) is now building their delivery vehicles themselves, so they can get electric ones quickly. [http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/deutsche-post-baut-elektro- aut...](http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/deutsche-post-baut-elektro-auto-blamage- fuer-die-deutschen-autobauer-a-1107782.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Swift: Close to greatness in programming language design - grandmczeb https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software-security/swift-programming-language-design-part-3/ ====== JaceLightning LMAO it's just a rip-off of Kotlin. Talk about Apple fanboy piece ~~~ vorg ... and Kotlin is a rip-off of Apache Groovy. But with static typing _everywhere_ so it always works properly in IntelliJ.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Boxee Remote - Flemlord http://blog.boxee.tv/2010/01/05/by-the-pricking-of-my-thumbs-something-awesome-this-way-comes/ ====== g0atbutt I really hope Boxee can gain some mainstream traction. I absolutely love the software, and this remote is pretty slick as well. ------ buro9 Am I the only one who thinks they would be accidentally pushing buttons on the underside all the time? ~~~ zhyder I'd guess it either has an accelerometer (hopefully) or a slider switch to change modes. ~~~ prawn An accelerometer wouldn't account for people lying on their back with the remote upside down. Could the keyboard perhaps only become operational while the device is expecting text input? Entering text on a 360 with a controller or ATV with the little Apple remote can be pretty glacial! An alternative remote for the ATV could be useful too. ------ MicahWedemeyer I love how "a simple remote" evolved into a qwerty keyboard. Kidding aside, as a Boxee user, text entry without a keyboard is a major PITA, so I'm glad to see they're not ignoring that fact. ------ stcredzero Or, you can buy this one right now: <http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=1219> (Wireless. Receiver is USB dongle. Approx size and form-factor of a Blackberry keyboard, with a touchscreen instead of a screen.) ------ robk Neat looking remote, but it feels like they're reinventing the wheel here. There are quite a few other handheld wireless keyboard designs that seem to work well (not to mention the PSP-type form factors). I hope they don't overstretch themselves at the expense of the core software product. ~~~ pmorici If no one ever reinvented the wheel there would be no competition.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Janine – your sexy generator and archiver of PDF invoices - gionn https://github.com/ClouDesire/janine ====== gionn Technical details: it's a java 8 webapp built with spring boot, pdf manipulated via Apache PDFBox, upload to the cloud via jclouds, packaged via docker.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Romania dictionary altered to thwart exam cheats - DanBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-39291279 ====== apetresc I feel like the Hacker News hive mind is short-circuiting here, the "anti- censorship" impulse is overriding rationality. This isn't some Orwellian conspiracy to compromise language, it was a three-hour redefinition of a small handful of obscure words. Obviously schools already try to curtail cheating, it's not useful to just say "be more vigilant instead". This is a clever way to identify cheats from an unexpected angle; and obviously if they're cheating on one section of the test, they're likely to be cheating on others. ~~~ Wonderdonkey Cheating is such a fluid concept anyway, and it's inconsistently applied. Some schools will suspend students for using calculators on a math test; some force students to bring calculators to their tests. Some give out the questions before a test, while others expel students for distributing test questions. Some require students to collaborate or use online sources; some forbid it. It's arbitrary. Punishment for cheating also presumes the validity of 20th century-style academic testing, which is debatable. What is the purpose? To ensure I'm qualified for a job? A job where I am free to look up words in a dictionary whenever I want? I'd also add this: The internet is developing quickly into a literal extension of the human mind. I don't think it will be all that long before we're connected much more intimately to the internet than we are right now with just our eyeballs and fingertips. And that means we need to reevaluate what it means to learn information versus to find information. ~~~ apetresc > Cheating is such a fluid concept anyway, and it's inconsistently applied. > Some schools will suspend students for using calculators on a math test; > some force students to bring calculators to their tests. Some give out the > questions before a test, while others expel students for distributing test > questions. Some require students to collaborate or use online sources; some > forbid it. It's arbitrary. These are students sneaking cell phones into an exam, and going out of their way to surreptitiously look up answers with them. There's no moral ambiguity here. > Punishment for cheating also presumes the validity of 20th century-style > academic testing. No it doesn't. > What is the purpose? To ensure I'm qualified for a job? A job where I am > free to look up words in a dictionary whenever I want? These are primary school-children. There's nothing wrong with asking them to learn basic skills like literacy or numeracy (or, say, basic integrity) even if they're disconnected from "jobs". > I don't think it will be all that long before we're connected much more > intimately to the internet than we are right now with just our eyeballs and > fingertips. And that means we need to reevaluate what it means to learn > information versus to find information. Sure, and there will be tests for _that_ set of skills where accessing the internet during the exam won't be considered cheating. But in this situation it is. ------ lettergram Does anyone else find this somewhat wrong? They are literally changing the definition of words (albeit momentarily) to try to identify cheating. This is likely a private institution administering the test and a government dictionary. Even if both were governmental (dictionary and test), it still seems silly to do this, as opposed to trying to catch the cheaters. ~~~ maxerickson Isn't trying to identify the cheaters a good way to catch them? ~~~ rnhmjoj Why would the editors of an online dictionary want to catch cheaters to begin with? ~~~ deevious I don't think they wanted to "catch" the cheaters. This was not a real examination to begin with, it was just a simulation in order for the pupils to get a feel for how things will happen. The real testing will happen on the 31st of March. It was more of an experiment/eye opener from the team of volunteers behind the online dictionary project. ------ sschueller If I was using that dictionary I would stop using it. Way to loose any credibility irregardless of what you are trying to do. Also, story seems made up. ~~~ stephengillie Indeed, something smells fishy. First, the words "Everywhere, [to] spot" seem too simple to need to be researched - are these words so uncommon in Romanian that students need to look them up? Second, they impacted ALL users to their site, merely because they saw an increase in use that coincided with the test? Did they even check their website logs to see where the source IPs were geo-located? They laugh off the impact caused to a blogger's readers with their replacement of "treachery"'s meaning. ~~~ pricechild > There were only nine searches for those two words in the hour before the > exam started, but the number soon began to soar. In the final hour of the > test there were 989 requests for their meaning The article suggests you could likely count the number of innocent users affected on fingers & toes? ~~~ stephengillie The article suggests many readers of a popular author's blog were impacted. > _The DEX editors assumed it was and changed its definition, but later > discovered that it had been used by a well-known Romanian author in a blog > post that morning, something they call an "unfortunate coincidence"._ ~~~ pricechild Apologies, thanks. ------ emiliobumachar > The third word that appeared abnormally popular, "treachery", wasn't > actually on the test. The DEX editors assumed it was and changed its > definition, but later discovered that it had been used by a well-known > Romanian author in a blog post that morning, something they call an > "unfortunate coincidence". I'm all for punishing cheaters, but this measure has just too much collateral damage. Legitimate dictionary users are being mislead. It's a bad idea, and it would shatter my trust in any dictionary. ~~~ GoToRO "Legitimate dictionary users are being mislead" They replaced the words with similar sounding words that have no link with the original words. Anybody could easily spot the change. ------ mgberlin Why would the owners of an online dictionary feel compelled to thwart cheating on tests? It's their job to provide accurate information, not justice to cheats. ~~~ PMan74 It's a volunteer project. What they decide to do with their free time is probably their own business. If they want to temporarily alter some definitions to validate a hypothesis then more power to them ~~~ pavel_lishin What they do is their own business, of course, but how would you feel if the folks running npm temporarily altered some of the javascript packages they served? ------ tantalor It would be far less harmful if the exam asked the students to define a fictitious word which appeared only in the dictionary. Only cheaters would get it "right". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry) ~~~ rootlocus The exam and the dictionary are completely unrelated. The exam is devised and organized by the state, while the dictionary is an online service run by a group of volunteers. ~~~ yjftsjthsd-h > The exam and the dictionary are completely unrelated. No, this article is specifically about them working together. ~~~ denulu Nope, it's about the dictionary admins noticing cheaters during last year's exam and deciding to do something about it -- without any coordination with the exam organizers. ------ Aardwolf What kind of exam asks for the meaning of the word "everywhere"? Doesn't _every_ one know that when you have an age where you can participate in an exam? It says it's for Romanian students and is in the Romanian language, so it doesn't look like it's a foreign language to them but their native language. ~~~ ubernostrum In English, a lot of standardized exams look for knowledge of lesser-known synonyms or variants of words; it's quite possible we're getting an article here which translates the words to a more common English variant for easier understanding. For example, a similar article translated to Romanian might claim English- language students were tested on knowing a word for "rural" (simplified translation) but the exam actually used "bucolic" (a word which I know has been part of the GRE vocabulary in the past). ~~~ ilogik The actual words are archaic, lesser known synonyms. ------ petre Some context: Cheating at exams and plagiarism is rampant in Romania. Multiple gov't officials, MPs and even a former prime minister nicknamed _copy /paste_ were accused of plagiarism in the last few years. They tried to subordinate comitees that analyze PhD thesis just to get away with it and even succeeded in doing so. National exams use cameras to twart cheaters. Dexonline.ro is a volunteer effort and assumes no responsability for the correctness of its content. ------ cooper12 Sigh, I understand this was done with good intentions, but a dictionary is one of the last things whose integrity should be compromised. They call the searches for "treachery" an "unfortunate coincidence", but it's really a betrayal of people searching for authoritative definitions. When you're deliberately falsifying the definition of words, you've failed as a dictionary. Instead, the schools giving the test should have sought other solutions: make proctors be more vigilant, collect student cellphones, or even reach out to dictionary websites beforehand so they could omit, rather than modify, the definitions of any words on the test day. ~~~ JoeAltmaier Or proxy the dictionary entry in the ISP DNS at the test site. No need to corrupt the dictionary for everybody. ~~~ catalinme The test is taken in schools national-wide. You should basically ban the entire country of Romania from accessing the dictionary. ~~~ petre That's actually censorship. ------ sauronlord Administrators want to catch people cheating at exams. So what do they do? They cheat the public by spreading misinformation and lying. Quote at end of article: "The third word that appeared abnormally popular, "treachery", wasn't actually on the test. The DEX editors assumed it was and changed its definition, but later discovered that it had been used by a well-known Romanian author in a blog post that morning, something they call an "unfortunate coincidence"." They fucked over a bunch of unrelated innocent people with their fake news/fake definition and simply call it "unfortunate". Talk about the irony and double standards here. What a pathetic bunch of sorry human beings. ------ adamnemecek This seems somewhat Ludditic. Technology makes the format of the test obsolete, why counteract that? ~~~ rootlocus Because there has to be a point where you start using your own brain and memory. Just like a muscle you need to train and use them in order to keep them efficient. In a normal conversation you don't have time to access a word in a dictionary. How many words are you willing to memorize? How much offline knowledge is required for you to "survive"? If we offload all cognitive efforts to machines, what is left except meat and bones? Where exactly is that point? I don't know. ~~~ adamnemecek > In a normal conversation you don't have time to access a word in a > dictionary. If you haven't the heard the word up until that points, odds are pretty good that you might not have needed it. ~~~ rootlocus Coupled with the question "how many words are you willing to memorize" I was trying to offer a sense of scale to the absurd. If looking up words in dictionaries is sufficient, how many words should you memorize offline? If everyone agrees learning words is outdated, what will they use to speak? Orwell's newspeak? Most communication, as opposed to art for instance, works both ways. You listen and read, but also speak and write. Dictionaries help you with the first part, but you'll need a little more effort with the second. ------ gumby I'm fascinated by this HN discussion! Personally I consider it an excellent hack, but it's good to learn why people think otherwise. (And it's great that the article even describes one of unfortunate side effects.) I can imagine a MITM product for schools to help here, perhaps not though if everyone is using LTE instead of the school's network. ------ ilogik here's the pull request for the feature :) [https://github.com/dexonline/dexonline/commit/1f67d663d8a8d5...](https://github.com/dexonline/dexonline/commit/1f67d663d8a8d568704c70f739f646b3ee9dcf5d) ------ DarkKomunalec Shows the superiority of offline dictionaries. Edit: And not-needlessly-online software in general. ~~~ pavel_lishin I agree, offline dictionaries have a certain _esquivalience_ about them. ------ cryptarch The dictionnary in question: www.dexonline.ro ------ grangerg They should just hire a psychometrician. They have PhDs specifically for this sort of analysis.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
House Grills State Department Over Wassenaar Arrangement - DiabloD3 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/house-grills-state-department-over-wassenaar-arrangement ====== wyldfire Was ist "Wassenaar Arrangement"? It's an export restriction that impacts software [1] > In December 2013, the list of export restricted technologies was amended to > include internet-based surveillance systems. New technologies placed under > the export control regime include "intrusion software"—software designed to > defeat a computer or network's protective measures so as to extract data or > information—as well as IP network surveillance systems. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassenaar_Arrangement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassenaar_Arrangement) ~~~ a3n > as well as IP network surveillance systems. Wireshark?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Microsoft is Hiring Go engineers to work on Kubernetes - wilsonfiifi https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/6o2lc3/microsoft_is_hiring_go_engineers_to_work_on/ ====== hit8run I was introduced to the Kubernetes source code by an Redhat Kubernetes Core Contributor. He showed me the nasty parts how they solved the lack of generics. Actually they use strings to concat valid go source code based on reflections. A little tedious but given the constraints for language choice they had (fast, compiled binary, close to the metal) I think Go is still a decent choice for Kubernetes. ~~~ tonyhb Kubernetes is literally the Angular of orchestration systems. SwarmMode is so much cleaner and less complex to use, dive into, and hack on. I'm unsure why the community rallies behind Kube considering it's insecure, horribly complex, and a PITA to configure. I guess because google lied and said they use it internally, even though they're still using Borg? ~~~ macNchz Well for one Swarm was released a year ago and Kubernetes went 1.0 two years ago, so there has just been more time for people to get familiar with k8s. I myself dug into kube before Swarm arrived and have put off getting into Swarm because constant framework hopping kind of defeats the purpose of getting familiar with a new framework in the first place. While I agree to some extent re complexity, I'd be interested as to what you're referring to when you say kubernetes is insecure. ~~~ thinbeige Framework hopping? With your knowledge in k8s you should be able to learn Docker Swarm and getting a swarm deployed in less than 60 minutes. ~~~ macNchz Sure, I could definitely get a swarm set up quickly and run something trivial on it, but then I'll be back to the docs for secrets, stateful containers, volume mounts, cert management, instrumentation, health checks, load balancing etc. My point about 'framework hopping' was that I try to get some value out of the time spent digging into a new tool/library/framework, rather than trying to use something new for each new project. Knowing the pitfalls, useful configs, edge cases, best plugins and so forth goes a long way towards being able to focus on what you're actually building. I'm not against early adoption and I am always learning new tools, but I do try to leverage the ones I have deep knowledge of. ~~~ thinbeige > I'll be back to the docs for secrets, stateful containers, volume mounts, > cert management, instrumentation, health checks, load balancing etc. Almost all of your points are on one page in the doc (just google 'docker- compose file') which is read and used in 5 minutes. Btw, load balancing is the default, no real config required (still you can but the defaults are sensible). Anyway, you are usually 5x to 10x faster than with setting up an k8s cluster. This should be a good enough reason to give it a try and to make your own picture of Swarm. It is up to you but I think you have a wrong picture of Swarm. Something huge, conplicated and intimidating like k8s. Something you should spend your weekend and the week after to learn. This is wrong. Just see is as another CLI tool which you can grasp in the next hour (instead of surfing the web). ------ majewsky Not surprising, given that they recently acquired Deis (the company behind [https://github.com/kubernetes/helm](https://github.com/kubernetes/helm)). ~~~ brianwawok Hum I was thinking about switching to helm. I think I will steer clear now. ~~~ nikon I found it has strange defaults (all services publicly exposed) and quite unfriendly to automate. Ended up sticking with native deployments. ~~~ brianwawok Yah so the few helm charts I have used, I had not seen a huge value. If I wanted to change something without a hook, I end up using my own dockerfile anyway.. so I guess it is helpful as just a reference on how to get a service to work, but not that useful for prod deploys. ~~~ bryanlarsen We've standardized on helm for prod deploys. Perhaps it's not a huge value, but it is a convenient way to bundle together a set of configs, templatize them and manage them. ~~~ majewsky Seconded. We use Helm to deploy OpenStack (and various supporting services) on Kubernetes: [https://github.com/sapcc/helm- charts](https://github.com/sapcc/helm-charts) and [https://github.com/sapcc/openstack-helm](https://github.com/sapcc/openstack- helm) ------ deckarep Can't wait for Kubernetes Home Edition, Kubernetes Premium or Kubernetes Server Edition....I know which one we're getting. ~~~ foo101 This is not Reddit! Please post substantively on Hacker News or not at all. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) reply ~~~ thinbeige It also says: 'Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.' So calm down. ~~~ foo101 I don't find myself uncivil. I would totally say what I said in a face-to-face conversation to preserve the decorum of a forum. ------ holydude I would really love for Microsoft to cooperate on Go with Google. Of course not the C# approach to sink in all the features but maybe releasing an official pkg for win32 api and maybe even the GUI. ~~~ pjmlp Maybe Google could learn how to implement generics.... ------ rusanu I also saw today this article Microsoft Prepares SQL Server 2017 for Linux and Containers [0], from this tweet[1] "Microsoft Prepares SQL Server 2017 for Linux and Containers, SQL Server lab runs on kubernetes and docker". If they moved the entire SQL lab (many thousands of machines) to Kubernetes is quite a big deal. They're probably warming up on how to manage it at scale, and I'm pretty sure that moving Azure SQL DB infrastructure to it is the goal. If they can get better isolation and higher density that today (some Azure Fabric derivative, afaik), it would save tonnes of moneys. [0] [https://thenewstack.io/sql-server-2017-brings-microsofts- dat...](https://thenewstack.io/sql-server-2017-brings-microsofts-database- linux-container-worlds/) [1] [https://twitter.com/slava_oks/status/887359748047216640](https://twitter.com/slava_oks/status/887359748047216640) ------ mandeepj You might find it relevant. Build a container from scratch using GO [https://about.sourcegraph.com/go/functional-programming- in-g...](https://about.sourcegraph.com/go/functional-programming-in-go) ~~~ leastangle Given "Linux Namespaces and Go Don't Mix" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14470231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14470231)) I am not so sure? ~~~ mandeepj Sorry. My Bad. I meant to provide this link - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPuvDm8IC-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPuvDm8IC-4) I screwed up during copy+paste ------ mtgx I think it's clear now. Microsoft simply _loves Google_! Sorry, couldn't help myself with all the "Microsoft loves Linux because it's working on some Linux code" arguments around here. Microsoft only does what suits Microsoft's interests. If they want to use Kubernettes and they _need_ Go engineers for that, or to support Go in any way, then they'll do it, especially if it makes strategic and financial sense for them to do so. ~~~ digitalzombie They can't let Google eat up another space. They lost to the search engine. I think Microsoft have waken up and realize they need to be active in all spaces that open source is at. It seems like this moves will help their cloud business since there are so much money in there. Supposely their Azure cloud is doing well and I guess they need to keep at it. I agree that they're not doing it for the pure of their heart but rather it's money driven and fear of being left behind again. ~~~ brianwawok So when do they throw their Microsoft wrench in it.. "Oh and these Kubernetes features only work on Azure Cloud(tm) running Windows Server(tm), or Microsoft Linux(tm)." I don't know.. does anyone that isn't a .net shop use Azure? It seems if you are a .net shop, Azure is the best choice. If you are not a .net shop, why use Azure? If Microsoft is going to reach a compelling chunk of AWS and GCE linux developers, I don't think they are going have that easy of a time... ~~~ nxc18 In my very limited experience Azure is much, much nicer than AWS from the admin experience. Its kind of embarrassing for Amazon how bad AWS is in that area. Google CE also has very nice UI. I understand that Azure is competitive on price, and they do support all of the linuxy things you'd expect from AWS or GCE. Unfortunately all that comes at the expense of reliability from what I've seen. :/ ~~~ brianwawok Ya right, so you are selling me a cloud service by the GUI. I don't use the GUI on any of my providers, so it doesn't really matter. (It might matter to the same subset of people that use remote desktop to "administer" their fleet of window servers) Like I said, I cannot imaginable that many non .net shops would touch azure. It has neither the features of AWS, nor the magic of GCE.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
In pace requiescat (On XHTML & HTML5) - sjs382 http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/jul/08/xhtml/ ====== ableal Do not miss the third or so link: [http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/07/06/this-is-the- hous...](http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/07/06/this-is-the-house) Funny post, and good followup comments.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do you decide what to learn next? - vijayr Let's say you have very limited time to learn and that you are not doing much learning in your day job. How do you decide what to learn? What is your process for picking up topics to learn (other than "this is interesting")? ====== tedmiston Something I've always wanted is "a Netflix queue for tech I want to learn" Ideal features would include: \- a regular review of the things you've listed to see if they're still relevant and to help you prioritize \- a way to see what's trending amongst everything you've listed (ex. I have three front end web frameworks on my list but React is collectively popular, so perhaps I should start there) \- it could notify you if a new (good) book / blog post is published on a topic you're interested in \- you could compare with your friends to see if someone you know has learned it recently or to sit down and hack together \- it could share a common list of subtasks across users -- for example, starting with Django Rest Framework might consist of: (1) doing the python tutorial + (2) doing the Django tutorial + (3) doing the DRF tutorial ~~~ visakanv I want this for everything. Music to listen to, books to read, guitar skills to learn next, etc ~~~ NhanH Why wouldn't multiple TODO lists work for you? Just a UI/UX issue or is there any reason? ~~~ visakanv I do currently have multiple todo lists, but the experience of going through all of them can be kinda tedious. I'd be curious to try something more intuitive, if it existed. ~~~ stakent Orgmode for Emacs? ------ shekhargulati I am doing a series called 52-technologies-in-2016 [https://github.com/shekhargulati/52-technologies- in-2016](https://github.com/shekhargulati/52-technologies-in-2016) where in I learn a new technology, build a small app, and blog about it every week. I maintain an Evernote where I write down all the interesting topics or projects I find. I go through the list and randomly pick any topic that excites me that day and then work over the weekend to publish something. This helps me keep in continuous learning loop. ~~~ fbr Sounds cool, how much time do you spend every week? ~~~ shekhargulati It depends from 5 hours to 15 hours depending on the topic. On Saturday I learn a topic by reading documentation or watching videos tutorials by their creators(if I can find) or if I have a book then I read first few chapters. Sunday, I start with building something and then documenting the process in the blog by end of Sunday. ------ voltagex_ Don't underestimate "this is interesting". Couple it with a goal (like building a personal site, doing some home automation, building a NAS) and make sure you take notes (if not a blog). You'll learn heaps in no time. ~~~ mhurron > Don't underestimate "this is interesting". That's pretty much me. Someone will say something, or I will see something somewhere and a little bit of looking it up to find out what was being talked about might pique some interest and off we go. ~~~ vijayr This doesn't work at all for me. Something seems interesting to me (and my problem is, _a lot of things_ interest me) and I start reading up on it, somewhere along the way there is something else that is referenced, which also seems interesting, so I read up on that...and so on. Pretty soon I've deviated far from where I started. Interestingly, this doesn't happen in my day job :( ~~~ altern8tif Also known as the "cool-new-framework rabbit hole" or also the more common "Wikipedia rabbit hole". ------ heartsucker I pick a project I want to complete or a cause I want to contribute to. Then I look at the smallest step I can take to work toward that (learn the basis of a new language, protocol). Then I iterate (learn a framework, tool). Then I try to close a bug or release the project to the wild. This usually leads to comments on a PR or someone opening bugs with the project, and then I have to learn something new to fix it. I think it's much easier to learn things when you have a goal because you have to learn tiny nuggets of knowledge that are useful. I find learning something without the context of how to apply it to the real world is very difficult, so I generally don't just go out and learn things (tech-wise) without a legitimate usage in mind. ------ crispyambulance I am surprised that no one has mentioned consultation with a MENTOR. Really, if you "don't know what you don't know", you need some type of trusted guide who understands your aptitudes and motivations and can recommend a path of study or provide some clarity of thought. There is absolutely nothing wrong with fumbling around in the dark and discovering stuff on your own, but if you're asking this question, it means you're resource-constrained and need some clear goals to work towards. This is where a mentor or at least a colleague can help out a lot. In addition to providing guidance, a mentor can critique and analyze the direction you're taking. "Todo" lists are perfectly fine tools for mastering some narrow focused topic or for achieving completion of a small project, but they're not a strategic tool. Deciding what to learn next is very much a STRATEGIC question, and those kinds of decisions benefit greatly from dialog with an expert who cares about your success. ~~~ DenisM It's fairly difficult to find someone who cares enough to mentor you. They can't buy stock in your person, they are busy with things in their life, they don't have much power over you so they can't quite be sure to get even a short-term payoff. It might work if the pupil is willing to just do the bidding of the master to relief him from his chores, so that the master has incentive to spend effort on pupil's education. I surmise so few students want to play this role that there is no cultural norm to draw from, the concept is too alien. It's a pity, too. There ought to be a way to transfer knowledge and skill from one generation to another. ~~~ crispyambulance It is difficult and most people will have only one or two mentors in their life IF they're lucky. But I think you'll find that those who mentor others don't see their efforts as directly "transactional". They mentor others because they're expressly passing on the knowledge they've gained to the next generation. It is an altruistic act. ------ fbr I've recently started this method: \- create a list of all the tools/products/whatever you use at work \- rate them from 1 to 5 (5 you are an expert on this topic) \- then pick the most important one for your job and try to increase your grade The grade is totally subjective, but still it helps. For the "next big thing" I take a look regularly to the thoughtworks radar [1]. That's a nice overview. [1] [https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar](https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar) ------ beilabs I'm someone who has decided not to learn new language or framework that comes my way. If there is something that can speed up my workflow, I learn it. If it improves my applications speed without much time to implement / learn then I work on that. For new shiny Javascript libraries I really have held back to see what the winner will be; backbone used to be the go-to lib, ember (tried to learn but it changed a lot in the early days), angular (decided not to invest any time into it). There are 24 hours in a day, don't try and learn everything, just try and be productive with the tools you have and the ones that will get the job done for you. My time these days are spent learning Nepalese, React and trying to build a business in Nepal....keeps me busy. ~~~ S4M What made you decide to learn React and not any other framework you mentioned? ------ brightball Usually if something is interesting it's because you're thinking about it in the context of a problem that you need to solve. Basically, it's interesting because you see the potential value. That generally is what drives what I learn. I'm about to start getting deep into BPM2 and Activiti because it looks like it will solve an organizational problem that I'm currently observing, just as an example. Otherwise it's not really connected to anything I would be doing otherwise (although there are a few potential use cases if I understand the system the way I think I do). ------ noir_lord Generally I look at the stuff I do day to day and then honestly critique myself for where I'm weakest and then learn from that. Since I'm the only dev and I have to do back end and front end I realised that I was weakest on the front end (particularly JavaScript) so I made a concerted effort to learn JavaScript properly since apart from picking it up organically for years I'd never really _studied_ it. The funny part (to me at least) is that while I'm never going to like JavaScript I dislike it a lot less than I used to once I understood the underlying structure better. ~~~ lalwanivikas What resources are you using to learn JavaScript? Any advice for people just starting on this path? ~~~ noir_lord [https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS](https://github.com/getify/You- Dont-Know-JS) and the associated videos where excellent. Javascript: The Good Parts (though this is a bit full on if you are really just getting started). Reading the source of popular libraries as well in a good IDE so you can jump around and get to where stuff is defined/created. ------ codecurve Read. And I don't just mean books (although they are a great place to start). Read technical blogs, read documentation, read other people's code. Seek out challenging reads that seem overly ambitious and use them to find out what your unknown-unknowns are, then use that knowledge to steer your learning. ~~~ tedmiston ^ This year I bought the subscription to Safari Books Online ([https://www.safaribooksonline.com](https://www.safaribooksonline.com)), which offers unlimited access to many books (every O'Reilly book) and some video courses. Though it's not cheap, I think it's the best investment I've made in my own professional development. ~~~ codecurve Just to add to this, pick up an Amazon Kindle. There's almost no-where you can't read when your entire library fits in a pocket or a rucksack. I've been travelling for most of this year and my kindle comes second to only my laptop on the list of essentials. ~~~ tedmiston I actually haven't bought one yet because I was under the impression code rendering was still less than ideal (e.g., lines wrapping to fit the Kindle screen where they shouldn't in code). Is that still an issue? ~~~ hoodwink Yes, this is an issue on the Kindle device, but reading textbooks in the Kindle app on the iPad is gamechanging. The speed with which you make highlights, leave notes, and bookmark is great for learning. I can then access the book from my computer for quick reference and/or convert my booknotes to Anki flashcards. This being said, I also own a Kindle Paperwhite and use it at least an hour a day for reading non-technical books. I can't recommend that device enough. ~~~ abustamam Would you recommend people who already own a tablet (iPad, Galaxy, Fire, etc) to