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Who’s Been Accessing Your Facebook Account? - knaox http://marketaire.com/2011/02/01/whos-been-accessing-your-facebook-account/ ====== kalpeshjoshi Is there a super secret feature which keeps ol Mark Zuckerberg from accessing my info?! But on the whole, good info to know about finding out other devices who may be accessing your account. ~~~ knaox Basically, no, haha. They should have a 'bubble' option, but then their advertising system wouldn't work. Wouldn't that be a shame? ------ jefe78 Cool stuff! When will they institute a, "Clean Break" feature to purge 100% of your data? ~~~ knaox This definitely won't happen. But hey, at least they don't sell your data, they just tell advertisers to come to them if they want to use it. ------ zdw The "Device Type" on this is horribly inaccurate, in my experience. My MBP with Safari 5 is always recorded as "Opera 10 on Windows XP", everywhere but the "Most Recent Activity" field, which is correct. ~~~ knaox Weird. I honestly don't know how that gets messed up, it would be interesting to find out how they're pulling the information. Works well over here..for now, haha.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Beware of those who say they help entrepreneurs - abarrera http://alwaysnewmistakes.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/beware-of-those-who-say-they-help-entrepreneurs/ ====== mixmax This sounds eerily similar to the so-called startupscene in Denmark. The events revolve around bankers, bureaucrats, lawyers and consultants trying to make a buck off the entrepreneurs. This is an evil spiral since nobody knows what the heck they're talking about, and drain the few startups of the money and resources they've got. The result is that there are very few startups that succeed, thus fuelling more of the same bullshit with the state giving grants to entrepreneurship events and programs that are promtly sweeped up by aforementioned consultants and lawyers. And the state keeps pouring money into the black hole not understanding why the new Google doesn't emerge. Two years ago Ernst and Young's highly publizised entrepreneur of the year in Denmark managed to give the first prize to a company which _two days_ after the event was exposed as one of the biggest frauds in Danish history. A few years earlier the prize was given to a company with 500 employees that was founded in 1956. I stopped going to these events years ago - they're a total waste of time. It's a structural problem - if there aren't any successful entrepreneurs there's noone to turn for for guidance, no capable investors and no role models. Which of course leads to even less successful entrepreneurs. Maybe this is a European problem? ~~~ pmjordan _Maybe this is a European problem?_ I think so. Some Europeans don't like to be thrown into the "Europe" pot ("but we're so diverse!") but it seems we're pretty united on this point of entrepreneurial un-culture. All across the continent, business plans, consulting companies, etc. are mistaken for entrepreneurialism. Everywhere I look, governments think the solution is throwing ever more complex grant programmes and sponsored bullshit events at the problem. The established players and the lawyers egg them on of course, as they're only the ones who can afford to benefit from all this stuff. Personally, I think the best thing the government could do is to get the hell out of my face. I'm discriminated against (in Austria) for healthcare compared to the employed and the unemployed. (I have to pay for insurance and social security whether I made any money that quarter or not; I _then_ have to pay 20% of my healthcare bills. Employees pay a percentage of their monthly salary and nothing else; of course they also get paid sick leave) I pay _more_ income tax (employee bonuses are taxed at 6% - my lowest tax rate is 36.5%; it's tradition, and in some cases _law_ , for employees to get 2 months' salary as a bonus). I'm forced into _paid_ membership of useless interest groups which are just extensions of the political parties. Sure, I could try to apply for grants. Except for startups the main expense is the cost of living of founders (most of which turns out to be taxes...). And guess what, that's not considered a valid expense for tax relief. Plus, the grant wouldn't cover the lawyers' fees anyway, let alone the amount of time I'd spend chasing after it. Hiring people is super difficult and _very_ expensive for startups. Most seem to employ their staff as perpetual freelancers because the rules (and taxes) are so arcane. I'd guess that doesn't exactly make them attractive to potential hires, so you're losing out on talent. It's better in the UK to a degree. (shame about the weather...) The bureaucracy is much less (there's a reason UK Limited Companies are popular in the rest of the EU). Still, at my (UK) university, we still had all the bullshit business plan competitions. But they seem to have those at Harvard, too... ~~~ joshhart The funny thing about business plan competitions is how often the "failures" turn out to be massive successes. The one I know of best is Raising Cane's chicken fingers. The business plan was given a C- and then the founders went fishing in Alaska to make the money for the downpayment. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_Canes_Chicken_Fingers> ~~~ metageek I was once told (in 1987) that the business plan for FedEx had been developed for a class, and it got a C because the professor believed nobody needed overnight delivery. ~~~ vietor Obligatory snopes link: <http://www.snopes.com/business/origins/fedex.asp> Summary: The rough idea of using centralized switching for parcel routing was in a paper for a class, but not much else. Key quote: "in a 2002 interview Smith acknowledged that "I don't really remember what grade I got. I probably didn't get a very good one, though, because it wasn't a well-thought-out paper."" ~~~ metageek Thanks. ------ quanticle The author makes a lot of good points. Its true that a lot of the officials who claim to be attempting to help entrepreneurs don't have any entrepreneurial experience themselves and that hurts their ability to help. Unfortunately, the random bolding of words really detracts from the content of the author's writing. ~~~ abarrera hehe, English isn't my first language, but I'll try to keep it to the point next time :) Thanks for the comment though!! :D ~~~ acangiano You mean blogese isn't your first language. ;-) The commenter above was referring to the abuse of <strong> tags. ~~~ abarrera ah damn, my bad, hehe well, I know a lot of people that do fast reading and having it in bold makes this easier, but yeah, maybe this time I over exceeded myself :P ~~~ vietor Could you clarify what you mean by "fast reading"? I read very quickly and it was like speedbumps for my eyes. If the article hadn't been short enough to fit on one screen I think I would have been annoyed enough to not finish it. ~~~ abarrera <http://www.copyblogger.com/the-10-second-rule/> Not that I used that, but I'm a diagonal reader myself and I do appreciate the bold parts. But as I said before, there are 2 things that don't work too well, which is, the current blog theme isn't great and too much bold parts on my side. ~~~ vietor Interesting, thank you. It got me thinking about and paying attention to how I read things, and that I will read them very differently depending on the source. Articles linked from HN fall into the 'fast but linear' category. Maybe if I'd ran across your article form a source I give less weight to the bold wouldn't have bothered me ... ------ robfitz Same deal with folks who introduce themselves as professional startup advisors. Be wary! The best ones seem to have tons of interesting stuff going in their lives already and just enjoy helping out young companies when they're in a position to do so. ~~~ ryanhuff True. There are people who invest a lot of time proclaiming their entrepreneurial advocacy in public forums. I have a hard time distinguishing this advocacy from a routine lead generation strategy, where the entrepreneur is a sales prospect. ------ kingsidharth This reminds me of 'TiE' (the Indus Entrepreneurs - <http://www.tie.org/homepage> )events in India. They have nothing to do with Entrepreneurs - just businessmen talking to each other about PR, boasting of some personal numbers and such. If you see entrepreneurs meeting - it's exciting, energetic and people want to make things happen. While TiE events are lame, lifeless and hopeless. Most of what they say - opposite of that is true for entrepreneurs. One dude was obsessed with his numbers - and suggested that so should every _entrepreneur_ , his words went something like - your numbers are the value you add to your customers. Pathetic. ------ joakin I'm Spanish and I couldn't agree more. The scene is full of people who don't know anything about real entrepreneurship and that do this things because of the State subventions on these matters... Oh and don't forget about the social media profets that focus more on buzz that on building things and the banks with abusive credits. This country is really bad, specially for technology startups. The philosophy here is 'Can't touch it, no money'. That's why we got the real state bubble, that's why the government cuts the subventions on I+D, and that's why founding any kind of enterprise takes much money, time and useless paperwork. Edit: typos ~~~ metageek Sorry, what are subventions, and what's I+D? ~~~ joakin Oops, poor english I have, I didnt stop to think if I+D was the same in english :p ~~~ hga It's close enough, I figured out from the context that I (Invention? Latin inventus -> Spanish invención or English invention) was our R and that subvention had to be something about transferring money. And some of the problems you and Vargas relate are hardly unknown in the entrepreneurial backwaters of the US although it's only in some particularly obnoxious very political cities where the local governments can really get in your way. Which of course lends itself to obvious solutions given how mobile our society is. Anyway, good luck improving things over there! ------ DevX101 If you ever get a business card from someone at a networking event who calls themselves a startup advisor, consultant, etc...RUN!!!! ------ dasil003 It's really unfortunate, but I think this is the reality in most places. Startups and entrepreneurship are now so visible on the internet that everyone is trying to get a piece. You have wannabe entrepreneurs everywhere now, and so there is also a cottage industry of snake-oil salesmen and unscrupulous "VC" operations that spring up to take advantage of the hype. One of the beautiful things about being in silicon valley (having been here for 3 out of 12 years of my professional life) is that you inevitably run into people who know what they're doing and are happy to share their experiences with you. Once you get a little bit of this under your belt you can spot the posers and wannabes a mile off. Even if you aren't in the valley, you can get still get enough information on the web now to really hit the ground running with a startup. Of course if you don't know what you're looking for, it's still a crapshoot to understand who's giving good advice and who's full of shit, but it's a far cry from 20 years ago, where if you were outside of silicon valley you might not even realize it was _possible_ to start a tech company from scratch. ------ rahooligan I found the situation to be similar in north america too (ontario, canada and michigan to be specific). There are people that show up to these events and sit on panels and have access to all sorts of funding. They say they can help entrepreneurs without having a single startup under their belt. ------ lesterbuck This tracks very well with Andrew's Mixergy interview of Spanish entrepreneur Juan Dominguez (<http://mixergy.com/redcpa-viajar-juan-dominguez/>), where Juan mentions that there are really no VCs in Spain, and the money sources there offer atrocious terms. ~~~ abarrera Couldn't agree more. Recently I gave a talk about startup financing where I had to explain some of the most crude clauses of term sheets that "were" used in the US 10 years ago, but that "are" used by VCs in Spain currently :(	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Linux driver map: paste the output of lspci -n, get your hardware and appropriate drivers. - kaens http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/ ====== ComputerGuru Why does HN show the domain as (.kmuto.jp) with that leading dot?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is It Ethical to Own an iPhone? - minecraftman http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-it-ethical-to-own-an-iphone ====== batista Why not: is it ethical to use any product or pay any company that has employees working more than the eight hour day, with possibly unpaid overtime and only gives them < 4 weeks summer vacations? Because, as a European, I wouldn't be comfortable with that either.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Explaining React's license - y4m4b4 https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining-react-s-license/ ====== kevinflo I love love love love love react as a technology, but this is just awful. I believe any developer not on Facebook's payroll still contributing to React or React native at this point has a moral obligation to stop. I personally feel like such a fool for not taking all this seriously before the ASF gave me a wakeup call. React is a trojan horse into the open source community that Facebook purposely and maliciously steered over time to deepen their war chest. Maybe that's an overblown take, but they had a perfect opportunity here to prove me wrong and they didn't. The defensive cover they present here feels so paper thin. Even if we paint all of their actions in the most favorable possible light, and even if the clause is a paper tiger as some have claimed, it doesn't matter. This is not how open source should work. We should not have to debate for years if a project's license is radioactive. Especially individual devs like myself who just want to use a great tool. We should be able to just use it, because it's open and that's what open means. This is so much worse than closed. It's closed masquerading as open. ~~~ stephen82 Well, I planned to learn more about React, but reading now this convinced me to learn Vue.js instead. It's under MIT license developed by a single person in addition to community's contribution. This link is rather interesting [https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html#React](https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html#React) ~~~ unkown-unknowns Alternatively there's this: [https://github.com/developit/preact](https://github.com/developit/preact) Preact is a fast 3kB alternative to React, with the same ES2015 API as that of React. Preact is MIT licensed and does not have any additional conditions beyond that. ~~~ tgb Sorry I've forgotten what the status was on the "are APIs copyrightable" question, i.e. the Oracle v Google fight. I'm kind of confused about what wikipedia says happened - there seem to be two final rulings one in favor of Oracle and one in favor of Google with Oracle appealing the second. Is it that APIs are copyrightable but duplicating them is (sometimes?) covered under fair use? Either way, I'd be a little hesitant to use this. ~~~ ktRolster APIs are copyrightable. You can see here: [http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/x-1.html](http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/x-1.html) There is still a question on fair use. Google won the jury trial, but the appellate court is ruling in a few months, and that could change everything. ~~~ gardnr The link that you provided is from May of 2016. AFAIK, Google won that case and the appeals and there are no ongoing appeals: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc). Oracle really has a way of being a big swinging legal turd, I do believe they would try anything they could. It just seems like they wouldn't wait a year to get it going. ------ DannyBee So, i feel for them, having watched Google's open source projects be targeted by patent trolls in the past. But i really don't think this is the way forward. A few things: 1\. If you want to suggest you are doing this as part of an attempt to avoid meritless litigation, you really should give concrete examples of that happening. Otherwise, it comes off as a smoke screen. 2\. The assertion is that if widely adopted, it would avoid lots of meritless litigation. This is a theoretically possible outcome. Here's another theoretically possible outcome of wide adoption of this kind of very broad termination language: Facebook is able to use other people's technology at will because nobody can afford to not use their stuff, and no startup that they decide to take technology from, and say "no more facebook/react/etc for you" could realistically launch an effective lawsuit before they died. Assume for a second you think Facebook is not likely to do this. If widely adopted, someone will do it. Nobody should have to worry about this possibility when considering whether to adopt particular open source software. (there are other theoretical outcomes, good and bad). It's also worth pointing out: None of this is a new discussion or argument. All of the current revisions of the major licenses (Apache v2, GPLv3) went through arguments about whether to use these kinds of broader termination clauses (though not quite as one sided and company focused), and ultimately decided not to, for (IMHO good) reasons. I'm a bit surprised this isn't mentioned or discussed anywhere. These kinds of clauses are not a uniform net positive, they are fairly bimodal. ~~~ fhrow4484 That's a good point, especially since the concrete examples won't possibly be about patent trolls. Why would patent trolls (aka _Non practicing_ entities) care about loosing rights "to make, have made, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise transfer the [React] Software". (as defined in [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/b8ba8c83f318b84e42933...](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/b8ba8c83f318b84e42933f6928f231dc0918f864/PATENTS))? ~~~ chrisco255 Look at Oracle v. Google...that was a mess. Samsung v. Apple...also a mess. Not all patent litigation is from trolls alone. ~~~ vonmoltke Oracle v. Google was not patent litigation (unless you are referring to something other than the oft-cited but not applicable to this situation Java API suits). ------ jwingy I wonder how Facebook would feel if all the open source software they currently use incorporated the same license. I bet it would deter them from enjoying much of the code they built their business on. This stance seems pretty antithetical to the goal and spirit of open source software and I really hope it's not the beginning of other companies following suit and 'poisoning' the well. ~~~ carussell > how Facebook would feel if all the open source software they currently use > incorporated the same license That would work incredibly well to neutralize patents, actually, and would be a huge win for free/open source software. It's surprising not to have seen anyone point out the logical conclusion of a world where every major license includes a React-like stance on patents: it's a world where no one is able to bring patent suits against anyone, because it means they are now violating the licenses of every piece of FOSS they're currently using. (I'm relying on the assumption that there's no entity that could perform an audit right now and conclude that there's not a single piece of FOSS underpinning their products/services/infrastructure.) Licenses like Apache 2.0, MPL2, etc all have a "MAD" policy wrt patents, but they all have a gaping hole in their strategy. The React license patches this hole in a really clever way--probably the cleverest thing since the GPL's invention of copyleft to hack copyright law by using it against itself. It's really disappointing to see people's sense of disdain for Facebook overpower their ability to appreciate how clever the React license is. Addendum from the last time [1] I commented: "FWIW, I don't use React, I don't want to, I'm not a Facebook employee, and in fact I think the world would be a lot better off with Facebook having less influence than they do today. But that doesn't change how weird it is to keep seeing comments like [those that frame the React terms in a negative light]". 1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780358) ~~~ hardwaresofton So this opinion almost swayed me, but the problem is that companies aren't scared of open source writers suing them. If you use project A that was written by one or two developers in their spare time (and they included a BSD+patents) clause, would Facebook fear being sued by them? Probably not -- but new companies that get anywhere close to what Facebook does (increasingly, that's everything these days) definitely live with the real possibility of facebook suing them. In theory the "no one is able to bring patent suits against anyone because they're violating licenses" is a good outcome (mostly the no patent suits part), but it doesn't quite stand up in practice because patent suits cost money, and bigger companies can sue you longer than you can sue them. I don't want a world where MAD is the default, because the large companies carry nukes, and I carry a peashooter. I will no longer use react on any new projects. ~~~ chrisco255 The clause states you only lose the patent rights if YOU sue Facebook for patent infringement (and only for patent infringement, not other reasons). As pointed out by Dennis Walsh in ([https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/react- facebook-and-the-revok...](https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/react-facebook-and- the-revokable-patent-license-why-its-a-paper-25c40c50b562)), it would take millions to bring a patent suit against Facebook. ~~~ yoz-y This is something I have yet to understand. From all I read about the patent situation in America it looks like they are totally worthless unless you are a multi million company. Is there actually no way of pursuing a giant if they infringe on your IP? ~~~ TimTheTinker For the most part, yes, unless you're a non-practicing entity (patent troll). Large companies carry massive war chests of patents, such that anyone who makes software is most likely violating several of them without knowing it. They defend themselves from patent lawsuits with countersuits from their war chests. (Trolls are immune, though, because they don't make software and therefore aren't infringing in the first place.) ------ eridius > _We 've been looking for ways around this and have reached out to ASF to see > if we could try to work with them, but have come up empty._ There's a pretty obvious solution to this: relicense React. The fact that Facebook isn't even considering that is a pretty strong indication that they "weaponized" their license on purpose. > _To this point, though, we haven 't done a good job of explaining the > reasons behind our BSD + Patents license._ I think we already understand the reasoning behind it. > _As our business has become successful, we 've become a larger target for > meritless patent litigation._ And the solution you chose stops merit-ful litigation as well. > _We respect third party IP, including patents, and expect others to respect > our IP too._ Clearly you don't, because you've intentionally designed a license to allow you carte blanche to violate other companies' patents if they're dependent enough upon React to not be able to easily stop using it. ~~~ jaredklewis I would patiently beg everyone to employ some basic reasoning. Situation A: React is licensed under BSD + PATENTS. You sue Facebook for infringing your widget patent. Turns out Facebook has a patent for something in react. They revoke your grant and counter sue you for infringing that patent. Long legal battle ensues. Situation A: React is licensed under just BSD. You sue Facebook for infringing your widget patent. Turns out Facebook has a patent for something in react. You never had a grant so Facebook counter sues you for infringing that patent. Long legal battle ensues. Can someone coldly explain how anyone anywhere would be helped in any way by removing the patents file? Or is the BSD license the problem? ~~~ SAI_Peregrinus People are worried about Situation C: React is licensed under BSD + PATENTS. You sue Facebook (or any corporate affiliate of theirs) for infringing on your widget patent. Facebook revokes your react license and counter sues you for copyright infringement. The patents clause doesn't have anything to do with any patents on parts of React. It's a way for Facebook to make it so that anyone who wants to sue them for patent infringement can't use React. ~~~ Lazare > People are worried about Situation C: React is licensed under BSD + PATENTS. > You sue Facebook (or any corporate affiliate of theirs) for infringing on > your widget patent. Facebook revokes your react license and counter sues you > for copyright infringement. This cannot happen. This is not a thing. Nobody is legitimately worried about this; anyone who is needs to take a deep breath and stop being ridiculous. This has been clarified many times. (Source: The plain language of the license, multiple independent lawyers who have commented on this, Facebook's official license FAQ, etc. The BSD license does not terminate when the patent grant does.) ~~~ allover The lawyer who wrote this piece [1], AND automattic's general counsel agree on this. > Automaticc’s general counsel also agrees with my analysis of contractual and > copyright liability in that the patent clause does not revoke the underlying > license. [1] [https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/react-facebook-and-the- revok...](https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/react-facebook-and-the-revokable- patent-license-why-its-a-paper-25c40c50b562) ------ rakibtg This is pathetic and breaks my heart. Expecting something good from thieves is not very practical, Facebook the company started by stealing others dream. This days if you take a look at them, they won't let grow any other app for any cost. They bought instagram, whatsapp where they already was providing such feature but due to their earlybird list. Also instead of contributing few tweaks into NPM they made a clone of NPM called Yarn, so funny. Instead of contributing changes to PHP they made a clone of PHP called HackLang, i am laughing laughter :D Facebook is a proven bad actor for all open source projects, and its time to be aware. One possible solution is to ban facebook from using any open source projects with a new license. One day we will going to have F-Git (a copied version of git with some tweaks by facebook) Snapchat denied to become a part of their monopoly cycle, they made a 100% clone of the product in facebooks every fucking platform. As a software engineer i found it very illegal and unethical, every maker should have good ethics, thats why facebook was unable to invent anything other than Poke feature on facebook itself. Shame If i were working at facebook i would definitely switch the company to better one, who won't force me to copy others. However, i am upset, because the technology that i loved most was just a typical facebook product comes with hidden payloads. I would definitely stay 100% away from all facebook products. It also gives us a free lesson how a evil a tech company could be. Alternatives: My personal list of alternatives are, React = Vue JS React Native = Native Script All i can do is this: [https://twitter.com/rakibtg/status/892784442476904449](https://twitter.com/rakibtg/status/892784442476904449) ~~~ rafinha Caffe and Caffe2 is also a good example! ~~~ zeptomu What - Caffe2 is a Facebook project? I used the original Caffe and thought it was built by Berkely University - Caffe2 only shared the name I guess? ~~~ rafinha Yes, just like he mentioned for the other projects. It even has the PATENTS file added to it: [https://github.com/caffe2/caffe2/blob/master/PATENTS](https://github.com/caffe2/caffe2/blob/master/PATENTS) ------ Scaevolus Almost all of Facebook's "open source" code has the same PATENTS file, which makes them toxic if you can imagine a future where Facebook infringes one of your patents: [https://github.com/search?p=5&q=org%3Afacebook+filename%3APA...](https://github.com/search?p=5&q=org%3Afacebook+filename%3APATENTS&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93) This includes things far outside the React ecosystem: - Flow (JS type checker, like TypeScript) - prepack (JS optimizing transpiler) - a bunch of Android/iOS UI/debugging frameworks, - all their GraphQL libraries (server/client) - their machine learning work (mostly targeting Torch) - Reason (statically typed programming language that transpiles to JS/OCaml) - ZSTD, a highly competitive compression algorithm. Disclaimer: I work at Google on Kubernetes (which is Apache licensed). This is my personal opinion. I am frustrated with software with trivially incompatible licenses. ~~~ IanKelling > I am frustrated with software with trivially incompatible licenses. It's not a copyright license, and it's not incompatible with any other free software license. I'm frustrated with the misinformation spread about it. If this patent license/grant get's revoked, you are back to simply using the BSD license with no patent grant. I've read so many people say "you'd have to stop using react if you sued facebook", uh, no, you'd have a bsd license with no patent grant like you probably do with tons of other free software your company uses. Clearly, people should be complaining about that if they are complaining about this, but the misunderstanding and misinformation is really strong. If you believe software patents are universally bad, like many people including me, then it is clearly better using the MIT/BSD license alone, which gives you zero patent rights, you are simply infringing and waiting to be sued. I have no problem with it. [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software- patents.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-patents.en.html). ~~~ jnbiche Your explanation really doesn't jibe with the explanation given in Facebook's post. If what you say is true, why do they make a point about this patent grant protecting them against patent trolls? There's something tricky about this that I can't figure out, but I really have a hard-time believing they're acting in good faith here. ~~~ vonmoltke As cited at multiple other places in this thread, Facebook's own FAQ on the licensing explicitly states what GP just did. ~~~ jnbiche If we use the "minimalist" interpretation like you and others propose here, then I'm stumped by Facebook would bother. It's such a _tiny_ , ultra-specific advantage for Facebook. Why throw this gas on the fire for such a minimal advantage? Just leave it alone. I suspect this must be coming from Zuckerberg. He's pissed off that some patent troll, somewhere, was using Facebook open source, and he issued an edict. That's the only way this makes any sense at all. ------ Steeeve > We've been looking for ways around this and have reached out to ASF to see > if we could try to work with them, but have come up empty. This, to me, is a significant warning sign. I was leery of the React license to begin with. But the community at large had _almost_ convinced me that it was nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, Facebook's position as stated here is clearly that the license is weaponized for a reason. I think it's irresponsible to leverage software with this license without clear guidance from legal and corporate overlords stating that it's OK. ~~~ pdfernhout Yeah, I got tons of pushback when I tried to steer Automattic and the WordPress community away from React in 2015 with people saying not to worry: "Replace React with Mithril for licensing reasons" [https://github.com/Automattic/wp- calypso/issues/650](https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/650) Personally, I increasingly doubt that BSD+PATENTS is even GPL-compatible -- and so potentially Automattic may be violating the GPL by using React integrated with WordPress. What's especially sad about this is that React isn't even that good compared to other vdoms like Mithril and Inferno and others. React just has a lot of name recognition and mindshare from the Facebook association (which then translates into a rich-get-richer effect with more tutorials and components). Here is a list of more than twenty alternative vdoms I put together in January 2016 (although Mithril remains my favorite): [https://github.com/dojo/meta/issues/11#issuecomment-17679024...](https://github.com/dojo/meta/issues/11#issuecomment-176790243) ~~~ Lazare If Facebook has a patent on React, it's almost certainly going to be on the vdom concept. If Facebook has a patent on the vdom, then all the projects in your list violate the patent, and none of them come with even a conditional patent grant from Facebook. If Facebook does not have a patent on the vdom or other React technology, then those other projects are safe, _but so is React_ , since termination of the patent grant has zero cost to you. My personal belief is that Facebook has no patents on React, so I feel safe to use React, Mithril, or any other vdom based library. But I can certainly understand people who feel like they need to play it safe, assume Facebook _does_ have a vdom patent, and avoid all such libraries. But I'm not really following your logic at all. It's like you think Facebook has a patent, but then you only want to use the libraries that maximise your ability to get sued over it? What am I missing? ~~~ jnbiche You're missing the fact that if you sue Facebook for _any_ patent infringement, even a legitimate one (say, you're the creator of some new hardware), Facebook will revoke your React license. Also, Facebook has no vdom patent. It's not like you can be granted a secret, hidden patent (even the word "patent" itself means "open"). ~~~ chii > Facebook will revoke your React license. you mean their patent grant? How can an open source license like apache, MIT or bsd be "revoked"? Do facebook have a public blacklist of people who aren't allowed to use react? ~~~ devdoomari um... because it's they can? I can make a library with MIT license to everyone else but you. MIT and BSD licenses merely provide short-cuts to understanding a project's licensing ~~~ nopzor Not practically, because once you make a library with an mit license available to anyone, they can give to anyone you didn't "want" to give it to, per the mit license. ------ antoncohen Facebook's license is no more dangerous than regular MIT or BSD-style licenses. If you are OK with using MIT or BSD licensed software you should be OK with using Facebook's BSD + Patents software. Here is why: MIT and BSD licenses don't have any patent grants, unlike the Apache 2.0 license. If you use MIT/BSD open source software, and some functionality of that software is patented by the author, you could be sued for patent infringement. If you use software licensed under Facebook's BSD + Patents license, and the author of the software (Facebook) has patented technology in the software (which AFAIK they don't), the author CANNOT sue you. Now if you turn around and use the author for patent infringement for something else, you lose the patent grant that came with the software, and you are back to a normal plain old BSD license. The BSD + Patents license is strictly better than the regular BSD/MIT licenses. You lose no rights, you may gain some patent protection. Major software like Ruby (BSD), Rails (MIT), and FreeBSD (BSD) use licenses without patent grants. Entire businesses are built on top of these pieces of software, e.g., GitHub (Ruby and Rails) and a lot of commercial hardware built on FreeBSD ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD)). Read the patent grant for yourself: [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS) ~~~ DannyBee "MIT and BSD licenses don't have any patent grants, unlike the Apache 2.0 license. If you use MIT/BSD open source software, and some functionality of that software is patented by the author, you could be sued for patent infringement. " Every single lawyer i've ever spoken to strongly believes implied licenses will protect you very well here. Like, among us open source lawyers, it's pretty much the one thing people agree on. "If you use software licensed under Facebook's BSD + Patents license, and the author of the software (Facebook) has patented technology in the software (which AFAIK they don't), the author CANNOT sue you." This is just flat out false, and i'm not sure why you believe this. The termination is broader than the grant. The grant is for patents in a given piece of software, the termination crosses all software. Concretely: if you use react, and they sue you over patents in notreact, and you countersue, you do not lose your react patent license. They are still welcome to sue you over notreact, there is nothing in this license that will prevent that from happening. It only gave you patent rights to react. (It also says that if you sue them over notreact, you will lose _all_ patent licenses in all software that use this license, which is why the termination is broader than the grant). "The BSD + Patents license is strictly better than the regular BSD/MIT licenses. You lose no rights, you may gain some patent protection." This is also an incorrect legal statement. Once their is an explicit grant, any implicit grant you would have gotten is extinguished. In this case, the terms of the implied grant were _much_ better for people than the terms of the explicit one. So you are, in fact, losing something ~~~ IanKelling > Once their is an explicit grant, any implicit grant you would have gotten is > extinguished. Citation needed. And if you aren't planning to sue over software patents, then the author is clearly correct that this is strictly better than BSD/MIT alone. ~~~ DannyBee "Citation needed." Seriously? This is basic IP law 101. No license can be implied if there is an explicit license. I actually started gathering cite lists for you like I normally do, but instead, i'm not going to in this case. If you really want to argue this point, please go to google scholar and spend the 2 minutes it will take to pull up 100 cases on this. I don't feel it's fair to argue about a thing without taking the very small amount of time to familiarize yourself with it. If you find cases that say otherwise, awesome, let's talk about it! Otherwise, this is like arguing about baseball and asking someone to cite rules because _you_ want to argue that swinging at the ball and missing isn't a strike. "then the author is clearly correct that this is strictly better than BSD/MIT alone." They actually are not, as the scope of the implied license is _much_ broader than the scope of the explicit grant here. ~~~ IanKelling Edit: afaik, implicit patent license for free software licenses are unproven in court. It's an interesting idea, and I actually hope it's the case that everyone is getting an implied patent license that will hold up in court. Thanks for the information, I wish I had incorporated it in my original comment. ------ fhrow4484 This is in reply to the Apache Software Foundation decision to list the BSD + Patents license as a Category-X license. \- Facebook gets attacked by meritless patent litigation \- Facebook creates the BSD + Patents license, which has the following effect : > The patent grant says that if you're going to use the software we've > released under it, you lose the patent license from us if you sue us for > patent infringement. \- Facebook believe that 'if this license were widely adopted, it could actually reduce meritless litigation for all adopters' I understand Facebook's position here, surely this will decrease meritless litigation, but what about meritful litigation? Let's take an example, a small startup has a cool technology but also all their front-end is using React. That cool technology is patented. Now if 'Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates' infringe on that patent, that startup won't be able to sue them without first re- writing the entire front-end to not use React. I don't think software should be patent-able in the first place anyways but it seems the situation above would still be true if that startup sues them for what they believe is a completely legitimate hardware patent. Also, IANAL, I'm wondering what even is the definition of a 'corporate affiliate' here? Who is a 'corporate affiliate' of FB? Finally, what ' _patent_ license' are they referring to in this post anyways ? The react's PATENT clause ([https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/b8ba8c83f318b84e42933...](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/b8ba8c83f318b84e42933f6928f231dc0918f864/PATENTS)) says they're providing the _React software_ License, and they revoke this _software_ license if you sue them. ~~~ bpicolo > without first re-writing the entire front-end to not use React Do note this isn't necessarily the case, because nobody has yet found a patent that covers React. ~~~ fhrow4484 This is what I find confusing, the blog post mentions a _patent_ license that you are granted, but as you say, nobody is aware of any patent covering React. React's doesn't seem to use any novel technique in the field of CS. But [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/b8ba8c83f318b84e42933...](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/b8ba8c83f318b84e42933f6928f231dc0918f864/PATENTS) , the way I read it says they grant you a license to to "make, have made, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise transfer" the React Software. They don't seem to give you a license to any patent. ~~~ fhrow4484 EDIT: "license under any Necessary Claims" seems to mean a license to the patents necessary for React as pointed out by [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15052962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15052962) >> A "Necessary Claim" is a claim of a patent owned by Facebook that is necessarily infringed by the Software standing alone. ------ Eridrus I think the reasoning that this will protect them against frivolous lawsuits is pretty poor; you only need a patent grant if you're actually building software. Patent trolls don't build anything so they have no need for patent grants. ~~~ coldtea > _Patent trolls don 't build anything so they have no need for patent > grants._ You'd be surprised. Patent trolls can have all forms, not just a only-suing company. Some company that has failed as a startup, but which holds 1-2 patents might decide to turn into patent-trolling to make a quick back while it dies. Think also of companies like SCO. ~~~ Eridrus > Some company that has failed as a startup, but which holds 1-2 patents might > decide to turn into patent-trolling to make a quick back while it dies. If the startup is dead it should be trivial to transfer the patents to a separate entity and then sue from that entity, making counter-suits irrelevant. This only has an affect on companies which are a going concern. Companies who plan to make litigation part of their strategy can pretty easily just not use React. This does the most harm to companies who were not planning to come into conflict with Facebook, and then do. ------ ralmidani For someone like me, (Free Software advocate, Ember user looking for a breath of fresh air--and better job prospects--with React), it all boils down to doing a cost-benefit analysis. Sweeping conclusions like "you have nothing to worry about" or "you should never use software with such a license" do not apply to everyone. As a Free Software advocate, I abhor troll-like behavior, regardless of whether the vehicle is patents, copyrights, or anything else. I am also more likely to benefit from potential patents contained in a project like React than I am to ever 1) Own a patent. 2) Have a company use that patent in a way I find harmful and offensive. 3) Have the resources to sue an internet giant. So for me, it's probably worth it to use React, although I can understand why others insist on a more cautious approach. One thing Facebook could do that would inspire confidence (not to mention make the company a champion of free innovation) is to enumerate which patents the company owns and release all of them under the Defensive Patent License [0]. Such a move would require a lot of courage, but Facebook is large enough and entrenched enough that they would probably gain much more than they could potentially lose. [0] [https://defensivepatentlicense.org](https://defensivepatentlicense.org) ~~~ falcolas Is React really free software? It's free as in beer, but you have to give up a lot of rights completely unrelated to React in order to use it. Sure, it may never be a problem (it probably won't be a problem for 99.9% or more of those who use it), but who is willing to take that chance with the future of their company? ~~~ ralmidani Facebook doesn't deny you the freedoms of using the software without restriction, studying it, modifying it, and distributing it (with or without your modifications). I personally wish FB would release even more of their platforms as free software, preferably under (A/L)GPL3 or MPL 2 or Apache 2. But we do not live in a perfect world. Even the folks at FSF made some compromises regarding the wording of the patent provisions in the GPL3 family, in order to get more companies to adopt the licenses [0]. I am sure the folks at FB know the first time they abuse the patent stipulations, a lot of people using React will jump ship. [0] [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html) ------ slackoverflower Of course they release this late on a Friday so it is does not get much reach. Facebook is very very evil - in every part of the company. Copying other's ideas (Snapchat) yet trying to stop other companies from copying them (this licensing). ~~~ bdcravens I don't see it as "released". It's just the closing of a Github issue, not a press release. Do you feel that if a company is "evil", do you feel there's a moral imperative to not use their products? It seems to me there's a lot of "But React!" going on. ~~~ Xoros The post linked is from 4 hours ago. So yes it's a late Friday statement. [https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining-r...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining- react-s-license/) ~~~ bdcravens I think the linked URL has changed - before I thought it was to the Github issue. ------ Illniyar It seems to me the core of the disagreement revolves around whether you believe there is an implicit grant of patent or not. If you believe the BSD has an implicit grant, then the facebook license is a more limited license. If you don't believe it, then the facebook license is better for the user. As far as I know there is no president to solve this neither in the U.S. or europe, so both views are valid. One thing is weird in facebook's behaviour though - they imply that the BSD doesn't have an implicit grant, and so they are benevolently giving away a better license, but if so, then the public outcry should be enough to take it back, if it's just a gesture of good will, and it isn't received as such, what's the point in continuing in this course? The only explanation they give is that they are more or less on a crusade for people to adapt this license because they believe it will reduce patent lawsuits ------ joobus The Facebook patents license, [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS) , says: > The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without > notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) > initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any > Patent Assertion: ... (ii) against any party if such Patent Assertion arises > in whole or in part from any software, technology, product or service of > Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, I always thought the main problem was this part, where you basically lose the license or your IP if Facebook ever decides to become your competitor, e.g. you start a company with a react front-end that does X, and then Facebook decides to directly copy your business. You have no recourse against Facebook, because if you sue them for infringing your IP, you lose the ability to use the React license. ~~~ nojvek If Snapchat used React, Facebook would kill them to death because Snapchat couldn’t do much. They already mass copied snapchat’s Features. Any sane aspiring developer would know not to give Facebook that much power. ~~~ neospice Is SNAP pursuing litigation in retaliation to this? If not, then would it have mattered if they used React? ------ captainmuon I would appreciate if Facebook would actually explain their license. Especially: Is BSD+Patent strictly more permissive than BSD or not? There are two major camps as far as I can see: Camp 1: BSD license does not give you a patent grant. You can always be sued by Facebook if you infringe (potential) React patents. On top of this, Facebook grants you use of (potential) React patents - but only as long as you don't enforce patents against them. If you do, you are back to the BSD license alone. Camp 2: This camp believes a) that the BSD license implies an unconditional patent grant (for React) and b) that the conditional patent grant ('PATENTS') is not optional, but inseparable from 'LICENSE'. If this is true, BSD+Patent grant is strictly less permissive than BSD alone. If you enforce patents against Facebook, you stand worse than with BSD alone. The only way this could be cleared up (beyond doubt) is by a court, or very easily with a few lines from Facebook. ------ beager As I understand the asymmetry in the BSD+patents license, the real issue here is that usage of React significantly weakens you with respect to mounting a defense against Facebook for infringing upon your own patents or IP, a possibility which, given the stark example of Instagram Stories, is plainly plausible. (This is not to say that Instagram Stories is patent theft, but rather a propensity to copy ideas wholesale). Were Facebook to amend that license to soften the criteria for revocation of the license grant in cases of suits against Facebook for infringement, this outrage might just go away. But as it stands now, Facebook stands to exercise an ability to infringe on others' patents for monetary gain so long as the patent holder uses React in deployment. It would be easy to weaponize this arrangement, and you have to assume that any fiduciary would consider it. More broadly, this is a good case to be made against software patents in general. ~~~ chrisco255 Not really. Not necessarily. Patents aren't all created equal. The economic value you derive from using Facebook's open-source patent grants is probably not going to be higher than whatever patent suit you're bringing against Facebook (if you deem it necessary and have the millions to wage such a war). ------ molecule Discussion of this topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15050705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15050705) ------ thesausageking > Their decision was not a legal decision about the compatibility of projects > with this license. As has always been the case, source code licensed under > the Facebook BSD + Patents license can be combined with source code licensed > under other open source licenses like BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0, and GPL. What complete, tone deaf newspeak. If a BSD-licensed project uses code with a Facebook BSD license, the project is now Facebook BSD licensed. That means it's incompatible with the BSD license. ~~~ rhizome The way I read it, ASF denied FB's BSD+Patents license in a mysterious bureaucratic decision that will cause a lot of pain for companies that use React, while FB's decision to _create_ the BSD+Patents license was an altruistic move designed to benefit the software ecosystem and reduce their patent litigation overhead. I believe FB is at the "pounding on the table" stage. ~~~ gstein67 The ASF does not want downstream users to be caught by more restrictions than those of the ALv2. The BSD+Patents licensing imposes more restrictions; thus, Apache projects cannot depend upon software under that license. This is pretty clear, and the ASF has been operating under this "no more restrictive than the Apache license" since its origin. ~~~ rhizome I know, I was satirizing the tone of FB's post, where ASF are weird meanies and FB is just trying to give everybody sunshine and lollipops. ------ jwingy I wonder how Facebook would feel if all the open source software they currently use incorporated the same license. I bet it would deter them from enjoying much of the code they built their business on. This stance seems pretty antithetical to the goal and spirit of open source software and I really hope it's not the beginning of other companies following suit and 'poisoning' the well of other open source projects. ~~~ pdfernhout I completely agree that the Facebook BSD+PATENTS license is antithetical to the goal and spirit of open source software. And that is why the Apache Foundation rejected it it. I'd like to see more statements by more groups like the FSF and OSI on that. ------ tbrock Isn't the style of programming react imposes (unidirectional data flow and component composition) the real innovation for front end applications here? Sure the dom diffing technology was hot at the time it came out but it's basically is a commodity item at this point. In that sense, the open source community can (and should) build multiple react clones that are licensed more liberally. Sure, I'm annoyed by the licensing of React too, I think abou it a lot. But does it really matter that Facebook won't budge on this? The technology is out there whether it's React or not. ~~~ krirken Indeed, preact [1] and and inferno [2] are both MIT Licensed. [1] [https://github.com/developit/preact/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/developit/preact/blob/master/LICENSE) [2] [https://github.com/infernojs/inferno/blob/master/LICENSE.md](https://github.com/infernojs/inferno/blob/master/LICENSE.md) ------ digitalzombie Damn glad I left web dev 3 years or so ago. It was ember vs angular. I was like I'm out, going for data science. While on the side line I've witness: Angular was winning until Google made a new framework and named it Angular 2. React took over until people find out their license is a trojan horse. Now what? emberjs? Angular 3 (oh wait wtf it's 4)? Jeez, front end is a mess of wild west. Yes, I understand the value in keeping up to date and continuously studying but the rate that frontend is going it is stupid. ------ abhisuri97 ELI5 anyone? My basic understanding is if you use React and decide to sue FB for patent infringement down the line, FB can countersue(?) bc they revoke your grant to use the patent upon you suing them. But what _exactly_ constitutes using React? Of course using the library is one thing, but what about using some other library that installs React as some dependency? Does using JSX also count as using "React"? I just feel that what exactly constitutes using React is very vague esp considering there are many non-FB tools that use "React" (and associated technologies, eg the idea of Virtual DOM) in some form or another. ~~~ ufo IANAL but... > but what about using some other library that installs React as some > dependency? I think that still counts as "using react". > Does using JSX also count as using "React"? I think that if you use a custom JSX compiler instead of the one that comes with React then you could be clean. JSX itself is just a programming language and cannot be copyrighted. > I just feel that what exactly constitutes using React is very vague esp I don't think that is vague, actually. In the end, what matters is if the whole system includes React source code in some way or another. > and associated technologies, eg the idea of Virtual DOM Associated technologies are not covered by copyright. They could possibly be covered by patents but that would be a whole different can of worms. ------ ai_ia Okay, I need some clarifications now regarding the whole issue. I am building my web app using React and will be extending to mobile platforms using React- Native. The product is kind of paradigm change in the way we deal with education, so I will at some point consider getting a patent protecting my own interests. My questions are as follows: 1\. If fb copies the entire thing, repackages it as something different and tries to make it free and open source. I wouldn't be able to sue them just because I used React and React-Native? Is that all what the patent license means or I am missing something here? ~~~ scott_karana You would be able to sue them, but you'd lose the grant to use any patents that cover React. ------ JoshMnem I'm not sure if React (and the other projects that contain the PATENTS file) will survive the backlash to this in the long run. Vue.js is rapidly climbing in popularity, and Elm is probably going to go mainstream in 2018. There are alternatives like Mithril and Ember too. ~~~ delambo The stats don't really suggest that vue is rapidly climbing in popularity: [https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=react&package=vue&p...](https://npm- stat.com/charts.html?package=react&package=vue&package=mithril&package=ember&package=elm&from=2015-01-01&to=2017-08-19) While popularity might not have anything to do with your use case, it still means a lot in terms of ecosystem, tooling, training, support and documentation. ~~~ JoshMnem See: [https://github.com/showcases/front-end-javascript- frameworks](https://github.com/showcases/front-end-javascript-frameworks) These things usually don't happen overnight. It will be interesting to take another look about a year from now. ------ web007 I don't understand ASF's position on this. How is FB-BSD+P different from CDDL 1.1, which includes section 6.2 regarding termination of patent rights in the event of a suit? ~~~ Steeeve ASF's license limits it's scope. ASF software cannot carry dependencies on licenses that have wider scope than their license. In addition to the scope, the FB license is very one-sided. As such, ASF decided to disallow FB licensed dependencies. One particular ASF project did not have an alternative, so they asked FB to re-license. FB agreed to do so. Because it was easy, and because the positive talk surrounding FB's license seemed to intimate that FB's intention was the same as ASF's license intention, they requested FB to relicense react so that it too could be included as a dependency on ASF projects. Faced with making a decision, FB determined that their licensing strategy associated with litigation was more important than their ability to be included in ASF projects. A lot of eyes were watching the request, many hopeful that the FB decision would justify and clarify their interpretation of the FB license and it's intentions. FB disappointed them though, and basically said "bugger off if you don't like it. We'll lose people, but we don't think it will be that many." Judging from this discussion - and the fact that HN is one of the most pro- react communities around - this decision will not play out kindly and could be the death-knell of react's position as a major force in UI development. ------ danjoc This is a defensive answer. Facebook doesn't even enumerate the React related patents, so you're left guessing about that. At the very least, they should maintain and up to date list of patents granted. What do they have to hide? ~~~ gstein67 With patents, it is usually best to not show your hand. Patent holders never publish the list of patents that read on their software. ------ valarauca1 TLDR: \- They confirm Apache's legal reading of the BSD + Patents. \- They deny the part about Facebook being able to steal your IP because _Facebook isn 't like that_. \- They refuse to codify changes to enforce _Facebook isn 't like that_ \- We therefore must assume Facebook is like that. ------ haeffin > I like that we clearly include a patent license in our repo. IMO it would be > nice if more companies would choose this route too. I don't get this. The Apache2 license also has a section on patents ... ~~~ CodeWriter23 Yes. And it says you lose the rights Apache granted you if you litigate any of the patents granted by Apache. Facebook's says you lose license to their patents if you litigate or even have shares in a company that litigates against Facebook for ANY patent. It's completely different. And toxic. ------ russellbeattie Hmm... "You don't like it? Go jump in a lake." Is that really an explanation? ~~~ ergo14 Well generally React users seem to not care. So I don't blame FB. I guess the clause could be rewritten to be more like what Google/Apache 2.0 does - then everyone would be happy. ~~~ pdfernhout React was originally under the Apache2 license. So is this a bit of a bait- and-switch? [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/75897c2dcd1dd3a6ca462...](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/75897c2dcd1dd3a6ca46284dd37e13d22b4b16b4/LICENSE) Also, could that original patent grant in the original license apply to later versions of React? ~~~ hajile I don't think so, but you could fork from v11 (0.11 in old naming) as it was the last full release to use Apache. ------ bakli Does anyone have experience with [https://preactjs.com/](https://preactjs.com/)? Is it really the same (component wise)? ~~~ hobofan Yeah, I recently replaced React with Preact in compat mode, without problems. ------ JoshMnem I'm not sure if React (and the other projects that contain the PATENTS file) will survive the backlash to this in the long run. Vue.js is rapidly climbing in popularity, and Elm is probably going to go mainstream in 2018. There are alternatives like Mithril and Ember too. ~~~ threatofrain Elm going mainstream?! What a prediction! ~~~ devdoomari yeah I doubt about elm, but vue is definitely catching up. ~~~ JoshMnem Why do you doubt it? I'm pretty sure that Elm will do it. :) ~~~ threatofrain Are there any big projects currently written in Elm? ~~~ JoshMnem What do you consider big? Elm is still in the early stages. [https://www.pivotaltracker.com/blog/Elm-pivotal- tracker/](https://www.pivotaltracker.com/blog/Elm-pivotal-tracker/) ~~~ threatofrain I'm curious to look at any big and open Elm app, to look at how a big project feels like, especially one that probably has to interact with other JS. I ask only because a precursory search on GitHub revealed little. ------ mrhigat4 That's a shame. I really like the React interface, but would never build a company with it at the core just on the principle. Revoking on first strike is super defensive and just plain slimy. If there were something like create-preact-app (not forked from create-react- app) I'd be all about it. With special decorators, dogmatic separation of templates, styles and logic, and mutability I don't think I can get aboard the Vue.js train though I'll admit I haven't dove deep yet. The worst part is how Facebook seems to be asking other big players to follow their lead in adding kill switches to FOSS. It'd be one thing if it were just React. Devs shouldn't let this become common practice. ------ gstein67 There is a lot of confusion with regards to one point: the Apache Software Foundation _did not_ make a request for a license change. The Foundation does not presuppose to know how others should license their products. That is those others' choice. The Foundation does have policies on what licenses can be used, within the Foundation's projects. But that is for _our_ projects, and not the same as pushing back against license holders. So please. Stop with the meme of "Facebook rejected the Foundation's request". Not true. Facebook