text
stringlengths
44
950k
meta
dict
Three Strikes of Injustice - kenshiro_o http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/opinion/three-strikes-of-injustice.html?_r=0 ====== stephengillie It's very sad that these _convicted criminials_ could have committed much more hurtful crimes for their _3rd offense_ and received the same penalty: life in prison. I don't feel sympathy for those people who are _twice_ convicted of felonies and get caught again.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Windows NT 3.50 Build 782 (RC2) source code leaked - ASVVVAD https://boards.4channel.org/vp/thread/43555197#p43583389 ====== ASVVVAD An article about it: [https://securitronlinux.com/bejiitaswrath/nt-3-50-build-782-...](https://securitronlinux.com/bejiitaswrath/nt-3-50-build-782-rc2-source- code-has-been-leaked/) Video of someone exploring the source files with date modified being in 1994: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to_uj-7pGwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to_uj-7pGwc)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PagerDuty makes their security training public - vuln https://sudo.pagerduty.com/ ====== Bucephalus355 In a few years, employers are going to start screening for and rejecting / hiring employees based on how secure they think they are in their personal lives. A user who is compromised in their personal/computer life is 99% going to be a user who is later compromised in their work/computer life. From a legal scholarship point of view, this is going to initiate some very interesting federal court cases. Like for instance, can an employer mandate that their already hired employees use an iPhone in their personal life? Can they require that all of their employees use a password manager? What about a specific brand of password manager? The questions are endless. ~~~ baseethrowaway Yes, an employer can mandate that employees use password managers for work- related accounts and are already doing it, from my experience. Also, for the precise reason you say, corp accounts exist. Employees in some companies already can't turn off 2FA for some accounts whether they want it or not. Let's not reinvent solved problems. Questions are not endless. ------ jtaft The engineering list is a decent start! Multiple vulnerability categories I see day to day appear to be missing though, such as race conditions, direct object references, and file inclusions. Would be nice to add a slide stating "Don't trust user input". If anyone is interested in security training, or looking for an application security review, feel free to get in touch with us! [https://www.oneupsecurity.com/](https://www.oneupsecurity.com/) ------ yread It's public but there are quite a few "redacted" slides there :( ~~~ dangoor Even so, there is still a good overview that remains.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Five surprising salaries (Astronomers 96K/year) - willz http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/04/09/cb.surprising.salaries/index.html ====== noodle iirc, we already had this on the front page, but i'm adding my $0.02 to it: i read this article, and then heard this (<http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1235>) this american life which included a piece on astronauts. most astronauts will never see space. 50% of their time is meetings, 25% is training, and the rest is paperwork and public speaking. not all its cracked up to be. ~~~ willz Thanks for the note. To support your reading, I met a guy from NASA a few years ago. According to him, NASA is a bureaucracy run by accountants.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Shipping Startup Shyp Raises $10M, Plans Expansion to New York City - dkasper http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/16/shyp-10m-sherpaventures/ ====== akurilin Really convenient product, excellent customer experience. Shipped half an apartment through these guys, would have taken me forever without their crew taking care of everything. ------ bitsweet Not surprised. Awesome product, great team
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
S&P 500 to exclude Snap after voting rights debate - gabbo https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/01/sp-500-to-exclude-snap-after-voting-rights-debate.html ====== hendzen This is huge. There are a huge amount of capital inflows from indexers from being part of the SP500. This will be a strong disencentive to future IPO candidates for issuing shares with reduced voting rights.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Apple is suing its former lead chip designer - mywittyname https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-suing-ex-employee-after-he-quit-tech-giant-2019-12 ====== ReptileMan Weren't non competes unenforceable in California?
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Big Breach Of Patient Data In California - joellarsson http://www.businessinsider.com/patient-data-breach-in-california-2014-3 ====== Zenst One key aspect of this is that the data was not stolen thru hacking or other networking evilness, but was physicaly stolen. Another aspect of note is that the data appears to not be encrypted. Now that is a whole area of IT security that many overlook in out times of internet badies our to get your systems. People think, not on the internet, no need for encryption as it is issolated, physicaly. Whilst the days of the RAM thefts have become a distant past with whole server rooms raided by theifs just after the RAM sticks during the times of oevr inflated memory prices making them targets. The threat to your data and systems from such means still exist and can be anything from a opertunist or disgruntled janitor down to planned targeting of the data or even the hardware it runs upon.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Picocli v4.1.0 - remkop2 https://github.com/remkop/picocli/releases/tag/v4.1.0 ====== remkop2 this release includes a built-in `generate-completion` subcommand that end users can use to easily install Bash/ZSH completion for your application
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Maily Herald – Rails open source self-hosted Mailchimp alternative - tortilla http://mailyherald.org/ ====== solidgumby Ever had to deal with email deliverability issues? This alone is a very good reason to go with a hosted service. The self-hosted software looks good but I'd never touch that with a stick. There might be cases where regulation/privacy rules makes the self-hosted system useful/required but in all other cases, do yourself a favor and use a hosted service. ~~~ lfxx You can still use Mandrill or Amazon SES for bullet-proof email delivery. This gem just helps you to organize and schedule your mailings within your app.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PolarSSL Remote Code Execution and a Denial of Service - draugadrotten https://www.certifiedsecure.com/polarssl-advisory/ ====== feld In the case of OpenVPN -- can anyone confirm if this is mitigated simply by requiring a ta key? I believe it would, as the server won't move to the next step and process certificates/keys unless the ta key is accepted.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Restricting User Access by Country using an IP Geolocation API - kevinjyc https://smartip.io ====== kevinjyc Using an IP geolocation API like [https://smartip.io](https://smartip.io) can help on restricting access to your website to users connecting from specific countries.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Find the fastest route via a place - FriedPickles http://road.li ====== rwhitman This is brilliant. Just such a useful idea. But I would say that this should have been 'mobile first', and would strongly suggest expending effort on mobile experience. This is large and by far something I'd be more likely to use on my phone than anywhere else and its very hard to use on the phone right now ~~~ wbobeirne Agreed, or at least a breakpoint at ~720 that makes it stack vertically (i.e. [http://cl.ly/image/0m30232n1N1A](http://cl.ly/image/0m30232n1N1A)) ~~~ FriedPickles That looks great, thanks. I'll try to make this happen soon. ~~~ prawn Maybe also have URLs update automatically for copying and pasting? At the moment, it stays as [http://road.li/](http://road.li/) Allowing people to share URLs might increase adoption of the site. You need to make use of your site a habit or people will think "Neat" and then forget about it. It was very fast for me from South Australia. Design needs work, but functionality was decent. Well done. ------ thesash This is super cool! I can't tell you how many times I've been driving between LA and San Diego or LA and San Francisco, and just wanted to find a coffee shop, edible food, or even a gas station. For all the things Google maps is great at, this is not one of them (despite some of the comments here to the contrary). Great work, and if you'd care for some unsolicited advice, a mobile optimized version would make this a killer roadtrip companion, and if you wanted to, you could certainly wrap it in an app and sell it. ~~~ erikig Indeed. I would also recommend giving your users a way to reach out (twitter, fb etc). Incidentally, I'm running late to a birthday party and I'm trying to pick up a gift on the way. I couldn't remember the site URL and had to spend some time searching through HN to find it. Thanks anyhow! ------ aaronpk If you're using Google Maps and are looking at a route from A to B, you can click any point on the path and drag it to anywhere on the map, and the route will update to pass through the point you selected. Example: [http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2835/9667570442_4689c021f7_o.p...](http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2835/9667570442_4689c021f7_o.png) The only downside is you can't search for the place to stop at, you have to find it on the map. ~~~ zeckalpha Until the recent UI overhaul, you could add additional stopping points, and drag to reorder them. It made solving the traveling salesman problem... I mean planning circuitous routes easier. ~~~ graue "Until the recent UI overhaul"? I still have the feature exactly as you described it in my browser. ~~~ emhs This is referring to all the push to use "The New Google Maps". One is not currently obligated to use it, but it's there and being pushed. He seems to be using it. ------ johnnyo Great idea. I often like to find something "along the way", especially for long road trips. Just a datapoint, trying to find a Boston Market along my route gave me lots of results that weren't a Boston Market. You might need to do a little better matching on the via portion of the data. ~~~ dmckeon OP may want to partner with lodging sites - road-weary travelers may not know where they will want to spend the night until late in the day, and the less expensive motel choices are often in smaller towns on their route, so a "search along route" function can be more useful than tools like Around Me with a "search around placename" function that requires iteration over many placenames. I tried "Boston Market" between San Mateo and San Jose, and got 7 results, of which 2 were Boston Market locations, 1 a Harry's Hofbrau, 2 more are probably restaurants, and 2 appear to be unrelated. Trying Boston Market "without quotes" produced many more results, including all the above, and also "Putnam Lexus," "Intel Capital," "eBay," "Aol," and, more tellingly, the "Fish Market" near Fry's in PA. So, users should employ double quotes in multi-word searches, and be selective in choosing from the results. ------ n00j The classic google maps lets you do this with any number of points. Just the new maps removed this feature: [https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=Mineta+San+Jose+Internatio...](https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=Mineta+San+Jose+International+Airport+\(SJC\),+1701+Airport+Blvd,+San+Jose,+CA&daddr=San+Mateo,+CA+to:San+Francisco+International+Airport,+San+Francisco,+CA+to:San+Francisco,+CA&hl=en&sll=37.56744,-122.170715&sspn=0.476771,0.686646&geocode=FXs1OgIdAIC7-CE- fvZtP0T6vCmbxbP6w8uPgDE- fvZtP0T6vA%3BFXAqPQId63W1-ClFVanvYJ6PgDGnG8wt9PyO_Q%3BFRT7PQId3Ii0-CE_7c0aV1zypClVVVVVjHePgDE_7c0aV1zypA%3BFVJmQAIdKAe0-CkhAGkAbZqFgDH_rXbwZxNQSg&oq=San+M&mra=ps&t=m&z=11) ~~~ FriedPickles The difference here is Google requires you to give a specific location (e.g., an "instance" of McDonalds), whereas my tool helps you decide which location to stop at when there are many workable options along your route. ------ thisisnotatest Feedback: I clicked on the suggestion "Boston to Providence via McDonalds." Then I decided to try entering the information I wished I'd had on my Labor Day road trip: where was the most convenient place to stop at In'N'Out? But after I typed my California zip code as the origin, before I could start typing my destination, the page went completely unresponsive for 10+ seconds. Apparently it was too eager and immediately started trying to find all the closest McDonalds on the route between my California town and Providence, Rhode Island. ~~~ aptwebapps Likewise. I did a search in one country, started a new one in a new country and it's still locked up. Couldn't even close the tab. (Chrome, OSX). Really neat app, though! ------ beh This is great. Suggestion – add Yelp ratings for destinations. I find myself taking long trips from point A to point B, and always feel like I'm missing out on things along the way. If I knew that the world's best coffee shop (according to Yelp) was just 4 minutes off my route, I'd love to stop. ------ outericky This is quite neat. Any way to extract the directions once I decide which way point I want to go through? ~~~ FriedPickles Thanks! There's a small "Open this route in Google Maps" link that will give directions via the selected location. I'm playing with ideas to make that more prominent. ~~~ excitom How about when you click one of the suggestions, go ahead and open the route in google maps. ------ dxbydt Here's a handy little problem you can solve with road.li - There are 5162 KFC outlets in USA. Say I want to eat a chicken breast at every one of these locations. What's the shortest route that connects all 5162 locations ? Do a topological sort of all kfc locations and run road.li iteratively ie. route from kfc-1 to kfc-3 via kfc-2, kfc-3 to kfc-5 via kfc-4, etc. until kfc-5162 - that should be a bloody interesting map. KFC will fork out hard cash for that sort of thing. Then try Domino's, Taco Bell etc. [http://ezlocal.com/blog/post/10-largest-fast-food-chains- in-...](http://ezlocal.com/blog/post/10-largest-fast-food-chains-in-the- us.aspx) ~~~ jffry "What's the shortest route that connects all 5162 locations" AKA Traveling salesman problem? Even with a few hundred cities that would be difficult to find the optimal solution, let alone thousands. You could find a decent to even good solution with other algorithms, though ~~~ pyk For the ambitious, some of the leading code for solving the TSP to optimality is Concorde (at best it has optimally solved an 85,900 "city" instance): [http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/concorde/downloads/download...](http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/concorde/downloads/downloads.htm) or solve/run Concorde on Argonne National Laboratory's server here: [http://neos.mcs.anl.gov/neos/solvers/co:concorde/TSP.html](http://neos.mcs.anl.gov/neos/solvers/co:concorde/TSP.html) Disclaimer: free for academic use ~~~ jffry Ah, cool. So I guess I was wrong that a 5k-city solution was infeasible. ------ Raphmedia Oh! That's awesome once you figure out what it is! You should make it clearer that the big feature is the "via" ! It's presented as an after thought on the website's design, while it is in fact the main feature. ------ rompic We did something similar for vienna last year as a research project (german only). [http://www.myits.at/](http://www.myits.at/) [http://www.myits.at/mobile](http://www.myits.at/mobile) ------ jamessb This looks really useful. However, it would be nice to give a link to the homepage of each option, especially when the user searched for something vague like "cafe" rather than a specific chain and so might want additional information before deciding which to visit. ------ smokestack maps.google.com does this exactly with a few extra clicks: Click "Get directions" button, click the "Add Destination" link, fill in A, B, and C then click the "Did you mean a different..." ------ joshdotsmith Awesome work on this. Another idea for you: I'd like to put in multiple competing places to see which is optimal. Should I go to Wendy's or Burger King on the way? ~~~ proexploit Similarly, I often have errands to run and 4-5 locations and it's not immediately obvious which route and order I should go to each of them. ------ sardonicbryan This is one feature that I miss from my Garmin GPS -- ability to set a route, and then search for locations or types of locations along the route. ------ avalaunch I love this. Make it an app please! I've downloaded multiple apps thinking they'd include this feature and none have. Very useful. ------ MasterScrat It's not obvious what kind of places you can specify in the "via" field... it would be nice to have autocompletion there. too. ------ awongh this is great, I was thinking of building something similar, but it didn't seem like the route finding APIs were there at the time. It seems to side step a lot of the problems I'd imagined... a great way to solve this problem I hadn't thought of before. It'd be interesting to see what it would be like for n legs of a journey (for n number of place searches) ------ shire I was looking for something like this for so long, very useful!. ------ mooneater Awesome! Does this use openstreetmap data, or what data set? ------ peter_l_downs Needs some debouncing! Other than that, it's awesome. ------ homakov Lol, i can just find route A to B and then B to C. ~~~ zackbloom With this app, B is a category ("hardware store" or "bank"), rather than a specific location. That's the innovation. ~~~ zeckalpha Google Maps _used to_ do that. ~~~ peterwwillis The old maps still does that, but it does not pick the ones along your route and sort based on shortest trip. In any case, _used to_ is not really use _ful_. ------ brndnmtthws Needs bike directions.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Group buying: Fad or future Facebook? - anya http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/01/06/group.buying.2011.prospects/index.html Group buying websites enjoyed massive growth in 2010 grabbing new customers and the headlines as the sector's biggest player, Groupon turned down a reported $6 billion offer from Google in early December. ====== veb "It brings offline and online together in a very unique way, which banner ads simply don't do. It's definitely opening people's eyes up to the way e-commerce can be transactive," Aitken said. People may _like_ Facebook, but we're still very social creatures, and we do _crave_ human interaction. Probably why we _may_ be seeing more intertwined real-life/interweb stuff soon.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How much money to set aside for legal work/fees? - chwolfe ====== zaidf It cost us about $500 to incorporate/get a PO box. I figure another few hundred - on the cheap side - if we paid to get our TOS and/or Privacy Policy written by a lawyer. ~~~ chwolfe Thanks... Did you go the LLC route? ~~~ zaidf We went with an Inc. since we had three of us with stakes and knew the number of people would only increase. Make sure you go with Delaware in most cases.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Peer-to-peer markets [pdf] - deweerdt http://papers.nber.org/tmp/95308-w21496.pdf ====== deweerdt > Internet marketplaces also have managed to deal fairly successfully with the > incentive problems that arise in long-distance and semi-anonymous trade, and > in doing so have enabled the entry and participation of small suppliers and > ‡exible workers into many markets.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The most beautiful equation - ldayley http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-the-most-beautiful-equation ====== RiderOfGiraffes Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2193377>
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Story of Oculus Rift - jonbaer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/oculus-rift-mark-zuckerberg-cover-story-palmer-lucky ====== staunch > _Before I met them, I’d assumed that Zuckerberg and Luckey would have much > in common. They’re both hackers who started valuable companies before they > turned 20, but the similarities pretty much end there._ > _..._ > _Luckey does not come from money, nor did he have access to the prep-school, > Ivy League fast track that Zuckerberg and so many of Silicon Valley’s young > masters started on._ People are still surprised that poor white people and rich white people are not the same. Wealth divides far more than race in America. What makes Palmer Luckey all the more badass is that he created a product from scratch that changed the world. Zuck cloned Friendster and leveraged the exclusivity of a "Harvard social network" to bootstrap his site. John Carmack, also from a poor background, is the one who believed in Oculus first. He is most responsible for helping Palmer Luckey make VR happen. They're the big heros here, not the rich kid who bought it for $2 billion. ~~~ kelukelugames Yes, the divide between the poor and the rich is wide. Though I don't know how it compares to race. That's really subjective. My friends make anywhere from 10 bucks an hour to over half a million every year. My wealthy friends are incredibly nice but sometimes they are awkward. Multiple rich people have asked me about the kind of boat I own. I don't have a boat. Sometimes I make my poor friends feel the same way. They are jealous that I can afford a mortgage. I also have white co-workers and black co-workers. My white co-workers are incredibly nice but sometimes they are super awkward. They ask me questions about chopsticks and interment camps. As for my black friends, well, sometimes they deal with worse. Bonus: Everyone's favorite astrophysicist on the challenges of being black [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU) ~~~ staunch Neil deGrasse Tyson is obviously an amazing person. He was also born into a nurturing, educated, well off household. He received a credential costing a fortune from an elite university which served as his entrance ticket into the professional world. Poverty and elitism are what prevent there from being more like him. ~~~ kelukelugames Did you watch the video? He literally lists all of the problems he faced from racism. ------ mentos Dk1&2 owner here, I've slowly soured on VR over the past year as my 'reptile brain' has come to associate the headset with motion sickness and I would say I have a pretty steely stomach. I'm an avid FPS player, spent 4 hours in the HL2 VR mod about 18 months ago with minimal sickness. But the killer for me has been the slow buildup of aversion to VR over time. I've never been more excited for a technology but I fear there are some impossible problems to solve.. Any other dev kit developers feel the same way? ~~~ ericflo You should not be playing a FPS in VR, especially on anything pre-release like the DK2. Acceleration without some kind of cockpit to ground you is one of the worst offenders, and virtually all FPS games do that by design/necessity. This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR. I'm glad Oculus is putting their "comfort ratings" front and center, and being really vocal about the principles of sickness-free VR, but I'm worried people are going to skip all the warnings and advice and ruin this for everyone. ~~~ mentos I appreciate that and I only ever played about 8 hours of HL2 VR, I stopped when I beat the campaign and moved on to playing WarThunder for a couple months then slowly tapered off. >>This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR. Part of the promise of VR is being able to negotiate a virtual world on foot which currently has too much of a mismatch to work without sickening the user. So what are the long term solutions to this? To me they are really hard if not impossible problems. ~~~ ericflo Cloudhead's "Blink" system is one good first step [http://uploadvr.com/cloudhead-blink-vr- movement/](http://uploadvr.com/cloudhead-blink-vr-movement/) AltspaceVR has been doing something similar for a while too. Another idea is something called redirected walking, which basically tricks you into walking in circles even though you think you're walking in a straight line. Someday we may have electronic solutions to sim sickness -- they've discovered that by sending tiny amounts of electricity through our inner ears, they can programmatically control how you feel you're moving. Edit: Here's a video of Palmer Luckey talking about that inner ear stuff (GVS): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CRdRc8CcGY&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CRdRc8CcGY&feature=youtu.be&t=11m5s) ~~~ sfjailbird I've often wondered if the feeling of acceleration/deceleration could easily be simulated with a simple tilting chair. Tilt the chair back to simulate forward acceleration (like a car speeding). Gravity pulls you 'backwards', similar to the feeling of being pressed back in the seat. Opposite for deceleration. I hereby donate this idea to the world. ~~~ cjrp That's exactly what they do in full-motion flight simulators. ~~~ wlesieutre Racing games as well. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-N3XDc-3QQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-N3XDc-3QQ) ------ whysonot > When Iribe said, Yeah, it’s pretty much just about gaming, at least for now, > Zuckerberg seemed to lose interest. Facebook was not a video-game company > and over the years had moved to make games a smaller part of what users saw > when they logged on. I've seen Mark's vision for Oculus described as the next step in connecting all of the people on the planet in a few pieces now. What interests me about this position is that it implies: 1) gaming and entertainment braodly are not the end game. Instead, the social interactions. 2) VR hardware will see broader consumer penetration in the population not yet reached by facebook than mobile phones Not sure what I think yet. ~~~ deelowe I don't see it happening. There's no way people are going to be strapping things to their faces for social interaction. ~~~ cpeterso I agree. Many people (30% apparently) prefer text messages over voice calls. I don't see 360° VR video being convenient or worth the bother for casual communication. [http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/22/tech/mobile/americans- prefer-t...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/22/tech/mobile/americans-prefer-text- messages/index.html) ~~~ interpol_p Our home use has really diverged away from voice calls and towards messaging and FaceTime. Where FaceTime is reserved for special occasions (kids chatting to grandparents, long distance relatives, calling home when on a business trip). I wonder if VR as a communication tool could supplant video calling? Although it lacks the ability for a family to physically gather around a screen and communicate as a group. ------ Animats What's the killer app for the Oculus Rift? So far, there are roller coaster simulators and first person shooters. Those are fun, but the market is limited. (The roller coaster thing is fun for about half an hour, tops. The FPS market is bigger, but will only catch on if you can kill more effectively wearing the headgear.) In the last go-round of VR, the killer app was supposed to be the Multiverse (as in "Snow Crash"). Now that Second Life is available but slowly sinking, that doesn't seem as compelling. The problem with Second Life doesn't seem to be graphics resolution, lag, or anything technical; it just isn't worth the trouble. There's an Oculus Rift client mod for Second Life, not that anybody cares. (The Second Life people should do a WebGL client; more people might try it.) Interestingly, in the first round of VR, back in the 1980s, it was "gloves and goggles", so you could actually do something while in there. This time, the gloves seem to have disappeared. The stock controller is the XBox game controller, although there's an optional wrist-tracking controller. Full finger tracking, no. ~~~ erikpukinskis > What's the killer app for the Oculus Rift? Here's my guess: Feeling like you're in the same room with someone who is far away. ~~~ IanCal This is something I see mentioned a lot, and would be great (as a remote employee). However, either the people are 3D renders or wearing headsets themselves. Maybe I'm picturing it wrong though. ~~~ greglmercer This is worth more than you'd think. The multiplayer demo I tried at PAX 2014 had me and a friend sitting maybe three feet from each other, and generic blank avatars in-game, but seeing him nod and nodding back myself was a hugely intimate experience. It's tough to describe, a purely emotional experience. ~~~ interpol_p Do you think the experience was worth putting on a headset for? To chat with someone like that? I ask because I wonder whether the overhead of using the device is outweighed by its value as a communications tool. ------ bkraz It's really sad to see no mention of Valve anywhere in the article. The work that was done at Valve in 2012-2013 on VR hardware and software was critical to the success of Oculus. Valve created a complete VR demo that was shown to Andreessen-Horowitz near the end of 2013, and was a deciding factor in their decision to invest, as well as Facebook's decision to buy. At that time, the best hardware created by Oculus did not have 6DOF, high-resolution tracking. It did not have low-persistance, globally-illuminated displays. It did not have proper lens distortion correction. It did not have presence. Basically, all of the hardware factors that have made modern VR exciting were discovered and developed by the team at Valve. Unfortunately, Valve was not able to capitalize or commercialize all of this work, and basically just gave it away through a very awkward interaction. Source: I worked there on VR. Of course, they are now working with HTC on the Vive, which is really great, and is going to give Oculus major competition. [http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%2...](http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf) ------ misiti3780 I’ve watched more V.R. than most people, and I don’t feel like I have brain damage,” says Chris Milk, a former music-video director whose company produces and distributes short, 360-degree movies watched on a headset. that's one of the best example of confirmation bias I have seen in a while. Chris is assuming because he doesn't feel brain damage he doesn't have it! (I have no opinion on if VR causes brain damage - just pointing out the absurdly of that quote) ~~~ in3d This not an example of the confirmation bias at all. More like possibly biased, anecdotal evidence that might have not been verified. You can very well notice signs of your own brain damage. ------ bane Here's a great post from 2014...has anything major changed in the last 18 months? [http://assayviaessay.blogspot.com/2014/03/virtual-spaces- rea...](http://assayviaessay.blogspot.com/2014/03/virtual-spaces-real- data.html) ------ callesgg The picture is clearly a photoshop job. Why would they do that. ------ oska _> As the Oculus Rift is about to hit the market, Zuckerberg is cautious. “It’ll ramp up slowly,” he says. “The first smartphones … I don’t know if they sold a million units in the first year. But it kind of doubles and triples each year, and you end up with something that tens of millions of people have. And now it’s a real thing.”_ I'm sceptical and not least because of Zuckerberg's involvement. Mark Zuckerberg reminds me most of Bill Gates and has so far displayed the same level of vision and imagination as Gates (i.e. almost none). ~~~ Tmmrn It fits then that Oculus partnered with Microsoft, cut out support for all operating systems except windows, cut back their source code releases and are working with Microsoft, AMD and nvidia on windows-exclusive proprietary (and as of now secret NDA'ed) APIs. I think a world in which technology is a black box that is controlled by corporations by means of proprietary software WAS Bill Gates' vision for Microsoft. ------ djloche I'm buying a Rift as soon as it is available for shipping. I experienced about 1.5 minutes of Dk1 and was sold. ------ bronz It was when the DK2 first came out that I realized VR was not the slam dunk it is often portrayed as. The DK2 was bought by many people, many more than the DK1. And once all of those customers started posting feedback on the internet it became clear that motion sickness was still a huge problem. And motion sickness will not be resolved with higher frame rates or lower latency as most of us believed prior to the DK2. Oh well. ~~~ Pfhreak Since the above is anecdotal (or at least, not well referenced), I feel comfortable in adding a personal anecdote to the contrary. I bought a DK2, played with it and developed some prototypes with it. I have a very wide IPD (Interpupillary Distance), which meant that I couldn't focus cleanly on the image of the DK2. I experience some mild to moderate motion sickness when I use the DK2 in most titles. However, there are some experiences -- particularly those with a cockpit or a third person camera -- that significantly reduce or eliminate the sickness. At PAX this year, I tested both the HTC Vive (Call of the Starseed -- a Myst-like title) and the Oculus CV1 (Eve Valkyrie -- a space superiority dogfighter) with absolutely no motion sickness at all, despite some rather hectic motion in Eve. Both demos were approximately 15 minutes of VR time. The higher frame rates and resolution, along with better accommodation of my wideset eyes absolutely improved the 'presence' in the demo. It was absolutely a material change from the DK2, which I've shelved until the consumer ready hardware is available. Additionally, DK1 and DK2 content is still generally content under development. We're still learning which experiences are good or bad in VR, and how to move the player without disturbing their equilibrium. Games like Eve Valkyrie and Call of the Starseed were both designed from the ground up with VR in mind, which also helps. ------ spoon16 Anyone know what type of desk they are using? ------ Tmmrn > Our mission isn’t to connect a billion people, it’s to connect everyone in > the world. I wonder whether he is aware that Oculus has been moving away from that goal for a while now. They are now a company that works with Microsoft, AMD and nvidia on Windows-exclusive APIs and have dropped support for all other operating systems. That's why all "social" VR applications for the Oculus Rift are a joke. Sure, you can get together in VR. But only when you use windows and only with other windows users. Zuckerberg says he wants to connect everyone. Right now Oculus is working on connecting Windows users exclusively. I wonder what Zuckerberg thinks about his newly acquired company acting this way. ~~~ blazespin Not really accurate, their mobile/ Samsung solution is not windows.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Boeing Crashes Highlight the High Costs of Cheap Government - molecule http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/boeing-737-max-crashes-highlight-the-high-costs-of-cheap-government.html ====== kazinator Throwing money at government just to make it expensive won't fix this kind of problem. What if a bigger, fatter, better funded FAA is still in cahoots with Boeing? ~~~ pohl I grant the existence of some who seek to make government less expensive for the sole sake of it being less expensive. (Existence proof: Grover Norquist, who wants to drown it in a bathtub.) Who are these mythical creatures who want it to be more expensive without providing more/better services? ~~~ kazinator Pretty much every governmental bureaucrat. ~~~ pohl People say that a lot, but without really thinking it through. There are 2.79M civil servants, each of which can be pejoratively referred to as a "bureaucrat" if that is your wont, and pretty much every one of them wants government services to become more expensive solely for expense's sake? That doesn't even pass the smell test. ------ purplezooey Many people don't realize that as much as we like to complain about big government and wasteful spending, the private sector is just as bad, or worse in some cases. ------ RcouF1uZ4gsC >It is true that the F.A.A.’s current delegation rules have been around for more than a decade — and that America’s commercial airlines have assembled an enviable safety record over that period. But the available evidence also suggests that America’s refusal to adequately fund the F.A.A. allowed corporations to gain inordinate influence over a public-sector function — and many people died as a result. This is classic motivated reasoning. The authors know that the US Airline safety profile over that time is stellar. Knowing they can’t base their claim on the actual statistical safety record, thy resort to using a comparison with vague words such as ‘suggests’ and ‘inordinate’ and emotionally charged phrases: such as ‘corporations to gain inordinate influence’ and ‘many people died.’ They are hoping that your emotional brain will overlook the lack of argument of real quantitative evidence and jump on the emotional bits of the argument. This is similar to how anti-immigration groups will seize on a high profile crime committed by an immigrant and use that to say that immigration should be stopped/cut back without discussing if immigrants are actually more likely to commit violent crimes than natives. ~~~ Gibbon1 You could argue that the current record is simply a legacy of previous high quality government regulation and oversights. And that the 737-MAX is the first article of the new regime. Another good example of that is the defective Bay Bridge replacement between Treasure Island and Oakland. That bridge is going to fail during the next earthquake because of design flaws that the oversight agency didn't have the manpower to spot. CALTRANS after three decades of Republican lead budget cuts doesn't have the ability to safely oversee projects of that size anymore. ~~~ DrScump CALTRANS after three decades of Republican lead budget cuts doesn't have the ability to safely oversee... Republicans have been in the _minority in both houses_ and had absolutely no power in the CA legislature appropriations process for _over two decades_. For much of that time, the Democrats had _supermajorities_. The new Bay Bridge debacle falls squarely on the Browns. ~~~ Gibbon1 Guess who doesn't know how government appropriations work. ~~~ masonic No guessing necessary. ------ watertom Seems like in the U.S. the pilots are properly trained and are capable of handling the difference in the new vs old aircraft. Other countries aren't fairing so well. Is this a failing of the U.S. Government's FAA? No. I have a good friend who was a Naval aviator and did crash investigations for the Navy, his ordered list for causes of aviation crashes. The top 3 causes he believes are responsible for 99.9% of all crashes. 1\. Pilot error due to fatigue (Which the U.S. has made strides to drastically reduce) 2\. Pilot error not due to fatigue 3\. Pilot lack of training 4\. Plane failure (hardware, software, mechanical, etc) ~~~ cmurf >Seems like in the U.S. the pilots are properly trained and are capable of handling the difference in the new vs old aircraft.Other countries aren't fairing so well. What specific difference training did U.S. pilots receive that foreign pilots did not? How are pilots in other countries improperly trained? What is the evidence either 737 MAX crash had anything to do with training? If better training can mitigate flawed design, should that absolve any portion of manufacturer liability for any discovered flawed design? In a proper investigation, all bias must be removed, and that includes statistical likelihood of prior causes of crashes. ~~~ DuskStar > What specific difference training did U.S. pilots receive that foreign > pilots did not? Well, they all have far more than 200 hours of flight time, for one. Even the copilots. > What is the evidence either 737 MAX crash had anything to do with training? The fact that the problem was displayed to the pilots (trim severely out of norm) and they didn't follow the correction procedures properly. Though that might not be "training" as much as "competence". > If better training can mitigate flawed design, should that absolve any > portion of manufacturer liability for any discovered flawed design? _Really_ depends on the flaw. ~~~ cmurf The pilots of Lion Air 610 had in excess of 5000 hours. Flight experience doesn't answer the question I asked either. The assertion was made that U.S. pilots received difference training (NG vs MAX). What difference training? You assume without evidence the problem manifests like runaway trim. And then proceed to assume without evidence the incompetency of two pilots. And yet you refuse to assume the incompetency of the automation, which didn't mere fail, it countermanded with lethal force the 100% correct control inputs of the pilots. The idea they have to assert their sanity by flipping two switches, is about as ridiculous as automation not having to assert its sanity when it, by design, trusts a single point of failure one upping that by trusting it while it's failing and one upping that to extreme by taking action on it without any regard to other input sources including the pilots themselves. It's beyond obscene to me. I have personally trained private pilots with competency at identifying failed gauges, knowing which one to disregard, and estimating the missing values by inference from the remaining gauges. And this is in sub-200 hour pilots. The skill required for the instrument rating exceeds this particular automation in the AOA failure case by quite a lot. And the skill required for commercial and ATP ratings is even greater than that by quite a lot. Meanwhile MCAS upset from judgement of a single sensor induced such an unusual attitude it became unrecoverable. So the assumption of incompetency by pilots, while cutting automation all kinds of slack is to me 180 degrees backwards. ~~~ DuskStar I think I misread difference training as _different_ training there, my apologies. And the Ethiopian Air copilot had ~200 total hours, thus the comment. > You assume without evidence the problem manifests like runaway trim. And > then proceed to assume without evidence the incompetency of two pilots. And > yet you refuse to assume the incompetency of the automation, which didn't > mere fail, it countermanded with lethal force the 100% correct control > inputs of the pilots. The idea they have to assert their sanity by flipping > two switches, is about as ridiculous as automation not having to assert its > sanity when it, by design, trusts a single point of failure one upping that > by trusting it while it's failing and one upping that to extreme by taking > action on it without any regard to other input sources including the pilots > themselves. It's beyond obscene to me. I didn't say that it manifests like runaway trim. I said that it manifests as "severely outside the norm trim", which it most certainly does. Unless you're saying that full nose down trim is normal? As for "asserting incompetence without evidence", they're certainly less competent than pilot #3 on the Lion Air flight the night before. (since, you know, that guy realized what was going on and how to resolve it) As for the automation being incompetent, yep you're right! It is! But airplane crashes don't happen for one reason - not commercial flights at least. They happen when a sequence of failures occurs, just like here. Boeing failed to consider the worst case behavior of MCAS, Lion Air maintenance fucked up, and the Lion Air pilots weren't able to diagnose the failure that morning. (The failure pipeline of the Ethiopian crash is still to be determined) As for why Boeing failed there... It's at least partly because the automatic trim controls weren't considered a safety critical part, since they had multiply redundant backups. It's just that the backups were "turn off electronic trim" and "grab the trim wheel and hold it in place", both of which require pilot action. (Allowing stuff like this to get grandfathered in is arguably a hole in the FAA's systems) > I have personally trained private pilots with competency at identifying > failed gauges, knowing which one to disregard, and estimating the missing > values by inference from the remaining gauges. And this is in sub-200 hour > pilots. The skill required for the instrument rating exceeds this particular > automation in the AOA failure case by quite a lot. And the skill required > for commercial and ATP ratings is even greater than that by quite a lot. > Meanwhile MCAS upset from judgement of a single sensor induced such an > unusual attitude it became unrecoverable. Well then why was the issue so difficult for the pilots to diagnose here? There's a gauge for trim, and I'd hope it would be looked at when trying to figure out why you have to keep pulling back on the yoke so hard. ~~~ bushido I am not a pilot. But based on my understanding the activation of nose down due to MCAS doesn't present itself like the standard runaway trim that pilots are trained on. Trained Behaviour: \- In case of continuous trim \- perform yoke jerk to disable the automatic trim (per previous 737 models) \- turn off electronic trim \- grab the trim wheel and hold it in place \--------------- MCAS Behaviour: \- On nose down event, pilots pitch the flight up, adjust trim \- Which disables MCAS for 5 seconds \- No continuous trim event manifests \--------------- From what I've read on some pilot forums, Boeing made a few errors: \- Removed "Yoke Jerk" \- The 5 second delay removed the continuous trim conditions \- Didn't sufficient train pilots on this condition i.e. intermittent automatic trim \- Pilots did not see the behavior that they were trained for in the few seconds between each nose down event ~~~ DuskStar > From what I've read on some pilot forums, Boeing made a few errors: I'll agree with #2-4, but #1 was the entire point of MCAS - to reduce the response of the aircraft to pulling back on the yoke in high AOA situations. Disabling MCAS when pulling back on the yoke would thus make the aircraft less safe, and cause it to (rightly) fail certification. ------ jmclnx Well as the saying goes, "You get what you pay for" ------ stillbourne There is only one way to fix this problem folks. Privatize the FAA, deregulate airplane manufacture, and use the money saved to give the rich a tax cut. The rich will then trickle down on the planes to save us from these software issues. ~~~ mieses actually you are right
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
“My position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies was eliminated” - binaryapparatus https://macosxautomation.com/about.html ====== binaryapparatus Q. I hear you no longer work for Apple; is that true? A. Correct. I joined Apple in January of 1997, almost twenty years ago, because of my profound belief that “the power of the computer should reside in the hands of the one using it.” That credo remains my truth to this day. Recently, I was informed that my position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies was eliminated for business reasons. Consequently, I am no longer employed by Apple Inc. But, I still believe my credo to be as true today as ever. Because who needs or expects anything remotely 'pro' at Apple any more? ~~~ mikeyouse Just for fun / boredom, if he was granted $100,000 worth of shares every year since 1997 and reinvested his dividends after they started paying out, he'd have somewhere near 800,000 shares today worth nearly $85 million. ~~~ Johnny555 Does Apple give anyone that's not a senior executive nearly that many shares? If they do, I need to go return a recruiter call immediately. ~~~ microtherion It's absolutely within the range of possibility, even for an individual contributor. ------ Jerry2 Apple's plan for the future does not include Mac or MacOS. They've been treating macOS as a second-tier OS for years and have been barely updating it. And when they do update it, they just backport some iOS features to it. You can also tell that macOS is not a priority because security updates for same kernel issues always come weeks after they've been fixed on iOS. And let's not even get into Mac hardware and how there's no more true Pro options and how rarely they even update them. Cook's infamous quote says it all about the future of Mac: > _“I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No > really, why would you buy one?” – Tim Cook, talking about the iPad Pro_ Requiem for the Mac is in order. ~~~ rimantas Or they have been treating macOS as a mature OS where there is little space for the revolution. Except that part of "barely touching" is not really true. > You can also tell that macOS is not a priority because > security updates for same kernel issues always come weeks > after they've been fixed on iOS. Or you can tell that iOS has much larger user base and hence the priority for security fixes. ~~~ binaryapparatus > Or you can tell that iOS has much larger user base and hence the priority > for security fixes. Yeah because that single guy that needs to code all security patches has to finish iOS first before he goes to another building to work on macOS? We are often discussing (me included) Apple moves like they have very little resources to do anything. Then I think again and d'oh. ~~~ gumby AKAIK Apple no longer has a separate MacOS group. You could interpret this as a good or bad sign -- I interpret it positively. The Mac folks can develop drivers or whatever they need but core tech (e.g. GCD) need no longer start on one platform. ~~~ microtherion Ultimately, all the various *OS functions report to the same senior vice president. However, there still are teams that predominantly do macOS, iOS, etc, and there always have been engineers who worked on multiple platforms. Historically, the barriers have mostly been against porting iOS technology to macOS, but that hasn't been an issue in several years. ------ cpr Sad day. Sal is and has been the biggest cheerleader for macOS automation technologies ever. ------ sarreph What a shame. I really thought we'd see some interesting developments in the macOS automation space, as only a couple of years ago JS was introduced as a scripting language alongside AScript. However, this is worrying as there are so so many individuals who rely on bespoke, fine-grained task automation (and not just glossy consumer apps) to use their Mac productively. ~~~ matt4077 I'm quite happy with hammerspoon for MacOS GUI automation. I'm using it to collect the screenshots for a hyper(term) theme gallery ([https://hyperthemes.matthi.coffee](https://hyperthemes.matthi.coffee)). Although now I'm not sure how much hammerspoon relies on the official APIs. ~~~ i336_ Two things: 1\. You have "https:/" (<\-- one "/") in the hyper.io link 2\. "server can't find hyper.io: SERVFAIL" I'm interested in terminals, but this has an impossible-to-Google name (for obvious reasons). The themes look really cool though! ------ mevile > was informed that my position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies > was eliminated for business reasons. Consequently. Business reasons to not have a head of automation for an Operating System? It truly could be the case, but honestly I'd be ok if someone investigated companies like Apple to see if there's an illegal pattern of letting go people over the age of 40. ~~~ jballanc I can't speak for the Apple of today, but when I left Apple in 2010 there were more wizened, "gray-beard" programmers working for Apple than at probably all the SOMA startups combined. Of all the things you could accuse Apple of (and there are plenty), I think ageism has got to be near the bottom of that list. ------ WesBrownSQL Hey, 20 years come get your reduction prize. This guys salary is probably a rounding error on a spreadsheet but what he knows about Apple in any line of their business would be worth the money. Just a shame. ------ bluthru This is a great way to scare pro users after a lukewarm reaction to the latest MacBook Pro's. ------ crack-the-code Does that mean that he was effectively fired? I can't help but think there must be some additional context as to why he was terminated and not transitioned to another role (assuming my understanding of the situation is correct). Is Apple really doing that bad? ~~~ kasey_junk Why would you think that? It's relatively uncommon for companies to transition employees when they decide to remove whole business functions. ~~~ maxxxxx It seems stupid that they just throw away talented people. And then they pay millions for talented people through buying startups. ~~~ rhizome Penny-wise and pound-foolish perhaps, but Apple absolutely doesn't have a cash flow problem that would get in the way of any flavor of these decisions. ------ r00fus Sad to hear about Sal's departure (I'm not going to speculate on the reasoning). What I guessing as I read into this is that Apple is likely moving towards cloud-based everything, and de-emphasizing OS-level functionality that's not tied to cloud. ------ bootload _" UNIX CLI (shell, python, ruby, perl), System Services, Apple Events (JavaScript, AppleScript, AppleScriptObj-C, Scripting Bridge), Automator, Apple Configurator (AppleScript, Automator), and Application scripting support in Photos, iWork, Finder, Mail, and other Apple applications."