get a dedicated device to reading? ~~~ bawigga I have both a tablet and a kindle paperwhite. I like using the tablet for technical references which are commonly in PDF format. For everything else I use the Paperwhite. The backlight is much easier on the eyes, especially when reading in bed. ------ mysticmode I learn things by setting a purpose. Eg: For a web project, I need to learn new programming technologies. I have a very sensitive mind. I can't concentrate on multiple projects at the same time. For example: If I'm working in a day job, I can't work on a side project efficiently, I can't concentrate on both my office work and side projects. If I do, My employer could easily figure that I'm churning out. So, If I want to work on a project.. I'll make sufficient money then I quit my job and spend next coming months fully-fledged on my project. ------ haffi112 I keep a list of things that interest me with sublists about interesting observations I make about each item on the list (I use workflowy for this task - no affiliation). The observations can be anything from ideas, to blog posts, books, online courses or articles about the subject. When I want to learn something new I pick an item from the list and work on it (usually some idea I came up with). My preliminary research efforts often help me realise an idea or it gives me a chance to compare two different learning sources. I also try to create something using what I learned. Through craft I feel like I draw more from the learning experience. The outcome can also be that I need to find better references or that I simply want to learn something else. The most difficult thing is getting started. I find it useful to be systematic about it by explicitly devoting time to it. Once you have a system in place you like it eventually becomes a habit. Also note that it is helpful to break tasks into small subtasks. Having a feeling of accomplishment leads to a more positive experience of the learning process which further leads to increased learning drive. Note that my process is not much more sophisticated than "this is interesting". However, instead of acting on some hunch in the moment I act on observations which I gather over time. ------ StevenForth Fascinating question. Every year I develop a learning plan covering major themes (some of these have been going on for more than a decade), specifics inside the theme, how I think I will learn, whose help I will need (person or community), how I will pay back this help or pay it forward, what evidence I will have of the learning ... I also try to make sure that there are at least a few things each year that cross two or three themes. I have a long-term theme on pricing and this year I am spending a lot of time studying platform business models, so I have a set of specific actions that combine the two: organize a one-day event on platform business models, lead the pricing session at this event; advise at least one client on a platform pricing model (I still do some consulting as it help me to learn and share what I am learning); write some blog posts on pricing in platform business models; stretch goal - build some tools to help design platform pricing models and share them. ------ exDM69 I've got a TODO list of things I want to learn that's populated enough to keep me busy for years to come. I just wish I had more time to act on it. The items on my list are half concrete tasks and half topics to learn. The subjects are very diverse, I have a broad range of interests. Here's a few from the top: 1. Learn enough classical mechanics to do a stable n body simulation 2. Build a piece of furniture with mortise and tenon joinery 3. Implement a prototype compiler for that GPGPU/shader programming language I've been dreaming about for years 4. Get an Indian fighter kite and learn to fly it 5. Implement a multiple revolution Lambert problem solver to plan the badassest Kerbal Space Program mission ever 6. Write a simulator for gyroscopic motion and compare the results with my toy gyroscopes. That's enough to occupy my Saturdays for the next five years. Both, the sunny and the rainy ones. ~~~ hoodwink This is basically what I do. Whenever a cool idea comes into my head, I put it into my list app. I have a list for projects (e.g., build a piece of furniture), skills (e.g., woodworking), topics, and business ideas. I then review these lists periodically and when the time is right, they naturally move into my "Active" list in one form or another. ------ DonPellegrino I pick some technology that has the following characteristics: \- A complete paradigm shift. I want something that will force me to rethink how I approach problems. I want to force my brain to develop new pathways, so to speak. \- Something will at least a minimum of documentation and community online. I've had to abandon dreams of learning some really awesome language before (ATS) because there was simply no resources and that would make my progress too slow. \- Something that could be fun to use in a side project. I need to be able to find occasions to use it. I learn best by _doing_ rather than by only reading. If I can't think of an application, then I won't be able to become proficient, so I'd rather learn something else. \- And finally, it has to be something fun that feels like falling in love with programming all over again. EDIT: I usually don't pick more than 1 technology to REALLY LEARN per year, so I don't make these decisions lightly. ------ narag Mostly what I anticipate I will need for the job. For my own pleasure I choose tools whose proponents talk with a reasonable voice. I dismiss any technonology when I see people that: * Says that the rest of the world is doing it wrong and they will fix the situation with this "change of paradigm". * Presents their products as a "social movement" that's "challenging the industry as we know it". * Promises 10x productivity. * In general, bases their success on attacking others. Specially if they say things like "everybody knows exceptions are like cancer". * Uses grandilocuent names to call a two thousand lines library. * The resulting code looks like gibberish. The most likely a child can understand it, the better. It it's directed at the elite programmers, bad. * Doesn't put enough care on tooling. Edit: OK, it's a very negative answer, but it's effective. It quickly discards 99% of shiny new things. ~~~ DenisM Is Haskell bad on your book? ~~~ narag "My book" doesn't tell what's bad, but things like how the community surrounding a tool is. You can't expect a problem will be solved if it's not even acknoledged. Also let me insist that these are heuristics I apply to what I use for my own consumption, usually to create private tools that will make my life easier, or just to learn something satisfying. That said, I bet you know Haskell better than me. The fact you singled it out asking about it makes me suspicious it shows at least one of the red flags :-) If that's right, I don't care how _good_ it is. ~~~ DenisM Actually I don't know Haskell beyond the most basic examples. I singled it out because it was one of the cases where "Promises 10x productivity" may be, well, the least outlandish. But it does come at the cost of "change of paradigm". For me C# is at least twice as productive as Objective-C, so I suspect there more where that came from. I'm on the lookout for another 2x boost. But the farther down that road you go, the more isolated you become. It's a bit of a balancing act between individual productivity and being able to hire and work in groups, or to find help. Perhaps ------ tedmiston By whoever's giving away the latest free t-shirt [https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa- sk...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills- kit/content/alexa-developer-skill-promotion) ------ jobigoud In addition to what others have written, I give an increased priority to things that will help me learn other things in the future. If I have two topics on the top of my list, and I expect one of these to provide new mental tools, or meta insights about learning or cognition, I'll pick that one. I also give a higher priority in general to techs that will cascade into improving my speed on future projects in the most generic way. For example I consider that learning how to automate something is never a lost cause, even if I can do it manually at the same speed, because it increases my knowledge about automation, which will be useful down the line. ------ moron4hire I keep my notebooks. I scribble notes in them all the time, and then when I have downtime I look back through them. It's great for recapturing ideas, but it's also great for avoiding retrodding the same paths again. I am prone to forgetting I've done certain small things before and then I lose time on re- implementing the early parts of it. For example, I've rebooted this one project 4 times without even realizing it: a solar-system wide cross between Moon Lander and Asteroids with a simple, multiplayer mining economy. ------ rshetty10 Most of things I want to learn revolve around the things I work on the job. If you are trying to solve a particular problem, I try to find all the possible better solutions I could use to solve that problem and learn each of those things along the way. For ex: If I am working on react and we are using Flux as the state management library, I try to explore other better alternative such as Redux, Mobx etc. I also keep track of various things which come up when learning something and in-turn learn those topics. ------ extrapickles I pick a part of a computer I don't know it works and try doing it myself. Everything from making a cpu from 74 series logic to writing a toy compiler. If you don't have much free time, just researching how to implement various parts of a computer works is good as actual implementation takes a large amount of time (eg: the cpu required learning basic electronic skills). Now that I've gone through a basic computer stack, I'm doing that bits that interest me in more detail. ------ ruralocity I created a Trello board with a backlog of things that might interest me, then pick things out of it as time allows, opportunities present themselves, etc. I described the process at [http://aaronsumner.com/posts/2015/12/personal- research-board...](http://aaronsumner.com/posts/2015/12/personal-research- board.html) ------ jqm Back up and ask why you should want to learn. People sometimes assume we should all be learning everything but the reality is we can't and we won't. So we need to focus. I've seen a lot of people that flit around and start this and that or take an online class but then never build anything with the technology. After a year or two they are pretty much no better off for the effort than if they had used the time to drink beer at the beach. So my philosophy is now to spend a small amount of time investigating. How useful is this to myself or an employer? How interesting it? How much time and effort is going to be required to learn this well enough to work it? If it's more than I'm willing to put out or the thing has limited use or interest then I don't even bother. I know it's there if I want to come back later. But if I'm not going to learn it to the point it becomes a useful tool I generally don't bother starting. I have found that half efforts are about half the effort of a full effort but they don't produce half the results. So they are by in large a waste of time and energy. ------ agentultra Usually I'm pursuing something. Along the way as I gain experience and encounter difficulties I put my head up and look for solutions. I don't always find what I'm looking for but it gives me hunches. When those hunches collide I get ideas and from there it becomes pretty clear what I know and what I need to learn in order to progress. I'm presently learning predicate calculus and formal specifications of software systems. I came to it by hunches: software engineering should be more like engineering because companies like Yahoo! Japan are building earthquake notification systems on OSS infrastructure and the keynotes at Blackhat suggested it was a requisite for this industry to move forward. It turns out the math is beautiful and it helps me design better software and I'm only just getting started. It has also added new things to my list of things to learn such as the refinement calculus as well as alternative modelling systems like Event-B. ~~~ selmat Have you list of good resources for these math topics? ------ stonemetal I use "This is interesting" to give it about three or four days. After the "this is interesting" stage, things that fall into the "this might be useful" bucket get a couple of weeks. Then it is either getting used, or it is getting put on the back burner indefinitely. ------ williamkennedy I love the answers here. My system is pretty simple. I keep a list on Evernote every time I find a new resource to learn from. I only consider the resource (usually an online course/book) is going to help me be better at my job or help with a current hobby project. Then when I am bored at home later looking for something to do, I can refer back to this list and pick up from there. Usually, I find these resources when I am looking through Stackoverflow for answers. If I find I don't understand something or judge a Stackoverflow answer, I would find a Lynda.com course or something similar to add to the list. ------ chris-aeviator I'm using the Getting Things Done methodology for exactly this. You'll be entering it as any other goal you want to achive, split it down in smaller tasks and (most important) regulary review your list and decide what to do next ( to postpoem it, start with the first task, break it down to smaller tasks, …). In the end it will be your belly deciding (it will takeover no matter what system you'll be using) and you have a nice overview of what to do for your new technology goal. ------ captn3m0 I started reading Passionate Programmer yesterday, and it talks about this. The idea is to either pick a relatively new technology that you can bet your career at and to pick a dying tech that might survive for a while (like COBOL). Picking the first gives you immediate coolness points, but learning the latter guarantees you won't accidentally become obsolete. Another categorisation (especially for languages) is to pick a paradigm that is different from your day job. Picking a functional language is the most common example. ------ tmaly I pick a larger long term project, then I start working on it in pieces learning each aspect I need to complete the larger project. I do not always know what each piece is going to be, but I find taking this approach to be worth while. When I an commuting, I sometimes listen to podcasts from experts in the subject area I am trying to learn. At my day job, I have little time to learn, so I have to make a concerted effort to always be learning outside of work. ------ yankoff I think the key here is to have long-term goals. I am trying to at least roughly understand where I wanna be in future (1, 5, 10 years) in terms of my skillset, abilities and knowledge. Then topics I learn should be aligned with those goals. There are definitely too much interesting things, but before I jump into something new I ask if it really helps me to get where I want to be in the future. There are sometimes exceptions to this, when I just want to learn something for fun, do it as a recreational activity. ------ shrugger I try and learn things bottom-up. I don't know if that's a good way or not, but that's how I've always done it. It has seemed pretty natural to me to sort of explode things into pieces and pick it up small bits at a time, gradually composing all of the knowledge that I need to be able to complete the thing I'm working on/learning about. Is there a better way? ------ m0rganic You need to pick something you can sink your teeth into but unfortunately that doesn't satisfy your first requirement (limited amounts of time). Learning things of value normally takes time and lots of dedication. ------ tedmiston Sometimes I just browse StackShare for what's trending or if there's a more highly rated competing tool for something I use regularly. [http://stackshare.io](http://stackshare.io) ------ gd2 I should do better, because I've been random in deciding what to learn But some combination of: found good teaching materials, people I'm in contact with are learning it, and this could pay off big. ------ moshiasri there is no one particular path way or a one size fits all solution, it depends on your choice and your requirements, instead of asking what to learn next, you should ask yourself should you really learn a particular thing today, or is this a scene from a different chapter of the book and should be done later. i just have one simple saying about the subject selection which i wish to learn "when you have removed a subject which is not a immediate requirement , what ever remain not matter how difficult it is, must be learned". ------ asimuvPR I look forward in time and try to imagine myself knowing/doing something new. Whatever pops in my head us what I go for. Always live in the future and build towards it. ------ vinitagr I decide based on what i need to build next, and that came from what i want to build, at some point in the past. Also i have "This is interesting" moments, from time to time. ------ pknerd > How do you decide what to learn? Work on my own idea. Another option; work on freelance projects. Earning _could_ be a good motivation to learn new stuff. At least it is for me. ------ deathtrader666 Metacademy has been made just for something like this. [https://metacademy.org/](https://metacademy.org/) ------ Bootvis Other than that: 'This is useful' ;) I believe something can be useful when I need to know it or when it is a good basis for other more applied topics. ------ Walkman I usually learn what I need for my job. ------ lazyant Intersection of what looks like fun, that I can be good at, and good career or money-wise. ------ DavidSJ When in doubt, learn more math. ~~~ dominotw I read 2 college textbooks on linear algebra, abstract algebra last year and managed to finish most of the exercise questions. It was never useful to me and I remember zero content from either of those now. ~~~ m0rganic Take that knowledge in linear algebra and put it to use by learning how machine learning algorithms work. ~~~ dominotw Not really interested in machine learning. ------ sidcool Thanks for asking, I have been struggling with the same problem for some time ow. ------ cubano I'm not really convinced if its even _possible_ for me to learn something that I'm not interested in. [edit] By learn, I don't mean simple regurgitation of the facts or some superficial thing, I'm talking about extended study and efforts. ------ bebopsbraunbaer ThoughtWorks tech radar ------ mapcars I just feel it. ------ mdip I'll bite: _Let 's say you have very limited time to learn ..._ I think that is probably the case for all of us. Personally, I recommend you apply some time to "optimizing learning". I have been improving my ability as a speed reader for 18 years (not the "read every word faster with eye exercises/gimmicks but strategic skimming/scanning)[1]. My strategy allows me to eliminate books that would result in wasted time in a couple of hours and rip through large volumes (with a very specific method of note-taking) in anywhere from a weekend to a few weeks (depending on depth of topic/my current ancillary knowledge level more so than the length of the work). That may not be the best approach for you, but the nice thing about focusing on optimizing your learning is that it allows you to focus on a topic _in addition to_ getting better at learning in general. _... not doing much learning in your day job._ This is one of those areas worth optimizing as well. If your job is dead-end, single-focus, and "not brain work", you should start looking elsewhere as soon as you can. In programming, there's often opportunities to study the corners around the area you're specializing in. If it's possible with your current workload, try to increase this as much as possible. _What is your proces for picking topics to learn (other than "this is interesting")?_ You hit the main one, but the list is as follows in priority (which falls well below the first "this is interesting"): \- Is it something I can use _right now_ on a problem I want to fix for myself. \- Will it give me a greater understanding of the craft that I have chosen as "my life mission" or "my career". \- Is it something that is narrowly related to my career, but far enough away from it that I'm unlikely to encounter it in my day-to-day job. \- Could learning this reward me financially by using it to create a sale-able product based on the knowledge I've gained? I put this at the bottom because I make a good enough living currently and I enjoy my job enough that if I were to have a side-income that replaced what I currently make, I'd still not want to leave my current job so the choice would likely be to sell the side- business, support it in my spare time (a non-starter) or do the side-project full-time. The result of the above bullet points led me to get into embedded/IoT-related devices. There are too many things I'm interested in solving to even list that relate to the embedded space. It involved researching and learning C++ (again), which I had a long-expired background in, and also served to give me experience in a language I have occasion to use in my day-job. It's unlikely (but plausible) that I'd be developing something in the embedded space in my day-job, but if an opportunity presented itself, I'd be prepared. The solutions I'm working on could certainly result in a product I could sell. It hits all points. [1] "Speed reading" has a bad reputation as of late, though a few articles have pointed out the idea of skim/scanning as it relates to speed reading. It's a very useful way of increasing the speed at which one can learn from a book, allowing multiple "reads" of a text at varying speeds/intensities. It is, however, something that took me 10 years to get good at and I think that's one of the reason the gimmicks are getting such a bad reputation. They promise an unrealistic increase in reading speed using an unrealistic set of techniques in an unrealistic time frame. Reading is a complicated mental operation and requires focused practice to increase both speed and retention/learning and in my case involves a strategy coupled with multiple reads of a text with a lot of note-taking. It is mentally exhausting for me when I execute and it was a very long process to get to the speed/retention I have today, but it works wonderfully. ------ bebopsbraunbaer ThoughtWorks tech radar	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Warning about Microsoft Internet Explorer and too-short custom 404 error pages - archielc http://www.404-error-page.com/404-error-page-too-short-problem-microsoft-ie.shtml ====== clishem Thanks for the heads-up.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Cassandra 0.5.0 released - bootload http://spyced.blogspot.com/2010/01/cassandra-05.html ====== xal Olden but golden? In fact it looks like 0.6 realease is really far along. It's read performance got so good that a bunch of sites are ditching memcached(db) in favor of it. Speaking of Cassandra, can anyone confirm that facebook is actually moving from Cassandra to hbase? ~~~ eevans Facebook is tight-lipped about such matters. I do not think you're going to get confirmation here, (not one that I would trust). ~~~ fizx Facebook is using both. ------ noah256 0.6 beta 3 is the new hotness. [https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra/tags/cassandra-0....](https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra/tags/cassandra-0.6.0-beta3/CHANGES.txt) ------ ericflo ...in January.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: New interesting games for programmers suggestions? - viach I mean like RoboWar, Ants from aichallenge etc. I can use google, but it's just interesting to know someone personal experience. Right now I'm reading the screeps.com documentation, looks interesting (and not, this is not a plug :)) ====== dhogan codingame.com is pretty rad	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Ham sandwich theorem - weaksauce What are your favorite famous/ridiculous theorems out there? I just stumbled upon this gem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem ====== RiderOfGiraffes Was this submission inspired by the earlier one here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982247> ?? And why is the Ham Sandwich Theorem "ridiculous"? It says that any N sets in N dimensional space can simultaneously be bisected by an N-1 dimensional (hyper-)plane. Giving it a visually evocative name doesn't make it ridiculous. What about Hall's Marriage Theorem? Is that "ridiculous" enough? ~~~ weaksauce No... I was looking at the post on mathoverflow:fundamental examples: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984512> and then I went off on wikipedia for a while and came across this. It's only ridiculous in the sense of the name and the fact that they used it as an example in the proof. Otherwise it is a fine result. ------ weaksauce Clickable link: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: My first website, an episode list for over 3000 shows - goldenkey http://episodelist.org ====== earless1 Congrats on putting something together, hope you had fun doing it. What are your next steps for this project? Mine would be to polish the frontend design. I'm not sure of your comfort level with frontend design, but as a programmer with no design skills I usually look to [https://dribbble.com/](https://dribbble.com/) for inspiration or use Twitter Bootstrap. good luck ------ vigneshv_psg Looks pretty good. I've been using [http://www.airdates.tv/](http://www.airdates.tv/) for this stuff. One suggestion would be to add more service providers like Google Play Movies and Vudu. ------ mapleoin I use wikipedia for this: List_of_Your_Favourite_Show_episodes always works: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mad_men_episodes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mad_men_episodes) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_Park_episodes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_Park_episodes) and there are usually links to individual episodes pages. ------ blinker21 Check the Amazon TOS if you're doing this for the $$'s. You have ThePirateBay links next to the Amazon links which they may frown upon for no good reason. ------ alexhawdon Very nice. Do you have a NetFlix API key or have you used some other source of info for them? ------ renang On the home page, where it lists all recent aired episodes, would be nice to show the "Available On" related to that episode only. Many series aren't up- to-date on those services, which is sad. ------ SimeVidas Individual episodes have links to Pirate Bay ------ imwhimsical Nice! Two questions: 1\. What stack are you working on? 2\. How does the "instant" search thing work?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
TensorFlow Implementation of Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks - carpedm20 https://github.com/carpedm20/DCGAN-tensorflow ====== zappo2938 I have an idea for anyone who is interest in getting their hands dirty with TensorFlow. There is a very large conservation group in Fort Lauderdale that works with Sea Turtles.[1] Thousands of turtles are born on Fort Lauderdale beach every year, however, there is a problem because once hatched they move towards a light source. So they are crossing the road towards hotels with bright lights and street lamps at night instead of crawling into the ocean. What the volunteers are doing is collecting massive quantities of data to show how devastating artificial lights are to the baby turtles. They have a massive quantity of data and they have a very good idea of when the eggs will hatch. They go out on the beach when the eggs hatch and pretty much make sure all the turtles make it to the ocean. Great program. They use data like air temperature and amount of daylight to try and figure out when the eggs will hatch so they are ready to usher them into the ocean. They have years of data. They know the data is linked to hatching times. But, they don't have sophisticated models. If someone wanted an interesting project to start using TensorFlow with I would suggest getting in touch with S.T.O.P. and request their data sets so see if a prediction model can be developed for when the eggs hatch. Being able to know when the eggs hatch would help the scores of volunteers who are out on the beach protecting sea turtles. [1] [http://seaturtleop.com/](http://seaturtleop.com/) ~~~ argonaut I understand that it's difficult for people not experienced with machine learning to tell what problems are actually suited for what models, but using deep learning / Tensorflow for this is like using Hadoop to sort a 10 megabyte file of numbers. Or writing a new Ruby on Rails app and deploying to AWS in order to create a survey for a class project. Plain ol' statistics, plotting, and some hand rolled features (this is bascially "data science") is probably the best fit for this problem, especially since it doesn't seem to me like this would be a massive dataset. ~~~ ska This is the big problem when an technique breaks through to name recognition in mass media. The last big one was SVM/kernel methods but it wasn't this bad. Now we have lots of people running around wanting to hit things with the "Deep Learning" hammer, with no real idea where it is appropriate (or worse, offering to do it for your company without much better understanding) ------ midko I can't recommend this video because I haven't watched it yet but looking at the slides it looks like a good survey talk about generative models and an intro to DCGAN [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeJINHjyzOU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeJINHjyzOU) ------ gnarbarian They all look the same to me. <kidding> Love to see with with more training data. ------ platz > "Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks" Only 4 qualifiers? We can do better.. 5, 6 even 7 are now on the horizon! ------ ruraljuror _ "	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hackers and Founders Meetup tonight in San Jose - iamelgringo Please, feel free to drop by. We still have room.<p>http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737 ====== ph0rque > <http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737> ahh, if it was only <http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1337> ;~)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Can my GPL webapp be a paid iPhone app? - roschdal I have created a webapp which I'm wondering if would be possible to turn into a paid app on the iPhone app store?<p>My web app is an open source multiplayer strategy game for the web. The app is released under the GNU General Public License.<p>I would like to turn this app into a web app for the iPhone, available here: http://www.apple.com/webapps/<p>However, the guidelines for the app store states the following:<p>- "You must either own all rights to your submission and the content displayed in or through the submission or have written authorization from the owner(s) thereof."<p>- "Your submission (and the content displayed in or through your submission) must not violate or infringe the intellectual property rights (including trademark rights) of others."<p>So do you think an open source civ-clone violates any of these terms?<p>My web app can be found on http://www.freeciv.net/ ====== Someone 1: I am not sure you understand what the App store is. The page you reference is not the App store; it is just a page where apple promotes URLs of web applications. 2: You probably are the best to judge whether your clone complies with those requirements. Who wrote the code? Who created the graphics? 3: Finally, there is the issue whether cloning an existing application infringes on somebody's rights. On the one hand the right holders probably are aware of the existence of freeciv, and haven't acted against it yet. On the other hand, you are saying you want to charge for using it. That may mve you over a limit the right holders have set. ------ jmount I am not a license expert- but I am pretty sure if you can only release your app as GPL (either it requires a GPL component you did not write or you are unwilling to release it non-GPL) then you can not make it an iPhone app (Apple seems to be hostile to this). In principle there is nothing wrong with charging for GPL apps, so if it wasn't for Apple's license issues you would be fine. However, if you wrote the app yourself (or somehow own it) then there is nothing in the GPL preventing you from releasing a non-GPL version on the iPhone app store (dual licensing). ~~~ roschdal Ok. The code has to be GPL licensed, because the webapp is based on an existing GPL codebase. Do you have any other suggestions for a business model? Alternatives to the iPhone app store? Should I try the Android Market? ~~~ jmount Actually now I wondering. It looks like GPLv3 is not compatible with the iPhone (the anti-Tivo clause: [http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/why-free- software-and-app...](http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/why-free-software-and- apples-iphone-dont-mix) ) but I am less clear if GPLv2 is incompatible (or if people just hope it is, see: [http://www.geoffeg.org/wordpress/2009/10/07/the- iphone-and-t...](http://www.geoffeg.org/wordpress/2009/10/07/the-iphone-and- the-gpl-v2-are-not-incompatible/) ). So you may want to look a bit deeper into the license of the library you are using (LGPL, GPLv2, GPLv3 ...). ------ roschdal The web application in question can be tested here: <http://www.freeciv.net/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
TX police issue explosion warning ahead of SpaceX test - myrandomcomment https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starhopper-launch-sheriff-issues-explosion-risk-safety-warning-notice-2019-8 ====== aurizon Show how PC and stupidity have riddled some police forces...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nim: –Gc:Arc - based2 https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/5734 ====== totalperspectiv This is super cool ... are there any more detailed docs on it? It sounds like it's borrowing a bit from Rust's ownership model?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Should Farmers Give John Deere And Monsanto Their Data? - RougeFemme http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/01/21/264577744/should-farmers-give-john-deere-and-monsanto-their-data ====== kfcm This will be the second year where I've placed data ownership in my farm leases. Essentially, any data directly describing the farmland (geolocation, soil types, nutrient levels, etc) is my data, and may not be given away except as required by law or crop insurance. Any data derived from or tied to farmland specific data (e.g., yield/acre) is a joint product with the tenant, and requires approval from both tenant and landlord/owner/agent. Like Hell I'm going to let some 3rd party/parties mine data about my property and sell it for their bottom line, and not give me squat. And there will be a lot of farmers thinking the same way. My 85 year old dad-- who's never touched a computer in his life--got it instantly when I explained what I wanted to do: "This information thing you're talking about is a new commodity." Bingo.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Golden Age of Tax Fraud Is Upon Us - smn1234 https://www.gq.com/story/golden-age-of-tax-fraud ====== masonic "Trump is poised to cut the agency’s budget even further. The number of audits has plummeted, with only .7% of all individuals audited in 2016." Trump wasn't in office for _any_ of that "plummet" period. That statistic shows lack of enforcement by the _prior_ administration. "If the IRS doesn’t have the manpower to parse the bill and send out estimated tax forms in time..." Uh, the 1040-ES form is a _one-page_ (actually, each payment slip is _one- fourth_ of a page) _downloadable, free_ PDF. Perhaps somebody in his office would be kind enough to show him how to use the Interwebz and a printer.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bacteria in clouds - oscardelben http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud#Bacteria_in_clouds ====== oscardelben <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/64122879.html> ------ hendler If you hadn't posted the national geographic link as well, I would have thought it was an April fools joke. ~~~ oscardelben To be honest, I thought that too before seeing the link. I still have to say I found this today, which is April 1st, so I'd like to hear from someone else if this is true or not. Edit: although it's unlikely that the link is fake.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Play Asteroids in Chrome - Thanks to HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript - dcawrey http://www.thechromesource.com/play-asteroids-in-chrome-thanks-to-html5-canvas-and-javascript/ ====== JeffL The arrow keys and space bar keep scrolling the page up and down in addition to controlling my ship! ------ geuis doesn't work in the ipad ~~~ ZeroGravitas Because of the lack of touch interface, or because of some missing standards support in mobile webkit?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