made a business choice, and the Apache Software Foundation will make its own choices. The request came from one our projects' committers. Please do not confuse who speaks for whom. ~~~ devdoomari it's not 'rejection' that's bothering ppl... most ppl don't care about 'rejection' whether it happened or not. ------ delinka Someone please help me understand the problems here. The repository includes two documents: 1) a proper BSD license, and 2) a patent license. While reading the latter, I see no mention of it affecting the former. So my take on this is that it's BSD-licensed code. Period. The patent license is a "bonus" and not at all required by the BSD license, and doesn't affect the BSD license. Any other company offering BSD licensed code is free to withhold licensing their patents at all. So are we suggesting that the patent license is a bad idea? That it's revocability is a bad idea? Why does this matter when the software is licensed under a BSD license? ~~~ navinsylvester This explains the rationale: [https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf- recommends-aslv2/](https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2/) ~~~ delinka This reads to me like it boils down to "oh, geez, stop making people read your additional licenses and just use ours." And that's fine. But the HN comments all make it sound like the situation with a custom patent license is an offensive affront to their existence as software engineers. And I personally disagree with that strong stance. Especially from a group that also seems to agree that patents in the software world are obnoxious and would presumably not ever sue over such a patent... ------ HugoDaniel Seamlessly switched from react to infernojs[0] a year ago. The only difference is that the apps are way faster now in infernojs while providing me with more optimization options as jsx properties[1]. Also their support channel in slack is great[2]. [0] [https://github.com/infernojs/inferno](https://github.com/infernojs/inferno) [1] [https://infernojs.org/docs/guides/optimisations](https://infernojs.org/docs/guides/optimisations) [2] [http://infernojs.slack.com](http://infernojs.slack.com) ------ tuxracer Just as a thought experiment if every piece of software had a similar clause in their license it would mark the end of software patents. Isn't this what we actually want more of? Isn't _that_ actually the moral high ground? ~~~ JoshMnem If that were Facebook's goal, why wouldn't they just team up with a few other large companies and lobby for abolishing software patents in the US? ~~~ sanxiyn I actually think this is Facebook's goal. As for your question, I think they aren't trying to abolish software patents in the US because they judge (IMO correctly) that it is unlikely to succeed. ~~~ JoshMnem That seems highly unlikely, considering the way Facebook operates. ------ tomduncalf I'm trying to understand what the real world implications of this notorious clause could be - obviously a lot of it comes down to legal interpretation but would be interesting to know people's thoughts. Say my company patent some key part of a product, and Facebook then release a product which infringes on this patent. If my company were to sue Facebook for this (unrelated to React) patent infringement, then as I understand it, this patent clause would cease to apply to my company. Does that then mean that Facebook could countersue my company for using React, saying that some part of React is patented and my use of it is therefore infringing that patent? This seems kind of weird to me, as React is a product that they put out there for people to use - it's like Microsoft suing me because I use Office and they have a patent on the ribbon UI or something. Or does it just mean that some third party could claim that React infringes on some patent of theirs, and they can then sue my company saying my use of React infringes on their patent? (Whereas previously Facebook would protect my company against this) Or does it mean something else entirely?! ------ jjm This is the kind of thing that makes devs start new projects that look really close to projects that run this course. You know, just to spite this act. ------ RomanPushkin Anyone knows what are consequences of ban from Apache Software Foundation? Okay, it has X-Cat exclusion by August, 31 ([https://react- etc.net/entry/apache-foundation-bans-use-of-fa...](https://react- etc.net/entry/apache-foundation-bans-use-of-facebook-bsd-patents-licensed- libraries-like-react-js)) and what will happen after that? ~~~ gtirloni [https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html](https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html) "Can Apache projects distribute components under prohibited licenses? Apache projects cannot distribute any such components. This means that no source code can be from Category X and that any convenience binaries produced may not include such contents. As with the previous question on platforms, the component can be relied on if the component's license terms do not affect the Apache product's licensing. For example, using a GPL'ed tool during the build is OK, however including GPL'ed source code is not" ------ rsgrafx What advice would you say to someone who just who's only about 6 months in ( learning React ) ? A. Its not been that long.. walk away and learn something else. B. If you've put in the time try to get something out of it. C. I don't know what the whole fuss is about your not going to be building anything worth facebook's time anyway. ~~~ chrisco255 If this is for your own personal projects or your startup...you should just keep using React. Seriously, unless you've got millions of dollars to bring a patent suit against Facebook (do you even have any patents to defend?), this should not even be on your radar. You should be focused on building great product and execution: not patent litigation. ~~~ rockdoe Don't ever hope of selling your business if it takes off though. The above may not apply to your potential buyers. ~~~ chrisco255 I really fail to see that. With Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, Yahoo, Amazon, and many other big names using React in production...Chances are the acquiring company is already using React in some form. Furthermore, the value of your company is not in which front end framework you choose, it's in your distribution and product value to end users. If you really needed to rewrite your front-end in Preact (a drop-in replacement for React) or Vue, in order to satisfy a buyer, you could easily do so. ------ sandGorgon Even worrying - Caffe2 is licensed under the same terms. [https://github.com/caffe2/caffe2/blob/master/PATENTS](https://github.com/caffe2/caffe2/blob/master/PATENTS) . This really makes Tensorflow the only real alternative for true, viable deep learning. ------ spacetexas Disappointed to see no forward upfront stance on what Facebook will do if someone sues them for a patent infringement unrelated to React in any way. Will note though that if Facebook does choose to revoke a license on the basis of getting sued for something unrelated it will definitely reflect poorly on FB in the developer community and reduce React's adoption. ~~~ kbenson > Disappointed to see no forward upfront stance on what Facebook will do if > someone sues them for a patent infringement unrelated to React in any way. Well, they've specifically related React if it's in use, so the only case where it's not related is if isn't being used by the plaintiff. In a similar vein, people are wondering what Facebook will do with patent infringement suits that _do_ have merit, to which I ask, when's the last time a company defending a patent suit stated the plaintiff's case had merit. ------ opensports The whole ecosystem of amazing people and companies that helped build React is jeopardized, which is such a sad waste of code, development time, late nights, and humanity! Please think of long term gains and not exploding software licenses. There's already enough pain going round in the world. ------ bytesandbots > Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Imagine a small company releasing a new js framework with BSD+Patents license. Will FB use ever this framework? No. Because merely using this framework gives this small company the effective freedom to infringe Facebook's patents. Why? Because the cost for FB to shift frameworks will be huge, thus prohibiting FB to sue this small company for patent infringement. Using a software with BSD+Patents license is almost giving up the right to sue this company. This is dangerously radioactive. ------ neilparikh What I don't really understand is if they're worried about patent trolls, how would this have any effect at all? Patent trolls are companies that don't create anything, and just sue with their patent portfolio instead, so why would they care that they can't use react patents anymore? ------ bsimpson > like some other large companies do and only release software that isn't used > in our most successful products Closure Compiler [1], GWT [2], and protobufs [3] would like to have a word... I realize they said "some" large companies, but it seems like there's plenty of precedent for successful tech companies to release core infrastructure as open source. [1] [https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/](https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/) [2] [http://www.gwtproject.org/](http://www.gwtproject.org/) [3] [https://developers.google.com/protocol- buffers/](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/) ------ kanishkdudeja My opinion on why this could now become a practical problem for people who still want to continue with React: 1) This will deter people and organizations from using such libraries. For example :- WordPress.com and many other companies have said that they will no longer use React. 2) Lower usage and application of such libraries means that lesser people will find bugs in them, lesser people will fork these libraries, lesser people will contribute to these libraries. 3) Facebook may itself lose interest in continuing to open source the library. Or add any new features to the open source version. 4) People may get stuck with bugs in such libraries and with no functionality being added to such libraries for years. ------ dmoney Let me make sure I understand this: The license means that Facebook grants you the right to use the patents on React, but if you sue Facebook for patent infringement, you lose the right to use React? ------ stolsvik Wrt. the idea that without the grant, Facebook can sue you. A) There's this thing with "implicit grant" since they've open sourced it and grant you a license. But even without this, and more interestingly, B) If they sue anybody for anything regarding React, wouldn't they immediately loose the entire community around React? "Damn, they really sued Widgets Inc. over some bs. patent in React, better stop using this minefield right away".. ------ grizzles Facebook's position on this is weird. Any company that wants to use react and avoid liability arising from Facebook's terms can do so easily by incorporating a subsidiary or wholly separate company and paying that company $1 to license the UI built on react. Maybe this is about fencing off Google/Amazon/Alibaba/etc who might be reluctant to do something that would be technically legal but something that a jury might take a dim view of. That seems to been the thesis behind Oracle v Google. ~~~ wolco Unfortunately the wording covers a subsidiary, agents act on behalf and any interest including financial even in an indirect way. ~~~ grizzles Since Facebook grants a license, the worst case scenario is you sue Facebook for infringing your "X" patent, and then they search your website and find a react ui, and then you say oh we bought that off WebKidCo. IANAL but it seems farfetched that a court could/would hold a company bound to such a broad clause for what it's supplier(s) did. Or you could just sue Facebook for using your patent "X" after having first moved the patent into a non practicing entity. ~~~ chrisco255 This theoretical litigation process with claims & counter-claims against Facebook would cost you millions. Patents are by themselves incredibly expensive to defend. Your "X" patent better be worth tens of millions and Facebook better be deriving millions in value from it, or this is just an exercise in futility. ------ addicted I cannot help but look at this along with Facebook's copy to win strategy. It appears to me that FB might be using their open source contributions as a Trojan horse to make sure others can't compete with them. If a startup happens to use FB open source tech for their startup, FB can duplicate everything they do, even legitimately patented stuff, and the startup is unable to fight back because their sign up page happened to be built in React. This is giving just too much power o one company. ------ RyanShook I have my doubts about the enforceability of BSD+Patents in a courtroom setting. I think it's an intimidation play on the part of Facebook to keep large players from profiting off of their IP. ------ throwaway26960 Onto the next Javascript framework! ------ yuhong I just noticed that software patents and employment anti-discrimination laws have some very similar problems. With the performance of manual labor jobs and physical patents the tests tends to be relatively objective, and that was probably what both laws was designed for. With many other jobs and with software patents this is often not the case, making the laws much easier to abuse for example. ~~~ yuhong As a side note, this is also why anti-discrimination laws still make sense for things like public places and voting, because the test for whether someone is able to vote for example tends to be objective. ------ itsbits I am no pro in understanding these licensing issue. Can someone help me how this affects if i) ReactJS is used in a company/organisation for their proprietor software? ii) ReactJS is used in a company/organisation for their distributed licensing software? iii) ReactJS is used in a company/organisation for a software which is opensourced? ~~~ rockdoe If you use React you basically can't sue Facebook for infringing your patents, so it is giving them a free pass on your IP. ~~~ gstein67 Of course you can sue them. It just comes with consequences. ------ akapaka > license is radioactive Same is true for Fuchsia, Google's new os replacement for android / linux. See [https://github.com/fuchsia- mirror/calendar/blob/master/PATEN...](https://github.com/fuchsia- mirror/calendar/blob/master/PATENTS) ------ jgalt212 In practice, here's who will can be reasonably expect to be affected. 1\. large tech cos. they always want to reserve the right to sue each other. 2\. large advertisers. they need the ability to sue FB for any beefs they have over the ads they have purchased. So if you're one of the two, I think your general counsel will say not to use react for any new projects. ------ danschumann I don't think it's bad. "If we give you free stuff and you sue us, you no longer get free stuff" ------ talkingtab My worry is that the BSD+patent license puts FB in the position where they are able violate valid patents that another company hold. If that company is using React, they will have a strong incentive not to pursue their claims against FB because it means they would have to rewrite their code. Is this a valid concern? ------ pdfernhout Facebook claims BSD+PATENTS is GPL compatible. I'd like to hear what the FSF has to say about that. ~~~ gstein67 The two copyright-based licenses are compatible, based on pretty much every legal opinion published. Facebook is offering a separate patent license, and that is out-of-scope of the GPL. ~~~ pdfernhout I agree the plain BSD 2 and GPL licenses are compatible. The issue here is how the PATENTS file from Facebook reduces an implicit patent grant by the BSD license making BSD+PATENTS into essentially a different license with less permissions than plain BSD. According to the FAQ on the GPLv3: [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide- gplv3.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html) "Whenever someone conveys software covered by GPLv3 that they've written or modified, they must provide every recipient with any patent licenses necessary to exercise the rights that the GPL gives them." So, since GPLv3 talks about patents, and the Facebook PATENTS clause reduces the implicit patent grant of BSD, I feel it is in scope for GPLv3. A plain BSD 2.0 license with an implicit patent grant would presumably provide enough patent rights to be compatible with GPLv3. To my reading of the situation, BSD+PATENTS does not seem to provide enough patent rights to comply with GPLv3 (because of the one-sided retaliation clause of Facebook's PATENTS file). The GPLv2 is a different story which is less clear to me. In section 7 GPLv2 says: "If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program." So, because some of your downstream users might not have a valid patent grant from Facebook if they sue Facebook for infringing their patents, does the last sentence imply you can't distribute the combined BSD+PATENTS and GPLv2 code? ------ tjholowaychuk Isn't React the slowest and largest React-like implementation anyway? Seems like this will just foster "nicer" implementations, I don't see what the worry is all about. It's not like React is some behemoth that can't be rewritten. ------ qxzw So for example if I create a product using React, something social-ish and it gets really popular. Facebook decides they like it and could easily implement something like that themselves. I find it to be blatant copy of my stuff. Nothing I can do there, right? ------ wdb It's similar to the line "We can create apps or products that offer features and services similar to your app." that's part of the agreement for using the Facebook SDK. It's mostly a one way street with Facebook. ------ tarr11 I wonder how much BSD + patents actually diminishes lawsuits for Facebook. Is React that widespread? What happens if you stop using React, and replace it with a clone like Preact? I also wonder if this will hold up in court, or is purely a defensive measure. ~~~ gstein67 Just say one, for discussion purposes. One is likely worth the (minimal?) loss of Goodwill/combinatorics/bundling with their licensing choice. ------ donpinkus So, can I use React as my company's front end framework or not? If I do use React, what is the specific legal risk (if any)? PLEASE no emotionally charged comments - I just want a clear answer from someone who deeply understands the legal stuff. ~~~ gramstrong You most likely certainly can with nothing to worry about. 99.99% of the world's developers will never need to sue Facebook for patent infringement. That is, unless Facebook begins reverse patent-trolling. But I see it as more of a decision on ethics at this point in time, and don't really see any reason to feel particularly threatened. ------ bugsbugs Once someone told me a story about two company that were building cars. One was building slick cars the other not so slick cars but with robust tires that could roll on spikes, additionally they were silently buying roads. So, there were quite even on the market, but one day suddenly spikes just popped up from roads. At, the time when I heard this story the "spike" company was referring to Microsoft. So much about "do not be evil" policy although that is Google slogan one must ask is the Angular or Node.js next? 21st century and still greed for money and monopoly "one to rule them all" screwing open trusting hard working guy ... I know this is side ways but: how should we trust any other thing they release or talk about privacy, sharing, VR, Basic Income ... ?! ------ whipoodle I think React is a very nice way to build UIs. I am still very dubious as to how serious this issue actually is. It still feels rather ginned-up to me. I can't understand what the real threat is here. ------ mderazon At this point not using Facebook OSS tools for development is like not using Google for search. There are so many popular FB libraries under the same patent license, React is just the most popular. ------ roadbeats Does MIT license work for Apache in this case ? If yes, they can easily switch to Preact; [https://preactjs.com/](https://preactjs.com/) ~~~ gstein67 Yes, it works just fine. Many projects at Apache rely on MIT-licensed code, and I know that several of the Apache projects are looking towards Preact as a replacement for their dependency upon React. ------ nkkollaw Can this problem easily be solved by avoiding to sue Facebook? If I understand the issue correctly, there's a clause in their license that says the license is revoked if you sue them. How risky is this for regular usage? ------ Vinnl Can anyone explain if the patents license is anything more than "if you use our patents, we can use yours", or if that in itself is the thing that is offensive (and why)? ------ noir_lord > Some even feel like they have to stop using UI frameworks because of it. No, some feel they have to stop using React, not _all_ UI frameworks, VueJS is pure MIT etc. ------ ngsayjoe As a small startup, I absolutely love this. It gives me the advantage to use React while my bigger VC-funded competitors can't. ------ Kiro What exactly does this mean to users of React? I've seen some dystopian scenarios but they feel really far-fetched. ------ alexandercrohde I have to say, I think Facebook is in the right on this one. I think the ecosystem would benefit greatly if this were adopted massively. I also think very few companies are going to have a time where they need to sue FB for patent infringement (how many people have patents, how many of those patents should really exist, how likely is facebook to violate that patent)? This mostly follows if you believe the world is a better place without software patents at all. ------ f38hf3fhhf Does this mean Facebook can infringe on your patents and you cannot sue? ------ boubiyeah Well it's a good thing there are plenty of alternatives. React is big but it only does the view well (and half of state management -.-') it's not too hard to replace in a stack. I salute its main author, Facebook and instagram for inventing the virtual DOM concept; it's fucking genius and helped us make better apps, faster. but absolutely no need to use react now. ------ shock > Facebook has always benefited from open source and has worked to contribute > back as much as possible to the open source community. Yes, they have benefited from open source software under BSD, MIT, Apache licenses and giving back under BSD+Patent grant. What a load of bullshit. ------ azr79 is anyone else is having trouble to share the link on facebook messenger? [http://imgur.com/a/TIQoP](http://imgur.com/a/TIQoP) ------ dinony Why is this unvoteable for me? :D ------ ap46 Way to close a debate. ------ 0xbear Hopefully it'll take all those half assed React Native apps with it. ------ supernumerary Same for Yarn... ------ adamnemecek Move to cycle.js. It's a better framework anyway [https://cycle.js.org](https://cycle.js.org) ------ throwgoog452 People used to say that the GPL was illegal, unacceptable, immoral, and all sorts of other things. Then, gradually, everyone started using it, and copyleft became an acceptable software licensing strategy. I hope that BSD + Patents also achieves gradual acceptability. ~~~ seanmcdirmid People started using the GPL because it works fine for software that isn't distributed to consumers, e.g. on servers. Those uses have subverted the entire intent of he license, however. ~~~ chii > Those uses have subverted the entire intent of the license You're reading too much into the intent of the license. GPLv2 being used on servers is a valid use case. Tivoization is indeed subverting the intent of GPLv2, which is one of the reason for GPLv3. But in the case of Tivoization, you _are_ distributing the code to end users, rather than just running it on their behalf, and hence, in my eyes, violates the intent of GPL (that end users you distribute your software to should be allowed to modify the software). Hosted software isn't like tivoization, in that the host doesn't distribute, and so no GPL issues whatsoever. ------ paradite /s Angular is terrible. React is trojan horse. Vue is developed by Chinese. /s And I honestly just want a decent framework to write JavaScript. Maybe the framework war is just getting started after all. Edit: I'm just summarizing and projecting the sentiments around the popular frameworks and wondering about the future, not sure why I got so much hate...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month - kawera https://open.buffer.com/marketing-budget/ ====== capkutay Most people are focussing on their advertising spend, but it looks like they've built their marketing team for inside sales rather than growth. $3k/month on advertising means they're getting spending about $100/day. That's too low to properly target a SaaS audience for actual growth. My guess is that because they have 80k customers (according to their website), they focus most of their marketing plans around customer success and renewals rather than acquiring new leads. You can see they have a lot of budget tied to mailchimp...a sign that they spend a lot of time on lead/customer nurturing campaigns. I don't think this blog post is meant to be useful for any company that doesn't already have mass traction. ~~~ soneca Their advertising could be focusing on kickstarting their content marketing material. Spend big money creating good content, spend small (but smart) money promoting on niche targeted audiences, count on it to be further spread through word-of-mouth. ------ was_boring I see a lot of comments about people are amazed by $3k/mo advertisement spend and most goes towards salary. I would say they have chosen wisely. HN is a forum for technical startups and people who work in the field. Yet here they are, without spending anything on advertising on the front page. The blog post was written by the marketing director, and just by being here they are marketing buffer. This is lead gen. ------ analyst74 Not marketing professional here, but I'm surprised at how almost all of the budget went to payroll related expenses. I would have imagined higher percentage spent on advertising spot, online and offline. ~~~ waisbrot Yeah, it's cool to see a budget. But then it's puzzling because I don't know what a marketing team _does_ besides advertise. ~~~ soared Pasting from another comment. Advertising is a section of marketing (You could get a degree in either one). The rest of the team works on things like branding, identifying markets/customers, picking price points, running tables at events, writing content, working on the website, researching potential new products, understanding how current users use the products, analyzing web site traffic for insights, etc. At some places things like ui/ux fall under marketing - like making it easier for a user to purchase a product, writing manuals/user guides, etc. ------ nishantvyas So to summarize, they have "10-Person Marketing Team" spending 93k/month total, with 2 major breakouts, 1\. Teammate Expenses (73,225 + 9,402 + 367) = ~83K 2\. Everything Else (or Actual Marketing) = ~10k Why do they need 10 person team for $10k budget (actual money spent to bring customers in)? unless these guys are literally going door to door. P.S. I'm not marketing professional. ~~~ soared Advertising is only a small portion of marketing. Probably 1/3rd of 1 persons job is spending that $3k media spend. The rest of the team works on things like branding, identifying markets/customers, picking price points, running tables at events, writing content, working on the website, researching potential new products, understanding how current users use the products, analyzing web site traffic for insights, etc. At some places things like ui/ux fall under marketing - like making it easier for a user to purchase a product, writing manuals/user guides, etc. ~~~ sjg007 I would do more sales... ~~~ Daktest May not be necessary for their kind of product and market. Looking at their company page, there doesn't seem to any salespeople at the company. Would suggest that you check out Patrick McKenzie's post about SaaS companies. Buffer fits the 'Low-touch SaaS' description pretty squarely - which would mean that they don't necessarily require a dedicates sales unit. [https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of- saas](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas) ------ tvanantwerp While lots of folks may think the salary-to-advertising ratio here is way too high, I think it probably makes sense. I have to imagine that most of the Buffer marketing team is either creating marketing materials or promoting them in highly targeted ways. (I.e., they must be doing things that don't scale.) Moving that entire salary expense into ads would probably yield far less value to Buffer. What's more useful: an article from a well-read tech site talking about Buffer's cool features that came about from direct outreach, or some more easy-to-ignore Google ads? ~~~ pascalxus but doing things that don't scale is a temporary move until you figure things out. The results of those experiments must yield something. they must be doing something that will eventually scale. ~~~ jermaustin1 You are thinking about doing things that don't scale as a feature of your service/product. The non-scaling feature of Buffer would be something like if a customer queued something to post to their Instagram feed, then a human actually posted it for them. Sure it doesn't scale, but you can probably do that for a while until the tech stack is built out. GOOD Advertising is always much more hands on. ------ butler14 Staggeringly low media spend, particularly on Google, which is the channel most likely to help drive sales within a suitable return on advertising spend threshold. ------ forkLding I'm always amazed at the amount of data Buffer makes transparent ~~~ mprev It's as much part of their marketing as anything in the budget that they shared. ------ libertine Is it just me who finds odd they put advertising production and media buying all mixed into "adversiting", yet break it down by media channel? It's usually: production + media I read their advertising breakdown as media purchased, unless production is diluted in the value (which I doubt because you can use ads across social media channels for example, despite having different specs). Or they just don't want to disclose it, which is completely fine :) ~~~ soared Its possible they do everything in-house and use free stock images. For facebook you don't necessarily need a designer, someone can easily write search ads, and they don't do any banner/video/etc advertising. Not how I would run it, but I don't know much about them. ------ wkemmey I know it's not the main theme of the article, but I'm really interested in Buffer's laptop policies. How do you handle it if a laptop needs repair? or is stolen? What if the breakage is the employees fault, but they are not a repeat offender, so to speak? I'm curious how Buffer handles these things that I've seen problematic at other companies. ~~~ kevanlee Good question. I lead the marketing team at Buffer, and we've had a couple cases where the computers have failed earlier than the renewal date (every 3 yrs). We reimburse a new laptop if it's needed. Otherwise, I really haven't experienced any "at-fault" scenarios or stolen laptops. My sample size is pretty small though (4 years, 10 marketing teammates). ------ soared Amazing to me that their media budget is only $3,000. That is absolutely tiny! I'm curious why they don't do any programmatic (like display), and how they only spend $500 on search ads (I'd imagine brand-only terms would be over $500/mo). ------ jl87 Yeah...I'm thinking you guys need to start spending on some advertising. ------ jclegg What about rent? ~~~ kevanlee Good one. Buffer is a fully remote/distributed team with no office. That being said, expenses like Internet go to the admin budget and not marketing. Thanks for the question. (I work at Buffer and wrote the budget article) :) ~~~ leonroy Not even a coworking type office for management or receiving mail/having an official company address?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dan Cohen Named Founding Director of the Digital Public Library of America - boonebgorges http://dp.la/2013/03/05/dan-cohen-named-founding-executive-director-of-the-digital-public-library-of-america/ ====== japaget I up-voted this article because I didn't know about the "Digital Public Library of America". It has several important backers, including Harvard University and the Smithsonian, and I will be watching this effort with some interest. The library will be launching April 18, 2013, according to a February 28, 2013 blog post on the site.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nintendo says this amazing Super Mario site is illegal - cheeaun http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/17/nintendo-says-this-amazing-super-mario-site-is-illegal-heres-why-it-shouldnt-be/ ====== scrabble _Creating a game like that from scratch is a lot of work, but it would be a lot easier to do if people could start with the Full Screen Mario codebase._ There's nothing that prevents the creators from making their own thing that people could start from. It doesn't need to be Mario. _Game designers could also incorporate parts of "Super Mario Brothers" as a "mini game" within modern video games._ This also seems odd to me. Generally I think I stand for reasonable copyright terms, but on the other side, I never applied those terms to Mario. I can't imagine a character like Mario being used by many companies in many games across many systems where it is not tightly controlled by Nintendo. That is really a dreadful outcome. Nintendo has grown the brand and character over the years and it would be immediately diluted. I could very easily picture a game like GTA starring Mario using a gun to shoot goombas and koopas, while Bowser snorts crack off of Princess Peach. That's not the kind of thing I'd like to see. ~~~ jiggy2011 Would it necessarily be such a terrible outcome? The idea of providing protection for intellectual works is to incentivise the creation of these works rather than to protect any particular brand from being diluted. What would be the upshot if the character of Mario entered the public domain, in the same way that characters from Greek mythology or Shakespeare are in the public domain? Nintendo might decide to expend creative effort creating a new set of characters to figurehead their brand, this could well be a win for society at large. Other unaffiliated developers might then decide to take mario in interesting new creative directions that would not have happened under Nintendo, this could also be a win. ~~~ GhotiFish Personally, I'm looking forward to a more official rendition of the "Mario and Luigi are high on mushrooms" theory. ~~~ stevvooe Didn't Nintendo already beat that theme to death? ------ petercooper How come its legal for musicians to do cover versions and pay a fee to centralized songwriter organizations to do so, yet this doesn't exist in other copyright spheres? OK, having things enter the public domain would be _better_ but if it were possible to pay a certain amount for every X pageviews of a Mario "cover version" and that makes it legit.. that could be pretty interesting and allow for things like this to live on safely via donations or sponsorship. ~~~ DominikR They can cover songs because they reach an agreement with the license holders and Nintendo obviously isn't interested in that kind of business. I can't blame them, because Mario is one the main drivers for sales of Nintedo consoles in the last decades. ~~~ Keyframe Original copyright holder doesn't have to agree for you to make a cover. It's a common courtesy though, but not legal requirement. ~~~ petercooper A related story I found interesting at the time about Weird Al vs Lady Gaga: [http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110421/10431413988/weird-...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110421/10431413988/weird- al-denied-permission-to-parody-lady-gaga-releases-new-song-free-anyway.shtml) ~~~ Keyframe That story also shows what you can and cannot do without copyright holder's permission. If you don't have a permission, you cannot profit from your cover. If you have a permission, you have to pay royalties for your cover to the original author if you're exploiting your cover commercially. ~~~ gabemart > That story also shows what you can and cannot do without copyright holder's > permission. If you don't have a permission, you cannot profit from your > cover. If you have a permission, you have to pay royalties for your cover to > the original author if you're exploiting your cover commercially. Weird Al does song parodies, not covers. AFAIK the prevailing opinion is that his songs would be legally protected under fair use (whether released commercially or for free) but he typically gets permission from the artists as a courtesy. ~~~ Keyframe You're right. It dawned on me once I have commented. Parodies are in different legal space, so I'm not sure about commercial exploitability of it. See my other comment, based on my experience, how regular covers are treated legally within EU. ------ Skoofoo Many of us love the Super Mario franchise and SMB has made a huge cultural impact, but that does not entitle people to use it as a base for their own work. Take inspiration from Mario and create original games! ~~~ JonnieCache The point is, if it weren't for disney et al, SMB would be public domain in the next couple of months. ~~~ candydance Including the IP of the "mario" character? ~~~ stonemetal Art yes, name probably not. I believe the name would be covered by trademark. Trademark allows for indefinite ownership. ~~~ rejoinder Can you really trademark a name such as Mario? ~~~ arbitrage In the context of a video game character who happens to be a plumber from Brooklyn, yes. ~~~ chinpokomon And movie... or are we trying to forget that that was ever made? ~~~ rejoinder Hoskins must have some plumbing fetish. ------ benbristow Too bad it's open-source. [http://files.benbristow.co.uk/archive/FullScreenMario](http://files.benbristow.co.uk/archive/FullScreenMario) ~~~ garethadams I guess you're saying that even though Nintendo say it's illegal to copy SMB, it's still technically possible? It's probably illegal where you live to break the lock on someone's front door and enter their house. That doesn't mean you can say "Too bad my hammer is stronger than their door". To take the hyperbole further, it's illegal to murder. Too bad these humans are so soft and squishy. Is the point that something being easy to do has some kind of impact on its legality? Or is this to do with how easy a law is to enforce? ~~~ benbristow The game's decades old now. Do you think it's going to do them any financial impact, really? They don't even sell the game anymore apart from on the Wii store. The only people playing it are those using downloaded ROMS on the internet using emulators or those with the original copy they had back in the day on a NES or NES-clone. And by saying what I said, I'm saying 'good luck enforcing that'. ------ VeejayRampay Reminds me of Square Enix pulling the plug on what was at the time a pretty awesome remix of Chrono Trigger. I really don't understand why any company would choose to piss on the efforts of dedicated fans who only wish to pay tribute to the greatest franchises. It's not like it's diminishing the sales of the game or anything. Quite the contrary, as all the past studies about piracy, fanart and derivatives have clearly shown. ~~~ rjbwork Copyright is, as in many things, a "use it or lose it" kind of situation. Unfortunate, but true. If you don't defend it today from some guy, you can't defend it tomorrow when your corporate competitor starts selling your original game on their digital marketplace. ~~~ gabemart >Copyright is, as in many things, a "use it or lose it" kind of situation. Unfortunate, but true. I don't believe this is true to any degree. True for trademarks [1] but not for copyright. The copyright holder is completely within their rights to turn a blind eye to the first 99 infringements and then sue for the 100th. [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution) ------ stonemetal _James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland, believes Nintendo would have a strong case in court. He says the graphics and music from the game are protected by copyright, and the levels and game mechanics likely are as well._ To bad they didn't contact anyone familiar with copyright law or look at copyright.gov for a few seconds. Game mechanics have never been eligible for copyright. You can copyright the art and code but not the gameplay. [http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html](http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html) _Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form._ ------ josephlord Obviously it won't help where companies want to retain their copyright longterm but I want to set a better example. I'm thinking of coming up with a license that offers no additional rights for a limited duration and then allows free use to emulate what would happen if copyright durations were more sensible. I don't think it will meet the OSS definition of Open Source although I think it should be possible to make it compatible with liberal licenses by offering mechanisms to exclude code (snippets, files or folders) from the licence. If you wanted you could dual license with a real OSS license. I'll put it on Github do a "Show HN" when I have something worth looking at. Does anyone know of any examples of this being done? Also I've never been able to work out whether code on Github needs to be under a license that allows modification/distribution, it seems like as long as it can be read it can still be copyright protected, does anybody know? ------ kvinnako Nintendo built the super mario franchise with the help of society's infrastructure(on top of the gaint's shoulders). For that society gave them 28years of time to monetize. But lobbying changed that equation in favor of corporations and made it 95 years. Nintendo making money or not, it's immoral to say the least for trying to impose copyright on what is supposed to be a public domain work. In the long run, relatively speaking society wouldn't be as big a gaint for future inventors as it was for nintendo. ------ aaronetz I wonder where Tuper Tario Tros[1] stands from a copyright standpoint, then. At what point would you say that a game violates copyright? Obviously Super Mario Bros was the inspiration for a whole generation of platformer games that came after it. What would be the minimal set of changes that will allow Full Screen Mario to exist without violating copyright? [1] [http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/522276](http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/522276) (flash required) ------ captainmuon Surely this is not causing Nintendo to loose money on SMB sales. I heard they have to pursue copyright violations, otherwise they might risk loosing the copyright (or did that apply only to trademarks?). Anyway, why don't they just give that guy a very limited, non-commercial fan license to make that game? Maybe charge him a cent or so. And have him slap on a big "unofficial" sign. They wouldn't loose much, but it would be a big PR gain. ~~~ pjc50 That only applies to trademarks. ------ bpicolo Lawyer in the article suggests game mechanics are copyrightable, but that is definitely not the case. Game mechanics aren't protected by anything (and shouldn't be). Art and music you can make the case for. ~~~ Tyrannosaurs Just said this below. Game mechanics aren't copyrightable but the artifacts are. The issue is that this looks identical - if it looked different but played the same I suspect there would be no problem. ~~~ jeena Like The Great Giana Sisters? ------ asadlionpk I wonder if they still earn money from the original Mario. If yes than this move against the project makes sense. ~~~ stonemetal It is in the virtual console store on the Wii and Wii U. So it is still for sale not sure if they are really making money on it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask YC: What is your take on web2py? - aitoehigie i am new to web2py and i must confess that i have fallen in love with it. if you have used the framework before, what is your take on it? ====== fredcy I've been experimenting with web2py over the last week and I like it. Simple web apps are easy to create with very little work. I'm not keen on through- the-web code development but that's not essential to web2py -- everything can be edited directly as simple files. The code of the 'gluon' library seems fine to me. It's a very compact style of coding that (IMO) could use a few more comments, but it's at least as good as what I've seen in Zope and Plone. (Of course, web2py has not been around long enough to accumulate the kind of cruft that happens in more aged software). The documentation is pretty good, particularly in its examples and tutorials. The new "manual" is good. The one thing is miss is an API manual such as can be found for the PHP and Python libraries. ------ ivank Have you looked at the source code? web2py is a bad joke with a lot of marketing. Then again, the author isn't really into the Python style - just its userbase. Look at Django if you want a full stack or Werkzeug if you want to roll your own; the latter can easily emulate the style of web.py or Pylons (in fact the trunk comes with these examples). ~~~ mdipierro Are you still upset with web2py because I did not include your package. Com'on. Grow up. web2py is a project grown in a university, it is all but marketing. Unless free good documentation is called marketing. Here is the latest draft manual: <http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/examples/static/web2py_manual.pdf> Here is a preliminary comparison with other frameworks: [http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/examples/static/web2py_vs_others.p...](http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/examples/static/web2py_vs_others.pdf) (please correct me if I am wrong) ~~~ webology I'm not sure about the other frameworks listed but I did notice the following related to Django: \- Django's caching supports ram, disk, database, and memcache as well. \- Migrations are supported in Django via the 3rd party django_evolution to name one of a few. \- Django trunk also has simplejson included. \- For documentation there are the online docs, the djangobook.com website, three published books as of today, and at least a few other books coming out in the next few months. My point just being that there is more then just one book. ~~~ mdipierro I just made many corrections. I could find only 2 published books. please send me a personal email if you have other corrections and they will be incorporated. ~~~ webology It also might be worth pointing out the community size based on the frameworks. By looking at their respective IRC channels and/or Google Group sizes you can get a rough estimate how big each of their communities are. Overall, I've found any / all python web framework communities to be extremely helpful and friendly. I say that not to take away from the non-python frameworks because I don't have experience with them. I couldn't easily find your email so here is a list instead. These books are out right now: The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right: [http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Guide-Django-Development- Ri...](http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Guide-Django-Development- Right/dp/1590597257/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209412044&sr=8-1) Sams Teach Yourself Django in 24 Hours: [http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach- Yourself-Django-Hours/dp/06...](http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself- Django- Hours/dp/067232959X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209412044&sr=8-5) Professional Python Frameworks: Web 2.0 Programming with Django and Turbogears: [http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Python-Frameworks- Program...](http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Python-Frameworks-Programming- Turbogears/dp/0470138092/ref=pd_bbs_12?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209412044&sr=8-12) Here are two coming out later in the year: Practical Django Projects (June or July 2008): [http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Django-Projects- Pratical/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Django-Projects- Pratical/dp/1590599969/ref=pd_bbs_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209412044&sr=8-4) Python Web Development with Django (Sep 2008): [http://www.amazon.com/Python- Development-Django-Developers-L...](http://www.amazon.com/Python-Development- Django-Developers- Library/dp/0132356139/ref=pd_bbs_sr_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209412044&sr=8-8) ~~~ mdipierro I updated the document and listed 3. When the other two come out I will update it again. Thanks. ------ BackSeat I've tried Django and web.py in the past, and given up with both. web2py works, is nicely implemented and the documentation is starting to take shape. Good support on the mailing list too. ------ g-man web2py 'gets it' about developing web apps! Massimo has boiled down the essence of what a web app needs to do (MVC, REST), and has delivered it in a clean, simple package, which is just what I would expect from a Computer Science professor. The new Google appengine Bigtable datastore makes any SQL-based ORMs moot now anyway, so all we really need to worry about are the business logic and presentation, both of which web2py excels at. Yes, you can still use Textmate if you want, but the cool thing about web2py is you never need to leave the browser IDE. Also, the framework itself is so compact you can carry everything around in a few megs of a USB thumb drive, so now you have a truly portable cross-platform package you can use to develop wherever you are! So just get involved, and let's lead the way into the cloud... I see a huge need for that kind of leadership over at the appengine; this is a chance to make a real difference and shape the future, folks. ------ inklesspen Web2py is a joke. The guy wrote his own ORM, rather than working with the best-of-breed Python ORM SQLAlchemy, and he touts this as a feature. He was also quick to point out that Web2py won a rumble, but fails to mention that this was because none of the other Python frameworks had even heard of it. If you want a good Python framework that doesn't unduly dictate your app structure, go to Pylons. ~~~ mdipierro The Flourish conference was sponsored by Google. The creators of Django, CackePHP and Rails were on the mailing list and some even replied to it. I agree that if nobody else participated it is not a victory. I would not say web2py won, I would say web2py was not afraid to participate and delivered a working project in 24 hours that met the specs. The organizers said web2py won. Ask the organizers. Ian Biking was on the jury. ~~~ inklesspen You did in fact say web2py won: "web2py is the only framework that participated to the www.flourishconf.com rumble (develop a web app in 24 hours) and won because all the other frameworks chickened out." [http://spyced.blogspot.com/2008/04/m-half-baked-thoughts- on-...](http://spyced.blogspot.com/2008/04/m-half-baked-thoughts-on-python- web.html?showComment=1207575720000#c7863386267780636294) ~~~ mdipierro Three other people came to pick up the rules and some more were on the mailing list, were supposed to and didn't. I spent 24 hours coding and felt like a fool when nobody else delivered. You are taking a quote I made to my users' group out of context. Why do you turn a discussion about some work of mine into a personal thing? ~~~ inklesspen No, I'm taking a quote you posted on someone else's blog in an attempt to promote web2py. I'm not turning this into a personal thing; you are. ------ nuggien got a 503 when trying to access <http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Kicking My Caffeine Addiction - mathgenius https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/kicking-my-caffeine-addiction/?amp ====== WheelsAtLarge I totally agree with the idea of caffeine being more destructive than beneficial to one's life. We think it's a mild addiction but it is not. I didn't start until my 30's but I regret I did. I've tried to quit a few times but each time I start again a few months later. I can get past the physical withdraw symptoms but mentally I continue to crave it and ultimate return to it. If you have not started be smart and never start. It makes for a better daily life experience and ultimately it does not help. Also, you'll save 1000's of dollars in the long run.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Street View Images Reveal the Demographic Makeup of the U.S. - adsouza1 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603779/how-google-street-view-images-reveal-the-demographic-makeup-of-the-us/ ====== nl Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742449) ------ tombone12 For a site called technology _review_ you'd think they put in the effort to mention some limitations as well... I guess one obvious one is that the correlations between cars and demographics change as cars get older and new cars appear, but I guess this can be useful for monitoring trends in years between censuses.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Backtesting Our 100% YoY Profit Generating Strategy - lettergram https://austingwalters.com/backtesting-our-100-yoy-profit-generating-strategy/ ====== cimmanom They backtested this only against a recent period with no major economic downturns. Buyer beware.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Global market share of Google Public DNS and OpenDNS - sajal83 http://www.cdnplanet.com/blog/google-dns-opendns-and-cdn-performance/ ====== nuttendorfer I used to use Googles DNS but when I started to move away from Google products for privacy reasons (I still use some, can't help it) this one was one of the easier decisions. ~~~ jonknee It's also one of the least impactful things you can do for your privacy. <https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy> ~~~ nuttendorfer I'm quite aware of that. Freeing myself of Google was the main point. ------ spindritf I used to use OpenDNS, then my own servers (you can set up a local resolver with BIND in minutes), then Google's DNS but all those options are slower and give worse results than using your provider's DNS servers. You can see for yourself, in your particular setup, which configuration is the fastest using namebench[1]. But it's not only DNS latency, it's also that some CDNs depend on your server's location for determining the best response for you so overall browsing experience also gets better. Right now I use local BIND but forward queries to other servers. It's a compromise between latency, caching and flexibility. For example it forwards requests for .bit domains to the dot-bit's DNS server and requests for OpenNIC domains to their servers. [1] <https://code.google.com/p/namebench/> ~~~ vegardx Another way to get a local cacher is to setup dnsmasq locally or on your router/gateway. I have it running on my gateway and it greatly reduce the latency for DNS-lookups on most things where there is a high probability that another client already has requested it. The more devices connected to it, the better. ------ modeless I wonder what the market share of 4.2.2.1-6 is. ~~~ sajal83 Those resolvers are run by level3. I could dish out the stats for queries coming from level3, but that may not be accurate. Do you know the real ips behind the anycasted 4.2.2.1-6 nameservers? ------ tomclancy I was using Google's DNS for many years, but just recently switched back to OpenDNS because of their DNSCrypt service (<https://www.opendns.com/technology/dnscrypt/>) ~~~ vegardx If you are interested in privacy, maybe you shouldn't use a DNS-provider that hijacks DNS and give you fake responses? It's a reason that they don't support DNSSec and probably never will. It will kill their business model, which in short is hijacking your DNS and giving you ads. ------ andyking My ISP doesn't even provide its own DNS servers - their DHCP dishes out 8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4 to customers. Is this a good thing, or just them being cheap? ~~~ k3n Yes and yes.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Interactive Maps for IoT Search Engine Shodan - achillean https://maps.shodan.io/#36.421282443649496/-99.228515625/5/green/apache ====== Stately Very cool. But you're using basemaps that require attribution[0], which you're very conveniently covering with the Shodan Maps logo. [0] - [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3a._I_would_lik...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3a._I_would_like_to_use_OpenStreetMap_maps._How_should_I_credit_you.3F)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Climate Change Inst. Hacked - Email Leak - Climate Change a Possible Farce - keltecp11 http://news.aol.com/article/hacked-e-mails-heat-up-global-warming/778525?icid=main\|main\|dl1\|link3\|http%3A%2F%2Fnews.aol.com%2Farticle%2Fhacked-e-mails-heat-up-global-warming%2F778525 ====== jacquesm Can we please stop posting the same stuff over and over again, this must be the 10th (no kidding) submission of this material.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Buddy Beers: How they are becoming the world's mobile beer tap - robwoodbridge http://untether.tv/ellb/sessions/new-mobile-business-models/buddy-beers-how-they-are-becoming-the-worlds-mobile-beer-tap-and-how-they-landed-carlsberg-as-their-first-client-with-founder-travis-todd// ====== nerdben What I've been waiting for so long! 3 Cheers...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Strategies for single source HTML5 mobile apps? - abhisec Is it even possible? Most of the js toolkits like Jquery Mobile say they are cross platform and cross device ready, but none of them actually look and feel like a WEB app (They look awesome on desktop browsers but you probably need a little more on a desktop web app). The widgets and buttons look nice on mobile devices but I was wondering have people actually built applications with single source and if so how and what were some UI design strategies and methods you employed. ====== nreece I recently wrote about our experience with jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch. Have a read - [http://blog.roveb.com/post/17259708005/our-experience- with-j...](http://blog.roveb.com/post/17259708005/our-experience-with-jquery- mobile-and-sencha-touch) ~~~ abhisec Thanks that is helpful. Surprised to see no other replies. I would have hoped many people doing single source apps. ------ abhisec Feedback, tools and libraries along with any live examples will be very helpful.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Do it yourself first - rantfoil http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1296-do-it-yourself-first ====== SwellJoe I've always done this...but sometimes to an extreme that is unhealthy (for myself and my company). I come from a DIY family. My dad never hired anyone to do anything: plumbing, car repair, electrical (he was an electrician and electronics repairman before becoming an engineer, so this was obviously sensible), roofwork, ductwork, painting, landscaping and yard maintenance, etc. So, when I run into a problem, my first instinct is to do it myself. And a lot of times, I end up doing it myself...and spending a _lot_ of time learning how to do it. But, I'm (finally) beginning to learn that there are simply some things that I will never do well. And some things that, even if I can do them, it makes me ill to do them because of how repetitive they are (like bookkeeping, filing, accounting, etc.), or how much practice it takes me to get to proficiency (like web design), or how my natural and very strong introversion fights against success in the area (like cold calling, or LinkedIn "warm calling", for market research and business development). I'm also beginning to realize that by focusing on these tasks, which can be very time consuming, I'm missing out on other opportunities to grow our business. So, I'm interviewing bookkeepers this week (craigslist is awesome for job postings, by the way...I've been amazed at the results: 200+ applicants for a part-time bookkeeping/filing office management position), and I hired a friend to do some light business development and market research for us. The thing is, when I add up the numbers (for example, $400/month for a bookkeeper), I realize how stupid it was for me to try to do this work for so long. There _is_ certainly value in knowing the position well enough to hire well. I can choose someone based on their intelligence and enthusiasm rather than purely on the resume and experience, since I can train them in the specifics, if needed. But, I think I waited too long to hire this position. It's one of the aspects of the company that has been weighing on my mind for a while, and keeping me from being as enthusiastic about getting to work each day. So, as with most things DHH says, I agree...but with caveats. Don't take it to extremes. ~~~ timr _"I'm also beginning to realize that by focusing on these tasks, which can be very time consuming, I'm missing out on other opportunities to grow our business."_ Opportunity cost is such a stealthy killer. Like you, I've spent a lot my time doing things like car repair, painting, moving...even simple (but time- consuming) things like taking stuff to the dump. The immediate reasoning is always something like: _"why in the world would I PAY someone three times as much to fix my brakes, as it would cost me to do myself?"