_ I can speculate why Apple has made this decision. Notice the amount of siri integration into macOS? This theoretically makes automation by code the black sheep in Apples grand plan. Do away with code, push voice. ~~~ cauterized Yup, that's exactly what my company's open plan office is missing. 50 people muttering aloud at their computers all day. ~~~ bootload _" The integration of an at least partially voice-controlled intelligent digital assistant into a desktop, laptop, and/or tablet computer environment provides additional capabilities to the digital assistant, and enhances the usability and capabilities of the desktop, laptop, and/or tablet computer."_ _" Intelligent Digital Assistant in a Desktop Environment"_, 2013 Apple patent ~ [http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...](http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- adv.html&r=2&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=\(345%2F473.CCLS.+AND+20140807.PD.\)&OS=ccl/345/473+and+pd/8/7/2014&RS=\(CCL/345/473+AND+PD/20140807\)) ------ draw_down Unfortunately they have been neglecting this aspect of the Mac for a long time. It's a real shame because it used to be a solid advantage of the Mac over other OSs. Recently I looked to see if Automator is still on my system, I was surprised it's still included. They clearly don't care about this part of macOS and it's such a shame. ~~~ matt4077 It's there, it works, you haven't looked at it in years. Apple may or may not care about it, but apparently neither do you. Automation probably gets us excited about ideas to streamline our lives, but nobody ever gets around to it. I certainly hope it remains well-supported because there are people who actually need it (accessibility comes to mind). Also because I did actually just use it in a toy project. ------ carsongross Remember this the next time you hear corporations complain about ruthless employees who are willing to jump ship for mere money.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What are your top 5 most frequently used apps on your phone? - avni000 I came across an interesting article about how to better understand how much users are using your app (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;13&#x2F;theres-an-app-for-that-but-how-much-are-you-actually-using-it&#x2F;) but wanted to see what types of apps are getting daily usage from people.<p>Mine are: Gmail, Day One, Twitter, Starbucks and Dropcam. ====== luxpir Opera Mini, Modest (email client), Vim, SSH, QCPUFreq Odd list, perhaps. Still ploughing away with the N900, overclocking it on every reboot. Notes with Vim are synced to laptop and raspberry pi via Syncthing. Websites for everything else. Trying to move off Gmail (already have for work, self-hosting now, was sending as my personal domain for years via Gmail/Apps) and the Google ecosystem. Already out of Facebook for a good while now. Still tweeting, but only work-related. Would like to play with Slack, but an N900 client is probably not in the works :) Side-note, while explaining, I'm holding out for a decent (open, free) alternative to Maemo. That looks to me like Ubuntu Touch/Phone, especially with their convergence plans, but the dust might need to settle on that first. None of the Jolla/Sailfish/Firefox offers look quite like what I'm after yet, for various reasons. A nice polished Ubuntu phone would bring me up to date and out of the 5 years-ago past. If that all comes to pass then the top-5 apps list might look something like: Firefox/Iceweasel, email client, translation tools, Vim, SSH ------ maraglee Well 5 is a bit boring, no? For me at least that would be filled with mail, browser, whatsapp, public transportation app and runtastic. Beyond that: moon Reader, pocket, pocket casts, calculator++, Wikipedia ------ KhalPanda I'm surprised some form of browser isn't in the top 5 of _everyone 's_ lists. Gmail, Hangouts (Android L SMS integration), Chrome, Sleep Better, reddit is fun. ------ Cyrag K-9 Mail, Telegram, Google Calendar, BlinkFeed, Firefox ------ simantel Coincidentally, an app may have some answers for you: [http://homescreen.is/](http://homescreen.is/) ~~~ avni000 Thanks for sharing - should have known there was an app for that. ------ laurenproctor Mailbox, Chrome, Weather, Nike Running, and Network (a podcasting app) in that order. ------ inck0705 Facebook, GMail, 9gag, Reddit, Chrome ------ MegaLeon Reddit Sync, Pocket Casts, Pushbullet, Fitnotes (frequent gymgoer) and Headspace ------ iqonik Not including pre-installed: Twitter, Facebook, BBC News, HipChat and WhatsApp ------ Jeremy1026 Safari, Spotify, Messages, Twitter(?), The game that I am playing that week(?) ------ lewisgodowski Messages, Safari, Mail, Tweetbot, ESPN SportsCenter ------ 0942v8653 Safari, Pythonista, Mail, Editorial, WolframAlpha ------ theGREENsuit Gmail, Reddit in motion, CBC News, Flipboard, GasBuddy ------ cdvonstinkpot Facebook, Evernote, Twitter, in that order. ------ FlopV Gmail, IHeartRadio, Instagram, White Noise ------ Pyrodogg Gmail, Facebook, Chrome, Hangouts, Clock ------ nonameface Gmail, Slack, Drive, Audible, and Twitch.tv ------ onedev Wow did not expect to see Starbucks in anyones list. ~~~ avni000 What can I say - I need coffee and their mobile payments app is handy. ------ pathy Probably something like: (Facebook) Messenger Tweetbot Chrome Overcast Instagram
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The best things and stuff of 2013 - platz http://blog.fogus.me/2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2013/ ====== shahzad_76 For the politically inclined - the GQ interview with Kim Jong-Il's sushi chef is brilliant (and will probably become a movie someday because the arc is so crazy). Excerpt: "The chef's name, an alias, is Kenji Fujimoto, and for eleven years he was Kim Jong-il's personal chef, court jester, and sidekick. He had seen the palaces, ridden the white stallions, smoked the Cuban cigars, and watched as, one by one, the people around him disappeared. It was part of Fujimoto's job to fly North Korean jets around the world to procure dinner-party ingredients—to Iran for caviar, Tokyo for fish, or Denmark for beer. It was Fujimoto who flew to France to supply the Dear Leader's yearly $700,000 cognac habit. And when the Dear Leader craved McDonald's, it was Fujimoto who was dispatched to Beijing for an order of Big Macs to go." Fogus, thanks for sharing this in your list: [http://www.gq.com/news- politics/newsmakers/201306/kim-jong-i...](http://www.gq.com/news- politics/newsmakers/201306/kim-jong-il-sushi-chef-kenji-fujimoto-adam- johnson-2013?printable=true) ~~~ ams6110 Interesting in that Air Koryo is banned from EU operations. ~~~ dualogy This was taking place in the 80s/90s. They flew Koryo to China, then somewhere eastern Europe where they apparently even had private jets stashed back then. ------ javajosh Hi Mike, the movie you ask about in your footnote #3 (the one with the force bubbles powered on a 9v battery) is "Explorers"[1] - which stars River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke in their screen debuts. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_\(film\)) ~~~ agumonkey This movie blew my young mind at the time. A-team meets NASA. ------ Expez The amount of books you're able to get through in a year is amazing! According to Goodreads, you're also able to do this consistently, which is even more incredible. How many hours do you spend reading in a typical week? ~~~ marcosscriven Curious about this too. I've always had to sort of verbalise in my head when I read, I think because of the way I was taught in primary school. This is extremely slow though. I can however read code without verbalising, and with sheet music I can sort of directly execute the notes with thinking explicitly about the notes I'm seeing. I can imagine some people can read prose in a similar manner, and I'd love to know how. I've tried to sort of 'relax' my brain while reading, but then it seems nothing has actually registered! ~~~ amvp I tried a number of things over the years, and the technique that finally worked for me was counting in my head as I read. By occupying the verbalising part of my mind I found I was able to train myself to read without it, and with a little practice I started to be able to read tat way without counting. ~~~ marcosscriven Interesting idea. May I ask where you found that technique please? ~~~ amvp I'm afraid I don't remember. I read somewhere that when asked to count in their minds, people count in one of two ways. It's my understanding that the majority do so verbally, sounding out the words in their minds. But some people count visually, by visualising the numbers, picturing them scroll past on a tape, for example. Those that verbalise couldn't simultaneously do another verbal task, while the visualisers couldn't do another visual task, suggesting that separate parts of the brain were involved, and occupied by counting. Now that I knew visual counting was an option (I was a verbaliser) I trained myself to do it. Unfortunately I'm yet to find an situation were the ability to choose between visual and verbal counting has been useful. ~~~ WildUtah "Surely you're joking mr Feynman" is where most of us read about it. ------ jeremiep Great list! My two favourites were "Internal Reprogrammability" which reminded me of Steve Yegge's "Pinocchio Problem" [1] article and "Ruins of Forgotten Empires" which made me want to learn more about APL languages. [1]: [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2007/01/pinocchio- problem.htm...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.html) ------ chaddeshon I didn't expect to see Sean Ross' excellent Haggis design diary on your list. But you are right, it is a great read. [http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/34429/item/734152](http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/34429/item/734152) ------ cju A simpler description of the rules of Cannon [http://www.pyromythgames.com/products/cannon/Cannonrules.htm](http://www.pyromythgames.com/products/cannon/Cannonrules.htm) (from the same site as the PDF linked by Fogus) ------ eaurouge The Autobiography of Malcolm X is indeed an excellent read. The three phases of his adult life were completely and radically different from one another. It's amazing how committed he was to holding himself up to the standards demanded by his _current_ beliefs, even when it meant renouncing all that he had previously stood for; and he did so, twice. I think this is the great lesson from his life and something the public should be aware of, more so than his "By any means necessary" vs King's "I have a dream". ~~~ danial I read that a long time ago and remember being inspired by Malik's commitment to educate himself after he was overcome with dread due to the realization that he had basically wasted his life up until then. Like Malik, I too felt I was behind on my reading and picked up a lot of non- fiction that year because I did not want to waste time on reading fiction (I don't believe reading fiction is not useful, just stating how I felt at the time). ------ BigBalli The past: [http://giacomoballi.com/13-most-popular-products- of-2013/](http://giacomoballi.com/13-most-popular-products-of-2013/) and the future: [http://giacomoballi.com/13-trends-that-will-drive-the- future...](http://giacomoballi.com/13-trends-that-will-drive-the-future-of- america/) ------ coin -1 for disabling pinchzoom ~~~ bhauer For what it's worth, pinch zoom works for me on a Windows 8.1 tablet. ------ hartror I think I've collected about a year's worth of content from that blog post and its links. So much for 2014! ------ kenjackson The Carver Mead interview is more than a decade old (and honestly I'd never knew about it before) -- great find and read. Is his characterization of Bohr and the statistical thinking (a remnant of poor tools) still believed? ------ kinleyd I liked the inclusion of PG Wodehouse - can never get enough of it. ------ yarou Cool list, will definitely check out when I have some free time. I really loved the lispy newsletter, looking forward to future editions. ------ dcreemer Thanks for this. There's a broken link from "newsletter" to www.readevalprintlove.org ------ dclara Interesting list. Will check out later.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
5G: The Next Big Public Health Experiment - rhollos https://anh-usa.org/5g-the-next-big-public-health-experiment/ ====== Crosseye_Jack The comment section of that page and the page itself seems like just general FUD.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Uploading files which method you prefer? - jamongkad ====== jamongkad Hi guys I've been wondering where would be the best place to upload files such as photos, music, videos and etc? into the file system? or database? This pretty much answers my question but what do the wizards here in YC think? <http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/10/15/binaries-belong-in-the-database- too> ~~~ SwellJoe Actually, many YC wizards disagree with that article in its entirety. In many cases, not only do binaries not belong in the database, nothing else does. In short: It depends on your application, and probably only you can know for sure (and then probably only with experimentation). ------ gibsonf1 I'm thinking that Amazon's S3 is getting hard to beat for storage, especially with their recent price reduction. We plan to go that route with our app, ~~~ jamongkad But didn't S3 go down some time ago? How does that say for reliability? ------ coolnewtoy I like yousendit.com for transferring files from one place to another.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Please stand with me [What happens when you critisize the Ukraine government] - tete http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1slk265 ====== anonbanker been in more than one argument on HN about this one, taking this person's side, and am usually downvoted to oblivion. no surprise this is buried on HN.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
'Don't Panic' Is Rotten Advice - bookofjoe https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-panic-is-rotten-advice-11584054431 ====== bookofjoe [https://archive.is/xZmaU](https://archive.is/xZmaU)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
US lifts restrictions on more detailed satellite images - darrhiggs http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27868703 ====== guylhem I don't like this. What is the business of a government in regulating the resolution of whatever form of imagery??? If it can be seen from the sky, or from the street, it's public. Planes, satellites, drones, whatever - you should be free to take pics and sell them if you want. Fortunately, digital camera didn't exist where such kind of laws had been passed, or there would have been similar stupid restrictions (imagine google streetview with n-times 640x480 pics crafted together, or worse - a law restricting the resolution of the reconstructed google streetview you can view on your screen!) ~~~ wahsd I don't think I can agree with that. To a certain extent, I think this will be another one of those fronts where modern technology tries to breach fundamental and human rights. What should give you the right, just because you can fly something over someone's property, to take pictures of them and their private space. The issue is a similar one to drones. Should you be permitted to violate someone's privacy in their own back yard or on their property just because you have the technology to circumvent safeguards? There is no real difference whether the drone is 100 feet above your property or in the ionosphere? If someone put a camera on a stick and held it high enough to tape what goes on in your bedroom or back yard when your children are swimming they would be considered committing an illegal act? In a way, you should have the right to automatically remove your property from satellite imagery. Or maybe you should get royalties for your property being part of the service. In fact, what is the difference between royalties due for commercial use of their images and that of your back yard? There is none, other than that the imagery of your back yard, especially at those resolutions, are a violation of your most basic and fundamental rights as a human. What, is it going to be left to individuals to build visual obstructions to prevent observation from above? So you are now rationalizing how this is all different and how it's justified. Well, what happens when technology is developed that allows real time 1cm resolution, live, 24/7 observation? Or what if technology is developed that allows reconstruction of the interior of your home, maybe even in color resolution based on chemical analysis, and maybe even in real time? Where is the limit? It should lie with the most fundamental rights that are being violated right as we speak. Everyone should have the right to privacy or a choice to profit from it. We are already having the value of our identities and activities harvested from us, are we really going to allow constant and pervasive surveillance to steal our humanity too? At what point do a certain subset of people simply regress to becoming a commodity that is monitored and maintained like cattle on Big USA Ranch? ~~~ IgorPartola I agree with your general point but: > In fact, what is the difference between royalties due for commercial use of > their images and that of your back yard? The difference is that the photographer holds to copyright to any picture they take. The drone/satellite operator would have to explicitly sign the copyright over to you of the pictures of your backyard. ------ pingou Does "images that showed features as small as 31cm" means 1 pixel = average color of 31x31cm or is it more complicated? ~~~ natosaichek That is roughly correct. There is typically a bayer-mask filter on a grayscale sensor, so any given pixel is actually only either blue, red or green, but then a mixing algorithm is applied and you get the full resolution with the appropriate mixing. Of course, there are a variety of filters and a variety of algorithms, so the exact mix will vary across different technologies, but roughly speaking, yes. ------ snarfy For anyone concerned about privacy, higher resolution imagery already exists and is used heavily in industry. See [http://www.pictometry.com](http://www.pictometry.com). They use airplanes. ~~~ secabeen Right. This is a win, because it allows you to get images that previously required airplanes over areas where airplanes aren't feasible or cost- effective. ------ joosters I thought that some of the higher-res photos from google earth and competitors were taken by plane, rather than satellite. I wonder how/if the new restrictions apply to lower-flying photography? ~~~ tokenadult Most of the higher-resolution photography on Google Earth and Google Maps is taken by airplanes rather than by satellites. Google calls it "satellite" view just to emphasize that it is from above, whatever the source. ------ trebor I don't like this. You can already see a lot of detail on these satellite photos. This is a huge breach of privacy. (Not that a 50cm lower limit isn't a breach of privacy.) ~~~ rwmj Do you worry about people flying planes over your house, looking over your fence, etc? ~~~ trebor What worries me more is what kind of corporate espionage these satellite images will be put to use for. They've been able to see the car(s) in a driveway for awhile now. But imagine: now they can pay to see what the most popular cars are in a geographical region; they can look at your deck and determine furniture brands; they can see you sunbathing; they can see what you play with, etc. No longer is it just "buying habits" but they can, en masse, buy the rights to psychoanalyze your lifestyle base on what they see from the outside of your house. I'm pretty certain that a company paying a team of photographers to stalk the average citizen to psychoanalyze their world would be creepy, if not illegal. But this is exactly what they will be doing—and we'll have no ability to "outrun" their team of photographers. Technically, we won't even know when they're overhead. And that does bother me. ~~~ toomuchtodo Write an app to calculate orbital elements and pop up an alert: "Imaging object arriving over horizon, take action" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements) [http://www.heavens-above.com/](http://www.heavens-above.com/) Other countries have done this _for years_ , and cover their equipment with camo cover when opposing country assets are overhead. This is why the Air Force/Boeing X-37B is such a big deal; its an asset that can shift orbits to counterattack known orbit information. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37) [http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/X_37B_Gets_Stranger_999.ht...](http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/X_37B_Gets_Stranger_999.html)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Clearwire Launches 4G WiMAX Network in Silicon Valley - johnnybgoode http://newsroom.clearwire.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=214419&p=irol-newsArticle_print&ID=1331811&highlight= ====== laut "Developers can expect to see peak download speeds of up to 10 Mbps, with average download speeds of 3 to 6 Mbps. In contrast, some of today’s 3G wireless networks typically deliver download speeds of between 600 kbps – 1.4 Mbps." Funny that their planned 4G is slower than 3G in Denmark today (I've seen 16Mbit 3G advertised). 7.2Mbit has been common for years. ~~~ mikedouglas Does anyone really consider WiMAX to be 4G, except for Sprint? Most American carriers have bet on LTE, which has a theoretical max of ~170 Mbps. Whether Verizon and AT&T can keep their deployment schedule (2013 and 2011, respectively), is another question, but at least they were smart enough to avoid the band-aid that is WiMAX. ~~~ mmt I've only ever considered the ordinal-G terms to be marketing fluff. Even WiMAX is technically inspecific, though I think it's always the mobile version (even if used in a non-mobile implementation), in this context. I, of course, care about actual speed, not marketing "generation" nor advertised speed. ------ johnnybgoode _The developer network, which is a precursor to commercial service planned for the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010, will cover more than 20 square miles in Santa Clara, Mountain View and parts of downtown Palo Alto, California._
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
nnn v1.2 – The missing terminal file browser for X - apjana https://github.com/jarun/nnn/releases/tag/v1.2 ====== apjana ## What's in? \- Use the desktop opener (xdg-open on Linux, open(1) on OS X) to open files \- Option `NNN_USE_EDITOR` to open text files in EDITOR (fallback vi) \- Bookmark support (maximum 10, key `b`) \- _Navigate-as-you-type_ mode (key `Insert` or option `-i`) \- Subtree search: gnome-search-tool, fallback catfish (key `^/`) (customizable) \- Show current directory content size and file count in disk usage mode \- Add detail view mode as default, use `-l` to start in light mode \- Shortcuts `F2` and `^L` to refresh and unfilter (if filter is empty, `Enter` _opens_ the currently selected file now) \- Help screen shows bookmarks and configuration \- Show a message when calculating disk usage \- Show the spawned shell level \- Linux only: use vlock as the locker on timeout (set using `NNN_IDLE_TIMEOUT`) Homepage: [https://github.com/jarun/nnn](https://github.com/jarun/nnn)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The United States slaughters 1M pigs every 3 days - arbuge https://publicemails.com/blog/display/1043/The-United-States-slaughters-1-million-pigs-every-3-days ====== jelliclesfarm I am more concerned about the pollution and environmental impact this kind of factory farming and CAFOs are responsible for...