North Korea creates its own timezone - hamoperator http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/08/07/north-korea-time-zone/31275995/ ====== pavel_lishin How many developers here will be directly affected by this?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Brain Hackers Beware: Scientist Says tDCS Has No Effect - Expeditus419 http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/ethics/brain-hackers-beware-scientist-says-tdcs-has-no-effect ====== Iv I had to get into the medical publications on this subject because a friend approached me one year ago with the idea of commercializing tDCS devices. I warned him that it looked like a fraud. The thing is, scientists are using transcranial MAGNETIC stimulation (TMS) more and more these days as interesting results are appearing. However, TMS is hard to do correctly. In the meantime, tDCS got branded as "almost the same thing" (I suspect that "tDCS" is a new term purposefuly chosen to sound similar to TMS) and quoted publications about TMS to claim a proven effect. tDCS is pretty easy: put two electrodes on the cranium and impose a small current between them. Mass-manufacturing them is easy and cheap. The only problem is that they have nothing to do with the tech proven to work. ------ briandh An important caveat from the inclusion criteria (touched on in the body of the IEEE piece, to their credit): > We chose to exclude measures that have only been replicated by a single > research group to ensure all data included in and conclusions generated by > this review accurately reflect the effects of tDCS itself, rather than any > unique device, protocol, or condition utilized in a single lab. If you looked at the (paywalled) appendix Table S3, you will see that (by eye) 100-something measures have been excluded. The researchers had justifiable reasons for doing so and it is a decision I (as a non-expert, granted) agree with, but it means the headline is incorrect; the analysis found no effect for a certain set of measures (albeit quite a few -- more than I want to type or count) in four domains. Also, like all good articles it includes a few paragraphs on limitations; I found the following one particularly interesting (and probably relevant to "brain hackers", of which I am not one): > This paper only explores cognitive measures undertaken during or following > one session of tDCS. As noted in the results section, there are many studies > which have utilized a multiple-day stimulation paradigm. It is wholly > possible that several sessions of tDCS are required in order for a reliable > effect to be seen. In this instance, it has been argued tDCS impacts > cognition via repeated exposure and, possibly, overnight consolidation. ~~~ argonaut And the rest of the measures are unproven because they haven't been replicated (by different teams, presumably). Therefore, on the balance, no measures have been shown to be effective (either because they're not effective, or because they haven't been replicated). ------ api Something really fascinates me about medicine... it's so incredibly difficult to actually tell if anything works! I mean look at the debates over antidepressant drugs. There are some large studies that claim most are no better than placebo, and others that claim otherwise. I feel like there has to be room for improvement here. Maybe we need to start learning to go beyond large studies at a distance and start really measuring things in real time, e.g. with something like an evolved connected descendant of the FitBit. ~~~ Normati It's because most scientists and the organizations funding them are not interested in advancing our knowledge of nature so much as looking like they're advancing our knowledge of nature. If we want to be less wrong, we need more replication. Scientists don't want to do replication because it advances our knowledge of nature without looking like it is. So instead they keep trying to find fainter and more obscure effects, so faint that they exceed their own abilities to recognize statistical significance. It fools reviewers, journal editors and employers though, so they keep it up. ~~~ ramblerman To argue, scientists/corporations are interested in the illusion of advancement is a fair point, albeit a pessimistic one. "Scientists don't want to do replication because it advances our knowledge of nature without looking like it is" To argue they therefore purposely want to prevent actual progress (on a whole) seems disingenuous. ------ ageofwant As one who lives amongst Australians let me assure you that nothing, not even vigorous beatings on the cranium with a heavy stick, will have any measurable effect on the brain activity of the average Australian. ------ lettergram The problem with this meta study is the tDCS methods are not controlled. It's possibly true, but this seems to be pretty much up in the air! ~~~ Expeditus419 Agreed. There are too many various electrodes, machines and protocols for the same applications. It would be interesting to see a study that incorporates readings of neurotransmitters, MRI & EEG prior to and post tDCS application over a longer period. I also think the chief science officer of Thync was avoiding making any medical claims as tDCS is yet to be FDA approved. ~~~ artifaxx It will be particularly interesting to see if Thync tries to get studies from third parties. It looks like tDCS hasn't been solidly proven or disproven, so it will be exciting if this gets more researchers to look into the effectiveness of tDCS.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Japan's Stupid Robot Contest - r7000 http://gizmodo.com/379591/japans-stupid-robot-contest ====== t0pj Is the contest stupid or the robots? English is really failing me right now.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999? - donohoe The person (or persons) deserve a medal.<p>All I can find is it was built for Outlook Web Access. Nothing more. No names, no nothing.<p>Who's idea was it, and who built it?<p>Anyone know?<p>http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/123475/who-first-created-or-popularized-the-original-xmlhttprequest-msxml<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest ====== Arjuna It would be remiss to not mention Shawn Bracewell in the discussion. According to Alex Hopmann, Shawn was responsible for adding asynchronous support: _"Step one was to bring the code up to production quality so we got Shawn Bracewell, one of the devs on the OWA team to take it over. Being a smart guy he promptly threw away all of my code and rewrote it in a more solid fashion, adding async support, error handling and more."_ [1] [1] <http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm> In addition, Jim Van Eaton wrote: _"XMLHTTP was born and implemented by the OWA dev effort of Shawn Bracewell. Exchange funded the effort by having OWA development build XMLHTTP in partnership with the Webdata team in SQL server. XMLHTTP changed everything. It put the "D" in DHTML. It allowed us to asynchronously get data from the server and preserve document state on the client."_ [2] [2] [http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2005/06/21/40664...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2005/06/21/406646.aspx) ~~~ kragen Sounds like Shawn Bracewell is the person to really credit — non-asynchronous XHR is unusable, and unused. Jim's remarks here are a little over the top. At KnowNow in 2000 we were asynchronously getting data from the server and preserving document state on the client by implementing Comet in in Netscape 4 (and IE 4), by using a frameset with zero-height frames. These days long-polling frames that finish loading when there's an event are more common, but we were using endless HTML documents that would get a <script> tag added when there was an event. The <script> tag would invoke top.somethingorother(data). A second invisible frame was used to send data back to the server as HTTP POSTs. We had a bunch of bodgy code to handle the case where you have several windows open doing Comet to the same server, ensuring you only ever have one persistent connection; otherwise the two-connections-per-server limit kicks in, and the page stops loading forever. It's more sensible to use wildcard DNS to circumvent this restriction. XHR is a much saner way to do AJAX, and Websockets are a much saner way to do Comet, but you can do AJAX and Comet without them. XHR didn't "change everything" and "put the 'D' in DHTML". It just made it more convenient. ~~~ derefr > non-asynchronous XHR is unusable, and unused. I wouldn't say this at all. We could have gone in a completely different direction with Javascript, even back then: spawning numerous lightweight processes running userspace code which then sit in a blocking "receive" state whenever they want to wait for the result of an XHR. In other words, Javascript could have been Erlang for the browser, instead of the odd OS7-like cooperative-multitasking abomination we have now. (What we _did_ get are Web Workers, which are full OS threads you can't even message if they're doing something synchronous. What's even the point of these?) ~~~ kragen Sure, non-asynchronous XHR _could have been_ usable. Opera at the time actually did give you multiple JS threads, but no locks or other synchronization primitives, so it was effectively unusable. We complained and, perhaps coincidentally, they "fixed" it by making it work like IE and Netscape. ------ BarkMore It was Adam Bosworth's idea. People on Adam's team built it. Edit: I recall seeing Bosworth's auction demo in late '97 or early '98. This predates Hopmann's timeline. Perhaps my memory is faulty. ~~~ corin_ Slightly different story at <http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm> with an update regarding Bosworth: _Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I'm probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to do the first major app that tied it together (Outlook Web Access). Without the earlier contributions of the Trident/IE teams, it wouldn't have been possible, and its absolutely true that Adam and many folks he worked with had the conceptual vision for tying it together (he called it weblications at the time)._ Note to OP: this blog was reference 6 in the Wikipedia article you linked to. ~~~ daigoba66 I feel that I want to now use the term "weblications". ~~~ chris_wot Feel free to use it in the blogosphere. ------ ExpiredLink BTW, XMLHttpRequest was a big mistake with significant consequences from Microsoft's point of view. It opened the door to Web applications an ended the age of desktop applications and thereby Microsoft's dominance. If MS managers had understood the technology they would have never let it escape into the IT world. Without IE's accidental support other browsers (Netscape, Firefox) would have been unable to establish the technology. ------ g8oz XMLHttpRequest was the critical piece in enabling proper browser applications. If it had come from Firefox and the functionality it made possible was not available on IE the uptake would have been minimal.While is has been beyond fantastic for the world, the results have been terrible for Microsoft and key to the diminishing importance of Windows. I would thus count XMLHttpRequest as an own goal. ------ MatthewPhillips I love getting history like this. I'll add to the question if any Microsoftians are around: who decided to call it XMLHttpRequest? ~~~ alexhop I did (Alex Hopmann). The easiest way to ship it in IE5 at that relatively late stage (right before IE5b2) was to put it in msxml.dll so we had to put the XML twist on it for that to make sense. ------ Thiz I'd like to know the first guy to send json over the wire starting the ajax craze. ~~~ jdminhbg Douglas Crockford, as that was the first thing JSON (as a data format) was used for: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#History> ~~~ chubot Crockford has said that people were using JSON before he "discovered" it. That's why he says he discovered rather than invented it. Unfortunately I don't remember who those people were, but anyone who used XmlHttpRequest, which was apparently there in the 90's, could have used it. ~~~ rsl7 I made up and used something similar to JSON in 1996. It's not difficult to think up if you're trying to find the simplest possible text-based hierarchical data format. There were a lot of variations on this idea. ------ pbreit I'd like to know...so I could ask him/her why the heck a data format was melded to an Http client! ------ corresation _Who's idea was it, and who built it?_ While history generally gets rewritten towards a simplified, single-victor model (e.g. Edison and electricity, Ford and assembly lines), there is no simple answer to this because the need for a scripted way to load and consume content was _very_ widespread. There were a number of solutions at the time. The most prevalent was simply having a hidden iframe (which actually worked quite well, with the biggest downside being a loading event noise it would fire in Internet Explorer). In Internet Explorer you could also take advantage of any Safe-For-Scripting marked ActiveX control (yes, ActiveX was the foundation upon which XmlHttpRequest was possible, adding binary extensibility to the browser), which at the time included a large number of third party tools and libraries for doing calls to web services, and a lot of hand-rolled solutions, pre- XmlHttpRequest. The problem, of course, is that your users had to have those same components installed which could be an issue. Which was why it was a great convenience when Microsoft started releasing mostly unnoticed XmlHttp components in the MSXML parser library. It was a fragile, memory-leaking beast, but it had the benefit of starting to be packaged in other Microsoft installs, so it was increasingly likely to exist on your client's PCs. The TLDR; is that it was inevitable, and it is unfair to the truth to attribute such a progression to one person. EDIT: To why I know this, at the time '99/'00 we were building a rather innovating web application to monitor and control distributed power generation units across the continent. We used the iframe approach, and then an HTTP component included with a Delphi component suite (name escapes me right now), and were then one of the first beta testers of XmlHttp. ~~~ jonny_eh Just because an invention appears to be inevitable, it doesn't mean the actual inventor doesn't deserve a ton of credit. ~~~ corresation Credit is absolutely due for using the monopoly distribution of Microsoft (that is not a slur, but it is simple truth that such components from other vendors could not have the same impact) to essentially sneak a simple HTTP ActiveX component through in the MSXML library, making such dynamic web tasks simpler. Credit is also due to the people who developed and implemented COM and ActiveX and safe-for-scripting (all _heavily_ maligned), making it possible in the first place.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
2018 Google Scholar Top 100 Publication Venues - wei_jok https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues ====== wei_jok Information about how the metrics described in this blog post released today: 2018 Scholar Metrics Released: [https://scholar.googleblog.com/2018/08/scholar-metrics- provi...](https://scholar.googleblog.com/2018/08/scholar-metrics-provide-easy- way-for.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
28,000-year-old mammoth cells have shown reactivity in mouse egg cells - PierredeFermat https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40546-1 ====== Mizza Does anybody know why so much mammoth research comes out of Korea and Japan? ~~~ PierredeFermat It might be geographic proximity to Siberia and thus abundance of research material, which drives some funding to do more research which then drives more funding, etc. ------ ourmandave With the ice caps melting, is there a big demand for Woolly Mammoths right now? I'm just asking. ~~~ sgolestane I saw a program on discovery channel a while back on how resurrecting mammoths would help with preserving the permafrost. Edit: A related article: [https://www.patheos.com/blogs/shanephipps/2017/06/20/mammoth...](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/shanephipps/2017/06/20/mammoth- solution-mammoth-problem/) ~~~ mfoy_ Does that make sense? The logic is that woolly mammoths would... am I reading this right? Tamp down the permafrost? Like, they'd literally just squish the ground on top of it to compact it and insulate the permafrost from rising temperatures? And they'd knock over trees... that's... that's the plan? EDIT: Apparently, yes, that is seriously the idea. But the scale required to make a difference, and the cost to get to that scale boggles my mind. You can't just whip up one pack of mammoths and call it a success... ~~~ michaelwilson It defies logic but case in point: the re-introduction of wolves actually changed rivers in Yellowstone: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q) . Not claiming this proposal will have the same impact, or even a positive one. ~~~ hashmap eh. [https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists- debun...](https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists-debunk-myth- that-yellowstone-wolves-changed-entire-ecosystem-flow-of-rivers/70004699) ------ bem94 I have yet to hear a convincing argument for "resurrecting" the woolly mammoth. The entire enterprise seems to be an abominably cruel and misspent effort. I've heard some argue we might need to resurrect a lot of species we're killing off in the next 100 years, so it's good practice. Better practice would be looking at those animals we expect to go extinct. Or, yanno, trying to stop the extinction in the first place. ~~~ herogreen If you understand French, watch this: [https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/078777-000-A/siberie-les- avent...](https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/078777-000-A/siberie-les-aventuriers- de-l-age-perdu/) you'll be convinced. If you don't: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park) Basically we need them for an earth-scale experiment that will try to prevent the permafost from unfreezing, thanks to ruminant eating the grass through the snow, thus breaking the snow insulation that prevents the ground from re- freezing deep in winter. If the permafrost do unfreeze, I believe the climate is doomed. edits: typos ~~~ phyalow It has english subtitles, just watched, very educational. ------ etxm These are going to taste like shit. ------ beat Ah, now I'll have steeds for my robot army! We won't win the war, but we'll look awesome.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Men would rather receive an electric shock than think - riaface http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/04/electric-shock-therapy-better-than-thinking ====== robert_tweed As far as I can see, it's not "being alone thinking" it's "being without any mental stimulation". If someone says to me: "here's a really hard problem, no go in that quiet room and come back when you have the answer", that would be "being alone thinking" and that would be fine. OTOH, if someone just puts me in an empty room with nothing to do and nothing in particular to think about, I'm going to get bored very fast, which is going to make the time seem to go even slower. The actual report is behind a paywall so I can't see the details but I suspect there could be hugely varied outcomes for the choice to administer a shock based on how the intensity of the shock is described (and how bad it turns out to be in reality). The finding that women are 25% less likely to shock themselves might just mean that the men are more adventurous or less risk- averse, not that "men don't like thinking". I highly doubt many of them would have chosen to administer the shock if it was presented as "definitely lethal" or "excruciatingly painful", whereas I can imagine that while bored someone might simply be curious to find out what a mild electric shock feels like. FWIW I've had lots of 240V shocks and they aren't as painful as you might expect; not at all painful in fact, most of the time. As far as I can tell, it's not that anyone chose the shock _instead_ of continuing to stay in the room, which might have been more interesting. That fact that someone apparently shocked himself 190 times implies that the time in the room was fixed regardless; it also implies that the shock wasn't particularly painful. ~~~ riaface Good points - I think the results might have been slightly different if they had been given a particular challenge to think about. Re your last point: maybe that individual just enjoyed it!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do people get started in open source? - Mz A recent comment to me suggested women should get more into opensource: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086552<p>I actually don't know much code. It's been a long standing goal of mine to learn to code. I know a little HTML and a little CSS and I have been gathering together a list of resources to learn Python, but I have been getting nowhere.<p>I will suggest two possible framings for this question:<p>1) You can answer it as a generic request for tips for anyone.<p>2) You can answer it as a specific request for little ol' me and my rather pathetic level of coding skill.<p>Thanks. ====== privong Many people will note that you don't need to be able to code to get involved with open source, but contributing code is obviously also a good thing. Helping with documentation, bug reports (submitting, helping track down, solving), or ancillary work are good ways to get involved beyond coding. Opensource.com has some suggestions: [http://opensource.com/life/14/1/get- involved-open-source-201...](http://opensource.com/life/14/1/get-involved- open-source-2014) GNU also has a page with ways people can help: [https://gnu.org/help/help.html](https://gnu.org/help/help.html) ------ jnazario if you're a student, consider GSoC: [https://www.google- melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2015](https://www.google- melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2015) there you can find existing OSS projects with specific needs outlined, although folks are always in the mood for new ideas, too, if you articulate them well. if you're not a student, simply look at existing OSS projects that you like and know and look at their outstanding features or needs, or even better identify something like documentation that needs help. documentation requires that you understand the code and the system, and how to present that to the user, but is a bit lower barrier than _producing_ that code. it's a great entry into OSS as you learn to code. submit some changes to the documentation - e.g. a github pull request - and that's a great thing to see. always better than "hey your docs are weak" or "may i work on the docs?" just do it, make some proposals, and begin working with people. website changes are also nice - e.g. HTML cleanups, CSS cleanups, or even site features. same model, submit changes to the code repository. hope this helps. ------ DAddYE Hi, When I started I followed this: \- Find something that you want to build, something real with a purpose This is important because having a goal: a real one, will make you more enthusiast and less likely to give up. My first real projects were two: a rapidshare and a web radio. Consider that it was around 90's and I'm 31yo. I succeeded in both but the most important thing was that in order to build these "products" I had to learn a lot: html, css, js, flash (yep at the time was a thing), php and c. \- Find someone or resources that will help you to go through your learning process. Having a mentor or more than one is important. Is not easy to find one, I know, but probably when you start over the time you'll find someone that you admire and want to be as good as him/her. A mentor will save you a lot of time because can point you in the right learning resources. I wasted ton of my time simply because I wasn't good at picking the right resource/tutorial/guide/book. Now there are plenty of resources i.e. Github. You can find a project that you might like and try to "reproduce" it yourself. If you have questions you can ask the author or post on [http://stackoverflow.com](http://stackoverflow.com) or IRC channels. Then there are online course (never took one) or good books i.e.: [https://pragprog.com](https://pragprog.com) or [http://www.oreilly.com](http://www.oreilly.com) \- Be updated and engaged This helps to keep your enthusiasm up, following someone on twitter, github or whatever can keep you updated on "cool things" but you have to be smart enough (here a mentor can help) to filter what is going to disappear and what's not. \- Ask, ask, ask. Never be afraid to ask even the things that you might think are dumb or stupid. You'll be surprised in how many people will try to help you or how many are have the same question. \-- I can't speak for you, but one cool thing about internet and opensource is that you might choose to be "mz" and not have a "face" and so a gender. I can't speak for others but me and all people I know (male) are not sexist and I guess there are many more around, I'm pretty sure that you might be surprised about that. ~~~ Mz I actually have a Github account. I have just not been active on it. I don't understand Github. I know a programmer who is willing to take me seriously. He is writing a project in Python and he would like me to be a developer on it. I have begun putting together a list of resources to learn Python. But I haven't gotten anywhere yet, in part because life has gotten in the way, in part because I don't really know where to begin. I do have a personal project I want to work on and I have started a paper to outline it. (There is a term for that, but it escapes me currently.) The project that my programmer friend is writing is potentially useful for my eventual goals (re my own project). I have developed a short list of people who might be willing to beta test my thing, if I can ever get it written. I'm just having a really hard time with figuring out where to start in a way that gets me meaningful traction on writing it. For me, hiding my gender seems to be a non-starter. In spite of my lack of success, people sometimes recognize me from elsewhere. Further, I was a full- time mom for a lot of years. It's hard to open my mouth and not inadvertently identify my gender. Plus, I don't think that serves me well in the long run. I don't care to try to invest a lot of time in building connections only to find those connections fail me should they finally learn who I "really" am. Further, I don't think it helps women in general for me to try to hide my gender. Comments on HN in the past have indicated that some women here actively hide or downplay their gender. I think that makes the appearance that it is almost entirely men worse than the actual reality. I don't think that helps the situation. Thank you for replying. ~~~ A_COMPUTER >I'm just having a really hard time with figuring out where to start in a way that gets me meaningful traction on writing it. You just need to start. You need to plow through and make something. You will make mistakes and your code will suck, you will throw that thing away. But the next thing you make will be better. Repeat. You sound like me when I started. I would get paralyzed from choices on how to architect or implement something. It wasn't until I just finally picked one did I learn what the tradeoffs were, what was just plain a bad idea, etc. I absorbed the experience and the next thing was easier. Another thing. I can tell you like to talk. You can talk about a project, think about the project, muse about what it would feel like to be done with the project, as a substitute for doing work on the project. Don't let yourself fall into that trap. ~~~ Mz Thanks.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates - kalvin http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11stream.html ====== skmurphy thanks for posting this. I read his double-book "Dream Machines / Computer Lib" when it came out: it changed my perspective on the future of computing from numbers and mathematics to narrative and media. I heard him speak perhaps 15 years ago now at a Computer Literacy bookstore event and he was a little cranky but extremely insightful. I remember two key points he made that I still value: 1\. We need to shift our thinking from an "educational curriculum" to a reticulum (or network) that emphasizes the connectedness of topics and concepts and teach students to learn how to learn through exploration as much as rote and replay. 2\. Read Mark Twain's "Roughing It" for insights into Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. EDIT: more info including a summary of "pre-history chapters" available at <http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/> ~~~ michael_nielsen Mark Twain's "Roughing It" is available here: <http://www.mtwain.com/Roughing_It/index.html> ------ blasdel Ted Nelson was a part of the orthodoxy in proscribing rich tightly-bound hypertext. There were dozens of projects, but none of them were anything but sandboxes at best. The web succeded only because it was nothing like Xanadu, and Ted still can't get over that. Self-contained systems like wikis would be a great place for rich Xanadu-like features, but MediaWiki hopelessly squandered that possibility. There are a few systems that approach it (tiddlywiki does some cool shit), but for most people Wikipedia's decrepit software has grounded their conception of what wikis can be in mediocrity. ~~~ DTrejo Ooh tiddlywiki, pretty cool. I just checked out <http://www.tiddlywiki.com/> thanks for mentioning it. ~~~ mhb You may also want to see a nice example of how Garrett Lisi used it: <http://deferentialgeometry.org/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
If I get hit by a truck... - artursapek http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/continuity ====== sakopov After reading a few of his blog posts from previous years, it almost seemed like he saw it coming years ago. Depression is a terrible thing. Most experience it in mild states. Only unlucky few contemplate suicide on daily basis. Some succumb to it within weeks. Others suffer years. Regardless, it's very sad to see someone so bright take their own life. Before you pull the trigger, tighten that rope around your neck or take those pills think of your loved once. Think of your parents. How miserable their life is going to be without the only being they cared for their entire lives. Then think twice about your life. When you kill yourself you kill others around you. This had stopped me once before and i hope it will help others. We all have a purpose here. Rest in peace, Aaron. ~~~ charlieok How much worse is a situation like this when you are literally faced with the threat of decades in prison? "I have a chance to end it now that I may not have in a few months" ------ wging It was incredibly unsettling to see this as the top link on Hacker News, then skim down the list to see 'Aaron Swartz', 'Aaron Swartz', 'Aaron Swartz', and feel my suspicions grow. (Yes, I conveniently missed the details of the second link, "Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz commits suicide".) ------ brainless The "I'm not dead yet!" felt like a bullet through my head. I never knew him, but being just a human being, I can feel a loss I can not describe. ~~~ martinced And he specifically wishes that that footer be replaced with a link (I take it a link pointing out that he's now death). That guy obviously had a sense of humor. R.I.P. ~~~ sjwright > I take it a link pointing out that he's now death Sadly, this isn't the Family Guy universe. ------ hkmurakami _> "Oh, and BTW, I'll miss you all."_ We miss you too, Aaron. ------ dreeves I have a question for the community here. Aaron writes "I ask that the contents of all my hard drives be made publicly available." Should we unmask his secret Beeminder goal? <http://beeminder.com/aaronsw> (Assuming it's nothing embarrassing, or even helps shine light on what's happened.) ~~~ jmillikin I would vote against exposing his goal because we don't know why he had marked it private, unless there's some explicit indication that he would also like all of his online accounts made public. You could contact Sean B. Palmer, as specified on the linked page: " _For other stuff, email Sean. I'm sure he'll do something reasonable._ " Regardless of whether you open his goal, you should freeze his account in some way to prevent someone from logging in. If the contents of his hard drive are made publicly available, that will expose his login cookies (and potentially passwords), which means members of the general public would be able to access his Beeminder account. They might also gain access to email, which could be used to do a password reset and thus gain access. ~~~ dreeves Smart, done. Thanks so much, John. (Now I'm dreading the skull and crossbones watermark that's going to appear when he derails on his public goal -- especially for how that will look to people not familiar with Beeminder. Maybe I'll suppress that too.) ------ manojlds Did he write that when he was 16? Makes me sad that he had already accomplished so much at that age, and is not there anymore. ~~~ jakub_g I felt suspicious about it so I opened <http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/> : "/2002 is a home for random things I want to publish." So it doesn't seem to be the publication year. ~~~ sciolistse Web archive has it at Jan 2003, so it seems to be awfully close. ~~~ jakub_g Right. Given the time to index, it could indeed come from 2002. ------ artursapek Looking through a website that was made by someone who is dead now feels very weird. ~~~ moepstar Especially the "I'm not dead yet!" note on the bottom of the page :( ~~~ speeder Kinda creepy. Since he wrote that awesome online will, I wonder if he prepared the passwords so people can execute his will. ------ Mz For those basically judging Aaron for his action, let me suggest that if you are so against suicide, you should stop lecturing and judging others. Instead, be compassionate, accepting, caring, patient, help people carry their burdens, turn the other cheek, be the bright spot in their day. People who attempt suicide are generally people who cracked under the strain. You generally don't know what burdens they bore, how you and others made the burden more instead of less. If you think people should choose to stay in this world, work on making it a choice worth making for more people. Be kinder, gentler, more generous. Or stfu when someone decides "enough is enough". ~~~ Mz I see my above comment is still getting upvotes. If anyone is interested, I did end up writing a blog post as well: [http://www.novemberwest.com/blog/2013/01/13/suicide- social-a...](http://www.novemberwest.com/blog/2013/01/13/suicide-social-and- physical-factors/) I did submit it to HN earlier. It hasn't inspired discussion, which is no surprise. ~~~ coconutrandom Thanks for writing that. ~~~ Mz Sure, no problem. ------ hdra I didn't know much about him aside from the fact that he is one of the founding member of reddit before this. I came to know about all his achievements and contribution to the things that matters a lot to me personally which he did at such young age after this incident. Even though I almost never heard of him before, I still feel that we lost a big one. Never before I felt this way because of a stranger, and to be honest, even kinda feel weird myself. May he rest in peace. ------ josephpmay The "I'm not dead yet" at the bottom gives me chills. ~~~ Sami_Lehtinen To me it in strange way tells that maybe he had considered something like that at so early point? Because people usually do not prepare for things they really do not expect to happen. ~~~ foxylad You don't have a will? I've had one since I had anything worth passing on, including physical and virtual possessions. I'd equate it's importance with an effective backup strategy - something every diligent person does. So I wouldn't read anything into the existence of this page other than he was a diligent person. ------ feniv I think it's incredible that he had the foresight to consider the morbid possibility of death at such a young age and take appropriate actions to manage his responsibilities even beyond the grave. ~~~ egwor I've thought it but never taken any action. In real life I set up my relevant payments (life insurance) and made a will. Everyone should make a will because of the consequences/issues that happen as a result of a lack of a will ------ giis I don't know much about him until today,as i read more and more about him. I feel very sad. I couldn't believe some 16 yr guy writing "Source Code Copyright for my GPLed source code should revert to the Free Software Foundation. They seem to have a reasonable policy about letting people use the code." So far, i thought only Indian judiciary system is so stupid compared to US judiciary system. Now I don't see a difference between them. RIP. ------ hn-miw-i The need for a digital probate policy seems very important. He based this his from esr, and the link to esr is now broken. Is there a central clearinghouse for thes documents? A digitally signed will should be far harder to forge and could be legally binding. To see ones digital wishes be fulfilled from the afterlife should set some tormented spirits to rest. ------ jbrooksuk Was this page not noticed before? Surely if it had been, someone would've spoken to him about the possibility of him suicide? I feel like the Internet could've done a lot more for him. R.I.P Aaron, you achieved a massive amount in the short time you were here. Remember that, wherever you are. ~~~ mscarborough It seems like a pragmatic web page. Plenty of us try to reduce the 'hit by a (bus\|truck\|car)' factor but we don't do much more than pushing to github regularly. ------ blackjack160 Days like these, I can't help but share some Pooh: <https://quip.io/q/awa> Disclaimer: I am a founder of the above entity, this is just my expression of solidarity for Aaron. ------ pknerd The line _I'll miss you all_ said everything. ------ benjlang What a brilliant man he was, so sad. Do people still make these types of pages these days? ------ nQuo Saddened to see someone so talented and young take their own life. It's never worth it. ------ chuckreynolds ..damn.... kinda weird reading that after the news i just heard. RIP man. ------ Techasura EPIC AARON! hats off buddy! ------ Evbn Oops, dead link: <http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/continuity.html> ~~~ dchest <http://www.catb.org/esr/continuity.html>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Organizing Data in Long Lived Applications - EvilTrout http://eviltrout.com/2013/05/26/organizing-data-in-long-lived-applications.html ====== dave_sid Interesting. Using composition of objects like that is a sensible enough approach. What about also just implementing lazy loading in your domain objects. If you try to get details of a user and it's already been fetched from the server, then great. If not then fetch it from the server. I guess that's what you're doing in a way, but with lazy loading, the fetching logic would be tied to the entity class and the rest of the application doesn't need to care.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