_ , and it usually made sense at the time. But then I realized that I was far less productive at the things that I _wanted_ to do, because I was spending so much time on the cruft. I've learned a lot by doing things myself, but this habit has also left me with a less free time to do the things I _wanted_ to do, or to _excel_ at the important things. So now I try to pay people to take the uninteresting things off my plate. Still...that's a hard thing to do when you're the type of person who is inclined to find nearly _everything_ interesting, so it usually boils down to setting firm priorities. ------ tdavis I have a tendency to follow the "do _everything_ yourself" mantra, where _everything_ refers to things I actually enjoy doing but may include an excessive number of tasks for a single person to do with great efficiency or skill. Did you ever watch "Jack Of All Trades?" Well, I'm Jack, but not as awesome as Bruce Campbell. Man that show rocked. Where was I again? Oh, right. So I'll code, design, sysadmin, and all this other stuff. I'd be a genius if I weren't so average at all of them. The problem becomes, though, that since I've been doing all this stuff for so long I'm very reluctant to actually let someone replace me. What if they're incompetent? What if they're really smart but lazy? How do I manage them when I can't even reliably manage myself? What do I do about the fact that I've become so used to being in complete control of everything? I think there's something to be said about just finding someone smart and talented to do something you have no idea how to do. I definitely take this approach with all business matters as they are forever deferred to Dan; I have no desire to gain more than a cursory understanding of how that stuff works. Sometimes I'll want to learn a bit more about what caused the financial crisis or what some business term is and I'll ask, but it's only out of curiosity, not because I want to actually use that knowledge for anything. A prerequisite to buying a microwave isn't knowing how it works, at least for me. I only care whether or not it _heats shit up_. ------ rewind This is way too general for my taste. I'm a creative guy when it comes to solving problems, but when it comes to graphic design, for example, I suck. I don't need to try it myself because I don't even know where to start with that kind of creative process. My mind just doesn't work that way. Don't always do it yourself first. Besides, I'm too busy writing code and that's what I do well, so there's no point for me to try to be a jack of all trades. Also, if you want to do everything yourself first, I hope you're not in much of a rush to get your overall project finished. There are a lot of things that you can easily understand and appreciate without having actually done them yourself. If you need to do everything yourself first, you're probably not going to be a great manager or boss. A good manager should have a good sense of what his/her employees are doing and be able to get them to communicate the most important parts of the job without actually having to do the job. Sure, you'll have a better sense if you do it yourself, but that doesn't mean that's a good trade- off in terms of how to spend your time. There are a lot of tasks that you can intelligently analyze without actually doing them. Are there a lot of crappy managers out there who have no sense of the jobs their reports are doing? Sure. But they can put some effort into understanding them without actually doing them. It's more of a communication issue, not an execution issue. Finally, I'm assuming the post is in the context of getting a project finished, not running a company. But if it's the latter, then I think it's especially bad advice: taxes, legal, accounting, etc. should NEVER be done by anyone other than an expert unless it's at an EXTREMELY basic level (and even then it's still usually a bad idea). I'm sure founders with limited financial resources fall into this trap sometimes, but it can really bite you in the ass down the road. ~~~ davidw I think the idea comes across as "you should have taken a stab at it to know what it's about". If you're smart, you'll appreciate even more the work of someone you hire who is truly talented in the given field. A bit I wrote down from Growing a Business: "Be a hands-on learner, and get involved with all aspects of your business, so that you know exactly how they work down to the details." <http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/4/growing-a-business> Which is a good book - it's like "getting real", but an actual, real, published book with an ISBN number, rather than a "let's see how many pdf's we can sell to our followers before we release it for free" type of deal. ~~~ raffi An ISBN doesn't mean much. Anyone can get one for free from createspace.com. I liked getting real and bought a hard copy on a recommendation even with the free PDF available. ------ wayne People are obviously opposed to a bad manager assuming he can do your job better than you can. But I think DHH's point is to avoid the opposite extreme, small companies that over-hire into positions that an existing employee can easily perform. Having an existing person do "marketing" or "business development" probably won't be an awesome as an industry veteran doing it, but it beats hiring a full time person to do it without really understanding what that person does, and regretting it later.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Michael Nielsen on open science at TEDxWaterloo [video] - munderwood http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/open-science-2/ ====== extension Funny how it's become a novel idea to do science collaboratively on the web, which was invented _by physicists_ at a _particle accelerator_ specifically for that purpose.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Want a new HackerNews? HackersUnit.com - karlclement Hello everyone,<p>I would like to know if you would all want a new, upgraded version of HackerNews. I would like to create a realtime version of HackerNews with user classes and communication tools.<p>If you would like me to create this project, please feel free to comment or to pass on the message.<p>I applied to Kickstarter to find some funding. Let me know if you would donate some money to this project. I have to convince Kickstarter to accept the project.<p>*Please note, we don't want to replace HackerNews, we are only making another network to Hackers to speak their minds. ====== fagatini nope ~~~ karlclement We want to create a network to allow users on HackerNews to communicate, not replace HackerNews. We love HackerNews!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google to court: Galaxy Nexus code is closed just like that of the iPhone - revorad http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/04/google-to-court-galaxy-nexus-code-is.html ====== ZeroGravitas For someone with "FOSS" in the title of his blog, he seems strangely surprised that you can release proprietary products based on open source code (e.g. Netscape 6 and Mozilla). ~~~ fomojola Florian Mueller at it again. From his Wikipedia page (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_M%C3%BCller>) he has multiple relationships with Microsoft and Oracle: he's largely just a gadfly on Google's behind. Most of what he has to say should be taken with a bag of salt. ------ tzs Wait...why does Google say that how Android runs on Samsung's phone is Google's trade secret? I'd expect it to be Samsung's trade secret. ~~~ raidwar It's Florian Mueller who's behind the site. His credibility it... well.. just google around, you know soon.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Building a local, people-focused tech jobs site for PDX - sanzen https://techjobspdx.com/about/ ====== sanzen I've worked in tech for over 20 years. I'm tired of throwing resumes at global job sites and hoping for the best. So, I'm building something local for tech jobs in PDX, focused on helping local companies and the people living and working here find each other. Being an "older" worker, I'm especially interested in helping people of all ages and identities (and experience) find work in the tech industry in friendly, inclusive workplaces. Post your tech jobs here if you feel the same. I'm going to make the best possible resource I can, to help as many people as I can. I'd be grateful for any and all feedback from folks here as things progress. James Gill hello@techjobspdx.com	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Differential Debugging - ctoth http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20130910/ ====== peter_l_downs Although only mentioned in a single line in this article, `git bisect` is well worth reading about by itself. I found the following tutorial to be extremely helpful: [https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git- bisect....](https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-bisect.html) ------ crazygringo > _Finding yourself in a situation with both a working and a buggy system is > quite common._ Man, I _wish_ it were common -- it's pretty rare, at least in my experience. From my experience, most bugs are introduced together with new features/functionality, and there was no time when the bug _wasn 't_ present. But when you _do_ find yourself with the working/buggy versions, a lot of the time source-control will make it quite clear what changed! Either that, or a hardware/os configuration changed...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Diary of a Failed Startup: Aftermath - nostrademons http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/2008/12/aftermath.html ====== vlad Regarding getting any type of programming job after doing it yourself for a time, it's not very difficult to do. I didn't have any difficulty getting a job at a billion dollar company after doing my shareware business for three years or so, after my father was laid off (I lived with my parents, being in early 20's). Basically, after Startup School 2007, I was thinking of joining a YC startup I really liked (Auctomatic) and they seemed to think I was the #1 candidate. Being rejected from YCombinator regarding growing my app, and looking at that YC startup I mentioned, I made my eBay-related program free to use instead of paid (because I was thinking I would join that YC startup, or if not, I would look at some more in California), to eliminate any guilt of not supporting it as much as I could while I would be moving on to something else. I also wanted to focus on web based instead of desktop software. Then, my father got laid off around the same time, and while I was helping my father find a job, I realized that he wasn't getting any responses. So besides creating his resume, as I went through job search sites submitting his, I thought, I might as well submit my own to a couple of companies directly as well, having just shut off my income by making my software free, and now feeling like I should stay in the area while my dad got back up on his feet. I had no problem getting interviews after only applying to a couple of big local companies. My dad finally got one, and I went with him, and they did not want him and instead wanted me. The guy asked me to come back and meet with his two bosses, and I did, though I cut that meeting short to go another interview. I was called and asked to come back again on a third interview, and to continue that interview, as well as possibly meet some executive from New York (their headquarters). (LOL) So my dad got only one other interview in those two months, which I didn't go with him to. :) The Fortune 100 company that gave me an offer first, I accepted, and declined to meet with that other company. One of the few places I applied was Google, and a Google recruiter called after I had already accepted another offer and said that Google wouldn't fly me in to California after my phone interview with a Google developer, and he thought my credentials were great and that I should try again in March 2008. Basically, I planned on reviewing the TopCoder pages on algorithms and such before the call, but my grandparents "went missing" and my dad and I went looking for them when their alarm went off, so by the time I got home, I was exhausted. Then my parents were in the same room as I, so it was tough to struggle through the phone interview with Google. Worse yet, I was just getting so tired from the interview that in the end, when I likely correctly answered that an algorithm took big O of "n log n" time, the interviewer sounded really excited and surprised and asked me how I got it. I said I don't know, and he kept asking me. I said, I just knew that's one of the common possibilities, and that the algorithm grows faster (is slower) than linear time but grows slower (is a faster algorithm) than exponential time. I started (at the company I accepted the offer) directly in a real position, while other people I know (and my age) had just gotten their B.S. in Computer Science or Business degrees and then had "Trainee" job titles for about 8 months, even though I was the same age as them (different department) and had about an Associate's Degree at the time. I quickly found that people do not think the same way as startup founders. The company was very conservative, and also I was the youngest by far of anyone else in my department. My favorite part of that experience was trying to bring up awareness of the iPhone. I remember, at the urging of the guy who hired me, showing off my iPhone last December to an executive who was walking by, who seemed interested. I worked with the guy who hired me to explain to him and others the difference between web-based and native apps, as well as WAP, and different ways this could be implemented. As well as why the iPhone was a better platform than anything else. Also, getting our IT department to register for the iPhone Enterprise Beta as soon as it came out. And, talking about having API's and and one place to render, so that the same content would simply be displayed differently, depending on the capability of the device-- regular phone, iPhone, laptop, 24" monitor. There seemed to a lot of backlash at the time, but then I noticed some of my ideas had become some other person's ideas, such as that of the guy who hired me. I created mockups of what an app might look like on the iPhone. This company's policy was to buy before build, instead of develop in-house (which made sense) so they got a mobile development shop to build some ideas, with the two guys--the guy who hired me, and the guy in IT I told to sign up for the iPhone Enterprise Beta--running the show, and I was not involved in any way. My favorite moment was washing my hands in the first floor bathroom late one day, around August, when a person started talking to me. Oh, it's the CIO! He let me know they're going to be pursuing some iPhone and Blackberry apps, and using it and such. I realized therefore that it was the same guy who saw me show him my iPhone in December, and that he must have remembered me, and I asked him of that. He says, yup! And I reply, ( this is still very funny to me ), "oh I heard that you were meeting with this person, and that person, and this person." He looked at me with a blank stare. I asked, "Did you like those mockups in the presentation?" He said, yes! I said, "I made those." Another blank stare. It was just funny because the executive was trying to surprise me about remembering me from a year ago, and I surprised him by basically telling him I made those mockups he saw as well as knowing everything about his meeting. Of course even though I bought the iPhone and Macbook Pro with my own money and explained things to my manager and stuff, created mock ups, and presentations, I didn't get any credit whatsoever. Another thing, when I was talking with executives (for some reason, I was originally sitting not with coworkers, but near an executive who was in charge of other executives, one of whom was the second most important in terms of strategy to the CIO), and I ALWAYS brought up the iPhone project and ALWAYS mentioned the guy-who-hired- me's name. Apparently, the guy-who-hired-me only sometimes mentioned me. And when I told the guy-who-hired-me that I had run-ins with executives, he instantly asked, "oh did you mention me? did you mention me?" I thought to myself, doesn't he want to hear my cool story? Why is this more important to him? I said, uh yeah, I always do. Lesson learned--next time, I will only mention people who actually do anything useful. I already had a path to executives, I did not need someone else stealing my ideas. Oh, and the project to get iPhone/mobile awareness started out as both of us working together, of course with him having zero knowledge about anything, but as soon as it go interest, the person asked me multiple times, in the presence of another executive (yes, there are too many executives), that he should probably do it... I said.. uh.. what... my current manager has full support of me using part of time on stuff related to the iPhone... why do you ask? However, this happened a couple of times, and always within earshot of an executive, like this wasn't a 50-50 effort. So in September, I left to get my Bachelor's in Computer Science and Mathematics while learning iPhone development (I signed up for a related class that was originally an independent study meant for development for another platform, but eventually everyone switched to iPhone development by November!) I also took a class on Adobe CS3, as well, of course, three real CS and Math classes. I think corporate was fun, but regardless, I did not want to stay because they were not going to develop my ideas, but contract them out to a vendor. I couldn't care less about credit; it was that day to day, I wasn't working on cool stuff. As far as ACTUAL WORK I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DOING, that actually started getting fun and productive when my department finally moved everyone together instead of all over the place, a few weeks before I was quitting. However, I wanted to get my degree and have time to work on my ideas. Since I remember you posting here as long as I have, and I remember you going through what you did, I just wanted to congratulate you and tell you what I've experienced as well. Also, I've found that some negative things people have posted here about certain YC startup's hiring practices/treatment of other people are true, though I think I've only officially applied to a couple over the years. I really have to give the hats off to Auctomatic though for asking me to create something in smalltalk for them, regardless of my degree, and these people had gone to Cambridge and/or had deferred accepting attending MIT. ------ eterno This is an amazing writeup. Incredibly honest. It would be great if you could do an as honest writeup after some time(possible a couple of months). I would be interested in thoughts along two lines: 1\. Maybe working Google will not be that great. They sure do have very smart ppl - but I guess you know by now that startups are a different beast. There was a reason you went into the startup world - maybe because you found more meaning in the complete responsibility a startup endows you, and probably that wont exist in Google - nor the adrenaline. Maybe you need to balance that 'meaning' in your job with having fun - your starup was all about meaning and probably too hard to be fun so a stint at Google looks exciting. Maybe you will crave meaning very soon, in which case Google might not be the best option. 2\. "And I have no cofounder, so I'd be doing everything myself until I could afford employees, and then I'd have to build a company culture. That will be no 'fun'" Maybe you can still find a cofounder(maybe in Google). I am not sure, but I think there should be a way to do startups while keeping the fun intact. One thing that I have seen is that big companies afford you a default(big) social circle which a lot of times is the source of the fun you have. (Also startups typicall dont have cute HR's ;)). But maybe you can still create a big enough social group by just hanging out with other startup folks and have as much fun. Just some random thoughts. Feel free to (not) reply. ~~~ nostrademons 1.) It's possible, though if that happens, I probably wouldn't write about it because I don't want to bad-mouth my employer. I also got the impression that there's a lot of cool, meaningful stuff going on in the Googleplex, but we just don't see most of it because products typically take a few years to mature. Think of all the stealth-mode startups that are out there building things you've never heard of, then imagine that going on inside one organization. 2.) Similarly, one of my reasons for choosing Google was indeed to meet potential new cofounders, but I wouldn't recruit them directly away from work (I don't think I legally can - I'm guessing that Google will have a no-solicit agreement like every other tech place I've worked at). It's more to get to know them as friends, so that if 5-10 years down the line, we're both getting really bored with everything going on at the Googleplex, there's a big pool of people that I'd like to work with. ~~~ ivankirigin People leaving at the same time to start a company isn't solicitation ------ luckystrike But if I were to do another startup, I'd be stuck with it for the next 4-10 years, it'd have to be profitable within about 2 to avoid running out of money, <SNIP> I might be able to pull it off and get rich, but it'd eat up all of my twenties, probably all my friends, and possibly all my sanity. Not worth it. This is one of the things that i ponder upon as well. A lot of people would say (and correctly so) it becomes more difficult later on to start your own venture, but at this point (I'm 27) i just can't convince myself to work like crazy for the next 2-3 years and possibly spend the prime of my life in front of the screen. I guess it's just a question what you want from life at that point in time. (Great work/money/time for other interests/good social life). Obviously all of it together would be nice :-), but till then got to be selective. ~~~ donw I'm also twenty-seven, and there's nothing I'd rather do than have a go with getting my own business running. And the thing is, that doesn't mean spending all of your life in front of a monitor. Spending time out in the real world, talking with other people, is a vital activity for anybody starting a company. It's also a great way to make friends with similar interests, which leads itself to all kinds of fun. Too many people spend a frankly stupid amount of time worrying about wasting their youth, or make up for it by spending their twenties in a drunken stupor. Think about it. Would you rather hit thirty, and have built a few things that you can be really proud of, and take a shot at making some real dosh, or just look back on a bunch of parties? ~~~ luckystrike I would prefer to hit thirty having done car rallies in Himalayas, knowing how to fly a plane, and building up some decent software as well. A bunch of 'memorable' parties would be an added bonus. :-) (And i think i should re-read my comments before posting if they give the impression that the author wrote them in a drunker stupor.) Well i do not believe in the theory of one size fits all. If running a business works well for you at this point of time, it's great and wish you success in it. I guess i need some more convincing before i finally take the plunge. (Yeah i know there is never a right time) tom_rath put it across very well in his comment above: "You're not wasting time if you genuinely enjoy how it is being spent." ~~~ donw I think we're on the same page; I don't want my epitaph to read, "Well, he sure worked a hell of a lot." So, I mis-interpreted your post... by quite a bit. :) ------ Mistone its now been one year since we officially closed up shop at my first startup, and I've now been working at a big co for a year as well. I felt a deep sense of loss after we closed down, while the financial pinch was very real, what burns me to this day is the fact that we did not launch, because it leaves a gaping "what if" void. I feel fortunate to be working on my next startup in my off hours, and not having any looming moonlighting conflicts (lesson learned) this time around. A lot of the frustration I felt around the first failure motivated me to get back in there with a new startup. Big or small, rich or poor there is nothing like working on something that is truly yours. The sirens call to entrepreneurship was more than I could resist. thanks for sharing your experience here and go kill it at google for a while until the siren calls you back. ------ timcederman I thought this was a well-written, very honest, write-up. ~~~ puzzle-out Not only can this guy write code, but his prose is fluent and insightful. A pleasure to read such a well written post. ------ dhouston jonathan -- thanks for the writeups & best of luck at google. you'll find some good future cofounder material there. swing by dropbox HQ sometime :) ~~~ nostrademons Thanks. I'm excited to finally get to Silicon Valley - a lot of the folks I've met through various YC meetups have all moved out there. ------ mynameishere Why didn't you let it run on auto-pilot? (It was a games aggregator, right?) ~~~ nostrademons It was a game creation engine, and we didn't complete it to a degree where I would've felt comfortable launching it. We also did a Flash games hosting site, as sort of a warmup, that was live and had some traffic. I left the decision on whether to keep that running up to my cofounder, since he was paying the server bills, and he chose to shut it down. I think it was moderately unprofitable (as in, it costs $80/month to operate and generated about $60/month in revenue) - it probably could have been profitable had we downgraded to a shared webhost or VPS, but he didn't want the hassle. ------ admoin congratulations on the new job! ~~~ nostrademons thanks! ~~~ litewulf Hm, it sounds like you may end up sitting near me (same department at least). Hope I run into you, sounded like you did cool stuff.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Exercise Boosts Your Brain - jamesbritt http://singularityhub.com/2010/08/05/exercise-boosts-your-brain-%e2%80%93-here%e2%80%99s-how/ ====== DavidSJ _So the next time you sit down to watch television, or, um, surf the internet, remember: your BMP count might be getting into dangerous territory._ Try to imagine that same sentence with "to read a book" substituted for "to watch television, or, um, surf the internet". Hard, isn't it? This is anti-technology bigotry. Pretty surprising at singularityhub.com, huh? That's how pervasive it is. ~~~ theBobMcCormick I would assume they picked the examples _because_ it's singularityhub. Most of their readers are likely to be technology/gadget centric and a message about more tech centric activities was probably expected to resonate better than a message about something as "old fashioned" as reading a book. Beside, be honest. What percentage of the population do you think actually spends _more_ time reading books than watching TV and surfing the internet? BTW: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, watching TV accounted for more than half the total leisure time for Americans 15 years and older. (<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm>) ~~~ johngunderman I used to. I don't watch TV, but I probably spend too much time on the computer. Just a few years ago I would read more than any other activity. ------ tomjen3 I must have seen a million of these "benefits of exercise" posts by now - everybody seems to think that exercise is a good thing, but making another post isn't going to change anything, people are still not going to exercise; making a drug that simulates the effects of exercise would change everything. So why aren't people working on that? ~~~ orangecat _So why aren't people working on that?_ I would hope they are. Of course if something like that actually comes out there will be lots of pushback from those with overdeveloped Protestant work ethics. No pain no gain, it's "cheating" to just take a pill, etc. ~~~ galdosd Oh, but the situation is even worse than that-- the Protestant work ethic already caught you (or us, or many people, whatever). I'm talking about the assumption that exercise is some sort of pain for gain tradeoff that you would suffer through in exchange for a later reward, but is itself unpleasant or undesirable without the health benefits. This insiduous paradigm seems to be everywhere in (at least) American culture. And so the magic pill already exists! And there's no patent. No copay. No HMO can deny you it. And it's fun! ------ lukifer Heart health is brain health. Simple as that. ~~~ mrj Well, as a brief mention said in the article, any exercise benefit to the brain used to be thought of mainly as an increased blood flow and oxygen uptake. But more recent research is focused on the hippocampus and neurogenesis, actually growing new neurons by exercising. Unfortunately, there's no test that can actually prove the new cells are responsible for new learning. This happens to be the focus of my current research paper. :-) ~~~ cynest Cool. So might the new neurons be more for motor control than say, mathematics? ~~~ mrj Well, the hippocampus is related to long term memory and not motor control, as I understand it. So it's doubtful. I'm having a hard time finding studies that adequately control for fitness level though. Most tend to focus on acute exercise. They run people for a while then immediately sit them down for a cognition test. I'm more interested in the influence of long-term fitness level. That's not as often studied. ------ palish _We all know exercise is your best shot at having a healthy heart, a strong immune system, and maybe even a 100th birthday party._ Wasn't this just recently proved false (here on HN)? The sentence may as well read "We all know the sun orbits the Earth" or "We all know that you have to write real programs in C". Or rather, if you spend most of your day sitting behind a computer, then it doesn't matter how much you exercise, you'll likely be dead by eighty. (Which is quite a liberating viewpoint if you simply accept it.) ~~~ dreaming In the context of the benefits of exercise, i'd imagine we need to be careful not to conflate health and longevity before we debate things being 'proved false'. Also, obligatory [Citation required] ~~~ palish _Proved_ was the wrong choice. _Implicated_ is probably more accurate. But really, there was some article very recently that made all the same points. ------ moonhorse Another theory is that low calorie diet leads to longevity. Too many theories. :) ~~~ pjscott It's good that we have a lot of observed correlations between various activities (exercise, low-calorie diets, etc.) and longevity. That way we can figure out what's going on biologically, and try to find easier and more effective ways of living longer, healthier lives. Science!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tesla: Don't use our Superchargers all the time - electic http://www.autoblog.com/2015/08/19/tesla-superchargers-letter/ ====== sunstone It's a good sign for Tesla that the charge stations are so popular. Sure it might be a pain for now but if consumers like them so much the charge stations could become a compelling product differentiator for a long time to come. ------ bato The part that really hurt my non-american sensibilities is when the letter points out a cost of 12cts/kWh. I wish my electricity was that cheap. As for the main point itself, I can imagine the intent was to make sure supercharger station are actually available for someone on a long distance trip, but it is quite poorly worded. ~~~ toomuchtodo > The part that really hurt my non-american sensibilities is when the letter > points out a cost of 12cts/kWh. That's commercial/industrial pricing. If Solar City is able to obtain status as a generator that can sell power on the open market (combining rooftops into blocks for firm generation using controlled release of power to the grid from sunlight stored in PowerWalls), they'll be able to "sell" power to Tesla at a much lower rate. As a residential customer in Illinois, my cost is 6cents/kwh, and as low as 1cent/kwh between midnight and 5am.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: A static file server in x86 Assembly - Jeaye https://github.com/jeaye/toybox/tree/master/httpd-asm#readme ====== stevekemp Nicely written though I think you could shave some bytes off it. For example in your `error_failed_allocation` function you don't need to jump to the `error_die` function - just fall-through.. [https://github.com/jeaye/toybox/blob/5a1978e134db6d70b30cac4...](https://github.com/jeaye/toybox/blob/5a1978e134db6d70b30cac4d0b356dd36039333f/httpd- asm/src/error.asm#L8) ------ kup0 Love this. I have a special appreciation for those that can write in assembly. It's one of those things, even after reading about it, that I just can't fully wrap my head around. I'm also a huge fan of efficiency (super small/fast programs, websites, etc) and assembly stuff is commonly in that vein. ------ dgivney I love the code style of your repo. It's very easy to read and I'm a sucker for the 0x80 interrupt call syntax. It just makes it feel more 'assembly'.. Thanks for posting - looking forward to going through it properly this weekend!..	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Twitter, make your choice, acquire a media sharing service or launch your own - abraham http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2010/12/28/image-upload-twitter-difficult/ ====== kmfrk What she wants is Tumblr. And, from a developer perspective, look how they are coping with downtime. (Horribly.) I think Twitter already pissed off enough developers by publishing their own free Twitter client. A free, integrated photo service would not appease a lot of people. I can still remember when TapBots touted their upcoming, secret iPad app, which, as it turned out, was a paid Twitter app. Ouch. ~~~ wizardishungry A free, integrated photo service would not appease a lot of people. Except for people who aren't web developers (aka Real Users®) ~~~ kmfrk The phrasing was a little misleading; a lot of people will be annoyed at such a move, but that is not to say that many other people will embrace it. ------ jonursenbach Light grey text on a white background scalds my eyes. ~~~ ronnier [http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://thenextweb.com/twitte...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2010/12/28/image- upload-twitter-difficult/) ~~~ markkat Thank you for this. I had no idea what I was missing. ------ adityakothadiya This is exactly what my wife struggled for this very moment. It was so hard for her to use Twitpic or Tweetdeck when all she wanted to post a photo from Twitter site. They should really just add their own photo sharing service or integrate seamlessly to other service from their current web site. Their iPhone app is quite good, wish they can bring that experience on their web site. ~~~ callmeed The app was an acquisition (and a good one) ... my guess is that none of the current services are good/polished enough to do what they want. ------ Z3UX I really miss Pownce for this. I loved it because I could share anything I wanted with my friends. :) ------ barredo Twitter is not for sharing photos. That's the whole point of twitter. ~~~ zeedotme but it is for sharing information and i'd argue that information can come in the form of photos, video, documents, links etc.. ~~~ coderdude That's kind of a slippery slope though. Information is data and data is anything!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
React-Laravel: Use ReactJS with Laravel - talyssonoc https://github.com/talyssonoc/react-laravel ====== sbarre Is there any data around the benefits of server-side rendering and client-side mounting vs. client-side rendering & mounting? Can the server-side render be cached in any way? ~~~ talyssonoc Yes, there is: [http://www.onebigfluke.com/2015/01/experimentally- verified-w...](http://www.onebigfluke.com/2015/01/experimentally-verified-why- client-side.html) The server-side render can't be cached. I guess it is only possible if the component is using the PureRenderMixin ([https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/pure-render- mixin.html](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/pure-render-mixin.html)). Feel free to create a PR/issue about it in the repo !	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Android banking malware is on Google Play over month with over 10,000 installs - boni11 https://lukasstefanko.com/2018/10/android-banking-malware-found-on-google-play-with-over-10000-installs-targets-brazil.html ====== ohazi The Android ecosystem today is like Windows circa 1998-2002, even with the Play store. It's now fairly reasonable to assume that every app has a high likelihood of containing malware. The safest bet is to avoid installing any software, especially random little games and utilities. You probably don't need them, and they're definitely not worth the risk. ~~~ saiya-jin You're probably right many apps are not worth the risk, but I use quite of few single-purposes apps, my phone would be semi-useless brick without them and I can buy old school Nokia for just calls and SMS. Heart rate (from optical sensor), free topo maps for outdoor, various transport apps (checking when buses/trams will go realistically based on their GPS), car navigation, watching BBC news, translate, use a freakin' calculator, browse phone file system, control my A/V receiver over wifi. And so on and on. For every app removed I would lose an useful functionality that helps me quite often, for some there ain't any good replacement. I think smarter is to not any sensitive data in the phone, consider it hacked out of factory and act accordingly. ~~~ timonovici Try Lineage on a phone with F-Droid as your app repo: much more trustable - though not completely, plenty of blobs floating around, the modem OS, and is safe to assume there are non-public bugs out there. Also, none of the crappy preinstalled apps, no google spyware, no touchwizz madness - just a clean, vannila Andoid experience, just as the original developers intended. ~~~ blacksmith_tb I have gotten Lineage going on a couple of older phones for friends, I am skeptical that it and F-droid are inherently much more safe than stock + the Play Store - except that they're less tempting targets for exploitation. Which I suppose is worth something, still. ------ Daniel_sk The situation on Google Play is getting serious, just check out the author’s twitter account. Every day several apps are detected, and this is probably just a small part of the total number. There are also lots of fake apps that don’t do anything (RAM increase, battery repair, ...) and either contain malware or at least they bombard you with ads (or make fake clicks on ads). ------ thatguy0900 I work at an AT&T store, we get people in everyday with phone issues related to all the advertising apps. People will have basically non responsive phones where you have to swipe through 8-9 different lockscreens just to get to the home screen. Not once has an ios user ever come in with the same issue, the play store is just a joke. [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smartkeybo...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smartkeyboard.emoji&hl=en_us) is a huge culprit on most of the phones that come in. The Emoji keyboard changes your launcher and does nothing but spam you with nonstop ads. That it has such a high rating despite so many 1-2 star comments talking about how it ruins whatever phone it touches shows you how messed up the play store is. ------ ocdtrekkie I remember when Fortnite came out on fortnite.com instead of the Play Store, and everyone was writing articles about how likely it was people would get malware if they weren't under the safe and snug umbrella of the Play Store. Turns out those were all just about the 30% cut Google didn't want to lose. The safest way to get an app is from the official website of that app. If they link you to an app store to download it, presumably they're providing the proper actual package name ID that's unique and published by them. ------ ravenstine Play Store security is a joke. A few weeks ago I shipped a new app to it, expecting a review process that would last hours or days. It was accepted and made live in less than an hour. Should I really believe that this thing was thoroughly scanned or so much as glanced at by a human being? ~~~ UncleMeat What analysis can you run in a day that you can't run in an hour? If your app didn't trip any alarms, why would you expect a human to review it? ------ vectorEQ :') no suprise. next up, apple store ;) ... oh wait, it's not malware if it's signed by apple ofcourse :'D ...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Book Review: The Book of Inkscape - abennett http://www.itworld.com/software/86062/book-review-the-book-inkscape ====== gengstrand I like Inkscape. It is certainly not as fancy as Illustrator but it gets the job done for making wireframes.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Invidious: what YouTube should be - skrps https://invidio.us/ ====== nafizh Just looking at the first page, seems like a dedicated alt-right sight.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to avoid building a Frankenstein product - samgetty https://dislack.com/blog/how-to-avoid-building-a-frankenstein-product/ ====== samgetty Any tips you all have on building the right features for the right audience?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A megathread on breaking away from Google - rinze https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8l3vjy/can_we_get_a_megathread_on_breaking_away_from/ ====== ejrv I've recently moved from Gmail to Fastmail (which also has a calendar), and to MicroG + Yalp instead of Google Apps on my phone. Both have worked very well for me as privacy-conscious alternatives, with minimal hassle after the initial setup. I'm still using Google search, YouTube, and Chrome on the desktop, for lack of alternatives I've gotten along with, but that's about it. I'm very happy how much less of my data that exposes to Google, but at the same time, it does still feel like a bit of a pyrrhic victory. ------ mattnewport I've been mostly Google free for a while now, other than for some work stuff where I have to access some Google Apps docs. I also still use YouTube because that's where lot of the content still is sadly. What I'm using instead: \- Search: DuckDuckGo, occasionally Bing \- Phone: Windows Phone, pre ordered a Purism Librem 5 \- Browser: mostly Firefox and Brave, Edge on mobile and occasionally on desktop \- Maps: Bing Maps (occasionally resort to Google Maps tho) \- Email: ProtonMail \- Calendar: Outlook.com, but I still use Google Calendar for some things \- Cloud storage and backup: Dropbox and OneDrive ~~~ craftyguy Same here, but instead of getting in bed with microsoft I've moved to using FLOSS components. ~~~ FrozenTuna That's what I was thinking. Are people just leaving google to use all the microsoft products? That makes 0 sense to me. ~~~ d0lph Some of it is for support reasons. ------ taylodl YouTube is the most difficult service to break away from, simply because it has all the content - and more and more of my entertainment time is spent watching YouTube. I'm thinking YouTube was Google's most ingenious purchase. ~~~ rinze YouTube subscriptions work fine with RSS, just to add to this. I have them added to my ttrss, don't even have to log in to watch videos (which is not exactly 'breaking away from YouTube', but I think it's a healthier approach.) ~~~ craftyguy Or use hooktube.com, which strips out all Google-related tracking stuff from video links on YouTube. There are even greasemonkey scripts to rewrite YouTube.com URLs to hooktube.com automatically. ~~~ sgtmas2006 I just use youtube-dl, it's simple and can be automated easily. Toss a URL at it and get a nice quality version. I really wish people would start publishing videos elsewhere for download, with high bitrate versions. I can (and do, as we all) live with the artifacts, but I don't mind some bandwidth. Even if it were patreon exclusive (to offset the costs for hosting) I would become a patron for that alone. ~~~ Something1234 How would you deal with video hosting? It's a high bandwidth application, and would be very expensive to self host. Just an hour of streaming takes about 1 GB or $.25 if you're using AWS. Multiply that out across a couple hundred users and many hours of streaming that's very expensive. ~~~ toomuchtodo Dedicated servers: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17113244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17113244) ~~~ Something1234 Even with dedicated servers, the new hosting site would have to find a source of revenue. The creators typically don't want to shell out. The sites with premium hosting are still kind of terrible too. They offer very little in the way of discovery of new content or moderation. [https://vimeo.com/upgrade](https://vimeo.com/upgrade) ------ go_prodev What's with all the tinfoil hats? Google != Facebook. Unpopular opinion perhaps, but I believe they use the information I share to enrich my user experience. It seems less about monetization and more about providing customized services. What am I missing? ~~~ fwdpropaganda > I believe they use the information I share to enrich my user experience. Manifestly false. They use your information to target ads. The pages that you've browsed will affect the ads you see on youtube and the paid search results you get. That's right, the paid search results you get are modified not to enrich your experience, but because some advertisers pay more for people with your browsing profile. Does that improve your experience, or does that improve google's advertiser's experience? ~~~ relics443 YMMV but it improves my experience because I get to use all these great products and features Google has, without lifting a finger, and in most cases without paying a penny. All I have to do is ignore the ads on my screen (which my brain seems to already do). ~~~ fwdpropaganda > all these great products and features Google has My post wasn't meant to dissuade anyone who's happy with being tracked from using google. I was merely pointing out that the post I was responding to tone of "google is tracking me for my sake" is in most instances based on nothing but faith, and in other cases known counter-examples exist. ------ andyonthewings There are pretty complete alternatives to all Google services in mainland China, well, because the Great Firewall blocks Google. I doubt if anyone really want to move from Google to those Chinese alternatives though because privacy is even worse. ------ jrnichols Does it sound odd that I've always been Google-free anyway? By virtue of being a Mac user. Search? Switched to DDG or Bing. I gave up Google Maps ages ago, using Bing/MS's map offering, and when Apple Maps came out I went to that. Email, has always been IMAP on servers I host myself. I never even went down the Google rabbit hole like many of my friends did. It's curious how they claim Apple is so proprietary when they're using Android, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Chat (or whatever it's called this week,) Google Music, Google Play, and maybe youTube, I mean Google TV. The Apple ecosystem has been pretty good for me. ~~~ jacksmith21006 Apple is just using Google. [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses- googl...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses-google-cloud- for-icloud.html) Apple confirms it uses Google cloud for iCloud - CNBC.com ~~~ jrnichols And to the end users, that's absolutely meaningless.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How I almost killed Facebook - neilc http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-i-almost-killed-facebook.html ====== mixmax _"Of course, at that time I thought that social networking sites were a complete waste of time -- both for the users and those developing the sites -- so I earnestly tried to talk Mark out of squandering his precious Harvard education on such a frivolous endeavor. "You think you're going to compete against Friendster and Orkut?" was the general outline of my argument. There were already too many social networking sites out there, I claimed, and building yet another one was clearly a waste of time."_ Interestingly the argument against building a social network is still the same, and inevitably someone will come along, not listen to the advice and create the next facebook. These things seem to be cyclic in nature. ~~~ liuliu When Google startup, many people suggested that there are too many search engines out there and yet another search engine will not succeed. However, after Google, there is no major search engine emergence. For SNS, maybe there will be a next Facebook, but the chance is much rare than before. In Orkut/Friendster era, not so many people daily live on social network. For now, everyone online knows SNS and Facebook. That is the most obvious barrier for new comers, people's custom. ~~~ unalone This. Everything is cyclical and doomed to fail until something better breaks that repeating pattern. It happened with Amazon before Web 2.0, when everybody thought it was doomed to fail. I'd bet it happens with Facebook. It deserved repeating, because I don't think some people get it: Friendster had a few users. Myspace had a lot. Facebook has every single college student and now it has every single high school student, and almost every person checks it at least once per day, and in the last 6 months it's been picking up in every demographic. Facebook is a part of life for those people, in a way that Twitter or Tumblr or Flickr or even a huge site like Youtube is not. It's not going down without a fight. ~~~ jfarmer YouTube probably doesn't deserve to be lumped with Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr, but you're right -- Facebook has been a part of my every day fabric for a few years now, and it's only growing. My parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles all use it, for goodness' sake. Sites I'm in contact with every day: Facebook, Google (search, mail, reader), YouTube, Twitter, and HN. As an aside, I honestly think Twitter will become very mainstream. I'm already seeing more pop-culture references every day, and have friends I never would have expected to see on it following me. It's certainly busted out of the Silicon Valley bubble, which honestly surprised me a lot. A year ago I thought of Twitter as the quintessential by-the-Valley-for-the-Valley startup. ~~~ wallflower > As an aside, I honestly think Twitter will become very mainstream. I'm rooting for Twitter to succeed independently (e.g. not acquired by Google or Facebook). I think I started suspecting Twitter was reaching out to the mainstream (or at least the younger generation) when I would click on random public timeline and/or summize search result rows and find people who had 40-50 followers, talking about what was going on in their life (e.g. normal, average people not social media cultists) The power of Twitter is that is like a cocktail party laced with real-time search capabilities. ~~~ unalone That's exactly what makes me wonder whether it will succeed in mainstream despite the advent of Facebook statuses and antisocialites like myself. ------ abrahamsen Matt Welsh could also claim some credit for making Linux popular. He wrote most of the user oriented documentation back when Linux was new, and founded the Linux Documentation Project. ~~~ davidw Oh... _that_ Matt Welsh! Cool, yeah, I had the O'Reilly book with the cowboy on it. ------ unalone I've always been curious to know how much of Facebook was Zuckerberg and how much was other people. A lot of people are quick to slap him down, but quite a few accounts say that he's as brilliant as he's credited for. ~~~ zandorg He was offered a near $1-million offer from Microsoft, just for a job there, so his ability's not in dispute (unless $1-million is peanuts nowadays). ~~~ jmtame wasn't that to acquire the app he built which suggests new music to listen to on your computer? and he rejected that and decided instead to go to harvard? i bet he was just trying to buy more time to build something bigger. from what i've heard, he was very much on a rapid fire mode with his projects. if one failed or didn't grow very quickly, he wouldn't wait long before moving on to another one. ~~~ unalone That music player is impressive. I didn't know he'd made anything before Facebook. ------ aristus This is very off-topic, but in the last few years I've noticed more and more intelligent people misspelling words phonetically ("unphased" instead of "unfazed"). I can understand someone flubbing pronunciation (eg "macabre", "learned"), but what is causing this other phenomenon? Are people (Harvard professors!) not reading as much as they used to? Are they less concerned about editing? Is this the last great challenge for spellcheck? ~~~ kwamenum86 The most intelligent people in the world make mistakes...pretty sure spelling error is inconsequential for him. ~~~ aristus Of course the mistake is not important. I'm just wondering about how it happens. If someone learns most of their words from books, you can tell because they will use a word correctly but say it oddly. I'm wondering what causes someone to use a word correctly but spell it phonetically. Are we speaking more and writing less? Hard to believe, no? ~~~ rudyfink I don't know about other people, but I have always heard what I'm writing in my head before I type it out. Sometimes, especially if I'm a little distracted, this produces misspelled words that would be pronounced correctly or homonyms like "hear" instead of "here". On the chance that it might help, I think the funnel is something like: -ideas/shapes which are always moving around->selecting the appropriate/better/good enough one out of these by focusing on it more. this always feels kind of like a sorter appraising different things bubbling up and sinking on the surface of a pool. -this selected one at the fore gets structured to be said probably more precisely that feeling right before you actually say something. if this is going well, little is lost between the thought and what comes out of the structuring, but sometimes the thoughts are much worse from the process. -this structured thing gets more concrete as I touch type it and somehow grammar and punctuation get in there. -this gets a look over as it is coming out for errors. is it gibberish or not, is the grammar correct, do I like it. Depending on what I'm concerned with different amounts of effort are going into those different sections. I think the error gets put in pretty close to when it gets typed out. ~~~ aristus That's very interesting... and a little creepy. It's like you are taking dictation from yourself. ~~~ rudyfink I suppose so. It's like that for everything though. If I want to draw a drawing, some part of me is picturing the drawing before it flows out, usually looking much worse than it did in my head. If I'm writing a program, some part of me is seeing the structure and how it works and fits together before it flows out. If I'm playing soccer, I see what I'd like to be doing before it flows out. I think it helps that the process almost always feels like a cooperative enterprise. Injury of some sort or another definitely will effect it. Something is always in my head out there a bit ahead (sometimes only very little) of whatever my body is doing. Maybe this is uncommon but I've never really gotten that impression from talking with people or other people's recitations of their experiences. I've never really talked with too many people about it though. "How do you feel your brain and body do things?" isn't exactly the kind of question one asks in the elevator, waiting in line, or on a plane. ------ dilanj How did the author 'almost kill facebook' if Zuckerberg was 'unphased' by his argument in this single conversation they had? ~~~ jsomers I don't think he is being entirely serious in this post, which is sprinkled with self-deprecation masquerading as egotism. ~~~ cpr It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation. It'd be like my talking about how I almost destroyed Microsoft because I used to tease Gates about he was wasting his time programming those silly microcomputers, when he was hacking late at night on his 8080 assembler/linker/simulator in the PDP-10 machine room at the old Harvard CRCT. (Which happens to be true. ;-) ~~~ gruseom _It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation._ Damn, you beat me to it! I was going to say: Egotism masquerading as self- deprecation masquerading as egotism. Edit: That's a pretty great story about Gates, and it got me curious, so I googled some other places where you mentioned him. This one was my favorite, because it confirms a belief I have about companies' personalities reflecting their founders': [http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in- to...](http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in-tooth-and- claw/#comment-1110) It also makes a shrewd observation about Microsoft. ~~~ gruseom Meant to add: sorry for web-stalking you... that tidbit was just too enticing to pass up! ~~~ cpr Oh, not at all. It's all public record. You found me off in some odd corners of the net, I see (Catholic agrarianism, in this case). ------ vlad _"I suggested to him that they really needed to find a way to get people to login to the site regularly. With most social networking sites, you sign up, add your few dozen friends, and maybe for one or two weeks get a kick out of messaging them as they join your friend list. But after that, there's little or no reason to keep returning to the site -- as a result your profile just stagnates. Well, wouldn't you know it -- a few months later Facebook came out with the News Feed feature which shows you what all of your friends are up on on an up-to-the-minute basis. Pure genius! Had I only thought to patent the idea..."_ Although Matt is obviously joking, the question is why did he even write this, if not to try to take some credit for the news feed? I've thought of at least half a dozen ideas identical to what YC had later funded, and the reality is that between the time I thought of it and the appearance of the same thing a few months later, the actual development of that began months earlier, and likely multiple groups formed and applied with a similar idea, and I did not develop or apply for funding for the idea. However, in his case, it doesn't sound like he even had a similar idea, but is just confusing giving somebody goodwill advice with having a piece of the credit in the creation of any features that are released in the next three months. ------ fleaflicker fleaflicker has a "front office" feed displaying a league's recent activity. I launched it 4 months before facebook's friend feed. A cool idea but hardly original or patentable. ~~~ neilc It's almost surely patentable, I think. A generic activity feed is not novel, of course, but the context (using it for social activities, methods for selecting what appears in the feed) is significant. ------ snprbob86 While this is interesting, it is just one bullet on my list of reasons not to grade based on class participation... ~~~ herval I'd add "not take business advice from teachers" to your list too... ------ thinkcomp I will always give The Harvard Crimson and the press at large more credit than Mark for spreading Facebook. ------ berlinbrown Yea right. Cry me a river. ------ dimitry good read. different point of view.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What Would Real Brain-To-Brain Communication Look Like? - DiabloD3 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/10/17/what-would-real-brain-to-brain-communication-look-like/ ====== plg I use this form of brain-to-brain communication that involves using other parts of my body to make sounds that I assume other people can interpret using their ears, and map onto ideas. It takes a lot of training during childhood to get this down but once you do it's pretty efficient and you can transmit fairly complex ideas fairly quickly, especially if you can assume knowledge and context on the receiver end. ------ liamzebedee Brain communication very much interests me, because it comes down to the essence of how we encode knowledge in biological signals. Like Google Deepdream, understanding how concepts of what a dog looks like and how it is related to other things, _encoded as a series of bits_ , is just absolutely fascinating. I know we still don't understand beyond a very probabilistic level how the brain encodes this information biologically, but I've heard lots about prosthetics. Can anyone answer me how they control robotic arms using just the brain [1]? [1] [http://www.instructables.com/id/Mind-Controlled-Robotic- Arm/](http://www.instructables.com/id/Mind-Controlled-Robotic-Arm/) ~~~ tim333 I'm sceptical the school kid project shown in your link actually works significantly. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory made a real one, I think by surgically moving 'spare' nerves to various points at the inside surface of the patients chest and then putting electrodes on the exterior surface. There's an interesting video explaining a bit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NOncx2jU0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NOncx2jU0Q) from [http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2014/141216.a...](http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2014/141216.asp) ------ ehsanu1 While not based on much real science/technology, Ramez Naam wrote a cool sci- fi book (trilogy actually) on this topic called _Nexus_. ~~~ escherize Another book that explores this (pretty in-depth) is The Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman. It won a couple of awards for sci-fi writing, and I found it enjoyable. In it there are remote-controlled humanoid killing machines that are piloted by soilders from a bunker through an electronic hole in their head. They can communicate sub-lingually, hear eachother's thoughs, and feel eachothers feelings to such an extent that the men in the platoon (it's 5 men, 5 women) start getting PMS. ------ petra There's a different type of brain-to-brain interface: I remember reading something about neurofeedback(eeg biofeedback) , when they trained to users to increase a certain brainwave pattern(their alpha wave) in some synchronized fashion and that created a strong feeling of contentedness between them . I'm not sure this is true though, because the field of neurofeedback has plenty of bullshit. ------ frozenport Perhaps it could reduce the latency of speech. ~~~ deciplex If we're going to compare human conversation to network performance, I think the limiting factor with speech is throughput, not latency. If I have a complex idea I can start explaining it pretty quickly, and whoever I'm talking to will understand the individual words I use easily enough, but it still might take a while to communicate the whole idea.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PulseWallet lets you pay with your veins - vinceleo http://pulsewallet.com/ ====== kseistrup Veins don't have pulse, arteries do.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bitcoin Exposed Silicon Valley's Ultimate Aim: Making Money - petethomas https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-exposed-silicon-valley-aim-making-money/ ====== jraedisch The author states that he heard of Bitcoin at $17 and then goes on describing Bitcoin as providing "oligarchic control" to early investors. This means he too could have invested. Additionally I would think it to be very hard to introduce a genuinely new technology without informing (and convincing) some people earlier than others. Of course now that everybody knows, that something like Bitcoin can succeed, we can (and probably should) think of fairer means of distribution (in hindsight). Maybe someone has a good idea that may develop a similar network effect without sacrificing decentralization, uncensorability, etc..	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Javascript Arrays and Functional Programming - zabana http://zabanaa.github.io/notes/functional-programming-and-javascript-arrays.html ====== seanwilson I accept that this is a widely used phrase now but I never understood why just using map/filter/reduce and avoiding state is enough for code to be called "functional programming". Most functional languages feature pattern matching, algebraic data types, purity, currying, strong typing, type inference, recursion instead of loops and types that cannot be null. It's a completely different style of coding. Adding map/filter/reduce to an imperative language doesn't get you close to the level of robustness and ease of implementation for that safety you'd get in a functional language. ~~~ hacker_9 Wiki sums up the term well enough: _" In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm — a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs — that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data."