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Photocracy.org = Revolutionizing photo-sorting? - joshwprinceton Hi everyone, For my Senior Thesis, I'm working on implementing pair-wise comparisons for sorting photos, in particular for national perception and cross-cultural identity (I'm an East Asian Studies Major). As of now, there are limited implementations of pair-wise comparisons for text or photo (bix.yahoo.com as one of the few).<p>We're preparing to launch on March 16th and are hoping to get as much activity as possible after that point (hypothesis/assumption: the more people in the crowd, the better the resulting data set). We launched a text-based version for student government issues with a fair amount of success in the Fall of 2008 ("WDYWM").<p>Any and all suggestions for spreading the word or making improvements are very much appreciated!<p>Josh Weinstein ====== aristus "These photos have won" is far below the fold -- I didn't see it until it was over. When it is over, the middle part of the screen is blank -- no game over, no thanks, nothing else to do. You need to follow up with the user to keep them engaged. I don't know much about China, or these sample photos, though I got the impression that most of it was "popular symbol vs present-day life". I am wary of what actual insights you can get with this kind of sociological game... seems to me pretty fuzzy, especially since you don't have any data on the users. "Pairwise" and statistics don't mean it's good science.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
On Liberating My Smartwatch from Cloud Services - zdw https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5863 ====== Shared404 > The point of open source is not to ritualistically compile our stuff from > source. It’s the awareness that technology is not magic: that there is a > trail of breadcrumbs any of us could follow to liberate our digital lives in > case of a potential hostage situation. Should we so desire, open source > empowers us to create and run our own essential tools and services. This is the best phrasing of this concept that I remember having seen. ~~~ smichel17 Yes, FLOSS is about the _power dynamic_ between users and developers. Proprietary software gives developers power over users. Typically, Developers seek this power in order to extract money from users (sometimes in reasonable amounts, other times not). Unfortunately, power is abused. By empowering users with the _option_ to take control of their own technology, FLO software provides strong protection against abuse -- developers need to weigh user- hostile decisions against the possibility of a fork. ~~~ wtallis I find it amusing to recall that Stallman's Free Software efforts were more or less kicked off by frustration with crappy closed-source printer drivers. 40 years later, being subjected to abusive behavior from your printer has become a near-universal experience. ~~~ josephg When I worked on google wave, one of the most requested features was adding print support (to allow users to print waves). Printing support is a super simple feature (especially compared to "make it run faster on IE9"). But print support didn't occur to us at google because was ... well, of course we didn't think of it. Google (and most tech companies I imagine) work in paperless offices. We almost never try to print things ourselves so we didn't think of it or care. I have a working theory that any software used by programmers will eventually get excellent (or be replaced with something excellent). And everything else stays vaguely mediocre. Postgresql? Excellent. The tooling to allow non-programmers to edit data in postgres? Halfbaked. Sound cancellation in macbooks for video calls? Fantastic. The software bank tellers use? Garbage. Github? Fantastic. Github equivalent for non programmers (eg people with folders full of Word docs)? 404 not found. Anyway, the fact that modern printer drivers are garbage should come as no surprise. Who amongst us cares enough to fix them? RMS was probably one of the last competent programmers who will bother writing clean, minimal printer drivers. I expect the world will become paperless before HP cleans up their act. I have the same problem at the moment with my Wacom tablet - the hardware is great but the software is truly awful, and apparently it phones home regularly. Software for artists is unfortunately off the golden path. ~~~ oever > I have a working theory that any software used by programmers will > eventually get excellent Most programmers rarely using office suites and prefer to use plain text editors. This has gone so far that developers prefer a sadistically under- featured file-format (.md) to office files. ~~~ posguy What you call underfeatured many would call correctly featured. A more complex format doesn't add value for most use cases, while being harder to reason with and correct issues in. .md files avoid the copy paste font/size mess by being plain text and rendering in the reader's choice of font. Bold, italics, hyperlinks and such are all explicitly added, easy to Ctrl + F for and aren't hidden behind finicky context menus as in standard word processors. ~~~ anoncake Plain text formats do have advantages but Markdown is a pretty bad one. ------ zxcvgm > A bunch of my paddling friends recommended I try Strava. [...] > The bad news is as I tried to create an account on Strava, all sorts of > warning bells went off. The website is full of dark patterns, and when I > clicked to deny Strava access to my health-related data, I was met with this > tricky series dialog boxes I noticed that most apps on the App Store all seem to want you to create an account. I get that that's how they primarily operate but I'm put off by it. This might be a controversial opinion but I like that my runs with my Apple Watch are recorded in iOS on-device, without needing to use any of these third-party apps. And if you still want to share or even backup your runs, you can use apps like HealthFit¹ or RunGap² to export FIT files that contain GPS points and heart rate data, or export them directly via API to the service you want. If you _really_ want to DIY, you can write some scripts that extract them from the SQLite files in your iOS backups. But by default, everything is local only and you have the choice to do whatever you want with the data. [1] [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/healthfit/id1202650514](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/healthfit/id1202650514) [2] [https://www.rungap.com/](https://www.rungap.com/) ~~~ tinus_hn There’s also open source apps that can do this (but you have to build them and install using a developer certificate). It’s a shame though exporting workouts to gpx is not possible using the built in apps. ------ andrewstuart Aaron Christophel has a YouTube channel in which he shows how to replace the firmware of P8 smartwatches with custom firmware, over the air. If you like his work .... you could support him by subscribing to his channel perhaps. [https://www.youtube.com/user/12002230](https://www.youtube.com/user/12002230) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbPz3WWBuJ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbPz3WWBuJ8) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgjKaSETY8Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgjKaSETY8Y) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aFDjymXjOw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aFDjymXjOw) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGFwQUxhCxc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGFwQUxhCxc) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRqulnz1nJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRqulnz1nJM) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUVEz- pxhgg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUVEz-pxhgg) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9KMUe6GVLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9KMUe6GVLw) ~~~ ngcc_hk Great channel and much more than smart watch. ------ walrus01 For anyone that's interested in doing this own visualization of .gpx files. This is GPLv3 licensed: [https://www.gpxsee.org/](https://www.gpxsee.org/) If you have an old Android phone laying around that can run at least android 5/6, there's lots of good tracking applications that can run persistently and create a .gpx file written to disk in a location of your choice under /sdcard/. May not even be necessary to purchase a smart watch if you don't want heart rate. I recommend this one: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gpslogger&hl=en_CA) One of the things I particularly like about that app is that it's fully configurable for how often you want it to get a GPS fix (has a direct impact on battery life), what filename prefix to create and where to create it, whether to create a new file every day or every session, and many other toggles and knobs in the options. ~~~ lazyjeff GPSLogger (the one walrus01 linked to) is a gem. I've been using it continuously for 7 years. Not all location trackers are the same. It lets you log with cell tower but fall back to GPS if the accuracy is poor. Like walrus01 says, it's very configurable in how accurate you want it to be versus battery usage, or if you want to optimize it some way (like not record if it hasn't been moving). While there were monthly crashes in the first two years I used it, the past 5 years it's been rock solid (running 24/7 with maybe one or two crashes for basically 5 years). You don't want to discover that one day the app hasn't been logging data for the past couple days. In comparison, the Android OS probably crashes about once a month for me. It can automatically upload to various cloud storage places (Dropbox, Google Drive, but even FTP) so you can generate charts on a server with a script. Truly open source, low battery usage, saves in multiple file formats, and the developer is active on Github with issues. Making a background mobile app is not easy because Android is constantly trying to reduce background battery drain or background process spyware. ------ Abishek_Muthian I've stopped wearing my WearOS watch and it now serves as a smart clock for notifications on my desk[1] and fitbit or any other heart rate monitor(even Apple watch) hurts me[2]. So even inexpensive smart watches with open-source firmware (detailed below) where heart rate monitor can be disabled would serve my needs going forward. Shout out to couple of smartwatch projects, which falls inline with the ethos of the author and anyone who agrees with it. AsteroidOS[1] - open-source linux based smartwatch firmware. Nice UI/UX, Wayland, good number of hardware support including MTK6580 chipset based inexpensive watches. In my tests about a year back, although the watch with AsteroidOS itself was usable, the sync with the android app was unreliable and could be due to android itself or manufacturer's kill-policy. PineTime[2] - $24.99, completely accessible, several RTOSes being built, Apps in Rust,Python etc. [1][https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1281998220118249472](https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1281998220118249472) [2][https://abishekmuthian.com/my-experience-with-fitbit- charge-...](https://abishekmuthian.com/my-experience-with-fitbit-charge-hr- numbness-tingling-and-pain-fec85d41d165/) [3][https://asteroidos.org/](https://asteroidos.org/) [4][https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/](https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/) ~~~ Abishek_Muthian Bangle.js - There seems to be another nRF52832 based open-source 'hackable' watch albeit double the price of PineTime but aimed at JS developers[5]! Has anyone got this? [5][https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js](https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js) ~~~ dariosalvi78 I have one. It's really nice to develop on and has lots of sensors/features. Dislikes: it's big, very big, and ugly, doesn't have an hardware step counter and the step detection algorithm embedded in Espruino doesn't work at all, the heart rate detection is OKish if you are still, but not very reliable either, battery doesn't last very long probably because of Espruino not being very careful at saving power. It's a fun device, but not great for more serious use. I hope that the community will improve the software issues and that they will come up with a nicer hardware. Espruino on PineTime would be perfect. ~~~ Abishek_Muthian Interesting, I didn't know Espruino (JS) smartwatch as USP has its takers. It seems to ship directly from UK, Is it made completely in UK? So may be that explains double the price than other nRF52832 watches. >doesn't have an hardware step counter Did you buy an earlier version? Buy page lists pedometer[1]. >Dislikes: it's big, very big, and ugly Ah! Where tech forgets fashion again...Google Glass(Gulp). [1][https://shop.espruino.com/banglejs](https://shop.espruino.com/banglejs) ~~~ dariosalvi78 The watch is made in China, but the software is made by them. The page says there's a pedometer but if you look at the datasheet of the accelerometer there isn't [1]. So it's computed in software (it's inside Espruino) but it's really basic. I have proposed Gordon, the author, an open source algorithm which I developed with some students (Oxford step counter), and he seems interested, but it takes some time to integrate and calibrate so, AFAIK, it's not there yet. About the size, I don't really mind, it's quirky, but it definitely doesn't follow the latest trends in terms of fashion... [1] [https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js+Technical](https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js+Technical) ------ huhtenberg Hold on. So how does one go about _retrieving_ the data from a Garmin watch? Garmin app's insistence on always needing a connection to their servers has always been bothersome, but now that the servers are fubared, it turns out that I can't even get the data off the tracker and onto an iPhone, because that too somehow needs a server connection. Finding an alternative had suddenly became a high priority task. ~~~ asimilator My Fenix 5 shows up as a mass storage device when I plug in the usb cable to my computer. You can pull .fit files off that, which contain everything the watch records. ~~~ js2 The Fenix 6 and 945 only support MTP, not mass storage. For those you need a third-party MTP client on macOS such as Android File Transfer. [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zx- iTg7...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zx- iTg7R5joJ:https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/running- multisport/f/forerunner-945/163453/please-add-usb-mass-storage-option-on- fr945&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0) ------ FloatArtifact This project is really interesting to liberate your smart watch. [https://gadgetbridge.org/](https://gadgetbridge.org/) ~~~ mjsir911 And some forks with garmin devices: \- [https://github.com/mjsir911/gadgetbridge](https://github.com/mjsir911/gadgetbridge) (mine) \- [https://github.com/mormegil-cz/Gadgetbridge/tree/garmin- wip](https://github.com/mormegil-cz/Gadgetbridge/tree/garmin-wip) ~~~ m-p-3 Just wondering, is the original Gadgetbridge repo not willing to accept code to merge? They're also on Matrix: [https://matrix.to/#/!KlgIJeiotNGZkxSqRi:matrix.org](https://matrix.to/#/!KlgIJeiotNGZkxSqRi:matrix.org) ~~~ FloatArtifact Nope [https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/](https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/) ~~~ vanous The main developer is very open to merging, so there must have been good reasons to not merge - I presume either code quality or requirements for network connection, which Gadgetbridge intentionally does not permit. ------ userbinator _I’ve often said that if we convince ourselves that technology is magic, we risk becoming hostages to it. Just recently, I had a brush with this fate, but happily, I was saved by open source._ _I was very pleased to discovered an open-source utility called gpsbabel (thank you gpsbabel! I donated!) that can unpack Garmin’s semi-(?)proprietary “.FIT” file format into the interoperable “.GPX” format._ ...and how do you think that utility was created? They probably didn't have access to Garmin's source code or documentation for the format. They just "figured it out". Furthermore, whether that utility is open-source doesn't seem to matter here: it's just doing a format conversion. _but it was mostly a matter of finding the right open-source pieces and gluing them together with Python_ Replace "open-source" with "freely usable", and the author would've probably been able to accomplish the same end-goal. Gluing together existing software, treating the pieces as black boxes, doesn't show off any advantages of open- source at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against open-source; I'm just against this rising glorification of it as somehow a be-all and end-all of software freedom. What is worth praise, however, is the rising availability of freely usable software. To go back to the author's first point, the best way to not "convince ourselves that technology is magic" is to start with a comprehensive low-level education: Computers are just dumb machines executing sequences of instructions, and in a non-hostile environment, you get to choose precisely what instructions they execute. ~~~ makomk I think FIT is actually a (somewhat) documented format that's used by a number of non-Garmin devices as well, mostly GPS cycle computers. It's not really any more non-standard than the Garmin extension to GPX being used for heart rate after conversion. Probably a little harder to implement though, given that it's a terse space-optimized binary format. (Though maybe not, since XML namespaces seem to be involved.) ------ jordan801 For those wondering, I just accessed and parsed a .FIT file. I plugged my watch's charging cable into a USB port on my Linux rig (works the same for windows). Navigated to GARMIN. And immediately saw .FIT files. To get to your activities, navigate to GARMIN->ACTIVITY. You should be able to see when the files were created, so you can figure out which one you want to view. Each is it's own activity. Next you need a FIT file parser. I'm a NodeJS guy, so I did an NPM search and found "fit-file-parser". I made a quick project, and wrote out the code necessary. In all of five minutes I had a JSON object with my run. Maybe I should engineer a simple, single page HTML app to open, parse, and render the statistics? I feel like when I get done Connect will be back online and this will be an afterthought :P. ~~~ lightbulbjim You might like GoldenCheetah. ------ ocdtrekkie I took my Fitbit off when Google announced the acquisition. Kinda hoping PineTime will be a good alternative when a more polished version becomes available. I still have my Fitbit data and even my old Google location history backed up. I wish more projects focused on importing from takeouts of proprietary services. ~~~ fouc I hadn't heard about google's attempt to acquire fitbit. It doesn't sound like it's gone through yet. [https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/3/21312383/google-fibit- acqu...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/3/21312383/google-fibit-acquisition- antitrust-data-regulatory-eu-scrutiny) ------ Animats Yes. The screenshots of the dark pattern dialogs from the "anal probe as a service" site are great. ------ lsllc As I take my daily runs through the woods (with my Garmin 935!) I have been thinking about the near future and what a 2nd wave of COVID19 might bring. What if we end up with a France/Spain/Italy style hard lockdown? Like troops on the street type lockdown?, can't go out at all except to go directly to the store, neighbors calling 911 on neighbors who go outside (which is how my Italian friends tell me it was in Italy). I could just go run in the woods in the dark, no-one would know right? And it's highly unlikely I'd be seen at night (a Spanish friend of mine ended up hiking several nights a week in the dark so he wouldn't be seen as he was going stir crazy being trapped inside). But my GPS data would be uploaded to the cloud! They would know! There would be evidence, fed to the NSA! Would I hear their standard issue kicking in my door! Of course I could just leave the Garmin at home, but I like my GPS and stats. So now I know how I can pull the data off watch, process it myself and remove it before it can be synced! Thank you! /s (a little bit) ~~~ RandomBacon Yesterday: We need backdoors for everyone's safety. Tomorrow: We need everything to be cloud-only for everyone's safety. ------ tdhz77 I’ve been following bunnie since I was 11 years old in the days of the original Xbox. I hope others know how important knowledge sharing is. For me, I had no idea what was going on, but the fact that I could try to understand it was enough for me. I’m now 32, and an engineer. I didn’t have money, but this thing called Linux was free. Such great memories. ------ andrewcooke if anyone is interested, i have a project that allows you to process and visualize data from garmin devices (FIT files in general). it includes a command (ch2 fit records <filename>) that dumps the contents of a file. it's not got many users and is a little unpolished still, but recently i added docker support which makes it easier to try out. [https://github.com/andrewcooke/choochoo](https://github.com/andrewcooke/choochoo) ------ phillc73 I've not seen it mentioned yet in the discussion, but my preferred open source tool for analysing Garmin FIT files is ActivityLog2[1]. Written in Racket, it provides some very nice analysis tools for cycling, running and swimming. Regularly updated and decent blog posts on different aspects by the author. [1] [https://github.com/alex-hhh/ActivityLog2](https://github.com/alex- hhh/ActivityLog2) ------ hdasika "Since Garmin at least made money on the hardware, collecting my health data is just icing on the cake; for Strava, my health data is the cake." I dont see a difference between what Garmin and Strava do to your data. Ultimately, Strava is trying to provide you some more insights using your health data. It ultimately depends whether you want it or not. Isn't this the same with all the services these days? ~~~ ogre_codes I think what the author is trying to say here is that Garmin _has_ a way of making money off them—selling hardware—and thus doesn't need to sell user data as well. Strava has no way of monetizing outside of selling user data. I'm not sure this is entirely true though, I've seen hardware companies sell out their users for a few bucks. Likewise, Strava has ways to make money from users—via Strava Premium services. I have no idea how well these particular companies handle data specifically so it's hard to say. ~~~ maxerickson Strava turned off most of their free features and is now pretty much a subscription service. ~~~ kingosticks That's a massive exaggeration. They turned off some features. The free offering is still very usable. ------ 205guy I'm a longtime user of hand-held GPS units for hiking and back-packing. Since before the time of wireless connectivity and social sports portals, these units have had USB cables and downloadable files--and fortunately still do. Garmin provides the BaseCamp software, which is just a local viewer for the files--admittedly, it doesn't have very good maps. But it has always had GPX export and seeing your tracks in Google Earth is way more compelling. So you get your own data on your own machine, and not on someone else's servers. And this has been one of the reasons I haven't gone to smart-watches (the other is accuracy in terrain). You have to have the app on your phone and pair them together. Even if that workflow is still possible (as demonstrated by the article, it is a fall-back), the default is to require cloud processing. I don't want my tracks stored somewhere else, and even less so if there's a chance of accidentally sharing them publicly. I guess I don't get the sports stats (heart-rate, etc), but that's a small price to pay. ------ solarkraft > The bad news is as I tried to create an account on Strava , all sorts of > warning bells went off. The website is full of dark patterns ... I'm glad I'm not the only one considering these warning signs, but also puzzled why not _everybody_ thinks like that, especially with services that could hold your data hostage. Is it a lack of education, lack of care or careful risk/benefit analysis? ~~~ TeMPOraL Lack of options - available, or known about. You learn about service X. Services online are usually non-substitutable (you can't use Fitbit service with Garmin watch, etc.), and often have network effects (all your runner friends are on Strava). So what is a regular person going to do? The choice is almost always binary: ignore the warning signs and sign up, or do without the entire category of experience altogether. ------ PeterStuer When I looked into quantified self IoT a few years back the monetization of the data as the primary component of the business model was ubiquitous. There was one kickstarter project for an open source wristband but it did not seem to get traction. Has this changed at all? I love the idea of measuring myself in various ways but I want real-time and private access to my data. ------ dariosalvi78 So maybe people now realise they are buying services not devices. These devices are locked, either you share your most intimate data with their companies or they're unusable. Garmin is a bit of an exception here because they at least allow you to get the data via USB. ~~~ submeta But they are very restrictive with API access. You have to apply for a developer access, and they won't give you any if you aren't a developer. All the "modern" companies will give you an API access, a token and even API wrapper code in many languages in an instant. Garmin is very old-school here. ~~~ dariosalvi78 Very old school indeed. In my job we tried to approach them. They have a very interesting library that allows your app to connect to their devices and skip their app. It's for research only. They kindly offered us to use it but when we mentioned that our app was open source they pulled the offer. We tried to explain that we could bundle their library in a proprietary module but they didn't want to listen. ------ holri There is a free hardware/software Smartwatch project: [https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/](https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/) ------ j88439h84 Does this take data from the Garmin web API or directly from the watch hardware, without uploading it to Garmin? ~~~ jordan801 It takes it directly from the .fit file on the watch, uses some software to parse the file. You can get the .fit file on a windows machine by plugging the watch into it and accessing it like a USB. Not sure about linux, but I've heard Mac requires some third party software. ~~~ js2 No third party software needed on mac. The watch mounts as a mass storage device then you just copy the fit files off of it. You may have to check the watch settings and make sure that the USB setting is mass storage mode. Edit: apparently some Garmin watches only support Media Transfer Protocol: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol) [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zx- iTg7...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zx- iTg7R5joJ:https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/running- multisport/f/forerunner-945/163453/please-add-usb-mass-storage-option-on- fr945&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0) For these you have to use an MTP client on macOS such as Android File Transfer. ------ jacquesl Thanks for this. It’s exactly what I’m interested in as I play with my Garmin and kayak this summer! I loved Strava in the early days, but as it tries to be a full social network, it’s lost much of its charm for me. I’m more interested in routes and stats, than what some athlete is doing in Chamonix. ------ lightbulbjim Cool, but you could also just use software such as GoldenCheetah or rubiTrack. ------ OnACoffeeBreak For a list of various utilities that work with fitness trackers: [https://www.dcrainmaker.com/tools](https://www.dcrainmaker.com/tools) ------ alex_duf Anyone knows if it's possible to do something similar with a Fitbit? Basically extracting the data without having to sync it with fitbit's servers? ~~~ andreashansen If you have the Fitbit Ionic or Versa, you could develop your own watch app and companion app, where the watch app will extract sensor data and websocket it to the companion app, which in turn could pass the data to your own backend/database. The API documentation is quite good from Fitbit. ------ dTal >It’s exactly the data I need, in the format that I want; no more, and no less. Plus, the output is a single html file that I can share directly with nothing more than a simple link. No analytics, no cookies. Just the data I’ve chosen to share with you. I click the link and am presented with the familiar blank page of needs- javascript. Oh dear. What has uBlock stopped this time? * maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com * cdnjs.cloudflare.com * rawcdn.githack.com (also a cookie from here) * code.jquery.com * cdn.jsdelivr.net Not quite the "single html file, no analytics, no cookies" that was promised. ~~~ jordan801 They were referring to the output file their code produces... Not the .fit parser. ~~~ dTal The link I'm talking about is literally the hyperlink in the text "nothing more than a simple link". It leads to a file titled "speed-2020-07-21-16-10-44-map.html" which I assume is meant to be the output. ~~~ maxerickson It's semantics. The mapping tool outputs a single html file, _that relies on stuff from other servers_. But all they have to deal with is the single file (if you view source, the exercise data is stored in the file). It's really not an interesting discussion. Maybe they could have used a better description, but it's not confusing or particularly misleading. ~~~ dTal I am not sure how "no cookies" used to describe a link which attempts to set a cookie is anything except misleading. ------ j88439h84 Is it possible to get data off a Fitbit without uploading it to cloud? ~~~ krtkush I don't think so, unfortunately. ------ montebicyclelo I mentioned that I do this, with gpsbabel on the Garmin thread the other day, but got downvoted. :( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926528) ------ greesil You could just buy a watch. It comes pre-liberated. ------ matsemann The long unsubstantiated rant about Strava seemed unnecessary. It drowned the interesting part about how one can do cool visualizations tailored to one's own needs. There are soo many ways to look st data. I use Garmin Connect, Training Peaks, Strava, Elevate. They all have something the other misses. Making a something myself tailored for me would be cool. Edit: the reason I'm downplaying the attack on Strava, is that it doesn't really know that much. It knows the explicit activities synced, and whatever it can derive from that (where I live and work for instance). But Garmin, Polar, Fitbit etc knows sooo much more. My pulse and movements during the whole day which can be used to corroborate lots of stuff, when I sleep etc. ~~~ davegauer I thought the Strava rant was appropriate in demonstrating that bunnie was aware of and tried alternatives before he wrote his own software. As for "unsubstatiated": part of it is _well_ substantiated: his screenshots clearly demonstrate Strava's questionable interface choices. :-) ~~~ matsemann As I've explained elsewhere here, uploading health data to Strava is the core feature it's used for. Asking for that is not a dark pattern, as it's pretty useless without..