SlideDeck 2 - The Web's Most Powerful Webslider - ZanderEarth32 http://www.slidedeck.com/ ====== tzaman I think the license is way overpriced - I can get pretty much any type slider either from github or codecanyon (for a couple of bucks).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How does free compete with paid? - ecaron Our free website makes money off of CPC revenue, but our chief competitor charges a monthly membership fee. This means they can run promotions saying "Hey! Sign up now and get your first 2 months at 50% off", while we can only say "Uhh... we're still free."<p>So they get coupon site love, and we end up in the free-site bucket. (Though our site totally kicks their butt, not that I'm biased:-)<p>And this leads me to my question: WWHND? ====== noodle freemium. say "hey, our free version is just as good as those guys' paid version. plus, if you want even better stuff, you can pay $X/mo and get some even more super awesome features that those guys don't even have at all! here's a coupon." ~~~ ecaron Where would you say "Hey, we're better"? Mentioning it on the service's site isn't that useful since the visitor is already there. ~~~ noodle adwords is a good start. ------ chanux The site he mention is <http://linkup.com> . HNers please suggest how to promote the FREE service. I have no connection with this service but like to see things free as long as it's possible. (No offense with making money with technology but if someone is happy & able to offer a free service it's cool I guess.) ~~~ swombat How about starting a blog about how to find jobs in this market? That'd no doubt be highly diggable and gather hits from all over the place. Then page rank goes up. then hits come in. ~~~ ecaron We've got a Twitter account, and a Facebook friend's page. I've leaned against doing a blog for two reasons: 1) There are many other experts in this field who praise us & eclipse my knowledge (like <http://jobsearch.about.com/>) 2) Other job search engine blogs have been miserable failures, based on number of comments & attention they've failed to attract (like <http://blog.indeed.com/>, <http://blog.simplyhired.com/>, <http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog/> and <http://monster.typepad.com/>) ~~~ swombat It's good to see that you've done your research, but I wouldn't discard the blogging route just because of those examples (so long as you have a good writer on your team). Looking at the examples you gave, and tearing them down one by one: <http://blog.indeed.com/> \- fairly basic design, and all the articles seem to be about themselves. <http://blog.simplyhired.com/> \- again, mostly self-serving and/or random articles... "2009 Simply Hired Nugget Bowl"?? Who cares. <http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog> \- better content, but terrible design. It's painful to even look at, let alone read. <http://monster.typepad.com/> \- better content again, but mostly ultra-short articles. None of those are blogs that anyone sensible would read regularly, because they mostly regurgitate fairly boring or self-serving points without any new, useful ideas, and they're badly designed. By "doing a blog" I don't mean doing a blog about you or about your business. I mean doing a blog about the topic that your business is related to, and making a genuine effort to write thoughtful articles that will influence the industry positively and/or be of interest to your target market. I'd like to give our blog (<http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/>) as an example, but it's a little bit shambolic at the moment. Yet even so, the "thought leadership" articles we posted there generate some good hits and have generated some very good leads for us. Importantly, they've also massively upped our pagerank (because we run it on the same domain rather than a subdomain), which means, for example, that woobius comes up on the first page of results already for, for example, "construction collaboration". So there's multiple benefits to creating a _good_ blog. Of course, creating a good blog is hard, but if you can, imho, it's worth it. Whether you can is a function of whether you have interesting ideas about your industry (you probably do) and whether you have a good writer on your team who can write those in a clear, blog-friendly shape. ------ ecaron The business is a job search website. Although the discussion certainly doesn't need to be limited/oriented towards that niche. ------ Chocobean depends on what kind of bussiness you're running though... If it has anything to do with "exclusivity" or "privilege" or "be the first to do blah", you _must_ charge. You can give "special" customers a free or heavily discounted pass, but you must make it seem like it's only them getting something exclusive for an exclusive price. Think country club or night club style business. ------ swombat This begs the question... why aren't you charging a monthly fee? Too much money sloshing around in your bank account? ~~~ ecaron We're not charging a fee because we're firmly against charging jobseekers (who are usually unemployed). We're able to finance ourselves through the CPC methods. ~~~ ajdecon OK, so you won't charge jobseekers. Does your service have a flipside where you allow employers to search resumes, or do any sort of matching between jobs and seekers? Are you charging the employers at all? And if not, why not? A free service is good for individuals looking for a job, but charging companies looking for excellent employees will actually make you look more credible. ~~~ ecaron Since the service doesn't have jobs on it, it just points to josb (like Google, ignoring their cache), there are no resume services offered. For people wanting resume hosting, we point them to <http://emurse.com> The service charges employers for sponsored listings, like Google's AdWords. Another paid service is for more frequent indexing, and another is for direct access to customized company-specific job feeds, which is useful to recruiters, affiliates & competitors. ------ chanux Hey let's do some campaign to promote yours, if it's really good. ~~~ chanux Hmm... I knew this would be a down vote magnet. Anyway I was trying to help the FREE service.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
95 percent of SAP systems were exposed to vulnerabilities - paganinip http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/36701/hacking/sap-systems-vulnerable.html ====== eliaspro securityaffairs.co/wordpress - isn't it ironic?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to survive 80+ hours a week coding - 0wl3x https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-survive-80-hours-of-programming-every-week-3cc1db75695a ====== 0wl3x I just came across this article and I found it too obscene not to share. Do people actually really do this? ~~~ jbawgs I was similarly aghast. I don't think I love anything enough to punish myself like that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Book Review: PiHKAL - jmcgough http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/11/book-review-pihkal/ ====== pizza Erowid hosts the syntheses and experience reports from the book online [https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.sh...](https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.shtml)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: CloudWatch Dashboard for CodePipeline metrics - cplee https://github.com/stelligent/pipeline-dashboard ====== cplee Simple dashboard built for viewing pipeline metrics in AWS. Built using CloudWatch dashboards and metrics populated from CloudWatch events that CodePipeline triggers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Free copy of Stroustrup - lisper Doing some house cleaning and came across an extra copy of Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" that I don't need. Free to the first person who sends me their mailing address. [email protected] ====== atlantic Thanks very much for the offer. I've just e-mailed you my mailing address. ------ srsamarthyam I can kill myself with C++.. I don't want it. ------ lisper The book has been claimed.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Launch of the Mayday Citizens' SuperPAC - famousactress http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/84419344732/the-launch-of-the-mayday-citizens-superpac ====== rayiner This is admirable, but I don't think the rhetoric is realistic or effective. "Government has failed us. More than 90% of Americans link that failure to the influence of money in politics." Most Americans also think we spend 10x as much money on foreign aid than we do. The cause of the current economic malaise is a factual issue, not a matter of public opinion. I have a sincere question for the people who support Lessig's statement quoted above: how can America's current woes not be easily explained by deindustrialization and automation reducing the need for labor, thus putting labor in a disadvantageous position relative to capital? I go into CVS or Wal-Mart, and see everyone using automated checkout machines with a few cashiers hanging around in case anything goes wrong. Ten years ago, those didn't exist, and there would be a long row of cashiers. Is campaign finance really responsible for the woes of the middle and lower class, or is it technology (and other factors that make Americans of average skill more fungible)? I wonder if the focus on campaign financing doesn't mistake correlation for causation. I think people mistake the degree to political decisions are caused by the money, rather than the preferences being communicated through the money. For example, if you're a big corporation with hundreds of employees in a Congressman's district, you might advertise in support of him, to communicate the message that raising taxes will lead to reduced employment. What causes that Congressman to vote against raising taxes? The money that was spent, or the message that was communicated with that money? I guess the bottom line is that rich people and corporations don't need to bribe politicians. In the modern economy, where they can replace most workers with machines or outsource most work to China, or even renounce their citizenship and live as an expatriate in Hong Kong, they have all the leverage. They use the money to communicate their preferences to politicians afraid of contravening those preferences. ~~~ ddlatham I think you can definitely debate whether the Congress has done a good job addressing economic inequality and malaise. But Lessig's point is about more than that. It's that because Congress has become so dependent on campaign funds from a tiny portion they have become very unresponsive and unrepresentative to the interests they should be. In the video he mentions infrastructure, education, health care, climate change, the tax system. If they're spending half their time on the phone dialing for dollars, that is going to skew their interest and their votes. I pledged. ~~~ humanrebar > It's that because Congress has become so dependent on campaign funds from a > tiny portion they have become very unresponsive and unrepresentative to the > interests they should be. I think people get who they vote for. It's not like there's an exchange where you can literally buy votes for dollars. I'm more upset with the electorate for having under-informed or unexamined political opinions. I think the first step is for Americans to find a way to disagree about politics in a congenial way. As long as it's rude to talk about politics, people will continue to get their information from ads, talk radio, yard signs, comedy shows, and hack blogs. ~~~ yummyfajitas _I 'm more upset with the electorate for having under-informed or unexamined political opinions._ This is unavoidable. Your vote doesn't matter - the probability of it altering the outcome are infinitesimally (read: too small to represent with a double) small. Unless you derive entertainment value from informing yourself, why would you waste any time on informing yourself or thinking carefully? ~~~ nokcha In Kantian ethics, there is a concept known as _universalizability_ : "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." If one subscribes to such a principle, and one believes that the world would be a worse place if everyone was willfully ignorant of important political issues, then one would hold that one has an ethical obligation to make an effort to become politically informed. ~~~ danielweber I guess I better not become a programmer, because if everyone became a programmer, there would be no one to farm the fields. ~~~ nialo A much better rule is something like "act as if you are deciding for everyone who can be expected to make similar decisions for similar reasons". This avoids that particular pitfall, because everyone who might decide to be a programmer for similar reasons is still not too big a fraction of the total world population, while still giving the right answer re: voting ------ jhspaybar Alternate Headline: Man vows to get money out of politics by throwing more money into politics One thing I really don't understand about this movement to get money out of politics is what the alternative is? No money in politics? Well clearly _someone_ has to put money into politics or you'd never see signs up, you wouldn't see commercials, politicians wouldn't have websites to post their platforms on, etc. It seems to me like what people actually want is better politicians and the influence of money is the current reason to see politicians as poor. People have always hated politicians though, didn't we have Nixon before this big money kick? What about Herbert Hoover? Surely he'd be accused of some corporatist agenda today for his blunders. It seems to me if you don't like how politicians behave and are influenced that the solution is to reduce their power and influence. If, and it's a big if, money is the problem, the money will stop flowing if the benefit of spending it drops. The larger government gets, the more power we give our politicians, and the more beneficial spending that money becomes. Remove the incentives and this problem will fix itself. That probably means many more complaints about why we don't have specific social programs, research programs, defense budget and whatever else we spend money on, but it'll fix the issue of the influence of money. ~~~ acgourley One popular alternative is to have $X campaign funds provided by the government to candidates with $Y levels of popular support. ~~~ ja30278 Begging the question of how candidates achieve the Y level of support. Either they are already well known figures (actors, athletes, etc), or they have to spend money to make themselves known. ~~~ samolang Is knowing nothing about a candidate really any worse than knowing only what their paid advertisements tell you? ------ jws Sounds like they are testing the fund raising mechanism. The first goal is $1M in 30 days, the second is $5M in 30 more days. In both cases the funds will be matched, so they already have $6M near hand, and realistically there isn't that much more you can do with $12M that you can't do with $6M. I suspect May is to get the first little news articles in the press (Kickstarter meets Elections, underdog to use super pac against super pacs). The June goal is for the follow up articles that should get more widespread coverage. I'm all for putting campaign finance reform at the front of 2014 and 2016. I'm in. ###ALERT### Check for SSL before donating. As of now the page is not secured. Edit: Broken autofill on the donation page? Come on, make it easy. I had to type characters and access my memory to make this happen instead of just clicking. ~~~ gavinpc Also, it is just me or is the donation page using HTTP instead of HTTPS? Maybe naive, but that's a showstopper for me. ~~~ justindz Lawrence and crew just responded to my tweet on this. They use Stripe, which is encrypted. The SSL certs for the page that is unencrypted will be up later today. [https://twitter.com/Boyko4TX/status/461902353105317891](https://twitter.com/Boyko4TX/status/461902353105317891) EDIT: forgot to link the tweet. ~~~ DEinspanjer I'm very unhappy with their replies on Twitter. They can't just say that the information is going to Stripe and Stripe is safe. The facts are, they have a form which asks people to put their credit card number in it. That form is on an unprotected page, which means it is vulnerable to some advanced attacks even before posting. Further, the form posts back to the same unprotected page. I don't see any evidence of fancy Javascript behaviors to prevent the posting, but even if it were so, they are still putting their users in significant danger of having that information plucked out of the air by anyone who might be able to sniff the traffic on any leg of the trip from the user's Wifi all the way to the company's firewall. ~~~ DEinspanjer Okay, my facts weren't entirely correct. The HTML of the form shows as POSTing to the same page, but the Stripe JS captures the submit event and cancels it, then makes an API call to Stripe's server via a secure connection. It works, but it is still somewhat vulnerable to MitM attacks. I like @lessig's latest response. Much more firm and reassuring: [https://twitter.com/lessig/status/461914159417147392](https://twitter.com/lessig/status/461914159417147392) ~~~ nollidge I just hit "donate" and it took me to: [https://mayone.us/fec_compliance/](https://mayone.us/fec_compliance/) Sincere thanks to everybody who complained to them about this - I wouldn't have donated without HTTPS. ------ dskang PSA: You should wait to donate as your credit card information will be relayed unencrypted over HTTP on their donation page ([http://mayone.us/fec_compliance/](http://mayone.us/fec_compliance/)). I'm hoping they'll fix this soon. EDIT: They've added SSL, so go ahead and pledge! ~~~ bhelx They added SSL but it appears they are still making some kind of mistake. They claim to be using stripe.js (edit: [http://mayone.us/distribution- plan/](http://mayone.us/distribution-plan/)) which, as far as i know, creates a token so you don't have to send the credit card information over to your server protecting you from liability. It seems like they have still implemented it incorrectly. If you click "Pledge" it still sends the raw (albeit now encrypted) information to their wordpress server. ------ humanrebar As long as there are incentives to manipulate the political process, there will be money in politics, whether in the open or under the table. Money in politics has been a problem as long as there has been money and politics. If this Superpac is successful(1), it will only prove that throwing money at the right problem in the right way actually works. 1) Given that the major changes have lately been Supreme Court decisions, this may actually require an amendment to the Constitution, so I am extremely skeptical that success is possible. ------ denom It's interesting that this is coming at the same time as the push for a campaign finance amendment to the US Constitution. [http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/04/30/john- paul-...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/04/30/john-paul-stevens- taking-another-run-putting-his-imprint- constitution/RkBFe4veWWMk0AiT3Pon5I/story.html) It's plausible $1-10 million could sway a few votes in the Senate if an amendment came to a vote. ------ cypherpunks01 Lessig's 2011 book "Republic, Lost" is his first foray into the world of writing about politics. It's a fairly shocking read, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm excited that he's partnering with a lot of great people to try and make campaign finance reform a reality. ~~~ higherpurpose His 1h talk about the contents of the book: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc) ------ protomyth Really, the big money corruption is the revolving door between lobbyists and politicians / staffers. Lobby to stop politicians / staffers from becoming lobbyists or accepting jobs with companies that contracted with the government for 5 years after they leave their position will do more to take the money out of politics than this does. ------ higherpurpose Money in politics is by far the biggest political issue, I'd say. It's the root cause of most evil in Congress. It's also the reason why Congress has so low approval rating (because they aren't listening to the People, but their _few_ donors), and why they are so useless in terms of collaborating with each other, too. How can they collaborate for the "good of the people", when they come from a position of having to pass new legislation to protect the interests of their donors one way or another. When you look at it from this point of view, you realize why so many refuse to compromise on their positions. Maybe they could compromise on ideology a bit, especially if some solution seems to be getting the consensus approval, but it's a lot harder to compromise on what your donors want, and you have to deliver on their wishes if you want to keep the money coming to your re-election. ------ Aloha I might be alone in this sentiment, but.. I dont have a problem with unlimited money in politics so long as there is daylight - If you want to spend money performing what amounts to electioneering, I think your name should go public with the amount of your donation. Daylight by far is the best nostrum for corruption. ------ avmich > And that’s the leap: It is impossibly hard to imagine raising $1 million in > 30 days, even as a contingent commitment (meaning, you only get charged if > we hit the goal). That's because America is a poor country, and doesn't really want democracy. Compare to Russia - no, compare to Moscow: [http://navalny.livejournal.com/845180.html](http://navalny.livejournal.com/845180.html) 76 million (unrevocable) rubles in 2 months, with about 32 rubles per dollar exchange rate. Summer 2013, Moscow mayoral race. For the candidate opposing Putin regime. ------ dskang I'm curious: Why was this post bumped off the front page so quickly? At the time of this comment, this post has 105 points, 79 comments, and was submitted 2 hours ago. Despite having more points and being younger than many posts on the front page, this post is on the second page. Is it due to the fact that this post is political in nature? I'm sure a lot of HNers who haven't been on the site in the past 2 hours would appreciate this submission, so it's unsettling to see that it's no longer on the front page. ------ tokenadult I decided to do a site-restricted Google search on Larry Lessig's tumblr to see if he has written recently on public choice theory.[1] There are no hits on his tumblr at all for "public choice," even though there are plenty of hits for his discussions of the influence of money on politics. I guess I went to a different law school, where we learned about public choice theory in a mandatory class in our first year. It's not so easy to fix public policy just by making something illegal that people are strongly motivated to do--a proposition that HN participants understand very well when we talk about drug policy, for instance. To better control the influence of people with a lot of money on a political system that also governs people who don't have much money takes a lot more than this SuperPAC. I'm not sure that it even represents me. [1] [http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html) [http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21569692...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21569692-james-buchanan-who-died-january-9th-illuminated-political- decision-making) [http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm](http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm) [http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html) ------ jpadkins campaign money is such a narrow factor in elections. While I think these efforts are well intentioned, they will not be effective. Billionaires buy media companies that lose money (Jeff Bezos is just the latest one). why? because they want to influence culture/elections/policy. The media has _way_ more influence in elections than crappy ads. But I don't people running around talking about the 0.1% controlling the media in America or doing anything to address that. Here is the problem: Most voters are dumb / don't care. Rich people can spend money to influence dumb, apathetic people. Solve that problem and you can get money out of US politics. Focusing on campaign money / lobbyist jobs is just a microcosm of the problem, and will only result in the money being moved to other ways of influencing elections/policy (whack-a-mole). Show me a solution that prevents rich people from creating the stage for Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Madow. ------ cwal37 I put together a little gif a few years ago (post Citizens United) to show some potential paths to anonymity for money in politics. I should really update it with dollar figures and some more detail, but I think it roughly gets the point across. [http://i.imgur.com/Hjp1b.gif](http://i.imgur.com/Hjp1b.gif) ~~~ humanrebar Why shouldn't foreign nationals be able to make statements about U.S. political candidates? ------ Splendor Direct link: [http://mayone.us/](http://mayone.us/) ~~~ llamataboot This link just redirects to mayone.us/countdown/ for me now which has nothing on it except for a signup form... ~~~ llamataboot fixed now ------ dang We changed the url from [http://boingboing.net/2014/05/01/mayday-larry-lessig- launche...](http://boingboing.net/2014/05/01/mayday-larry-lessig- launches.html). ------ ProAm He wants to "elect a large enough roster of congressmen and senators that they can pass meaningful campaign finance reform". Sounds like asking a wolf to feed on itself, I don't see this happening. ------ slantedview For some more background on Lessig and his focus on campaign finance, check out his TED talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g) ------ bhelx Do they want me to put my credit card and personal information in an insecure form? I'm trying to figure out if this form posts to a secure endpoint. I don't think it does. ~~~ notme_ [http://mayone.us/distribution-plan/](http://mayone.us/distribution-plan/) " What payment processor do you use? Are my money and information safe? We have decided upon using Stripe as our payment processor. Stripe has offered us a very competitive rate (for which we thank them), and Stripe is compliant with PCI requirements and no sensitive data hits our servers. When you enter in your credit card information, it is not stored on the mayone.us site and goes directly to Stripe via the Stripe.js API. Or in short: Yes, your money and info are safe. " ~~~ bhelx Yeah I read that. But it's strange, when I enter in information and hit "Pledge" it posts the fields to another insecure endpoint: [http://mayone.us/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php](http://mayone.us/wp-admin/admin- ajax.php) Maybe I am missing something about how stripe works? ~~~ yahelc [https://stripe.com/help/ssl](https://stripe.com/help/ssl) > Do I need to use SSL on my payment pages? > Yes ~~~ bhelx I'm concerned about why they are posting to THEIR own server to begin with. Even if they were using SSL, it seems like some kind of misuse of stripe.js ------ canvia Has anyone ever done a statistical analysis of post voting patterns in political discussions to attempt to determine if any manipulation of the discourse might be occurring? Using non-public votes to determine comment rank seems like a ripe target for abuse since it can't be independently analyzed. I would love to see an outside audit of votes on a site like reddit to make sure there isn't corporate or political influence corrupting the exchange of ideas. ------ seivan What happens if you get backstabbed by these politicians? They tend to do that ------ rdl The irony of raising money for a SuperPAC to end SuperPACs... ------ r00fus I hope they have some big names lined up to launch their "moonshot". ------ puppetmaster3 Ha, ha. I too will throw stones into the ocean to get less water. Say hello to trillions of $.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System - coderdude http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2010/09/design-and-implementation-of-log.html ====== jacques_chester LFSes also have the nice property that they have a smooth CPU usage profile. Traditional FSes improve perceived performances by batching writes and flushing them periodically, leading to occasional spikes. An LFS can pretty much flush a write as it comes to hand. It turns out that LFSes are awesome for ... logging :D	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Screenshots of ecommerce sites before they became popular - allsop8184 http://www.shopify.com/blog/6464492-the-ecommerce-graveyard-how-37-popular-sites-used-to-look Example:Dell, Apple, Netflix..etc.. ====== Mike_Williams These arent all ecommerce sites. Apple looks so ridiculous. ------ jackmicky123 Great list! ~~~ allsop8184 Thanks! :-)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Funny hack: “I'm a disgusting pig, and proud of it to boot.” – Linus Torvals - nichochar https://lkml.org/lkml/2002/12/18/218 ====== signa11 this is also particularly relevant: 1\. anatomy of a syscall(part-1) [http://lwn.net/Articles/604287/](http://lwn.net/Articles/604287/) 2\. anatomy of a syscall(part-2) [http://lwn.net/Articles/604515/](http://lwn.net/Articles/604515/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The First Best Seller: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela - Petiver https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/first-best-seller ====== illiilliiililil As for myself, I found it a totally boring read. I understand its place in classrooms though. And I'm glad the society depicted is dead and gone.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Flop Heard Round the World (2007) - smacktoward http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090301419_pf.html ====== comrade1 I guess this is here as commentary on the Apple watch and the associated hype? Personally, the thing that disappoints me about the Apple watch is that Apple is no longer even trying to talk about bringing computing to the masses through ease-of-use and reasonable prices. Now they sell a $12,000 watch. (I guess that trend started with the 20th Century Mac) edit: had the price wrong at $25K ~~~ johnpowell Or you could buy the low end one (still very nice) that has the same internals for $350. But keep grinding your ax. ------ irascible [http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AXINGi3z_Uk/U03c6ZPz- PI/AAAAAAAADs...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AXINGi3z_Uk/U03c6ZPz- PI/AAAAAAAADsc/_P6pgaoDBSo/s1600/starship-troopers-001.jpg)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Panel Wants Deep Space, Not Landings as U.S. Goal - edw519 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/science/space/31nasa.html?_r=1&hpw ====== DanielBMarkham _But it would also eliminate the possibility of astronauts leaving new iconic footprints on the Moon or Mars for a couple of decades._ Translated: manned extraterrestrial landings probably aren't happening in your lifetime (unless private industry gets in and reduces LEO cost by a thousand- fold somehow) I've given up on NASA. I love those guys, really I do. But you can't keep changing missions every time a president takes office, you can't spread the pork out to every state you'd like to, and you can't run a serious manned spaceflight program on a shoestring budget. They're totally dependent on public opinion and don't have a clue in the world as to how to capitalize on it. In short, NASA is a political animal masquerading as a science agency. As such, it's not much use for controlling/promoting spaceflight. If JFK were alive today he'd be dismayed. Remember his words? We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are difficult. Big missions, big drama, big heroes, big goals for the nation. Now the article talks about sending astronauts to Langrange points! That's going to be as exciting as watching cars rust. NASA needs to get out of spaceflight implementation altogether and become a spaceflight promoter.Write the checks (which it seems to be very good at) and let somebody else worry about breakthrough propulsion techniques. Farm out funding of the International Space Station to the State Department. Time to hang it up guys. You were great back in the day, but back in the day you had a clear, steady,long-term mission. Those days are not going to return. ~~~ idlewords Your comment only seems to apply to the manned space program, which is a very small piece of what NASA does. ~~~ DanielBMarkham NASA today is involved in all kinds of things. Dozens, if not hundreds of projects and programs. As opposed to NASA in its heyday, which had only a few major items in it's queue. Which validates my point: mission creep is what is killing NASA. ~~~ maximilian I think NASA is no longer in the business of rocketing people around the solar system. It now actively does and funds science projects to better understand our universe. Almost every project revolves around sending a probe into orbit or deep space with some sort of new sensor to detect some sort of particle or whatever. Should NASA create heroes or science? (or both..) ~~~ DanielBMarkham The problem is that we can't ask questions that begin with "Should NASA", even though we keep pretending that we can. NASA is political, and is deeply entangled with dozens of key politicians. There is no _one_ mission, and there won't be one any time soon. NASA's only problem now should be reducing cost-to-orbit through the use of progressive prizes that keep increasing in value each year until a solution is found. This would be a much better use of taxpayer dollars because as cost to LEO is decreased, everything else gets easier too. Trying to push science first is getting the cart in front of the horse.