_ To that end map-reduce fits and can be referred to as 'functional programming'. The other things you mention are just great language features, but not specific to functional languages. Imperative C++ also has type safety, Swift has non-null types, etc. ~~~ seanwilson > The other things you mention are just great language features, but not > specific to functional languages. Imperative C++ also has type safety, Swift > has non-null types, etc. All those features in combination are shared by the vast majority of languages called functional programming languages. They're pretty much the defining features of functional languages was my point. Other languages can have a subset of the features but it doesn't make them functional languages. See: [https://wiki.haskell.org/Functional_programming](https://wiki.haskell.org/Functional_programming) The Wikipedia quote is really vague. ~~~ dahart None of pattern matching, algebraic data types, strong typing, type inference and types that can't be null are specific to functional, nor do they make it any more functional. Purity isn't a language feature, it's a measure of how functional a language is, so it's tautological to say functional languages share purity. Currying is a byproduct of first class functions, not of functional programming, and currying is common in JavaScript and Python and other non-functional languages including C++. Forced recursion instead of loops would just be a byproduct of not having mutable state. And a good alternative to a recursive loop is a call to map() or reduce(). > The Wikipedia quote is really vague. I think the Wikipedia quote is clearer and FAR more precise than a common feature set. Functional programming "treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data." That is the definition of functional, and it's the _whole_ definition. No mutation, that's it. Including the features you wrote about is not functional programming, it's other things. That's important to consider the precise definition if you're going to critique someone for talking about functional programming in a certain way. The author was pretty clear that this is functional programming concepts as applied to arrays in JavaScript, he never claimed that this post covers functional programming in general. Map, filter & reduce are examples of functional programming, and if they were all you used, and you had only const and no var, then you might have a functional program. @zabana didn't claim that this is all you'll ever need. ~~~ seanwilson > Functional programming "treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical > functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data." That is the > definition of functional, and it's the whole definition. No mutation, that's > it. Including the features you wrote about is not functional programming, > it's other things. Are you meaning that "no mutation" is the definition of functional programming? That's such a vague definition I can't see how it is useful personally. "Stateless" is already a word that covers that. If you're going to quote Wikipedia, keep going to the "Concepts" section that lists language features: "A number of concepts and paradigms are specific to functional programming, and generally foreign to imperative programming (including object-oriented programming). However, programming languages are often hybrids of several programming paradigms, so programmers using "mostly imperative" languages may have utilized some of these concepts.[40]" > The author was pretty clear that this is functional programming concepts as > applied to arrays in JavaScript, he never claimed that this post covers > functional programming in general. I even said I accept it's common usage of the phrase and I was just wondering why that was. ~~~ dahart > Are you meaning that "no mutation" is the definition of functional > programming? You can see that I was intentionally summarizing wikipedia's definition in one word to make my point more clear that functional does not mean type inference or currying, right? > That's such a vague definition I can't see how it is useful personally. > "Stateless" is already a word that covers that. Since I'm not offering "immutable" as the complete and final definition for functional programming, maybe you can find a better one to make your original point clear? Because the list of features you offered as defining functional programming doesn't define functional programming very well. IMO, the entire first paragraph of Wikipedia's article on functional programming is pretty good. It repeats the concept of immutability in a bunch of different ways with clarifying examples, to make it more concrete and less vague. I don't personally like "stateless" because it's not strictly true. Functional programs have state, and the state is contained in the stack. The point of functional programming is that the language avoids side effects, and the most direct word for something that avoids side effects is "immutable", not "stateless". I can accept that common usage of stateless is sometimes referring to immutability. Note that WP's definition of "state" agrees with that, and talks about declarative state being indirect, as opposed to being stateless: "In declarative programming languages, the program describes the desired results and doesn't specify changes to the state directly." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(computer_science)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_$computer_science$) > I even said I accept it's common usage of the phrase and I was just > wondering why that was. Because it's true and meets the definition? Your objection is too vague. What, exactly, is wrong with calling map/filter/reduce "functional"? In my book, referring to map as an example of functional programming doesn't stretch the strict definition of functional programming _at all_. map() and reduce() were some of the very first things I learned about when I was introduced to the concept of functional programming in Scheme, more than 20 years ago. The post didn't claim that map, filter & reduce were 'enough for code to be called "functional programming"'. He only ever implied that map, filter & reduce are _part_ of functional programming. That is absolutely true, always has been, and isn't a matter of common usage. ------ zabana Author here: I wrote this article mainly as a note to self that I could refer to in the future and as an exercise to help me learn the concept and force me to structure my thoughts into a coherent blog post. I thought I'd share it for those of us who are more intermediate and would like to pick up a few tricks along the way. Thank you all for the positive (and not so positive feedback) ~~~ dberhane Reading your blog allowed me to better understand the reduce function for the first time and I want to thank you for that. ------ Kiro I don't know if I'm delirious but I remember a few years ago when articles like this were very common on HN. Then all of a sudden it felt like everyone had "learnt" it and all that got upvoted was very complicated articles explaining some esoteric JS thing. Now it seems we're back again with. Another example is the article explaining "this" which is on the front page again. It almost feels cyclic, like it's time for the new generation of programmers to learn the quirks. It's probably an incorrect observation but it feels like the front page has developed with me. Like we all started on square 1, evolved together and now it's time to graduate and leave room for the new generation. ~~~ supermdguy Maybe hacker news is starting to gain popularity with students, who are trying to follow the "pro hackers". ------ drinchev Some more practical examples // Grab unique [1,1,2,3,4].filter( ( item, index, array ) => array.indexOf( item ) === index ) // => [1,2,3,4] // Flatten [[1,2],[3,4]].reduce( ( result, item ) => result.concat(item), [] ); // => [1,2,3,4] Not sure why the author missed `sort`. // Sort [1,2,4,3].sort( ( a, b ) => a - b ) ~~~ Veedrac The first is slow (O(n²) where O(n) will do), and the second is very likely to be slow (probably the same). ~~~ drinchev The good old question about sacrificing performance for readability. Anyway these days filter is not so bad. [1] [https://jsperf.com/array-uniq-filter](https://jsperf.com/array-uniq- filter) ~~~ Veedrac And insertion sort is not so bad with 20 elements. It doesn't take much for it to start falling over, though. [1]: [https://jsperf.com/array-unique-filter-2/1](https://jsperf.com/array- unique-filter-2/1) ------ nerdponx JavaScript has an advantage on Python in this style, because Python lambdas are hideously ugly and JS anonymous functions are less hideously ugly. In Python it tends to be cleaner (and sometimes faster) to write list comprehensions instead of map() and filter(), especially since Python also has lazy generator comprehensions. ~~~ pryelluw Python actually discourages using map anf filter. Which is kind of weird to me but whatever. ~~~ nerdponx Well in some cases it really is more efficient. [func(x) if x in collection if cond(x)] makes a single pass over the data and gives you a list, but list(map(func, filter(cond, collection))) makes two passes _and_ requires some extra function calls. I think the real reason is perceived legibility on the part of the Python core devs. I seem to recall a document from a while ago in which GvR himself came out in favor of list comprehension style. "Explicit is better than implicit". ~~~ nitroll Both map and filter returns an iterator, so you only iterate once when creating the list. ------ Blackstone4 Thank you for this! I've been learning JS for React and .reduce, .every and .some are new to me! Super helpful ------ cygned As a side note, using .push() isn't something I would consider being functional because immutability is a core concept of functional programming. Too bad, JavaScript makes it hard to do it that way, in that concrete example using Object.assign() and .concat(). ~~~ jlg23 > immutability is a core concept of functional programming. That depends very much on your definition of FP (or how "pure" the FP is, depending on your definition of "purity"). ~~~ cygned Fair point. All my touch points (Lisp, JavaScript, even a bit Haskell and several books) all proposed immutability as being a fundamental principle. Would you mind expanding a bit on that point in case I totally misunderstood something? ~~~ jlg23 You did not "totally misunderstand something": Immutability is a virtue in FP, you _should_ write in this style. But it is only a "fundamental principle" and "core concept" in _highly pure_ languages - and even Haskell allows mutable variables[1]. Sometimes you just need them, e.g. when handling potentially very large vectors in finite memory. CL's (sort ...) for example mutates the input sequence (or "destructively sorts" it [2]). [1] [https://wiki.haskell.org/Mutable_variable](https://wiki.haskell.org/Mutable_variable) [2] [http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_sort...](http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_sort_.htm) ------ jaunkst For more fun with FP checkout lodash fp [https://github.com/lodash/lodash/wiki/FP- Guide](https://github.com/lodash/lodash/wiki/FP-Guide) Also read about using flow over chain ------ namanyayg Great article, but questionable formatting: `return {name: player.name, age: player.age }` It also seems _wrong_ to mutate the accumulator in the reduce example, it would just be simpler to use `forEach` and use a variable defined outside if you're going to write code this way? ~~~ drinchev Wouldn't do it with variable, since it will make your function impure [1] 1 : [http://www.nicoespeon.com/en/2015/01/pure-functions- javascri...](http://www.nicoespeon.com/en/2015/01/pure-functions-javascript/) ~~~ pdpi That's the GP's point though: it already is impure! If you rewrite as let acc = {...} footballPlayers.reduce(...,acc) It should become clear: acc is an external variable that got mutated by the reduce. ~~~ bestest Indeed. A pure function should not depend on and / or mutate external variables. I'd do it like this (yay for one-ish-liners!): const playersByCountry = footballPlayers.reduce((acc, player) => { return {...acc, [player.country]: [...(acc[player.country] \|\| []), player]}; }, {}); ------ guiomie In his example Array.prototype.reduce, isn't this almost the same as just doing a foreach loop? I don't understand why doing this, it's pretty much the same number of lines. ~~~ ablomen In this example it is, but a nice thing about using map, reduce etc is that you can chain them together, ex: let out = ["a", "b", "c", 1, 2, 3] // Turn letters to upper case .map(i => { return typeof i === "string" ? i.toUpperCase() : i; }) // Add one to numbers .map(i => { return typeof i === "number" ? i + 1 : i; }) // split letters and numbers up .reduce((all, i) => { typeof i === "string" ? all.letters.push(i) : all.numbers.push(i); return all; }, { "letters": [], "numbers": [] }); // => { letters: ["A", "B", "C"], numbers: [2, 3, 4] } ~~~ moosingin3space The problem with this is that it generates two intermediate arrays in the maps, then effectively drops them in the reduce. This may be inefficient. I wish that JavaScript's map/filter/reduce functions returned lazy iterators, like in Rust, so that code like this doesn't produce intermediate arrays. Does anyone know of a library that provides this? ~~~ marmart Those intermediate iterations could be dropped by composing the map functions together (same with the reduce), if that really was a performance bottleneck. ~~~ moosingin3space With lazy iterators, there is the possibility of better composition of maps/filters/reduces. That's why I'm a fan of the lazy iterators approach -- otherwise the abstraction breaks too easily and it ends up looking like a for- loop anyway. ------ sbr464 I noticed you used let to instantiate variables. Should switch to const, and if really going functional, will begin to find few rare cases where let is needed. ------ sleazybae this post introduced me to the arrow function (([https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24900875)](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24900875\))), which i'd previously not heard of. evidently it was introduced in ECMAscript 6 but for engines that use JavaScript and older browsers (amazingly, they still exist) it won't work ~~~ dave7 There is a spurious ) ending your link, resulting in page not found error. For those using arrow functions these days for web, most will use Babel in the build process to provide compatibility with older platforms. ------ arkadiytehgraet TL;DR author provides an example of map, filter and reduce functions in JS. I have been wondering lately what is the value of articles like this. They do not convey any meaningful idea, they do not offer any useful insight on underlying matters; why do people even write something like this, except to litter the Internet even more? Anyone, who is distinctly familiar with functional programming or even just with the concept of higher order functions, surely knows those three basic primitives; those, who are not, would benefit much more from the basic concepts of first-class functions etc, than this random abrupt post. ~~~ kaishiro Man, I had just worked up the nerve to start a personal dev blog but you've just scared me straight off. ~~~ arkadiytehgraet I have wanted to start a personal dev blog myself for quite a while, but each time I think of a suitable topic, I immediately recall an article or a post that is already better than anything I could write myself on the matter. If you think you have something valuable or interesting or just funny to share, that either was never discussed or written about or you know you can do better, then you absolutely should blog about it and do not let haters like me stop you. As for the original article: * It should have been named just "JavaScript arrays and higher-order functions" (I get that using term _functional programming_ is very catchy nowadays, but I am trying to talk about quality here, not clickbaitness) * As it is aimed for people unfamiliar with the concept and coming from more imperative background, where first-class functions are either not present or not that popular or handy to work with, an introduction (even the most gentle one) would be very suitable * Then the introduction of filter/map/reduce functions would be in place, ideally compared in place with imperative implementation of the same task * The best way to make sure a reader understands how each of this functions works is to make them implement each one of them, even the naive implementation would suffice * Finally, you could provide some reasonably unobvious usages of any of the functions, e.g. insertion sort done with fold-only. ~~~ Can_Not > I have wanted to start a personal dev blog myself for quite a while, but > each time I think of a suitable topic, I immediately recall an article or a > post that is already better than anything I could write myself on the > matter. Sounds like you should be curating a list. ------ matlin This hardly covers any functional patterns that javascript is capable of. You can compose functions, avoid stack overflows in tail call recursion, use immutable values, etc. I've seen articles on pattern matching with Typescript or trampolining code but this is simple a descriptive look at three basic javascript functions. If you're interested in more of a functional approach in JS take a look at Immutable.js and/or [https://pattern-matching-with- typescript.alabor.me/](https://pattern-matching-with-typescript.alabor.me/).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Java Advent Calendar - code-dog http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2012/12/java-advent-calendar.html ====== code-dog Good point - what is clojure actually for?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
APFS and HFS+ Benchmarks on High Sierra - robk https://hk.saowen.com/a/e9c3e3a82f4000f86663ba10526d1a3d5e6e68face971ebd61a3f3f2244730fb ====== cerberusss Interesting read, but written in July last year, so things might be different now.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Lost Generation: The Relay Computers - cfmcdonald https://technicshistory.wordpress.com/2017/05/10/lost-generation-the-relay-computers/ ====== pavlov My favorite "lost" type of computer is the balanced ternary machines. These were actually built in the Soviet Union in the 1960s: [https://dev.to/buntine/the-balanced-ternary-machines-of- sovi...](https://dev.to/buntine/the-balanced-ternary-machines-of-soviet- russia) Programming with trits and trytes! Unfortunately, domestic Soviet computers were effectively killed by a 1970 decision to base all future efforts on a "Unified System" which was really a clone of IBM System/360: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM) Playing it safe by shooting yourself in the head... ~~~ Kinnard Are there major benefits to ternary computation? ~~~ rwmj I pulled out my copy of Knuth vol 2 to answer this (pages 190-193): * You can negate a number by interchanging 1 and ̅1. * The sign of a number is given by its most significant non-zero trit. * Rounding to nearest integer is the same as truncation. By the way if we had balanced ternary computers today, then you wouldn't have programming languages with signed and unsigned integers. They'd be the same thing. Of course the above might be academic if it's more difficult to implement in CMOS ... Edit: Also you can argue that the most economical radix is _e_ , and 3 is closest to this ideal. See: [https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/10...](https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/105Sp10/addcomments/Hayes_ThirdBase.htm) Edit #2: Removed the claim that addition is easier than binary. I misread what Knuth was trying to say. ~~~ FullyFunctional Representing binaries numbers with explicit sign bit and the rest unsigned gets you an even better version of that; this is how floating point handle the sign. I'm skeptical of value of ternary. The key behind the success of binary computers is that binary has great noise immunity; having a _single_ threshold is way simpler to get working than two or more. (Yet we do go there for NAND Flash, but note how speed and endurance worsen dramatically as thresholds are added). The "most economical radix" is often cited but it's a red herring - it ignores practical concern of greater importance. ------ deskamess Wow... the writing, the prose... wish I could put words together like that. Sample: """ Fame is partial with her favor, and has not seen fit to bestow any upon the creators of the panel switch, the type E relay, the crossbar marker circuit. There are no biographical anecdotes we can summon to illuminate the lives of these men; the only readily available remains of their lives are the stark fossils of the machines they created. """ ~~~ Animats Number Five Crossbar is well remembered in telephony, and studied by people who do high-reliability systems. It was one of the first systems that was _more_ reliable than its components. No one person is associated with it, though; it took a big team to develop. ------ Nokinside You had electronic relays? Finland had strong import controls directly after the war, so imported electronics was very expensive. Industry automation still used legacy hydraulic logic (fluidic logic) to control complex automation in pulp mill processes in 70's. It was very steampunk. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics) Hydraulic logic control is still a useful thing but nobody builds complex industry automation using them. [http://ph.parker.com/us/17567/en/hydraulic-logic-element- val...](http://ph.parker.com/us/17567/en/hydraulic-logic-element-valves-hcd) [http://www.logichyd.com/](http://www.logichyd.com/) ~~~ mschaef Pneumatic signaling has been commonplace too... set points for valves, etc. can be sent by varying the (low) pressure in an air line to the valve itself. One downside to this is the case where there's condensation in the line and temperatures go below freezing. You can lose control thanks to the ice that forms. I remember this causing trouble with powerplants in the 90's during an ice storm in Houston (which is usually quite warm and humid, so they didn't think too much about icing.) ~~~ zkms Yes, there's lots of building automation / HVAC stuff that uses pneumatic signalling/actuation (like the infamous T-4002 thermostat, look up images of it, you've probably seen it before!). Amusingly enough, lots of those pneumatic systems use 3-15 PSI signalling, which works the exact same way that 4-20 mA signalling works -- with a live zero so breaks in circuits can be detected! ~~~ mschaef Early in my career, I did some work on what was essentially a Foundation Fieldbus to 4-20ma adapter. To get it to control our pneumatic valve for a demo, we wired it to a 4-20mA to 3-15PSI converter and then to the valve itself. It was a bit Rube Goldberge-esque, but it served our purpose well. ------ whatshisface Today, hobbyists build these computer for fun and to test their engineering mettle: [http://www.nablaman.com/relay/](http://www.nablaman.com/relay/) [http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/](http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/) ------ zkms I accidentally discovered a year or so ago that Thomas L. Dimond (working at Bell) invented core rope memory (which the wikipedia page says was "first used in the 1960s") in the 1940s. His memory got used in phone switches as a fast and reliable read-only lookup table. Here is a paper about the "Dimond ring translator": [http://etler.com/docs/Crossbar/articles/30-AMATranslator.pdf](http://etler.com/docs/Crossbar/articles/30-AMATranslator.pdf) ~~~ Animats "Writing" was done by manually stringing wires though those big rings. Those could be changed, but it was a big headache. It's like classic reverse DNS. There was already a mapping from A to B (phone number to outgoing wires) and a mapping from B to A was needed for billing purposes. But B to A info couldn't be obtained from the switch fabric. A physically separate B to A mapping had to be built and maintained in sync. There was nothing which inherently made the two match. That was all done by hand. The early history of computing was a struggle to find a usable memory device. Relays were very bulky as memory devices, and none of the relay computers had much memory. ------ mschaef This book contains descriptions of many of these, including a particularly nice discussion of the Zuse Z3: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/first- computers](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/first-computers) Also here: [http://www.inf.fu- berlin.de/lehre/SS01/hc/zuse/node4.html](http://www.inf.fu- berlin.de/lehre/SS01/hc/zuse/node4.html) Interestingly, the machine (built in 1941) used binary floating point. (Not IEEE754. :-)) ~~~ pinewurst My favorite on this subject is "Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer, from Relays to the Stored Program Concept, 1935-1945" by Paul Ceruzzi - sadly long out of print. ~~~ mschaef Thanks... I just ordered a used copy. I remember enjoying one of Ceruzzi's other books: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/history-modern- computing](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/history-modern-computing) ------ ThomaszKrueger I worked on a project that replaced an electromechanical Telex switch. Four racks of microcomputer based hardware replaced an entire floor of mechanical relays. However it was a marvel to see and hear that thing click and clack all day, with technicians with their ear trained to detect issues and replace relays by listening to the switch. Of course billing was done through a guy on top of a ladder taking large format B&W pictures of the bank of user's (mechanical) counters. ~~~ NegativeLatency Happen to have any of those pictures? ~~~ ThomaszKrueger I wish I had. That was my first job out of school, and I developed the UI for commands and reports, all through the BAUDOT-code based terminal. Our field test switch sat on a corner, with some more modern electronic telex terminals (they were blue), along with EPROM burners for patching, etc. The big switch was the rest of the floor. So many things I participated in 30+ years ago and didn't have the idea of taking at least a couple of pictures. Such is life. ------ brutuscat Even though I only scanned the article, many of those computers appear in Turing's cathedral G.Dyson[1], book which I enjoyed, given that there is not a lot of history lessons at the universities (at least the one I went to in Buenos Aires... UBA). [1] [https://openlibrary.org/search?isbn=0375422773](https://openlibrary.org/search?isbn=0375422773) ~~~ alexanderdmitri I always thought it would be neat to have a CS History lab where every couple of weeks the students would program with a particular generation of computer, moving up through time and getting a true sense of the ingenuity at each step. Might be expensive to house and maintain something like the SSEM or the CSIRAC, but universities have spent money on sillier things. ~~~ jerf Emulators are good enough for most students. I did "circuit design" in an entirely emulated environment and got what I needed out of it as a computer programmer. It would not have been adequate for a real EE, because for instance it offered unlimited fan-out and fan-in, but from my perspective I wasn't losing much to abstract that away. ~~~ alexanderdmitri True. Mixing emulation in would probably save a lot of work and resources. I feel like having to do things like manually punch up your programs on cards and manage with tiny amounts of storage would be a great experience and really force students to work towards elegant solutions. I love getting my Dad talking about some of the labs he's worked in over his career and kind of wish I could get a sense of how much has changed over such a short time. ~~~ jerf The other nice thing about emulation is that you get to use modern IO hardware, particularly keyboards. I can imagine having fun programming on a Commodore 64; I have a much harder time imagining having fun doing it with an actual Commodore 64. The keyboards were not all that great by modern standards when they were brand new, don't get better with age, and _certainly_ don't get better in a student lab environment :) ------ dwyerm If this interests you, I've got to throw in a plug for the Museum of Communications in Seattle. They've got a bunch of old mechanical telephone switches running. There's something truly awesome -- in the correct sense of the word -- to be standing inside a computer and hearing the signals passing around you. It is a unique experience that I strongly recommend. ------ GnarfGnarf I built a relay computer for a science fair in the 60's. The power supply was from a pinball machine. The relays were mercury-sealed, from an aircraft. It had seven words of five bits each (that's all the relays we had). It could add, subtract and store results. We got honourable mention. ~~~ Animats I did that, too.[1] 10 words of 7 bits, addressed with a Strowger switch. Add, subtract, shift, branch, conditional branch, so it was Turing-complete. The "paper tape" reader had so much drag I had to use vinyl seat-cover material for tape. [1] [http://www.animats.com/nagle/myfirstcomputer.html](http://www.animats.com/nagle/myfirstcomputer.html) ~~~ cr0sh This is amazing - thank you for posting about it! BTW - how old were you (if you care to tell the world!) when you created this machine? What made you take pictures of it? Did you keep any part of it, or was it all relegated to the "junk bin"? I have found that it is extremely rare that these machines like yours ever have pictures, much less the writeup like you have created. It doesn't appear many people created such computers back then, and I don't know of any who published how they created them. For instance, I have yet to see any old "Popular Mechanix" style article from the 1960s on "Build Your Own Electronic Brain" (as I would imagine it would be titled) - but such an electro- mechanical project would certainly fit those kind of pulp magazines. Which I find odd. I don't know why these machines - few as they were - were never publicized; perhaps there wasn't an audience, or because there were so few, those with the ability to write such an article were fewer? I do know there was some interest in computing at a "lay-person's" level, because there were several books on contemporary forms of computing and programming available in the 1960s (most had enough information to allow a person with sufficient skills and knowledge to design and build a simple machine - perhaps you got inspiration from such a source for yours?). These early "hobbyist" computers, along with early hobbyist robots - represent the very earliest dawn building toward the microcomputer revolution of the later 1970s - but the vast majority, if not all of them, are lost to time, unfortunately. ------ agumonkey Yann Guidon made a nice little relay computer on hackaday.io [https://hackaday.io/project/18757-ygrec16-ygs-16bits- relay-e...](https://hackaday.io/project/18757-ygrec16-ygs-16bits-relay- electric-computer) Enjoy ------ terminalcommand Fascinating read, especially The part about Bell Model III. The machine had lookup tables, which were actually tab-separated paper. It was an actual table. They further implemented in the functionality to jump forward and backward in that table (they called it "hunting"). I don't have much experience in assembly, but reading this article made me appreciate it more. Assembly basically operates with the same principles as the first computers. ------ cr0sh There's another kind of "lost" computer that many don't know about. Actually, I hesitate to call it a computer, as it didn't compute anything, and none of the actual machines had anything like a conditional branch operation that I am aware of... ...they're called "reproducing pianos" (also "reproducing player pianos" and "reproducers"). Not many were manufactured, due to their complexity, need for a lot of maintenance, and sheer cost. Basically, they were a kind of player piano that strived to reproduce the actual mechanics and technique of the person who "recorded" the original paper roll. They did this by having additional tracks which handled certain nuances of the player and such, such that when the roll was played back, the piano could play in the same manner. These player pianos were much more mechanically sophisticated than regular player pianos, and those extra tracks acted like a form of control structure for the notes being played. I believe that on some of the models meant for public performances, you could select the song (and it would "wind" itself to the song, sensing when it had located the piece), and I think they also had an auto-rewind function - but that was about the limit of their operations. I've always thought of a CPU - in it's simplest form - as nothing more than a sophisticated and fast "player piano", with memory being the roll, the word at an address being the holes in the roll at a certain point, and the CPU being that which controlled the operations and were instructed by those same holes. This in fact was actually implemented in some early electronic computers (known as "drum-based" computers). The history of computers and computation is a fascinatingly deep and varied field of study; I encourage everyone to delve into it a bit. ------ dwarman We built relay computers in HS in the early 60's. There was this street in London: Lisle St, in the Soho district. One could buy surplus PO 3000 multi- pole relays there real cheap - up to 10 pole IIRC. These were the relay type used on the Post Office Telephone exchanges, pre-electronics (up to #5?). In 66 I also discovered a recently published book by Russian authors: "Introduction to the Theory of Finite Automata" by Trachtenbrot and Kobrinskji [https://g.co/kgs/EqZYC2](https://g.co/kgs/EqZYC2) which taught me the formal of the topic using relay logic. I believe the robustness of Russian space tech was due to use of relays as well as tubes. That book gave me my career, effectively; turned out to be equally appropriate for electronic logic circuitry. ------ wernsey Wonderful read. These types of articles always puts the amount of computing power I spend to watch videos of a cat jumping into a box and falling over into perspective. ~~~ mschaef Around the time of ENIAC, there was a quote to the effect that you could do a lot with ten million multiplies. I loved the fact that they were thinking in terms of absolute number of operations (as opposed to rate), and that the scale is just so vastly different. ------ nasalgoat Anyone who enjoys relay computers would probably find electromechanical pinball machines fascinating. It's quite amazing what they accomplished with mechanical relays! ------ mthwsjc_ Wonderful!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The picture that makes you feel as if you're on Mars - amerf1 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2301619/Amazing-FOUR-BILLION-PIXEL-interactive-panorama-gives-360-degree-view-Mars-standing-Curiosity-rover.html ====== anigbrowl Not only does it provide impressive Martian panoramas, this is also a good way to get a close-up look at the Rover itself. I didn't know, for example, that it has its own sundial: [http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/08/29/from-uw-to- mars-su...](http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/08/29/from-uw-to-mars-sundial- has-an-important-role/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
This Is Why Apple Won’t Be Fine If Steve Doesn’t Return - kanebennett http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/01/this-is-why-apple-wont-be-fine-if-steve-doesnt-return/ ====== kanebennett I generally don't like Gizmodo's articles (generally being sensationalist rubbish) but I found this article very interesting.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
TLDRead – Sparknotes for Research Papers - tayvz https://www.tldread.org ====== tayvz Hey All, I built a program that takes research articles and uses Machine Learning to automatically summarize papers and mount them as a dashboard to get a quick overview. If you enjoy it please show some love on product hunt: www.producthunt.com/posts/tldread	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Professional Software Engineer Exam coming in April 2013 - stephen http://ncees.org/About_NCEES/News/News_Pages/New_PE_Software_exam.php ====== spamizbad Looks like "How to do Waterfall" (62.5% of the test) with additional coverage of Security (15%), QA (7.5%), and Engineering process (7.5%), and Configuration Maintenance (7.5%). There are 80 multiple-choice questions spread across 2 sessions (4 hours each). Open book. An overview of the exam: [http://ncees.org/Documents/Public/Exam%20specifications/PE%2...](http://ncees.org/Documents/Public/Exam%20specifications/PE%20Software%20Apr%202013.pdf) Not something I'd feel inclined to get unless this somehow became an industry requirement- which is unlikely - Agile and progressive Software Dev shops are probably throwing up a little bit in their mouths at this thing. Replace Agile with "Extreme Programming" and you've got something that looks like it came straight out of the 90s. ~~~ ntkachov Really? Just because its structured like waterfall doesn't mean its "how to do waterfall". I read the req spec and there isn't a thing on here that isn't valuable information for every engineer no matter what process they use. Read what it actually covers and the topics they test and tell me there's something on there that is completely useless. ~~~ spamizbad Couldn't disagree more. If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck... I've worked in waterfall shops. Sections I through V are very similar to what we aspired to do. Look, it's not like this knowledge is worthless. It's just that what is outlined in these sections is a very thorough but expensive ($$$ and labor) and time-consuming process that that when put into practice often insulates itself from the business problem at hand. Just because it looks good _on paper_ does not mean it will look good when you start applying it to the real world with real people. I'll say this: If you want to participate in an organization that is culturally waterfall and practices waterfall this certification will prove quite valuable. Anywhere else though, and you might give the impression you're not a good "culture fit" for the organization. ~~~ demian But "activities" are not "phases". You are always trying to get the requirements right, the difference is that some people get them while coding, and others before even start designing. ------ rsl7 I hate it. The content of that exam is like a list of everything that's wrong with industry. Those are problems to be fixed, not things to set in concrete as the way it shall be henceforth. ~~~ AYBABTME Yes, like requirements, prototyping, user interfaces, minimizing complexity, profiling and performance, unit-to-usability testing, metrics, refactoring, performance monitoring... All that ugly stuff that's wrong with the industry. ~~~ rsl7 Those are problems in the sense that software is a young industry, unlike other engineering disciplines (or "actual" engineering). We're likely to abstract away today's issues, whereas matter and physics are more direct, immediate limitations in engineering disciplines. We don't have a "software physics". ------ eranation Yes, because we have too many engineers. It's so hard to choose a good developer from the hundreds of applicants for each job so we need a 10 year old obsolete test to filter the good ones out. Talk about waste of money, this is something I hope is not paid by tax dollars... ------ noarchy Developers are fortunate that our field has not been swamped by credential inflation. In other words, we don't even need a degree to do what we do. It is enough to have a portfolio of solid work and some good references, and high- paying work can come your way. The last thing I want to see is for some kind of guild to arise, which could ultimately lock down the industry (via government requiring licensing, for instance). ~~~ X-X While I agree, I think that a large portion of developers want some way to set themselves apart from the masses - to be recognized as Uber 10X code ninjas. Those people will never rest till they create their own credentials, whether it be number of contributions to opensource projects on Github or Coderwall achievements or a standardized test. ------ eranation Thinking that taking a multiple choice test will prevent you from causing a bug that will kill someone is as smart as learning to be a lifeguard from youtube tutorials. Organizations that create weapons, spaceships, medical equipment and anything that can and will kill you if it has any bugs, needs to enforce quality not by certifying the engineers, but by certifying the organization to follow very rigid quality criteria. Some companies just have it naturally (perhaps Apple is a nice example) some companies need a structure (see things like <http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/>) So if this is not for saving lives, then I don't see any purpose in taking or creating this test. if you can code, you'll get a job, if your code is bad and has a lot of bugs, our software cycle is so fast you'll be forced to either improve or switch a profession. or work on non critical software. ------ tdicola A software engineering certification exam with no coding seems a little odd. ~~~ demian That's because in "high brow software engineering", coding is for "workers" (as in "construction workers"). ~~~ barik Well, the exam for Electrical Engineers doesn't have them build a circuit either. I assume you're forgetting that you also have to apply to the State Board, documenting your entire Engineering career, which will be the most substantial part of the licensing process. I guarantee you that you'll have plenty of opportunity at this time to demonstrate your programming experiences. When individuals ask me for a PE recommendation, I am often reminded in particular of one of the questions from the PPI2PASS FAQ [1]: Q: I have been in supervision since graduation. I have never performed a single calculation. A: Oops. [1] [https://ppi2pass.com/faqs/qualifying-to-take-the- licensing-e...](https://ppi2pass.com/faqs/qualifying-to-take-the-licensing- exams) ------ mcgain despite my disdain for accreditations and certifications, I approve of the content of the exam. It looks like it covers a lot of ground, in a variety of subjects. ------ tomkinstinch What does this mean for people currently working as programmers? Will it be necessary to study up and get licensed to remain competitive? ~~~ GuiA It could be necessary to be licensed for government jobs or jobs in large companies building real time critical systems (ie power grid control software, avionics, etc). I doubt it'll ever catch on for programming jobs in mobile/web/etc ~~~ barik I think it will become necessary for the areas you outline, particularly in industrial control. Although best practices and standards have been established for electrical systems and mechanical systems, my observations in factory control show that the programming components continue to be the most fragile and buggy. And currently the legislation here lags as well since software systems are typically __not__ certified, except in certain military cases. This isn't something for Web 2.0 programmers, who can carry on as they have been doing. Instead, it's for folks like myself who have designed the clean- room door locking logic for the CDC when contamination is detected (see "Walking Dead" for a grossly exaggerated example of such a system). ~~~ tbranch227 You sound like someone I know. I agree with the above. This cert is definitely applicable for engineering tasks at my place of business and something I will probably pursue. It's very beneficial when proposing on harder tasks. Web dev, which I do as well, generally doesn't reach this level of rigor. ------ ilaksh I am guessing I could answer enough (how many is enough?) of these 80 multiple choice questions to pass the exam right now. But it would be nice to have an idea of what other people think is the most important information in each topic they mention in that PDF (as far as passing the exam). So maybe we should create a wiki where we enter in all of the information people should understand in order to pass the exam? I created one on Wikia in case anyone is interested. <http://softwarepe.wikia.com> Also, question, would this PE exam be the last step in obtaining a Software Engineering license, or would it be the only step. If its the last step, exactly what are the other steps? What group would provide a software engineering license? Would there be any point in me passing this exam, since I don't even have a college degree? ~~~ barik It is the last step. The other steps vary by state, but in general, it requires that you have at least four years of documented and progressive experience under the direction of another licensed Engineer. You also need to have taken the EIT, which is a general Engineering exam that covers all disciplines, not just computers (brush up on your thermodynamics and concrete mixing!). If you do not have an ABET degree, then it is still possible to obtain a PE, but the requirements generally go from four years to sixteen years of documented experience. I may be wrong, I don't think this will be a route for Computer Science. It is more for those individuals who have been programming under other Engineering hats ("controls", "electrical", "mechanical") but now have a way to take an exam that satisfies their actual Engineering work. For instance, I might have fit more under the hat of Software Engineer (since I did a lot of embedded programming), but had to take the Electrical Engineering exam instead due to lack of selection. ~~~ prodigal_erik Don't engineering licenses usually require a bunch of stuff like fluid mechanics and metal fatigue which are completely irrelevant for reliable software? I think we'd be better served with more statistics and denotational semantics.... ~~~ barik The EIT does, because the first portion is a general Engineering exam. It is generally at the sophomore level of a four-year University. The PE exam, however, is related to your discipline, though sometimes tangential questions may appear (some analog circuits on a digital exam). ------ jboggan Many years ago when I thought I was going to go into patent law (egads) I ended up taking the Fundamentals of Engineering exam and passing it as an Engineer-In-Training. Does this mean I can do four years of software engineering and then certify as a PE? ~~~ barik Generally, the PE exam itself is considered one of the least difficult portions of the process, though it's still stressful for certain disciplines. The PE exam topics are also generally known to lag reality, regardless of discipline, and often by a decade. It's also open book and some people bring entire carts of books, though I find that not to be very effective since you basically only have six minutes per question. The major part of the application process is that you will need to work under the direct supervision of a PE, and have increasing levels of documented responsibility, which is often harder to satisfy. Depending on the state, three of the five (minimum) of your recommendations must come from licensed PEs, who need to be able to certify more about you than simply your character. Usually when threads like this appear, too much emphasis is placed on the exam rather than the requirements that allow you to sit for the exam in the first place. The PE license process is not like a Microsoft or Cisco certification. It took me a good six months to get all the paperwork ready to apply for the exam. I minimally studied for the exam itself. Consequently, four years ends up being more like five or six, in my case, due to less than stellar record keeping. ------ brownBananas So this just makes it official, right? Or does this affect people currently employed as Software Engineers? ------ rprasad People on HN seem to be misunderstanding the purpose of this exam. This exam is not for web programmers, or game programmers, or any "startup"-type programmers. If what you do can be done iteratively without much problem, this exam is not for you. This exam is for people who work on very difficult, very error-sensitive, very high-end stuff that needs to work from the very start: jet planes, medical devices, spacevessel systems, etc. You don't get second chances with these types of systems, so this exam is focused on making sure passers know the gold standard for how coding is currently done in these areas. ~~~ LnxPrgr3 And for an (admittedly dated) example of what can go horribly, horribly wrong in some fields: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25> It's ok if your Web app occasionally spits a 500 error or your game crashes once in a while. It's not ok if your radiation therapy machine occasionally flips out and kills people with a massive overdose.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Iceland-Bound Jet for Edward Snowden 'Could Take Off Tomorrow' - stfu http://www.usnews.com/news/newsgram/articles/2013/06/21/iceland-bound-jet-for-edward-snowden-could-take-off-tomorrow ====== crazygringo I'm assuming that the chartered yet ($240,000, yikes!) is necessary because there are no direct flights between Hong Kong and Iceland? I mean, he still has to pass through Hong Kong passport control and everything on the way out, if he's doing this "legally" \-- if they're publicly announcing something like this, then I assume the plan is not to smuggle him out. ~~~ johansch Yeah, there are no direct flights. I guess the high cost comes from requiring a rather large corporate jet with the needed range of 6000+ miles: [http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=HKG-KEF](http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=HKG-KEF) [http://www.avchart.com/users/quotes/passenger- request.asp?ch...](http://www.avchart.com/users/quotes/passenger- request.asp?chtype=One+Way&passengers=15&leg1from=VHHH&l1frcity=Hong+Kong%2C+Intl%2C+Hong+Kong&leg1to=BIKF&l1tocity=Keflavik%2C+Iceland&leg2from=&deparr1=Depart&hour1=12%3A00+AM&date1=06%2F30%2F2013)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 - reitzensteinm http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html? ====== zmmmmm I've switched to ddg for my basic searches. Hard searches still go through Google but the truth is, most of my searches these days are because I can't be bothered bookmarking stuff, not because they are difficult searches. The nymwars are the main reason I switched. Ironically I always have had my real name attached to my account. However Google suddenly insisting on it being my real name makes me very paranoid about what Google could possibly want from it. I'm happy for them to use data about me anonymously - I couldn't care less if they mine every email I ever send and every search I ever do as long as I am sure it is safe and secure and impersonal. But as soon as I get a sense they are not treating my participation as anonymous they lose the lot, and that's effectively what they did with the nymwars. ~~~ naner I switched awhile back and I use ddg mostly the same way you do, though as of late it has felt slower. Google's social integration, instant search, image previews, and advanced feature removal have made it a chore to use and I'm too lazy to go around disabling every new feature they come up with. Part of me wishes I still had the plain 'ol classic Google interface and behavior but I guess the site is now geared towards everyday folks, not techies. I gave Chrome a spin the other day again (haven't used it in months) and the default twitchy instant search behavior seemed bizarre and jarring. I think I must be becoming an old fart... I also think that search quality has gone down at Google (ddg still doesn't hold a candle to Google in that regard, however). ~~~ mverwijs > geared towards everyday folks, not techies. See, that is what I do not get. Google claims to be able to create a better product experience based on all that datamining they do. If that is the case, why don't they change the user interface based on what type of person they think I am? They have the data for it, or don't they? ------ ChrisLTD I'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's perceived gaffes in the last few months. I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched to DDG after Google started pushing Plus in their search results. ~~~ stcredzero _I'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's perceived gaffes in the last few months._ It's not Google gaffes, but unavailability that's been driving my DDG use. Whenever google.com fails to resolve in DNS for me, or Google's server fails to respond, I switch to DDG. Unfortunately, events like this have been happening frequently of late. I'm on Comcast in Houston. Anyone else experiencing this? ~~~ JS_startup You're not the only one. I counted three occasions just in the last week when an attempted Google visit timed out, yet DDG and Bing worked fine. Not sure what's going on behind the scenes at Google. ------ micahflee I've been using DGG for a couple of months now and it's been great. As a programmer, it turns out that like 50% of what I search for at work is programming reference stuff, so I've found the !php and !jquery syntax totally awesome. There's still occasionally searches that I make that I can't find what I need from DGG, so I manually go to google for those (and of course for image search). But DGG definitely meets my daily needs for a search engine, and I love how privacy friendly it it. ~~~ prakash You can use "!gi" to search google images from DDG & "!bi" to search bing images. ~~~ zecho !i brings up Google images, too. ------ buster I've tried DDG a few days but was disappointed by search speed and search results. I've found <https://startpage.com/> much better in terms of search results and speed. It's basically just proxy'ing to google (which is great, imo). ~~~ andrewcooke this is great. i tried ddg, was also frustrated by the speed, and returned to google. this is an easy drop-in replacement for that and works much faster. ------ loopdoend I wonder how much of this traffic is from Tor... Google blocks most searches routed via Tor exit nodes and the queries are rerouted to DDG by the tor browser (yay EFF!). ~~~ derrida "Google blocks most searches routed by Tor exit nodes" - Really? I've never had a problem, but the last time I used Tor was a week ago. Has something changed? ~~~ thesnider They don't 'block' most of the searches -- they just put up a CAPTCHA before each SRP. ------ scrrr I was surprised to read an article on DDG in a mainstream (albeit liberal) german newspaper "Die Zeit". It's getting press. At the same time, I've tried <http://www.hotbot.com> again (last time I tried it perhaps 10 years ago) and I was quite pleased with the search results. So yes, there definitely is a world outside of Google. And it's working well. But who else has GMail, Documents, Maps, Cache, Translate.. that's a major advantage for the #1. ~~~ TazeTSchnitzel Bing. Microsoft has Hotmail, Skydrive, Bing Maps, Cache, Translate and tons more. ~~~ moondowner The point was, who else has a good search engine and also offers other services. I don't recall Bing as a good search engine. And additionally, there are better services than Hotmail (like Gmail), Skydrive (like Google Docs), etc etc.. ~~~ EwanToo Bing is a very good search engine, pretty much identical to Google for my searches. ~~~ p0ss DDG's default search _is_ Bing. ------ riledhel Any idea how much Linux Mint and other projects embracing DuckDuckGo as their default search engine deliver to it? ~~~ reitzensteinm I'd like to know that too. I've emailed Gabriel, hopefully he'd be interested in sharing. Edit: He answered the question here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598541> ------ pnathan I use DDG about 2/3 of the time. Like others have said, its initial search quality is not up to Google's, and also its speed isn't either. However, I do think that DDG is a more truthful search engine: it seems to search for what you ask for, not what it thinks you want. This provides, in my opinion, a more nuanced web, where interesting things can turn up that _aren't_ highly "ranked". And, I do prefer Gabriel's focus on anonymity and non-bubbling. ------ Chrono I like the idea of DDG but it is quite frankly of little use to me. For most English terms it works reasonably well but for other languages such my mother tongue, Swedish, it is more or less useless. I found most results to be close to useless but I have not used DDG to a great degree because of this issue. I rather take relevant results results in multiple languages while being logged than less relevant results without being logged. ~~~ bleakgadfly Have you set your regional settings in DDG to "Sweden"? Heres a comparison between search results when I chose "English" vs. "Norwegian" on a Norwgeian term: <http://i.imgur.com/ReIa5.png> ~~~ Chrono Ah, that might be a improvement but then the questions becomes, how does the English results become affected by me changing it to Swedish? To be fair I do most of my searches in English and therefore it might cause irrelevant results again. Changing back and forth depending on what language I am search for is hardly ideal. Will have a look to see how it affects my searches. ------ lignuist I switched to DDG after scroogle's shutdown. DDG feels a bit slower - obvious, since they add some features, while scroogle basically was just a proxy. What I didn't like about scroogle was their negative attitude (at least it seemed negative to me). I tried also <http://gigablast.com> , which is nice, but its index is too small for general purpose searching. ------ eostyx I like using DuckDuckGo with Google Chrome because its Omnibox searching is really fast. Unlike Chrome, Mozilla Firefox suffers this annoying 2 second delay for searching through the main URL bar. Quite frankly I'm mad with Mozilla for sticking with two damn separate search utilities. Who else doesn't like the slow ass URL-bar search for Firefox? ------ twelvechairs I switched to ddg to try it out, and am still using it, mostly because of the bang syntax, not because its general search results are better than Google's, or because of privacy concerns (as long as you tell google not to remember your search history I'm not too worried...). ~~~ user3528 you can't tell google not to remember your search history... you can only tell them not to personalize your search results with your search history. you don't need to be worried, just aware that unless you put effort into it, pretty much everything you do on the web is knowable by google. ------ tinio Not surprised as I'm also in the camp of having switched to ddg as default search engine. ------ yardie I've been using DDG ever since I submitted a bug and got a response from yegg a few hours later. That lets me know someone on the other side really cares and I'm not just firing emails off into the dark. ------ bearwithclaws Always put a smile on my face when I spot somebody using DDG. ------ nyar Un/fortunately Bing won't have access to this data to make their search engine better. Duckduck is good for hiding porn, not for finding hard to find stuff. ------ donniezazen One major reason, I like Google search is their Omnibox autofill suggestions. It makes things real easy.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Snortable Chocolate Arrives in U.S. Stores - notscj https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-06-16/snortable-chocolate-arrives-in-us-stores ====== lwlml First thing I thought of when I read this was of the two people who thought it would be fun to play with cocoa powder. They died. [http://1000waystodie.wikia.com/wiki/Choke-A- Lot](http://1000waystodie.wikia.com/wiki/Choke-A-Lot)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Failed $4.4 billion bid for Nortel patents comes back to haunt Google&Friends - pietrofmaggi http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/11/failed-44-billion-bid-for-nortel.html ====== tehabe Florian Müller is not an independent voice. He was/is a consultant for Microsoft and Oracle. Also he was wrong in his predictions when Oracle sued Google and I hope he wrong now too. Too bad that Groklaw had to shut down in August. We still need a reasonable voice on the other side. ------ transfire So just b/c Google's $4.4 billion dollar bid lost to Microsoft & Apple's combined $4.5 billion bid, MS and Apple now have the right to extort Google? Does anyone else see what's wrong with this picture?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: I built this simple Trello clone today and launched it before lunch - aculver https://bt-cardboard.herokuapp.com ====== kinduff Looks nice but it's more a kanban board rather than a Trello clone. I don't doubt you're that skilled to build something like this "before lunch", but in my experience it is highly unlikely. A few tips: \- Add a landing page or at least a demo of how it looks \- Remove those paddings and go full screen \- Remove transitions, they may look good but they're not usable in this case \- App feels heavy, not sure because of transitions, but feels slow. Also if by simple you mean this: \- REST API and API documentation \- Invites sent via e-mail \- Full design \- Twitter integration \- Users and Abilities \- Multi-teams feature and ability to switch Then I don't know what's simple anymore. ~~~ aculver Thanks for providing such detailed and thoughtful feedback. I actually did build this app on top of [https://bullettrain.co](https://bullettrain.co) in less than two hours. I actually recorded the entire process and I'm happy to share the video privately. (You can DM me on Twitter or email me at andrew@bullettrain.co .) I'll post it publicly once someone is able to edit out the parts where I spend 10-15 minutes debugging really simple CSS issues, etc. I provided some more context on this project's purpose here: [https://twitter.com/andrewculver/status/968215988436004864](https://twitter.com/andrewculver/status/968215988436004864) ------ yodon Without even a screenshot or anything I’m unlikely to create an account on some site I’ve never heard of ~~~ perilunar Agree. Need to be able to see what it is and play with before I set up an account. The point to prompt to create an account is when the user is about to leave: "set up an account to save this page". ------ yakshaving_jgt Why does this app want permission to tweet on my behalf?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A website for human-centered news using location verification - aellaboudy http://peoples-word.com ====== aellaboudy The People’s Word is a project dedicated to bringing more human-centered news to the people. This means publishing news that is produced from the actual places where it’s happening, by the people affected by those events. Check it out, more info at peoples-word.com/aboutus ~~~ smt88 Spoofing location is trivially easy, either using an app or submitting doctored HTTP requests to your API. I would ask what you would do to stop this, but you just can't.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