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to get rich in America: A dozen entrepreneurs, a dozen success stories - staunch http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0706/gallery.success_stories.moneymag/index.html ====== brlewis The second guy lives in my town, is about my age, prepped while on payroll as I'm doing, and entered an established market as I'm doing. I should meet him.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go - rkirkendall http://www.CheckUpApp.org ====== phfez I can understand why you think this might be a good idea. But it completely doesn't take the depressed person into account at all. It thinks it can solve suicide by checking up on the individual? Do you think the individual wants to be checked up on? Maybe the people checking up on the person are the actual problem in that person's life, which could create an even more serious dilemma for that person. If there is anything that would drive me to suicide, it would be more people thinking that they can 'solve the problem' in this manner. ~~~ smclaughlin That's an interesting perspective. I disagree. I think if someone is tweeting about suicidal intentions then it follows that they are not concerned about the privacy of those intentions. ~~~ phfez Many people don't understand the terms and conditions of social networks like twitter and facebook, and privacy with those services is ambiguous and difficult to manage. If a person is feeling suicidal because the people in their life are not noticing their pain, I really doubt that knowing an algorithm had to do it will make them feel any better. ------ wyager This seems a little accidentally sinister to me... Something about doing automatic sentiment analysis on someone's data without their permission seems morally questionable. I mean, almost none of us are happy when the government does it, even though it's allegedly with the (very questionably) "good" intention of "fighting (terrorism|drugs|bogeymen)". ~~~ fmdud It's different when it's public data, though - it's data _willingly shared_. ~~~ phfez It's not willingly shared to you ------ jwise0 Ricky, Thanks for this service. Sometimes, all it takes is to remind someone that people are there for them, and care about them. I don't terribly like Twitter, but I try to read it once a day or so just to keep a view on how people are doing; this service would be incredibly useful to me to make sure that I don't have things that I'd like to pay attention to falling through the cracks. I know a bunch of people here seem to wish that the service were less aggressive (or that it didn't exist at all): for my application, I'd almost prefer it be more aggressive! Three negative sentiments is a high bar to meet, and I fear the false negative rate could be quite high. Anyway, thanks very much for writing this. As a whole, classes of applications that help me mediate my interaction with social networks are things that I support, and in specific, this application is incredibly valuable to me. ~~~ rkirkendall Glad you like it! Thanks for kind words. ------ conistonwater Have you thought at all about the ethics of meddling in people's lives? [1] This "service" seems contrary to basic notions of privacy and freedom. [1] [http://www.davidhume.org/texts/suis.html](http://www.davidhume.org/texts/suis.html) ~~~ jwise0 The only thing the service does is alert the friends of someone who appears to be about to end their own life, but who, for some reason, is posting about it on a public forum. I can assure you that the service does no meddling whatsoever. Someone who is swept by the depths of depression, and takes a last moment to emerge long enough to ask their friends for help -- well, I think that it is only fair to counterbalance the feed algorithms that try to keep the rest of us blissfully ignorant, and let them have the support that they ask for. ~~~ conistonwater > alert the friends of someone who appears That's meddling all right. ------ cjslep I think this is really cool. Clarifying question from these two statements that seem to conflict: > The goal of the CheckUp project is to detect any serious sign of depression, > self-harm or suicide posted to a social network and provide peer support by > notifying a concerned party. > The app works by checking the tweets on your home timeline every few minutes > and sending you an email notification if a tweet is flagged. Shouldn't it instead make the person signing up the "concerned party" to be notified via e-mail, and instead have that concerned party specify which twitter feeds to watch? I'm probably missing something here. ~~~ rkirkendall Hey thanks for the feedback! I will try to update the site to clarify the language a little more –– what you described actually is how it works. The user that signs up is the concerned party that we would notify. The app watches all tweets on that user's home timeline. By "home timeline", I was referring to all tweets posted by the user and everyone followed by that users (so, your Twitter feed). That's how it's described in Twitter's API docs, but I can see where that may be a point of confusion. ------ DanBC This looks like a useful tool. Assuming for the moment that this is very accurate. What then? Ann discovers that Bob is suicidal. What is Ann supposed to do then? (My suggestions are to ask Bob if he intends to die; and to help Bob access medical help. (Emergency help if he says he intends to die soon)). Perhaps some set of accurate, international, flowcharts showing what you're supposed to do if a colleague / friend / relative / etc is suicidal would help. (In UK: Contact their GP; or an ambulance if suicide is in progress;) You also seem to be ignoring ages, which is tricky. What do your ethics team say about reporting suicidality and people under 18? ~~~ rkirkendall Good idea on the flow chart! Thanks ------ bussiere hum, interesting. Kind of minority report here. Machine learning on depression syndrome ? I'am a hacker and not truly white, are you not afraid that people used this to take advantage of depressed people ? A man can use this to spot depressed women , some are manipulator born people. I find the project interesting but it have a lot of ethic problems. I think that it will be more a tools for the people in wealth. maybe it could be more interesting to have the global mood of people than the mood of one people. ~~~ fleitz ML would be a huge step forward, this just matches a couple keywords. ~~~ bussiere if you need some advice on ML i will be glad to give you some. I'am mainly use python for this but there's other solution. ------ matart How accurate do you think this can be? What happens if I write a facebook update that says, as an example: I don't believe I have ever said "I feel depressed" Would this be flagged? Does it only take one post to be flagged or is it looking for recurring behaviour? ~~~ rkirkendall Good question. Part of the ongoing nature of this project is to expand our phrase detections. I pulled the original phrase list from a white paper written by BYU last year because I figured that would be a good starting point. There is room for vast improvement though. If the last few posts leading up to the flagged post are classified as predominately negative (currently looking at the last 3 tweets before the flagged tweet), then we send the notification. The intuition is that if a person is comfortable enough with social to post seriously suicidal content, he or she has probably already made some preceding negative remarks. ~~~ matart Very interesting. Thanks for the response! ------ rubiquity This sounds like a great service but I really don't give a damn that it is written in Go. Also: > _This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again > later._ ~~~ rkirkendall Hey! Thanks for the heads up. We picked up more traction than I had anticipated, but we should be back online now! And some people may be interested in the Go repo ;)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Corn biofuels worse than gasoline on global warming in short term - 001sky http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/20/corn-biofuels-gasoline-global-warming ====== 001sky There seem to be limits on both sides of this debate. What is 'news' here is not that one-side or the other has 'won'.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mint.com turns 404 ad page into date ad for developer - punkrobby https://www.mint.com/accounting ====== chimeracoder I love it when companies add a little personal touch to their 404 pages (though they're taking 'personal' to a whole new level here!) I saw an incredibly great collection of creative 404 pages a few months back. I can't find the one I saw, though Fab404 (<http://fab404.com/>) has a bunch. ~~~ effigies My favorite 404: <http://www.rathergood.com/404> ~~~ ComputerGuru Sound, plus it's annoying as hell? I can see why. ------ ComputerGuru Am I the only one wondering if it was a prank on Justin? I think it's more likely that a coworker was being funny than Justin's desperate for a date :) ~~~ MichaelApproved He's clearly posing in the picture. He must know it's being used for something funny. ~~~ delinka That, or the entire thing is a big joke and if Justin exists, he's not quite that ... caricature. ~~~ ComputerGuru s/caricature/character/ ? ~~~ delinka Nope. I'm intentionally misusing the noun 'caricature' as an adjective. I suggest that Justin's notable features in his photo are exaggerated, if he's even a real human. ------ aaronbrethorst Clever, reminds me of Groupon's unsubscribe video: <http://www.groupon.com/unsubscribe> (flash required) ~~~ wtn The Groupon unsubscribe video is so awesome I recommended my friends to unsubscribe to see it… ~~~ joshmlewis As long as you're signed out you can still watch the video and not really unsubscribe. ------ josegonzalez When I saw this page committed, I smiled quite a bit. <http://seatgeek.com/404> (Image: [http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main- qimg-e859ed4563650...](http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main- qimg-e859ed4563650849267fc5cad7baa3ba)) ------ goodweeds If you've ever posted an ad on craigslist, then you know he's probably received hundreds of penis photos in the hour since this link was posted. ~~~ bostonpete Pshaw. I posted an ad for a lawnmower and only got a handful of penis photos. ~~~ rapind In my defence, I really need a new mower. ------ guelo I know this is off topic but beware of Mint. As they say, if you are not paying then you are not the customer. EDIT: ooh -4, I guess ya'll REALLY didn't want to be warned. It was just intended as a friendly warning but in reality I don't care what you do, go ahead use Mint all you want then. ~~~ hendrix This is oh so true. Wtf are you giving out your bank history and info to a website? If they get hacked…lol oh shit. (let the downvotes commence) ~~~ ceejayoz Frankly, I trust Mint with my bank info more than I trust my bank. One has a history of incompetence, and it isn't Mint. ~~~ esrauch I agree with that in general, but it feels like a single point of failure. 10 different servers that all have an X% chance of being hacked are much more secure to me than 1 server that even has X/10% chance of being hacked. That said, I like the idea of mint in general. It's depressing that banks can't (won't) figure out read-only credentials for use cases like this. ~~~ tedreed ING Direct implemented read-only credentials for Mint, after fighting with them about access for months. (ING kept blocking Mint, and then Mint would find a way around it.) ------ Aloisius Am I the only one who finds the picture a bit disconcerting? It is mostly the kissy face pose. The photo seems so over the top that it just doesn't seem sincere. And is that a sweater vest? Nice. ~~~ maratd Relax. It's obviously a joke. Nobody is a desperate enough to look for love on a 404 page ... ~~~ maximusprime It's PR. And it worked - got to the top of HN and probably sent around other places. It's just an advert for mint. ------ hirojin I see many guys (yes, only the guys) here curious about Justin's sexuality. Really, if you're interested in him, just email him already. ------ yogrish Other interesting 404 page <http://www.foradian.com/404> ~~~ bbrizzi Niiiice. I just spent 5 minutes turning it along all 4 of its axis to find an angle from which it looks like a cube. ~~~ FireBeyond There's an easter egg there, too - try Control Shift drag. ------ rehashed 1.17MB 24bit PNG with alpha transparency on a flat color background... ------ hansy Haha this is so awesome and creative. Way to take a completely buzz-kill page and turn it into something fun and (perhaps) useful. ------ richardw The perfect place for a really good 404 is here. Missed opportunity, I think. <http://xkcd.com/403/> <http://xkcd.com/404/> <\-- <http://xkcd.com/405/> ~~~ beaumartinez I'm getting a 404 for it. Has Munroe changed it recently? ------ jspash Looks like a stock photo. Has the same amount of "funny" as grannies on motorcycles. Just an opinion or two... ~~~ sp332 I don't think it's stock. There's something up his sleeve. ~~~ udp I think it's some kind of watch. ------ jdelsman I emailed him; never heard back :( ~~~ emwa Could be he's into girls. ------ Cushman Serious question: why do we still have 404 pages? A 404 means the server can't find what I asked for, can't tell me where it went, has no idea what I'm looking for. By definition, my browser shouldn't show me the content that was returned-- it _knows_ it's not what I want! If I get a 404 code, the page shouldn't change. The browser should just show a message indicating that that resource doesn't exist, include the reason message if it's something other than "NOT FOUND", and let me either try a different link or correct my spelling. If I clicked a link to get there, it could even set a style on the link to indicate the resource doesn't exist. It's strange how much we're still living in the nineties. I wonder how many of the use cases of Ajax could be replaced by an intelligent browser using the existing HTTP standard? ~~~ eck The webmaster wanted you to see it. If browsers didn't show the content of a 404, webmasters would just send you the same "not found" page but with a 200 code, which would be even worse. ~~~ Cushman Well, no, it would be the same. That's my point; the conventional treatment of 404 on the web is a 200 that says "Sorry." So what's the point of it? ~~~ jamesaguilar It would be the same for the browser user agent, but a lot of other user agents might have trouble. Anyway, why are you advocating a change that you recognize will have no effect? ~~~ Cushman ? The change I'm advocating is in browser behavior, and would definitely make a difference for any site that complies with HTTP. There's nothing preventing malicious hosts from continuing to serve pages full of ads, but then, there never was. ~~~ esrauch It sounds like he is claiming that if a major browser changed this behavior, websites would just reconfigure their response to give a 200 response error page because they would prefer if the browser showed something like this rather than a browser dependent error message. That would end up making 404 _completely_ useless, even for actual tools like wget because it would be against webmasters interests to use them anymore. Do you disagree with that claim? ~~~ Cushman Well, my counterargument is that a change in browser behavior would make sites more usable, encouraging the proper use of 404. Of course, if that weren't the case, I'd agree there'd be no point in changing :P ~~~ esrauch If webmasters wanted a spartan base error they could easily have one though. ------ noja They should probably mention whether he wants a date with a guy or with a girl... ~~~ digitalsushi ahh maybe that doesn't actually matter. why is everything so boolean. ------ yarone Next up, ad network designed for embedding on 404 pages. :-) ~~~ CyrusL Actually, that already exists. Believe it or not there are ad products that pay for the people who click "Under 18" on porn entry pages. ~~~ ComputerGuru I find that hard to believe - mainly because it's impossible to believe anyone actually clicks that link. Heck, I'd bet half aren't even links, just text (only kidding!). ~~~ MichaelApproved I've clicked them before out of curiosity to see where it would take me. ------ Groxx I _love_ the description. Sharp crayons FTW! This might just take the cake for my favorite 404 page ever. ------ alapshah Quora- What are some of the funniest 404 pages: <http://www.quora.com/What- are-the-funniest-404-pages> ~~~ rottencupcakes Certainly not Quora's: <http://www.quora.com/zxdasd> ------ tomlin The points for this post are currently 404. I. Can't. Upvote. ------ athst I can't stand it when sites try to be cute like this with their 404 pages. I guess it's a good thing for getting buzz, but what about a user who is actually trying to use the site and gets that page? It's awful. You were trying to complete a task, the site isn't working how you wanted, and to top it all off, now they're trying to be funny and lighthearted. It just seems like a site failure isn't the right time to be making jokes. ------ cfontes Hahaha, very very nice ! It's petty that Mint doesn't work in my country... it doesn't sync with Brazilian Banks. So I am stick with Buxfer. ~~~ juliano_q Buxfer automatically import data from brazilian banks? I am looking for something like Mint for a long time to use here. ------ kkt262 I wonder how long till he gets a date? Probably a while since it's only us nerd dudes that know about it. ~~~ argarg What if he's interested in nerd dudes? ------ kr1shna Well done, Mint. Now if you could get a service up and running in the UK? Pretty please? ~~~ maximusprime Mint wouldn't work in the UK. Our online banking is secure. It seems that in the US most online banking is just secured with a password! :o ~~~ kr1shna Secure is relative. The HSBC crap-gadget that one has to carry around on a key chain is susceptible to easy theft/loss. Anyway, "security" is a poor reason to not have such a great service in the UK ~~~ maximusprime An HSBC security device is absolutely useless unless you know all the other details needed to login. That's kinda the whole point of it... I personally don't see the need for mint. ~~~ mikeash Mint wouldn't be very useful if your finances are simple. I have accounts with three banks, two credit card companies, and three investment brokerages, so having a service that aggregates all of that activity together makes it _much_ easier to keep track of what's going on. ~~~ maximusprime I guess possibly, but I still don't understand the need. I have quite a few accounts, but they're all for different purposes. Seeing them "all together" would make little sense for me, since they are different entities. ~~~ mikeash The investment accounts are really just a bonus, but it's really useful to have the checking account and all credit cards visible in one place. The checking account is where money comes in, and the credit cards are where money goes out, so seeing them together makes things much clearer. I also use multiple credit cards for purchases, so I can't easily see all of my purchase activity in one place otherwise. Additionally, having everything consolidated means I can do a quick check on recent transactions several times a week, instead of just looking at things when a bill comes. That means that it's much easier to detect fraud, since the activity is fresh in my mind, and takes much less time to notify the institution of the fraudulent transaction. ~~~ maximusprime OK, I guess I'm a completely different use case. Why multiple credit cards for purchases? Why don't you buy things using a debit card? ~~~ esrauch In addition to what mikeash said, using a credit card and paying it in full improves your credit score whereas a debit card doesn't, which will make it easier to get loans later. ~~~ salvadors That's (thankfully) not true in the UK (or, indeed, most countries). ~~~ esrauch Is there no such thing as a credit score in the UK? Or does paying credit cards not improve your credit score? The banking industry in the US is messed up, but how does it not make sense that responsibly paying loans doesn't indicate you are more likely to make good on future loans? ~~~ salvadors There's no such thing as a credit score (at least not in the US sense). The big problem with the US system is that it gets you needlessly hooked on the whole idea of credit. As per this very example, you need to do things like get credit cards just to pay them off on time, or else you're screwed when it comes to things like getting a mortgage. In most of Europe the key factor for that sort of loan is simply whether you have a steady income that's high enough to make the payments, factoring in outstanding debts. A credit check will show up things like whether you've a history of missing payments on any existing credit, and that can certainly be taken into account, and most lenders have their own version of a 'credit score' they'll apply based on all that info — but it's not a centralised thing, and it's generally more concerned with raising past problems as a red flag, rather than with past good behaviour. If you've a history of living within your means that should be a good thing, not a bad thing. ~~~ esrauch > If you've a history of living within your means that should be a good thing, > not a bad thing. How is always paying off a credit card not living within your means though? Maybe this is some US-centric brainwashing, but it seems to me that someone who has never had a credit card is less trustworthy than someone who had it and didn't overspend; it proves that the person had the opportunity to do something really dumb and didn't. The person who never had the credit card might have done something dumb if they were ever given the chance. It's interesting that your credit checks are so decentralized, but it seems unlikely to me that would cause them to consider no history to be the same as known good history. That said, I'm not even sure how much impact properly paying credit cards has versus not having one, but even with a minor difference there is practically no advantages to using a debit card instead of a credit card that you always pay off in full from your checking account. Even excluding credit, certainly you must get additional fraud guarantees and possibly rewards programs with credit cards in the UK? ~~~ salvadors But if you're always living within your means, why would you ever want to have a credit card at all? Things like reward programs certainly aren't universal (or even common, I believe, though they do exist), and pretty clearly only exist to try to get people to use the card in the first place, on the basis that it's to the credit card company's advantage, in that enough people won't pay off in time to justify the rewards. (I should also note that it's more common in UK/EU for credit cards to also have a monthly or annual fee.) I'm not sure what additional fraud guarantees exist. I had fraud on my debit card once, and it was resolved much easier and quicker than the time I had fraud on my credit card. The UK does have a slightly odd additional consumer protection law in that if you buy anything over £100 on a credit card, and the goods turn out to be faulty, you can claim the cost back from the credit card company, rather than the retailer. That's certainly vaguely useful, but I've never heard of anyone choosing to have a credit card just for that reason. I think there's potentially a different worldview at play in the "had a chance to do something dumb and't didn't" approach. To massively overgeneralise, I'd say the European way is to simply not put that temptation in front of people, whereas the US way is to deliberately encourage it, so as to massively profit from it (with the UK constantly torn between the two!) :) So I'd say pretty much the opposite of your final conclusion: There are so few advantages to using a credit card rather than a debit card that why would you bother with the hassle/risk? ~~~ mikeash If nothing else, a credit card gives you a month-long interest-free loan when used properly. That's money in your pocket if you keep the difference in an interest-bearing account. Why _wouldn't_ you take advantage of this? I'm not sure what hassle/risk you're talking about with a credit card. The hassle factor is the same (approximately none) and the risk is lower, not higher. ~~~ salvadors People always say this "interest-free loan" thing, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. In an average month I spend under €1000 a month on my debit card, but let's round it up to that just for an example. My bank doesn't pay interest on current account balances. Even if I were to go through the hassle of setting up a term deposit for that, the total interest I'd receive on that in one month is 78 cents. I can think of any number of reasons why I _wouldn't_ bother taking advantage of that. The question as to whether a credit card is more/less/even risk to a debit card is pretty much the issue at hand here, but even leaving aside the slightly odd issue of psychological risks and hassles, I've heard plenty of horror stories from people in the US where something went wrong to make their monthly payment late (including the credit card company just deciding to change the due date), thus triggering all sorts of badness. ~~~ mikeash Well, get a better checking account to start with! Yeah, the money is small, but it's also free. I mean, $10-20/year for doing nothing? Why not? So as you say, it comes down to the risk differential. If you believe a debit card is less risk, then certainly a tiny amount of interest won't change your mind. For what it's worth, I've heard far more horror stories about debit cards than credit cards. The major difference is that with a debit card, _any_ company that gets your card info can screw you over. You place an order online, and the company charges you $1000 instead of $10 by mistake, leaving no money in your account. Your next transaction then overdrafts, leaving you with a fat fee. In theory, it's not your fault and you should be able to get the bank or the merchant to cover it, but they'll all be pointing fingers elsewhere.... And of course, if you can't get the money refunded immediately then you spend a great deal of time with no money in your account. Now you may have trouble buying necessities etc. until the situation is fixed. Additionally, I have my credit cards set up to automatically pay off the full balance each month. If somebody tries to pull a dirty trick and the payment is made late, the blame is clearly and fully with them, so I imagine that would be quickly resolved. Beyond that, there really isn't anything to go wrong other than a major failure of self-control. ~~~ salvadors Where does one find these magical accounts? In many countries no bank pays interest on current accounts, or, where they do, currently interest rates generally are so low anyway that the amounts are negligible. I have much better ways of arranging my finances than faffing around with credit cards I don't need and moving money around short term money market accounts just to earn less than $20 extra a year. As for your example of buying something online with a debit card, I don't do that. My bank lets me generate as many virtual cards as I like for online shopping, each with a different number. I set the maximum amount that can be charged to each one and I can then order anything I want online with it with none of the risks you mention. Even if I couldn't do that, the situation you describe wouldn't arise, as a) I have daily limits on various types of transfers and withdrawals (that I can adjust online if I need to spend more than that at any time, so I keep the defaults pretty low). So even if someone was being malicious they still couldn't take out more than that amount (and I've SMS notifications set up for all transfers over a fairly low limit too, so they couldn't just come back and take another payment every day until I was cleaned out). It would certainly inconvenience me, but that's just as true with a credit card (and that would probably take me longer to notice). And, as I said earlier, I've had experience of problems with both, and the credit card ones were much more hassle to resolve. b) my current account is multi-currency, so even if someone managed to clean out all my euros, I'd still have cash in GBP, USD, etc. c) most of my money isn't in my current account anyway, so even if _that_ got completely cleaned out, in all currencies, I'd still have money in my various other accounts. ~~~ mikeash Interest bearing checking accounts do exist. They're not making much right now, but it's more than zero. I don't get why you describe credit cards as "faffing around". They're no more hassle than debit cards. ------ guynamedloren So, who emailed Justin after seeing this page? Wonder how affective this is! ~~~ blahedo Clearly, this page displays strong affect; that's why we're all talking about it. The question is, does it work? ~~~ sandieman Only if females existed on hackernews to let us know! ~~~ ChrisAnn Damn, I guess we'll never find out seeing as there aren't any on the internet at all... (also, maybe Justin likes boys.) Edit: It would seem sarcasm falls on deaf ears at Hacker News. Note my feminine username... ~~~ sp332 HN doesn't read usernames, that's why they're in small gray print. ------ wwweston Shades of datelance.com: [http://www.deseretnews.com/article/600150311/Friends-post- bi...](http://www.deseretnews.com/article/600150311/Friends-post-big-ad-for- old-bachelor.html) ------ dr_ Since it's at mint.com/accounting I wonder if it an intentional dig at the traditional concept of accounting, or at least personal finance, as opposed to what mint offers? Just a thought. ------ insraq "The page is not available, but Justin is" - very creative. ------ scoot Um, why are we upvoting this dreadful stereotype of a developer (dickie bow, nerd glasses, and "slow cars, sharp crayons, awkward silences") Puhlease! ------ JAVagueArgument JavaScript Polaroid (you have to shake it like one) 404 <http://fatjed.com/404> ------ asktell GitHub has the 404 I've been looking for: <https://github.com/404.html> ------ cupcake_death Page Sad Clowned <http://www.explore.to/nothing-here> ~~~ jarofgreen That serves a completely blank page for me. You broke the 404! :-p ------ anid101 This one is awesome too - <http://playcez.com/error> ------ jeremyt Genius link bait. ------ kwamenum86 Watch from tokyoflash.com. Nice. ------ LearnYouALisp That man needs to shave! ~~~ biesnecker Or maybe he doesn't.... they need to A/B test! :) ~~~ LearnYouALisp I knew what the reaction here would be. I know what the modern "trend" is, and its unprofessional. ~~~ biesnecker How is figuring out what your customers actually respond to unprofessional? ~~~ LearnYouALisp It's so basic that we really shouldn't have to talk about it: this is personal presentation, interaction, humanity. The trouble is people who live in a virtual world lose much of that consciousness (and it's happened to me as well before). ------ Tharkun I can warmly recommend <http://www.404.be>. ------ ronbeltran Is there any mint.com girl developer who wants a date? I only see Justin on 404, or maybe they dont have girl developers.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Need Some Feedback on the Python Job Positions Aggregator - vmesel http://www.pyjobs.xyz/#refer ====== txsh Menu bar overlaps heading on mobile. iPhone 6, chrome. ~~~ vmesel Thanks for reporting, bro! Gonna change it xD
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Stockfish – open source chess engine - uriva https://stockfishchess.org/ ====== ganeshkrishnan I use this as my primary chess engine. Most top chess engines are better than any human grandmaster. However none of them use deep learning like Google did with go and I am trying to setup tensor flow with stockfish so that it can see patterns in chess board