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dear Twitter, help, I need a job - cyberomin https://cyberomin.github.io/life/2018/06/26/twitter-i-need-a-job.html ====== onion2k What makes these suggestions better? Unless someone can demonstrate how effective each tweet is (maybe by retweets, or by how quickly employers respond (if at all), or by actual hirings) they're really just as good as each other. Data is key here. The author is making the _very_ common mistake of believing more information and a more verbose writing style makes better marketing. The opposite is true in so many situations. I can certainly believe that something very short like "I have a first class in X. Please RT" would be _much_ more effective at actually getting retweets. ~~~ cyberomin Hey @onion2k, this is not a full proof way of getting a job. Every time I see this, I am asking, why should I hire you? If you can give me something extra, more meat, the context for demonstrable skills, then I can talk to you. That's the point I am coming from. ~~~ onion2k _Every time I see this, I am asking, why should I hire you?_ Maybe you should be asking "Am I the target audience for these tweets?"	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dvorak: Don't Trust Web-Application Servers - gibsonf1 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,295642,00.html ====== Goladus A big problem with the article is that they throw up "Trust" as this gigantic, vague moral litmus test and anything you "can't trust" is evil and To Be Avoided. In typical fox news fashion the article is so laden with presuppositions that it's hard to discuss rationally. There's an important distinction between what happened with WGA and the "Software as Service" model in general. Namely, that WGA is a mostly superfluous add-on only there to protect against piracy. The fact that the system shuts down or locks up when WGA is not available does nothing to support what the users bought the OS for in the first place. It's true that you can't trust 100% uptime from web servers. Millions of Myspace users are pretty solid evidence that people can live with this. The advantages of the server-based method are generally appreciated by customers, who are also generally aware of the drawbacks. In contrast, users tend not to appreciate being treated like criminals and having their OS crashed on purpose because it couldn't complete a minor validation step. ------ gibsonf1 The crazy premise in this story is that MS represents great technology> MS radically messed up their online service > therefore online on-demand services are a bad idea. Yikes! ------ edw519 An argument gone too far. Which is more likely to happen? a. Google, Amazon, Yahoo, or <other host> goes down and loses all of your data. b. Your hard disk crashes and you have no backup. ~~~ mynameishere There's a (I don't know whether to call it a fallacy, but I will)...there's a fallacy that Jumbo Jets are safer than automobiles. This assertion is easily derived from looking at death statistics from each vehicle. But then, such statistics involve random parties. You or I aren't random drivers and so we may be very safe or very dangerous on the road [1]. Anyway, the average person's data is much more likely to disappear than that on google's server clusters. But if you are diligent, you can have backups that work 99.9999999 percent of the time quite easily. [1] Of course, on roads, the guy driving in the other lane is pseudo-random, so... But there is no other lane with computers. ~~~ edw519 I am ALWAYS concerned about this (some may call it fanatic). I back up everything twice every night. Hit the safe deposit box once a week. Always have one thumb drive with me, another hidden. Print hard copies of recently changed code. What if I have a break-in? What about a fire? How about lightning? (Already lost 2 servers that were protected - it happens.) What about a flood? Sometimes I wonder why I don't just store everything on the "cloud". One of these days... ~~~ mynameishere _Print hard copies of recently changed code._ Okay, that's nuts. ;) Source code shouldn't be a problem. It practically backs itself up: 1) Production server(s), 2) Test server(s), 3) Development server(s), 4) Source control server. ~~~ edw519 "It practically backs itself up" I'll rank that up there with "Step on it! We're only doing 90!" as famous last words. ------ cstejerean i think this article takes what happened to WGA in the wrong direction. I think the lessons to be learned from the WGA outage is that critical systems should avoid relying on external services or at least provide a fail safe mechanism. Also, as far as I can tell from the article the servers that went down were not hosting true web applications that users log into, just web services that some desktop software relied upon. There are plenty of other network services that desktop computer need to function correctly (for example DNS). Perhaps the WGA failure should server as a lesson in risk management and designing applications with decent failure modes. ------ far33d Proving that no matter what the topic - everything on Fox News is knee-jerk, under-reported, and over-simplified. ~~~ gibsonf1 Actually, this seems to be from PC Magazine and just reprinted in Fox. ~~~ far33d Man, i'm 0 for 2 today.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
5 product design mistakes you need to avoid - daschaiek https://mobile.twitter.com/tryaryforyou/status/460985000955875328 ====== karangoeluw any reason why this a link to a tweet and not to the article directly?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
US Jobless Rate Fell in May as Hiring Rebounded - sjb_Live https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-jobless-rate-unexpectedly-fell-in-may-as-hiring-rebounded/ar-BB154ATi ====== rodiger [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23428340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23428340) Dupe	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Adobe AIR launches on Linux - johns http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10042475-16.html ====== pmjordan Wow, now I don't even have to open my browser to run down my battery faster with 100% CPU load. Adobe has some severe quality problems with its Flash player already, pushing out more badly written software is hardly going to help. Or am I really the only one who cares? EDIT: Just as I posted this, I noticed that a rogue Flash process was once again pegging one of my CPUs. Fail. I wonder if there's a way to restrict off- screen Flash processes to use a maximum of 2-5% CPU time? Also, more browsers need to take a no-nonsense approach to crashed plugins. ------ apgwoz While this might make it easier for some to adopt a GNU/Linux, adding more closed platforms to a free OS is a step in the wrong direction. ------ iamdave "Sorry, your platform is not supported." Really?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Stock Picks from Space (2019) - johnny313 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-value-satellite-images-investing/586009/ ====== brenden2 > Investors are using real-time satellite images to predict retailers’ sales. > Is that cheating? This is no more "cheating" than using any other pseudo-publicly available sources of information, such as credit card purchase data, yelp/foursquare/FB checkins, or whatever. It's entirely legal in the same way sitting outside Macy's and counting the number of people who enter and leave through the public entrances. ------ TeMPOraL It's not cheating, but it gives one a perspective on just how far humanity can go in figuring out ways some humans can get an advantage over other humans in a silly, arbitrary, zero-sum PvP game we've somehow evolved. I know that's unfair. But the way I feel, there's lots of absurdity in this. In a more reasonable world, if you wanted to know when some CEO is leaving on vacation, you'd just _ask them_. You wouldn't have to spy on them with a satellite. ~~~ p1necone I don't think investing in shares is zero-sum. Day trading might be, but so far _most people_ win in long term investment. ~~~ jklein11 The act of trading is zero-sum(slightly worse when you consider taxes and fees). On one side, a person is getting a right to an uncertain cash flow based on the companies performance and giving up a lump sum of cash in the present. On the other side the person is giving up the uncertain future cashflows for a lump sum in the present. Both people can win based on their risk/liquidity preferences but one person's upside is the other person's downside. ~~~ oceanplexian I'm not sure you're using the terminology zero-sum correctly. Yes bad investments can be zero-sum, but as a whole, the economy is positive-sum. Positive sum doesn't mean "Everybody gets paid the same", it means that the value output from a closed system exceeds the input (e.g. greater than the sum of its parts) If you're referring to derivitives, you could technically refer to it as zero sum, since speculating on a contract between two parties doesn't necessarily create value. But there's an argument to be made that options actually help liquidity, and the act of being able to purchase insurance contracts on investments reduces risk, meaning more people are likely to invest, which does, in the end, actually create value. ~~~ TeMPOraL > _but as a whole, the economy is positive-sum_ But is that due to trading? I thought it's due to population growth and progress of technology creating more wealth faster. A locally zero-sum game in a growing environment may not feel like zero-sum. ~~~ ajaalto Trading helps the society to determine various prices and therefore makes it possible to allocate resources more efficiently. ~~~ TeMPOraL It does, but I get the distinct feeling that we're putting cart before the horse. I mean, we ought to be able to correctly price wheat and steel better than through ever-growing financial industries and having people use satellites to spy on CEOs. ------ davidw "Why you should buy index funds, Exhibit 494920". It's not cheating, but it's something you probably can't compete against, so you shouldn't try. ~~~ cheez You don't need to compete, stock price tells the story. ------ harry8 There's a strong case for firms to publish more and higher quality data now the web makes it easy. Forget sattelite images use carpark stats from entry and exit and so on. Many of these equity analysts will do your job of analysing the data for you giving you a bigger lead on a developing problem or strategy failure allowing for sooner correction. On the flip side, earlier notice of strategy success for quicker ramp up decisions. "Yes but we do more sophisticated data analysis anyway" \- firstly, I call BS on that CEO & management career self-marketing and secondly, if I'm wrong and it's already being done at an excellent level there is nothing to fear putting it out there - you can spank analysts doing a shoddy job with hard analysis scotching undeserved "impression, zeitgeist and rumour" based negative market sentiment. Of course every board of directors should have an IT committee and a data committee to go with the audit committee with a similarly highly qualified chair of those comittees. It's basically unthinkable not to have a very qualified accountant on the board. Should be the same for IT and Data - although IBM Global Services, Accenture, Oracle etc etc will campaign heavily against having people who know what they're doing on the board! Chair of the data committee would be a crucial figure in earnings calls and so on - they better know their stats! ------ perryh2 Using Foursquare data seems easier to me. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052444) ------ larnmar Investment idea: build a bunch of projectors that fool orbiting satellites into reading empty parking lots as full, then short retailers’ stocks at earnings time, knowing that all the big smart money will be on the other side. ~~~ batt4good Filling spots with inflatable "dummy" cars would probably work better - or you know just cover your parking with canvas shades haha ------ m3kw9 This type of play usually used for short term buying and selling. I.e options. ------ deepnotderp Satellite data has been used for a very, very long time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Russia's secret space shuttles have been sitting in plain sight for 22 years - sakopov http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-russian-abandoned-space-shuttles-by-ralph-mirebs-2015-6 ====== detaro The link that actually matters: [https://ralphmirebs.livejournal.com/219949.html](https://ralphmirebs.livejournal.com/219949.html) The headline makes it sound like their location or even existence is somehow new information, which is not the case. But there are new and cool pictures ------ dm2 According to this document it was stolen: [http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a160564.pdf](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a160564.pdf)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
1972 Solar Storm Detonated U.S. Mines in Vietnam - samfriedman https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018SW002024 ====== masonic [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18412594](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18412594) 70+ points	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Im Lainon. AMA - lainon pg/dang/stcb are you here? ====== gen_greyface Who are you?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mobile Apps That Reward Impoverished Students With Food, Medicine - danielharan http://www.fastcompany.com/1771527/mpowering-rewards-impoverished-students-with-food-medicine ====== danielharan High-tech micro-managing paternalism? Feeding kids at school would achieve much the same goal, minus the need for a cell-phone.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Teen hacks Pentagon websites, gets thanked for finding 'bugs' - OMG__Ponies http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cyber-idUSKCN0Z32IU ====== devnonymous Click-baity title. The teen participated in a bug bounty and found some (know) vulnerabilities. ------ mtgx A whole thank you? ~~~ ddworken Well I did get to meet with the Secretary of Defense and get his personal challenge coin! And they did pay out bounties, I just wasn't the first to report the ones I sent in (despite sending most of them in on the first day).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Bit of History about Bits - ingve http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/12/09/Dbtails.html ====== eesmith As usual with Bob Martin, this is a personal history, and not some broader detailed history. It does not, for example, contain much in the way of specific dates, people, or hardware models. The general spirit is correct. Two small incorrect details stick out: "Cards were linear arrays of 80 byte records, period." \- While IBM's 80 column punched card was by far the most common, there were other formats, including from IBM. "Relational databases (which often ride on top of file systems nowadays) provided random access to fixed sized records." \- SQLite is a relational database. It does not use fixed sized records.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Game Theory and the joy of shutting down Google Reader - rogueleaderr http://rogueleaderr.com/post/46782448771/the-game-theory-of-google-reader ====== anigbrowl This is pretty bitter lemonade, but I have to agree with _If Craigslist would just take a lesson from Google and shut down completely, it would be one of the best days ever in tech._ ~~~ rogueleaderr Sometimes a spoonful of bitterness helps the lemonade go down. Or something like that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
New Ball Prototype - chaostheory http://blog.gearbox.me/prototype/new-ball-prototype/ ====== run4yourlives Cool... but here's how my evil military trained mind works. 1\. "Ball" has core of C4, surrounded by wire, etc. (i.e. it's a grenade with a bigger bang) 2\. Add increased range. 3\. Add ability to "bounce" (for stairs, etc) 4\. Add firing mechanism. You now have a movable, controllable grenade. Ideal use: Room clearance. Turn ball on, roll into target room, bounce to waist height, activate. You could easily modify this with CS gas or such for lower lethality options. ~~~ sdurkin Add acoustic sensors to triangulate enemy positions, coordinate with aerial surveillance, add ability for aerial drop to be deployed across battlefield, add control moment gyros to allow it traverse difficult terrain. You could have them roll back to a base point for self-charging. To make them airborne you could embed the standard model in a quad-rotor "collar" and use the rolling mechanism for avionics and control. Really, you could base a whole micro-UAV/UGV system around some version of this concept. ~~~ evilduck <http://diydrones.com/> I've seen the Arduino drone guys report they've been able to land within 6m of their target. Not perfect, but considering the whole shebang is built by hobbyists for a couple hundred dollars, I'll excuse them. ------ noonespecial There seem to be two kinds of people. The first, when presented with this technology immediately think about weapons, the second, cats. I'm a cat person for whatever that's worth. ------ evo_9 Great cat toy (with or without suggested c4). ------ oldgregg Saw these guys at BDNT a couple days ago. Love the smart toys concept. My dream is a personal UAV I can fly over the cell network. I want to drop my android phone into the cradle on the plane then sit back on my laptop and fly it around town, take pictures, stream video, fly it over the pentagon, etc. ~~~ NaN Something like what <http://www.microdrones.com> makes, then? There was a demo at it at 23C3 ([http://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/events/1402.en.h...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/events/1402.en.html)) and someone made an open-source UAV control system and demo'd it at 24C3 ([http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2225.en.h...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2225.en.html)) ------ todayiamme Wow. If any of the guys who designed it are around; if it's possible can you please explain how it works? Do you have a plastic sphere with 2 racks inscribed on it inside with a central assembly that has the motors and shifts the COG? Or is it something more beautiful than that? ~~~ gearboxian It's really rather simple. We'll be posting more info soon! Sign up for our news at gearbox.me (I swear I don't spam). ~Ian ------ eduardoflores How can this be better than playing with the ball with, say, your hands? your feet? Maybe I'm getting old ~~~ nooneelse Tele-Ball (or BallTime in Apple-speak). Hook the movements of two such balls together via a phone call so widely separated people can enjoy the bonding power of play. ------ sabj I really really like it. I also have scary thoughts thinking about how an innocent robotics company can end up like iRobot... not that that's such a bad thing of itself :) Roombas and military killing machines, woo. ------ joshwa Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1475336> (run4yourlives see my comment there ;) ) ~~~ run4yourlives hehe... great minds and whatnot. </drevil> ------ perplexes <http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://blog.gearbox.me/> ------ ElbertF Great for playing golf. ------ lotusleaf1987 Seriously one of the coolest gadgets I've seen, I can't wait to buy these for people.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
It's time to make your own face mask - bookofjoe https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/opinion/coronavirus-n95-mask.html ====== foxyv If you are having trouble finding elastic for the elastic bands, try looking for stuff like elastic hair ties and even waists for underpants and bras. (Probably want a new pair!) Materials for making masks are mostly sold out right now but we should have the materials already.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Four Big Banks to Create a New Digital Currency for Inter-Bank Transactions - minamisan https://news.bitcoin.com/four-banks-create-new-digital-currency/ ====== andr Sounds more like a digital currency than a blockchain currency. When this is just between a few banks, which inherently trust each other, there's no need to build a sophisticated P2P blockchain for a job that can be done with a couple of SQL tables. ~~~ pzone Err.... no, banks definitely do not "inherently trust each other." Not when the incentive to misrepresent your position is so high. They use very expensive record keeping and clearinghouse arrangements (often involving quite a lot of physical paper) that in theory could be cheaper to do with a distributed ledger. ~~~ ChemicalWarfare Yes, there's no 100% trust of course, but the banks, merchants and general population trust other banks more than they would trust some random entities or bitcoin exchanges for example. There are of course reasons for that, the major ones being the shared (and regulated) clearing system you're referring to (which I'm assuming this "bitcoin alternative" is aiming to replace) and then there's the fact that these are accredited financial institutions with reasonable controls in place to keep them honest. In a hypothetical scenario where credit card authorization succeeds (meaning that the issuing bank is guaranteeing the funds to the merchant), merchant ships the goods but the funds don't make it to their account on the merchant bank side because the issuing bank "misrepresented the position" \- if the issuing bank gets caught doing this they'll be in all sorts of trouble. ~~~ pzone It's not that just about having an inherent distrust of one another. When they do have a dispute, it is necessary to have very good documentation to bring to court. Legally doing a mediocre job with keeping records is barely better than not keeping records at all. So they end up spending a lot to mind their p's and q's, even though they do have a good amount of trust. With a blockchain it becomes cheap to add a layer of ex-post verifiable mutual agreement between mostly-trusted parties. ~~~ ChemicalWarfare I'm all for a blockchain (or ripple or whatever) type solution replacing today's antiquated setup. My point however is that I highly doubt that it's the trust issues between financial institutions that is the primary driving force behind this implementation. ------ rahimnathwani This article references a paywalled FT article: [https://www.ft.com/content/1a962c16-6952-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a...](https://www.ft.com/content/1a962c16-6952-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c) From that FT article: "The coins, each convertible into different currencies". This suggests that they're using blockchain as a distributed ledger, and that the 'coins' are just fungible IOUs for existing government-backed fiat currencies. So, it's a Bitcoin alternative in the sense that it can move money quickly. But they're not creating a new currency. They're just creating new paperless non-interest-bearing bearer bonds. ~~~ freeone3000 How does this differ from a currency? ~~~ rahimnathwani Two things which make me see it as something other than a currency: 1) The 'coin' will not be the unit of account. The underlying currency (e.g. US$) will be the unit of account. 2) If the underlying currency (e.g. US$) ceased to exist, the 'coin' would have zero value. Consider how the above two points compare with: A) Bitcoin (which I say _is_ a currency) B) Zero-coupon government bonds (which I say are _not_ currency) ------ tjic The more things change, the more they stay the same. Back in 1994 I worked at startup created by a consortium of banks that was intended to deliver tools for intra-bank settlement, B2C, etc. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certco_(financial_services)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certco_$financial_services$) It was plagued by being ahead of its time, having technology in search of a use case, having predatory and venal business folks (and I like most biz folks!), a high burn rate, development split across two locations (long before this was a solved problem), issues with corporate culture, dysfunctional technical management that saw testing as a problem to be routed around, etc. Hope this newest spin on the idea has better success. (It would be hard not to - Certco was a perfect storm. That said, some great people worked there, and after a certain point I was a dysfunctional employee with a bad attitude myself. ) ~~~ mywittyname It's hard to envision how a new technology can change your business operations until you see how other businesses are using it. ------ Retr0spectrum This isn't a Bitcoin alternative. It's just a blockchain based currency. ~~~ lgas Considering Bitcoin is a blockchain based currency, and this is a blockchain based currency that isn't Bitcoin, it sure seems like a Bitcoin alternative to me. Perhaps you can elaborate on why you feel otherwise. ~~~ kbody Bitcoin's core mission is enabling people to do payments. It's "consumer"-targeted, cash alternative. USC looks like more of a settlement layer that could be used for more than just moving monetary amounts around. I think it will just end up being used as a more reliable contract agreement between banks, not that it won't be useful to them. It's pretty obvious that they need something like that, but in no way it's an alternative to Bitcoin. ------ 20yrs_no_equity The devil is in the details. Banks have been talking about "permissioned blockchains" for awhile, and whether this is really a bitcoin alternative, or just using the blockchain as a jumpstart for interbank transaction software remains to be seen. (The article is very light on details.) If it is a bitcoin alternative then it will be distributed and tustless. Those are some of bitcoins key innovations. Being distributed means that no central authority can rewrite history by changing balances. Being trustless means that the system keeps accurate records even if participants are compromised (assuming less than %51 are compromised.) Banks are unlikely to want to give up that level of control and probably will make it centralized (eg: a few banks run the miners) and trusted (eg: only authorized transactions and probably they will put in a way to rewrite history.) Which means, if those assumptions are true, this isn't an alternative to bitcoin, but simply banks jumping on the blockchain hype to create a centralized system of fast settlement. ------ throwaway1974 Just don't call it "Ecoin" please, do not want to upset Evil corp ------ codingmyway Isn't this just a shared ledger to encourage more trust, with the other banks all keeping a copy so that if UBS say they settled with Santander but there's disagreement then they can ask the others to verify? ------ eclipse31 When I read the title originally, it reminded me of when Microsoft wanted MSN to replace the Internet, seemed like the exact same scenario. ------ steveraffner So a centralised decentralised coin ? ~~~ pzone A distributed ledger is only "decentralized" among the users of the ledger. We're talking about a consortium of banks making up both the developers and the users of this ledger. There is no mismatch in how "centralized" it is. ------ cloudjacker If big banks re-released Tether, that would work decently well The proof of concept is already there. ------ dsr_ I'm reminded of the US currency situation prior to 1863, when any bank could print its own money and you needed to figure exchange rates on every transaction. The status of 'unlimited legal tender' which the USD enjoys today is a major factor in the growth of the US economy. ------ zoenolan and just to point out we (clearmatics) are hiring [https://clearmatics.workable.com/](https://clearmatics.workable.com/) ------ gjolund Bitcoin is dead and the blockchain has been coopted. ------ proyb2 Acronis is the first customer to adopt blockchain. ~~~ tobias3 They are using MD5 to hash the data: [http://notarystorage.acronis.com/certificate/eebb9edc63a06c5...](http://notarystorage.acronis.com/certificate/eebb9edc63a06c588dbeafbbff88a0709d99afc03cd1955cddfe38b475716553) Ouch. ------ the_duke The title is a bit misleading. This new "USC" (utility settlement coin) is for inter-bank transactions only, not for the general public. It apparently is backed by a blockchain as a distributed ledger. Details are a bit sparse across the web, but apparently it is intended as a way for fast money transfer between and within central banks and regular banks. The coins act as a proxy for 'real' money issued by central banks. ~~~ jokoon What's the point if it's not public? Wouldn't it be faster to just wire money as it's being done currently? ~~~ sp332 Blockchains are good for preventing double-spending without a central authority. ------ simonswords82 If you can't beat them join them? ~~~ pzone Bitcoin isn't in direct competition with the financial industry in any meaningful way. It's basically just another currency like all the others in the world. The financial industry doesn't suffer from servicing new currencies. Bitcoin is more in competition to fiat money, since it is not issued by any government and is extremely hard to control or track. But even if it's not in competition,the ideas behind Bitcoin are very useful for making banking more efficient and cost effective.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dropbox confirms that a bug within Selective Sync may have caused data loss - ghuntley https://gist.githubusercontent.com/ghuntley/42803b4cabb181098063/raw/2e06230c31018cefbc706dca5e7b12ef9692d87e/gistfile1.txt ====== ghuntley Additional info from Dropbox support: We received several reports from users who used a Dropbox feature called Selective Sync and couldn’t locate certain files they’d saved in Dropbox. When we took a closer look, we discovered that older versions of the Dropbox client had introduced an issue affecting a small number of users whose Dropbox application shut down or restarted while users were applying Selective Sync settings. In light of all of this, we've taken the following steps to ensure the Selective Sync bug won’t affect anyone else going forward: 1) we've patched our desktop client so this issue doesn't exist in Dropbox anymore; 2) we've made sure all our users are running an updated version of the Dropbox client; and 3) we've retired all affected versions of the Dropbox client so no one can use them. We've also put additional testing in place to prevent this from happening in the future. We’re very sorry about this issue and the trouble it might have caused. We’ll keep doing our best to ensure our users' data is always safe and available to them. ~~~ Ma8ee Just so you folks don't have to scroll sideways: We received several reports from users who used a Dropbox feature called Selective Sync and couldn’t locate certain files they’d saved in Dropbox. When we took a closer look, we discovered that older versions of the Dropbox client had introduced an issue affecting a small number of users whose Dropbox application shut down or restarted while users were applying Selective Sync settings. In light of all of this, we've taken the following steps to ensure the Selective Sync bug won’t affect anyone else going forward: 1) we've patched our desktop client so this issue doesn't exist in Dropbox anymore; 2) we've made sure all our users are running an updated version of the Dropbox client; and 3) we've retired all affected versions of the Dropbox client so no one can use them. We've also put additional testing in place to prevent this from happening in the future. We’re very sorry about this issue and the trouble it might have caused. We’ll keep doing our best to ensure our users' data is always safe and available to them. ~~~ andy_ppp Is there a way we can contribute some CSS fixes to the HN code base. These issues could be quick and permanent fixes. Also 12px Verdana? Mobile? ~~~ colinbartlett They've been reluctant to change the markup because of the many scrapers. Hence, the recently released API in preparation. An updated UI is incoming. ~~~ andy_ppp The majority get a poorer experience because a few people are scraping? I'm guessing 99% of traffic is from people hitting the site in browsers. ~~~ noblethrasher HN has historically subscribed to a form of deontological ethics[1] rather than utilitarianism. [1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/duty_1.shtml](http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/duty_1.shtml) (I happen to agree with HN’s ethical posisition, but I invite you to look at the section “Bad points of duty-based ethics” in the link). ~~~ andy_ppp You are assuming the rule "Never change the source code unless you have to" is a deontological imperative. It's not really is it? It's just something you believe and are justifying with obscure ethical arguments. Thanks for the reading :-D ------ NDizzle I was affected by this, but I realized it at the time. I have an older laptop that I turned on. It was a work laptop a few years ago, linked to my dropbox account, etc. Since then I had added a bunch of things like a bunch of git repos to a folder included in dropbox. I turned on that laptop and Dropbox started using 100% cpu after a few minutes. Then the fan kicked on and it was annoyingly loud so I looked at dropbox and saw it was chugging along in the repos directory. I went ahead and clicked on selective sync, unchecked repos, and left it alone for about 5 minutes. It was still 100% cpu, so I killed the dropbox task and restarted it. Minutes later, on another machine, I went to fetch from one of the repos and it had a gnarly error. So I went about investigating. I found my way to the dropbox events tab (on the website - the desktop client doesn't have this feature) and saw an event where dropbox decided to delete 7,800 files. I submitted a support request, but before they responded I had figured out it was (mostly) in the repos directory, which I fixed by simply deleting the repos and pulling from one of my servers. Anyways. There's my real world run in with this bug. ------ phren0logy This is exactly why sync is not a commodity. Dropbox is the very best at what they do, and even they have bugs. So when someone offers to sync your files for less, ask why. ~~~ zvrba > This is exactly why sync is not a commodity. Dropbox is the very best at > what they do, The very best? I use OneDrive across all of my Windows machines and I don't even notice it exists; never had any problems. I just access all my files everywhere. If you buy a windows phone you even get a decent amount of space for free (15GB). (Though I subscribe to Office 365 so I have virtually unlimited space.) ~~~ danieldk It is a cliche, but the plural of anecdote is not data. I never had any problems with Dropbox, but had Office on OneDrive corrupt files. OneNote has also rendered some notes unreadable. The bottom line is that errors happen. You should prepare for that and make backups. Also, Dropbox are still among the very best when it comes to syncing. Many useful synchronization features are implemented by Dropbox, but not the competition. E.g., features that most competitors do not have: \- Modifying a large file on Dropbox will only resync modified chunks. \- DropBox avoids re-uploads, both when uploading identical files and moving files around: [http://macography.net/2013/05/speed-test-dropbox-google- driv...](http://macography.net/2013/05/speed-test-dropbox-google-drive-box- skydrive-amazon-cloud-drive/) \- Dropbox does LAN sync. If a machine has to download a large file and another machine on the network has the same file, chunks are provided peer to peer. This makes using large files on multiple machines or in a team much faster. \- Dropbox does streaming sync. A machine can already download chunks when another machine is still uploading: [https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/07/introducing-streaming- sync-...](https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/07/introducing-streaming-sync- supercharged-sync-for-large-files/) Sure, OneDrive and Google Drive do have many useful functions that Dropbox does not have, such as including complete office suites. But for the original task, file syncing, Dropbox is still pretty much unbeaten. ~~~ calinet6 I think you're attributing too much of Dropbox's success to simple technical reliability. It really isn't that difficult a problem, and many services and projects do it right. I have an rsync script that has been syncing my files