We're in an icon-sharpness limbo - tbassetto http://simurai.com/post/19895985870/icon-sharpness-limbo ====== WiseWeasel I think the answer is SVG for anything we've got vectorized, and I've started delving more deeply into the format, which turns out to be pretty awesome. First, to create them, I draw icons with vectors at the actual size the final icon will be rendered on regular non-retina displays, then export as SVG with Illustrator. But what I really want are the paths; fill and stroke colors and shading effects can be added manually. Then, I open the SVG output in a text editor, and since it's all XHTML formatted, I can easily modify everything to get the look I want. I can re- organize the path and fill elements, change their fill colors, and add things like shadows right in the SVG file as filter elements, in case your editor makes sub-optimal choices as to how to encode your design. These icons look perfect when rendered on both normal screens at 1x and retina displays at 2x resolution. If I needed an in-between size, I'd have to design a new vector for the new target size. One vector design will typically not work well for different rendered sizes at this small scale, as every pixel counts, and anti-aliasing does more harm than good. That problem is just unavoidable, even when you try to make a flattened PNG at all these in-between sizes. I've also found SVG ideal for small bits of text with special non-web-safe fonts. Converting text to paths and exporting to SVG is the way to go over gif or png text, and looks great on retina displays. ~~~ luminarious As SVG supports CSS and Media Queries, it's possible to optimize the display for different display sizes. Like demonstrated here: [http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/10/12/how-media- queries-a...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/10/12/how-media-queries- allow-you-to-optimize-svg-icons-for-several-sizes) ~~~ WiseWeasel OK, I take back what I said. SVG _can_ be used to create a single asset that looks good at ALL resolutions; it's just going to take some work and possibly add too much bloat to be worth it in some cases. So let's say you have a 16px icon design, with an element 7px wide, and you want a 24px version of that icon. The problem is when you scale an odd- numbered-height or width element by a factor of 1.5 in this example, you get an element with a height or width defined as a non-integer (10.5px wide in this case), which is when anti-aliasing kicks in and replaces that extra .5 pixel of element and .5 pixel of background with one pixel of element at half opacity. this makes it look fuzzy. What you need to do is have a media query like this in the SVG file: <style> @media screen and (max-width: 24){#element {width: 10px}} </style> Or maybe: @media screen and (max-width: 16){<shape id="element" width="7px"</shape>} @media screen and (max-width: 24){<shape id="element" width="10px"</shape>} I haven't played with it to be sure yet, but something like that might allow you to set the width, height or radius to an integer for the sizes you care about. Complex paths would still likely need to be redrawn for various target sizes to get rid of the more egregious anti-aliasing issues. In that case, we're adding bloat to everyone's SVG files to serve the needs of different clients. Maybe we're still better off with different SVG files served to different clients when we pass a certain threshold of duplicated content within the SVG, and duplicated paths would seem to me to be in danger of crossing that threshold. ------ mmahemoff I'm curious if there are any standards for "patching" vector graphics. So you could download the base SVG and a separate vector and/or bitmap-based patch to produce something appropriate for the resolution. (As well as being appropriate for the bandwidth constraints etc.) The patch could be downloaded simultaneously or progressively, i.e. after the base image has been rendered. ~~~ natevw I've always wondered if adding something like "font hinting" would cover most use cases. Although I suppose for e.g. icons sometimes at the smaller sizes the actual graphic is pretty much a completely different image, rather than just a hand-tweaked rasterization. ~~~ schmerg See [http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those- vector-...](http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector- icons.html) for a detailed exploration of precisely the issue with icons and real-life examples of how smaller versions are actually different images (eg a large 3d image with drop shadows gets gradually flattened to a simplified 2d version). One thing you can do for patching SVG is to have multiple versions of images/shapes and use CSS rules to select just the most appropriate one to show depending on a class you add to some root or parent item - hiding the other until needed. I haven't tested this, but wonder if the browser would be smart enough to prioritise loading of the different images depending on the visibility. Otherwise you could generate those parts of the SVG as required, and use the load event to only swap the display to the more appropriate version of an image once loaded.. hence as you zoom the display, you first get the "core" image/shapes etc simply scaled by the browser, and then as background images are loaded, these scaled versions are replaced by more appropriate versions. This would match the way that zooming works with tiles in apps like Google maps - when you first zoom in you simply get the base tile images scaled by the browser, and then replaced by the more detailed versions as they're loaded. ------ alexchamberlain We need a multi-resolution image format and/or support for browsers to dictate to the server what size they want. ~~~ ars There is a workgroup working on it: <http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/> Some of the options: <https://etherpad.mozilla.org/responsive-assets> ~~~ alexchamberlain We need to send the dimensions with the image request. It's the only way. ~~~ pornel There are many factors beyond screen size that could be involved in selection of image DPI: bandwidth availability and cost, screen density and current zoom level, amount of free memory available, hardware limitations (like iPad's max 1024px bitmaps). Sending all these factors to the server would be problematic, so IMHO it's better if page declaratively specifies what sizes are available and lets UA pick one (so my UA doesn't need to tell every server when I'm out of my bandwidth allowance and _hope_ server acts as expected). ~~~ alexchamberlain I disagree to some extent. Given DPI, screen density and zoom level, the CSS etc should dictate the pixel width/height which can be sent to the server to obtain the correct version.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Designer/Programmer Harmony: Not Just a Myth - omgsean http://factore.ca/on-the-floor/22-designer-programmer-harmony-not-just-a-myth ====== whiskeyjack This is a difficult dynamic to manage and depends really heavily on the designer and programmer involved, how good they actually are and how much they credit the others expertise. I've worked on projects at one job with a designer that was top notch. He knew and understood the medium despite having started as a print designer. As he did with print, where he learned about the pre-press process, he made sure he learned about the web, usability and understood HTML and CSS. What a joy it was to work with him. His designs were beautiful and understood usability without sacrificing appearance. He's gone on to do independant work and now makes double what I do. Good on him. Then there's the other side. I've worked with another designer who thinks design exists in a silo, refuses to learn anything about the medium and has very firm (and misguided) ideas about usability. They see no point in involving a programmer in the design phase because the programmer is just supposed to make things work and doesn't understand design. They have learned nothing about the web and feel learning HTML or CSS dilutes their focus; any designer that does know these things is looked down upon because they're spreading the attention to far and will make a poor designer. Programmers can make it hard on a designer, even good ones, and we shouldn't. This is the most valuable working relationship you can form in my opinion. If you find one of the former, hold on to them like they are the only life preserver in the ocean. If one of the latter, run like hell. There are, of course, many skill/knowledge levels in between but it really makes me appreciate it when I have a good one to work with.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amazing Career Advice For College Grads From LinkedIn's Billionaire Founder - rahulroy http://www.businessinsider.com/amazing-career-advice-for-college-grads-from-linkedins-billionaire-founder-2013-5?op=1 ====== pcrh Fairly standard stuff. However, here is one piece of advice for Hoffman: do not use one hundred and twelve full-page stock images to convey a few paragraphs of advice. ~~~ jbackus It looks like this was a presentation. If you were in the audience would you have preferred a dozen heavily condensed bullet point slides? ~~~ HarryHirsch Sure. Martin Luther's had some immortal words on giving presentations: "Tritt fest auf. Tu's Maul auf. Hör bald auf." (Stand tall. Speak loud. Don't take long.) ------ spencerhawkins "Take intelligent risks, and you will find opportunities that others miss."	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Drone Flies Over NSA Complex in Germany, Dropping Leaflets - cryoshon https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/drone-flies-over-nsa-complex-in-germany-dropping-pamphlets/ ====== dogma1138 While it's a nifty gesture it's also one of the easiest ways of getting drones banned (especially considering that according to openAIP that airspace is restricted). A protest would be more effective but i guess it's a bit harder to fit in a 1min YouTube video.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tech firms shell out to hire and hoard talent - prostoalex http://www.economist.com/news/business/21709574-tech-firms-battle-hire-and-hoard-talented-employees-huge-pay-packages-silicon-valley ====== xenadu02 Translation: hey all you other crabs, LOOK! One of you is making it out of the bucket! Pull them back! Am I the only one who has started to see media hit pieces for what they are? One way to lower personnel costs is to make it socially unacceptable to attempt to profit from a business transaction (aka job). People were angry because Wall St bankers raked in bonuses while the economy tanked, Wall St got a massive bailout, and people were losing their houses. Silicon Valley isn't looting people's retirement accounts and doesn't need bailouts. The money is also spread slightly more equitably than Wall St (individual companies vary of course). ~~~ exstudent2 Yes, it's becoming unrelenting. On the one hand you have pieces like this lamenting the "high" pay of engineers. Nevermind how much value they add or CEOs that make orders of magnitude more money. On the other we have articles like the one yesterday saying how _so many_ qualified women are being passed up on engineering positions due to the patriarchy (technical interviews) -- directly contradicting this article stating talent is being aggressively hoarded. There's a push by the media and investors in every direction to lower engineering salaries (through shame or increasing the supply of engineers). Some is profit motivated, some is probably motivated by jealousy but together there's a theme that engineers are in some way privileged and undeserving of what they earn. Given how incredibly difficult and time consuming it is to become a good engineer I suspect all this whining will not accomplish much. ~~~ walshemj Yes the other professions don't like it when us greasy engineers start getting a slightly bigger share of the pie. And remember the Economist is a UK publication and the status of engineering is now where near what it is in the USA ~~~ gaius Yep an Engineer no matter what the prestige of their university or their degrees will always be considered "blue collar" in the UK. Everywhere apart from the City that is, ironically. ~~~ Kurtz79 I think this is due to the fact the word "Engineer" historically was meant in the sense of "Technician", "Repairman", if I'n not mistaken. From Wikipedia: "In the UK, "engineering" was more recently perceived as an industry sector consisting of employers and employees loosely termed "engineers" who included the semi-skilled trades. However, the 21st-century view, especially amongst the more educated members of society, is to reserve the term Engineer to describe a university-educated practitioner of ingenuity represented by the Chartered (or Incorporated) Engineer. However, a large proportion of the UK public still sees Engineers as semi skilled tradespeople with a high school education." ~~~ walshemj Yes that talking about the UK's perception not the actual historical meanings. And I though the origin was military engineers you know like Leonardo ------ lordnacho If you want some resource as an ingredient to your business, you have to pay for it. The price mechanism is what society uses to decide where the resource goes. It may well be that it's better (by whatever definition) to send these people to work in the large firms rather than startups. Wrt startups, it's also a signal that this is perhaps not where value is, ie turning coders which are already expensive into some product which needs to be even more valuable. You could for instance start a business that takes unskilled labor and turns it into something else offering high ROI. It's just a matter of developing such a business. The fact that it's expensive also skews the founding teams towards having coders. Which IMHO makes it more likely they'll succeed, at least in coding intensive businesses. As a coder I'm not so worried. For the moment it appears demand is outstripping supply, and I'm somewhat sceptical that the marginal supply is particularly good. The first guy to sign up for CS really, really wanted it. The last guy, he might be smart, but he was just as likely to go into management consulting or banking. And coding in particular seems to reward people who have real interest. I'm sure a lot of other fields are like that, but coding especially so. You're sitting in front of a machine that allows you to practice and look up advice 24 hours a day. Other fields are typically limited, eg you can only practice sports for so long each day. That will tend to advantage people who are interested, rather than those who need a paycheck (which isn't a terrible reason either). ~~~ forgotpwtomain > You're sitting in front of a machine that allows you to practice and look up > advice 24 hours a day. I don't think you become a better coder by going on sleepless coding sprees. Sure, sometimes its necessary and productive - but over all I think it has as little impact on your development as an engineer as a researcher binge reading academic articles (sure, sometimes you need to when approaching a new area/problem) but I don't think that's what defines you as a researcher either. ------ jim-greer > "It’s gone too far,” says one venture capitalist... This investor is probably making more than the vast majority of the people building technology. It's not clear to me why society benefits from that. High salaries encourage young people to enter the field. That's a good thing. High housing costs are another matter... ~~~ sfaf A pretty ridiculous statement given that a VC pays close to 20% income tax while these well paid engineers are taxed at almost double that %. The VCs carried interest tax loophole has gone too far, not market competition for engineering salaries (which was previously priced fixed through non-poaching agreements). "The engineers are getting paid too much so my startups can't convince them to work for equity because of the free market while my entire industry avoids paying taxes and stiffs America." Cry me a river, vc. ~~~ wolfgke > A pretty ridiculous statement given that a VC pays close to 20% income tax > while these well paid engineers are taxed at almost double that %. The VCs > carried interest tax loophole has gone too far, not market competition for > engineering salaries (which was previously priced fixed through non-poaching > agreements). The problem rather is that it is (from bureaucratic-legal-financial overhead) hard for an "ordinary" person to become a VC. That is where you should demand change for more justice. ------ abc_lisper I don't see it as a problem as an engineer living in bay area. If not for my current employer, there is no way I could afford a home here. Having said that, this feels like somebody got butthurt that they couldn't find cheap labor who will work 80 hours a week. Tough luck! ~~~ arcanus > this feels like somebody got butthurt that they couldn't find cheap labor > who will work 80 hours a week Precisely. The article acts as if employees receiving excellent compensation is bad, yet cannot put its finger on why. Meanwhile, a few guys were paid millions of dollars to play baseball last night. ~~~ prostoalex > yet cannot put its finger on why They do, down towards the bottom: "The rising cost of talent has also pushed up the level of funding startups need to raise. The idea that it is cheap to launch a firm is a myth, says Evan Williams, who co-founded Twitter and set up Medium, an online-publishing platform. “It’s harder and more expensive than ever to make a startup successful.” The more money young companies raise from investors to pay their employees, the harder it is for them to break even or become profitable." > a few guys were paid millions of dollars to play baseball last night Which significantly raises the bar on entering the baseball team market. The world is unlikely to suffer from the shortage of baseball teams. Shortage of new tech companies does seem to have stronger negative effects on the economy. ~~~ arcanus > Which significantly raises the bar on entering the baseball team market. I disagree. Baseball is a legally enforced monopoly in the united states. ([http://www.swcollege.com/bef/policy_debates/baseball.html](http://www.swcollege.com/bef/policy_debates/baseball.html)) If not protected by antitrust laws, all major sports would arguably be prone to disruption and price undercutting. The SF megacorps are not similarly protected. These salaries are market based pricing. ~~~ walshemj Doesn't seem to happen in soccer the premiership pay bill is immense. ~~~ lordnacho That's effectively a cartel as well. You can't just set up a team and join the EPL. ~~~ walshemj But you can go from a lower division to the premiership its not a closed shop with no penalty for failure in the way the American football teams are. For example Leicester's run from third tier to the championship 09 - 16 ~~~ lordnacho Sure, it's a bit different from the US sports. But you still cannot just set up a business and compete. You'd either start at the bottom of the football pyramid, meaning a multiyear barrier to entry, or you buy a club, which is paying an incumbent for their seat. ------ wolfgke Where is the problem? If one founds the company in the Silicon Valley, one has to pay the salaries that are usual in this region. There are lots of places on earth where you can get cheaper engineers; and they will even often be satisfied with lower salaries when the living costs, particular the housing costs, are much cheaper, too. Since what you, as an engineer, are interested in is the difference between salary and necessary expenses. ~~~ HarryHirsch You are also be interested in time between jobs, that's where the real problem lies. In Dallas, during the last downturn, you'd be looking at 6 - 12 months, in SF it was more like 3 months. ------ 20years "Some startups are already moving elsewhere to hire cheaper engineers and reduce other costs. They don't have to go very far from the Bay Area, perhaps to southern California or other states." ^This. Or hire remote, which is a perk in itself. ~~~ gaius _Or hire remote, which is a perk in itself_ How is it a perk? You provide your own equipment, give up some of your personal space, do your own support, the company saves on rent, cleaning, utility bills, equipment, furniture, security... and they convince you its such a perk you should be paid less too! Remote workers should be more highly paid! The boss is laughing all the way to the bank! ~~~ jackmaney Who the hell works for a company (remotely or not) and uses their own equipment? I'm not a lawyer, of course, but a developer exposing their personal system to company data could be a significant liability risk to the company. In particular, my last employer gave everyone the option to use an app[1] for easy access to email on their personal phones. I refused to install it, since it gave my (then) employer the ability to remotely wipe my phone at the press of a button. [1]: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.good.andro...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.good.android.gfe&hl=en) ~~~ elcct Depending on relationship if you are a contractor usually you have to provide your own equipment and software. I prefer it that way - if company provides equipment it is usually minimum to get job done which doesn't make it pleasant most of the time. ~~~ jackmaney That's a fair point. I wasn't thinking of contractors when I wrote my reply above. Hmmm, in that case, are there protections other than an NDA that are employed to minimize the risk of exposure of company data to a contractor's personal systems? ~~~ elcct For example you don't have access to production servers and work only with dev/staging environments ------ nappy-doo The people who get rich in a gold rush aren't the miners, it's the people who sell the shovels. I ask HN, who are the shovel sellers in this goldrush? Is it the tech superstars who can "touch millions", the VC, the founder? Who is hocking shovels in our current scenario? ~~~ SteveNuts Also, recruiters take a huge chunk of the hourly pay/salary of candidates they place. I was offered a job that paid "$90/hour" but I'd see about $60 of that. That means the recruitment agency would make about $60k per year off of me, all while not really doing anything but checking in monthly with me. Not sure what it's like in the SV but here in the midwest I know a lot of people are hired through third party recruiters, and even a small team can place hundreds of candidates per year. EDIT: Sorry for the confusion, in this case I have no idea why the recruiter revealed the "true $ amount" to me, rather than just the amount I would make. They wouldn't be taking the $30/hour from me, they'd be charging the company I'd work for obviously. 99% of the time you only see the amount after the agency takes their cut. ~~~ jackmaney Reputable recruiters charge employers, not candidates. Any so-called "recruiter" who takes their cut directly out of your salary (as opposed to charging the employer a percentage of a candidate's salary in a lump sum payment) is a con artist. Period. ~~~ SteveNuts Sorry, yes you're correct - edited my comment. They wouldn't be charging me, they're taking a 30% cut of the hourly rate and giving me the rest. My point was that the recruitment agencies will benefit from the rise of salaries ~~~ jackmaney No, they still took the cut directly from your pay. Sorry, but you were scammed. ~~~ SteveNuts How else would it work? The recruiters need to take a cut somewhere, whether it's a lump sum up front or a cut per hour is fine with me. I agree that it's annoying that a company would pay a recruitment agency 90/hour to have me, but would never pay me directly that much. ~~~ jackmaney They take a cut from your employer. The employer pays the recruiter _above and beyond_ what they are paying you. ------ elitro I see nothing wrong with paying premium salaries for premium talent. I'm not in the know here, but if i'm allowed to throw my 2 cents, i feel the article focuses too much in money as the only way of attracting talent. Maybe smaller companies can attract top talent with different strategies? Remote work option, family benefits (health and education packages). Some creativity would have to be thrown in the mix, but going the extra mile could play a big role in getting people's attention. ~~~ BurningFrog Smaller companies attract me by the absence of bureaucracy and the ability to get a lot of productive work done. ------ gist > Google, Facebook and Amazon alone probably hire around 30% of all American > computer-science undergraduates, reckons Roelof Botha of Sequoia, a venture- > capital firm. What kind of bullshit is this? "Reckons Roelof Botha". Number coming out of his ass with no basis whatsoever. Not even a meaningless study to back it up. ~~~ temuze Maybe true at Stanford or a top school? ~~~ stale2002 Yeah, I went to CMU, and 30% sounds about right to me. ------ yankyou Don't want to pay for engineering work? You can get it for free! All you need is to rack up a decade of experience, then put in 60 hours a week plus 20 hours of professional development to keep current on the latest technologies. If you're reading this you already have everything you need. What, that doesn't sound very appealing? Alright, here's my card. ------ Futurebot In order to be a developer you have to: \- Be willing to sit in a chair for 8-12 hours a day, staring at characters on a screen, paying attention to tiny details that would drive many non-devs mad, and work in deeply-focused, high-concentration mode \- Be willing to keep with the latest technology trends on your time and often on your own dime. For many people this means essentially jettisoning the idea of a healthy social life \- Have the financial resources, talent, and drive to get through challenging academic material for 4-8 years at a university or spend all your free time teaching yourself everything you need to know, which can even harder, meaning again, no healthy social life \- Live in an area with an incredibly high cost of living that only gets higher each year (occasional pullbacks notwithstanding.) This can mean spending 30, 40, even 50% or your income every month just on rent or living with a gaggle of roommates through your twenties, thirties, even forties. \- Be part of an industry that, despite fierce competition for talent, will decline to hire qualified candidates on that basis of age, perceived "poor culture fit," having attended a "bad/wrong" school (or no school) Devs are also value multipliers; they're worth more than some marginal value. When you hire a dev, you're hire them to bring in 2,3,5,10 times what you're paying them in value, not 120k so that they can bring in 130. The fact that devs are paid high salaries is good and makes perfect sense. It's part of the reason doctors are paid so much (and if we were really fair, currently underpaid professions that are similarly demanding would be paid far more than they are now.) Now, the "this hurts startups" issue is something to be concerned about, but not at the expense of workers. What can be done here? \- Get used to needing more VC money. Adjust expectations \- Figure out ways to make startups cheaper (#1 on the list should be massive housebuilding. If rents were 1/3 of what they are, we would likely not be even reading this article. Right now all that would-be "extra" money gets directly funneled into the pockets of landlords. Tech bigwigs should be pouring massive resources / clout into changing this. Density, public housing to take pressure off the low end, all of it: [https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/fixing-the- nyc-rent-crisi...](https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/fixing-the-nyc-rent- crisis-or-the-rent-is-still-too-damn-high-edb13ca853cc)) \- Get used to having fewer, but better capitalized startups ------ matchagaucho What's not mentioned is the toll for high comp: 42% of RSU earnings withheld to cover taxes. 90 minute commutes to work _one-way_. Stack ranked performance reviews. Open office space, cramped quarters, and distractions. Off-hour email and texts. Implicit expectations to be "on-call". ------ gedy If there were more decent housing to rent and buy within a short to medium commute within the Bay Area, I and plenty of other engineers I know would gladly relocate to there without insane salary requirements. ~~~ xenadu02 I really wonder why the tech companies and startups don't pour money into lobbying, grooming candidates for public office, etc. Spreading the cost over many companies would make it much more feasible. Lower housing costs would slow salary increases and make recruiting easier. Maybe they think the increase in infrastructure (requiring taxes) and lobbying costs would be more than they would save? Or maybe they see their personal property appraisals increasing and decide not to do what's best for the firm? ~~~ crdoconnor Google is building its own housing (and fighting to do so). We're seeing the return of company towns. I don't think they're interested in lowering housing costs for the whole valley though. ------ the_watcher This article seems to imply that Facebook, Google, etc are behaving nefariously in offering high compensation to employees. Startups have always been at a disadvantage here, and employees should not be made to feel poorly for looking after themselves first. ------ kafkaesq ... but comparatively little to train and nurture said talent. From another article crossposted here recently: _" The perceived skills gap is because companies have stopped training and developing people internally," says Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School, who was interviewed for the report. "Before the 1980s, 90% of vacancies were filled internally and 10% were hired outside. Now, 65% of vacancies are filled from outside," Capelli says._ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12865971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12865971) ------ mc32 Since a few of these firms already over-hire for positions (where talent is underutilized), can we expect eventually it will morph into hiring people to simply keep them from being available to competitors and thus pay some people to simply stay home? So cut-throat. ~~~ arcanus "Google, Facebook and Amazon alone probably hire around 30% of all American computer-science undergraduates, reckons Roelof Botha of Sequoia, a venture- capital firm." This is far more pervasive than the cream, they are getting at best the top third. That is just high demand for programmers, not a talent war. ~~~ sadface Maybe 30% of graduates of top 30 universities. There are lots of CS grads from lower ranked schools that are definitely not getting fought over by the likes of Google/FB/Amazon... ~~~ JoelBennett Agreed. I've got an MSc, and the only contact I've ever had was a practically spam message for an Amazon recruiter (who contacted half the province I live in, as near as I can figure). ------ crdoconnor >“It’s gone too far,” says one venture capitalist I bet he wasn't quite so outraged at the illegal wage fixing cartel. ------ acchow > The price of housing plays a part in pushing up salaries. I'm 100% sure it's the other way around. ~~~ crdoconnor It's probably a bit of both. After all, people do leave/not come to SF because of the housing costs and that restriction in the supply of labor will naturally push up the price of labor that does live there. ------ gxs >>> A famous example of this occurred in 2011, when Neal Mohan, a senior Google executive, was considering leaving for Twitter. Some say he was offered a bonus of $100m in stock to stay at Google. I imagine this has more to do with keeping company secrets within the company. It has to, right? Is one person really worth 100M? I guess if an athlete is worth 400M over the course of his career to a franchise (thinking of an A-Rod), it makes sense in this case also. ------ mamcx I have talk to some of the people that try to push the startup scene here in Colombia that the day some good VC come here, them will sweep with all the talent for a dime (from the POV of USA). The thing is that too much is centered around a few spots. That increase the "scarcity perception" because them are in a island and don't look across the ocean. ------ pascalxus And yet, tech firms still try locate themselves in the most expensive parts of the world: San Francisco, and Palo Alto. There's so many tech hubs other than SF, where they could hire talent for less than half as much, but they choose not to. The article states the cost of living is 41% higher. That's a large underestimation. In Palo Alto and SF, the average house prices (keep in mind these are mostly dilapidated tiny lot and barely livable) for 400% to 700% higher than the national average. Taking into account the cost of living, I'm surprised that bay area salaries and compensation are not increasing more than it already has. ~~~ eitally I think this is something non-locals don't really understand. Not so much that houses are insanely overpriced, but that in the most desirable cities for homebuyers (let's call them Palo Alto & Cupertino for argument's sake) the average house is a total piece of crap. It's not like you're getting something nice for your $2m. The people who are buying them are either buying them to tear down or significantly remodel, or they're tiger parents -- usually both working in tech -- trying to buy into the top public school districts ... but who then either don't care about the property quality or don't have any money left over to make improvements (hence all the detached garages converted into rentable studios). The property quality in a lot of relatively cheaper parts of the region are a lot nicer than what you find in some of the most expensive. ------ gorbachev If these folks were really worried about high salaries and interested in reversing it, maybe they should be talking about education policy and high cost of living in the US tech hubs. Additionally if they were on the evil side, they could also advocate for open borders and removing visa restrictions for high tech workers. But no, instead it's just whining. It's particularly hypocritical since it's coming from a bunch of rich folks, who typically became rich by owning a successful tech company. ------ pascalxus And let's not forget, there are engineers line up around the block, trying to work in SF and palo alto, but there's simply not enough housing. I'm sure these companies would be able to attract a lot more talent to the bay area, if they just solved the housing problem: but that would be politically illegal. ------ thesimpsons1022 >>Google, Facebook and Amazon alone probably hire around 30% of all American computer-science undergraduates that is so wrong i don't even know where to start. ~~~ CalChris Let's see. Department of Labor says there were 55,367 bachelors in computer and information sciences in 2013/4. [http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_322.10.as...](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_322.10.asp?current=yes) .3 * 55367 = 16610 or about 5000 per company. Google employs 57,100. Facebook employs 12,691. Amazon employs 132,600. It's hard to say how many of those are CS grads. Yeah, count me as incredulous. ~~~ spyspy There's no way any of them hire 5000 newly graduated programmers every year. ~~~ mrep That does seem a little high but not too ridiculous. My company has over a thousand interns every summer and we have interns all year round. ------ sonabinu It's not just the CEO's and VP's who get handsome rewards. The rank and file do as well. ------ walshemj equating stock options to to a wall street bonus is just silly bonus are 100% cash I bet the amount of options that actually are in the money is no where near 50% ~~~ swalsh They actually talked about stock grants, which is pretty close to cash. ~~~ walshemj Apart from taking account of the time value of money,dilution or being forced out and lose any unvested stock.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Defensibility as an touchstone for development decisions « Hints and Kinks - mceachen http://matthew.mceachen.us/blog/defensibility-as-an-touchstone-for-development-decisions-786.html ====== bediger I have to question the _universal_ truth of "there's more than one way to do it". That saying bears truth for algorithmic parts of systems, but how about "business logic", that be all and end all of J2EE systems? I spent a few hours contemplating some exceptionally unreasonable and hence difficult-to-test "business logic" once upon a time. After kicking it around with co-workers, the project manager decided that maybe "business logic" is the only part of a system with one correct implementation. I'm not sure that's a true statement all the time, but it sure does make sense a lot of the time. ~~~ mceachen Even in the scope of business logic, though, there's almost always multiple implementations that will result in a functionally correct output.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger Slams Boeing for Inadequate Pilot Training - jgwil2 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/capt-sully-sullenberger-slams-boeing-093246566.html ====== PowerfulWizard The thing that still bothers me about the 737 MAX information I've seen, in particular from the NYT article that was discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20070509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20070509) is that I'm not convinced anyone at Boeing understood the flight characteristics of the aircraft, even after the 1st crash. When you have a very complex system, which has been incrementally modified over a 50 year period, it is going to be really difficult to understand all the interactions. The NYT article describes a Jan 2016 parameter change on the MCAS to make it faster and more powerful. I _am_ convinced that the MCAS will be studied and understood, and pilots can be trained to respond appropriately. I'm _not_ convinced that there is a process in place where the consequences of changes to the aircraft are known and tested in advance. Ultimately, if the pilot is willing to fly, I'm willing to fly, but based on what I've seen, I don't think there was an adequate change control process in place, and as long as that is true issues will continue to be "discovered" in flight. Training is a solution to known problems, not unknown problems. ~~~ salawat I have trouble believing that Boeing didn't know exactly how that plane flew. Back in the 60's, Boeing was notorious amongst test pilots for knowing exactly how a plane would behave, when it would misbehave, and how[1]. That's back then. The state of the art in CFD has only made the process easier. There is absolutely no room for them to have not known the physical ramifications of that change. Where the story gets sketchy is where Boeing didn't update the FAA on the later change to the system, and every attempt being made to ensure that they didn't design anything such that the FAA would deem simulator training necessary as evidenced by whistleblower testimony (See the Australian 60 minutes expose[2]). [1] The D. P. Davies Interview, Royal Aeronautics Society, [https://www.aerosociety.com/news/audio-the-d-p-davies- interv...](https://www.aerosociety.com/news/audio-the-d-p-davies-interview-on- testing-the-comets-boeing-707-britannia-brabazon/) [https://www.aerosociety.com/news/audio-the-d-p-davies- interv...](https://www.aerosociety.com/news/audio-the-d-p-davies-interview-on- the-boeing-747-the-trident-vc10-one-eleven-the-boeing-727/) [2][https://youtu.be/QytfYyHmxtc](https://youtu.be/QytfYyHmxtc) ------ DamnInteresting _“We should all want pilots to experience these challenging situations for the first time in a simulator, not in flight, with passengers and crew on board,” Sullenberger said, adding that “reading about it on an iPad is not even close to sufficient.”_ This is the one quote attributed to Sullenberger. Is that enough to claim that he "slams" Boeing? Headline hyperbole is annoying. ~~~ giobox Given that a material part of Boeing's solution was to provide iPad based training materials rather than the simulator time he believes was necessary, coupled with his language - "not even close to sufficient" \- I'm comfortable with calling this a slam. The full remarks from which this quote is lifted are significantly critical of Boeing, during which he describes the "current system of aircraft certification and design" as having "failed us". I don't think this headline mistakes the the nature of his remarks at all. ------ Hasknewbie Reminder (motivated by taway69's post questioning Sully's credentials): prior to the Hudson river incident in 2009, Sully was already an aviation safety expert, having participated in multiple National Transportation Safety Board investigation, and having founded a safety related company in 2007 (so at that moment in 2009 he was kind of the perfect man for the situation). So yes he's very much qualified to testify in front of Congress. ------ bfdm The best part of this whole thing has been the airlines being forced to pull some older 787-800s off the bench for main route duty. They have so much more leg room in the old seat configuration. We had one trip where the window seat was able to get out without the other two leaving the row, in economy! (There was a lot of rubbing, but it was possible) ------ blt Check out this documentary on Boeing's sketchy manufacturing & QA process back in the days of the 787 release. It seems that the company has been toxic for a while now. [https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os](https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MTU Study: 3D printers may soon be in every home - makos http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130730-mtu-study-3d-printers-may-soon-be-in-every-home.html ====== anigbrowl _In the study, Pearce and his team chose 20 common household items listed on Thingiverse, such as cellphone accessories, a garlic press, a showerhead, a spoon holder, and the like. Then they used Google Shopping to determine the maximum and minimum cost of buying those 20 items online, shipping charges not included. Next, they calculated the cost of making them with 3D printers. The conclusion: it would cost the typical consumer from $312 to $1,944 to buy those 20 things compared to $18 to make them in a weekend._ Oh come _on_. Like all those items online were made out of the same low-melt- point plastic and the 3d-printed ones were of equivalent quality. I'm very much pro 3d-printing but there's some serious reaching here. The last page of the study ([http://www.academia.edu/4067796/Life- Cycle_Economic_Analysis...](http://www.academia.edu/4067796/Life- Cycle_Economic_Analysis_of_Distributed_Manufacturing_with_Open- Source_3-D_Printers)) offers examples such as a shower head with prices ranging from $7.87 to $437.22, jewelry organizers from $9 to $109, and orthotics ranging from $99 to $800. There's a _little_ bit more going on with the expensive ones than just being a heap of plastic that you can duplicate at home, I think. ~~~ buro9 I wondered whether the bicycle water bottle holder could really hold a heavy bottle as the bike vibrated, hit potholes, etc. Just making something that looks the same does not mean it will perform the same. For example, would the lemon juicer in the picture withstand the dishwasher for as long as the shop bought equivalent? If not, how many times would the printed version be replaced and at what cost? I just don't yet buy, in the examples given, that the items are of equivalent performance, and that is if one were to generously say that they had equivalent aesthetic qualities. 3d printing will get there, but it's not there yet. ~~~ snom380 ABS is quite sturdy (it's what Lego is made of). You can also print polycarbonate with some all-metal hot-ends and a fume hood. ~~~ jalada How much would it cost to install a fume hood? And what are the dangers? ------ diziet 3d printing will truly be consumer ready when I could take out my phone and 'scan' the broken alarm clock housing, and within 10 minutes of tweaking with relatively easy to use software be able to print a replacement. Until then, a shapercube will sit in a closet and only get occasional 'geek' time to show to others. ~~~ patio11 One could envision something like "Take a photo of your broken thing", sending that photo off to an industrial/mechanical engineer who lives in (without loss of generality) China and can be employed profitably to do non-trivial work in CAD software to save $X0, and then sending the resulting IP to a local 3D printing firm who'd maintain expensive, fiddly equipment, make sure the printing process terminated successfully, and then give the product to either a gopher or UPS for delivery. Now I question whether that makes more sense along any axis than "Buy a new alarm clock from a more-or-less-locally cached store of Chinese alarm clocks and cut out the middlemen", but it might be interesting to try. ~~~ snom380 What makes more sense (and that I've done myself) is to print out a part for some expensive appliance where the parts are either extremely expensive or just not available at all. For instance, a $1000 automatic espresso maker can have lots of moving plastic parts, and the rest of the machine might be in perfect working order save for that one broken part. And when you've made the replacement part it's easy to print another one, and share it with others. Or another example (from some years ago), just to get one replacement part for my perfectly fine shower cabinet, I had to buy a complete set of plastic mounts, to the price of $160. ~~~ rubinelli One could create a line of "open-source appliances", that had ease of maintenance as its main selling point, although catering to a part of the market that prefers fixing rather than buying stuff can be a little tough. ~~~ mechanical_fish They probably don't need to be open-source appliances, though firms that insist on suing people who post open CAD drawings of their machine's parts will incur a competitive disadvantage. What will happen is that groups of hobbyists will rapidly converge on the machines on the market that fit in a sweet spot of good design, affordability, and mod-ability, then amplify the effect by building up open libraries of printable parts. I think of all the Honda Civics I saw in California. The Civic is a long- standing hobbyist car. Or think of all the iPhone add-ons you can buy or make. The iPhone is a far cry from "open hardware", but it's still a standard base for a hobbyist market. I do wonder whether this is the sort of thing that will push 3D printing across the chasm, but that doesn't mean it's ridiculous. One must start the market somewhere, and there seem to be enough hobbyists and prototypers around to keep things moving forward. ------ rickyconnolly 3D printing is rather useful in the research lab. For example, most biological research labs will have a piece of kit called an electrophoresis chamber. This is essentially a plastic, watertight box with two wire electrodes inside. These chambers will cost upwards of 800 dollars. I drew up plans for my own electrophoresis chamber in Sketchup, uploaded it to Shapeways ([https://www.shapeways.com/model/1240729/sds-page- tank-v6.htm...](https://www.shapeways.com/model/1240729/sds-page- tank-v6.html?li=my-models&key=18f1e746e2b834553627f15f0600d845)), and got it printed and sent to me for less than 70 bucks. Wiring it up cost less than a dollar. By the way, does anybody know of similar services that are even less expensive? Shapeways seem to specialize in making little trinkets and gadgets, so I suspect my rather large, bulky box cost even more than it needed to. ~~~ jamessb The Derisi Lab at UCSF has a repository of 3D models for parts they use in their (bio) lab: [http://derisilab.ucsf.edu/index.php?page=3D](http://derisilab.ucsf.edu/index.php?page=3D) (Press release from 3D printer manufacturer: [http://www.stratasys.com/resources/case- studies/medical/deri...](http://www.stratasys.com/resources/case- studies/medical/derisi-lab)) ------ 7952 If something can be made at home on a 3d printer, surely it can be made in a factory for less money with a better 3d printer. It could reduce the price of factory made parts, but it is hard to believe it would eliminate them. I would love it if the affect of this was to make companies focus on better materials that can't be made at home. The price doesn't change but the product gets better. A lot of cyclists would prefer a $30 carbon fiber bottle cage to a home made plastic one for $10. ~~~ joakleaf Except, if it is made in a factory you have: • Transportation costs from factory to store • Cost for additional space required to hold stock If it is sold through a store • Cost for display space in a store • Cost of a sales person selling the item • Cost for (neat) packaging • Cost of your time picking up the item etc. So while the factory can logically create the product cheaper it could still end up costing more. ~~~ 7952 I agree that posting and packing are always going to be a factor. The other points you mention are becoming less relevant as we move towards online buying. This is especially true of shops selling random obscure parts. Also, just think about how annoying normal 2d printers are. Sure you can print something at home; but it will be expensive and slow compared with the expensive laser printer at the office. ------ beering The methodology behind this study is pretty shaky. Most concerning is that their main claim - that $312 is a lot more than $18 - isn't held up by much searching. As an example, you can get a decent silicone nano wristband for $2.78 online. They listed $16.98 as the "total retail cost". Similarly, a plastic iPad stand (though of not the same design) can be ordered online for $1.27, while the study listed $16.99. Many items' retail prices were about 2x-5x higher than they could have been. Of course, the RepRap cost doesn't include the cost of getting a RepRap, nor the ridiculous amount of time it takes to even keep it running. And, of course, doesn't include the cost of all the failed builds you'll inevitably run into when trying to print things. ------ bigiain I keep seeing articles like this and thinking "these people are thinking about this wrong". 3D printers _aren 't_ better at making mass produced injection moulded plastic objects than injection moulding. They can (more or less) replicate the sort of mass-produced thing you can buy on Amazon that's been sailed here in shipping container loads from China – but if you're going to make a few thousand of them (or better still, a few tens of millions), then "the industry" has got the efficiency of that manufacturing and supply chain down to a very fine art. (In the same way that it's very difficult to match McDonalds on a calorie-per- dollar metric.) What I believe will really make 3D printers "go viral", is when enough people work out that there's different, _new_ _categories_ of objects we can produce. Things where only 50 or 100 people in the world are ever going to want - maybe a mount to fit an iPhone 4S with an extended battery case to the handlebars of a 2012 Vespa 125 Sport, or a bracket to hold an Arduino and a 2x40char LCD to the side of a pre 2005 Rancilio Silva espresso machine. I wonder how many things/objects get thought up, but discarded because "it'll got $x,000 to make a set of moulds, and there's only 100 people in the world who'd even consider buying this"? I think there are also objects that right now don't exist because existing manufacturing techniques don't allow them to be (mass) produced - one of the cheaper 3D printers comes with a sample file of a Chess Rook (the "castle piece) with an internal spiral staircase inside it - a geometry that's physically impossible to create a mould you could extract the part from (without destroying the mould). I wonder how many things/objects get thought up then "discarded" because "you can't make that"? I see people trying to print 3D plastic guns using more or less "traditional" gun shapes and designs. That's just _wrong_ (though I have some grudging admiration for the people doing it for largely political/anarchist motivations). What we need is for people to start developing the knowledge and experience with 3D printing materials – so they've got the same sort of "gut feel" for sizes/configurations/suitability of various options to design parts, as "old school" welders have about what size/shape/configuration of steel stock and gussets/bracing is "strong enough" for your boat-trailer/golf- buggy/go-kart. People who can go "that _might_ work, but how about we over- engineer that section a bit more, 'cause it seems a little close to the material limits". People who can go "Lets 3D scan that metal bracket, then adjust the thickness of _those_ planes and increase the gusset radius along _that_ intersection, and add some webbing around _those_ holes, then it'll be 'strong enough' to replace the original metal part". I look forward to that – and I suspect it'll start happening in a fairly short timeframe. ~~~ dorfsmay Make sense. But then one of the item on his table is an orthopaedic insole, an item that is custom made for one's foot. I can totally see orthopaedist, dentist etc... have a 3D printer in their office to manufacture one-of-a-kind insole, dental cap, or even prescription lenses. ~~~ Qworg Invisalign braces and Vivera retainers are already 3D printed (using UV photopolymer and a laser). They just do it at a factory, because the 3D printer that can produce that level of detail/strength is terribly expensive. ------ mipapage Most of this is done with plastic, no? What would be cool is that the plastic from no-longer-used printouts could be recycled thru the machine. Kipple: I worry about the amount of plastic kipple these things will generate. ~~~ snom380 With the filastruder project (DIY plastic filament extruder) that should be possible. However, 3D printers don't like too much recycled material (at least not for ABS) so you would have to add it along with new ABS pellets. ------ noptic Why would i want one at home? I do not even have a 2d printer! I can handle nearly all of my stuff without paper so it is a lot cheaper to go to the copyshop next door. I know a 3d printer is used in a different way but I would rather go to a 3d print shop with high quality printers and a good choice of materials and post print services (polishing, coloring, ...). ------ smoyer With this study, I can finally justify the ROI of a 3D printer to my CFO (my wife). ------ darkxanthos Of course they leave off the cost of the print in that $18 estimate. ------ meapix with this, can I print money bills? ~~~ gyom Only if you're a bank. Or the FED. ~~~ slavak And your country's money happens to be made out of ABS...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Audience Interaction System running on iPod - demetree http://demetree.yourqforme.com ====== demetree Go ahead and try it. Ask a question.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MacBook Pro 2012: 15″ Retina Display, USB 3.0 and ultra-thin - PaulMcCartney http://www.slashgear.com/macbook-pro-2012-15-retina-display-usb-3-0-and-ultra-thin-14228062/ ====== bigs324 It will be interesting to see if they found a way to deal with the reported heat issues related to ivy-bridge. Supposedly it was related to cheap thermal paste. If that is the case this is going to be a really sweet machine. ~~~ kristianp The only heat issues were when the chips were overclocked. At standard voltages and clock rates, the chips were fine.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs - johanam https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49664633 ====== hirundo Next they'll come for the cooks: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc) There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US. Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones. Put the kitchen in a shipping container that plugs into the restaurant. When it breaks swap it out for a refurbished one and haul it back to the repair center. With a self-driving truck. Let customers watch their order being prepared on their phone, micromanaging the bot with special requests. ~~~ Spooky23 Next they’ll come for the liquidator. The Burger King on the NYS thruway north of nyc went to touchscreen ordering. Everyone refuses to use it and there is one long line going to the one register that remained. ~~~ cbdumas Really? I've seen touch screen ordering at McDonalds all over the place and most people seem to have no problem with it. Why do you think people avoid it? ~~~ bluedino We have those and they are slow. I wonder when they’ll put them in the drive through. ~~~ randomdata The ones that McDonalds has here are fairly well implemented. Certainly preferable to dealing with the average cashier not thrilled about the job. But I haven't travelled enough to see what systems are being used in other regions of the world. It seems that what you and others are saying is that they are not all the same. ~~~ bluedino Custom orders are really slow to enter ~~~ JetSpiegel You should also have some kind of hash of the order as a simple hex string, or "correct horse battery staple" thing, if you always order the same thing. Or the terminal could read a QR Code. ------ zaroth Why would I order with my _voice_ by yelling at a microphone outside my window? How stupid is that? Obviously I order on my smartphone and a creepy robot hand extends the bag to me as I drive by. The UWB radio in my phone will let them know which car is mine. Most of the time I’m ordering the same thing for my family of 4 (not at _McDonalds_ , but you get the point) and so two taps later everything is ordered and paid for. This takes like 2.5 seconds from the time the app is launched. I’m not going to, like, recite out loud the 7 different modifications I made between the sandwiches, toppings, drinks, and sides every time I want something to eat. That would be barbaric. Next thing you’re going to tell me is I’m supposed to hand a thin plastic rectangular device to a human so they can stick it in some other device just to process my payment! ~~~ ilaksh McDonald's app is really convenient for ordering and paying. And they have coupons. I am a fan. ~~~ dole Used to be a fan until they started having shittier coupons. ~~~ buzzerbetrayed Their coupons used to be insane. I went all the time and they have to have lost money on me. I couldn't believe the amount of food I would get for almost nothing. It's no wonder that they couldn't sustain that. ------ wnmurphy I cannot wait. Finally, going to McDonald's will lose all semblance of visiting a restaurant, and be fully realized as the experience of receiving various permutations of bleached flour, HFCS, and sad meat from a giant red and yellow robotic playdoh factory that it was always meant to be. One can only hope the robot arms will sport giant mickey mouse gloves. Value added. ~~~ blisterpeanuts As long as the AI can reliably and accurately serve me a _decaf_ coffee, I'll be satisfied. ------ claar Much better article about this direct from McDonalds - [https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news- details/acqu...](https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news- details/acquistion-of-Apprente-a-voice-based-tech-start-up/) @dang can we get the URL changed? ~~~ devoply Article you posted is mostly P/R fluff. I would prefer a human taking my order. Automating this stuff has 2 benefits, reduced costs while still selling over-priced sub-par food. Second, being able to upsell using video and voice technology. Are either of these good for consumers, not particularly. Nor are they good for employees. They are potentially good for management and ownership. That's pretty sad outcome to all this. Optimizing increasing the number of calories people are eating by up-selling sugary drinks and other add-on items or larger sizes (was recently at a McDonalds and that's exactly what their large ordering terminal was doing) and optimizing for increasing people's weight. Imagine using the same technology to reduce people's weight. But that's not usually the way to profit for fast food companies like McDonald's. ~~~ loceng I think you should take your analysis a bit further. Freeing up human time by using machines is amazing, the issue is distributing resources - which is what Presidential candidate Andrew Yang's #1 policy of UBI ("Freedom Dividend" as he's branded it) will do - and paid for via a 10% VAT tax, so companies like Amazon who paid $0 in taxes last year can't avoid taxes. Allowing management, owners, innovators to maximize efficiency - allowing them to still be incentivized to do so, and simply taking a small portion - which is enough - and redistributing it to society will lead to an exponential increase in quality of life; the buying power of "$1,000" / month of UBI Yang wants to give every adult American will increase exponentially as automation replaces everything. ~~~ snaptravisty If I'm not mistaken, the VAT is a consumption tax that is paid for by the consumer and collected by the companies for the government. It's not a tax paid by companies. I assume such a tax would replace the local state based sales taxes? Having said that when I was in the US, it was very frustrating to never know how much something would cost me based on the advertised price. ~~~ loceng Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Your initial point's thinking isn't evolved enough: in Europe the # I have heard, however I haven't confirm - it does however align with my own understanding, is that 55% of the VAT tax is paid for by a company's profits; companies have to maintain being competitive by not transferring 100% of the tax to consumers, e.g. companies will compete based on how much profit margin they're giving themselves. I'm not sure how Andrew Yang at least will implement the VAT - it will be 10% VAT vs. Europe's 20% - which will maintain competitiveness with Europe. Likewise, Yang doesn't think income tax is a good idea because he believes you should incentivize and not penalize people who are actually working; tax people who are consuming. And agreed, there is indeed a planned confusion - psychological trick - that occurs, manipulates people - when something is priced at say $9.97 - where people tend towards not calculating the final price that includes tax, and it otherwise requires people to unnecessarily use mental energy to do calculations if the person wants to stay very price conscious. ------ RcouF1uZ4gsC I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands. I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc. What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers re-doing their order at the payment window because the voice AI completely screwed up their order. I think mobile ordering through an app is a much more viable option. ~~~ jsharf I'm not sure when the last time you tried the assistant was, but Google's speech-to-text is getting ridiculously good. I think most of the time, it would be able to get even complicated orders correct. Anyways, I'm sure that for the 10% where it doesn't work, they can install an interactive touchscreen for correcting orders (or have an app). And for the 90% of the rest, they save a ton of money by having computers do the task instead of humans. ~~~ bluedino Have you seen people order? I would shoot half the customers if I worked a fast food counter much less the drive through. ~~~ Mountain_Skies My first job was at Burger King. Working the drive thru was seen by most as a punishment. During the day it wasn't that bad but at night people were absolutely ridiculous in their behavior and expectations. It didn't help that many were drunk or under the influence of other intoxicants. Not sure how well automated systems would be able to deal with such situations. Maybe the customers simply couldn't order food unless they conformed to the system. Or maybe they'd just drive off, with the business losing a sale. With the near ubiquity of internet connected phones and tablets, making a greater push for people parking outside the restaurant, ordering on their phone and having it delivered to their car curbside seems like the better medium to long term play. Get rid of the drive thru altogether. Likely would make the entire place safer for pedestrians too. ~~~ loceng Sounds like a design funnel using AI system that doesn't respond to the shenanigans would take the reward away from them, and they'd just "behave" and order. ~~~ Scoundreller Sounds great for the employees, but where's the sell for the franchisee/HQ? ~~~ loceng Eh, competitors who are doing it will put you out of business if you're not innovating towards same efficiencies. :) ------ tracker1 "Double Quarter Pounder, just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun. Two side salads no croutons, no dressing, two dip cups of ranch for nuggets. Large diet dr pepper, easy ice." Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can. ~~~ js2 Oh, you're one of those. My parents _never_ order what's on the menu. They've always got to customize it. Which is fine. But then they get all bent out of shape when the order isn't right. From a fast food joint. Can't you just order what's on the damn menu? :) ~~~ tracker1 It's not like they don't have the ingredients.. and I'm expressly asking them to give me less of them, not adding any. It's not like being pissed off because something isn't in the color I want. Product colors and manufacturing are hard problems... getting a fast food order right isn't. The problem is the younger generations don't give a damn about their quality of work. ------ cavisne I wonder if mcdonalds records/retains the audio from its drive through systems. Seems like a goldmine of validation data thats already labelled (with the order the employee entered). Voice with some minor interaction seems like a much better solution for the kiosks as well. "Large Big mac meal" is a lot quicker than clicking through a kiosk. ~~~ triggercut Unless the technology has improved I would say that most systems are not much better than a CB radio. The external microphones can be subject to a lot of wear and tear, external noise. I haven't any knowledge of a system as sophisticated as recording voice and storing, let alone pairing an audio segment to data on the pos. But rightly identified as a perfect opportunity to label training data, and you wouldn't think it would be too hard to deploy, at least in a limited capacity for the initial training and validation on this project. ------ randomerr The local economist has been ascribing this move to the $15 minimum wage. His take is that the only way fast food can stay profitable, with the higher minimum wages, is automation. Computers cost less than people. ~~~ chillacy Everyone in the latest YC class working on an automation-like product can now bump up their "cost savings" numbers in their pitch decks. Minimum wage increases work only if companies have to hire people. ------ vallismortis Welcome Manna. [https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm) ~~~ SECProto Was there some other short story about a similar concept (AI managed fast food workers)? Something by Stallman or Doctorow maybe? I have vague deja-vu at that story, but from much longer ago than 2017, when Manna was published. ~~~ hnick It's from 2003. I guess the copyright notice became a hassle to update after 2017 :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_$novel$) ~~~ SECProto That explains it, thanks! ------ mc32 Whimsically, I’d like to see this system only take orders in Japanese. Well, you can speak to it in English (or whatever native tongue you prefer) but it gets translated out loud to you, then in response it speaks Japanese back to you and again on the fly translates that to you in your native tongue. Imagine a live translator between you and the ordering system (as redundant as it is). Eventually returning customers would learn to order in Japanese and they would not need the translations. But I want it to have a contrived aspect of Japanese futurism even if it’s rubegoldbergian. M:いらっしゃいませ C:ハンバーガーを1つくださ M:はい ------ habosa At many fast food restaurants, especially the less busy one, the person taking drive through orders is multitasking. I've seen people run the front register and the drive through ordering at the same time. It's very impressive, and it also means this won't cost quite as many jobs as it could. ------ fma I've never understood why drive through ordering was not done through a call center. It could be in India for cheap labor. At the end of the day, you are "calling" someone and they punch things into a computer that is the same system no matter where you are ordering. ~~~ mattferderer I believe they experimented with this in the late 90's early 00's. I recall seeing job ads for rural remote workers doing exactly this kind of work. You don't even need to go overseas, as rural America & people looking for temp work would probably offer you higher quality for very low wages. ~~~ delfinom >You don't even need to go overseas, as rural America & people looking for temp work would probably offer you higher quality for very low wages. Hah. Low wages yes, but not Indian low wages. Profit trumps all. ------ kylec Why not just use a call center for this? Someone pulls up to the speaker, and someone in another part of the world takes their order and puts it into the restaurant’s system. Surely that would be easier and have a greater chance of success than voice gen? ~~~ heavymark Presumably because the idea is to save money, and a call center forever would be more expensive but the far more realistic issue, if unlike an AI that could provide a consistent on brand experience, with a call center your experience would be hit or miss every time and drive thoughts are already not usually a great experience so a low wage call center would probably be even worse. Taking away jobs is certainly an issue in itself but I imagine overall this will mean a more consistent experience that they can improve over time. ------ ineedasername Lots of people here are saying they should just use a phone app. I see it as problematic to require drivers, even those stopped at a drive through, (you don't generally put your car in park) to use their phone. There are laws against it, and they don't have exclusions for drive through ordering. I'm not even sure that a McDonalds policy that said "put it in park" would pass legal review since the car is on and you're only stopped temporarily. There would also be an issue with keeping the orders in the proper order. 10 people in line at the drive through sending their orders through at once would make that difficult, error rates could be high. Maybe a kiosk would work though. ~~~ jmkni I use the phone app every time I go through the Mcdonalds drive thru (in the UK). I order on my phone, drive up, give them the order number. This is already a thing. The only thing it's missing is number plate recognition, so I don't need to talk to anybody. ------ esotericn Why not just stick a kiosk there? In Europe most McDs have kiosks inside them... make it weatherproof / stick a roof over it, done. ~~~ macintux Everything outdoors needs to be fairly robust, and the kiosks would be hard to reach and painfully slow compared to any voice system. I use them most times I go to McDonalds, but they’re always slower than it would be to just order if there’s no line, and worse, they feel much slower than they probably are. ------ dredmorbius I'm about 99.99964% positive that a key point behind voice (and touchscreen) sales interfaces will be to integrate upsell and/or advertising into the transaction consistently. Witness: petrol station pump adverts, hold-queue upsells Also: the range of accents and ordering styles is likely to be challenging for voice response, particularly at volume and for McD's demographic. ------ jumelles "What drinks do you have?" "Can I get combo without the drink?" "How much cheaper is it with a water?" "My kid wants the rainbow Happy Meal toy, can we have that one please?" "What time did you stop serving breakfast?" "Do you still have McFlurries? What flavors are there?" This won't go well. ~~~ CamperBob2 Yeah, because the same machines that wiped the floor with a 9-dan Go champion a couple of years ago will be completely flummoxed by people placing orders at McDonald's. ~~~ mattkrause They’re totally different domains. McDonald’s orders don’t have the crazy branching structure of Go, but they also aren’t nearly so self-contained. ~~~ CamperBob2 How is this not a _perfect_ example of a self-contained problem? There are only so many items on the manu. Each can only be prepared in so many different ways, with so many different ingredients. Never mind Go, this application would have been possible in the days of Zork if speech recognition had been up to the task. It is now. Anyone who doesn't understand that has questionable business on a site called "Hacker News," IMO. Frankly this entire subthread is surreal, as if the site had seen a lot of recent signups from people who've never used a smart speaker before. ~~~ mattkrause If you can get people to treat it like a voice-activated commandline (“tea, Earl Grey, hot; Big Mac combo, medium, Sprite”), then sure, it’s probably doable. This is how people mostly use Alexa, Siri, etc. It’s not the greatest experience though, especially when there’s “state” to manipulate. On the other hand, humans conversations assume a lot of background knowledge. “I’ll have a coffee if it’s fresh; orange juice otherwise” needs facts the system might not even have access to. You need to know a bit of pragmatics to figure out that “a cheeseburger with nothing on it” should still have cheese and a bun and exactly how many drinks and fries are being ordered when someone says “Two cheeseburger happy meals and one chicken nugget. I’ll have crispy chicken sandwich too. Fries and milk for the kids; just a Diet Coke for me.” It’s obviously not impossible to figure this stuff out, but it might require emulating more of a teenager than you might naively imagine. ------ tibbydudeza Up to 2 years ago our local McDonalds drive-in used to have a separate booth where you interacted with a person when you placed an order. Now you have to shout through a rather crappy tinny loudspeaker that sounds like a telephone and they now inevitably get it wrong so you repeat the order to each other 3 times to make sure. ------ nestorherre TBH I wondered why they took so long. ------ la_barba Ironically, all this voice input stuff is making the regular people bend over backwards so that the computer understands what they want. The one extreme is programmers who completely bend over backwards to tell the computer exactly what to do with each byte. ------ masonic Those of you who are touting use of the McDonald's app: have you bothered to look at the _permissions_ you are granting to the contents and usage of your phone in order to use the app? ------ lupanar Logical turn of events though, everything goes to human replacement by robots and/or AIs in many kind of manufactures. Total human replacement by robots is a matter of time I believe. ------ King-Aaron Oh that won't be infuriating at all ------ echang426 Great another move to remove the human touch of service from the food industry. If anything I feel like we're still a few years away from being able to have AI sophisticated enough to mimic conversion for people to comfortable enough to use daily for even simple tasks such as taking orders. ~~~ owenmarshall I am fairly violently opposed to automation eliminating human jobs without some type of compensating control, which gets into a political place I don’t want to go right now. But having said that... The human touch of fast food ordering? What human touch? There isn’t much conversation that happens with the human that’s there today. ~~~ chillacy There are the beginnings of political attention right now. Andrew Yang is of course the biggest champion in this cycle. But it's also started to catch the attention of Biden and DeBlasio (robot tax). Then on there are still some candidates who are in the "it's not happening" camp. ------ aaron695 > McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive- > throughs So that's a lie. [https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/McDonalds-acquires- Israeli...](https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/McDonalds-acquires-Israeli- founded-Apprente-to-accelerate-drive-thrus-601292) Remember in 2006 how they outsourced the drive in windows to a call centre in Hawaii, how did that turn out? Did it immediately sack everyone one or did it not work out? [https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the- longdistan...](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistance- journey-of-a-fastfood-order.html) Yes, yes AI will kill jobs, what we don't know is when. This article contributes nothing. All evidence is AI/voice gen is to immature yet, since nothing is actually implemented by McDonald's nothing contradicts this yet. ~~~ Scoundreller > "Their job is to be fast on the mouse -- that's their job," Ugh. No wonder why the project failed. It treated people as tools instead of people. There should be a custom board of keys. The more common the order item, the bigger the button to press.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
JavaScript Charting in Angular 2 - derekfletes https://blog.zingchart.com/2016/07/19/zingchart-and-angular-2-back-at-it-again/ ====== derekfletes If you are interested in Angular, you might also be interested in getting started with charting in Angular. As the description says, this tutorial will get you started in making interactive web apps with JavaScript charts. Let me know if you have any questions, we would be happy to help you through the process! [https://www.zingchart.com/support/](https://www.zingchart.com/support/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Startup Myth - inglorian http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/03/the-startup-myth.html ====== blackguardx I thought it was a great article. The author is basically telling people not to create bubble startups. If you want to create a business, create one that has value. Don't just create a startup for some romanticized ideal. It is sound advice, even if it cuts a little too close to the bone for some. ~~~ noodle i feel like it would be a great article if it weren't playing totally on semantics to write a sensationalist article. he's basically labeling startups and startup culture as the "bad business" subset of entrepreneurs. it is not the case that all startups are bad businesses, nor is it the case that all entrepreneurs are running good businesses. he could totally skip all of that labeling and write an article on running good business. ------ PonyGumbo I took an eighteen month detour from my own business to go work for another startup. I was broke from trying to get my company to break-even, and they were boomer-aged Microsoft millionaires who told great stories about their product and the funding that was right around the corner. That was in 2006, and they're still telling the same story today. The difference now is that they no longer have any employees, and the CEO is essentially living out of his car. They obviously didn't eat Ramen (although it's possible they might now), and they weren't 60 days late on the power bill, but they were just as absorbed with the idea of the startup. For them it was about telling the story of their imminent success, and more importantly, getting other people to believe it. You obviously have to believe in what you're doing, and of course the startup atmosphere can be incredibly thrilling, but the author's note that "we need more people wanting to build companies, not startups" rings particularly true for me. I don't think he's saying that every startup should plan to become a staid, monolithic corporate giant. I think he's saying that you should have a credible plan for organic growth. Even if your end goal is to get funded so you can get out, this will be a thousand times more likely if you can demonstrate multiple consecutive quarters of growth. Then even if you don't get funded, you've at least created a viable business. ------ timbowen Is there really a huge faction in our community who isn't in business to make money? When I left my middle class desk jockey job to work for trailbehind.com the chance (however small) to create and own a valuable business was the main motivator. I think that the author has a fundamental misconception about what a "badge of honor" is. Soldiers don't spend months or years in the trenches with the purpose of earning "badges of honor" they go into the trenches because they have to. The badges are awarded after the fact to recognize the accomplishment of putting everything on the line for some greater purpose. While we are not soldiers, we do risk big chunks of our life because we believe in our products and businesses. We eat Ramen Noodles and scrimp by because the pursuit of our goals require us to, not because we like it. I also think that the author has misconstrued the "badges of honor" concept. People get badges of honor as a reward for being in the trenches, they don't go down into the trenches with the main intent of earning a badge of honor. You are in the trenches because you have to be. While ~~~ trapper There is a difference between being in it to make money and having no plan to make that money. Those that have a plan find it very easy, even in todays climate to make money. Those who don't won't. The future is clear, make money or perish. I often have to point out to entrepreneurs the difference between an idea, project and a business, regardless of how many "eyeballs" they have. ------ 10ren _Entrepreneurship is about turning every dollar of resources spent into something worth more than a dollar._ Including your time. Even if you can live on $100 per week, your time is still worth $100 per hour, so that's how much value you need to create with every hour. But it doesn't need to be $100 cash, but of value. Warren Buffett doesn't evaluate companies by their current price, but by their likely future worth. A key factor in evaluating worth is their economic moat - their enduring advantage over competing companies. Therefore, creating more than $100 of economic moat in an hour is a good use of your time. Of course, Buffett doesn't invest in startups or even tech companies like IBM. Tech is too unpredictable: a product that is good + a market that actually wants it. Your success or failure is not predictable from data points - it pretty much _is_ the first data point. ------ swombat Umm, considering the hard attitude the article presents, the actual content is really rather fluffy. I can think of a word in response to this article: straw-man. ~~~ noodle i think it might be hasty generalization or slippery slope instead of straw man. there are plenty of people who do live the life as described. however, there are plenty more who don't. he's attacking a fraction like its the whole. ~~~ swombat You may well be right. Regardless, the article is clearly less than great. ------ johnrob ... get a billion or die trying! I don't buy the "create big companies to create many jobs" mantra. A one man company creates one job, and leaves one more job available in the market for someone else. That's a contribution in my book. ~~~ v3rt The job market is hardly a zero-sum game, though. By growing from a startup to a major player in an industry you helped found, you can do a lot more economic good than you would by creating one job and leaving one available in the existing market. ------ xiaoma > _"The world would be a much better place if less people tried to build > startups."_ fewer people I really don't want to be a grammar nazi, but starting off with an error in the very first sentence made me less interested in reading the rest of the article. Yes, I realize that English grammar is changing, that countable/uncountable distinctions are less important than they used to be, and that "less + a countable noun" doesn't sound bad to everyone anymore. But to some of us, it looks like it was written by a struggling high school student. There are so, so many things to read on the internet that readers can be driven off by minor blemishes at the beginning of a piece. ------ keltecp11 Well done. I love what I do... I hope that is what it means to run a start-up.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind - artur_makly https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/arts/music/bob-dylan-rough-and-rowdy-ways.html ====== bredren Speaking of being lost you might enjoy this story from 2009 where people called the cops on Bob Dylan for being "an 'eccentric-looking old man' in their yard," and the officer did not recognize him: "'I asked him what his name was and he said, 'Bob Dylan,' Buble said. "Now, I've seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn't look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head." "He was acting very suspicious,'' Buble said. "Not delusional, just suspicious. You know, it was pouring rain and everything." [https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jersey-homeowner-calls-cops- bob-d...](https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jersey-homeowner-calls-cops-bob- dylan/story?id=8331830) ------ allard Saw him 234 nights ago. My date and I have each seen-heard him a few times before but none of them shared. We both thought it was an incredible show, which we wouldn't say about all of them. This interviewer had good questions. Didn't know him, but was pleasantly surprised to read a bit about him. I get a free assist over that paywall from my public library. What is the significance of the 19th? ------ adaisadais Anyone have a link without a paywall? ~~~ arprocter The com. trick works ------ YeGoblynQueenne More to the point, Bod Dylan has a new record, Murder most Foul. It might be a good album or not, though there's probably no going back to the Dylan of the '60s, or the '60s anyway. In any case, noone's going to find out how good the album is from a NYT article and I don't know why we have to spend so much time reading adverts disguised as thoughtful interviews. ~~~ techbio The new record is “Rough and Rowdy Ways” and comes out on June 19th (note that this is a significant date). Songs for the album: “Murder Most Foul”, “False Prothet”, and “I Contain Multitudes” were pre-released in the past month or so. ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne Thanks, my mistake. I confused the title of a song with the title of the album. ------ poulsbohemian Worst concert I ever attended. Absolutely zero engagement with the audience. Played what he wanted to play, and that didn't include most of his hits. Showed up, collected his fee, left. ~~~ vikingcaffiene > played what he wanted to play > Didn't include most of his hits I am always baffled when people expect a jukebox from artists of this caliber. When I go to see an artist I want a unique experience. Dylan is known to rework his songs on the fly live and you never know what you're going to get. He's got one of the best backing bands on earth who can go wherever he wants too. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. Sounds like you might have caught the former which sucks but it's the nature the way he approaches live music. It's anything but safe and doesn't always work. That takes serious guts IMO and it's much more exciting that seeing some geriatric geezer punching out his hits and "collecting his fee". ~~~ ageitgey I'm long-time Dylan fan and I've seen him live quite a few times. I can honestly say he puts on one of the least coherent concerts of any famous musician. Yes, he reworks the songs nightly but he can barely sing anymore and no one can tell what he is saying anyway, so the results are unpredictable. But sometimes it can be great. He's been doing it like this for decades so it's just part of the deal. Take it or leave it. I think it's fair to call it out and fair to enjoy it. ~~~ uglycoyote There was a question in this interview where the interviewer asked what role improvisation played in his performances, and Dylan said absolutely none. I was a bit surprised by this answer but too it at face value. I am a Dylan fan but haven't seen him live. Now that I have heard a description of live shows, I assume the response to the interview question was pure sarcasm.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Draggabilly - JS library to make elements draggable - areski http://draggabilly.desandro.com/ ====== duopixel This is great, it even provides hardware acceleration for browsers that support CSS 3D transformations (which is important on mobile devices), all without the overhead of jQuery UI. ------ joeyespo This is excellent! Any plans on doing the same thing for resizing? ------ bkyan What is bower? The link to it from your page appears to be broken... ~~~ chenglou Twitter's package manager for JS. <http://bower.io> ------ ellisonleao Nice one!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
RAISR Sharp Images with Machine Learning - wsxiaoys https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/enhance-raisr-sharp-images-with-machine.html ====== romaniv I would not compare a fancy NN algorithm to Bicubic interpolation, even as an example. Bicubic sucks. If someone really wants to get a decent high-res upscale of an image via "conventional" means (like GIMP) they would probably use something like Lanczos algorithm for upscaling -> Anthropomorphic smoothing for denoise -> unnsharp mask for clarity. And that's a simple pipeline, you can go even fanciers with masks, layers and edge-detection kernels. ~~~ lotyrin They aren't. They compare to techniques "A+" from R. Timofte, V. De Smet, and L. Van Gool, “A+: Adjusted anchored neighborhood regression for fast super- resolution" [http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~timofter/ACCV2014_ID820_SUPPLE...](http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~timofter/ACCV2014_ID820_SUPPLEMENTARY/) and "SRCNN" C. Dong, C. C. Loy, K. He, and X. Tang, “Learning a deep convolutional network for image super-resolution” [https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.00092](https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.00092) Their result seems not to score as well in quantitative metrics (signal to noise ratio), but is faster. (And seems to have good qualitative results, in my opinion.) ~~~ amelius Indeed, I just skimmed through the paper, and the results don't seem much better than A+ and SRCNN (even worse in some instances). ~~~ ska Yes, they aren't notably better, but they are a lot faster. Maybe useful. I really wish people wouldn't call these algorithms super-resolution, as they already had a useful meaning. ~~~ TTPrograms I think superoscillation is a better description of the phenomena in E&M/optics. ------ lotyrin Those looking for quantitative comparison of this against other techniques, it's on page 21 of the paper ( [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01299](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01299) ) Edit: and to see for yourself in more detail there's [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzCe024Ewz8ab2RKUFVFZGJ4OWc...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzCe024Ewz8ab2RKUFVFZGJ4OWc/view) ------ hatsunearu [https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x](https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x) Here's a previous project that attempted this as well. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.00092](https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.00092) ------ d--b This is obviously something where machine learning is a great tool, knowing about the way images usually look, it's easy to imagine deep learning methods doing a great job at this. However, an obvious application of this will be to apply these methods to security image footages, in order to improve the recognizability of the people shot. You know like in Hollywood movies where the detective asks the geek "can you improve the details of that picture?" But the general public (and by this I mean cops, lawyers and jury people) will not understand that the details are actually made up. The person in the security footage may be unrecognizable before treatment, but after, it would look as "the most likely person to have been there." What could go wrong? ------ amelius Are there any machine-learning approaches to superresolution which take context into account? By that I mean filling in details that can only be guessed by context. For example, when the algorithm detects that the image is of a field of grass (but individual blades of grass not discernible), then in the superresolution output it paints in these blades. ~~~ sillysaurus3 One of my favorites is Neural Enhance: [https://github.com/alexjc/neural- enhance](https://github.com/alexjc/neural-enhance) I was playing around with it and the results are quite interesting. It's pretty much exactly what you describe. The nice thing is, if you have Docker installed, you can run: docker run --rm -v `pwd`:/ne/input -it alexjc/neural-enhance --help and everything magically works. Compared to other machine learning projects, neural enhance is probably one of the easiest to get started with. ~~~ amelius That looks amazing! Thanks. ------ abritinthebay This is very clever, and an interesting read, but kind of disappointing results. They don't look _much_ better than doing say... upsample to twice desired size, apply basic sharpen/structure filter, downsample to desired size. A little better? Yes. But some (like the horse) look pretty weak ~~~ IshKebab They're never going to look as good as you might be expecting from films. That would require fabrication of information that doesn't really exist. ~~~ londons_explore The best methods for this, using Generative Adversarial Networks, do in fact fabricate new realistic-looking information. I think it would be great to input a blurry version of a cityscape, and have it add numbers to mailboxes, litter to the streets, cracks to the sidewalk, etc. ------ plaguuuuuu I wonder how it compares with Waifu2x ------ sengork Does this mean we can finally get a form of Zoom-and-enhance seen on CSI? ------ canada_dry I'm imagining the day when old black and white films and home movies are restored to be almost crystal clear. Can't be more than 18mo away by the sounds of it. ~~~ visarga I was thinking of perfect restorations of old classical music recordings. If we decode the sound of a violin, we could re-synthesize it in studio quality. ------ kazinator From a qualitative glance at the images, I believe I could come close to the same results with some basic filtering, like a gussian blur followed by a quantization to a smaller number of colors, then a little bit of blur. The image of the horse head statue looks like an "oilify" effect. Mind you, a pretty good oilify effect. This filter is clearly useful independently of what it achieves in relation to what it "says on the box". In creative image processing, I just have to like what it does, whatever that is (and I do). ------ bcheung Is there an executable form / source for this we can play around with?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Anatomy Of Search Technology: Crawling Using Combinators - pathdependent http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/28/the-anatomy-of-search-technology-crawling-using-combinators.html ====== walrus Ok, I'll bite. From the article: Now let's see how combinators (which we discussed in the previous blog posting) might make doing some of these computations easier. So, how are they defined in the previous blog posting? A combinator is an atomic operation on a cell of a database that is associative and preferably commutative. No, it's not. A combinator is a function with no free variables. Even the example is wrong: "Add(n)" is an example of a simple combinator; it adds n to whatever number is in the cell. If "Add" was a combinator, the cell would have to be one of the parameters of "Add". Otherwise, the cell is a free variable. To be clear, I'm just complaining about the misuse of the term "combinator", since it's a word with a strict mathematical definition and no other common- language interpretation (like "function" or "operation" have). I'm not commenting on the actual content of the article. ~~~ greglindahl The initial value of the cell is (eventually) one of the parameters of add(n) -- when you compute the final value. Before you get to that point, the various add(n) operations aimed at a given cell are combined. In the diagram in the first posting in the series, 18 add(1) operations on the same cell turn into a single add(18) operation. It's only then the cell is read (or the bucket is merged) that the final value of the cell is computed. ~~~ walrus I understand, but I still think it's iffy calling it a combinator. Maybe calling it lazy evaluation (sort of) would be better? (I'm not sure if you saw my edit before you replied. I added the last two sentences only a few minutes before your response.) ------ PaulHoule I found this to be a remarkably bad article. Out of this you'd learn nothing whatsoever about what it takes to build a moderate-scale (10 million pages) never mind large-scale web crawler. ~~~ greglindahl The goal of this article was to only talk about how combinators make crawling easier. If you'd like a more general introduction to the topic of crawling, I provided some references in the 3rd paragraph.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why You Won't Quit Your Job - georgecmu http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/01/why_you_wont_quit_your_job.html ====== cafard I have been conditioned to discount "blog posts by and about the new generation of purpose-driven leaders." (And shouldn't purpose pull rather than drive one?) ------ gregjor Good example of the term "premature optimization" misused by a management consultant.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do you keep your coffee fresh? - a_lifters_life For those who buy a full bag of unground or ground coffee? ====== eco I don't go through my coffee quickly but I buy a 3 lb bag at Costco so I divide it into 1 lb portions, vacuum seal them, and keep them in the freezer. I've never found it tasted stale while doing this. ~~~ a_lifters_life This is helpful, thanks! ------ franciscojgo I just add it in a ZipLock bag and suck (literally) the air out of it. Seems to work well. I know there are some vacuum containers that suck the air out (have pumps and such) but don't know if its worth it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Japan’s sexual apathy is endangering the global economy - networked http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/22/japans-sexual-apathy-is-endangering-the-global-economy/ ====== greggyb A simple (though far from easy, and likely complex in political reality) solution to this sort of problem is to import workers. Japan, as a high productivity nation, would be a very desirable destination for workers willing to relocate. The practical issues stem from xenophobia and (based on my naive understanding) higher cost of integrating with such a foreign culture (for much of the world). ------ Macuyiko This problem has been known for quite a while. For the past three years or so I see articles popping up discussing this trend with some stats, graphs, and reasoning, but most of them fail to mention whether the Japanese government a) acknowledges the problem and b) is taking steps to fix it (I'm thinking measures such as a subsidy-per-child). Anyone have more info on this? ------ michaelochurch I'm not entirely convinced that population "graying" is as bad as it's made out to be. If the society needs work to be done, it will pay for the work to be done. The people most screwed will be non-working old people who thought that they were retired, but face high inflation due to a lack of young workers, and who can't easily get back into the workforce. That's not a good thing, but that itself is unlikely to damage _the global economy_. From a US perspective and a member of the 2nd in a series of Screwed Generations (Millennials, after Xers) I'm actually OK with this. No one wants Weimar inflation, but wage-driven inflation is often a good thing. Besides, the reason why Japanese young people aren't having sex is _because they can 't start their careers_. The Japanese economy has been fucked for 25 years and the situation for education young people over there is far worse than in the US. We can't buy houses, but many of them can't even get stable jobs. I'm not an expert on Japan at all, but an increased demand for the work that young people can provide seems to be exactly what that economy needs. In other words, the "sexual apathy" was caused by Japan's lost quarter-century and, while Japan's economic state (and especially its debt) is a threat to the global economy, I don't buy the headline because I think the sexual apathy is, quite obviously, a symptom of Japan's economic problems and not a cause. On the age pyramid, I do wonder if societies should get rid of the concept of "retirement" (as an entitlement or expectation) wholesale and replace it with a basic income... and I think we should also oppose the need for retirement by more aggressively enforcing anti-ageism policies in the workplace so that people in their 60s and 70s who are able to work and want to do so, can. (I may move to something less remunerative or even unpaid, but I plan on remaining active until I die.) Much of "retirement", sadly, is involuntary and I'd like to see that change... but with a Japan-style age pyramid, one might think that societies would be less ageist against the capable older people. When there is a labor surplus, society peels off the young and the old (by forcing the young into unpaid schooling and internships for longer, and becoming ageist against the old as in Hollywood and, more recently, the Valley). When there's a shortage, those attitudes change pretty quickly. In sum, I'd argue that the "sexual apathy" is a symptom of a bad economy. It would be a danger if one believed it to be causative of a positive-feedback loop, but I don't think that's so. When there are jobless young people, the economic signal is that the society has a surplus of young people... and the producers of 30-years-younger-people (out of self-preservation) hold back. Over the decades, we can expect that (unless there is a collapse of demand in labor, which I find unlikely) to increase wages and eventually normalize. It's shitty for a generation of people who don't get to start adulthood until their eggs and tadpoles are stale, but it does stabilize.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What are the best audiobooks you have ever listened to? - rblion I'm interested in science, technology, engineering, art, math, music, history, biographies.<p>I am open to good works of fiction (particularly historical and science) too.<p>I have one Audible credit left and I plan to cancel after that. I have a lot of audiobooks that will last me for a long time now. ====== Blakestr Shogun by James Clavelle is one of the best "culture shock" historical epics available. You will learn some japanese too. Pillars of Earth, read by John Lee, is another one, simply about building a cathedral in medieval europe. Great characters, a villain you love to hate. If you haven't, you cannot claim to be a fan of science if you haven't listen to Foundation by Issac Asimov. The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss, read by Nick Podehl. It's Harry Potter but for grownups. Fantastic story. Edit - I'm adding this because I doubt anyone will mention it - there is an audio production company called Graphic Audio, their tagline is "a movie in your mind." The absolute BEST story I have ever heard, in my entire life, is the Stormlight Archives Series - Way of Kings & Words of Radiance books. These are written by Brandon Sanderson. I don't actually read much fantasy when I read fiction it tends to be scifi or historically based. But this series, with the voice actors and the properly timed music/sfx, is absolutely fantastic. I know OP mentioned audible and Graphic Audio isn't available there, and they are very expensive. But if you can afford it, you won't get a better experience. There are some "jump out of your chair and fist pump" moments in these books. ~~~ sethammons Stormlight and all things Brandon Sanderson. The whole cosmere series is fantastic. ------ vo2maxer Before digital audiobooks were available, there were a number of offerings on cassette tapes, and LP records even earlier. I remember subscribing to Recorded Books and Books on Tape which would mail an unabridged book on multiple cassettes. They arrived in a cardboard box after requesting them through an 800 number. The rental was for thirty days. The two that stand out from that time are both by Robert Graves: I, Claudius and Claudius the God. It was such an immersive experience into the Roman Empire that it made my long commute not only bearable but an anticipated joy. Both books are available on Audible by a different narrator than those I heard. If you want more of Graves’ Julio-Claudian drama, it’s hard to beat the BBC adaption starring the great Derek Jacobi [1]. For more, top it off by actually reading the books. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Claudius_(TV_series)?wprov=...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Claudius_$TV_series$?wprov=sfti1) ------ taylodl The _Harry Potter_ series narrated by Jim Dale. We listened to them while driving on family vacations. Kept the kids engaged and prevented the driver (me!) from getting bored. Another good one is _The Hitchhiker 's Guide to the Galaxy_. ------ timemachine John Lee is one of my favorite narrators and his reading of the Count of Monte Cristo is wonderful (even at 47 hours). Ron Chernow’s biographies of Grant, Hamilton, and Washington. Candice Millard‘s “Hero’s of the Empire” (about Winston Churchill) and “River of Doubt” (Theodore Roosevelt) are both interesting looks at important historical figures in situations we don’t often prescribe to them. Her first book “Destiny of the Republic” (James Garfield) is also good but the other two are superior. “David and Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell. ------ catacombs The Power of the Dog series by Don Winslow, read by Ray Porter. Porter is a master narrator, using different voices for the sea of characters in the trilogy that really immerses you in the story. I listened to all the books -- The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, and The Border -- and am worried no other books will match Porter's deft acting. ------ senjindarashiva If you like history The rise and fall of the Third reich was really interesting [https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Rise-and-Fall-of-the-Third- Re...](https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Rise-and-Fall-of-the-Third-Reich- Audiobook/B003VWJAPA) ------ stockkid Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World narrated by Jack Weatherford was quite cool to listen to. ~~~ satvikpendem The Hardcore History podcast episodes on Genghis Khan (Wrath of the Khans) is quite good. If you've listened to it, is the book similar to the podcast? ~~~ Blakestr I'll summarize this for anyone who hasn't listened to it. Don't fuck with the mongols. ------ qzx_pierri 'Can't Hurt Me' by David Goggins - Incredible. It's actually setup like a podcast. Every couple chapters, the narrator and David have a 5 or so minute discussion about what just happened, more insight, etc. It's a really cool format. ------ afarrell For a history of the start of WWI, I really liked Guns of August by Barbera Tuchman. Also, there are some books whose authors wrote with a musicality that they are far better on audio than on paper. Included in this category are: \- Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein \- Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois ------ megamike The Wright Brothers Paperback – May 3, 2016 by David McCullough Great writing e.g Mr McCullough's description of the interior of the Wright home is wonderful and hearing it on audio its as if you are standing in their home ------ startuplife01 The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman Start with Why by Simon Sinek Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness Game Changers by Dave Asprey Shoe Dog ------ Japhy_Ryder How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. ------ WheelsAtLarge Napoleon A Life by Andrew Roberts read by John Lee Worth the time to listen to the 32+ hours.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Create on-line portfolio from Dropbox files - wojk http://www.triangly.com ====== wojk Triangly will use Dropbox API to build on-line portfolio from graphic files located on your Dropbox/Applications/Triangly folder. Each user will have custom domain (e.g. joe.triangly.com) with a few customisation options, like main color, name and contact details. On our website you can see the small preview of final look of the portfolio. We plan to invite first users within 2-3 weeks. ------ nodata If you want to get peoples email addresses you're going to need to add more info about the service.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Polyaxon – An open source platform for reproducible machine learning at scale - jonbaer https://polyaxon.com/ ====== aflam It's great to see this sort of tool open-sourced. I am excited by new tools enabling better algo/ML engineering workflows. In addition to the infra management, it's quickly tricky to support qa/viz/tuning/debugging tools for very different sorts of algorithms/outputs/configurations/metrics. Do you see your project going in those directions? ~~~ mmq I can't say much about long-term roadmap apart from the fact that the platform will be open source and that it will try to introduce features that will increase the productivity of data scientists. For short-term roadmap, I am trying to work on stability, it's very hard to have default values since you don't know how it will be used, e.g. on Minikube or by a team scheduling a lot of parallel experiments, so what I am trying to do is at least having an automatic or simple way to scale workers responsible for scheduling, hyper params tuning, and monitoring. For tuning, the platform will keep supporting some algorithms to automate the hyper params search, maybe introducing more priors for the Bayesian optimization, I also think more tests are needed to validate the behavior of the Bayesian optimization and Hyperband. For visualization, currently, you can start a Tensorboard for any project created on the platform, but there are some problems with this assumption, if the project has a lot of experiments, Tensorboard becomes slow to irresponsive. Next release will introduce the possibility to create Tensorboard jobs per experiment or per hyper tuning experiment group, and possibly any collection of experiments to compare them. The platform collectes already metrics from experiments, so a basic visualization is also planned to have a quick overview before diving into a Tensorboard. And most importantly, I think there are some usability issues that need to be solved to make the experience better. There are also a couple of ideas around team collaboration that will be introduced in the mid term. ~~~ aflam Thanks a lot for the answer! It's very promising. ------ mmq Hi, I am the author of Polyaxon, a bit late to notice, but thanks for sharing Polyaxon here. I will be around to answer questions, and any feedback is welcome. ~~~ mallochio Thanks a bunch for taking the effort to create this, and for making it open source.! The project looks amazing. Could you maybe also explain what the target audience is? Are there any benefits for using Polyaxon in (solo) research projects on a cluster, or is it tailored towards production-ready environments at corporations? ~~~ mmq I think the target audience, is individuals or small teams who want to have an organized workflow, immutable and reproducible experiments with an organized and easy way to access logs and outputs. The platform also provides a lot of automation to schedule concurrent experiments. There are a couple of things that need to be polished to be used, notes on experiments, notification of finished experiments, especially if you are running hundreds of experiments. Depending on how organized you are, many times you will end up with experiments that you did not know how you started, having a platform that takes care of that could be beneficial. If you have already a cluster, for running your experiments you will most probably end up ssh-ing to the machine to check which experiments finished, probably in a screen, and their results and logs, Polyaxon simplifies that part as well. ~~~ jorgemf This is all the reasons why I want to use your tool. Thanks for creating it and I hope one day soon to contribute to your project. ------ mallochio Can someone tell me how this is different from/improves over pachyderm? ~~~ syllogism Pachyderm is a system for the nouns; this is a system for the verbs. Polyaxon makes it easy to schedule training on a Kubernetes cluster. The problem this solves is that machine learning engineers generally spend too long running their jobs in series, rather than parallel. Instead of running one thing and waiting for it to finish, it's both more efficient and better methodology to plan out the experiments and then run them all at once. Pachyderm is more concerned with versioning and asset management. It's more like Git+Airflow. Let's say your experiment depends on training word vectors from Common Crawl dumps. You need to download the dump, extract the text you want, and train your word vectors models. Pachyderm is all about the problem of caching the intermediate results of that ETL pipeline, and making sure that you don't lose track of like, which month of data was used to compute these vectors. Polyaxon is all about the problem of, there are so many ways to train the word vectors and use them downstream. You want to explore that space systematically, by scheduling and automatically evaluating a lot of the work in parallel. ------ stared For reproducible ML I recommend Neptune - Machine Learning Lab [https://neptune.ml/](https://neptune.ml/) (disclaimer: I work with people, who created it). Not only it allows to run/enqueue things in the cloud, but also does very well tracking of source code (with code snapshots and git integration), parameters and output statistics (e.g. so you can select all models with #lstm tag, and sort by log-loss on the validation dataset). ------ sytelus Great to see infrastructure like this come along. I'm wondering what everyone else is using... ------ syllogism I've been starting to use this in spaCy, so I'm glad to see it posted here! It's still a young project, but Mourad has been very dedicated to it, and I think it's already at the point where it's useful. I hope more people can contribute. Here's a quick review. Most people doing machine learning at the moment are using a pretty bad workflow. It's difficult to avoid the trap people refer to as "grad student descent": endless tinkering, where you run two or three jobs, monitor the results, and then kick off another one. You don't really have a hypothesis in this cycle, so you don't know when to stop. At the end of the process you've generally gained intuition and insight, but nothing you can reliably pass on. The solution to this trap is to commit to a matrix of results you're going to collect, program up the experiments, and let them run. Once you have the proper comparison, you can then decide what to do next. Most university research groups get a grant to buy some hardware, create a cluster, and then schedule jobs on the machines using SLURM or HTCondor. These technologies are mature, but they leave individual researchers with a lot to do. You can schedule your jobs, but you have to write the experiment management yourself. My hunch is there are maybe 5-50 companies in the world with internal systems significantly more sophisticated than this. Polyaxon brings the shiny new "cloud native" workflow to the problem. It runs on Kubernetes, which is much easier to use, especially with heterogenous hardware. I think just switching to Kubernetes and containers would be helpful to a lot of teams. On top of the cluster solution, Polyaxon brings a nice experiment management layer, with hyper-parameter search. It also manages the containerisation for you, so that the researcher doesn't need to interact with Docker directly. There are still a number of things that are under-developed. The most noticeable are dataset management and artifact export. You currently have to do this yourself, e.g. by adding persistent disks to the cluster. I use GCSFuse to mount GCS (Google S3) buckets as directories, which works pretty well in the meantime. There are also a few defaults that could use refinement. If large clusters are being created, the management services are currently a bit under-resourced. Finally, there are a few more minor rough spots. For instance, the web app is currently a little unpolished. It's a Django app, so everything takes two or three more clicks and refreshes than you'd ideally want. A more AJAXy front-end would be nice. There are several commercial competitors. There's a pretty obvious analogy between the use-case here and the CRM. Companies hope to own the "system of record", and be the shared space where ML teams collaborate. DominoDataLab.com , Neptune.ml , Cloudera.com , Datascience.com and others all have slightly different takes on this problem, to different degrees. Many of the above are built around a Jupyter Notebooks-based experience, and are targeted more towards workflows where the primary outputs are insights and reports rather than product development. I think an open-source framework is valuable for a few reasons. We should be reluctant to buy in to commercial platforms for precisely the reasons vendors are so interested in this space. Lock-in can hurt here, and if the computation is scheduled via the vendor, they get the chance to tax you a % of your compute spending. Given how expensive GPU experiments can be, that's a big ongoing cost to sign up for. I also think uploading all your training data to someone else's system is a bad idea, that your data sharing agreements often won't permit. Finally, it's nice to have a local Kubernetes cluster for other reasons. Kubernetes is basically an OS. Polyaxon is an app that runs on that OS. This is nice: you can develop other apps to work with it as well. In contrast, if you rent a service, the easiest way to meet your next requirements will be with further services. As soon as you hit custom requirements, costs and risks rise rapidly. The in-house approach signs you on to a better future --- it's a step in the right direction. The commercial services may or may not be easier today, but at some point you'll want to switch out of them. It may still be worth using them today --- but the long-term perspective is at least a point in Polyaxon's favour. ~~~ mmq Thank you for the great feedback, a lot of things are indeed planned to enhance the dashboard as well as the cli in terms of search, filtering, and ordering of the experiments based on some rule, e.g. parameters or metrics. Also, some of your, and other users', feedback were also very helpful to bring some changes to the infrastructure for the next release, to maximize the usage of the cluster's resources. ------ albertzeyer It's only reproducible if the computation would be deterministic. This is often not the case for machine learning, esp TensorFlow on GPU. How do you deal with that? ~~~ mmq As you said if the library/framework provides deterministic computation, then it should not be a problem, I am not sure if it's already fixed in Tensorflow, but parallel computation and order of operations could all influence the reproducibility of the run, so sometimes you need to provide that in your code. What Polyaxon provides, is a way to restart a run based on as many parameters collected, by default it will use same code based on the internal git commit, it will reuse the same configuration, same Dockerfile, and if provided, it will use same resources, CPU, GPU, and memory of the original run, if the experiment had a node selector, the restarted experiment will be as well scheduled on the same node. ------ amelius No support for (Py)Torch? ~~~ syllogism It supports PyTorch. It also supports anything --- you give it a script and it builds a Docker container and runs it. You don't need to use any particular language or framework.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Do I need to pay for Java now? - nfrankel https://dev.karakun.com/java/2018/06/25/java-releases.html ====== fcurts The conclusions that the article draws in "What does the new release train mean to my company?" are completely wrong. Starting with Java 11, Oracle JDK is no longer free for commercial use, not even for a single day. However, as long as people are OK with GPL v2 + Classpath Exception (which is more permissive than it sounds) and don't need support from Oracle, they can just move to OpenJDK, which is built from the exact same codebase. Shoutout to [https://adoptopenjdk.net](https://adoptopenjdk.net), which plans to ship LTS releases of OpenJDK. I believe this will be crucial for keeping the Java ecosystem healthy. ~~~ Justsignedup Does OpenJDK have the same optimizations as the official JDK? I thought OpenJDK doesn't have java's JIT... ~~~ the_why_of_y Where did you get that idea? The differentiation between OpenJDK and Oracle JDK happens of course in the truly important part of the library: font rendering. [https://technfun.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/last-difference- op...](https://technfun.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/last-difference-openjdk- oracle-jdk/) ~~~ fcurts That information is outdated. I'll say it once more: Oracle JDK 11 and OpenJDK 11 will be built from the exact same codebase. [https://mjg123.github.io/2018/05/25/Opening-Oracle-JDK- Featu...](https://mjg123.github.io/2018/05/25/Opening-Oracle-JDK- Features.html) ~~~ bullen From that article: "The JVM - This is where the majority of the OracleJDK-only features are. Oracle is open-sourcing a new GC, performance enhancements, tracing tools and a host of other changes." If they open-source the performance of the JVM, they have nothing left to sell. ~~~ fcurts The quote describes the situation before JDK 11. As of 11, performance of Oracle JDK and OpenJDK will be exactly the same. They'll sell support and certified LTS builds. ~~~ bullen Can you source that claim? Also funny that they took the downloads offline today: [https://docs.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jd...](https://docs.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html) ~~~ fcurts Apparently some links broke, but nothing was taken offline: [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html) > Can you source that claim? From [https://www.azul.com/eliminating-java-update- confusion/](https://www.azul.com/eliminating-java-update-confusion/): Oracle stated that their goal was to eliminate any functional differences between these two binaries. This will be complete with the release of JDK 11 in September. To achieve this goal, certain features (such as Flight Recorder and Mission Control) have been contributed to the OpenJDK project, whilst other features (like Java Web Start and JavaFX) are being removed from the Oracle JDK. From [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.htm...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.html): As announced in September 2017, with the OracleJDK and builds of Oracle OpenJDK being interchangeable for releases of Java SE 11 and later, [...] ------ krob I wonder how this is going to play with JetBrains. If they're going to say F java and focus on a different direction. This is a pretty big deal moving forward. Seems like the community will now need to focus a lot of effort into the open jdk. This effectively happened with mysql & oracle. This company likes acquiring open source tech and then turning it into a commercial tech. ------ mr_overalls Does anyone have an idea of whether C#/.NET are gaining ground on Java in the enterprise? ------ bullen Will you have to pay for the current Java 8u181 in prod? I'm backing up the latest Java 8 for all platforms now. Goodbye Oracle, Java 8 is the final Java, time to roll up the sleeves and build our own VM language! ~~~ fcurts You won't have to pay for using Oracle JDK 8u181 in prod, and you won't have to pay for using OpenJDK 11 and higher in prod. You will have to pay for using Oracle JDK 11 and higher in prod, which is built from the exact same codebase as OpenJDK 11 but offers commercial support and long-term support (LTS) releases. [https://adoptopenjdk.net](https://adoptopenjdk.net) plans to ship LTS releases of OpenJDK for free. ~~~ bullen Ok, thanks! But I'm pretty sure the superior performance of the closed source Oracle JVM will never be open-sourced. It's the only value Oracle has left, and they know they cannot exploit it, even if this is a nice try. Of the 2 million Java coders there are atleast 1% that care enough to look at building a 100% open-source VM language. I hope James Gosling is building exactly that at Amazon. ~~~ fcurts As of 11, a "closed source Oracle JVM" won't exist anymore, and there won't be any performance difference between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK. ~~~ bullen If so my guess is Oracle will be gone within 10 years. ------ IloveHN84 If openjdk doesn't make it's own JavaFX builds, it's time to move on to other languages, far better than Java on licensing base.. ------ znpy TL;DR: Yes. You have to pay for Java now. Quoting the article: «Oracle JDKs may only be used in production if you buy the commercial support.» The alternative is using OpenJDK in production. We'll have to see how much the Oracle JDK and OpenJDK will diverge. ~~~ fcurts > TL;DR: Yes. You have to pay for Java now. You have to pay for Oracle JDK but not for OpenJDK, which is just as good, except for a less business-friendly license, no commercial support, and no LTS builds straight from Oracle (instead you need to put your bets on adoptopenjdk.net). > Quoting the article: «Oracle JDKs may only be used in production if you buy > the commercial support.» Yes, but the author forgets about this in the "What does the new release train mean to my company?" section and draws completely wrong conclusions. > The alternative is using OpenJDK in production. We'll have to see how much > the Oracle JDK and OpenJDK will diverge. They will be identical. All of Oracle's JDK work, even LTS related work, will go into the OpenJDK repo. ~~~ the_why_of_y How is a license that puts no restrictions on usage "less business-friendly"? ... Oh I see, Oracle's strategy here is to monetize GPL FUD. ~~~ fcurts > How is a license that puts no restrictions on usage "less business- > friendly"? Use of GPL licensed software is heavily restricted in many corporations, whether or not it has the Classpath Exception. Among other things, it's hard to verify/enforce that projects only link against files that have the Classpath Exception.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How we might abolish Cabal Hell, part 1 - tux1968 http://www.well-typed.com/blog/2014/09/how-we-might-abolish-cabal-hell-part-1/ ====== jordigh Why do we keep running into this problem over and over again? Why do we need one package manager per programming language? Why is software distribution so damn hard? ~~~ makmanalp Because general purpose package managers suck at dealing with the concerns of individual programming languages. E.g. installation paths, virtual environments, different compilation methods, etc. There is also no single cross-platform package manager. Mac has macports and homebrew, windows barely got one, linux has yum, apt and others. As a language designer, you don't want any part in this, you want your code to work. So you make your own. edit: To clarify, I'm suggesting that we're stuck in a local maximum - now that all these systems already exist and have widespread adoption and tool dependency in their own environments, there isn't much of an impetus to use Nix or something similar even though in the grander scheme of things it'd be way nicer. ~~~ davexunit Haskell folks seem to be gravitating towards the Nix package manager, which is general-purpose. We need to stop the proliferation of a package manager per programming language and make systems package managers capable of handling the use-cases of pip, bundler, npm, cabal, etc. Nix and Guix are the only 2 general-purpose package managers that I know of that can do it. ~~~ pjmlp > Nix and Guix are the only 2 general-purpose package managers that I know of > that can do it. For anyone constrained to GNU/Linux, right? ~~~ davexunit > For anyone constrained to GNU/Linux, right? I don't feel constrained by a free software operating system. Besides that, a bunch of people use Nix on OS X. On Windows I suppose you're stuck with the inferior package managers. ~~~ dllthomas _" I don't feel constrained by a free software operating system."