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bill Gates: Chinese censorship is "very limited" - ilamont http://blogs.computerworld.com/15466/bill_gates_chinese_censorship_is_very_limited ====== nailer I quite like a lot of Microsoft's older products, and I think the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation does great work with his (and others' contributed) money. But every so often I, along with everyone else, gets reminded of Bill's ethics. ------ dublinclontarf Sorry as someone who lives in the mainland I can tell you that it is NOT easy to get around the GFW(Great Fire Wall). All websites related to T-o-r are blocked, even if you can get a hold of T-o-r the GFW blocks the IP that T-o-r initially connects to as well as the default ports. Web proxies are useless unless they are https and even then if there are the wrong keywords in the https get request it's blocked. The GFW uses deep packet inspection, so not only are there blacklisted websites but they also analyse the content your viewing. People say there are trivial methods to get around the GFW but I haven't found any that work(short of buying access to a VPN, and currently unless you have an international creditcard you can't). Where are the trivial methods that work if there are so many of them? This is a censor-ship net where the gaps are constantly being closed, a few years ago it WAS trivial to get around, not anymore, and it's becoming more difficult as the GFW systems and methods advance (using technologies provided by western companies such as Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft etc) note-formatted so post can get through the GFW ------ maconic I've spent some time in China and found Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, BBC (just to name a few) to be entirely blocked while I was there. While it's debatable as to whether or not these Western websites are important to average Chinese, it seems like a mischaracterization to say blocking several of the top 10 most popular websites in the world is "very limited." Another experience which spooked me a bit (I don't know if it was purely coincidental or not): I was visiting some fairly obscure websites while I was there and they were accessible. Yet, within a few days after I first visited them, some of them were blocked. That made me wonder if there are human beings checking websites to decide whether or not they need to be "harmonized" (Chinese joke). ~~~ araneae And livejournal. I haven't been to China, but a friend of mine taught English at a university there for 2 years. She used a proxy server, but none of her students had even heard of them. (She was subverting the gov't by gently encouraging them to use them.) It's irrelevant how _easy_ it is to get around the censorship for Bill Gates. What's relevant is how _effective_ the censorship is for Chinese people- and it is. ------ helveticaman This fits with Mencius Moldbug's idea of rule by the smart: "Yet, even within the ballpark of restricted democracy, racial qualification is an incredibly crude measure. A much better result would be achieved, for instance, by psychometric qualification. If your IQ is less than 120, you have to go through life with the dunce-cap of a nonvoter. On the other hand, you get to go through life with a government elected by those whose IQ is over 120. Even better, the result of the test could be undisclosed - so you have no idea whether or not your vote matters. You feel no humiliation if it doesn't; you receive no advantage if it does." This is essentially how China is run: you take a standardized test when you're eighteen or so, and that test determines your life. If you do well, you have power, and if you do poorly, you don't. By the same token, if you're smart enough to download and set up Tor, you can access to controversial information. If you can't set up Tor, you can't. It's an IQ test. The thinking here is one I have met in peopel from the East, and it goes like this. A little learning is a dangerous thing. You can't have innocent fools upset with the goverment because you just can't have a revolution every thirty years. It's a mess, and you never get ahead as a country. Not my opinion, but if you ever found the rule of the nerds appealing, (I for one am a nerd and sort of do), now you know: that's China. ~~~ tsally _This is essentially how China is run: you take a standardized test when you're eighteen or so, and that test determines your life. If you do well, you have power, and if you do poorly, you don't._ I wonder how China's Steve Jobs did on the standardized test when s/he was eighteen. Our Steve Jobs hadn't even met Wozniak by that point. There are many types of intelligence and only one type is measured by standardized testing. Indeed is it probably all the other types that will become increasingly important as society adjusted to its complete saturation with technology. Ken Robinson's TED talk addresses this far better than I could: [http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html). If you only watch a few TED talks, Ken's should certainly be one of them. As you point out, the picture you paint of China is strangely appealing to those on HN (myself included). I think our types tend to be good at standardized testing and we enjoy highly efficient systems. However there is a massive cost to such a system because the Steve Jobs of the world are less likely to thrive. Once you look past the initial appeal of efficiency, it becomes a scary ideal indeed. ~~~ elblanco It's interesting though, there is a very large population of extremely bright and creative people who tend to score poorly on standardized tests as well. Selecting people based on standardized tests means that you have selected people who are good at standardized tests not necessarily the smartest or most creative people. There's a growing consensus that, at least at present, while China is certainly capable of producing complicated stuff (TV's, Cars, Electronics, Plastics, etc.) and very large numbers of well educated engineers, there is very little Steve Jobs type innovation happening in the country. ~~~ tsally _It's interesting though, there is a very large population of extremely bright and creative people who tend to score poorly on standardized tests as well._ That was the point I was trying to make. At 18 years old Steve Jobs was only just beginning to develop that intelligence of his we see so often today. ------ est > "The Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited. It's > easy to go around it, and so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is > very important." It's true to someone like Bill Gates. But for average Internet users in China, the Internet propaganda and censorship mechanism works great. ------ noarchy That's the kind of rationalizing I'd expect from someone with such a poor standard of ethics. Gates is not going to be alone here, of course. Everyone doing business in China has to be telling themselves stuff like this. ------ Klondike At least Google's initial rationalization was (paraphrasing) "even though China's censorship sucks, we think we can still benefit people's lives there by censoring the bare minimum possible". They've always acknowledged that China's censorship is a form of repression, and never emphasized the "we're just following the rules" bit over the actual ethical problem they were dealing with. ------ elblanco Really? Did somebody just run through this entire topic and downvote every comment? (8pm EST) (seriously, every single comment in here was sitting at 0 points right after about 8pm). ------ rbanffy Let me be the first to say I am not surprised.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What Microsoft gets for $2 billion - loboman http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/what-microsoft-gets-for-2-billion/ ====== cletus Isn't it simple? Microsoft is sinking a huge pile of money into improve Bing, getting market share and making acquisitions (altough I guess these wouldn't be expensed directly against income). Whether or not that's a wise strategy is another matter but there really is no mystery here. ~~~ davidu They are not making acquisitions -- They acquired powerset over 2.5 years ago. More than 10 quarters ago. I'm not aware of any other acquisition since then, or anything in the online space besides that in the last, what, 4+ years? Not that I disagree with that choice, acquisitions just because you have cash is just as stupid as no acquisitions. Better for them to determine a strategy first. ------ iterationx Steve Ballmer says he is willing to invest 5%-10% of Microsoft's operating income over the next five years on search. Read more: [http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-steve- ballmer-h...](http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-steve-ballmer-has- gone-bonkers-2009-6#ixzz19NFIfq1Z) Specifically, assuming Microsoft's operating income stays constant (it will likely grow), it's $5.5-$11 billion. endquote. ~~~ MarkMc That was 18 months ago, which means there's 3.5 years left of this experiment. If it's not making a profit by then, Ballmer will probably pull the plug on the project. Unless someone pulls the plug on Ballmer first. ------ natmaster Disclaimer: I do not speak for Microsoft, I am simply an employee - these opinions are mine and mine alone. As someone working in the online services division I have to say that this analysis is extremely simplistic. Would they be saying the same thing about Facebook? It was in the red for many years before it became profitable. That was the plan. ~~~ BarkMore The comparison to Facebook is not fair. Facebook is now profitable and Microsoft online services are not. Facebook was never in the red to the tune of 2B a year. Microsoft online services had a multiple year head start on Facebook. ~~~ viggity Facebook doesn't do 60B a year in revenue ~~~ BarkMore The comparison is between Facebook and Microsoft's online services, not all of Microsoft. Microsoft's online services didn't do 60B a year in revenue. ------ apedley This is such small thinking. As one of the commenters on the page did: <http://i.imgur.com/jHLOX.png> It shows a much more likely scenario. Although maybe a bit over the top with the naming of the profit section as Google Kill Zone. Why can't big companies play nice. :) ~~~ goalieca do you project a turnaround right now? Looking at their current product base I would say "hell no!". Microsoft has nothing up and coming to convince me they will gain more search users. Each and every time they have unveiled a new search or online tool they have failed to capture the market. I do not see what will be different in the future once they come up with their next big idea. Bing is clearly not going to take over even with it being the default in internet explorer. ~~~ apedley So what about the recent Facebook integration, still rolling out and the overall switch to social search, something Google can't get right no matter how many companies they buy. What about the only very recent Yahoo integration, the Windows Phone integration and the constant improvement with maps beyond what Google have offered. ------ nopinsight It's not the absolute amount that matters most, especially for a company with Microsoft's size and cash flow. Google's 2009 revenue is over 23 billion dollars and its operating income is over 8 billion. Considering the market size, two billion is not over the top. Not to mention online is a growth market and its strategic value is paramount. They're not a startup and they can invest really long-term to capture part of a market this significant. ------ anonsoftie This is a challenging problem that doesn't fit nicely into comments or short blog posts, but I'll try. Search is a tremendously expensive game to try and win. It's economics are such that the more search share you have, the more money you earn per search. This is a critical point, so I'll spell it out a little further. All search companies have more advertiser dollars than they have searches to spend them on, Google, Yahoo and Bing included. It's a supply constrained marketplace. The search ROI is so good for advertisers that they all want to spend more money at their current CPCs, but there aren't enough searches. This supply constraint leads to a problem for the smaller players. Search revenue is driven by having lots of advertisers compete in every auction. The larger the share, the more clicks each advertiser will get, and thus the more advertisers you attract. The smaller scale players don't drive enough clicks for some advertisers for it to be worth their time to set up and manage campaigns on them, while the larger scale players it is worth their while (the return they get exceeds the fixed cost of advertising in the marketplace). So with fewer advertisers, there are fewer bidders in the 2nd price auction, and the revenue per search is lower for the smaller scale players. So how does this apply to Microsoft's online division? Well, if they want to catch Google, they're going to have to do it at a scale disadvantage, meaning that Google is going to make more off of the same searches than Microsoft will simply because they have a bigger marketplace. To beat that, Microsoft has to commit to spending lots of money to try and close that scale gap by buying share through distribution deals and spending a ton on technology to differentiate the search product while accepting that they don't monetize the searches they do have as well. If they can eventually build a product that will pull enough marketshare from Google to be roughly equal, then they should start to see better monetization. The valid questions are: 1\. Is it possible to catch Google? Or are the market dynamics such that without a transformative difference in how the product works that Google will never be caught. 2\. If it is possible to catch Google, how much money will you have to spend, and what will your eventual ROI be when you get there. Since Microsoft is a company that does 60B in revenue, it has to look at big businesses to drive a 10% growth in that revenue. Your hot little startup that does $100MM doesn't make a dent. Even Facebook only does 1-2B, depending on which report you believe. Search is a 10B going to 20B market, and if Microsoft can spend 5B over 5 years to get half of that market and earn 10B every year it's worth it. Of course, the division has been horribly mismanaged for years. Qi Lu now runs it, and he's a different breed from most Microsoft execs. So time will tell if it's a good bet or not for Microsoft. ~~~ Umalu This analysis seems right to me. MSFT's annual cash flow from operations is in the $24 billion+ range. MSFT has $44 billion of cash in the bank. What is MSFT going to do with all that cash? Watch Google slowly eat its business? I'm surprised MSFT hasn't invested more in web services -- $2 billion seems small given its resources. Could it be a shortage of opportunities? ~~~ RockyMcNuts The $2b is what they spent IN EXCESS of the value they currently carry on the books for the business - they invested far more. It's an abysmal performance by anyone's standard BUT they could probably sell that business for considerably more than the book value. Even if the book value is fair and they lost $2b, they got the only viable (albeit still money-losing) alternative to Google, which was a strategic imperative if they want to link Office and Windows to the cloud. ------ bl4k And if they canned online - all the pundits will be saying: _"Google is beating Microsoft because Microsoft DOESNT EVEN HAVE A MAPPING PRODUCT OR SEARCH ENGINE.. they do not see the FUTURE IS ONLINE.. blah blah blah.. "_ This is Microsoft playing defense - and cheap relative to the profit machine they are defending ------ brudgers The chart doesn't account for the operational value of Bing for Microsoft. If you want to search MSDN, Google doesn't get to sell advertising or skew the search results to fit their business model or for that matter track what you're searching. Likewise, searches from MicroSoft IP addresses using Bing aren't tracked by Google either. ~~~ BarkMore If Microsoft is really concerned about Google gaining a competitive advantage by looking at search query traffic from Microsoft IP addresses, it would be much less expensive for Microsoft to hide the traffic through proxies than it is to build their own search engine. For a long time, Google's search results for MSDN were superior to Microsoft's. Perhaps that's changed with Bing. In any case, it seems to Google's advantage to provide the best search for MSDN. ------ forgotAgain I think the greater damage is what Microsoft lost by being fixated on search for so long. They went to where the puck is not to where it was going. Because of that, they now face the same situation in mobile. In other words they've become reactionary instead of being innovative. ------ disruptivetech Many see online as a "loss-leader", consider it setting out your stall. MS makes plenty of cash from selling product, but you could argue without the online presence their sales would be diminished - so where they are on the balance is what really needs to be considered i.e. if they shut up shop online, what the cost to the OS/Office division would be now and in the future? There is always the hope to tough it out in the hop of eventually gaining more market share as your competitors run out of steam and cash. ------ presty February 2010.. ~~~ nhebb Here's a link to their latest financials: [http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Fina...](http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Financials/FY10/Q4/SegmentRevenues.aspx) The Online Services Division for 2010 had an operating loss of $2.355B. ------ mwerty I think the infuriating logic goes something like this: 1\. If the shareholders held a gun to my head, can I make this profitable? Answer is probably yes but for some tiny profit. 2\. Do I see any other big prizes I can spend money on given I'm running a company with this skillset? Ans: Yes, but I still have lots left so what the heck. Plus, if they return money to shareholders in dividends, its waaaay less fun. ------ grandalf To make the claim that this is a bad thing, one must argue that Microsoft's stock would be worth more today if Microsoft had not been aggressive about search. How a company shows gains and losses is also very subjective. The numbers could turn around and show strong profits around the time that bing reaches 45% market share (which will be soon). ~~~ dotcoma 45%? Not even in Ballmer's wet dreams. Bing's market share is only up 4% since launch [http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...](http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/SegmentResults/OnlineServicesDivision/FY10/Q4/Performance.aspx) and most of those gains must have come at the expense of Yahoo! ~~~ grandalf What is your projection for search market share in 5 years? It's a business that takes lots of investment in scale. I think Google is one misstep away from Bing grabbing lots more share. Google instant was a near-miss. Even on my new macbook wtih google chrome it's annoyingly jittery and hinders the user experience. ~~~ junkbit You can see how much they have moved in the past 12 months in this graph. Project this forward 5 years [flash warning] [http://gs.statcounter.com/?PHPSESSID=nv37oj3f3ovned6v8hr2mlp...](http://gs.statcounter.com/?PHPSESSID=nv37oj3f3ovned6v8hr2mlp4v0#search_engine- ww-monthly-200911-201011) ~~~ dotcoma so: not much. Or not? ------ moonhorse I am a fan of Scott, but the last paragraph on Sinofsky is laughable. Online business and software are different beasts. With all his advocation of the dogmatic triad model, Sinofsky would for sure slow down online service division and sink the business even more. ------ known Sometime back I read MS _marketing_ budget is more than $2 billion.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Germany to meet EU guidelines to ban single-use plastics by 2021 - yboris https://mymodernmet.com/germany-single-use-plastic-ban/ ====== air7 From my reading of the data, I feel that banning plastic bags (for example) would do more harm than good (in 1st world countries). The alternatives require more reuse than actually occurs in order to be environmentally viable [0], waste management makes sure that no garbage gets into the ocean and is either kept in a landfill or incinerated responsibility. And "dumping plastic overseas" is a non issue: Its at most 10% of the exporting country's plastic waste. It's not that plastic doesn't cause expenditure of resources but rather that life requiees that anyway and in most use cases plastic may be the most enviormently friendly way to answer a need such as a carrying vessel for forgetful people (again, in 1st world countries with excellent waste management) [0] [https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...](https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf) ~~~ molmalo > The alternatives require more reuse than actually occurs. Where I live, we banned plastic bags in 2017. Every store at first sold cloth bags, for buyers who didn't bring their own. Some weeks later, everyone had several reusable bags, that they would bring when buying stuff, not a hard thing to do. Those bags last even years, so I don't understand why you think people wouldn't reuse them. They actually are quite better (they don't make my fingers hurt, won't break so easily, etc). ~~~ dogma1138 Because there is a study showing that some bags needs to be reused 50,000 times, degradable plastic bags which are then reused as rubbish bags or put into recycling are a better option than the trendy cloth bags that have a pretty substantial environmental impact and not the beneficial kind. I don’t know about you but even if a bag lasts for years I don’t think it will be reused more than 1000 times. ~~~ zaarn It's not 50000 times. It's 131 times. Paper bags 3 times. You can use a cloth bag 131 times easily. [https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or- reusable](https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable) If like you assume the bag will not be used more than 1000 times, it beats it's target to be better than plastic bags by a factor of 10. ------ teach I hope this doesn't turn out like the ban on single-use plastic shopping bags in Austin. Many grocery stores "complied" by replacing the single-use bags with much thicker "reusable" plastic bags. So now customers still don't bring their own bags into the store, the new bags still aren't easily recyclable and I suspect most are thrown away just as before. Edit: on the other hand, the city of Austin's waste management is very supportive of recycling and hopefully they'll support plastic film in the single-stream collection and make it much easier for the average person to do the right thing. ~~~ andrew_eit This _may_ be a just factor of culture and attitude. In Germany, single use plastic bags have not been allowed in supermarkets for several years now and it has worked quite well IMO. Yes you can buy thicker re-usable bags (sometimes made out of textiles or a mixture of textiles and plastic) but by far many people bring their own bags, or just load the stuff into shopping trollies and take it to their cars (unfortunately the petrol/diesel car culture is still going strong :( ). Also, in places like Lidl and Aldi, it's quite normal to just look for an empty box of some product on the shelf(e.g. a box that had some canned goods) and use that as your 'basket', stuff your items there, pay, go home and dispose of the box in the paper recycle bin. EDIT: I also forgot to mention, as an example of culture/attitude: plastic bags are still available for fruit & vegetables but even then, people do make their own choice to just take the produce without a bag, and place it 'loose' at the cashier for them to weigh. ~~~ mjevans I'd like to see a return of paper bags. That technology is very ecologically friendly. Really crummy paper bags for (dry) fresh food isolation, heavier re-usable for takeout and carry. It's nice to have bags to be able to give to others and forget about. Re-usable produce containers should be sold too, and I'd prefer if those were sold from a special part of the store so that consumers could pack in their own togo containers. ~~~ gruez > I'd like to see a return of paper bags. That technology is very ecologically > friendly. How? Random search turned up >According to the previously cited U.K. study, it takes three reuses of a paper bag to neutralize its environmental impact, relative to plastic. A bag’s impact is more than just its associated carbon emissions: Manufacturing a paper bag requires about four times as much water as a plastic bag. Additionally, the fertilizers and other chemicals used in tree farming and paper manufacturing contribute to acid rain and eutrophication of waterways at higher rates. [https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or- reusable](https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable) I guess you can argue that paper bags are compostable, but I'm not sure whether that matters much. Plastic bags that are sitting in the landfill doesn't harm the environment, and their bulk is negligible due to how thin/light they are. ~~~ novia > I guess you can argue that paper bags are compostable, but I'm not sure > whether that matters much. Plastic bags that are sitting in the landfill > doesn't harm the environment, and their bulk is negligible due to how > thin/light they are. The biodegradability of paper bags is the whole point here. You've seen the sides of the roads. You've seen the streams and rivers. People get done with their garbage and just throw it wherever. With garbage made out of plastic that doesn't break down, this is a big deal. ~~~ gruez >You've seen the sides of the roads. You've seen the streams and rivers. My local rivers are relatively plastic-free. Same with roads. They're not completely free of plastic, of course. Given that there are thousands of plastic bags being dispensed in my neighborhood every day and that the roads/rivers aren't being regularly cleaned, the fact that the neighborhood isn't completely filled with plastic bags makes me think that the overall disposal rate is pretty good. Plastic litter might be the most _visible_ externality of single use plastics, but I'm not quite sure whether tripling our co2 emissions from plastic bags is a worthwhile trade for eliminating plastic bags from our neighborhoods. ------ andrew_eit I have strong feeling that in the coming decades we will see strong growth in the re-usable / repairable product market. It's high time we got more creative in the products we mass produce, we've grown complacent, something as simple as the plastic bag or the plastic straw have caused such environmental destruction yet can actually be phased out with behavioural modifications. I would also argue that reusability and repairability is a part of the equation of 'long-term economic mass production', at least for day-to-day necessities where sterilisation isn't paramount. Seriously, just looking at what I have lying around at home, even something as mundane and as simple as a broom seems to have special plastic elements (plastic hook on the top to hang on a wall, plastic lining in on the pole). There's a lot of unnecessary un-recyclable waste out there and while banning Single-Use plastics is a great step in the right direction, we need a paradigm shift in how we think about the objects we construct. ~~~ vondur I miss having glass Coke bottles. I can’t remember what shopping ing was like when I was really young, but I’d imagine plastic containers were rare. (1970’s) ------ kachurovskiy It's always good to have less waste and single-use items. At the same time, maybe it's better to use the oil in it's processed form (plastic) before burning it[1] instead of burning it right away[2]? On the go, now you're forced to pick up a 500g single-use glass bottle instead of a 20g plastic bottle. Only 1-10k tons of German trash ends up in the ocean from 50M tons and I don't think plastic spoons are a material % of that. It's not that I love plastic, it's just the optimal choice for food packaging now. Saying "I don't use plastic spoons" while following current consumption standards makes no dent whatsoever. [1] [https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/muenchen-grosse-muell- luege...](https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/muenchen-grosse-muell-luege-warum- verbrennen-wir-so-viel-abfall-9828158.html) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Energy_consu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Energy_consumption) ~~~ badestrand > It's not that I love plastic, it's just the optimal choice for food > packaging now. Saying "I don't use plastic spoons" while following current > consumption standards makes no dent whatsoever. IMO the value is not only in the concrete measures taken (e.g. using wooden spoons) but in the overall trend. We have the movement away from plastic right now and while some single actions or policies may only have a negligible effect there is a huge value in the big picture: Research for alternative materials, lots of companies and consumers trying to figure our ways to reduce waste and plastic usage. And boom, after a few years or decades we might have a plastic free future where everyone consumes less and close to 100% of materials are recycled. Could we search for alternatives without banning single-use plastic bags? Probably yes but the workings of society are messy and not always rational so better take the path that actually works. ------ LargoLasskhyfv Oh my gawd! Now vee vill be burried under heapz of dogpoop! No, really. What about the dogpoo-bags? It's mandatory to pack the shit of your dogs into bags, and drop them into some trashbin in most places here. Example: [https://www.hamburg.de/saubere- stadt/7174714/gassibeutel/](https://www.hamburg.de/saubere- stadt/7174714/gassibeutel/) [https://www.hamburg.de/behoerdenfinder/hamburg/11260865/](https://www.hamburg.de/behoerdenfinder/hamburg/11260865/) [https://www.hamburg.de/hundegesetz/](https://www.hamburg.de/hundegesetz/) ~~~ oseityphelysiol I don't see why they can't be made out of paper. ------ pl-94 This measure is more of a symbol than an effective way to reduce carbon emissions. Attacking symbols is a always nice, but isn't it a little bit late for that? I can't wait the day where EU will try for real to follow Paris agreement. ~~~ andrew_eit I think you are talking about two different environmental issues. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the Paris Agreement covers climate change, carbon emissions, energy production, etc. The topic of single-use plastics, while related to sustainability, covers an entirely different emerging issue, namely: the infiltration of micro-plastics into our environment. Besides the environmental effects that microplastics already seem to have, such as hindering plant growth [1], microplastics are also entering the food chain, and making their way back to us. The long-term affects are as far as I know, quite unknown. [1] [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b01339](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b01339) ------ dgellow As said in the body of the article, it’s a EU directive, Germany is just the first country to act on it but other will follow. I feel that should be part of the title instead of singling out one country. ~~~ akerro There are also other non-EU countries that are following this directive, Canada and Wales, it's a nice global movement. ------ stock_toaster Does this also apply to medical devices? Some are disposable (like syringes) for sanitization reasons. ~~~ jankassens A different source [1] describes certain product categories. Initially products like swabs, forks, plates, cups, stick for balloons that have non- plastic alternatives. [1] German: [https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/umweltschutz-verbot-von- ei...](https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/umweltschutz-verbot-von-einweg- plastik-kommt-mitte-2021-a-51e5fb32-7dca-4139-a8a9-734a4b893d00) ------ BallinBige They also banned all ads for cigarettes & vapes. I think that's great.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Grafana v6.2 - el_duderino https://grafana.com/blog/2019/05/22/grafana-v6.2-released/ ====== mikepurvis Tried Grafana briefly a year or two ago, and I wanted to like it, but similar to Kibana, it's laser-focused on the task of realtime monitoring current data. I wanted to use it for a high-level view of historical stuff (robot data recordings from ROS), and there was a lot of really basic functionality for that use case that just wasn't there at all. Even stuff as basic as being able to pan a plot back and forth after you've zoomed in— here's the four year old ticket for that in their issue tracker: [https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387) I ended up generating Bokeh plots and had a much better time. So Grafana is great for what it's great at, but I don't recommend it for uses other than current-moment data. ~~~ nopzor thanks for the feedback. there's definitely a lot of validity to what you're saying, for what you describe. grafana has traditionally been used for 'real time dashboarding and analytics' in the IT/devops world. that's the original use case, and its sweet spot, as you allude to. but, since the beginning, the mission of the open source grafana project has had nothing to do with IT per se. it was about democratizing metrics; helping teams understand their 'systems', by breaking down silos between databases and people. over the last few years, interesting things are afoot in grafana community. we're seeing grafana used for more and more non-IT use cases. it's being deployed in the industrial and business worlds. about 10-20% of the grafana community now deal with things that have nothing to do with IT/devops. the 'systems' are no longer limited to things like servers, switches, containers and clusters. these emerging users deal with things like temperature sensors, dollars, robots and ambulances. we are making progress in bringing grafana to these worlds, while also ideally improving it overall. there's tangential threads in various stages of recent completeness (none of which solve your specific issue admittedly). things like sql support, general focus on ad-hoc analysis with ('explore'), the upcoming abstraction around being able to better use ui components within grafana ('grafana/ui'), improved support for tabular data, new panels, etc. sorry about the four year old issue; i'd be lying if i said there weren't myriad things we'd like to do, that don't make the cut not due to desire but due to time and resources. again, thanks for the feedback, please know that we're very interested in continuing to develop and improve grafana for use cases like yours! -r [disclosure, very biased and opinionated response. am co-founder/ceo at grafana labs. lucky enough to work with torkel and the team on making grafana better] ~~~ mikepurvis Thanks for the response and for a pretty cool open source project! Sorry my comment dumping on it ended up being the top of the thread here. FWIW, I definitely had a nicer time trying out Grafana than I ever have fighting with Kibana, and I definitely liked that I was able to use it with SQL based datasources rather than just Elastic. ------ markbnj A fun little thing to do if you want to play around with the new release: install prometheus, prometheus node_exporter, grafana, and grab the node_exporter full dashboard from the grafana site. In like 10 minutes you've got a pretty cool system info dashboard for your laptop :). ~~~ latchkey I did this for 1500 raspberry pi-class litecoin miners. It was _awesome_ to be able to see all the data in realtime across so many devices. ------ tbarbugli Lazy loading is a feature I was waiting for long time, hopefully this time is here to stay! ~~~ retzkek If your dashboards have so many panels that lazy loading is important, you need to reconsider your dashboard design. Endlessly scrolling to find the panel you're interested in makes for a painful user experience, and it makes it harder to compare series across panels. I aim to keep dashboards no larger than what can be displayed in a single window on a desktop, with perhaps some supplementary plots below, often in a collapsed row. I make heavy use of "drill-down" links, preferably from tables or single-stats (or more often the "status panel" for denser displays [1]), or in panel notes otherwise, to dive further into the data. When designing a dashboard, I ask myself "what story is this dashboard going to tell?", and as with a good novel I try to keep from straying too far from that narrative, branching side-plots out into new dashboards as needed. [1] [https://grafana.com/plugins/vonage-status- panel](https://grafana.com/plugins/vonage-status-panel) ~~~ mtrpcic It depends on what your use case for the dashboard is. If the dashboard is meant for constant display, then yes, too many panels is a bad user experience. On the other hand, if you're trying to create a "Oh my god something is wrong in production right now, show me everything so I can see at a glance" dashboard, I would rather scroll than jump between 3 tabs because of "aesthetics". ~~~ retzkek Aesthetics? How about ergonomics? In the same vein as "alert fatigue," having too many panels on a dashboard (or too many lines on a graph, etc) can overload the user, and obscure the real issues. > show me everything so I can see at a glance Yes, exactly, at a glance, not after scrolling through five pages. With careful dashboard design, you should be able to see a problem area actually "at a glance," and then drill-down to pinpoint the actual cause, faster than you'll find it scrolling through a single large dashboard. I admit this is something of an ideal to aim for, and it can take a lot of time and effort to achieve, which may not be available. However, it will pay off in the "Oh my god something is wrong in production right now" scenario if you can take that time. ~~~ zepolen Agree, designing a good dashboard is a skill just like anything else it comes with experience. ------ NickBusey Those new gradient bar gauges look great, can't wait to use them on some environmental data. ------ colechristensen I have been having some fun recently with Grafana session storage. In the end it seemed like a database issue which was unavoidable because there aren't other options for session storage when you use a db (other than downgrading to 5.x) After endless grinding with configuration options, debugging go code (new skill) and javascript running in the browser I tried switching out to a local mariadb and it worked instantly. Lesson learned, be wary of a Galera mysql cluster. My running but unproved theory that during the login process the creation of the user token in the db and reading it back happen so quickly that the item isn't available yet so Grafana can't find it and logs the user out. ------ BossingAround If I have a CSV of a number of values (say in the thousands), and what I need is basically a tool that will create a slick, good-looking graph that compares two or more of these CSVs, what's the best tool for that? Think JMeter if that rings any bells. I honestly just used some basic graph-generation tools which would spit out PNGs, which is always less than satisfying. I looked at Grafana, but never had the time to actually try it out. My feeling also was that it was a bit different of a use-case as I had no real-time data, but I may be totally wrong here. ~~~ wielebny We have JMeter to pump the data to InfluxDB and then visualise them in Grafana. Additionaly, you can see results while JMeter is still running. ------ dogtail Waiting for better Loki integration. ~~~ netingle Loki author here: got some ideas? We’re all ears! ~~~ mgbmtl Hi! Any plans to release binaries? If I am currently using 1% of ELK features (I use it for simple log aggregation of servers), but not k8s, would you still recommend loki? ~~~ netingle Yes we do! Plan on cutting v0.1 in the next week or so, kubecon kinda got in the way... I’ll work on adding some binaries to that - what platform you looking for? ~~~ nickserv Not the OP but in the same situation. I run Debian 9 on my servers, would be great to have some debs to try it out. Thanks! ------ Sytten Great job. Though I am still waiting for official CSP support, it seems like it should already be there. Unfortunately the legacy angular code prevents us from applying any real policy.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google/Alphabet partners with GSK to develop nerve implants - ucaetano http://www.dw.com/en/google-parent-alphabet-makes-foray-into-futuristic-biotech/a-19441725 ====== danielmorozoff It's interesting to see where google sees this will go, given BMI tech is in its infancy. Has anyone else heard more about this?