reliably to an offsite location for 6 years. It's certain that Dropbox has a high quality syncing service, but there are other factors. Think, for example, how this case was handled: a fault in their core product, a breach of user trust in their service, and they understood that it needed more than a technical solution. None of this was part of their core sync reliability: it was part of a more broad quality, which is closer to their true reason for success. ~~~ danieldk _I think you 're attributing too much of Dropbox's success to simple technical reliability._ I did not say anything about their reasons for success. Only what the technical advantages are compared to some of the other file sync services. _It really isn 't that difficult a problem,_ Difficult enough that some of its useful features are not matched by other services yet. _I have an rsync script that has been syncing my files reliably to an offsite location for 6 years._ That's great. But that is one-way sync and not something my parents could use. Dropbox is successful because they made sync technology that is relatively flawless to the average user. Also, there is a network effect. In the longer term, it will be interesting to see if they survive, since Microsoft and Google have been undercutting prices heavily, and as far as I know there is no online Office suite on the horizon (only Microsoft Office integration for business users). ------ darrenkopp I aggressively use selective sync, and have since as long as I can remember yet I haven't got an email like this, so it may only affect specific users. ~~~ bradleyland It appears the circumstance is more specific than simply using selective sync. > This problem occurred when the Dropbox desktop application shut down or > restarted while users were applying Selective Sync settings. So, you must be in the midst of applying selective sync settings while the app shuts down or restarts. Although I'm not sure what they mean when they say, "while users were applying selective sync settings." I'm not sure if this means: A) Changes made in the selection dialog box, but not committed (by clicking OK). or B) Changes committed, but still syncing. The former is an edge case, the later, not so much. ~~~ darrenkopp Interesting. I know a few times I've had to kill the dropbox process while changing my selective sync settings before. ------ general_failure Dropbox should have understood that people are using it as a backup service. I mean carousel and other use cases sort of ebcourage and imply this. With that in mind, it baffling they didn't have any proper backups for user data. ~~~ danieldk It is a shame that they don't offer the unlimited packrat option anymore. It's still not backup, but at the very least people would be able to recover files in such cases. Also, if I understand correctly, Google Drive has a better policy here: removed files are just placed in the trash until you remove them from the trash. Of course, trash takes space up as well, but it protects better against such cases. I guess Dropbox is trying to maximize its profits with its 'remove after 30 days' policy. ~~~ grey_golem I have been using the "packrat" feature for more than a year, and Dropbox sent me a similar notification today to tell me they lost several thousand files, 816 could not been restored. They were "lost" around 8 months ago, so "packrat" didn't save me at all. As it turns out, I have other backups of most of the files, and the rest of them weren't important. So I was lucky. Still, my confidence in the product is unlikely to recover. I want to note that I had been aware of the "dropbox is not backup" chorus, but that argument usually is just "sync is not backup", which is sort of obvious. The packrat feature pretty much addressed this issue, so dropbox with packrat WAS a backup solution. So the lesson here is never to rely on any ONE backup provider. ------ Lazare A good reminder that Dropbox is not a backup client, and should not be relied on for backups, any more than RAID should be. ~~~ Dylan16807 It's about as good as any online backup system. It's much much better than raid. If you want to be picky you shouldn't _rely_ on backups unless you have multiple independent backup systems, at least one offsite, at least one offline. ~~~ m_mueller Sorry, but this is just wrong. Any system that offers multi user sync is inherently more complex than it needs to be as a backup solution. A backup should generally be \- convenient enough that you do it without thinking about it. \- technically as simple as possible, so it's easy to understand and review. \- secure. Dropbox fullfills the first point, but not the second, and the third is debatable. Spideroak as a counterexample is just as convenient, has a pure incremental backup mode and is client-side encrypted, the gold standard of security. ~~~ Dylan16807 You really don't need any of those to be a solid backup system. What matters is that you make backups, the backups last long enough, and there's testing of backups. Also from what I've seen spideroak is significantly more complex than dropbox. ------ sanyo We provide a self hosted sync offering for businesses. It is currently used by close to 1000 businesses. It took us almost 18 months from our launch to get the sync right. There are simply too many edge cases and the development team needs to closely work with the customers to identify and fix it. Even then our complexity is much less than dropbox. The largest customer of ours have 10000 users. Short story: if you plan to develop a sync product from scratch, be prepared to spend at least 2 years or hire core developers from Dropbox sync team. Eve now dropbox has issues with handling large number of small files. Try to stuff 200000 to 300000 files and see how it works. ------ chdir How old is this issue? The release notes don't spell out clearly if this bug was fixed in the past 2-3 updates (using v2.10.30 on Win 7) [https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes](https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes) ------ waverunner I was notified of the potential data loss and checked my data on the 'personalized web page.' Of the 12,000 files that may have been affected, I found only a subfolder of a few dozen photos that may've been removed. The problem is that when I clicked 'restore all' from within the subfolder, Dropbox restored all 12,000 files rather than just the files within the folder. Note to DB's UX team: when you place a Restore All checkbox above the lefthand file selection column, it means 'select and restore all files on the page', not 'lift the roof off my house and dump in all the shit I spent months decluttering.' ~~~ mayneack I've been hoping for a 'restore folder to date X' for a long time too. ------ andy_ppp Ha, dropbox deleted my files the other day presumably due to this bug. I ranted on Twitter and they came back with the dropbox client can't delete files. Hmmmm. Seems I was correct :-/ ------ kwijibob I have all my digital life on dropbox, a few hundred gig. One of my greatest fears is that thousands of files might disappear without me noticing for years. I use selective sync and twice I was looking for something that has disappeared and I have to restore it. I assumed maybe my wife accidentally deleted some files, but maybe it was dropbox? What is the solution to this anxiety? ~~~ pbhjpbhj Perhaps you can have a cron job run against your local dropbox folder(s) and do an "md5deep" reporting only differences (or sha1deep or whatever, perhaps test which uses least resources, maybe nice it heavily too). Then you could have the output report saved to a folder (not a dropbox one!). Perhaps add another job to email/alert you if the "count" of lines in the report is greater than a certain number? Crude, for sure. ------ h43k3r I remember someone posting on HN about this, a month ago. Can't seem to find the link. ~~~ dmdeller Here it is: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441230) ------ andrea_s This manifested for me as a large number of "conflicted copies" everywhere inside my main visual studio solution. Thankfully, source control saved the day... But I was really annoyed at Dropbox for a little while. ------ sdizdar As founder of cloudHQ, I have to jump into this. Software products will have bugs. And people will make mistakes. We are all human. So even if you store data in Dropbox - it is smart to have one extra copy in some other cloud storage. Like Google Drive. Or Box. Or Egnyte. So if data is deleted in Dropbox (accidentally, maliciously, or due to a bug) you can restore it from other cloud. Of course, cloudHQ is the system which can do that: [http://chq.io/hnsc](http://chq.io/hnsc) ------ paulhauggis I stopped using Dropbox because of this. I booted my system up one day and a ton of my files were deleted (locally). Luckily, this didn't affect the sync on my other systems. ------ copper_rose Yikes. All those nines of durability that Amazon provided for Dropbox...brought to naught by a bug in Dropbox's software. ------ nintendo1889 I think this calls for an aggressively distributed, user-controlled backup system. Perhaps tahoe lafs based.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Most(ly Dead) Influential Programming Languages - weinzierl https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/ ====== merricksb Active discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22690229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22690229)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
wu.js -- A lazy, functional Javascript library - mnemonik http://fitzgen.github.com/wu.js/ ====== jashkenas One interesting idea (for JS) is defining functions as pattern matches on the arguments. Here's a factorial from the docs: >>> var factorial = wu.match( ... [ 0 ], 1, ... [ Number ], function (n) { return n * factorial(n - 1); } ... ); >>> factorial(5); 120 ~~~ adamdecaf That took me a bit to understand what is going on, but now that I see it it really is cool. Each line (e.g. [ 0 ], 1,) represents something similar to (key,value) pairs. So, in the first example any input that matches the array ([0]) (or [1,293,592] for that matter) would return the "value", or in this case "1". It gets better with the following line, if the input matches a ([Number]) then it returns "function (n) { return n * factorial(n-1); }", a common recursive algorithm for finding a factorial. Really, a nice looking framework all around. ~~~ johnswamps Yep, it's pretty neat. If you're familiar with haskell (I'm not sure if haskell invented it, but it's probably the most well-known example) this will be familiar to you. For example, factorial could be written as: fac 0 = 1 fac n = n * fac(n-1) ~~~ silentbicycle Other languages with pattern matching include Prolog* , ML, and Erlang. (If I'm not mistaken, it originated with SNOBOL.) Awk also uses regular expression matching toward similar ends, but it's like comparing REs to a full parser. * Prolog has unification, actually, which is more powerful than pattern matching. Instead of trying to match a value against a list of patterns, it tries to match two (or more) potentially partially-defined values against each other. Pattern matching is one of my favorite language features. PM-based code is usually quite straightforward to read (especially compared to a jumble of nested 'if's!), and can be compiled to efficient decision trees. It also works well with both static typing (checking full coverage of ML-style variant types) and dynamic typing (such as with Erlang's receive). The closest thing most OO languages have is polymorphism, which tends to break up the pattern table into lots of little scattered ones (unless the language has multimethods), making it harder to see the big picture. ------ alrex021 I'd be very interested to see some real-world cases for lazy sequences in context of client-side JavaScript interpretation. The "Why?" section doesn't seem to have any information in the docs. ~~~ apgwoz > I'd be very interested to see some real-world cases for lazy sequences in > context of client-side JavaScript interpretation. Please remember that JS is no longer just client-side stuff. Node.js, and other implementations have become quite popular in some circles for doing server side things. ~~~ alrex021 > Please remember ... JavaScript runs on the server side? ;-) Quote from wu.js site: _"Works great in the browser"._ Hence my genuine interest in understanding the not so obvious real-world cases for lazy-seq and client-side programming. ------ mnemonik Hey everyone, this is my baby and I would love to get some feedback. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask anything (but I might disappear for a couple hours because I have a final coming up). Thanks! ~~~ mnemonik (Back from my final now (it went well)). ------ sharkbrainguy Just quietly, I've written a library that provides lazy sequences as MooTools Classes if anyone is that way inclined. <http://github.com/sharkbrainguy/sequences.js> Some basic examples: <http://jsfiddle.net/Zh7pR/> It does suffer from the whole "what's the point" problem. ------ yacin Killer name. ~~~ mnemonik Thanks :) If anyone isn't aware, it is named after the infamous Wu-Tang Clan: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OEcZqG9xnE> ~~~ erlanger you can sell wu wear ------ olliesaunders I like the idea of these functional JS libraries but I'm always concerned about the performance hit. ~~~ sharkbrainguy underscore.js provides alot of functional (not lazy) tools with solid performance. <http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/> Check out the benchmarks: <http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/test/test.html>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Yoshua Bengio: ‘The dangers of abuse are real’ - Anon84 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00505-2 ====== monkeynotes AI is like a mountain. No matter what humanity does, someone will summit just because it's there. We can control businesses to an extent, but a curious person in the basement, no one has control over that. And good luck holding the military back. One way or another humanity is on its way to the inevitable, and it's our evolutionary destiny because we are basically hard-wired to pursue the curiosity that is AI. ~~~ jononor The amount of resources and thus damage that an individual in a basement can do is rather limited. We got treaties on nuclear and chemical weapons. It could happen for autonomous weapons and weaponized intelligent agents also. But it might require a serious case of abuse before we get there, as it did for chemical and nuclear... ~~~ bitforger Right. Currently in order to do state-of-the-art AI, you need a lot of _computers_ and a lot of _data_. Neither of these is easy to obtain by an individual in a basement. We would need to consider, however, access to finished products (like trained models). In some cases in the future, having access to the appropriate model might be as dangerous as handing someone a nuke. How hard would it be for someone to assemble a indiscriminate "killer drone," given the appropriate image recognition and flight control models? ~~~ jononor Image recognition and flight control makes a drone, but probably not a _killer_ drone, as that would presumably require some sort of munitions - like a gun or explosives. So it might be efficient enough to just limit access to those parts? ~~~ MRD85 People with low education levels can show you how to build all sorts of things that go bang. Someone with an engineering background could vastly improve on a lot of designs. If you could make a small, lightweight projectile weapon that can be 3d printed then you have what you need. My background is an engineering role in the military and my current path is CS. I don't think it's unfeasible that an individual could build a crude drone that would kill a single person. Building an entire swarm of death robots is a different story. ------ 0x8BADF00D > You have expressed concern that corporations have ‘stolen’ talent from > academia. Nobody is stealing anything. What they don’t realize is that the free market will incentivize AI researchers to go to the private sector. It’s just simple economics. ~~~ webmaven If private industry are using inflated (in the short term) valuations and low tax rates to fund a talent war, but publicly funded educational institutions can't compete by increasing funding (through governments raising taxes or printing money), then the playing field isn't exactly level, is it? ~~~ GuiA Publicly funded educational institutions can compete by reassigning some of their budget dedicated to sports and administrative roles to their researchers, for starters. For instance, the public US university I attended for grad school has an endowment of about $1B, and spent ~$150M on athletics in the past year. A post doc salary there is about $40k a year. Why would anyone take this over $200k a year (with lots of sweet perks) at eg Google? Because they are passionate about academic research (and potentially teaching), something that the university is very aware of and has no problem using to their advantage. Talking about level playing fields here seems disingenuous. ~~~ webmaven _> Publicly funded educational institutions can compete by reassigning some of their budget dedicated to sports_ Athletics programs are a huge driver of both alumni donations and student enrollment. Unfortunately. Not to mention licensing revenue from apparel and the like. _> Because they are passionate about academic research (and potentially teaching), something that the university is very aware of and has no problem using to their advantage._ This was more effective when the pay disparity was smaller. ------ i_am_proteus How will regulating AI be any more successful than the 1990s attempts by the US to regulate cryptography? ~~~ jagger27 The accessibility story is nearly identical. So I'd say nope. ------ novaRom Not a secret that largest military companies are actively investing into AI. Enormous opportunities and dangers. And it's not just computer vision and robotics - almost every aspect of modern warfare will be AI-extended. ------ woliveirajr > "has raised concerns about the possible risks from misuse of technology" Isn't misuse possible in all (or, at least, almost all) technology? Drugs can change humor, physical condition, hormones, and I think can be miused even as a long-term weapon over the population of some nation. Nuclear. Explosives. Social medias. TV programs. Data processing with punch cards. Drones. Knifes. Herbicides. Small plastic rejects. I understand the reasons Bengio tries to make, but it seems that it is the same problem with all technological stuff: someone, somewhere, will find a way to use it against others, and will cause minor or giant consequences. ~~~ jononor Most of your examples are covered by rules and regulation in order to try to get the most out of the technology without too much adverse effects. The point here is that we should do the same for "AI", and that we should start thinking about this now. ------ novaRom AI arms race is real. Will outcomes be good for civilization like those of space race (Internet, Communication) nobody knows. ------ alwaysanagenda Bengio is asked: What will be the next big thing in AI? > "Deep learning, as it is now, has made huge progress in perception, but it > hasn’t delivered yet on systems that can discover high-level representations > — the kind of concepts we use in language. Humans are able to use those > high-level concepts to generalize in powerful ways. That’s something that > even babies can do, but machine learning is very bad at." I read this as: "We have super-advanced skip-logic software that can produce specific results when provided a large enough data set, but "intelligence" as it is defined, does not exist." AI is really just sophisticated software algorithms. In my opinion, there is no true artificial intelligence, and it will be unlikely that we will ever create such a thing for quite some time, if at all. AI is being used as a buzzword to garner attention. It seems much more likely that we will build a brain-computer interface before true AI, and it will prove more efficient than what we have today, which is effectively many computers churning through a super-long list of "if-then" statements. ~~~ xthestreams This joke about "if-then" statements has gone too far, and when people cite it it's clear that they don't understand the basics of how ML works today. ------ luxuryballs It always seems like FUD to me when I read these articles. What is the specific concern? Can we get some examples? Sometimes people are like oh no AI is gonna take over! And I just think about how hard it is for humans to integrate two software systems and laugh. What are we afraid of it doing? If it gets out of control can’t we just you know... cut the power? ~~~ superhuzza Did you even open the article? "Killer drones are a big concern....dangers of abuse, especially by authoritarian governments...AI can amplify discrimination and biases". Bengio is specifically talking about malicious actors using AI. So saying "just unplug it" isn't really applicable, especially when it comes to governments. ~~~ luxuryballs you don’t need AI to make killer drones ~~~ jhayward This is an example of 'whataboutism', and is used to derail a discussion without actually responding to the point. ~~~ luxuryballs my original point was already a response to your quote from the article, what is there to expound on? the problem isn’t an AI problem it’s a malicious actor problem ------ peterwwillis They keep using the term 'AI' when they seem to mean 'software'. We have all these problems regardless of how 'intelligent' the artificial machine is. ------ drak0n1c Meanwhile, Google has cancelled its AI ethics board in response to an internal employee petition complaining about a mainstream conservative being included in the 8-member committee. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2019/04/04/google...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2019/04/04/google- cancels-its-ai-ethics-board-less-than-two-weeks-after-launch-in-the-wake-of- employee-protest/) ~~~ Dobbs The heritage think tank is a known anti lgbt group. They spend significant resources in the US and abroad to fight against lgbt rights. I for one and f __king sick and tired of my existence being subject to debate due in part to these groups. ~~~ satokema_work What do LGBT issues have anything to do with AI discussions? I ask purely for information. ~~~ CamperBob2 It means you can't assume the Heritage representative is going to participate in good faith. They are bringing a religious agenda to the table, which has (or at least should have) no place in the discussion.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Redshift CI/CD – How we did it and why you should do it too - dvainrub https://medium.com/big-data-engineering/redshift-cicd-how-we-did-it-and-why-you-should-do-it-to-e46ecf734eab ====== masonic [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dvainrub](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dvainrub)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy? - dnetesn http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/can-a-living-creature-be-as-big-as-a-galaxy ====== lazaroclapp The article makes the argument that intelligent life a couple orders of magnitude larger than human would think very slowly, since the time for a single message to cross a brain 10 times the size is 10 times longer. This necessitates that every thought traverses the entire brain. But, taking not too much poetic license, we can argue that human society at a whole is a 10^6m scale intelligence (well, more like 10^3 if we are only counting the pile of human brains, but the distances are still in the 10^6 scale). It furthermore has incredibly slow thought transmission outside of very small "fast" nodes. Yet it solves the problem by not requiring most signals to propagate very far. Only a few ideas need to be globally known by humankind, the intermediate filtering is still mostly local. So, a galaxy-sized "brain" can exist, it just needs to be very hierarchical, since any global consensus would take hundreds of thousands of years to formulate, even at the speed of light. In computing / distributed system terms: locality matters. ~~~ jerf You still can't call that a meaningful organism. The speed of light still means it can't have had more than a few dozen "clock cycles" since the galaxy stabilized enough to permit it, and it doesn't have all that many more "cycles" before the galaxy will be too dead to sustain it. There is no activity it could set itself out to do and then actually do it that would not be literally at least tens of thousands of years behind the stimulus that produced it, and that would be an incredibly quick reaction. There is no force of "evolution" or anything else that could drive this entity. It's just not useful to model it as an "organism". Even human society can only be _analogized_ to an organism. It isn't one either. It's not enough to point out there's vague similarities but ignore the multiple-orders-of-magnitude differences in the various scales. And there's no _need_ for "everything to be an organism". There's no physical reality to that idea. It's merely a reflection of our own predisposition towards weak analogical thinking when we should be dealing with things on their own terms. For human society, analogical thinking can easily lead us astray; for galactic scale society it's even harder to get away from analogical thinking because there isn't one (so far as we know) from which we can derive any observations at all, so there's no concrete facts in which we can ground our thinking. As a stepping stone, "human society as an organism" may be the beginning of understanding. But when you start doing things like bemoaning its lack of self-preservation instinct, it's a sign you've gone too far with the analogy at the expense of dealing with what is really there. ~~~ lisper > Even human society can only be analogized to an organism. It isn't one > either. Why not? An organism can reasonably be defined as the minimal subset of a gene's phenotype that is actually capable of reproducing. On that view, an ant (for example) is not an organism, an ant _colony_ is the organism. This neatly solves the puzzle of how it is possible for evolution to produce ants, since the vast majority of individual ants are sterile. On that view, the minimal possible organism for a sexually-reproducig species is a mating pair. But a single pair of humans would not survive in the wild. At a minimum it takes a village (as they say). So a human village can reasonably be taken to be an organism, just as an ant colony can. But a village can't produce a technological society. At best, a village can subsist. So why is it unreasonable to consider (say) a city-state as an evolutionary advance on the village, and hence an organism in its own right even thought it isn't minimal? And so on through the Roman empire, the British empire, and the modern nation-state and multinational corporation, all of which are no less examples of the human genome's phenotype than the human body itself. ~~~ titzer > An organism can reasonably be defined as the minimal subset of a gene's > phenotype that is actually capable of reproducing. Where did this definition come from? > But a single pair of humans would not survive in the wild. Not true; there are numerous examples of single families surviving in the wild. ~~~ lisper > Where did this definition come from? From the puzzle: how can it be that evolution produces a creature (ants) where 99% of the individuals are sterile? And the answer: ants are not the organism, the ant colony is the organism. This idea was introduced by Dawkins in "The Extended Phenotype". > there are numerous examples of single families surviving in the wild Not without some external support. At a minimum they went into the wild with some clothing and tools. ~~~ titzer > From the puzzle: how can it be that evolution produces a creature (ants) > where 99% of the individuals are sterile? And the answer: ants are not the > organism, the ant colony is the organism. This idea was introduced by > Dawkins in "The Extended Phenotype". That has nothing to do with the definition of the word organism. Maybe you want another word for the unit of reproduction, but the word /organism/ already has a specific meaning, independent of reproduction. ~~~ lisper That's news to me. AFAIK, the meaning of "organism" is inextricably bound to the concept of life, which in turn is inextricably bound to reproduction. But please do enlighten me: what is this established meaning of "organism" that has nothing to do with reproduction? ~~~ titzer LMGTFY: [https://www.google.com/search?q=define+organism](https://www.google.com/search?q=define+organism) ~~~ lisper "an individual animal, plant, or single-celled _LIFE_ form" "the material structure of an individual _LIFE_ form" "a whole with interdependent parts, likened to a _LIVING_ being" So let's go on to look up "Life": "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, _REPRODUCTION_..." ~~~ Razengan So planets that host sentient life are a form of life themselves. ~~~ lisper Not unless the planet itself reproduces somehow. ~~~ Razengan If we go and terraform Mars, for example, and make it just like Earth, won't Earth be said to have reproduced? ~~~ lisper I don't think so. What really matters is the _information_ that is being replicated. In the case of humanity, that information is encoded in our DNA and in our artifacts. But the planet exists independently of any information that is encoded on or in it, so I don't think it would be fair to say that the planet has reproduced. But it's arguable. ~~~ Razengan This mostly depends on whether the planets where life originates are anything like each other. We just assume that every life-harboring planet will have water and trees and blue skies, but even the "dead" planets that we've seen so far are nothing like each other. However if Earth is the only place with leafy green trees, for example, and we go on to plant these on Mars and other planets, we will essentially be making copies of Earth (which would otherwise be the only example of itself) by replicating its attributes and variables on other worlds as much as we can, for our own comfort. Over a large enough scale of time and space, Earth could be seen as a successful organism that managed to replicate itself. It doesn't need to have any direct agency over its reproductive components (us) any more than we have any agency over our own sperm and eggs. ~~~ lisper That's a good argument, but it depends entirely on whether we (earth life) adapt new planets to suit our preconceptions of life, or whether life from earth adapts to the conditions in finds on other planets and becomes very different from what it once was. In the former case, yes, I would totally accept that earth had replicated. But I think the latter scenario is more likely. ------ titzer A lot of research suggests that the human brain has about an 80ms time window within which events are roughly considered "simultaneous". Interestingly, that's about the same amount of time for nerve signals to travel from your furthest extremities to your brain. If we were to scale up our brains and bodies with upgraded speed-of-light transmitters, then 80 light-milliseconds is about 24,000 kilometers, or almost exactly twice the diameter of Earth. Thus a similarly time-scaled fully integrated conscious experience is probably limited to that volume. Obviously, brains have lots of localized computation and subsystems that are smaller and have lower cycle times. Planetary brains could have very fast local regions but the integration time across subsystems is probably what contributes to the perception of time in consciousness. ~~~ agumonkey In a book by Bertalanffy (50s System Theory) they also measure frequency limits (my blub) in animals. Anything faster than that wasn't registered by said animal. Like waving a a stick 20 times per second would be invisible to him. While at 15 "fps" it would runaway. ------ ThomPete Speed isn't a problem if everyone else at your scale are equally slow. If you are at the size of a galaxy you aren't being affected by humans ability to be faster just as little as individual cells mostly aren't affecting humans even though their ability to deal quickly with things at the cellular level react way faster than your entire body do. In fact most studies about the human mind seems to suggest that we are actually more like tourists than captains on our own ship. So the update frequency of the whole system can vary. The most important part is that it's a pattern-recognizing feedback loop which can store past cycles. ~~~ mcguire Until those pesky infestations start building Dyson spheres around your ganglia. ------ gonvaled When discussing these issues I have always the impression that we have a too strong anthropomorphic view. For example, we assume that life needs a liquid for support, but maybe it can work with other substance (gas, plasma, ...). We think that watter has magic properties, but maybe another material works better - we simply do not known about it. Why? Because Earth does not contain enough material to produce and study the compound, or because Earth simply does not have the conditions which make the substance perform at its optimum level (maybe millions of degrees, or extremely high pressures). I think we barely know anything about chemistry: the universe offers so many options, that restricting outserlves to life as we know it is bound to make us miss most of the real alternatives. ~~~ LeifCarrotson I agree that we have too strong an anthropomorphic view, but disagree that water and carbon are bad assumptions. There are only a finite number of elements, and these elements are prouduced in similar ways due to radioactive decay and stellar processes. Of these, a simple study shows that carbon is best. Also, life requires some kind of chemistry to reproduce - this is easiest in a liquid, and water is the best, most abundant liquid for the process. Perhaps a complex molecule is superior to carbon in some way. Or perhaps something could exist and reproduce as a plasma. These materials and conditions may exist somewhere in the universe, but are not nearly as likely as carbon and water. ~~~ gonvaled > There are only a finite number of elements, and these elements are prouduced > in similar ways due to radioactive decay and stellar processes. Of these, a > simple study shows that carbon is best. Maybe another element (or compound) performs better in certain conditions or in the presence of certain catalizators than carbon. We have not detected this because we do not have the conditions to perform the experiments, or maybe we haven't found the right proportions of catalizator to compound, or maybe we have not even tried that specific combination. There are maybe other stables elements that we have not yet discovered, with >1000 protons in the nucleus: another isle of stability which we do not know about because the stars do not easily reach it when going supernova. Maybe there are other organization structures (not atoms) for matter that do not occur in this part of the universe. "Chemistry" would be very different then. There are too many variables: humankind is very young, science is in its infancy, we have a very limited spectrum of the possible conditions / materials at our disposal, and anyway the possibilities that the universe offers are way too big for us to make any final statement. The universe has been running for a long time, in a massive parallelized manner: it sure has found possibilities that we do not even dare of dreaming about. > These materials and conditions may exist somewhere in the universe, but are > not nearly as likely as carbon and water. You can be right there, but what is more likely: carbon and water or "the rest of possible alternatives"? It could be that carbon+water is the most common option, but still most life in the universe is based in lots of different alternatives. ------ ilamparithi I read somewhere that there is a universe in each scale. For example, there is a whole world in the atomic scale. Similarly there are billions of bacteria in our mouth alone. They couldn't make sense of their host. Sometimes I think it is possible that the entire universe is some body part of a giant organism which we couldn't comprehend. ~~~ mbil Whenever I hear something similar I think of this Simpson's opening: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OiRk56pNEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OiRk56pNEk) ------ craftandhustle After recently finishing The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, the sci-fi trope of life at different magnitudes is fascinating to think about. Without spoiling too much, there's a chapter where an entire universe rich with intelligent life is discovered as scientists "unfold" a single proton. ~~~ Confusion I liked the book very much, until those kinds of things started happening. The last third of the book ruined it for me ------ justsaysmthng > Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy? This can be followed up by an even "crazier" question: If so, is our Galaxy a living creature ? Going in the other direction, are cells in our bodies "living creatures" ? They sure do exhibit all the qualities of the larger organisms. If that's true, then our body is a conglomerate of 100 trillion living beings locked together in a biological ecosystem, each individual cell or collection of cells having probably no concept of the larger system they are part of. So then we (our bodies and other animals) could also be locked together in a biological ecosystem (The Earth) and we would be oblivious of the fact by default. Is Earth a "living creature" ? The "overview effect" that astronauts report upon seeing the Earth from orbit seems to be related to exactly this realization - that the planet is one big living organism. There's a fantastic short documentary about this - [https://vimeo.com/55073825](https://vimeo.com/55073825) We are just beginning to see the complex interconnection of things and beings in the biosphere so there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that the planet might be a huge living organism - not quite fits in our definition of "organism", but then it might mean that our definition is a bit too narrow. Ancient shamans and the modern day "psychonauts" repot the same "overview effect" after tripping on various psychedelic plants and fungi - that everything is alive, including the planet, the stars and so on. The idea of a "soul" \- as the differentiating property of living things - has been around since .. forever. And if we touch the idea of soul, then we're entering the realm of the Holy and the idea of God. If all living beings have "souls" and if the Galaxy is a living being that it results that it too has soul. Interestingly that it's the "soul" that allows us to "grasp" the "being part of" thing.. So if cells have souls, they feel Us with it, if the Planet has soul, we feel it with our souls and so on... Oh well, this is a infinitely long discussion, so I'll just pause here and contemplate on some C++ code :) ~~~ LordKano _This can be followed up by an even "crazier" question: If so, is our Galaxy a living creature ?