_ I appreciate the sentiment, but there's a substantial difference between "constrained to" and "constrained by". ------ mswift42 Cabal is by far the worst thing about Haskell. With no other programming language have I ever had to deal with these difficulties. It made me stop using Haskell. ~~~ tel Mostly because these difficulties are front-loaded by the Cabal system. Version/implementation conflicts are faced by all other package managers, but most solve the problem by (a) waiting until you notice your program has broken and then (b) suggesting you nuke your package sandbox. Cabal just tells you up front when this will happen which can be annoying. That said, the prior mechanism requires that you notice when version mixes are causing issues. ~~~ mswift42 I understand that is's a very hard problem to solve, but there has to be something better than the Status Quo. A couple of months ago, I wanted to write a simple Web App using Yesod. The only way to get a working installation of yesod and all the dependencies was by using the sandbox thing. This however meant, that after every code change, you had to wait ~10 secs for the project to rebuild. That doesn't sound like much, but it gets annoying very quickly. ~~~ sjy That's not a sandbox problem, that's the cost of developing in an AOT-compiled language. Sandboxes do require you to recompile Yesod and all its dependencies (> 10 minutes) every time you start a new project though, which is pretty annoying. ~~~ dllthomas I agree that it's not a sandbox problem, but it's not inherent to "an AOT- compiled language" \- builds of my yesod projects take disproportionately long compared to my other development, almost all of which takes place in compiled languages. ------ SuperStache I was wondering if someone could explain something to me. I understand the issues involving inconsistent environments, but bad constraints don't really seem like a particularly challenging issue to me. If you have libraries A and B which each require mutually exclusive versions of library C, what is stopping the compiler from adding both versions of library C to the compiled code for A and B to call separately? Obviously this would result in larger binaries and should generate a build/install warning, but it seems like this would solve the overwhelming majority of Cabal's dependency resolution issues. There's clearly something I'm missing since this has been an outstanding issue in Cabal for quite some time. Would someone with a better understanding of GHC/Cabal's compilation/linking/installation steps mind shedding some light on this? ~~~ munificent I maintain the package manager for the Dart language. This question comes up all of the time. The problem is that these libraries may interact at runtime: * A gets a value from its version of C. * It passes that to your app. * Your app gives it to B. * B gives it to its incompatible version of C. Haskell may handle this scenario differently because of its type system, but in Dart, this would cause lots of user problems. ~~~ seagreen Anyone know if there's a formal name for this situation/problem? Thanks for the clear explanation BTW. ~~~ tel You probably would have good vocabulary for this in the _ML family languages. You 're essentially talking about existential type mismatching—a core component of how modules work in _ML family languages. It's just hard to read that into Haskell since "modules" are not as well represented in-language and exist somewhere between Haskell-the-language and Cabal-the-package-manager/ecosystem. ------ toolslive The first thing that needs to be done is to acknowledge its existence. Often Haskell zealots pretend it's not a Cabal problem but a user problem. So this article is indeed a very good start. ~~~ dllthomas I think it's _not_ "a cabal problem", in the sense of cabal being somehow awful and "doing it wrong" where other systems "do it right". The symptoms are a result of the confluence of a few things (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion), some of which are quite positive, which make the problem substantially harder. Which isn't to say there's no problem, or that nothing could or should be better - I'm glad it's getting attention and I'm glad people have ideas for improvements, though both of those have been true for a while. ------ tieTYT > The feeling of powerlessness one has when Cabal does not do what one wanted > and one does not know how to fix it. I experienced this immediately after I read Learn You A Haskell and it made me give up on the language. I develop on Windows (currently?) and I was passionate about creating my first hobby project in Haskell. But every direction I turned, I ran into an issue where a dependency or transitive dependency expected some linux library to be there and I couldn't install. Maybe I'm just spoiled and need to be more open minded. I come from Java-land where I take "write once run anywhere" for granted. I eventually switched to Clojure but that was unsatisfying for different reasons. I wish there was a language with Haskell's purity and type system but Java's ability to "write once and run anywhere". I think Frege is very close, but I feel uncomfortable learning something with such a small community (damn... I am spoiled). ~~~ wyager >I develop on Windows In my experience, this sucks in basically any language. ~~~ skrebbel Then your experience is rather limited. As a counter-anecdote, my experience is that Windows is frictionless for developing PHP, Node.JS, C#, Java, Scala, Elixir/Erlang. It's also close-to- first-class for Python. Ruby to a lesser extent, with a lot of the community just assuming you're on OSX, period. I've often been impressed by how, despite the hacky nature of the Node.JS community, a lot of stuff simply just works there. For example, getting PhantomJS, a full-fledged scriptable headless browser, available for a project is a single "npm install" away on _all three major OSes_. ~~~ sanderjd That is definitely impressive of the Node.js community! Good on them. Also great to know Elixir is working well on Windows, yet another feather in its increasingly-well-plumed hat! I remember a get-Windows-working-better rallying call at a Ruby conference I was at 4 years ago, and as far as I can tell, things have not changed much since then. The OSX thing isn't quite fair though - everything works on linux too, because that's what people deploy on. In fact the trend seems to be toward developing against containers running your production version of linux, rather than OSX directly. ------ wyager I had no idea people were having problems with Cabal! It's always worked very well for me. It seemed like one of the better build systems out there. I suppose a lot of the issue comes from the fact that Cabal is very careful about everything. It seems like most package managers I use have a "try and maybe fail" attitude, while Cabal seems to have more of a "guarantee success or fail" attitude. ------ seagreen Nix is getting mentioned a lot in this thread. If anyone's interested in NixOS feel free to email me. I switched to it on my main computer about a month ago and might be able to give some perspective on what it's like. My config is here: [https://github.com/seagreen/vivaine](https://github.com/seagreen/vivaine) ~~~ tomp Could NIX be used as a _language_ package manager? Does it allow installing on cutting-edge code from random repositories? Can you only download something, without installing it? Can you access multiple versions of the same library from a single "project" (e.g. by using different aliases for different versions)? ~~~ seagreen Yes and with ease for the first two. Yes, but you may have to write some Nix code for the last. ------ npsimons As someone who has tried to compile pandoc from source, I welcome this. ------ colemorrison You know you play too much Destiny when... But seriously. It's so difficult to realize how much of a game changer a great package manager can be. I've never tried Haskell, but is this really THAT much of a problem? I hear so much praise and worship about Haskell... ------ jabberwock I think the Haskell folks would do well to consider a complete rewrite of Cabal and look at something like Leiningen, Npm or even Opam as a base from which they can start with their new version. ~~~ freyrs3 Like many people have pointed out, cabal and npm are not solving the same problem. npm appears to "work" more often because a whole class of problems in Javascript program are deferred to runtime while in Haskell all interfaces have to be compatible, link properly and compile. That's why "cabal hell" is such an imprecise term because on top of the version bound issues it's also used for any and every failure that happens when using cabal, even if it's the library in question that's to blame and not cabal. If you want to consider a similar problem, take 20 interdependent C++ libraries and try to link them into a single application using just version information and see how often that works out of the box. ~~~ dllthomas I think that's only a part of it. I think that it's also the case that the Haskell ecosystem has more breaking changes at the root of diamonds in the dependency graph - which isn't something a build tool can solve (or at least isn't something any build tool _does_ solve). ~~~ sjy In my experience the dependency graph often has many more nodes as well. I'm not sure if this is because Haskell code is especially reusable or Haskell developers are especially lazy. ~~~ freyrs3 There is an ambient culture of code reuse at a level I don't see elsewhere, that's one of Haskell's strength's in my opinion. Though it does make certain packaging problems more difficult.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Serving Customers in New Ways: Walmart Begins Testing Associate Delivery - Nelkins http://blog.walmart.com/innovation/20170601/serving-customers-in-new-ways-walmart-begins-testing-associate-delivery ====== Nelkins Fun fact: the mobile app for associate delivery was written in F# using Xamarin. Source: I work at Jet, but not on this product.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Rising Anxiety Among American Whites - 11thEarlOfMar https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-rising-anxiety-white-america/ ====== ralusek Identity politics beget identity politics, and it's _always_ bad, period. The amount of comments in this thread alone talking about what "white people" are and aren't entitled to feel based off of their own privileges is representative of the wider left's own brand of identity politics, and quite frankly, racism. If you're a white person hearing day in an day out about your inherent power in society, and how much you've benefited from "your people's" exploitation of others, the first thing I can guarantee is that you're much more likely to be defensively thinking along these terms of group identity. Regardless of whether or not those perceptions of privilege hold true for your specific situation, a part of you gains awareness that a non-negligible faction is making these categorizations on your behalf. Where the identitarian reaction kicks in fully, though, is among the people for whom these tales of privilege and power quite clearly do _not_ hold true. If you're born to two alcoholic parents who beat you and got you working in the coal mines as soon as you possibly could, it's not difficult to see why the prevailing narrative doesn't sound appealing. The absolute baseline human response to feeling attacked along these hard group lines is an identitarian outcry taking various forms, the mildest of which could be classified as "rising anxiety." I'm not saying that this is a good thing, I think it's a terrible thing, I just also happen to think it is an obvious result of the economic and political climate. Trump and his supporters are not a disease, they're an ill-conceived, but expected reactionary symptom. ------ isabelc This has nothing to do with skin color or racism on the part of white Americans. The anxiety is not only among American Whites but also among Black Americans, and 2nd and 3rd generation Americans who speak only English. At least in cities like mine (Miami, Florida). It's not just a fear but a real problem because people cannot get jobs here unless they speak Spanish. Black Americans can sometimes get hired without knowing Spanish, but never whites or 3rd generation "Hispanics" who speak only English. Worse than that is that many businesses will not do any business in English. And they are somehow certified. At all levels. I personally have dealt with business owners, real estate agents, small retail store owners, investors, technicians, restaurant owners, and more who speak no English, only Spanish. You can't even order a pizza in English. My English-speaking son was hung-up on because he tried to order a pizza in English (I speak Spanish so I have to do the ordering). There are pockets of Miami where English is spoken in businesses, particularly the tourist areas by the beach or downtown. Because it's treated like a foreign language. Also, government offices and libraries still mostly speak English. There is real discrimination against non-Spanish speakers and white Americans. I don't know if data exists that shows this but it's witnessed and is common knowledge among people who live here. This was not the case 21 years ago when I began having children. That's why I didn't think it was mandatory to teach my children Spanish. People still spoke English. Now, my kids will likely not get jobs unless we move elsewhere, which is easier said than done. ------ rotexo I observe that the article starts out talking about closing coal mines and the decline of manufacturing jobs. As a white person, it sounds to me like the white people interviewed for this article face declining economic prospects (understandably of concern), notice an increased abundance of people of color around them, and then feel angry about the people of color. Emotions are of course not rational things, but I don't really understand the leap there. After all, it seems like racial disparities between whites and people of color still exist, with whites on top ([https://news.stanford.edu/2017/06/16/report- finds-significan...](https://news.stanford.edu/2017/06/16/report-finds- significant-racial-ethnic-disparities/)). So the real wealth transfer seems to be from low-income whites to high-income whites. Bear in mind, I don't think that's a good thing at all. Indeed, it seems like the antipathy would be better directed at the wealthy, rather than people of color. Or the energy would be better spent lobbying for help transitioning economically away from dying industries like coal power. But somehow this nebulous notion of racial pride gets dragged into the conversation instead. I suppose that's just people being people, but it doesn't leave me too optimistic about our prospects for a more peaceful and sane future. ~~~ kej Your comment reminds me of this story told by Bill Moyers about LBJ: We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” It makes sense today, too. If the wealthy can convince the poor that their hardships are caused by immigrants, then the newly poor won't consider how much of their previous wealth is being concentrated in a few hands. ~~~ rotexo YES to that LBJ quote. I seem to recall also reading a similar observation backed up quite thoroughly with statistics in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. ------ nulldereference This will probably be unpopular but here goes. Honestly, if a community wants to be made of a particular homogeneous ethnicity or race it'd be much better if they were very up-front about it. Its fine, not everyone needs to be multi-cultural or multi-ethnic. I'm looking at examples like Japan, they make it very difficult for outsiders to integrate, see the various "Gaijin" articles out there. I'm OK with this, Japan is up-front about it, you don't get to a case where you immigrate to Japan and the locals start complaining about losing their "ways". Really, just say up front, only WASP's allowed. ------ sbinthree Sure, people can reskill, but it is quite hard to do as life goes on and poverty makes it hard to justify going back to school for four years of CS that many of these people probably can't make sense of. Don't know what the solution is, other than encourage people to retrain. People seem to perceive big companies talking about people needing to learn to code as a way for them to reduce wages, when in practice most software companies would hire as many competent developers as they can and you just can't find the people with the skills. ------ meri_dian The effect of one's culture and surroundings changing will naturally be anxiety. Consider a proud ethno-cultural place like Iran or Japan. If a large number of non-persian or non-japanese people began moving into each of those respective countries, the result would be anxiety among the established majority. Similarly, it's really just a natural human response that people of European descent are experiencing anxiety in their native countries when faced with large scale migration. I think that a lot of people are unwilling to give sympathy to Europeans because of the recent history of European colonization across the world. But it's not some failing of white people in particular that they in some cases may have anxiety about their communities changing. It's just a result of the human condition, human social behavior. As such they do deserve sympathy. Just like the hypothetical Iranians or Japanese in my prior example. ~~~ KingMob While you can argue that racism is universal, that doesn't excuse anyone for racist behavior, whether they're Japanese, Iranian, or American. If you examine "may have anxiety about their communities changing", it clearly implies they think non-whites are changing their community for the worse. It also implies the community belongs to the whites, and they get to define it. Alternatively, they could (but don't) view their community as something they share, becoming more diverse, more interesting, more inclusive, etc. ~~~ whatyoucantsay Tribalism is a part of human nature and you engage in it, too. It's not pretty in any circumstance. ------ alexandercrohde This is one of those discussions where I almost feel like the comments are deliberately trying to be provocative. ------ KingMob Wow, yet another article asking heartland white people what they think. The worst they have to deal with is anxiety about loss of power and jobs. Whereas people of color I know are worried about being in the wrong town after dark, after Charlottesville showed white supremacists are now bold enough to march in the open. The plight of white people no longer being on top is really not that dangerous or urgent. ~~~ Knufen Yes, how horrible it is to think of other people. And honestly, one problem does not diminish another. Another thing, one is not a whitesupremacist just because he disagrees with your political opinions. ~~~ KingMob > And honestly, one problem does not diminish another. Yet, when compared, it _is_ diminished. Loss of a privileged place in society doesn't hold a candle to the suffering of those who are still struggling to obtain one. I didn't say those who disagreed with me were white supremacists just for disagreeing. I said white supremacists marched in Charlottesville because, in fact, there were people marching there, arguing for suppressing non-white minorities. Not that hard to grok. ------ patrickg_zill "In 2000 Hazleton’s 23,399 residents were 95 percent non-Hispanic white and less than 5 percent Latino. By 2016 Latinos became the majority, composing 52 percent of the population, while the white share plunged to 44 percent." It's not "Change", it's an engineered "Replacement". Mass immigration is the State's way of electing a new populace. ~~~ eganist > Mass immigration is the State's way of electing a new populace. Mass immigration is the population's way of integrating a new population. Consider that it's the population which elects the state, at least in our case. ~~~ patrickg_zill I wish you were correct. However there seems to be plenty of evidence that shows the State does what it wants to do, regardless of the opinion of the people. One example would be Obama promising to close Gitmo, and he was elected with a plurality ; yet Gitmo was never closed.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
RedHack leaks reveal the rise of Turkey's pro-government Twitter trolls - mynameislegion http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/redhack-turkey-albayrak-censorship/ ====== JumpCrisscross > _Simultaneously, Albayrak’s wife, Esra, who is a Ph.D. graduate from the > University of California, Berkeley, arranged a social media monitoring > agency for sentiment analysis of online content about the government, > according to a June 22 email. The agency’s presentation, attached to that > email, offered to set up a 60-member team for PR and crisis management on > social media._ If we are training foreign leaders and their families in our universities, we need to have an ethics discussion. Banning abusive regimes could backfire by isolating them from our values. Perhaps this is a side effect of turning our universities into trade schools, where the "soft" arts are deëmphasised in relation to the "hard" core sciences. ------ clydethefrog "Troll armies" have been quite successful in quieting dissent the last years in Russia, Turkey and other authoritarian countries. There are also theories Russia is partly responsible for the whole Trump spam on Twitter and Reddit. It's time this is taken as a serious threat to democratic values instead of shrugging off "it's just the internet, 99 % of the comments is always garbage". It's part of a successful information war now when the majority of the public gets their news from social media, which take popularity as a metric for what news is important. It's propaganda behind a proxy. ~~~ chinese_dan "It's propaganda behind a proxy." The Democrats don't even need a 'Troll army'. They own all of the mass media and feed them the information that we see in many articles. The last batch of Wikileaks showed us this to be a fact. Even Obama is in on the Propaganda (no proxy needed) and used a fake name when emailing Hillary. So, the only real way to defend against it is to create a grass-roots effort (IE: troll army). The only real way to stop it is to have less biased media. Trump was the direct result of political correctness, biased media, and liberal policies run amok. I don't even think he will be a good leader, but it's a big fuck you to the current administration. It's a non-violent protest vote. They aren't even trying to hide it anymore. Every mass-media outlet has trolled the world with articles about terrible Trump for the past week. Some going as far as calling him a 'rapist'. When we have Wikileaks about the DNC, CNN and other news outlets ignore the real information leaked and only focus on Russian hackers. When the Washington post obtains illegal and private tax records or a private conversation illegally recorded, they immediately focus on the content, and brush aside the illegal activity involved in getting it (I seriously doubt there will be any investigation). ..and the involvement with Russia? It all comes down to a Russian VPN. Anyone in the tech industry knows that this doesn't mean the person resides in Russia. Yet I still see people on HN spreading this misinformation. This is the definition of propaganda. I actually hope Hillary wins at this point, so I can blame everyone I know that voted for her and when her evil and shitty behavior is aimed at the American people? Well, they get what they deserve.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ubuntu Linux: Donationware? - CrankyBear http://www.zdnet.com/ubuntu-linux-donationware-7000005497/ ====== s_henry_paulson This solidifies the idea for me that Canonical is completely clueless. Asking for donations AND bundling Amazon shopping ads? That's over the line IMHO. Yes, you can disable the Amazon stuff, but leaving it as a default is a poor choice. At best it's incredibly tacky and unhelpful, at worst it's a security risk. To me the answer is glaringly clear. Offer a donation based download with the Amazon stuff not bundled with it. This makes people feel like they're getting a clean product, and many people don't mind paying to support the OS. Then offer a free download with the Amazon bundled, and let people know that's what they're getting. People can still disable it, but for those that don't Canonical profits. This hybrid mess of "pay us some money" and "don't forget to turn off our advertising" is the worst of both worlds. ------ smacktoward This is a good idea; anything that makes it easier for Ubuntu users to support the distro financially, and thus help keep it moving forward, is a Good Thing. That being said, I'm extremely skeptical that donations will ever amount to a large enough amount to support Ubuntu all by themselves, or even to come close to doing so. They cite as inspiration the example of the Humble Bundles, but in those you get something in exchange for your money -- the bundle of software. There's nothing comparable here, it's just a straight donation, so use of it will probably be low at best. ------ moystard I think this is a great idea and I love how they decided to include a users' feedback on what matters for them.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Massive genetic study shows how humans are evolving - gwern https://www.nature.com/news/massive-genetic-study-shows-how-humans-are-evolving-1.22565 ====== Will_Parker Now that we have access to the entire genome directly, instead of relying on twin and adoption studies, we are going to get many more of these insights. And it's not all going to be comfortable. There will be cries of biological essentialism, while the blank slate idea is no longer one that can be held by an educated rational person. On more controversial lines, see this [http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/06/184853.1](http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/06/184853.1) study (N=280,000) that correlates specific genes with IQ. ~~~ Arcsech There are two big risks, as I see it: 1) the human tendency to turn statistical averages into absolutes. Imagine genetic testing saying that gene A is associated with a slightly higher than average propensity for coding ability (say, 3%). Then we see people saying "Oh you can't code? Must not have gene A!" Or genetic testing revealing that someone doesn't have gene A, so they're told they can't code, even though they could very well have been great at it. All because of an extra 3% probability. 2) Making it impossible/unbearably expensive for people with genes that are correlated with higher risk of whatever conditions to get health care/insurance. We need to be really careful with how we talk about genetic insights as we gain more and more understanding, as well as what uses of that information we allow, or we're going to get ourselves into another period of atrocities justified by what boils down to eugenics. Perhaps not on the scale of genocide of entire populations, but still bad enough. ~~~ zo1 I'd add 3) A Genetic arms race between nation states. It's only a matter of time before a nation state starts spending a not-so- insignificant amount of money on IVF + DNA-based screening to start picking good genetic offspring for their populace. It's only going to start becoming more and more plausible the cheaper we make this technology. Very awkward and important questions/decisions await us in the near future. ~~~ tosser350 China already paid people with high intelligence to ship them DNA for research in 2013, they are already doing embryo gene manipulation. They are years ahead of us due to not caring about ethics. Political correctness will be the death of the west. [https://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the- genet...](https://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-genetics-of- genius-1.12985) ~~~ mcbits Different ethics != not caring about ethics. And if not caring about ethics were the key to winning the nation-state game, the ethical response would be to tear it all down ASAP, which is usually quite unethical in practice. ~~~ dTal I'm not sure I follow your argument. Tearing it all down is or isn't ethical, therefore not caring about ethics is not the key to winning the nation-state game? ~~~ mcbits Ethics is stuck between a rock and a hard place if nations collapse _because_ they're not disregarding ethics enough, as the previous comment suggests. (I'm disputing the premise.) ------ riazrizvi I found the article confusing, I don't understand the link between the paper and evolution: 1\. APOE-Alzheimer-propensity gene is a new gene, emerging in the younger population. (Clearly, prevalence of this gene reduces a person's life-expectancy but not until they are done giving birth). 2\. Same with CHRNA3-heavy-smoking-propensity gene. 3\. These genes are not evolutionary drivers since they don't effect E[number of offspring] or E[survival rate until given birth to final offspring]. 4\. From an evolutionary perspective, prevalence of these genes should be found in equal proportion across all ages of the population. 5\. Then why are these genes emerging? Isn't it far more likely that there is some new factor in our lifestyle/diet/habitat etc that is causing the gene to appear in the population? Which has nothing to do with evolution. Where in the paper do they talk about evolution? ~~~ perlgeek The confusing part is that we are used to thinking about evolution as spanning multiple generations: a gene increases fitness, so its prevalence increases over the generations. Or the flip side: it decreases fitness, so the members that have it reproduce less, its prevalence decreases. But this study takes a snapshot of a population, and looks at gene prevalence as a function of age. So what you see are not effects of reproduction, but rather on survival. It finds the Alzheimer's gene less in 70 year olds, because those with the gene are more likely to have died earlier, and thus not appear in the study. Thus your statement "APOE-Alzheimer-propensity gene is a new gene" is likely not true. It is likely just as prevalent in the current generation as two generations before; just those individuals from two generations before who had it are more likely to be already dead. So the study looks at how genes influence survival rates -- something that is very obviously related to evolution if it occurs before reproduction. If survival rates only depend on some genes in higher age, they have only small, second-order effects on reproduction (like a child being more likely to survive if it has healthy grandparents or parents). (Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist, so take this with a grain of salt). ~~~ riazrizvi I suppose that does explain the drop off in expression of the gene: Alzheimer's risk of death/year 1-3% [1]. That annual mortality rate is in the right ballpark to explain the frequency of gene expression decrease by about 50% between ages 40 and 80 [2]. Agree the study does look at genes influencing survival rates. I still don't see the link to the headline 'humans are evolving!'. Small second-order effects, okay, sure. So how about, 'Massive Genetic Study shows genetics affect mortality rates, plus maybe there's a small secondary effect on reproduction, who knows?'. [1]. 83,000 (i) or 3,349 (ii) Alzheimer's deaths per year out of 2mm deaths (iii) => 1-3% i) [http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/alzheimer- kills...](http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/alzheimer-kills- previously-thought-study-article-1.1712078) ii) [http://www.alz.org/mglc/in_my_community_60862.asp](http://www.alz.org/mglc/in_my_community_60862.asp) iii) [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm) [2] See graphs in paper. ~~~ mirimir I'm confused. Sure, they identified two alleles with occurrence that decreases with age. And sure, that does suggest that those alleles reduce survival rate. But to demonstrate evolutionary change, they'd need data on occurrence of these alleles as a function of birth date, stratified by age. It'll take some time to get such data. Probably at least a few decades. ------ cowpig > But if that were the case, there would be plenty of such mutations still > kicking around in the genome, the authors argue. That such a large study > found only two strongly suggests that evolution is “weeding” them out, says > Mostafavi, and that others have probably already been purged from the > population by natural selection. This seems like a lot of speculative leaps to me. 1\. assuming that they should necessarily find many of these correlations, absent evolutionary elimination (maybe the effects of individual groups of genes just aren't that strong?) 2\. assuming that the lack of them indicates that they existed before and were eliminated (maybe they never existed at all?) 3\. more generally, assuming that evolutionary selection is a determining factor in the data they're studying at all (I don't often see noticeable changes in a few generation in highly-contrived genetic algorithms I play with, let alone real-world data which has way, way more noise) ------ ronnier * Analysis of 215,000 people's DNA suggests variants that shorten life are being selected against. * tested more than 8 million common mutations, and found two that seemed to become less prevalent with age. A variant of the APOE gene, which is strongly linked to Alzheimer’s disease, was rarely found in women over 70. And a mutation in the CHRNA3 gene associated with heavy smoking in men petered out in the population starting in middle age. People without these mutations have a survival edge and are more likely to live longer, the researchers suggest. * certain groups of genetic mutations, which individually would not have a measurable effect but together accounted for health threats, appeared less often in people who were expected to have long lifespans than in those who weren't. These included predispositions to asthma, high body mass index and high cholesterol. * Most surprising, however, was the finding that sets of mutations that delay puberty and childbearing are more prevalent in long-lived people. ~~~ mannykannot This puzzled me, as these Alzeheimer's and smoking results do not seem to be evidence of evolution; one would surely need to see a decrease over generations? The article goes on to say 'That such a large study found only two [late-acting genes] strongly suggests that evolution is “weeding” them out, says Mostafavi, and that others have probably already been purged from the population by natural selection.' The article and paper then repeat some hypotheses as to why natural selection would eliminate these hypothesized former late-acting genes from the gene pool, given that they seem to act after most people's reproductive years. So the article and paper seem to be arguing that a _low_ frequency of late- acting genes indicates ongoing evolution, but acknowledge that this raises questions about why natural selection would act on them. The relevance of the decrease of the prevalence of these genes with age is apparently that survivorship bias is being used to distinguish causation from mere correlation. ~~~ skookumchuck An Attenborough TV show suggested that the reason people live long compared to animals is that grandparents are needed to help raise the young. The grandparents raise the young while the parents work/hunt/farm/whatever. So having healthy grandparents gives a survival advantage. ~~~ fauigerzigerk This theory is mentioned in the article as well, but it doesn't seem very plausible if we're talking about living into the 80s or 90s. At that age, the effect should be reversed as people often need care themselves rather than caring for grandchildren (who may be adults by that time anyway) I suppose the "grandmother theory" originally only explained why women live beyond menopause, not into their 70s, 80s or 90s. ~~~ skookumchuck Primitive societies are known to abandon old people to die when they become a burden rather than an asset. ~~~ ch4s3 some ~~~ skookumchuck What's a nomadic tribe to do with someone who can no longer keep up? When there is insufficient food (commonplace in older societies) who is going to get the food? When resources get scarce, there are a lot of ugly realities. ~~~ dredmorbius You might do better to provide citations over argument. ~~~ skookumchuck "Traditional nomadic tribes often end up abandoning their elderly during their unrelenting travels. The choice for the healthy and young is to do this or carry the old and infirm on their backs — along with children, weapons and necessities — through perilous territory. Also prone to sacrificing their elderly are societies that suffer periodic famines. Citing a dramatic example, Diamond said Paraguay’s Aché Indians assign certain young men the task of killing old people with an ax or spear, or burying them alive." [http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/jared-diamond-on- aging-1505...](http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/jared-diamond-on-aging-150571) ~~~ dredmorbius Thanks, exactly. ------ NyxWulf I agree with the premise, these reports seem to focus on the act of passing your genetic material to a child as the final act. Anyone who has had kids knows that passing on your genes is the easy part, raising them to be productive members of society who will in turn procreate takes a long time and you continue to influence and guide them. So something that shortens your lifespan would reduce the survival edge of the remaining offspring compared to a group with that guiding influence. This is a pretty clear social structure in humans. I understand not all or even most animals have that same social structure. Can someone explain to me why they would assume remaining alive after you dump off your genetic material would be neutral? (from an evolutionary perspective) ~~~ tempestn This is addressed in the article: _Why these late-acting mutations might lower a person’s genetic fitness — their ability to reproduce and spread their genes — remains an open question. The authors suggest that for men, it could be that those who live longer can have more children, but this is unlikely to be the whole story. So scientists are considering two other explanations for why longevity is important. First, parents surviving into old age in good health can care for their children and grandchildren, increasing the later generations’ chances of surviving and reproducing. This is sometimes known as the ‘grandmother hypothesis’, and may explain why humans tend to live long after menopause. _ ------ Udik Can someone explain this to me? The article says: "People who carry a harmful genetic variant die at a higher rate, so the variant becomes rarer in the older portion of the population." However, this is the opposite of how I understand evolution: "harmful" variants (from the evolutionary point of view) should become rarer in the younger portion of the population- whatever happens to their original carriers is irrelevant. Also "researchers scoured large US and UK genetic databases"\- well, I wouldn't be too sure that the biggest part of evolution happening in the human species can be seen inside the UK and US genetic databases. ------ marcelsalathe Direct link to paper (OA): [http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...](http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2002458) ------ hellofunk > one of the first attempts to probe directly how humans are evolving over one > or two generations. Considering the extraordinary amount of time it takes for evolution to do anything at all, that they can quantify it in what is relatively zero time in the span of life on Earth, seems to remarkable to be true. ~~~ vanderZwan This is a very, very stubborn idea about evolution that has proven to be kind of false. Rapid evolution exists, and we can observe evolution happening in many species: [http://discovermagazine.com/2015/march/19-life-in-the- fast-l...](http://discovermagazine.com/2015/march/19-life-in-the-fast-lane) As I understand, the simplest explanation for species being so _stable_ over millions of years (like, say, sharks) is that while evolution can happen quite fast, it "averages itself out" \- there's a kind of regression-to-the-mean effect. ~~~ hellofunk I have been taught something different in school, but that was a while ago, so perhaps the field has evolved some in recent years. That, depending on the species, evolution rarely occurs between generations, and that it leans on large changes that are sudden and far between, and these changes are not at the same time for each species. That is to say, evolution is not usually a linear process for which at any point in time there is a delta. It is more of a stair step. That is part of what makes the report hard to believe, even if it is a novel idea and has some other merits. Not to say it couldn't be true, but as I expressed, it seems remarkable that such evidence was found in a single generational study. ~~~ vanderZwan You're right that it is a relatively recent development: the first papers (cautiously) going against this idea of evolution happening slowly started appearing in the middle of the last century. The first paper flat-out stating evolution was observed within a few generations was in the late 1970s (mentioned in the linked article in my previous post). So you can imagine it would take a while for the field to accept this new attitude, let alone how long it takes for this new knowledge to then diffuse into the rest of society. Either way my comment certainly wasn't intended as a critique aimed at you! Also, thinking about it some more, it's not that strange that the idea of slow evolution hasn't died out yet, because it's not so much wrong as that reality more complicated and really counter-intuitive than what you think if you _only_ look at fossils[0]: > _In the 1950s, the Finnish biologist Björn Kurtén noticed something unusual > in the fossilized horses he was studying. When he compared the shapes of the > bones of species separated by only a few generations, he could detect lots > of small but significant changes. Horse species separated by millions of > years, however, showed far fewer differences in their morphology. Subsequent > studies over the next half century found similar effects — organisms > appeared to evolve more quickly when biologists tracked them over shorter > timescales._ > _Then, in the mid-2000s, Simon Ho, an evolutionary biologist at the > University of Sydney, encountered a similar phenomenon in the genomes he was > analyzing. When he calculated how quickly DNA mutations accumulated in birds > and primates over just a few thousand years, Ho found the genomes chock-full > of small mutations. This indicated a briskly ticking evolutionary clock. But > when he zoomed out and compared DNA sequences separated by millions of > years, he found something very different. The evolutionary clock had slowed > to a crawl._ (I have to apologise for not remembering this article yesterday, it would have made things more clear) So in retrospect my "very stubborn idea" assessment is probably a bit unfair. But, back to what we were taught in school. Caveat: I'm not a biologist, let alone evolution expert, just a nerd who is into this topic. There are a number of issues with the description you gave (which, for the record, fits with how it was taught to me in high-school) It is true that evolution is not linear, but being taught that evolution is a stair step is just as bad. It (implicitly) assumes evolution is a form of _progress_. It's not, it's just adaptation. The simplest of life forms that exist nowadays are just as successful as we are, in the sense that they also didn't go extinct and will continue to thrive in the future. On the other end of the spectrum you actually can have runaway adaptation, especially when there's a kind of "arms race" between predator and prey. The cheetah is so hyper-specialised for catching its prey by speed alone that it's a kind of evolutionary dead-end; it can't zig-zag like the gazelle can. Anyway, the stair-step attitude originates from outside of biology, from Platonic thinking that there are "higher" ideal forms. And the sudden changes turn out not to be "few and far between", they just don't seem to stick. Most adaptations average out, because they're highly contextual to their short time periods. As mentioned, since we based our first ideas about evolution on fossils, we only noticed the slow evolution. Sex actually seems to play a large part in the filtering process[1]: > _For a species whose numbers show no signs of collapsing, humans have a > shockingly high mutation rate. Each of us is born with about 70 new genetic > errors that our parents did not have. That’s much more than a slime mold, > say, or a bacterium. Mutations are likely to decrease an organism’s fitness, > and an avalanche like this every generation could be deadly to our species. > The fact that we haven’t gone extinct suggests that over the long term, we > have some way of taking out our genetic garbage. And a new paper, recently > published in Science, provides evidence that the answer may be linked to > another fascinating procedure: sex. (...) As the number of nasty genetic > errors in a population rises, natural selection will sweep large rafts of > them out of the genome together. And in sexual organisms, because of the > ways that mutations from each parent can recombine randomly onto the same > chromosomes, the synergistic elimination of bad mutations can happen even > faster._ Anyway, hope this addresses some of your understandable scepticism! [0] [https://www.quantamagazine.org/evolution-runs-faster-on- shor...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/evolution-runs-faster-on-short- timescales-20170314/) [1] [https://www.quantamagazine.org/missing-mutations-suggest- a-r...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/missing-mutations-suggest-a-reason-for- sex-20170713/) ------ c3534l I'm confused about how the inferences are being made. If genes are found in older people, okay, so what? That doesn't mean anything. But then the article says: > But if that were the case, there would be plenty of such mutations still > kicking around in the genome. So does that mean the gene is less common in children than parents? If so, what does it matter that older people don't have the gene? Why does age factor into this at all? ------ marcofloriano * This is not, by itself, evidence of evolution at work. In evolutionary terms, having a long life isn’t as important as having a reproductively fruitful one, with many children who survive into adulthood and birth their own offspring. So harmful mutations that exert their effects after reproductive age could be expected to be ‘neutral’ in the eyes of evolution, and not selected against. This. We want to live more (and more). But that's not the main point of life, as science (and most religions) say. We are in our best form when we reproduce and give our best to our children (and family). So they can do the same in the future. Today's society tries to sell the idea of small families (or no family at all ) and long lives as the best option. But maybe it's not the case. ------ subru This reminds me of my core mission: sterilize myself or self terminate. Everything I've experienced and felt since youth indicates that my seed is unwanted by humanity, and it's clear suicide helps evolution by eliminating bad genes. I think about suicide constantly and have done so since youth. This is my brain telling me to help humanity by leaving. Hoping to complete that mission ASAP. ~~~ jmmcd I wouldn't necessarily go along with your logic here. If you decide not to have children for one reason or another you can implement that decision without suicide. A lot of people have suicidal thoughts at some stages in their lives, then recover and are glad they didn't take a non-reversible action. Anyway, it's too dangerous a topic for you to work things out without a bit of "peer review". So I strongly recommend to contact a counsellor. ~~~ subru This isn't occurring st some subset of stages; it's been steady throughout my entire life. And I've grown more and more cynical with age. It's a decision that I've long intellectualized. People who don't survive aren't around anymore to discuss whether they are satisfied with their decision. Why would I waste my time talking to someone who intends to talk me out of something that isn't a debate to me? It's a personal decision. ~~~ magic_beans Have you considered Buddhism, the entire purpose of which is to learn to overcome suffering? Here's a summary: [http://www.bcc.ca/buddhism/fournobletruthsandeightfoldpath.h...](http://www.bcc.ca/buddhism/fournobletruthsandeightfoldpath.html) ------ jlebrech People are having children later on in life so it would make sense. ------ otakucode It is odd that longer lifespans would be selected for. Given two otherwise equivalent populations, the one with the shorter lifespan will come to dominate. ~~~ 24gttghh This does not seem intuitive to me. Would not having a longer lifespan allow a subset of a population to better care for itself through social means? ------ meri_dian This study absolutely does not show that humans are evolving ~~~ pamqzl Unless the statistical distribution of alleles is _exactly the same_ (unlikely) from one generation to the next then humans would have to be evolving, wouldn't they? ~~~ gwern Genetic drift is not usually considered 'evolving' because the variants are selectively neutral. That's why finding selected variants isn't as simple as 'SNP X is 0.00001% more common in generation 2 than generation 1, case closed!' \- you are looking for variants which are becoming more/less frequent than would be plausible under simple drift. Just like an experiment where you know the effect will never be exactly 0 because of chance imbalances and random noise. ------ joak An explanation not explored in the paper: the social pressure to have children later in life favors people living older. ------ randyrand we're evolving mostly through sexual selection now as opposed to natural selection but still some of that too ~~~ sacado2 What's the difference between sexual & natural selection ? ~~~ randyrand Sexual selection can still happen even if humans become immortal. Natural selection cannot. ------ LinuxFreedom You do not even need a scientist to see that there is a massive degeneration and retardation going on in the US gene pool currently. Influx of foreign genes was the solution, but now dumbness itself will trigger its own growth even stronger. If you want a better gene pool for your descendants it is time to leave US now. Good Luck! ~~~ sctb This comment is way outside the standards of civility and substantiveness here. We ban accounts that continue to post like this. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
US Apple iPad to be released in April - computinggeek http://thecomputinggeek.com/us-apple-ipad-to-be-released-in-april/ ====== ktf <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169343> Or: <http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/03/05ipad.html>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do you handle Excel import/exports in your apps - NOtherDev Hi folks!<p>I'm implementing Excel-related functionality for at least 4th project in my career. As usual, an ability to save the data set into an XLSX file in a custom format and the way to ingest the data back, using the same data format, or ideally letting the customer map their own formats into our format.<p>What worries me is that I need to take care about all the hassle around - handling large uploads, managing timeouts, reporting the progress, caring about basics of data validation, file encodings, ensuring the import process doesn't take up all the server resources etc.<p>The list of impediments for such a "side" feature is unproportionally large, IMO. There are few libraries for almost every stack, but they still require me to handle at least half of these impediments by my own (resources, server config etc.).<p>I'm wondering, how do you usually handle these stuff? Do we all go through these problems over and over again or are there solutions that I'm not aware of that makes things easier, like a standalone tool or service I can "just use"?<p>If not, my maker soul asks: maybe there should be one? Maybe I should build one? Would you consider using this kind of service in your applications if one exists? Why not? ====== borplk Been there done that. Tips (apply common sense based on your specific company): 1\. As an engineer, learn to say no. Want to import some random excel sheet into our system? Sorry no you can not. 2\. Try to provide an API instead and push the problem to the customer. If they want it badly enough they can pay someone to write something that takes their stuff and imports it via your API. 3\. If you have to do the file thing avoid XLSX like the plague. Stick to CSV. It's their problem to convert their XLSX or anything else to CSV. 4\. CHOOSE, VALIDATE AND ENFORCE the format (or a few possible formats). Do not negotiate or collaborate with customers about "custom format" and so on. That is a never ending battle you will never win. You give 1 inch they take 10. Eventually they will give an animated gif compressed in a zip file, wrapped in a tarball and ask you to convert that to CSV and import it in. 5\. If you are running a typical SaaS don't turn your product into free in- house IT consulting for the random customers. Make the capability possible within the system by exposing an API and leave the rest for them to figure out. If they care about enough they will have to pay someone to create the integrations. 95% don't care and will give up and adapt. If you have enterprise customers paying 6-7 figure sums it's a different story... ~~~ marktangotango Expose the api and offer consulting to work with them, min 40 hours st $200 hour for example. ------ marktangotango Sounds like you’re talking about two separate things, the upload part and the import part. The upload part is solved for most languages and frameworks. The import step; excel parsing solved, getting data into the correct format is highly app specific. Maybe you could clarify what you have in mind? ------ lucasverra SheetJs [0] [0]: [http://sheetjs.com/](http://sheetjs.com/) free as beer, voila ! ------ acesubido > If not, my maker soul asks: maybe there should be one? Maybe I should build > one? Would you consider using this kind of service in your applications if > one exists? Why not? To answer your "maybe there should be one?" question. What you're describing sounds like this: [https://flatfile.io/](https://flatfile.io/). It was shared here 2 months ago. Though to answer your original question: > How do you handle Excel import/exports in your apps One way we go about that is: whenever someone uploads a file, create some sort of UploadRequest record which contains the filepath in S3/Azure/GCS/etc. Then the actual parsing and validation is spun off in a worker process. That way the web process isn't locked and we can pub progress ((processed_rows/row_count).percentage) on authorized subs. If that worker process ends, update the UploadRequest record status and dump the array of good_rows/error_rows in some column for that record. Users see that the status for that UploadRequest is updated, then they can review the UploadRequest errors. If there are errors, they download the uploaded file, fix that and re- upload again. At the start you can also provide a template to "gate" your upload, if it doesn't match your template you blow up UploadRequest with the proper error. If all is good, they click "Process" or something, which actually inserts the rows or does whatever. Again, that’s just one way. If bizdev asks to make a feature that allows fixing those rows in your app without leaving the browser, we find that it slowly feature creeps into Google Sheets territory, which is a BIG undertaking and a separate feature on it’s own. It's a nice experience to do in-app editing but we try to see if most of our Excel uploaders would prefer to go back to Excel for editing. Sometimes we find that they’ll prefer going back to Excel because they’ll use the same excel sheet for other purposes in their process (send that Excel as an email to another department, use that and aggregate it as a separate report, etc.). But really, the hardest part in Excel uploads isn't server resources, progress, file encoding, or timeouts, it's the validation. There are different levels of validation: from presence checks, formatting, type-checking to running a row or a cell against business logic, 3rd-party API calls or records in your database. This is where most User errors arise, because you'd have to educate them on what values to put if you're referencing something in your business logic (special abbreviated codes, special combination of codes, date formats, etc.). ~~~ FearNotDaniel Small question, since the developer docs are not available on mobile devices: When the flatfile.io homepage keeps referring to "XLS" docs, is it actually trying to say they will import modern Excel files ("XLSX") or does it literally mean you would have to ask users to re-save their spreadsheets into the ancient format?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to fix knockout/playoff tournament format - awa http://letuscode.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-every-other-playoff-system-sucks.html A nice hack for fixing the knockout tournament format. The discussion on soccer (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850202) reminded me of this piece I wanted to write about for a long time. ====== awa A hack for fixing knockout tournaments. The discussion on soccer yesterday (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850202>) reminded me of this piece I wanted to write.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Spotify plans to join the hardware race, but what can it offer? - adrian_mrd https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/spotify-is-building-a-hardware-product-and-it-could-be-a-smart-speaker/ ====== adrian_mrd Really hope this is something unique and interesting - rather than just a copycat smart speaker, for instance. Spotify has such a strong brand and identity, so hopefully they can imbue that into any hardware (if/when it gets released). And given Sweden's fantastic music pedigree (Sverige!), I could even see potential for a music/rhythm device-of-sorts - more Dropmix and Guitar Hero - than say something akin to a UE Boom or an Echo Dot.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Big Banks Thread the Software Performance Needle - osullivj http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/02/02/threading-the-performance-needling-with-automated-pinning/ ====== Chyzwar Self advertising on crappy tech. Running everything on one box is like moving back to mainframe era. Thread pinning described in article is BS, software will run as process not threads and I don't think you can use custom scheduler for processes in linux kernel. This whole thread manager is just few settings on task scheduler and kernel config options. This type of tinkering with kernel is extremely dangerous. AWS + Docker and I could be build much more flexible and faster platform.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Would you risk $31,000 for milliseconds of application response time? - lmacvittie http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/03/30/would-you-risk-31000-for-milliseconds-of-application-response-time.aspx ====== sho Your thesis is at odds with the experiences of others. For example, Marissa Mayer from Google once noted that a 500ms delay in search results directly resulted in a 20% drop in traffic. And Amazon's A/B testing indicated that even a slowdown of 100ms resulted in a measurable drop in sales. Speed definitely matters.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Intel Gives Moore’s Law a Makeover - jonbaer https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/05/13/intel-gives-moores-law-a-makeover/ ====== Fjolsvith Must be rewriting it to address performance hits from Meltdown and Spectre.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A collection of open AWS security solutions - hackeralmond https://asecure.cloud/solutions/ ====== hackeralmond I wanted to have an easily searchable collection for security solutions posted by AWS and the community, and something that could be updated on an ongoing basis. I would love to get some feedback or suggestions for content, layout or any other details.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tell HN: How to ban url shorteners from linking to your site - pj This is just an idea I'm going to throw out there. It seems a bit odd to suggest it because any link is a good link, right? Maybe not.<p>Anyway, something like this in a bit of javascript would prevent people from linking to your site using a url shortener:<p><pre><code> <script> if (document.referrer.indexOf('bit.ly') > 0 \|\| document.referrer.indexOf('someothershortener')>0) document.location.href='http://yoursite.com/noshortener.html'; </script> </code></pre> Put in that noshortener.html some content that will tell people why you don't allow shorteners to your content, here are some suggestions:<p><pre><code> 1) You want to know where your visitors are coming from and shorteners steal the real referrer. 2) Shorteners are a layer of indirection that could be modified beyond the user of the shortener's discretion to do something like digg is doing now 3) If the shortener goes away, the link to the content is no longer valid 4) It slows down the web due to one more DNS lookup, one more server redirect, etc... </code></pre> Most users of shorteners, when they use one to link to a site are going to click the link just to make sure it works. When they do, they'll see your banned url shorteners page and it will help all of us "experts" in the web who understand why url shorteners are bad educate the lay users of the web as to why those url shorteners are bad.