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
SwiftUI and Catalyst: Apple executes its invisible transition strategy - colinprince https://www.macworld.com/article/3402057/swiftui-and-catalyst-apple-executes-its-invisible-transition-strategy.html ====== thought_alarm There is a disconnect between what Apple's engineers say vs. what the Apple pundits at large think, and that disconnect is fucking gigantic. Apple has never described Swift, Catalyst, or SwiftUI as a transition from or to anything. Instead, Apple has gone out of its way to say that these are _not_ transitions. Remember that big "NO" slide from last year? When a transition is required, Apple does not ever hide it. Classic Mac to OS X was a transition. PPC to Intel was a transition. UIWebView to WKWebView is a transition. SwiftUI is no more a transition from AppKit/UIKit than Storyboards were a transition from NIBs and programmatic UI. Modern ObjC syntax, Enterprise Objects, Java/Cocoa Bridge, Ruby/Cocoa, Python/Cocoa, Key-Value Observing/Encoding, ObjC Garbage Collection, ARC, Storyboards, Playgrounds, Swift, SwiftUI, etc. These are not transitions. These are all just tools in the toolbox. Some more useful than others. The only thing Apple's engineers are trying to do here is create stuff that developers find useful. There is no hidden or invisible strategy with this stuff. ~~~ setpatchaddress Carbon. ~~~ diesal11 Has been deprecated since 10.8 (2012) and was never ported to 64 Bit. It was pretty clear they weren't working on a Carbon replacement imo. ~~~ stefanfisk True, but the official deprecation was quite sudden, and anyone using at the time and who expected Apple to be open and sensible about their API direction was caught quite off guard. ------ atonse I largely agree, although disagree about the point that this is unique to Apple. I think Microsoft also does quite a good job of maintaining compatibility and slowly bringing people forward (to the point where it's often used as a negative argument). As an outsider, the whole UWP thing felt like a bit of a mess, so I'm not even sure what's the "modern" way anymore to build Windows apps – is it UWP? WinForms? something else? Apple benefits from having higher average quality of developers in its ecosystem, which allows them to sunset things faster than, say someone like Microsoft, who has to keep things backwards compatible for a decade+. While there are larger applications (Adobe Suite) that dragged their heels on the move from Carbon to Cocoa, a lot of software on macOS/iOS is written by independent developers who do tend more to keep up with the latest frameworks. ~~~ addicted Having been through the whole .Net Framework -> .Net Core processs, I think one of the biggest problems with MS is that they just have pathetic naming. Apple creates these new names that are unique, exciting, and evoke something concrete. It makes it easier to remember what they mean when they’re talking about something. So for example, their new UI framework is called SwiftUI which builds off the swift legacy and logo and the emotion of being faster therefore better, whereas MS’s was UWP. WTF is UWP supposed to evoke. How am I supposed to mentally associate that with something. And the .Net stuff was otherworldly. You had .Net Core, .Net framework, and .Net standard. Other than Core, neither of the other have any unique meanings. All the 3 are frameworks and standards. Or strongly associated with frameworks and standards. 2 of them are technologies, and one is just a document, but they all sound the same. .Net core sounds like it should be a subset of the other stuff, yet it’s the future. If it wasn’t MS who invented .Net Core, they may have given it a different name, say, I don’t know, Mono, and it wouldn’t confuse the crap out of people. They would need to be told it’s a ground up rewritten open source implementation of the .Net Framework which will eventually supersede it once and they would not get confused again. ~~~ FridgeSeal Oh my god yes Microsoft’s naming conventions are mind boggling. .Net Standard, .Net Framework, .Net Core, and they all do slightly different things, and they seemingly change with version, and now there’s .Net Framework 5, which apparently replaces/unifies some of them but it’s not super clear. Then you’ve got C# and F# and the specific language versions of those. Oh also, don’t forget the fact that there’s inexplicably like, 3 different package managers, which may or may not pull from the same place and it’s not clear what the differences are. Coming from Python (and a little bit of Rust) I had literally no idea what was going on. I tried to learn C# twice and gave up out of sheer irritation and confusion. ~~~ thrower123 Is there a third package manager now? There's the blessed one, NuGet, which most use, and Paket, which the cool kids and F# people use, but if there's another one out there I'm drawing a blank. ~~~ FridgeSeal You can use the CLI as to do stuff. Not sure if it counts as package manager, but coming from Python, being faced with 3 different ways to install packages (I'm still not sure how environments/projects are supposed to work in .Net) certainly added to the confusion. ------ gdubs SwiftUI looks like it can bridge that final gap I’ve had with my Metal and SpriteKit projects, which were _almost_ entirely cross platform. There will still likely be distinctions in touch handling vs mouse — I haven’t had time to fully explore SwiftUI yet — but I’m looking forward to simplifying the code even further. ~~~ vardump > which were almost entirely cross platform... Cross-platform Metal and SpriteKit? Wouldn't it be better to code against Vulkan (== MoltenVK) or OpenGL if being cross platform is the goal? Or do you mean "cross platform" as for example Microsoft has often done. Within _their_ platforms. Current difficulty of developing native cross platform projects is depressing. You have to use domain specific tools like Unity, React Native, etc. Or just target the web browsers. ~~~ gdubs Correct, within the Apple ecosystem — Mac, iOS. ~~~ josteink So not so much cross platform as it’s commonly used, but rather multi- targeting within the Apple-platform. ~~~ fastball Mac OS / iOS / tvOS / WatchOS are certainly different platforms. The iPhone and the Mac are very different products with very different use cases, so of course they are different platforms. It's not "all-platform", but this is definitely "cross-platform". ------ spinningslate > [Catalyst/SwiftUI] provides iOS developers with a familiar set of tools and > access to an entirely new platform Rather think that's the wrong way round. Whilst it might be true in the short term, it's really part of the MacBook/MacOS obsolescence plan. The next generation of MacBooks - whatever they're called - will be an evolution of ipad, using ARM hardware and running an iOS-derived OS. The recent creation of ipadOS is another symptom of that transition. Not that it changes the central thrust of the piece: that Apple does slow, sustained, steady evolution well. But Catalyst/Swift aren't primarily about giving developers access to an extra platform; it's to make sure there's a ready-made market of apps and developers when the macbook range as we know it goes away. ~~~ eridius > _The next generation of MacBooks - whatever they 're called - will be an > evolution of ipad, using ARM hardware and running an iOS-derived OS._ No they won't. I mean, it's conceivable that they could be using ARM chips (though Apple would need a strategy for emulating x86_64 in this case, like they did for PowerPC->i386), but there's no way they're going to be running iOS. Apple is slowly expanding the capabilities of the iPad, that's certainly true, but it's not even close to replacing a laptop for all tasks. iPads are becoming usable for more and more tasks, but there's a very long way to go before the laptop is obsolete, and I don't expect iPad to ever actually go that far (if it did, it would just end up being a laptop). Even given laptop hardware, iOS is not set up to be able to replace macOS for all tasks. Even ignoring all that, Catalyst is if anything evidence to the contrary, that Apple sees macOS as being very much alive and wants to encourage more apps to be developed for it. Catalyst isn't _just_ iOS apps on macOS, it's also tools to extend your iOS codebase to adopt macOS-specific features, like multiple overlapping windows of arbitrary sizes, menu bars, a mouse¹, titlebar controls, and more. ¹I know iOS 13 now supports using a mouse on iPadOS, but it's just an accessibility feature that looks to the app like a touch, it doesn't e.g. support hover states, or encourage smaller click targets, or anything like that. ~~~ spinningslate >No they won't. I mean, it's conceivable that they could be using ARM chips (though Apple would need a strategy for emulating x86_64 in this case, like they did for PowerPC->i386) Exactly. Apple has proven it can do emulation very successfully - it's already done it twice (M68K->PPC->x86) > there's no way they're going to be running iOS I didn't say "running iOS", I said "an iOS-derived OS". >Catalyst is if anything evidence to the contrary, that Apple sees macOS as being very much alive and wants to encourage more apps to be developed for it. That's the other interpretation. I don't see it personally: the central thrust of the article is that Apple is really good at gentle evolution. MacOS has seen no meaningful innovation in years. iOS, by comparison, has evolved significantly. It's been steadily gaining more features that move it towards being a laptop-capable OS (e.g. multi-tasking). It's certainly not there yet - but that's the trajectory. To be clear, when I said "next generation macbooks" I didn't mean "next revision". It's probably several revisions away and it'll happen incrementally. Still, of course, it's just opinion :). Thanks for sharing yours. ~~~ eridius If iOS gains enough features to replace macOS, then it will just be macOS again. iOS is gaining new features, but it's still a rather constrained and touch-focused environment. For example, you can do split-screen on iPadOS, but you can't do arbitrary overlapping windows. Instead they're focusing on ways to save "scenes" and switch between apps, but each app still owns the portion of the screen it's been given (and those portions are very constrained; full- size, half, 1/3rd, or a slightly shorter 1/3rd in a slide-over; and the 1/3rd size is literally supposed to be your iPhone UI). They added mouse to iPadOS but strictly as an accessibility feature, and apps can't even detect that the mouse is there, let alone add mouse-related functionality. The file system is still heavily locked down. There's still no process spawning or any indication that Apple will ever allow process spawning (which is a hard blocker for a lot of developer tools). iPads support external screens, but not as the primary display (that's basically just for projecting stuff, e.g. presentations or photos). Ultimately, there's no point in relaxing these restrictions for an "iOS- derived" laptop OS. The primary argument in favor of unifying macOS and iOS was the fact that iOS has a lot of developer momentum and that way you can use iOS apps on macOS, but that's exactly what Catalyst gives us already. Apple is working towards unifying stuff at the developer API level (e.g. Catalyst, SwiftUI, etc) but at the OS level macOS and iOS are quite distinct and will stay that way. ------ throwaway34927 TLDR: over time, Apple transitions from one technology/development platform to another. author calls this an "invisible" strategy because... it's done properly and methodically. ~~~ scarface74 I can’t think of a single transition that Apple botched. They even had a good transition strategy from the Apple //e to Mac for users with the //e card. ~~~ ken Apple II->III? Mac->Copland? Mac->Taligent? Apple IIgs->Mac? HyperCard->(nothing)? Carbon 32b->64b (as originally promised)? FCP 7->X? iMovie HD->08? iWork '09->2013? Mac Pro 2012->2013->2019? It depends on your definition of "botched", but I can think of lots of examples of cases where Apple either gave up, or essentially reverted their changes, in the face of public outcry or technical hurdles. I wouldn't really call the IIe card a "transition strategy", either, any more than Mac86 was. It was a kluge to add another entire computer as an add-on card. It didn't help move your programs or data at all. It also only emulated a IIe (8 years old at that point), not a IIgs (only 5 years old). It was only a 'transition' for the absolute penny-pinching-est buyers, i.e., education. ~~~ inspector-g Some of your examples are pertinent, but I think calling MacOS->Copland, MacOS->Taligent, HyperCard->(nothing) "botched transitions" is a bit disingenuous. Copland never shipped, and as such was not a transition at all, because the public was not directly involved in the internal failure. Taligent basically never shipped anything, and so the same argument applies. The replacement OS that Apple _actually_ shipped (OS X) aided a legacy transition that I think went down basically as well as it possibly could have (given the inherent dissimilarities between the two OSes). HyperCard was merely killed off, so there was clearly no transition at all. That's like saying Newton->(nothing) failed as a transition.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What's the history behind 192.168.1.1? - vinnyglennon https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-history-behind-192-168-1-1-Why-not-192-169-1-1-or-any-other-IP-address-When-did-it-start-being-used-Who-started-it-Why-Why-not-1-1-1-1-What-is-the-relation-to-127-0-0-1-What-about-10-0-0-1-Apple?share=1 ====== insickness This explains the reason private ranges were designated but not why 192.168.0.0 in particular within the Class C range was designated to be private. Does anyone know why that number in particular was chosen? ~~~ egwynn Found this link in one of the responses on that page: [https://superuser.com/questions/784978/why-did-the-ietf- spec...](https://superuser.com/questions/784978/why-did-the-ietf-specifically- choose-192-168-16-to-be-a-private-ip-address-class) Similarly, I expect Postel picked 192.168 because, at the time he made the choice, it was the next available, or nearly the next available, network to be assigned from the former Class C space. This probably can't be proved one way or the other, but the pace of address assignments shown in the RFCs strongly suggests that they would have been in this general vicinity around 1993-1994 when the assignments were made. (Addresses in 192.159 were being assigned in 1992. No dates are available for assignments in 192.160-192.167 as these were at some point reallocated to RIPE.) ~~~ danpat To be clear, the 192 part is the lowest "Class C" network prefix. The 168 part was the arbitrary time-dependent part from the allocation database. ~~~ egwynn Correct, thanks for making that explicit. ------ garganzol What the given article does not address is when to choose 10.x.x.x, 172.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x and why it's important to choose the right one. Here is the prescribed solution: \- Use 10.x.x.x for office/enterprise LANs \- Use 192.168.x.x for home LANs \- Use 172.x.x.x for supplementary services like guest networks, DMZ etc Why so? The reason is VPN. When you connect to office VPN from home, you connect from 192.168.x.x to 10.x.x.x. This makes it very easy for routers to avoid address range clashes. If you break that rule then you may end up with a weird situation when you connect from a home network 10.0.1.1/24 to an office network 10.0.1.1/24\. Good luck trying to connect to that specific 10.0.1.12 machine: there is no easy way to determine where the packet should be routed. ~~~ keshav_ what if I have two homes? ~~~ forapurpose Or if you are visiting someone else, you're in a cafe, a hotel ... ~~~ limeyx Or your home is in a hotel but you walk down to the cafe ... should you renumber ? ------ 6t6t6t6 Something I never understood is why people choose 192.168.1.1 for private networks. Being all the other factors equal, isn't 10.1.1.1 easier to type and more "aesthetically pleasant"? ~~~ forapurpose > Something I never understood is why people choose 192.168.1.1 for private > networks While interviewing someone for an entry-level job, I told the interviewee that there was a network using 10.0/16 (a 16-bit subnet mask, or more popularly 10.0.x.x). He corrected me and said that 10.0.0.0 networks should have an 8 bit subnet mask (10.x.x.x). On one hand, I definitely liked that he was willing to challenge me, even during an interview, and that he knew the spec (RFC 1918 does assign an 8-bit mask to the 10. private network). On the other hand, I wasn't sure he was technically correct that a 16-bit mask was wrong, even if 8-bits was 'correct', and I couldn't see what negative consequence the 16-bit subnet had - his thinking seemed a bit rigid. Anyway, maybe there are other purists who believe smaller networks should use 192.168/16, or maybe they instinctively use it because the RFC gives it the smaller network allocation. Or maybe they know something that I don't. > isn't 10.1.1.1 easier to type and more "aesthetically pleasant"? And it's much easier for non-technical people to understand and to remember without error. In fact, I recommend something even easier, such as 10.9.8.x. For people supporting the non-technical, those little details can save hours, even a day. I've seen cases where after hours of frustration, the support tech discovers that the user typed in something like 129.168, or 192.16.8. Great support reps are great humanitarians, able to handle those situations with grace, without humiliating the poor user, and without heavy drinking. EDIT: clarifying edit ~~~ srj 10/8 is a class A range (high order bit = 0), but CIDR says that you can separately describe which bits are for the network. Unless this interview was conducted more than 20 years ago I'd say your interviewer was mistaken. ~~~ forapurpose > I'd say your interviewer was mistaken Is that what you meant to say? The interviewer (me) thought that 10.0/16 was fine, which I think agrees with your analysis. The interviewee said only 10/8 was correct. (Re-reading my GP comment I realize that my role might have been ambiguous, so I've clarified it.) ~~~ HighPlainsDrftr If you said 10/24, I'd immediately think 10.0.0.0/24\. 10/8 would certainly be valid. 10.0/16 is too. I remember when CIDR came around back in the 90's. Man people were pissed off when you would call out a 'Class A/B/C/D/E' block. I prefer to always be specific when writing my CIDR. I understand when people don't do it. Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send. ~~~ forapurpose Yes, Postel's advice applies to many things. I think there is some misunderstanding. The question wasn't the notation but the subnetting. See the story in the GGP. ------ HighPlainsDrftr Up until 4 years ago, I used to always allocate addresses specifically on bit boundaries. I did this mainly for one reason - aligning the bytes and trying not to waste CPU cycles. For example, in a /24 network: 0-15 - network equipment 16-31 - some special gear 32-63 - mail servers or something like that 64-127 - split it up and align more things 128-191... you get the point. ... The ultimate goal was to hit everything on a bit boundary so the CPU wouldn't work so hard These days, CPU power is so prominent, it doesn't matter. DHCP is probably the way to go. IPv6 is here. We have the opportunity to really make CPU's fast again with IPv6! ~~~ anyfoo What's a "bit boundary" in this context? And how does you subclassing scheme prevent wasted CPU cycles. at all? ------ derekp7 I wish there was a netblock reserved for packets that never leave a physical (or virtual) host, that could be used for the default internal network for things like Docker. In my case, Docker defaulted to 172.17.0.0/16, which happened to conflict with one of the IP ranges for my wing of the building at work. I've resorted to using RFC 5737 (test-net-1 through 3) IP ranges for this purpose, even though that isn't what they are designed for. ~~~ y4mi Uuh, 127.0.0.1 never leaves the physical machine. It's also a full subnet, so 127.0.0.254 would work as well. Dockers main usecase just isn't purely internal, do using that ip range wouldn't make any sense ~~~ y4mi Too late to edit my message, so I'll use a response instead. Docker rebinds the 127 network to each container, so you cant - by default - communicate through these IP Addresses. An easy fix could be to just let the container use the hosts network stack (so, not network type: bridge). After that, you can bind the daemons to specific IP Addresses in the subnet - i.e. 127.0.0.2:3306 DB1 127.0.0.3:3306 DB2 and they'll be able to communicate directly. But as mentioned before: this is not the primary usecase for docker, so its cumbersome to use. ------ k__ I still learned about net classes, subnetting and supernetting in 2003, to me it was how networks worked till a few yeara ago :D ~~~ forapurpose What changed a few years ago? IPv6? ~~~ k__ I read about classless internet domain routing. ------ dlhavema I gotta try out the 127.0.0.x thing at the end of the article. I never knew the range was so large! ~~~ jarfil It's actually 127.x.x.x, a whole class A. ------ dlandis Ugh, not another site that blocks pinch to zoom gestures on mobile. It doesn’t make sense to me why so many (quite popular) sites care so little about enabling their users to comfortably read their content. The solution, for now, is to use Safari since it started ignoring that setting, but unfortunately Chrome still allows it for some reason.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Wedding Startup RegistryLove (YC S12) Lets Couples Register For Anything - Jerpo http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/16/yc-backed-wedding-startup-registrylove-lets-couples-register-for-anything/ ====== creativename From their "Tour" page: _The fun part! Browse and shop our gorgeous gift catalogue filled with inspiration and ideas and add things to your registry_ While their (more obscure) "How it Works" page says: _Find things you love on our gift database, or list gifts and services from your favorite stores._ I think they could do a better job of making it clear that you can go and add registry items from everywhere. And honestly, as someone who just got engaged, I would probably be inclined to use Amazon Universal Registry if it came down to it (as someone else mentioned). Edit: Part of the confusion is that I skimmed the landing page and went right to the bottom. I looked so quickly for the call to action that I skipped the tag line! (Any Gift. Any Store. One Registry.) ~~~ thomasfl "How it Works" for HN people is Ruby on Rails, google hosted webfont, twitter bootstrap css and javascript. Would like to know a bit more about the business side of it. ------ w1ntermute The most difficult part about getting into the wedding business as a startup is _advertising_. People (hopefully) only get married once, and they're usually too happy to go shopping around for deals. This is why wedding businesses can rake in huge profits by ripping off their customers. You get similar phenomena in the baby business and the funeral business (although with the latter the lack of interest in comparison shopping is due to grief). So RegistryLove's success will hinge largely on their ability to get the word out to the general public. ~~~ patio11 The mortuary industry is also covered by state regulations designed to keep out competition, justified by entirely specious public health reasons. For example, it is illegal to import wooden boxes without a license in most American states, if those boxes are intended to be either buried or burned. Wooden boxes are well-understood commodity items which, if they had an OSHA sheet, would be stamped "generally regarded as safe." The bridal-industrial complex does not benefit from similar regulations, but _not for want of trying_. ~~~ minikites Honest question: could the wooden box license be intended to slow the transport of pests via wood? Moving firewood that hasn't been heat treated has been responsible for a lot of pest plagues in forests. ~~~ travisp If so, it would be about moving wood that hasn't been heat treated. The law is generally worded to specifically be related to the funeral business. There are other laws that are similarly restrictive, such as a law in Louisiana that prohibits anyone from selling "funeral merchandise" if not licensed: [http://abcnews.go.com/Business/casket-making-monks-fight- sel...](http://abcnews.go.com/Business/casket-making-monks-fight-sell- wares/story?id=11489765) ------ jschulenklopper They could do some work on the (privacy) protection of those registries, for example by making the URLs of registry a little harder to guess. (Yeah, I know, adding obscurity instead of security, but nevertheless). I wanted to see an example list, didn't knew a valid first and last name to search for, so guessed <http://registrylove.com/registries/> and some low ID number after that. Pronto! I don't know if some Daisy & Javier mind that I can see their wishlist for their wedding. Personally I would have wanted to keep that list a little more private to only those people knowing I had registered my list at RegistryLove. ~~~ masterzora I'll admit I haven't dealt with wedding registries much at all (really, I watched somebody use a registry kiosk at a store once and that's about it) but I was always under the impression that registries are generally pretty much public. ~~~ Kerrick You're right. If you know the first and last name of either the bride or the groom, and the store at which they registered, you can access their registry. This is by design--stores want it to be easy to find what the B&G want, because they want it to be easy for you to buy something for them. ~~~ jschulenklopper I could access a registry by guessing an ID (an ActiveRecord primary key, so just an integer), not searching for names. Agreed, this isn't very useful, but the list isn't protected/obscured if the URLs are that easy to guess. For example, at Amazon Universal Wishlist, the ID of a valid wishlist is very hard to guess -- like 6HV8XSTGDT3E7-difficult. On top, you can select whether you want that list to be public (discoverable via name search), visible if one knows the link, or private. ------ tedchs My engaged brother is using Amazon Universal Registry for this purpose - <http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/universal> ~~~ Jerpo We provide a personal concierge and service unparalleled by Amazon. Amazon does have a large collection of item's but they don't partner with local boutiques! ~~~ eli (To be clear: the amazon service lets you add anything with a website, not just items sold through the site) ~~~ MixWish We're still in Beta, but <http://www.mixwish.com> allows you to add items from any website as well. Similar concept to Amazon, but much easier to use. ~~~ heretohelp This has gotten comically out of control and is probably saying something about the wedding industry. ~~~ eli Speaking of Amazon, you may enjoy: [http://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Day- Selling-American/dp/15...](http://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Day-Selling- American/dp/1594200882) ------ jbenz Based on the name and the vertical, I thought this was going to be another site from the team behind <http://weddinginvitelove.com/>, <http://weddingplannerlove.com/>, <http://weddingphotolove.com/>, etc... but there appears to be no connection. Interesting to see that this naming convention is becoming a pattern. ~~~ Geekette I'm actually quite surprised that this team would use this name when another, earlier company (WeddingLovely) has clearly established that naming pattern for its own name and that of all its products/business lines as you mentioned (WeddingInviteLove, WeddingPlannerLove, WeddingPhotoLove). If they did any research on startups in this space, they must have come across WeddingLovely, so why continue with this name choice? ------ rwhitman _None knew how to code, so Sofia taught herself... “At first we tried to hire somebody, but we quickly realized that master coders are just not that interested in the wedding market,” says Markia, “and we were like, well, we could just sit here forever or we could just do it.”