_ I like this, a galaxy-scale Gaia Hypothesis. Why not? Our perspective is so small and our life span is so limited, would we be able to recognize or even comprehend the thought processes of a galaxy sized organism? ~~~ outworlder If you like that, and without spoiling too much, read the last book in the Foundation series. ------ gumby The article is compelling that you can't have an organism _like a human_ but why should it look that way? A loosely coupled system with lots of local computation could just as well "think", just not like us. Ants and termites are extreme examples of this though we don't typically think of them as a single organism (except in The Sword in the Stone) but they have collective behavior. Bacterial biofilms too. And in fact all parts of our brain do not communicate with all others; there are specialized subprocessing in the early visual system (cf Letvin) much less the various specialized cortices. So one could _construct_ a computational agent on the scale of a galaxy -- this ignores the question of evolution. I've long presumed that we're unlikely to even recognize an intelligent alien (and that an alien encountering human interstellar travelers might not recognize the humans as intelligent). It's a fundamental hermeneutic question. ~~~ zodPod I've always had thoughts about this too. I understand that our definition of "living" might be that it requires water and air or something like that but honestly I think that's a little short-sighted. ------ meric _Could an intelligent species embark on an effort to build a self-replicating machine as big as a galaxy?_ ~~~ drieddust This idea is explored by Robert Charles Wilson in his Sci-Fi trilogy. He calls these being Hypotheticals and they operate over time frame and distances uncomprehensible to human mind. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_$novel$) ------ amelius > Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy? If you consider your brain as the brain of the galaxy, and the rest of the galaxy as its limbs, then certainly :) The fact that the brain has only little control over its limbs (through very weak forces of gravity and electromagnetics) doesn't really matter. ~~~ saalweachter Lack of interstellar travel / stellar engineering == locked in syndrome? ------ vatotemking Is it possible that galaxies are actually atoms of gigantic beings? ~~~ noonespecial Or atoms galaxies? It's turtles all the way down. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down) ~~~ vatotemking Yeah. When you look at it everything is just a sphere rotating on something. ------ f_allwein Pretty interesting, and pointed me to the "powers of 10" film visualizing changes in order of magnitude: [http://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0](http://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0) ------ millstone > Progress in the theory of computation suggests that sentience and > intelligence likely require quadrillions of primitive “circuit” elements. Can anyone elaborate? What is the evidence that sentience and intelligence requires this? ~~~ oafitupa Intelligence maybe, but sentience? We haven't made any progress in that. We don't even know if science will ever be able to figure that out. See: the hard problem of consciousness. ------ joshdick The classic essay on this topic is "On Being the Right Size" by biologist J.B.S. Haldane in 1926. It's really worth a read: [http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right- size.html](http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html) I'll never forget: "You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes." ------ carlob This reminds me of Look to Windward, a Culture novel which features behemotaurs, creatures much larger than whales which are near immortal and have a very very slow metabolism. ~~~ ajuc Also Algebraist by the same author Ian Banks - there is a species living so slowly, that star travel is practical for them, so they are ubiquitus in the whole known universe. ~~~ tfgg Also one of the intelligences encountered in Diaspora by Greg Egan. Actually, they just meet a localised handling agent that explains that they work for a star-spanning sentience - which is something the characters had been considering as a way of making themselves robust against civilisation- destroying gamma ray bursts, but dismissed on the grounds that it made everything so slow - though that links into the other theme in that book of simulated beings existing on very different timescales. ------ KineticLensman It depends on how you define life, which the article doesn't cover. If by life you mean 'demonstrates complex emergent behaviours', the answer might be 'perhaps, although it would take a very long time for anything to happen'. However, if 'living' means 'self organised, maintains its integrity and can reproduce', then the answer is more likely to be 'probably not' ~~~ alanwatts >'living' means 'self organised, maintains its integrity and can reproduce' I like the definition of life being something that can reproduce. But self organized, I'm not sure. All life depends on non-biological environmental factors for its organization and reproduction. ------ vorg So, to an accuracy of a factor of 10: smallest theoretical scale is 10^-35 m, i.e. Planck length smallest observed scale is 10^-19 m, i.e. quark interactions smallest life scale is 10^-6 m, i.e. bacteria and viruses size of vessel of consciousness is 10^-1 m, i.e. human brain largest life scale is 10^3 m, i.e. Blue Mountain honey fungus largest observed scale 10^26 m, i.e. the cosmic horizon largest theoretical scale is unknown Looking at this sequence of orders of magnitude, i.e. (-35, -19, -6, -1, 3, 26, ???) makes me wonder: * is there a theory that encompasses General Relativity and defines a theoretical largest possible distance/time? * perhaps consciousness, being in the middle, will never, via mathematics, unite such a theory with Quantum Mechanics ~~~ placeybordeaux For those that wanted a visualization 10^-35 - Planck length 10^-34 10^-33 10^-32 10^-31 10^-30 10^-29 10^-28 10^-27 10^-26 10^-25 10^-24 10^-23 10^-22 10^-21 10^-20 10^-19 - quark interactions 10^-18 10^-17 10^-16 10^-15 10^-14 10^-13 10^-12 10^-11 - hydrogen atom 10^-10 10^-9 10^-8 10^-7 10^-6 - bacteria and viruses 10^-5 10^-4 10^-3 10^-2 10^-1 - human brain 10^0 10^1 10^2 10^3 - Blue Mountain honey fungus 10^4 10^5 10^6 10^7 10^8 - Diameter of our sun 10^9 10^10 10^11 10^12 10^13 10^14 10^15 10^16 - Oort cloud 10^17 10^18 10^19 10^20 - Our Galaxy 10^21 10^22 10^23 10^24 10^25 10^26 - the cosmic horizon ------ wavesum This makes sense if you make the assumption that Big Bang theory is correct. In my opinion the theory has quite a few leaps of faith. [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-scientific-criticism-of- th...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-scientific-criticism-of-the-Big-Bang- theory) If we consider the possibility of infinitely old universe with no beginning or end, the answer is yes, most likely, but it's unlikely we ever know. Those strange blobs of light could very well be living, thinking things or parts of them, but everything that happens on their physical scale is so slow that we can only observe a mere snapshot of their state. ------ JohnDoe365 A galaxy is a living creature. See it that way? ~~~ travelbyphone Absolutely. Even more if you think that life isn't but a slow transfer of the Suns energy between organisms. Even our thoughts are just energy. ------ Sommer Maybe it's worth thinking about it the other way around: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7ojSW5pODk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7ojSW5pODk) ------ habosa This reminds me of the book "Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson ([http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016IXMWI/ref=dp-kindle- re...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016IXMWI/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1)). While I don't want to spoil too much for the HN crowd (more than I have already by posting it under this link) it's a great SciFi book that hints at some really cool theoretical questions about life, space travel, and inter- species communication. ------ miloszf If you find this topic interesting to think about I strongly recommend the book Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. It was written in 1930's, but in some ways it's still incredibly refreshing and thought provoking. ------ fit2rule At some scale, Earth itself could be considered a single life-form. ~~~ FooNull And the sun, and the solar system ------ ZeroFries Depends on how you define "organism", I think. If you mean an entity possessing some sort of unitary consciousness, then yes, thoughts would become slower the larger you scale the brain. If you mean distributed information processing system, I think you can classify the entire universe as one, and there's no such thing as a "thought". ------ mchahn > The height of the tallest redwoods is limited by their inability to pump > water more than 100 meters into the sky, Actually they grow higher than that limit. They absorb dew in their leaves so they can grow taller. There is a reason there are redwoods only in a certain climate. ------ netcan Just the title has two big semantic questions: (1) what counts as life and (2) what counts as intelligence. Like lazaroclapp commented, it's not that big a stretch to think of humanity (as a whole) as meeting the definitions of both. Also (or alternatively), the earth. Interesting questions. ------ paulpauper Issac Asmimov's the Final Question ends with a sentience that spans the universe ------ hyperliner Who cares about how long it takes for the thing to think? It seems such large thing would have no predators, therefore it is not in a hurry to decide whether to fight or fly. ------ Qwertious >It’s likely that the first true artificial intelligences will occupy volumes that are not so different from the size of our own bodies, despite being based on fundamentally different materials and architectures, again suggesting that there is something special about the meter scale. That's circular, it's begging the question. Assuming that there's something special about the meter scale, then using that to reinforce the notion that there is something special about the meter scale. ------ awinter-py if materialism is true, the united states is probably conscious [http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...](http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140130a.htm) ~~~ gonvaled Sure. Another level of conscience. Materialism accepts that things are neither white nor black, but gray; the world is more complex than what we want it to be; simplifications take you only so far. Rabits are more conscious that amoebas, and less than men. The consciousness of the US is probably not comparable to the consciousness of men - they are basically different things, with some common properties. So yes, the US is conscious, for some definition of consciousness. ~~~ awinter-py I think the author of that paper is leaning more on the 'phenomenological consciousness isn't true' case than the 'united states is conscious' case. I land in the max tegmark 'information probably is the same as consciousness' camp. It makes sense that a guy who studies simultaneity would ascribe magical properties to information that is partitioned like spacetime. But I can't argue with the critics -- we don't yet have a measurable physical quantity for consciousness, much less a definition. Dave Chalmers says the 'hard problem' is why we have qualia. I think the hard problem is even more fundamental -- it's really hard to formulate questions about consciousness in a way that communciates the problem to someone who hasn't already thought of it. You can say the behavioral evidence (i.e. measurable quantity) for consciousness is that we're having a conversation about it, but that feels like a copout. ------ staticelf Is there any reason to think that there exist a limit on how large or small things can be? ~~~ oafitupa The Universe is expanding, and some parts will never interact with other parts, because not even light could make the trip. One could say they are now in separate universes. So that's one limit I can think of. ~~~ staticelf Yeah but that doesn't mean they don't exist? Our universe could be a drop in an ocean of a real multiverse. ------ outworlder I came here expecting to find a discussion of the Foundation series... ------ abledon Reminds me of Peter F Hamilton's Void series ------ known Interesting concept. ------ runn1ng Galactus must feed. ------ am185 april fools? ------ numbsafari Yes, I have met your mother.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Death of Hype: What's Next for Scala - epelesis http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/TheDeathofHypeWhatsNextforScala.html ====== melling "compiler itself is massively sped up, with code compiling literally twice as fast as it did just three years ago" Scala always looked like a nice language. The slow compilation was a huge turnoff for me. It's been on my shortlist of weekend projects, but I was going to hold out for Scala 3 ------ AheadOfTime295 Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22830779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22830779)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Subscribing to GraphQL events in a React client - nareshbhatia https://medium.com/naresh-bhatia/graphql-concepts-i-wish-someone-explained-to-me-a-year-ago-3b84203fb0b9 ====== nareshbhatia You guessed it–the last step, described in Part 7 of my GraphQL series, is to subscribe to events in our React client. Thanks to the GraphQL and Apollo GraphQL teams for creating this awesome platform! I hope this series helps you apply GraphQL in real projects. If you found the series helpful, please share it with your fellow developers. Until then, happy computing! Here's a link back to Part 1 in case you missed it: "GraphQL concepts I wish someone explained to me a year ago" [https://medium.com/naresh-bhatia/graphql- concepts-i-wish-som...](https://medium.com/naresh-bhatia/graphql-concepts-i- wish-someone-explained-to-me-a-year-ago-514d5b3c0eab)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
India will become number 1 source of PHP developers soon - palehose http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/99-India-will-become-number-1-source-of-PHP-developers-soon.html ====== embeddedradical hey, hey...don't pick on india, they're still emerging - they'll make it through this php problem. we still have a lot of people using php here...the thing's contagious. ------ maheshs Sooner same will be true for other languages as well ~~~ palehose Although I don't have any hard evidence, I think this is less true with Ruby on Rails, probably Python/Django as well. I just can't imagine that legacy Rails applications are going to be getting outsourced anytime soon. It will probably take another 15 years before Ruby even comes close to the widespread usage of PHP. ~~~ socratees 15 years is such a long time to predict anything. ------ socratees Expect your PHP related projects to be outsourced in a big scale very soon.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
YC Fall 2015 College Tour - katm https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-fall-2015-college-tour ====== BinaryIdiot It would be really cool if YC came by UMD (University of Maryland). There is a start-up shell where a whole bunch of companies work out of, some of which has raised money and some not quite yet but it's a cool spot for start-ups nonetheless. ~~~ wtvanhest Alumni of UMD founded Google, Oculus, Under Armour and many other companies. ~~~ dylanjermiah Squarespace also IIRC. ------ wj Clicking through to one of them ([http://illinois.edu/calendar/detail/4922?eventId=32998738&ca...](http://illinois.edu/calendar/detail/4922?eventId=32998738&calMin=201509&cal=20150914&skinId=11049)) says: "In July 2015, Y Combinator introduced YC Fellowship Program to make an investment of $12,000 into 1000 startups every year. The first batch of YC Fellowship includes 32 companies, which received an equity-free grant instead of an investment." Does that mean there will be 968 more fellowships given over the next ten months? ~~~ manuelflara I think that 1000 figure comes from a statement they made along the lines of "one day we could be funding 1000 companies through this Fellowship program". I don't think they had a figure in mind for this batch. ~~~ wj I was thinking it might be through scaling up the next batch. ~~~ katm Thanks for catching. I asked UIUC to make an edit on that. The first batch of YCF is starting up this week -- and we're not making decisions about the future of the program till we see how this pilot goes. ------ Jun8 Awesome, wish I was back in college! Note to YC: Why don't you set up an official YC Startup University? You're effectively doing it now with all the talks, tours, etc. ------ athyuttamre Excited for Startup@Brown! [http://startupatbrown.org](http://startupatbrown.org) ------ dabent I'd love to see this at Georgia Tech in the future. ~~~ katm We're planning to visit Georgia Tech this winter. ~~~ ryanSrich Any plans to visit NY? RIT or RPI would be good candidates. ~~~ bernardom Or Cornell! ------ spike021 Any chance that you'll be coming to San Jose State University? We're not so far away from you. ~~~ sama I'll come, who can we coordinate with? ~~~ spike021 Honestly I'm not too sure. There is an Entrepreneurial club, but I wouldn't say any particular organization is out there for this kind of thing. Do you have an email I can reach you at? Maybe I can connect you with someone from the Computer Science club at the very least. ------ yefim A bit disappointed that YC isn't visiting Penn seeing as 3 of the startups from the most recent summer batch were by Penn students. ~~~ dubin Also agree that YC should consider a trip to Philly / Penn. There are a lot of students in the area that would flock to any talks or office hours ------ esfandia How about a stop in Ottawa, Canada? Two big universities (Carleton and Ottawa U), and a pretty big tech community here. ~~~ cbhl Waterloo is well within train commute distance of Ottawa -- consider applying to Hack the North next year! ------ vertoc Would love for you guys to come to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. We're only a 3 hour drive away and we have a huge entrepreneurship mindset on campus - we have an on campus incubator as well as a whole Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, plus a pretty good CS program :) ------ dvt Can YC set anything up at UCLA? We're really starting to have a very vibrant start-up community. Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO) is actually paying us a visit and is sitting down with students and alumni in a couple of weeks! I'd be more than willing to help out or volunteer. ~~~ katm Shoot me a note at kat at ycombinator. We'll be visiting more schools later this fall and this winter. We went to UCLA last year with Alexis Ohanian's bus tour and we'd be happy to visit again. ~~~ dvt Sent! ------ ff_ Hi! As a student I am really happy you'll be touring universities to inspire hackers about making great things :) Unfortunately I'm too far away from any of them to personally enjoy this opportunity. Do you plan any visit to European Universities in the near future? ------ pyromine I would really love YC to come to Utah. We're building a dorm specifically made as a 24/7 living / co-working space providing all the resources for students to start businesses. ------ adenadel It seems like the west coast isn't getting much love. I understand staying out of the Bay Area, but UW, UCSD etc. seem like they would be good places to visit. ------ xigency Why not make a stop at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology? It's not far from Urbana-Champaign if the Y Combinator folks have a presenter to send. ------ techwizrd Would y'all consider coming to George Mason University? We're actively trying to build a entrepreneurial start-up culture here. ------ snake117 Anyone else heading to the Ann Arbor event? ------ HorizonXP Hey katm, are you still planning to do Startup School this fall too? Or does this replace that? ~~~ katm We are not doing Startup School this fall. This doesn't replace Startup School - but we decided to focus on things like this, YCF, and open office hours this fall. Startup School will be back next year. ------ fhjskakaan Any plans for Cal Poly? ------ baristaGeek Are you planning something like a college world tour soon? ------ adenta huge startup community at Indiana University:Bloomington that would love this opportunity. ------ hacker_kid No stanford? ------ mspecter No MIT? ~~~ katm We visited MIT this past spring and plan to visit again soon -- just not this fall. We are doing office hours in Boston, which you're welcome to sign up for: [https://ycombinatorevents.wufoo.com/forms/y-combinator- offic...](https://ycombinatorevents.wufoo.com/forms/y-combinator-office-hours- in-boston-928929/) ------ philippnagel Too bad I'm located in Germany. ------ hacker_kid No Stanford? ------ pmalynin And Western Canada gets shafted again, nice.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
OK Go’s video, for the song “The One Moment”, took only 4.2 seconds to film - breck http://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2016/11/23/503134502/ok-gos-new-video-for-the-one-moment-is-another-mind-blower ====== sleepychu Title is inaccurate. >How long did the routine take in real time? The first three quarters of the video, from the beginning of the song until I pick up the umbrella at the a cappella breakdown, unfold over 4.2 seconds of real time. Then I lip sync in real time for about 16 seconds (we thought it was important to have a moment of human contact at this point in the song, so we returned to the realm of human experience) and we return to slow motion for the final chorus paint scene, which took a little longer than 3 seconds in real time. ~~~ midgetjones That dodgy formatting made me think you were in OK Go for a moment. ~~~ dev360 Me too. Heres link to quote: [http://okgo.net/2016/11/23/background-notes-and- full-credits...](http://okgo.net/2016/11/23/background-notes-and-full-credits- for-the-one-moment-video/) ------ stevewilhelm The background notes are pretty interesting. [http://okgo.net/2016/11/23/background-notes-and-full- credits...](http://okgo.net/2016/11/23/background-notes-and-full-credits-for- the-one-moment-video/) ~~~ kejaed "I made a motherfucker of a spreadsheet" Love it. ~~~ AceJohnny2 <div class="post-image bg-center bg-contain bg-no-repeat" data-img="" style="background-image: url("http://okgo.net/build/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spreadsheet.png"); padding-top: 57%;"></div> What ever happened to <img> elements :( ~~~ w-ll Easier to overlay other dom nodes than having a wrapper and position hacks. ~~~ tvanantwerp I recently learned of a CSS property, object-fit, than can achieve the same positioning effects as background-size for DOM elements without having to inject background-image style attributes. But, unsurprisingly, it's got no IE support. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/object- fit](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/object-fit) ------ michael_h Anybody know of a mirror? Facebook won't let me through :( Edit:: found [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvW61K2s0tA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvW61K2s0tA) Bafflingly, a search on YouTube for 'OK go the one moment' didn't turn this up for me. Bunch of ripped songs came up though. Edit 2: Ah, it's 'unlisted'. Also, I've read a few of the comments on the youtube video, so you don't have to. It's still the worst bit of the internet. ~~~ seanalltogether OK Go have listed there last couple songs on facebook first and then youtube second, i think it has something to do with preventing reuploads to facebook for sharing ------ GuiA Yet another solid example of the spreadsheet being the best programming tool for the masses there is out there ~~~ qwertyuiop924 Spreadsheets are like FORTRAN: If you have certain, specific needs, they're the best tool for the job. However, they're not the best tool in the general case, and if you learned another programming tool first, you will recoil in disgust from some of the more non-ideal uses of it. At the end of the day, though, it gets the job done. I never really learned spreadsheets, so for most of the (very simple) work I have to do that would involve spreadsheets, I use AWK. ~~~ TeMPOraL > _if you learned another programming tool first, you will recoil in disgust > from some of the more non-ideal uses of it_ Will you? I've learned plenty of programming tools and I recoil in disgust at the sight of _them_ \- of all the bullshit you need to jump through to get anything done, and the arcane (and constantly changing!) knowledge you need to have to make it work. Spreadsheets are pretty much the best tool out there for exploratory work with numbers. And because the masses don't think of it as "programming", they still build suprisingly complex models and tools within the spreadsheets, when otherwise they'd likely be scared away. Personally, I'm in a process of learning Excel in depth - the more I work with it, the more I like it. It's like a REPL for moderate-complexity data processing and visualization. ~~~ qwertyuiop924 >I've learned plenty of programming tools and I recoil in disgust at the sight of them As do I. >Spreadsheets are pretty much the best tool out there for exploratory work with numbers. That's an _ideal_ use of a spreadsheet. A _non-ideal_ use would be, say, re- inventing the RDBMS in Excel (perhaps the most common one, but there are far worse sins). >Personally, I'm in a process of learning Excel in depth I would, but I don't have the time. As I've said: with the sort of data analysis I'm doing (very little), AWK works well enough. ------ mattdeboard The interesting thing for me about this video is the math behind "scaling up" the rhythm of the song, syncing that with the "events" (popping balloon, splodin guitar, etc), so the 6000fps cameras can cut down to, idk, 500fps or something in editing and have them all reflect the actual rhythm. Pretty cool stuff ~~~ MBCook That was one thing that occurred to me while watching the video, because they keep transitioning between different speeds they can choose the transition point so that the music will continue to match up even if in real time there was a very minute timing difference that would cause a problem. I'm assuming that's how they got the various flipbooks to sync up perfectly, where the lead singers singing when they went back to real-time video for a second. I think I have all their albums, I love their videos and their music is often pretty good. I suppose I should know his name. (Edit: Damien) ~~~ tgb Note that in their FAQ they specify that they really weren't fiddling with the playback speed: it's not constant but it has a handful of discrete jumps to different rates at each part (eg: the guitars exploding versus the lip syncing are at different rates but the rate is constant within the guitars exploding). Knowing this makes it _much_ more impressive. [1] [http://okgo.net/2016/11/23/background-notes-and-full- credits...](http://okgo.net/2016/11/23/background-notes-and-full-credits-for- the-one-moment-video/) ------ ymse OK Go really do make some amazing music videos. The Rube Goldberg machine [0] one is particularily impressive. It even got its own TED talk [1]. 0: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w) 1: [https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_sadowsky_engineers_a_viral_mu...](https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_sadowsky_engineers_a_viral_music_video) ~~~ code_chimp Needing/Getting is pretty cool as well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c) ~~~ udkl It looks like they take a video first approach with their music. ~~~ jboynyc Not exactly. "The One Moment" is already over two years old. ------ sbierwagen What role did Morton Salt play, and what is #WalkHerWalk Morton Salt have recently launched a campaign to support a group of people who are bravely making a positive difference in the world. They’ve pledged funding and assistance to incredibly inspiring and effective young innovators who are tackling difficult issues like the global water crisis, the plight of young female refugees, systemic failures in arts and music education, and children’s health and wellness education. The slogan for this campaign is #WalkHerWalk, a reference to the girl in their iconic logo, and you can learn more about the innovators and the many facets of the campaign at http://MortonSalt.com/WalkHerWalk. Morton was moved by the message of “The One Moment,” and felt it captured the spirit of what they are trying to do with #WalkHerWalk, so they reached out to us and asked if we were interested in making art with their salt – a video that could fly the banner for their initiative. We were impressed with their efforts to support positive change, so we proposed this idea, and together we collaborated to bring this video to life. A beautiful and inspiring 4 minute video ad for Morton Salt. ~~~ grzm Just a friendly FYI: block-quoting long-line text makes it very hard to read, especially on mobile, due to side scrolling. ~~~ deathanatos It's for this reason that I usually use > _blockquoted text_ but even that is imperfect; is there some reason that HN doesn't support actual blockquotes? has it just not been done, or is there some objection to it? I know that perhaps egregious formatting can be detrimental, but blockquotes seem to be one of those formatting things that is extremely useful in discourse… ~~~ grzm Agreed. I've been using italics myself. I'm not sure the reason behind the quoting limitations. Just using what I have available. ------ lukeholder You can see that the first flipbook has a digital overlay mask for the sync of the mouth video to the words. See his right hand fingers. ~~~ teraflop Yeah, there's definitely a lot more manipulation than they admit to. Around 1:50-2:00, a guy is turning a crank that flips the pages of another flipbook, but the pages keep turning at the same speed even while the speed of the crank changes dramatically. Also, the apparent lack of regard for personal safety irks me a little. Wear some eye protection, dudes! ~~~ cs2818 From the behind the scenes video [0] it looks like safety was taken into consideration (though the final edited product doesn't make this obvious). [0] [http://okgo.net/2016/11/23/the-one-moment- bts/](http://okgo.net/2016/11/23/the-one-moment-bts/) ~~~ wikibob Here's the robotic camera control arm they used which you can see in the BTS video. [http://www.cameracontrol.com/equipment/bolt/](http://www.cameracontrol.com/equipment/bolt/) ------ jszymborski It seems like it's only released on FB, which is a shame because even with their "HD" option on, I feel like I'm being transported back to YouTube circa 2008. Holy crud is the quality awful on FB videos, really undermines the work they did here. ~~~ CaptSpify [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvW61K2s0tA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvW61K2s0tA) It's unlisted on YT for some reason ------ jboynyc Whenever I hear an OK Go song (or see one of their amazing videos), I have to remember the appearance of Damien Kulash at the Aaron Swartz memorial at the Cooper Union Great Hall. "Everybody's heart's breaking now..." Very moving. ------ piracyde25 Any other bands (or music videos) that does this sort of thing? I am ready to love them! ~~~ bertiewhykovich The Pharcyde's video for "The Drop" was filmed entirely in reverse. They apparently worked with a linguist to work out mouth movements that would sync to the lyrics when played backwards. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co3qMdkucM0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co3qMdkucM0) It's a really cool effect -- except for a few bits where objects fall upwards and the like, there's nothing too strikingly "off" about the motion in the video, but you can tell that something's up. It doesn't form an uncanny valley, though -- there's still an overarching "organic" feeling to the thing. ~~~ elmigranto I was pretty impressed by «2 guys 600 pillows»: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=01TL9bUWr6I](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=01TL9bUWr6I) ~~~ mlok It reminds me of this old french show, they once played a scene (live) backwards. So funny and amazing : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Noy0DdjG3FI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Noy0DdjG3FI) ------ cyberferret I didn't think they could top the 'Zero Gravity' clip, but indeed they did... indeed they did! ------ amelius Personally, I think this clip looks almost as boring as a screensaver. But then again, I might not be the target audience. ------ xyzzy4 OK Go needs good videos to compensate for the music quality. ------ debt tech makes music cool sometimes ------ mccoyspace with integrated sponsorship. "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" ------ oolongCat HN and GO(lang) has ruined me. Every-time I see "Go" my brain tries to think Golang. ~~~ rounce Why all the downvotes? His (dis)position is legitimate nonetheless. ~~~ catshirt probably because there is no way anyone could read the title of this post and think they are referring to a programming language ... ------ beefman No video appears in latest Firefox Mac. Also, blogspam. Official link is [https://www.facebook.com/okgo/videos/10153836041340683/](https://www.facebook.com/okgo/videos/10153836041340683/) (which is notable for not being at YouTube...) ~~~ dang I think the article adds enough context to the video that it's ok for it to be here. No one who wants to watch the video will have trouble finding it. We did replace the baity title with the article's first sentence. (That's in accordance with the HN guideline that asks to not use original titles when they're clickbait.) ------ qwertyuiop924 ...and in related news, water continues to flow downhill. ~~~ rosstex What planet are you on? ~~~ qwertyuiop924 ...The one where OK Go consistantly puts out amazing music videos. Which one are you on? ~~~ MBCook So we should just ignore it? ~~~ qwertyuiop924 ...No, but a comment about the consistancy is wholly deserved, imho.