<p>Yes, we take a hit, but we are sacrificing a little traffic for a better web experience in the future. ====== zain None of the reasons you listed are significant to the person reading them. It is not the visitor's problem that you can't track referrers or that it slows down the web, and the fact that they're seeing this page means the shortened is working as intended. Furthermore, you're basically making it impossible to share links to your site on Twitter (where they get auto-shortened). All in all, you're doing little more than pissing off visitors you've probably worked pretty hard to get. ~~~ pj _the fact that they're seeing this page means the shortened is working as intended_ They won't actually see the page they used the URL shortener to create a link to, because the browser will automatically redirect to another page where you have explained why you are disallowing url shortened links to your content. I also disagree with your premise. I think the reasons I mentioned are significant to all users of the web. I do understand the issue you have presented though, that the short term benefits to the user of using a shortened url, may outweigh the long term ramifications I have listed, but perhaps as a group here, we can come up with some arguments that may help us content producers take back the web from the url shorteners. Really, I just think when taken to the logical conclusion, a web saturated with url shortened links is really a not very good web. I'm trying to propose a solution here, it may not be the best one and it will take a coordinated effort among content producers. I suppose those who ignore the call to arms are going to "please" url shortener users more than those who don't, but with a little effort and a genuine interest in a sustainable web, I think we can win this war. ~~~ rex _...the browser will automatically redirect to another page where you have explained why you are disallowing url shortened links to your content._ If you're going to the trouble of serving up content from your site, why would you disallow the content they came to see anyway? Maybe the concept could work if you had support from higher-up in the redirection process (from url shortening services themselves), but to effectively re-direct from your own page to another "you an't access this content" page on your site will only make end users confused and disinterested, driving traffic away. I agree that URL shorteners are bad and acknowledge you're trying to do something about it, but this isn't the way to solve the problem. ~~~ calambrac Because it's more important that the shorteners die before they become more entrenched than that I get their traffic. The fact that I can seriously say this right now is something worth fighting to preserve. ~~~ ubernostrum TinyURL has lasted longer than many of the sites its links point to. ~~~ calambrac The fact that for however many years TinyURL served a niche purpose hiding goatse links somehow means the recent explosion in the use of these services is positive for the web? And: what good is a shortened link to a dead site? ~~~ ubernostrum "And: what good is a shortened link to a dead site?" About as much good as an un-shortened link to a dead site, which is what it turns into after the redirect. I guess my problem here is I still haven't seen an actual _argument_ to back up the sorts of "behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Digg, and Twitter followed with him" hysteria that's been going around. Yeah, sometimes links die of old age; we've been dealing with that for years and it's not a new or unique problem. And yeah, sometimes people hide nasty things behind redirects; again, we've been dealing with that for years and it's not a new or unique problem. So what's with the gloom and doom? ~~~ calambrac _About as much good as an un-shortened link to a dead site, which is what it turns into after the redirect._ That's exactly my point; you were the one who pointed to TinyURL outlasting some of the sites it stores links to as though that were a good thing. _Yeah, sometimes links die of old age; we've been dealing with that for years and it's not a new or unique problem._ Yes, but this introduces another failure mode, where the end target could be fine, but it could be the shortener service that dies. That sure is awesome if it's your content being linked, and you have no way to fix it, huh? At least with regular links, if a link goes dead, it was your own fault, and you can fix it if you want. _And yeah, sometimes people hide nasty things behind redirects_ So why would you want to create more opportunities for this to happen? _We've been dealing with that for years and it's not a new or unique problem_ But not on the scale that we're starting to see now. You seem to be operating on the premise that things we've seen used in moderation without too much trouble are automatically safe for heavy use, but the Digg thing shows how ripe for abuse these services really are. ------ callmeed I'm all for blocking framing sites like the Diggbar, but killing all URL shorteners is a bad idea, IMO. With Twitter growing so fast and _automatically_ shortening pasted URLs, you could actually be losing some quality traffic if people start talking about your business/app/site. ~~~ calambrac Someone with a big vested interest in seeing the internet not break needs to step up and provide a shortening service that says "if you own the target, you own the shortened link, period". ~~~ barredo like <http://awe.sm> ? ------ jerf Honest question: Why do you care? Consider this like an impromptu poll about why you care about not getting linked via a shortener. (If you _don't_ care, I'd ask that you not post a reply to my message here, though I obviously can't enforce that.) I ask because I wouldn't care, but I am interested with an open mind in why someone would. ~~~ pj I think really, because I care about the future of the web. I know there are myriad problems with url shorteners and they are jeopardizing the future of the web. My website is just one little piece of it, I know, but education is grand. I think people, when presented with rational reasons that benefit us all, will listen to them. The person linking to your content is interested more than anything in bringing users to your content. If you put up a page that prevents them from doing that, then they'll use another link, or not link to you at all. Really, it's about education and education comes at a cost. If you are educating, then you aren't focusing on coding or something else. On the page where the javascript redirects, you could say, "Thank you very much for linking to my content. I think it's great that you appreciate what I have written, but please understand that the method you are using to link to it is not good and here's why: yada yada yada..." ~~~ ubernostrum You really think that being able to get a shortened URL to put in a post on Twitter is such a threat to the future of the Web that you need to, essentially, implement a huge "fuck you for trying to visit my site" message? If that's the case (and believe me, I've read Schachter's bit, and many of the zillions of "me too" posts following it, and so know the arguments inside and out at this point), I really don't have anything to say to you except "congratulations on your new job in the newspaper industry, I'm sure you'll fit right in". ~~~ joshu Indeed. I guess the main points were: 1) The shortener ought to be owned by the publisher; at least then the document and the identifier are connected within the same organization/entity/whatever. At least that way if the URL is lost, the document probably is too. 2) The shortening is necessary due to design decisions by twitter (and poor ones, at that.) Changing these in the right way could make the entire problem dissapear. Punishing users is probably not the right way. ~~~ ubernostrum Well, URL shortening has value outside of Twitter. There are plenty of services which generate absolutely enormous URLs which would be a pain to sling around on their own, and being able to get a quick, short version to refer to is awfully handy (think "directions on Google Maps"). ~~~ calambrac And before Twitter, that's the only kind of thing these services were used for. They were hardly prevalent, and they certainly weren't "necessary" in any sense. The downside just didn't really matter that much. Now that's starting to change. By analogy: there's a legitimate use for DDT, and when I go camping once a year I happily buy a bottle of it, but that doesn't make spraying it out of a firehose around cities a good idea. ~~~ ubernostrum You're blowing this so far out of proportion that I'm not sure it's possible to have a reasonable discussion with you. ~~~ calambrac You really believe that people who think heavy widespread use of url shorteners is bad for the web are too unreasonable to even speak to? Dude... alright, whatever. ~~~ ubernostrum You compared the use of shortened URLs to spraying poison out of a firehose. Can't quite put my finger on it, but yeah, I think that's a bit unreasonable. ~~~ calambrac You do know that they did actually used to spray DDT out of a firehose, right? That that wasn't just some random bullshit I made up on the spot, it's actually a case where we did wrong by taking something that's okay in moderation and trying to use it in large quantities? Do I really think url shorteners are as bad as spraying poison out of a firehose? No, but _it was a fucking analogy_. ------ a2tech I tend to think that any link and visit is a good one. What I would prefer to do is using the above javascript, detect incoming traffic from URL shorteners and display my own informational bar across the top with the pages real URL and perhaps simple stats of how many people were referred to that page using a shortened link. ~~~ pj That's a good idea, instead of document.location.href="..."; You could use: document.getElementById('urlshorteners').style.display='block'; Where originally, the div is like this <body> <div id='urlshorteners' style='display:none;'> Url shorteners information... </div> I like that idea. ------ jasonkester While we're talking about it, here's a feature I'd like to see these URL Shortening services impliment: \- If the "Shortened" URL you are about to give me is actually _longer_ than the URL I gave you, just give me back that URL. I see this sort of thing on Twitter all the time, and it drives me nuts. "hey, check out: <http://tinyurl.com/mweytn> ... which redirects you to... <http://twiddla.com/> Uh... What exactly have you shortened again? ------ keyist The reasons you give are all valid reasons. However, you miss the reason most likely to sway end-users: a shortener service can relate every page a user has seen to that user (or at least, to his ip). The privacy angle is the biggest factor imo. In your info page you may also want to promote Untiny (<http://untiny.com/extra/>) as a service which helps bypass shorteners with minimum fuss. ------ jrockway This is exactly why I use noscript. But anyway, why not a standard API, similar to robots.txt or favicon.ico that will let each site control shortening? Requesting <http://foo.com/shorten?url=http://foo.com/long/url/goes/here> will return <http://foo.com/lkjdhf> or whatever. ------ philfreo I think if you're going to do this it'd be better done as a server side redirect, like through .htaccess However even though I'm, in general, against URL shorteners, I wouldn't do this because I think there are some situations where they are helpful. ~~~ pj That's true. I just threw this together. I think you could even create a database table and generate the redirect on the server side or dynamically create the javascript. Most browsers have javascript enabled. Maybe a hacker with some time (maybe I'll create one) could create a site with a dynamically created .js file and a remote link like this: <script src="http://takebackthewebfromurlshorteners.com/bannedreferrerslist.js"> </script> This .js could be dynamically generated from a database table of known url shorteners. Such a service could even get really fancy and show stats from all the known shorteners, etc. You could add parameters like this: <script src=".../bannedlist.aspx?allow=digg.com,bit.ly,etc..."></script> Then the user could customize exactly which url shorteners they want to allow. All kinds of things a service like this could do! ~~~ nir <http://www.listable.org/json/url-shortening-sites> :) ~~~ pj Yeah! That's what i'm talking about!! now it's just a FOR loop! ~~~ bhseo <http://www.blackhat-seo.com/2009/short-url-services/> A bigger list. ------ ErrantX As a user if you did that to me I would just close the link and lose interest in your site.... Yes, agreed, the DiggBar style thing IS annoying and we should stop that. But short links are _important_. Several forums I frequent insist you use shortners for URL's longer than 25 characters (you get a warning if you dont!) to keep things neat. Twitter - your isntantly killing traffic from that crowd. Now, showing a box on the page with some of that info would be useful / understandable. ------ throw_away it would be nice if url shorteners did a double redirect so that the following happened: 1) user clicks on <http://sho.rt/abcdef> located on <http://original- referrer.com> 2) sho.rt redirects to [http://sho.rt/abcdef?original- referrer=http://original-refer...](http://sho.rt/abcdef?original- referrer=http://original-referrer.com) 3) second url redirects to the content. in this way, content owners will know where their traffic is coming from, people who place shortened urls don't have to do anything special and the pasted urls remain short. the only downside is a slight increase to latency to retrieve the second redirect. ------ tallanvor Why not pass the url the user was trying to visit to your noshortener page? Then you can have a brief blurb and let them click the link to continue. You still don't get full referrer information, but it's better than nothing and the user gets to view the content. ------ nir Might find this list of URL shorteners useful: <http://www.listable.org/show/url-shortening-sites> (can be exported as JSON/SQL/plaintext) ------ tokenadult How long are the URLs on your site, that they are getting shortened so often? ~~~ andrewf Putting as much content in the URL as possible is a common SEO tactic. A bit silly, really - we're producing readable English links targeted at the machines, and short strings of unintelligible gibberish for humans to look at and click on. ~~~ jrockway _Putting as much content in the URL as possible is a common SEO tactic._ Are there any controlled studies that shows that this does anything useful? Or is it an imagined effect? ("We think it should work this way, so it does!") ------ paul9290 ALl links will die someday! Not every website is going to be around forever! The only ppl who hate on URL shorteners is this crowd here while millions of others usual them daily! We are hackers and thus if this is such a big issue and change, one of us should do something about it. Something that works for the users and solves the issue about 3% of all users rant about! ------ skwaddar I have no idea what your beef is, I think you have a stick up your ass about something. Why you think you're some sort of web "expert" is beyond me. A real expert wouldn't be using javascript for this for a start. Punishing third parties because of some moral crusade is dumb. Slows down the web hahahah jeesh.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Every Ubuntu Karmic user will have an address book stored in CouchDB - paulcarey http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200910.mbox/%3c4AD53996.3090104@canonical.com%3e ====== felixc Though the comments here so far seem positive, there has also been a lot of negative backlash, primarily out of privacy concerns. Elliot Murphy posted a comment on LWN clarifying his message (comment here: <http://lwn.net/Articles/356947/> attached to parent <http://lwn.net/Articles/356911/>). The most relevant part is this: "It seems I was overenthusiastic when sending that email to the couchdb dev list, and left out an important word: 'can' be replicated :)" In other words, this is an optional service that you can choose to use -- no default install is going to send your info to Canonical. ~~~ chanux abook with dropbox/ubuntuone for the geek who is concerned about privacy. ------ davidw Seems like an awful lot of server just for an address book. ~~~ gord clearly Ubuntu think CouchDB will be useful in other areas... and this is a trial run. Id stick my neck out to say that something like CouchDB will become the de- facto standard for almost all data. Data that isn't {securely} on the web is in effect data that doesn't exist, while more data than not is naturally in a graph or tree-like form. Mix in offline mode, JavaScript on client and server and you have a really nice development stack to make apps with. I can imagine a generation of teenagers developing web apps [they'll think there is no other kind of app] using map / reduce idioms to get to their data, SQL a thing of the past. ~~~ dualogy Would be nice but my feeling is that the simplicity of SQL CRUD statements could be grokked by way more teenagers in the "past" than will be able to grasp map-reduce in the "future". Myself I'm also into document DBs and graph DBs, a lot. But for the kind of rapid prototyping that got most of us going as teenagers in the first place, I'd argue table based data with the simplest incarnations of INSERT UPDATE DELETE SELECT WHERE haven't been beaten yet by those no-SQL DBs. ------ tmountain Does this also mean Erlang will ship with Ubuntu? That'd be a nice bonus. ~~~ jurjenh Yes, been installed on my laptop for a good coupla months now... Now I only have to <http://learnyousomeerlang.com/> for great good! ------ futuremint The awesome part about it is that your database can be very easily replicated "to the cloud" for backup/sharing purposes. This is an attractive feature of CouchDB that I'm considering for a web application too. ~~~ tlrobinson Is it possible to replicate a users' local database into a shared "cloud" database (many-to-one) or does the "cloud" have to have one database per user (one-to-one) ~~~ mey CouchDB's current built in replication doesn't have the concept of sharing partial data yet. It currently push/pulls everything in a single Database. Conversely it's also a trivial thing to create a new database, so one database per user would certainly be possible. Also as the project develops that is functionality that is intended to be there. ------ DanielStraight This sounds like it has some cool potential. Also, I'm in love with CouchDB. So... awesome! ------ chanux But I thought KDE guys would be the first to go with CouchDB. ------ swannodette Just mentioned this myself here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881488> ~~~ gord HN/PG feature request - merge 'really the same' threads feature? I guess a link works well enough.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hacker known as “fxmsp,” charged with fraud hacking 40 different countries - vuln https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/citizen-kazakhstan-known-fxmsp-charged-computer-fraud-wire-fraud-and-conspiracy-hacking ====== rurban He is known under his real name Turchin, not his handle fxmsp.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Windows HAL Functions (Hal.dll) - peter_d_sherman https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/hal/api/index.htm?tx=155;13 ====== peter_d_sherman Even though Windows is not open source, from a pure OS design perspective, I like the idea that OS functions which touch hardware directly -- are placed into their own library... For future OS designers out there, the list of function names gives a clue as to what functionality the base layer of a future OS might include...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
On End-To-End Program Generation from User Intention by Deep Neural Networks - apsec112 http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07211 ====== teraflop RNN's are pretty cool, and I don't want to be a downer, but we need to keep the hype under control. Ever since Karpathy's excellent article[1] and sample code made the rounds, it seems to have become a popular pastime to grab some arbitrary dataset, throw a deep network at it, and marvel at whatever output it synthesizes. Those experiments are fun, but we need to avoid the temptation to make assumptions about how well they generalize to "hard AI" problems. Let's look at the actual experiment described in this paper. Given a corpus of a couple thousand short programs, they discovered that a neural network can: * Mix and match fragments of near-identical programs to produce something that is "almost" compilable and "almost" equivalent to one of the originals. * Identify patterns that occur in specific frequent contexts (e.g. the array name that appears before the string "[100]" in the examples given) and remember them for short periods of time, albeit not reliably. * Do this for four different problems with a single network. We are not told what the problems are, much less how they were chosen or what the sample data looks like. What's notably lacking is any discussion of generalizing beyond the training data. This isn't much different from writing a paper about how if you give a classifier the same data at training and test time, it can achieve a high accuracy, and using that as a "case study" to argue that the algorithm has the potential to be useful on different test data. Even if the claim turns out to be true, the experiment provides no evidence for it. (Note also that there is zero _technical_ contribution from the authors; they appear to have literally just downloaded Andrej Karpathy's code and cat'ed a bunch of files into it. The paper cites Karpathy's article as "other work" but makes no mention of the fact that they used his code.) It's not entirely uninteresting as a quick demo, and there are a few paragraphs of interesting speculation about the difficult aspects of automatic program generation. However, I don't think either those speculations or the near-trivial demonstration justify the paper's claim to "demonstrate the feasibility" of end-to-end code generation. [1]: [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
When everybody’s reading, but nobody’s smarter, what value has the word? - pmcpinto http://www.themorningnews.org/article/binge-reading-disorder ====== macromaniac I think it would be cool if, when scrolling through an article, the word size changes based on how far along the article you are. For instance, at the top of the article the words towards the top of your screen are bigger and easier to read, and at the bottom of the article the words towards the bottom of your screen are bigger and easier to read. This has the effect that your eyes start at the top of the article and slowly go towards the bottom as you read through the article. This should help combat the "F" shaped reading problem the article was talking about. ~~~ serve_yay ... What?! ------ lsiebert Have people not heard of the flynn effect? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) Basically, IQ has been continually increasing since it was first measured, by about 3 IQ points per decade in the US. IQ tests are readjusted based on this. ~~~ SpaceManNabs The article is about how the disproportionate state of our knowledge and time spent reading when using a naive assumption that more reading leads to more "smart." Nothing about measurable differences in performance... ~~~ spiritplumber I'd love an IQ test that allows, and makes the assumption, that the person taking the test has a smartphone. ~~~ superobserver Good luck: www.iq-tests-for-the-high-range.com ------ gavinpc So far, there are three comments, each with links to further reading. C'mon, guys. TL;DR: TL;DR ------ jdc Schopenhauer's "On Reading and Books": [https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter3.html) ------ lotsofmangos _" The typical American consumes more than 100,000 words a day, and remembers none of them."_ Well, this is obviously not true. Also, we are seeing the largest explosion in literacy in history. ------ obstinate But before you stop to consider that, please finish reading my contribution to the supposed problem. ------ Sven7 I call it the Jon Stewart\Glenn Beck model of selling ads. Reactions vs Solutions. ------ ocfx [http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html) ~~~ pcurve "Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why." Love that paragraph. Thanks for the link. Unlike other fillers I've read all day, this one will stick with me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Negative Carbon Emissions - biofox https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2019/03/02/negative-carbon-emissions/ ====== hannob This starts to sound right and at the end takes the completely wrong turn when he says: "I especially like the idea of CO2 scrubbing for coal-fired power plants." I actually believe this is the big risk of all Carbon removal and Carbon Storage technologies, and the one that always needs to be kept in mind: That they're used to justify the continuing use of fossil fuels. (This isn't theoretical. This happened around 10 years in Germany when many new coal plants were built, and when people brought up the climate issue a very common answer was: "Don't worry, we already planned to enhance those plants with Carbon Capture and Storage technology later." Of course the latter never happened. At around the same time Norway had very similar discussions and I'm sure it happened elsewhere, too.) ~~~ taneq Is continuing to use fossil fuels a bad thing, if it's in conjunction with sufficient cleanup systems? It sounds like in your example, the problem is the bait-and-switch from "clean CO2-neutral power plants" to "traditional coal power plants". ~~~ hannob Stopping fossil fuel burning is always preferrable to carbon cleanup technologies. It's simply cheaper and easier. Also "CO2-neutral coal power plants" is a scam. You'll always have emissions left. Digging up coal causes emissions (the coal is not alone, there's e.g. always methane coming up with it that you can't capture). No Carbon removal tech can remove 100% of Carbon from emissions. (There was actually a lawsuite because Vattenfall called one of their CCS testing plants "carbon free". They lost.) ------ cmutel The following open access publications give a broad overview of NETs: Part 1: Research landscape and synthesis: [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9b](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9b) Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects: [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f) Part 3: Innovation and upscaling: [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4) ~~~ aoner If you are interested in negative emissions this is the best review paper I've come across so far that covers all various negative emission technologies, from trees and oceans to bio-energy with carbon capture storage (BECSS) and direct air capture (DAC). Highly recommended. ------ saagarjha The article mentions this itself, but I think it's still worth mentioning that carbon scrubbing is hard to scale. IMO it's still better to work towards cutting emissions and finding sources of clean energy: in a very extreme case, assuming we can figure out how to get unlimited clean energy from fission/fusion/pushing baryons into the seventh dimension we can just pull CO₂ from the atmosphere and split it. Many of our problems can be solved with unlimited energy; clean water for example (just boil it!). ------ ggm I feel very strongly that proposed technical solutions to de-carbonise need to explain the energy cost of driving CO and CO2 into carbonate complexes. If the proposal is to make something like methane clathrates in extreme depth there is a pumping cost. If the proposal is to inject into fracking and have it form complexes underground there is a pumping cost. Most carbon intense energy sources depend on big pressure drop across the turbine so there is little energy in the stream and the smokestack for the fuel is decoupled from the steam anyway so either there is a reaction energy (coming from where?) Or it consumes power being generated which reduces overall system efficiency. I just don't get it: there is no free lunch burning coal to make heat to make steam implies combustion which necessarily makes CO and CO2 and it's in gaseous form. It's diffuse. So making liquids or pumpable gas expends energy and making to flow over a reaction surface to make carbonate implies back pressure on the flue gases.. it's just hard work. ~~~ 205guy Nature invented solar-powered CO2 scrubbers, they're called plants (and algae). We just need to not kill them everywhere. This is hard when humans have an expanding population, which is why we humans need to realize that we are now so numerous we are competing for physical space (Our housing and agricultural needs) against the very resources we need to live (forests and clean water and clean air). ~~~ AnimalMuppet It's not that simple. If we didn't kill any more plants, would the plants be able to pull CO2 out of the air at the rate we're producing it? I am not an expert, but I believe that the answer is no. ------ astazangasta This is a thermodynamically losing proposition for a human industry - liberating carbon is enthalpically and entropically favorable. Sequestering it requires putting the genie back in the bottle, and where will the energy budget for that come from? Fortunately there is a system to do this which dwarfs in scale pretty much any industry humans ever have and ever will come up with: photosynthesis. While 10 Gigatons of C is a lot, terrestrial biomass is ~600 Gigatons of C. The best strategy for reversing carbon emissions is letting the Earth soak it back up again. ~~~ adrianN Photosynthesis is only about 1% efficient and you'd have to store the biomass in a form that doesn't decompose (e.g. as coal). It might be possible to improve this. ~~~ barry-cotter Mass production of biochar and use it as a soil amendment. Sequesters carbon in production, sequesters more in the soil as it encourages biomass formation and encourages even more as plants grown in such soil do better. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar) > Biochar is charcoal used as a soil amendment. Biochar is a stable solid, > rich in carbon, and can endure in soil for thousands of years.[1] Like most > charcoal, biochar is made from biomass via pyrolysis. Biochar is under > investigation as an approach to carbon sequestration,[1] as it has the > potential to help mitigate climate change.[2][3][4] It results in processes > related to pyrogenic carbon capture and storage (PyCCS).[5] Independently, > biochar can increase soil fertility of acidic soils (low pH soils), increase > agricultural productivity, and provide protection against some foliar and > soil-borne diseases.[6] ~~~ roryisok This passage caught my eye : > Researchers have estimated that sustainable use of biocharring could reduce > the global net emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2), methane, and nitrous > oxide by up to 1.8 Pg CO 2-C equivalent (CO 2-Ce) per year (12% of current > anthropogenic CO 2-Ce emissions; 1 Pg=1 Gt), and total net emissions over > the course of the next century by 130 Pg CO 2-Ce, without endangering food > security, habitat, or soil conservation. It feels like every other week I read about one approach which has the potential to save us from climate change, if scaled correctly. Suberin rich food crops. Autonomous ships that produce artificial clouds. Biochar. Painting things white. Olivine rock weathering. Greening the Sahara. I don't believe any of these solutions alone is going to save the planet, but surely doing several in concert would help ------ mrpopo The article does a good job at keeping ideas within the realm of reality. > I especially like the idea of CO2 scrubbing for coal-fired power plants. Of > course to cut carbon emissions it would be better to ban coal-fired power > plants. I don't like this idea at all. It shows that at the current rate of action, global warming handling is a tragedy. It's a life threatening issue for billions of us, yet nothing happens, only insignificant changes. ~~~ chrisco255 Life threatening? Cold weather and lack of electricity kill far more people than global warming. ~~~ mrpopo Currently yes, although it's not long before things are really going to change. I am not sure where you stand on this but here are a few things to think about : I assume you heard of the 1.5C target from the COP21. Depending on the estimations we already reached +1, and there is a lot of inertia in the whole system, so it's just not gonna happen. It's all a political "aim high, think later" thing. Without doing anything about the climate itself, thepeak oil and the people aversion to coal pollution will probably slow down our carbon addiction by the end of the century. Estimates for this scenario are within 7-12C. More optimistic scientific reviews, that assume we would give a fuck about it, are in the 3-7C range. Note that there are more centuries to come. Assume we reach a rather optimistic 4C global warming. This is a worldwide average, and you may know that oceans trap most of the heat, so the air above the oceans will not warm up as much. To compensate, it means that the air above land will be a couple degrees hotter, say 6C, and depending on how the winds will change, some place will get hotter than others (for instance currently the Arctic region is already 2C warmer than ours industrial levels). So even in an optimistic scenario today the average year round temperature in some place could get to +10C. If nothing is done, I'm not quite sure, but it's probably safe to say that it will be +20-30C in some areas. Maybe this kind of temperature delta can make you think of the kind of challenge the next generations would face. Vegetation (food) would die during heat waves, mass migrations, etc. When ice caps melt, the earth's albedo changes, and it reflects less sunlight. That's one of the mechanisms behind the transitions from an ice age to a warm age. The Arctic is currently melting at unprecedented rates, which means that the warming is unlikely to stop unless drastic changes are done. Global warming causes sea level rises, through dilatation due to heat, and melting of on-land ice (greenland, Antarctica). Current warming is enough to make sea levels rise by 1m. This is locked in (unstoppable). Estimates vary but including future warming, it may rise by 2.4m. Bangladesh is the poster child for rising sea level dangers. It's not just about loss of coastal areas (40%), but also increased salinity in drinking water, less fertile lands. People will lose their houses and starve. There's a lot more to global warming than this, and the literature is plenty. I invite you to discover it. ------ aoner I've read a lot of papers about negative emissions. My main take-away was: 1\. It will be necessary 2\. We can solve part of the problem with cheaper/easier solutions like trees and ocean farming, but we will need more technological solutions. I think BECSS are difficult since it's still uncertain how the actual net carbon negativity changes when we change land to grow 'BECSS' crops/grasses. Also BECCS cost a land and water, something which will be a luxury when we are going from 7.5 billion to 10 billion people in 2050. With DAC we can actually set an upper boundary of the total cost of the negative emissions, which will only go down due to technological improvements. What I do agree on is that we need to stop using fossil fuels where possible. I don't think every sector will be ready in time (airplanes and boats for example). However we can make synthetic fuels using direct air capture which are almost carbon neutral (look at the super work David Keith is doing with Carbon Engineering: [http://carbonengineering.com/](http://carbonengineering.com/) ) ~~~ roryisok > Also BECCS cost a land and water, something which will be a luxury when we > are going from 7.5 billion to 10 billion people in 2050 This is going to be the biggest challenge. It's going to be a struggle to maintain biodiversity and stop deforestation while also trying to feed 10 billion people , especially with the overfishing currently happening with just 7. We'll have more mouths to feed and less fish to do it with. The only way we can realistically achieve this is by cutting out livestock, increasing fish farming and lab grown meat and building lots and lots of vertical farms. ------ alexandercrohde How about this proposal - Carbon tax. Over 30 years it scales up to the cost of carbon-scrubbing. All of the tax collected goes to purchasing scrubbing (within the US only, and monitored for accountability). ~~~ 205guy How about putting it much more simply: you can either change to reduce your carbon usage across the board (and help everyone else to understand and do the same) or your children will suffer by your own fault. ~~~ alexandercrohde That's a terrible non-solution. Your strategy is to hope that every single person independently chooses to reduce carbon usage? It _has_ to be government mandated. And most of the carbon is by COMPANIES not individuals. ~~~ 205guy That may work in China (maybe), but I'm afraid it doesn't stand a chance in the US--probably still the biggest CO2 emitter overall and certainly the highest per capita. No, my strategy is to spread this message far and wide, and encourage others to do so too, until hopefully enough people are convinced and choose to do so. I kinda went overboard with the comments on this one article, but I was inspired. Sometimes I wonder if turning carbon-piety into a religion (or vice versa) would be the way to go. After all, the way I see it, the defining characteristic of US conservatives, who generally oppose individual actions and government mandates to reduce carbon, is religiousness. "Forgive me father for I have flown in an airplane again this month." ------ fallingfrog I can only imagine how it feels to be an 18 year old in 2019, knowing what’s going to happen in your lifetime. A lot of the social movements of the 60’s were ultimately based on the fact that every young male at that time had a draft number, and so the political struggle was personal and very real. I’m not surprised that young people are starting to treat climate change in the same way. It’s different when it’s your life that’s on the line. ~~~ antt Being 18 anytime between 1948 and 1988 was worse. People forget that everyone expected a nuclear war to kill all of us in a way that makes climate change seem like a nice relaxing day at the beach. ~~~ paulsutter I was 18 in 1984 and I never met anyone in my entire life who expected nuclear war. Anyone with an interest in science already knew about global warming in 1984. And politicians from both parties haven’t done jack about it ever since. ~~~ ars That is not true. I was (and am) obsessed with science and the only thing I heard about then was global _cooling_ because of carbon (as in smoke, not carbon dioxide) pollution. The main fear back then was toxins of various kinds, from smog to nuclear to pesticides. I agree with you that nuclear war was an earlier fear, 1960's. Back then the concern was cleaning up the environment. CO2 was never mentioned. It was about air and water pollution, and garbage on land. ~~~ mikeash I would just like to remind everybody that nuclear war is still a major threat! It didn’t evaporate with the USSR, despite how people act. The US and Russia still have thousands of warheads ready to go at a moment’s notice. The numbers are down substantially from their peak, but the arsenals are still large enough to thoroughly wreck civilization. I’m constantly baffled at how everyone acts like nuclear war is a historical curiosity. This is not to take away from climate change, which is also a major threat. It’s not either-or, we should fix both. ------ mrhappyunhappy I feel like this article wrongly assumes that the switch from coal to alternative would take a very long time and presents a nifty graph of total energy use. The reality is that current policies worldwide favor coal for many reasons - most of which boil down to self-preservation. If a switch in policy was enacted quickly, that chart would see a dramatic rise in alternative energy sources. The trick is enacting self-harming policies that limit economic prosperity while ensuring the other guy does the same. This is where international agreements come in, which some countries _ahem_ simply ignore. What is the ultimate solution? I don’t know, but it feels like we need a huge shift in political values that put climate as the one and only issue that matters before all else. This would require and educated public willing to put aside other policies that they may disagree with. Ultimately we are probably doomed because our individual self-preservation will trump our collective well being (however flawed this view may be given that we are all living on the same rock). ------ pkrein Lots of discussion here, but is anybody here working on a negative emission technology that might help? Would love to hear about it! We’re working on carbon negative industrial hydrogen at Charm Industrial, and we’re hiring: [https://www.charmindustrial.com/about](https://www.charmindustrial.com/about) ~~~ aoner I've definetly come across charm industrial :). What is your plan on the negative emissions part? Underground CCS or do you have utilization plans? ~~~ pkrein Overproduction of biochar relative to closed loop heating needs, and underground CCS. ------ planck01 Couldn't we achieve negative carbon emission simply by build all houses from wood? Cut down all grown trees and replace them by young ones. The houses act as carbon sinks. The young trees capture more co2 than the old trees. Easy. Takes little technology, but does take up land. Probably we need all alternatives too, but this seems low hanging fruit to me. ~~~ kanjus The theory that young trees capture more CO2 than older trees has been debunked as far as I know. The best carbon sinks are older large trees: they grow at lower rates height-wise, but faster mass-wise, sequestering much more carbon. A single large tree might add the same amount of carbon to a forest within a year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree, I’ll add some sources later ~~~ 205guy I read once that the highest density of living entities on the planet, measured in weight per surface area, are the Sequoia groves in California. That is, the mature ones that escaped logging. Now, I'm not sure we can consider the entire tree to be alive, but relevant to this discussion, they are almost entirely composed of atmospheric carbon, tons and tons of it quite literally. In all practicality though, I think sequoia and redwoods are more difficult to grow and have limited climate tolerances (an issue when the the climate is changing). I wonder if go fast-growing tropical trees such as albezias or others would be better. But we should also be looking for 3-4 ideal trees for each climate zone or better yet, trees adapted to several zones. ------ agumonkey A tiny gateway into cement replacement: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement#Green_cement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement#Green_cement) ------ l_camacho84 The best negative carbon tech that exists are trees and plants. It's not future tech it's already here! ~~~ ElKrist Yes. However it only works when trees grow and are not burnt after (use in construction for example). I will try to find sources if you're interested but basically this solution (planting forest & not burning wood) does not scale. You'd have to cover very large areas with trees (losing land for agriculture btw). To push it further as the amount of land is limited this can't work with a scenario of growing emissions. It's clearly interesting to mitigate the problem though. ~~~ l_camacho84 We don't need to scale up if the developed countries agree to scale down consumption. Reducing commuting (working from home when possible), have taxes on airplane travel, tax goods that come unnecessarily from far away, invest in durability. This is not scyfy solutions sorry to disappoint ~~~ ben_w Sure, and the UK could have a 4-hour work week if it halved it’s manufacturing and automated all its services. Annoyingly, people don’t follow such oversimplified economic models. (If we did, free market economics and communism would both be ‘right’). ~~~ leadingthenet Well they are both "right" in the sense that they have different premises and optimise for different variables in the economy. They both work in certain circumstances and not in others. There's no such thing as a perfect economic system that magically solves all human problems, but that doesn't mean that there aren't gradations of how good one is compared to another, given a set of things you want to achieve in a society. Capitalism has advantages and disadvantages, and the same is true for communism. If, however, the variable you want to optimise for is carbon footprint, then clearly capitalism is the wrong tool for the job. Also, models are a perfect representation of reality, but since we can't possibly capture all the data inherent in a system as large as our planet (or Solar System, or the Universe), it's pretty much all we have to make sense of the world.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Internship/Apprenticeship in Buenos Aires - gluque I'm an Electronics Engineering student. I'm moving to Argentina to finish my degree and would really appreciate any [info \| hints \| tips] to find a job or internship there. ====== tomascot Do you know spanish? Search for satellogic, they build satellites ------ brudgers Which companies interest you? ~~~ gluque I've worked mainly with instrumentation, control, embedded systems and FPGAs ~~~ brudgers I am curious about the names of companies that interest you because research is often helpful in finding an internship (and later when finding regular employment). Maybe you will have great luck and a Hacker News reader in Buenos Aires will discover your question and offer you a job (but there is no contact information in your profile). It is more likely that you will have to depend on the ordinary luck of finding a job by gathering relevant facts about possible companies or by contacting the placement office of your school or by meeting people and hearing about a job from them. The internet probably will not replace most of the traditional hard work of finding a job. ~~~ gluque Thanks for the advice, I know It seems like I'm going for an easy way out (and it kinda is), but I was curious to see if there was anyone from Buenos Aires who I could talk to since I don't know anyone in the industry there. (And the industry in my country is non existent). I'm currently searching for companies and openings but I'll expect to do the real work when I arrive there in a couple of weeks, I guess I wanted to get a few pointers. ~~~ brudgers My experience has been that it is usually much easier to look for a job once I am in the new place. In the past, however, I have done research beforehand...once it involved cutting a payphone phonebook in half with a pocket knife and taking it back to my home town, but that is a pre-internet story. Besides companies, it might make sense to look at hacker spaces and meetups and electronics surplus stores. Also, think about talking to companies that sell instruments and electronics parts because they will know who the local industries. I don't attribute anything to laziness. There's only so much a person can do and before moving there are a lot of other things to do.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Facebook open-sources a speech-recognition system and a machine learning library - runesoerensen https://code.fb.com/ai-research/wav2letter/ ====== mark_l_watson Very nice. In my work, as much as I love working with RNNs, convolutional models are faster to train and use. Years ago, FB blew away text modeling speed with fasttext and it is good see these projects made publicly available also. As much as I sometimes criticize FB and Google over privacy issues, they also do a lot of good by realeasing open source systems. Most of my work involves using TensorFlow and Keras, and a little over two years ago I replaced a convolutional text classification model with fasttext, with good results. ~~~ stochastic_monk I haven’t done any significant projects using neural networks for sequence modeling or analysis, but when I do, I plan to start with a temporal convolutional network, based on [0]. They argue that RNNs being standard is likely an artefact of the history of the field, while they get superior performance from TCNs. [0] [https://github.com/locuslab/TCN](https://github.com/locuslab/TCN) ~~~ yablak The truth is that the best architecture depends on the problem, and you get a lot out of "graduate student gradient descent", i.e., hyperparameter search and fiddling with the architecture fine grained details. You'll want to experiment with rnn, tcn, and transformer (t2t) models to find the best one for your problem. Disclaimer, I wrote the TF RNN api. ~~~ alexcnwy Totally agree - it's hard to say which sequence architecture works best for your problem (are there long term dependencies, do they exist at multiple levels of scale, etc) and dataset size. Convolutions are cheap to compute and can be more efficient on smaller data but it's also possible that a CNN outperforms when you have a small dataset and an RNN when you have a larger dataset. ------ jimmychangas People are quick to criticize Facebook here on HN, but this release is awesome. I believe open source speech recognition is still lacking, and any contribution is very welcome. CMU Sphinx and Kaldi are great, but it feels like the most recent advances in the field are still hidden behind paid services. ~~~ pbalau You would be amazed about how little comments does an article about FB doing "this tech thing" attracts, vs a generic FB is bad. There are terribly few people that can comment on a tech subject, but everyone and their dog has an opinion about how FB destroys humanity ~~~ mempko People confuse Facebook the org with Facebook the workers. Don't confuse the great work it's workers do with the what management decides. ~~~ chrisbrandow That logic doesn’t generalize too well. ------ ToFab123 So how good is that speech recognition system in, let's say, to listen in on a phone conversation and use that information in, let's say, the Facebook news feed. You know the precise thing many, me including, suspect Facebook is actively doing. And if you say they don't do any things like that, why do they need a speech recognition system in the first given that Facebook is a text based system. ~~~ varenc They need speech recognition for their Alexa/Google Home like hardware product: [https://portal.facebook.com](https://portal.facebook.com) (Notice how much they emphasize privacy and security in their marketing...) ~~~ akhilcacharya For the record, I do think it's telling that they currently use Amazons's Alexa Voice Service for this (or at least most of it after the hotword recognition) instead of building on Project M. ~~~ varenc Alexa is optional and Facebook has their own voice recognition for Portal features, You can use the wake word “Hey Portal” for a limited set of portal commands mostly around calling and messaging, or “Alexa” for all the Alexa capabilities. When using Alexa functionality Facebook isn’t suppose to “listen” at all. (Though not sure if these queries still flow through their servers or not?) [https://portal.facebook.com/help/2149102838698668/](https://portal.facebook.com/help/2149102838698668/) ------ m0zg Where are the pre-trained models? It's worthless without them. Edit: NM, someone hunted down the AWS links wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/wav2letter/models/librispeech-glu-highdropout.bin wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/wav2letter/models/librispeech-glu-highdropout-cpu.bin wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/wav2letter/models/librispeech-glu-lowdropout.bin ------ maddyboo Link to the GitHub repo, for the lazy: [https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/](https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/) ~~~ motivated_gear As someone behind a corporate firewall on a Friday, thank you ------ Yoric Does anyone know ho this compares with Mozilla's DeepSpeech? [https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech](https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech) ~~~ yorwba From [https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06864](https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06864) "On Librispeech, we report state-of-the-art performance among end-to-end models, including Deep Speech 2 trained with 12 times more acoustic data and significantly more linguistic data." Specifically they claim word error rates that are 1 to 2 percentage points lower, 3.44% on "clean" and 11.24% on "other". ~~~ StudentStuff It'll be interesting to see if anyone can reproduce their results, thus far its been troublesome: [https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/issues/88](https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/issues/88) ------ dlojudice I wonder how all these open-source releases happening this month [1][2][3] are related to improve team morale internally... [1] [https://github.com/facebookresearch/DeepFocus](https://github.com/facebookresearch/DeepFocus) [2] [https://github.com/facebookresearch/nevergrad](https://github.com/facebookresearch/nevergrad) [3] [https://github.com/facebookresearch/pytext](https://github.com/facebookresearch/pytext) ~~~ rock_hard Probably just a end of year push to get things out ~~~ benbayard Or they're in a production code freeze so engineers and spend more time pushing these final projects to finally get them released. ~~~ xpaulbettsx It's Perf Review time, gotta get that Impact without affecting production ------ ZainRiz Did they release a model to go with this (so that the average dev can actually use this in their app) or is this just a tool for researchers? ~~~ nh2 [https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/issues/88](https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/issues/88) mentions a "pre-trained model named librispeech-glu-highdropout.bin", but I couldn't find it anywhere. [https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/issues/93](https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/issues/93) also mentions a pre-trained model but without any reference which one or where to find it. Googling "librispeech-glu-highdropout.bin" still shows the text "luajit ~/wav2letter/test.lua ~/librispeech-glu-highdropout.bin -progress -show -test dev-clean -save -datadir ~/librispeech-proc/ -dictdir ~/librispeech-proc/ -gfsai ..." for [https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/blob/master/R...](https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter/blob/master/README.md), but clicking it, it's gone. But the Google Cache still has the result, including 3 pre-trained models: wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/wav2letter/models/librispeech-glu-highdropout.bin wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/wav2letter/models/librispeech-glu-highdropout-cpu.bin wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/wav2letter/models/librispeech-glu-lowdropout.bin The cache also includes a much more detailed README on how to use the software. ~~~ taf2 Thank you! I found that some of the forks also have the more detailed README files for example: [https://github.com/19ai/wav2letter](https://github.com/19ai/wav2letter) ~~~ nh2 Thanks. It would be great if anybody could build it all and try if the out-of-the-box experience with the pretrained model is good. I've tried Mozilla's DeepSpeech a few times but so far it didn't recognise "this is a test" reliably without mistake out of the box from a good microphone. ------ ocdtrekkie Always excited to see more speech recognition releases. Way too many solutions are "just point your microphone's feed at our cloud service", and a lot of those that aren't have somewhat lagged behind. ------ sfilargi Interesting, why does FB need a speech recognition system? ~~~ karmasimida Why not? Facebook as research arm dedicated to play Go/Starcraft also, what do you think their reason is for doing that? They can use a speech recognition system to transcribe videos, just like what Youtube is doing to improve ad targeting and recommendation. Why is this hard to understand? ~~~ nurettin that would be a bit creepy and opportunistic if fb did that. Yt videos are by and large uploaded for profit. Fb videos are uploaded for storing birthdays and family vacations. ~~~ dqpb Could be used for indexing videos for search ------ freyir Any idea why they developed Flashlight for this, instead of using PyTorch? ------ ngngngng > developing in modern C++ is not much slower than in a scripting language. Is this accurate? I haven't written C++ since freshmen year of college and it was very cumbersome then. ~~~ AlexCoventry It's improved a lot in terms of expressiveness, but it's still plagued by memory errors and obscure error messages. Who said that, anyway? I don't see it in the text linked by the OP link. ~~~ ngngngng Sorry I should have mentioned, it's part of the research paper announcing the release. It's on the right column of the first page. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.07625.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.07625.pdf) ~~~ AlexCoventry Thanks. ------ nshm I like the way they politely skipped Kaldi WER on test-clean (4.31) in results table. Their best WER (4.91) will not look so attractive. ~~~ woodson Even more so if they compared it to Kaldi TDNN-LSTM with RNNLM lattice rescoring (test-clean 3.22%, apparently): [https://github.com/kaldi- asr/kaldi/blob/master/egs/librispee...](https://github.com/kaldi- asr/kaldi/blob/master/egs/librispeech/s5/local/chain/tuning/run_tdnn_lstm_1b.sh) ------ IshKebab This is excellent. Modern free speech recognition software is hard to come by. Everything except Kaldi has laughable error rates, and Kaldi is a huge pain to set up. Will be interesting to see what people can do with this and the available data sets. ~~~ faitswulff > available data sets Reminder that Mozilla's Common Voice project accepts voice donations! [https://voice.mozilla.org/](https://voice.mozilla.org/) ~~~ darkpuma Given the value of open source training data (or scarcity of it), has anybody attempted to use LibriVox for training? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibriVox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibriVox) [https://librivox.org/](https://librivox.org/) The recordings are public domain audio books of public domain books, so the licensing should be fine. The audio isn't annotated, but given the value involved I think it would be worth attempting to use forced alignment to annotate the recordings with their public domain source texts. Forced alignment using the sort of speech recognizer you're trying to train in the first place may be a bit "chicken and the egg", but from some experiments I've run myself existing open source speech recognizers can do it reasonably well. Humans could manually tune up the alignment to improve the quality if necessary. As for motivating people to actually do that mundane work... well these are audio books so maybe the work isn't so mundane after all! The LibriVox recording of Tom Sawyer (read by John Greenman: [https://librivox.org/tom- sawyer-by-mark-twain/](https://librivox.org/tom-sawyer-by-mark-twain/)) is pretty great and has been listened to by millions of people. If somebody created a "read along" web app that showed you the text of the book from Project Gutenberg getting highlighted as the audiobook from LibriVox was played, users who have an interest in reading/hearing the book could have their attention held by Mark Twain and with the right UI provide fine tuning for the forced alignment at the same time. ~~~ lingz Librivox is commonly used as a training corpus however it's main weakness is that reading speech differs quite a lot from conversational speech. ~~~ darkpuma I see. I hadn't considered that might be a weakness because to be honest the creation of forced alignments between LibriVox and the source texts was my objective (it's a feature that exists on some Kindle's when pairing ebooks with audible audio books. I believe the feature makes literature more accessible, a noble enough cause. Although I can understand why more effort is being spent on recognizing conversational speech.) ------ honkycat I like to take recordings of my thoughts on my cellphone similar to Dale Cooper. Unfortunately, I do not have a Diane on the other end to translate my thoughts to text, I have to do that myself. I've been looking into things like mozilla/deepspeech and other open source libraries for automatically converting my messages to text. I'll have to take a look at this project as well! ~~~ halfjew22 Hey me too! A while ago I was looking st trying to figure out how to hack something like this together myself when I came across what is now one of my top thre apps: Otter. Sounds like a shill and I don’t really care. I’m a premium member with 6,000 minutes of transcript time per month (and sometimes I’ve used almost all of it) and I couldn’t be happier. You can export everything, support and head of product are kind and responsive, and you can click in the transcription anywhere and it will play the audio at that point. Exactly what I need. My main complain is that it’s geared towards corporate environments for conferences, meetings, etc, and so the grouping isn’t exactly what I like, but I was my text editor to keep the links more to my liking. Being able to search by word hundreds of hours of my thoughts is a fantastically empowering experience and I hope you find the same. Let me know what you think! Shoot me an email if you want to chat about it ever. If you can't tell I'm a pretty big fan. ------ buboard How good is this library? Is this good and fast enough to see wider adoption in embedded devices or phones? Would be awesome to be able to voice-enable apps without the need for a cloud provider. How would this compare with a C++ pytorch-based approach? ~~~ woodson It has dependencies on CUDA and/or Intel MKL, so not really suitable as-is for embedded/phones. ------ SpaceManNabs From what I understand, this is less of a machine learning advancement and more of an engineering advancement? Trying to see if any of the bleeding edge stuff has been implemented. Still waiting for SeLUs to be standard! ------ EGreg Is it better than openEars? I want something that will work onboard without sending to a server. ------ wpdev_63 It would be interesting to see this benchmarked against mozilla's deepspeech. ------ suyash Is there a demo of a working example app using this library? ------ g_delgado14 Management: "Let's keep open sourcing all of the things so that the informed community will overlook our transgressions!" ------ vbuwivbiu Is it ethical to use their code ? ~~~ darkpuma I think you should consider it ethical to do ethical things using a tool created by unethical people. Consider for instance Fritz Haber, the so called "father of chemical warfare" who contributed to the development of the Haber–Bosch process for artificial nitrogen fixation, that facilitated the mass production of explosives by Germany during the Great War, but also provides as much as 50% of the nitrogen in the body of an average human today due to it's role in the production of fertilizer. Whether it's ethical to contribute back to the project knowing that the unethical creator might derive unethical utility from your contributions, is perhaps slightly more complicated. However the same could be said of any open source project, you could create something new wholly from scratch and if you release it publicly, somebody else could use it for something unethical. I commend your consideration of ethical concerns, which I think is lacking in the tech industry today. But in this particular case I don't believe there is too much cause for concern. ~~~ adjkant I think your points generally stand, but I think Facebook open source raises some specific issues at least worth consideration: If your use of it contributes to its popularity, perhaps becoming the standard of X area, does that give Facebook the company more power and possibly enable other unethical actions? I think it's probably not as much of a worry given the narrowness of the area, but I do think this is something to consider when it comes to React for example.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Scientists have figured out exactly how much fun it is to get drunk - falcor84 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/24/scientists-have-figured-out-exactly-how-much-fun-it-is-to-get-drunk/ ====== falcor84 TL;DR: UK researchers studying the data coming from the Mappiness mood tracking app found a 10.79 well-being boost (on a 0-100 scale), reduced to 4 points after trying to control for all other variables[0] [0] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953616...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953616301344)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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