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Facebook in legal fight for its future - wumi http://www.mercurynews.com/businessheadlines/ci_9682260 ====== falsestprophet "The worst case scenario is that Facebook doesn't own its core code and that it's been using someone else's code for the foundation of its company. That could lead to damages that are catastrophic," said Eric Goldman, assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law and director of SCU's High Tech Law Institute. "In the worst case scenario, this could be a fight for Facebook's life." I am pretty shocked that Silicon Valley's most prominent newspaper is so helplessly uninformed.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Piranha: An Open Source Tool to Automatically Delete Stale Code - vinnyglennon https://eng.uber.com/piranha/ ====== ublaze One of our internal experimentation systems handles this by capping rollouts to 95%. So the author is forced to clean up their code if they want a full rollout. ~~~ ThouYS I'm sorry, but I don't entirely get this. Does it mean that after I've finished something I want to merge, I have to remove 5% of that? Or of the entire code base? Or something completely different? ~~~ rkangel I think they're saying that any new feature controlled by a flag is only rolled out to a maximum of 95% of the user base. To make sure it gets rolled out to 100% you have to remove the flag controlling it (and therefore the old version of the code). ------ iandinwoodie Here is the link to the Piranha repo since I didn't see it mentioned in the article: [https://github.com/uber/piranha](https://github.com/uber/piranha) ------ ginko Wouldn't "nibblefish" be a more apt name for this? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_garra#Relationship_with_hu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_garra#Relationship_with_humans) ------ ResidentSleeper A while ago I deleted my Uber/UberEats account (they didn't make it easy btw) because of how utterly unusable their apps were compared to competition. After me and my girlfriend spent 30 minutes trying to order food on 3 different platforms, which has been a repeated experience with them for years, I decided it's time to give up. Same obvious UI/UX bugs as over a year ago - I'm actually dumbfounded at how this is possible, _do they even use their own app_? To sum up, I tend to look at tech coming from Uber through a somewhat sarcastic lens these days. ~~~ nyanpasu64 Try rooting your phone and installing a CPU monitor like [https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.eolwral.osmonitor/](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.eolwral.osmonitor/) . Then watch for apps burning CPU in the background. Uber might show up _wink_. ------ ramraj07 Can someone point to a good write-up on how to introduce and start using feature flags in a repo? Seems like I just can't find any good resources on this topic! ~~~ sulZ If you're looking to try it out in a simple way, you could probably dynamically load different functionality or modules with environment variables. But I'm also looking for a good resource ~~~ dabeeeenster Hi - we're developing a 100% open source feature flagging platform that can achieve this - [https://bullet-train.io/](https://bullet-train.io/) \- would love feedback! ------ RickJWagner It sounds pretty fancy. I'd want a very thorough set of unit tests before trusting code to delete code, though. ~~~ lazaroclapp Piranha co-author here. I'd say you trust it a bit more than we do, then ;) As the paper and blog post mention, we use Piranha to create diffs/PRs against the original author of the code. Developers are expected to code-review the changes before they are ever landed. As used within Uber, Piranha won't ever auto-land code deletions. That still saves the time of: a) remembering that the flag is stale and must be removed, b) actually removing the code and putting the diff up. Piranha diffs for a single flag are also generally small enough to fully read them during code review. We do have comprehensive unit tests for both the Piranha tool and the target codebase(s), and the majority (65%) of diffs generated by Piranha are landed without changes (and the most common change in those that are changed is to delete extra lines that Piranha couldn't prove as stale). Thus far we haven't had an outage caused by a Piranha deletion, but certainly there have been incorrect diffs generated and caught either by CI or manual reviewers, requiring us to update the tool. We would not recommend landing diffs generated by Piranha - or other stale code removal tools - to master without any reviews right now :) ~~~ victords Follow up question: In general, when a diff is generated, is the standard process to just do a manual code-review and CI, or do you also test it manually to check for unexpected side-effects? ~~~ mkr-plse Manual code review and CI only. In our experience of deleting more than 2.5K flags, testing would have helped in one case but then the code was not tested well when the flag was introduced. ~~~ lazaroclapp Just as an extra note: there are manual testing steps (and automated end-to- end test, and internal alpha test, etc), independent of whether the diff was Piranha- or developer-authored, but all those happen for the continuous delivery internal version of the app, which is after the diff has been landed to master, but before a release is sent to app stores. We would count an issue discovered there as an outage having made past "our tests", even though it could well be caught before it gets to any external users. ------ X6S1x6Okd1st Neat! I experimented with something similar and found the state of java AST transformers to be in a kind of painful state. I'll have to look though the code base to see what y'all used. ~~~ lazaroclapp We used Google's Error Prone framework. Pros: you get full compiler symbol/type information, in addition to the AST. Cons: you need to build the code to process it (Error Prone runs as a javac plugin), and if you want to do things efficiently then you are restricted to basically a single AST traversal. It's very use-case dependent whether you are better off just using e.g. javaparser. ------ bluesign If I am not mistaken this tool requires technical debt to begin with. I think more important part is what caused this debt to begin with. In my opinion it lies in the implementation of feature flags. ~~~ another-dave Can you expand a bit on what you mean here? How would you introduce feature flags in a way that doesn't leave any debt behind in contrast to their approach? Or are you saying that feature flags themselves are inheritly debt-generating (which I think they acknowledge, but are taking it on prudently & deliberately) — in which case, what would you do instead? ~~~ bluesign Actually what I meant was this tool is kind of a after thought of bad feature flag life cycle. When you set a feature flag, normally you should put a deadline on it, after this deadline, you should either choose to keep it, or remove it or you can extend the deadline. But seems like they accumulated a lot of flags, which stayed stale over time, and went unchecked and lack of feedback created the debt. Also unrelated but I prefer 2 stages for retirement of flags, from production and from code. From the example in the article. Instead of using direct access to: experiments.isTreated(RIDES_NEW_FEATURE) I think it is better to indirectly refer this from a function like (considering we are in context of RIDES module/class): function isNewFeatureEnabled(){ return experiments.isTreated(RIDES_NEW_FEATURE) } So when you want to retire this flag to disable new feature but want to keep code for some time (for few versions), but don't want to bloat your binary you can simply do: function isNewFeatureEnabled(){ return FALSE } ~~~ lazaroclapp > When you set a feature flag, normally you should put a deadline on it, after > this deadline, you should either choose to keep it, or remove it or you can > extend the deadline. This is actually a feature we did identify as important to have in order to increase Piranha's effectiveness, and it is being added to our internal flag tracking, but it doesn't negate the need for the tool. An expiration date makes it easier for the tool to know when to run on a given feature (rather than using heuristics based on % rollout and days without changing the experiment), it still means that Piranha: a) reduces manual effort by auto- generating the (candidate) removal patch, and b) acts as the reminder portion for the expiration, so it's more actionable than just adding a task. The thing to note is that, even on a steady state where flags are removed as soon as they go stale, enough new experiments are being created every day that reducing the time spent cleaning them up is valuable. Also, you definitely don't want to block someone from fixing a crash because they have pending expired flags, so all you can really do with any expiration policy is to remind them. With Piranha, you are reminding them _and_ reducing the friction to solve the issue. After all, the diff is right there for them to review and click 'land' on. As for the hardcoded flag value in your example above? What does that accomplish? It looks to me like you'd only be shipping dead code, since there is no runtime way of re-enabling the `RIDES_NEW_FEATURE` behavior (which is the main difference between "rolled 100%" vs "Piranha-removed"). It also makes harder to remove the related code later, since the semantic information about it being part of the feature is lost. If it's just about having the old code available, then version control does that already, no? What am I missing? ~~~ bluesign I am in favor of all automation and I totally agree that the tool is valuable. I am sorry if my comments seemed on other direction. What I was trying to say was basically, without tooling also you can manage the debt from feature flags. Answer to the RIDES_NEW_FEATURE question is about "you definitely don't want to block someone from fixing a crash because they have pending expired flags" mainly. When I am disabling a flag, if I set isNewFeatureEnabled to False, basically, I am removing bloat instantly. Then when I have time to review the code I can also remove the dead code. Actually this is fixing the concerns in your blog post about "accidental activation" and "bloat" without waiting developers to fix the code. Piranha can set flag to stale value, then later can send the developer task to fix the dead code. My flow is little bit more complicated then I replied actually, I have also assets etc related to feature flags. CI pipeline also removing non-used assets for that flag when it is stale. So basically I have more like: function isNewFeatureEnabled { return isFlagEnabled(flag) && getFlagValue("RIDES_NEW_FEATURE") } What I am curious on this topic, do you have any kind of conflict detection for your feature flags? ~~~ mkr-plse BTW, we also have a tech publication at [https://github.com/uber/piranha/blob/master/report.pdf](https://github.com/uber/piranha/blob/master/report.pdf) where we discuss some of the design tradeoffs pertaining to the stale flag cleanup problem. Can you elaborate on what you mean by conflict detection? Are you trying to understand how flags are dependent on each other? ~~~ bluesign Thanks a lot, I will read it asap. Basically sometimes I have some conflicting flags that can introduce bugs. Especially some rarely used flag and a new feature. Basic example, 2 different flags, setting same property to different values on an UI object. Although more testing coverage probably can help, but I am curious, if you have some automation to detect those cases. ~~~ mkr-plse Interesting. We don't have tooling for this yet but extending the Piranha static analysis may help detect the issue. ------ unnameduser1 It relies heavily on feature flags. Makes sense for big systems with lots of feature flags. However it works for now only with Java, Swift, or Objective-C Code. Check it out if your projects fit those two conditions ------ clumsysmurf > Currently implemented for Objective-C, Swift, and Java programs Are Uber's Android apps written in Java? I would have thought they would be Kotlin. ~~~ lazaroclapp Most of the existing Android codebase is Java. There is some Kotlin code, and PiranhaKotlin is certainly in the roadmap somewhere but, especially when the goal is removing older features, Java makes the lion share of the use case for such a tool right now. ------ awinter-py this seems to work by comparing feature flag configs I've always been a buyer of tools to make runtime stats available in the IDE would be awesome to overlay trace / route timing _into the codebase_ on whatever part of the call graph is on the screen ------ abjecton So it's like Gilfoyle's anton but it only deletes stale code	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Twitter Halts User Verification Process, Saying It's ‘Broken’ - Varcht https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-09/twitter-halts-user-verification-process-saying-it-s-broken ====== msravi Hmm.. if they claim that the blue tick is the sign of a verified account (not an important or exclusive account), then they should simply open up the verification process for everyone - not just important people. Ask for proof that you are who you claim you are in the twitter handle and lock down the handle and identity description from any changes once verified. ------ LeoJiWoo The verification process should really be for everybody. Nowadays trolls or bots go after anybody and everybody with fake almost libelous accounts. I suspect they have more important things going on after deactivating President's Twitter by a disgruntled employee. Then the increasing the tweet character limit also seems like a bad move. I'm really questioning leadership at twitter. I don't mean Jack alone,since I doubt he is responsible for everything. ------ SpikeDad I guess it took verifying a racist nazi and the ensuing lambasting of Twitter to get them to "review" the process. Funny how that's what it takes for Twitter and Facebook to ever change. You'd think less horrific mistakes would get their attention sooner? Not that this was the worst mistake they made this week - that would be increasing the tweet character limit. ~~~ orionblastar I remember if you have a common name, that a celebrity also has, it is a better chance that they flag you as a troll or spammer and make you enter a cell phone number to verify your account.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
HTML to CMS - saoronxxx http://vemo.me ====== saoronxxx For a test drive : [http://vemo.me/html2cms](http://vemo.me/html2cms) ------ saoronxxx This platform will take 70% of valid HTML5 templates and will convert it to a super easy CMS just like that..	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Switchboard Is Like Craigslist Without the Creeps and Flakes - seanslerner http://www.wired.com/2014/08/switchboard/ ====== kazinator When I navigate to switchboardhq.com, it wants my browser to run Javascript from about ten different sites (as reported by the NoScript FF extension). Yuck! Craigslist only requires Javascript from one domain: their own. That is refreshingly clean, man. You know what other site is like that? This one! HN only references ycombinator.com for scripts. I don't want to have to create an account and go through some incubation stage to first prove that I'm not a creep or flake, so please can I finally sell that cabinet now! I don't want to send myself an invite to "start a switchboard" whatever that means. I want to post an ad, now, this minute, and have that thing gone by seven tonight if possible.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
While we're on the subject of Rails security, should this be of concern? - rubypay https://github.com/search?q=Application.config.secret_token&repo=&langOverride=&start_value=1&type=Code&language=Ruby ====== skimbrel I presume this is not strictly a Rails problem. You can check in things that shouldn't be checked in with any language/framework. If you _have_ done this, here's how to fix it: <http://help.github.com/remove- sensitive-data/> ~~~ kevinpet Better is to change your security token and expire all sessions. Removing sensitive data should be seen as just a suggestion. Google never forgets. ------ antics Before we all grab our pitchforks, I have just gone through the entire first page of results and a huge majority of them were explicitly noted as test applications. Sometimes you can see this in the names: test / rails_app_v3 / test_app / config In many other instances, things are not as the seem. For example, some of these results come from commits where the author is moving the token to an environment variable. For example: [https://github.com/cimm/blathy/blob/2d3a9550d3a0be55db8e26a2...](https://github.com/cimm/blathy/blob/2d3a9550d3a0be55db8e26a25f959a891dee1bcf/config/initializers/secret_token.rb) I certainly agree that we should all be security conscious, but I'm also a fan of keeping perspective. Things are bad, but let's keep the truth in mind too. ~~~ TazeTSchnitzel Also, for the ones that were not test apps, they may be the testing/development secret keys which are different from the production secret keys. I do this myself, where the hash salt and API keys for my local development server are different from those I use on my production server. ------ 5h Not just rails, same for django ([https://github.com/search?q=SECRET_KEY&repo=&langOve...](https://github.com/search?q=SECRET_KEY&repo=&langOverride=&start_value=1&type=Code&language=Python)) and I imagine any framework with this sort of thing in their default project skeleton ------ justindocanto This is not a language/framework based issue. This is an issue with careless and/or uneducated developers. This is like people storing plain text passwords in publicly readable txt files on a server. It's not a problem with FTP, HTML, Apache (pick anything you'd like) it's a problem with people making poor decisions. ------ bradleyland Flagged. This is just ridiculous. I actually support Egor, but this borders on absurd. The question is stated incorrectly. The actual question is: "Is storing your _private_ key in a public repository a security concern?" It's a parody of a security question. This is a needless distraction in an important discussion. ------ oscardelben Could this help? <https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5286> ------ manojlds Soon, there will be articles on how insecure Git is because, well, it allows people to check-in sensitive stuff. ------ yuvadam Not really. At least not in the way you are insinuating. ------ zbuc Facebook as well... [https://github.com/search?q=FB_SECRET&repo=&langOver...](https://github.com/search?q=FB_SECRET&repo=&langOverride=&start_value=1&type=Code&language=) Not really a "vulnerability" because you can't keep stupid people from giving out their secret key. ------ AznHisoka The solution is simple. Don't use a secret token :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Illusion of Life: Disney's principles of animation - mike_h http://the12principles.tumblr.com/ ====== GuiA Those animation principles absolutely apply in UI work, and I wish digital designers were more exposed to it. There is still a lot to be explored with what can be done with quality animation in UIs, and digital designers should absolutely pay attention to this. If you're a designer, doing motion well will do wonders to your career. Motion has always been extremely important, but with the faster processors and GPUs we have in our mobile phones we finally have the extra cycles for it - Apple's latest iOS does really well on that front (far from perfect of course, but they're trying really hard and getting places). It's no coincidence that UIDynamics shipped with iOS7. CSS3 brings its lot of cool things too. Also no coincidence is that Apple and Pixar grew very close together - a lot of OSX's charm comes from subtle and delightful animation (genie effect, apps bouncing on the dock, etc.) that Windows didn't even try doing until Vista. Relevant article: [http://watchingapple.com/2007/06/are-apple-ui-designers- lear...](http://watchingapple.com/2007/06/are-apple-ui-designers-learning- from-pixar/) I've been maintaining a blog where I document animations that I find particularly interesting: [http://www.ui-animations.com](http://www.ui- animations.com) (no throbber/loading spinners, those are very rarely interesting from an animation standpoint, even though they may be cute from a graphic design point of view). For the more academic minded of us, I like this CHI 1995 paper: [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=974941&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=974941&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE) (ACM paywall, but Google Scholar is your friend. Also, you should get an ACM membership- it's really worth it and will make you a better computing professional) ~~~ applecore Can you recommend any high-level libraries to incorporate motion into web UIs? It's annoying to work directly with CSS3 animations. ~~~ puppetmaster3 #1 by far: GSAP! Lots if not most award winning stuff w/ them, ex, spend a few minutes on [http://intothearctic.gp](http://intothearctic.gp) It makes famo.us look like the 80s. ~~~ malandrew There's nothing inherently special about Into The Arctic that isn't easy to accomplish in both famo.us and GSAP, so I can only conclude that you haven't really used famo.us (which would be understandable since it's only been available publicly for 3 weeks now). The reason I find the tone of your post interesting is because we just hired someone two weeks ago who has been using GSAP professionally and sees much more promise in what we're doing. Personally I haven't used GSAP enough to render an opinion, so I use his decisions as proxy until I can give GSAP the attention it deserves. Furthermore, no regular HNer who values the high quality of discourse on this site would say something like "It makes famo.us look like the 80s." That's kindergarten playground smack talking. So, given the tone of your post, do you have any conflicts of interest or biases you should be disclosing to the HN community? Mine are obvious. I work at famo.us. total karma 80, average karma per post 0.39. That helps be better consider the value of your contribution, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Besides any conflicts of interest, how long have you been using GSAP and how long have you been using famo.us? ~~~ puppetmaster3 (Rather than your personal attack or your self importance, lets focus on the discussion instead of redirection, m'k.) Let me underline a stark fact: GSAP can and is used by designers. Famo.us is used by programmers, so it is not a fair fight, designers writer nicer and more creative UI, end of story. Look at Swing apps, they lost out to Web due to programer UI. Famo.us took too long to develop and the window is now closed shut, that is my prediction. That is the footnote to famo.us investors, too long, too many pivots. Ads are being done in GSAP, google IO ([http://www.google.com/events/io](http://www.google.com/events/io) ) is GSAP, etc. due to works with existing flow. It's true that something done in GSAP by designer quickly, could be re-done in Famo.us by a programmer later, but it won't be. And games won't be done in Famou.us either, it does not work w/ models, or modelers, but a game engine like [http://typescript.away3d.com](http://typescript.away3d.com) does. Famo.us is interesting and fun tech experiment, but it will be the market development (lean) that decides, not me. Famo.us are behind in the market and way slow development velocity to pivot again. I am a techie and root for such, but famo.us is an example that makes techies look bad, a solution w/o a problem, as just chasing a tech w/o market. I did start out liking famo.us when it first came up, but moved on after the long delays. There are positive examples of techies aligned with a market, that is what we need. Anyway, I just made a prediction of your market, lets it in 2 more years. ~~~ malandrew Famo.us took too long to develop and the window is now closed shut, that is my prediction. Famo.us is interesting and fun tech experiment, but it will be the market development (lean) that decides, not me. Famo.us are behind in the market and way slow development velocity to pivot again. I'm not going to make a prediction myself, since I have a dog in this fight, but you're just spreading FUD and Github can back me up on this. As of today, Sunday May, 4, 2014, GSAP JS libs [0] have 1265 stars and 226 forks, 1 open issue and 35 closed issues. The famous github repo [1], which has been publicly available for 3-4 weeks has 3229 stars, 404 forks, 38 open issues and 119 closed issues (main repo and submodules combined). That's hardly a textbook case of "window [of opportunity] is now closed shut". In fact, in light of this new evidence, you may want to re-evaluate if you are on the right side of the decision being made by the market. Being first doesn't matter. Google wasn't the first search engine, nor was Facebook the first social network. In fact the market is littered with the bodies of first movers. And games won't be done in Famou.us either, it does not work w/ models, or modelers, but a game engine like http://typescript.away3d.com does. FWIW, One of the main creators of [redacted quantity] top 40 highest grossing video games of all times is exploring famous for his next game. Again, one of my questions still stands, have you even used famo.us? Yes or no? Also, what do java swing apps have to do with famous and GSAP? [0] [https://github.com/greensock/GreenSock- JS](https://github.com/greensock/GreenSock-JS) [1] [https://github.com/famous/famous](https://github.com/famous/famous) ~~~ puppetmaster3 I'll wish you good luck. Please post websites, webapps or games built w/ famo.us when they are. The personal thing of yours, you must work for GSAP and now something else, is not a good approach to evangelize your brand. I gave you specific example where you'll fail: no workflow for designers or modelers. Famo.us was early as it relates to your example, but chose not to release. What year were your first showing those cool videos? Famo.us chose not to do customer development apparently. How do I import a model? ex: [http://kurst.co.uk/samples/awayts/tests/?test=js/Intermediat...](http://kurst.co.uk/samples/awayts/tests/?test=js/Intermediate_PerelithKnight.js) Most if not all WbGL work w/ Maya, Blender, etc. One game may be written in famo.us? m'k. A few of classic mistakes. Please be open to learn the lesson of a solution looking for a problem w/ $5M ( [http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/famo- us](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/famo-us) ). The investors made a mistake, it happens. ~~~ malandrew The personal thing of yours, you must work for GSAP and now something else, is not a good approach to evangelize your brand. I normally calmly address negative points people point out (there are some and they are being addressed), but that's not how you began the conversation at all. Instead you began with the comment "It makes famo.us look like the 80s." and no further content backing up that claim. When I challenged on your initial claim, I did so because I knew it could only be rooted in ignorance (i.e. never actually used famo.us) since the people I know who have spent time with both don't hold such beliefs. My other comments on this thread were there to evangelize a tech product that I work on because it has merit. My comments to you are rooted in no such thing. Instead they are rooted in responding to behavior that is not forthcoming of mature intelligent discussion on HN. I've been in this community for a long time and participate regularly. I care very deeply about it and hate it when people treat it like reddit and lower the quality of discourse. With that in mind, my replies were my own and were composed on behalf of Hacker News and not my employer. It's not different than when a wikipedian challenges an obviously bogus claim on the talk page or with a "citation needed" superscript. If you want to judge the a piece of technology based on my comments, you are free to do so (despite being very poor methodology). If you don't use famous, because of those replies, that's unfortunate for us both. However, if next time you comment on HN on any topic and choose to give pause and give more thought and consideration to what you write instead of mindless fanboi-ism, I will have considered it a worthy sacrifice. Regarding the criticisms of the workflow. You're 100% correct. We don't have a workflow for designers or modelers. It's simply not ready for consumption by audiences who can't code. FWIW, our plan is to build out towards those audiences layer by layer since doing so keeps our platform far more extensible and usable by many audiences. If you built out for designers on day one, it's very hard to really be able to then build out lower level foundational APIs. If you instead take a unix philosophy approach, you can build out layer by layer like an onion and each layer can be made of composable parts. This means that we'll eventually have a layer that makes it very easy to build out the designer tools on top. Not only that, whichever developers (in the company or from the community) build out the layers for designers and modelers, will be working at a higher level of abstraction that affords them more flexibility and speed when creating need features and exploring different directions. Apple only achieved what they did with UIKit for iOS and AppKit for OS X because they had a very robust base called FoundationKit, that is built on top of Darwin/BSD. If you play the short game and satisfy higher level customers instead of building out the right code infrastructure, you are more likely to create a platform that is short-lived and can't stand the test of time. Also, by building out for developers first, you create a community that can magnify your capabilities and reach since your initial core community has the skills to contribute back to the commons. If you skip this group, then you are on the hook for the majority of improvements to your platform because someone needs to be a senior developer to understand the code base all the way down to the lower levels. One day we may have something that works for Maya or Blender. That day isn't today, and people who cannot code and need a capability like importing a model, should definitely go with GSAP. If on the other hand they can code, then they may find famo.us to be the more interesting platform. There's no silver bullet. Given the number of forks, followers and activity in the community so far, we think we've made the right decision by going developer first. It's not really possible to make the judgement of "a few classic mistakes" until you've made an effort to understand the end-game. For example, if GSAP wanted to build out a true platform, then building out to designers and modelers first, IMHO represents "a few classic mistakes", but that's not their product and not their market, so they've done a great job in reaching that market today. I wish we could serve that market today, but we've made a conscious decision to play the long game here. We don't think we're a solution looking for a problem, and given the play that smart investors[0] are looking for, we're pretty well positioned [0]. [0] [https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/462476067463102465](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/462476067463102465) ~~~ puppetmaster3 We are going in circles. You need to realize that just because someone disagrees with you does not mean that they are a bad community member. I'm not getting paid for essays or to PR. I predict your corp will fail, prove me wrong. You agree that ad/agencies won't use it as it does not work for designers, game companies won't use it as it does not work with model pipeline. I repeat that should you guys fail, it makes other tech founders look bad to other investors, and that affects me. You should have done lean process. ------ pdenya Very cool animations and most fit the principals nicely but there's very little info on this page. I found the wikipedia page helpful and relevant - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_basic_principles_of_animatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_basic_principles_of_animation) ------ huxley I'm not generally a big Disney person but the books on animation theory from them that I've bought are quite enjoyable. There is book that the linked-to animation is based on: The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Frank Thomas Two other Disney animation resources that I've picked up over the years include: * The 2 volumes of Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes by Walt Stanchfield * Walt Disney Animation Studios: The Archive Series in 4 volumes: Story (about storyboards not writing), Animation, Design, and Layout & Background I haven't seen the flip books they released recently for each of Disney's "Nine Old Men" but it sounds interesting. ~~~ GuiA I own all of the books mentioned above, as well as the flipbooks. They're really great, but you have to have a certain appreciation of animation beforehand to enjoy the details. It's really just the flipbooks - no accompanying text or anything. It gives you great insight into how talented animators animated certain movements, but you have to know what to look out for. Not Disney, but the Animator's Survival Kit is also heavily recommended. Also recommended: Timing for Animation. I also have been meaning to check out "Elemental Magic" (2 volumes, about animating substances such as water, fire, etc.), and "Setting the Scene". /signed a computer scientist who wishes he can retire and attend CalArts on his startup millions ;) ------ braveheart1723 This is the greatest resource on animation I've found By Richard Williams [http://www.theanimatorssurvivalkit.com/](http://www.theanimatorssurvivalkit.com/) ~~~ Kiro So you would say it's worth the price? ($959.50) ~~~ Htsthbjig Obviously it depends on what you do for a living. If you are an animation pro, $1000 could be even cheap if you earn way more money thanks to it. ~~~ braveheart1723 Sorry, a friend got me the book and videos so had no idea how expensive they were... Guess I have just found out I have a good friend :) here are some excerpts from the videos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbtbbdA4kUM&list=PL1A1FEDA47...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbtbbdA4kUM&list=PL1A1FEDA47ADC18D4) also the book is also amazing [http://www.amazon.com/The-Animators-Survival-Kit- Principles/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Animators-Survival-Kit- Principles/dp/086547897X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1399122684&sr=8-1&keywords=animator+survival) and only $30 if you need any excerpts or advice on this stuff, tweet me @jonathanmatthey happy to help :D ------ aspidistra For great examples of these principles in videogames, see World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (1992) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Illusion_Starring_Mick...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Illusion_Starring_Mickey_Mouse_and_Donald_Duck) and Disney's Aladdin (1993) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27s_Aladdin_(video_game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27s_Aladdin_$video_game$) ------ Tloewald There are two editions of the book which is a masterpiece (the longer edition is intended for serious animators). If you have any interest in animation you owe it to yourself to grab a copy. I don't think that two of the principles are dealt with well in the animations — staging and pose-to-pose. The morphs are too subtle to really illustrate the principle well. (The elegance of animating a cube for each principle is fantastic.) ------ 1stexp There is a video that goes along with this: [http://www.centolodigiani.com/117722/3078861/work/the- illusi...](http://www.centolodigiani.com/117722/3078861/work/the-illusion-of- life) ------ ulisesrmzroche Hey, nice. This was one my favorite books in film school! Also, 'In The Blink of An Eye' by Walter Murch. ------ taigeair Very neat. Not really sure how to appy this though. ~~~ qwerty_asdf Do you need to present a series of images in rapid sequence, to the user, in a seamless manner, evocative of a particular concept? ------ timdiggerm The fake film-dirt noise is really silly.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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