_ I advised a startup with a premium domain in the wedding space a few years back. Both founders were non-tech founders, and they struggled day and night to find a tech... anything. Lots of folks like myself offered little bits of assistance and packages of discount consulting work but nobody was really willing to commit and take the plunge as a tech cofounder. I'm sure this is a common story. If you don't have a huge amount of capital investment its really hard to rally tech folks behind bootstrapping something like this ------ endtime We've been using myregistry.com and have been perfectly happy with it. MyRegistry syncs directly with several popular registries, and lets you add anything not in one of those stores with a bookmarklet that intelligently grabs name/price/etc. from the page you're on. It doesn't sound like this doesn't anything significantly different, other than having syncing with more stores (which is, admittedly, nice). ------ benhoyt Huh, interesting that it's YC-backed. It overlaps with my own website <http://GiftyWeddings.com> \-- though mine is more of a gift list, where you really can add any gifts you like (you just type them in, and optionally add a web link). One thing that really put me off trust-wise with Registry Love is the payment page (for guests) is sent, and I think submitted, over clear-text HTTP, for example <http://registrylove.com/carts/N/payment> ------ petemack Is the only difference between this and all the other gift registries like <http://wantsthis.com> <http://wishpot.com> etc. that they handle payment/customer service? I'd be curious to see how things like returns and really odd items like "cash" are handled. ------ Elessar Is this international? I would recommend the service to friends but can't find any list of which retailers are supported from the FAQ or About pages. I suppose I could create an account and trudge deeper but honestly, I can't be arsed to do that much work just to find out if Canada is supported and advertise this to my friends. ~~~ marikachen Hey there! We are currently focused on the SF Bay area, but we are expanding very quickly! Depending on what they are looking for we may be able to accommodate them immediately. I appreciate you considering suggesting us, and would love to hear from you/or them at any time! Marika@registrylove.com ------ fmcferran12 We launched this social feed feature today and play in this space: <https://knackregistry.com/hot> Instead of browsing through various retailers websites knackregistry.com has set up a What’s Hot product feed so brides can easily see what friends and other brides are adding to their Knack registries. When a bride finds something she wants she just clicks the add to my registry button and the item will be added from the feed to her registry. ------ ernestipark This would've been fantastic for my family member who got married recently. ------ kumarski Almost makes me want to get married....NOT. but cool shtuff. ------ ukd1 Great idea, my sister would have loved this too! ------ marikachen Thanks! <3 Marika
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Wave Patent License (what does this mean?) - paulgb http://www.waveprotocol.org/patent-license ====== tlrobinson Google promises not to sue you (or rather gives you a license so they can't sue you) for violating any of their patents while implementing the Wave Protocol. Unless you sue them. Pretty standard for open specifications backed by large companies, I think. ------ glevy Leave it to the attorneys to come up with scary stuff. It seems that Google may be learning from Microsoft to push its weight around. I wonder if this would violate antitrust laws? Under normal circumstances if Google were a smaller company, an inventor whose invention have been infringed by Google, would have the option of shopping around and use another product than Wave. And Google may be entirely in its own right to refuse providing him with a service. However, given the potential of Wave and the enormous size of Google, Wave could possibly completely replace email. Depriving the inventor of the Wave license would cause him irreparable harm since he cannot shop around for a comparable product.Google is facing an antitrust issue. Google is becoming like Microsoft. Here is another angle: Background: If several persons are co-inventors on a wave invention without having assigned it to a single entity such as a company, then each co-inventor own 100% of the invention. This means that each one can independently conduct business such as leasing or selling 100% of the invention. So let's say that Google infringes on the invention and one of the inventors sues Google for 100% of damage. Google by contract can cancel the license for that one inventor but the other ones can still use the wave license. So one of the inventor needs to be willing to sacrifice himself. Who would sue Google anyways???? Microsoft??? ------ paulgb _If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross- claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed._ This part piqued my interest. So if I sue some third party because I feel Google's implementation of Wave violates my patent, I lose the license to the Wave patents? Or if I feel that a third party implementation of Wave violates my patents, do I also lose my license? Eg. if a Wave implementation violates my (say) encryption patent, and I file a lawsuit for patent violation, do I lose my license to the Wave patents? Seems like a neat way to scare off patent trolls, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting it right. ~~~ wmf I think you are interpreting it right, although it won't have any effect on pure patent trolls since they don't need to license Google's patents anyway.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
My Favorite Pieces of Syntax in 8 Different Programming Languages - yakkomajuri https://medium.com/@yakko.majuri/my-favorite-pieces-of-syntax-in-8-different-programming-languages-ba37b64fc232 ====== perfunctory def even_numbers(limit): return [num for num in range(0, limit, 2)] It’s unfortunate they chose this specific example because it doesn’t really show the power of list comprehensions. This example could be written as return list(range(0, limit, 2)) Or even simply return range(0, limit, 2) If one doesn’t need a mutable list. ~~~ yakkomajuri Great point! Was trying to keep examples simple but that just flew over my head. Updated the article. How about the new example? def squares(limit): return [num*num for num in range(0, limit)] If you have another suggestion I'd be happy to hear it! ~~~ perfunctory Much better.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Shunting-yard Algorithm - wooby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting-yard_algorithm ====== BigZaphod Yeah, it's a neat algorithm. I think we implemented it in college. I'm not sure why it was posted here, though. Is there a greater context to this that I'm missing? ~~~ memetichazard Possibly related to this story (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=928025>) which has to do with parsing.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Karl Rove's book vs. Rework - what the American People need to know - henning http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2209-karl-roves-book-vs-rework-what-the-american-people-need-to-know ====== mixmax This is genius. 37signals is already a strong brand, but only in a relatively narrow niche. This is an excellent way of marketing their new book to a much broader segment that doesn't necessarily know that they're behind ROR, or read their blog. There are several things worth noticing: 1) They create an "attack ad" on Karl Rove, thereby putting themselves on level with a much much bigger player and leveraging themselves onto a pedestal where they don't belong. They seem like big guys battling another big guy. They've used this tactic before comparing their product to Microsoft and Google as if they're equals. 2) They've picked one of the most unpopular people in America to attack. No- one will feel sorry for Rove, and everyone will love 37signals. 3) As stated above, they are sure to have this video passed around much larger circles than their normal reach allows them since it's funny, sarcastic and not about programming or project management. Everyone understands it. 4) It'll probably be controversial. This is a favorite tactic of 37signals, and if they're lucky they'll be on talkshows around the country getting free publicity for their book while telling the American public that Karl Rove's book is too long, written in a French font and thus isn't patriotic. I don't care much for their products but their marketing is absolutely amazing. ~~~ patio11 While I don't doubt that hitting Karl Rove is effective (because you don't have to push buttons which are emotional for everyone, you just have to push buttons which are _really_ emotional for at least some folks who control links), I just have a quick comment to make: be careful about attributing your own views to the population at large. (The overwhelming majority of Americans do not know who Rove is and a large portion of the remainder will vaguely remember "Political something-or-other, right? Helped get Obama elected?" Of those who actually know who he is, many come from that weird niche market called "the other half of the country.") ~~~ axod Agreed. He's #5 on the Amazon best seller list for a reason. Similarly, it'd probably be a bad idea to do an attack piece on religion, however silly the idea of religion is to most of us here. ------ byrneseyeview The narrator needs to be an octave lower, and they could have some more pauses between sentences. But this was a surprisingly good job. There aren't that many attack ad tropes, but they really seem to work. Although it's missing a picture of the 37signals guys outside, with their golden retriever. I can't buy them as morally superior until I've seen that. ~~~ sophacles Can you expand on the moral superiority of a golden retriever vs a labrador or possibly a dalmation? ~~~ tomsaffell It's not moral, it's chromatic.. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1193657> ------ pclark Fantastic. I loved the Garamond = french font joke. ------ kadavy "When it came time to choose a font, Rove selected Garamond, a kind of type developed in France, and NOT by hard-working Americans." Shoulda gone with Goudy. ------ run4yourlives People: Learn how to market by watching these guys. This is what they do best. ------ collision I love their own use of Garamond in the ad. ------ nkassis Ok, I'm going to order this book just for the ad. I hope this doesn't make me a political ad sheep. The sheer genius of the ad makes me think that the book might have something good in it for me. ~~~ aaronbrethorst Neither the book or the ad contains demon sheep. That alone elevates it above much of our country's political discourse [1] ... ;-) [1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRY7wBuCcBY> ------ mhd While I dislike self-help books almost as much as neocon apologetics, this ad should be rewarded. Is the Kindle version readable (no DX), i.e. no special layout or pictures get lost/scrambled? ~~~ nwjsmith The Kindle version is excellent, the pictures are crisp, no special layout. ~~~ axomhacker I just "picked up" the Kindle version and it looks excellent on my DX. However the Amazon detail page says it's "Optimized for Larger Screens", which means: "This title has complex layouts and has been optimized for reading on Kindle DX's or Kindle for PC's larger screen, but can still be viewed on other devices. <http://www.amazon.com/Rework-ebook/dp/B002MUAJ2A> ------ jayair I liked it. Good job 37s. They constantly work to grow their brand and have fun while doing it as well. ------ pw0ncakes On a scale of 1 to 10 I give that ad an Aleph_37. Well done. ------ dejan ok, I will respectfully disagree with most of you here, as there is nothing "comical" about it. This made me officially sick, although so far had high opinion of them. I didn't get the joke of "french" font, and "hard working americans." I feel...insulted, as this is a way how to promote stupidity and national hatred. The guy wrote a book, and just because it is one position higher, he is a subject of an attack like this. Did they even read his book? No, it was easier to search the internet of a guy who didn't like it and quote it. Maybe tomorrow it is >you< there, with your book, or your product. Or me? Wasn't the content that mattered? I've seen excerpts from Rework and feel this is a toilet book. Inarticulate and arrogant, I know it all style, but I don't go making a video comparing their book with e.g. Re-Imagine by Tom Peters. Tom has an attitude, but not an insulting one, but of a creative energy, an innovative arrogance that he wishes to spread. Again, it could be just me. I would never smack Americans with "All European/Asian/African" labels. Nationality, religion and all other kinds of divide are elements of mediocrity. Real hackers should know that. ~~~ samdk Karl Rove practically _invented_ the attack ad. This is not an attack ad, it's a satire of an attack ad. Taken literally, yes, it's pretty stupid--attack ads generally are. But that's missing the point. ~~~ anamax > Karl Rove practically invented the attack ad. No, he didn't. Attack ads predate both TV and radio and were run on both almost immediately after they became available. ~~~ philwelch Rove learned most, if not all, of his tricks from Lee Atwater, who was the Karl Rove of the Reagan/Bush era. ~~~ gruseom There's a superb documentary called _Boogie Man_ about Atwater, who died horribly and spent his last years seeking out everyone he had wronged with his ads and asking for their forgiveness. He was an amazing, contradictory character, a larger-than-life sort who holds far more interest than the pusillanimous toady Rove. I watched that documentary late at night in a hotel room during the 2008 campaign; I was on a consulting trip and had to get up early the next morning, but I couldn't turn it off. It explains a great deal about how all that dirt became commonplace. ~~~ GmanFUNK Yeah, it's an amazing hilarious movie and those guys did it totally independent and then sold it to TV. Buy a DVD on their website (i Did) because it has killer bonus features too and i'm into supporting the Little Guy. www.BoogieManFilm.com
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Please review my crazy idea. - thetrumanshow So I took one of jacquesm's ideas from his list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790564<p>... as I told him I would do: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791494<p>... and build a gadget around the (5) AdProfs idea: http://fcgadgets.blogspot.com/2010/10/ad-spaces-gadget.html<p>... and honestly, I have no idea what I am getting myself into.<p>I would love it if some friendly HN folks would chime in and tell me what they would do if they were in my stead. And, if they are knowledgeable about such things, let me know what kinds of pitfalls to avoid here.<p>Thanks!! ====== RiderOfGiraffes Clickables: \+ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790564> \+ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791494> \+ <http://fcgadgets.blogspot.com/2010/10/ad-spaces-gadget.html>
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
US Patent system so dysfunctional you can patent a stick from a tree - lotusleaf1987 http://www.google.com/patents?id=hhYJAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false ====== ck2 We need to sponsor that image as a billboard in Washington D.C. to get the mainstream news to cover it and then maybe Congress to look at it eventually. ~~~ drndown2007 Anyone have any idea how much it would cost? I'm in for $100 or more ~~~ civilian Estimates here: [http://www.bluelinemedia.com/billboard-advertising- media_13....](http://www.bluelinemedia.com/billboard-advertising- media_13.html) ------ jws Check the last two pages. It only took 4 years for a re-examination to cancel all 20 claims. ~~~ wisty Fantastic. Only four years in which anyone throwing a stick to a dog could be creditably threatened with a patent suit. My gut says that the threat would be hollow, but my gut says a lot of things. Like that "1-Click" is too obvious to patent - all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion. Can you tell me if 1-click patents are valid? If anything can be patented (if not actually defended), and patent threats (even hollow ones) are an obstacle to new businesses, how is the patents system encouraging innovation? I know pg advises to ignore other companies patents completely (though you should file a few of your own), and worry about the flack when you have something to lose, but that doesn't mean the system isn't crap. ~~~ RyanMcGreal > all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to > place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion. That's it - my new goal is to invent and patent the Zero-Click Purchase. You read it here first. ~~~ eftpotrm Slashdot described the method and benefits for this many years ago, so could be cited as prior art. ~~~ Symmetry My college dorm's Laundry webservers were slashdotted but someone was still able to come along later, patent the idea, and try to sue us. ~~~ eftpotrm ... which is just another example of that which has long been implemented (and sometimes long been patented) still managing to attract protection. However, at least when there is a significant pre-established publication of the idea the 'try to' becomes rather more significant than the 'sue' and they can be got rid of rather more easily. ~~~ Symmetry Yes, and really it wasn't much of a problem for us. The company still has a monopoly on the laundry-webserver business, though, and overcharges other people horribly. ~~~ eftpotrm Hmm. If this sort of thing is happening with any regularity the other side of this argument is that there needs to be a clearer, simpler way for patents to be struck down. If it's not valid for one it's not valid for any and any other position is dangerously close to extortion. ------ alexqgb Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Administration continues to bloviate about other nations, and their "failures to respect intellectual property law". At what point are those nations going to lose enough patience to point out the unbelievable corruption, cynicism, and mind-bending incompetence with which the law is administered in the first place? ~~~ throwaway8487 >> unbelievable corruption Any proof? ~~~ steveklabnik Every time Mickey Mouse is about to go out of copyright, the term mysteriously gets extended... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_mouse_law> ~~~ bioh42_2 There is nothing mysterious about it. This is what I call "legal corruption". Lobbying is fully within the law of the land. It may not be _right_ but it is legal. Unfortunately I don't see a way of changing this. Not within a republic with a representative government. And I don't see America switching to Swiss style direct democracy either. (Americans seem to have a reflex to Goodwin any thread as soon as someone mentions "direct democracy", please don't today. And please do read up on how a certain someone actually got to power.) The only hope I see is technology (Pirate Bay!) not to "fix" copyright and patent law, but simply to make their enforcement less effective. ~~~ alexqgb The issue isn't lobbying per se. After all, you can't have a viable representative government if you're not allowed to talk to your representatives (or petition them, as the Constitution puts it). At the same time, you can't expect those same lawmakers to govern effectively if they feel their re-election prospects hinge less on the will of the voters, and more on the value of campaign donations provided by the very industries they're supposed to govern. A lot of people dislike the idea of public election finance, since they don't want 'their' tax dollars going towards 'candidates they don't like' (as if taxation depends on liking each and every thing the government does). But as sharper wits have observed, you pay no matter what. Moreover, you pay a _lot_ more for the corrupt alternative. Exhibit A is the bazillions of dollars spent bailing out the most politically influential banks, while protecting their shareholders from any major losses and shielding fraudulent managers from richly deserved criminal investigations. In retrospect, a few publicly-financed elections for one-one thousandth the cost of 2008/09 would have been an exceptionally good value. Extra added bonus: not cratering the global economy. Extra extra bonus: Patent Reform that doesn't die every time it hits the Senate floor. It's one thing for third-world kleptocracies to run themselves into the ground (see Tunisia). But when the largest, most consequential economy on the planet starts operating in the same way, it's a serious problem. ------ bmr Obligatory exercise your cat with a laser pointer patent: <http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5443036.html> This was always included on the first day of any patent class in law school. ~~~ pyre I'm curious what the bias of patents classes in law school are (at least in your case). Are lawyers really taught that when an engineer brings them an 'invention' to patent they are supposed to try and expand the scope of that patent to absurd levels just because they think that they can sneak it past the patent examiners by making the language so obtuse that the simple act of inhaling and exhaling clocks in at 2,000 pages? ~~~ arethuza Having been coerced into having work of mine patented I can honestly say that once the IP "professionals" are finished with your description of your work you will barely recognize the content - straightforward claims and descriptions are translated into vague, overly general, statements of the type that seem to be specifically designed to annoy technical folks. I found the whole process deeply unpleasant - but as it was mandated by our VC investors, even though I was CTO, I couldn't say "no". ~~~ CamperBob Actually, people in your position can, and have, said "no" to demands by investors to cooperate with patent filings. It takes a hell of a lot of guts, admittedly, but doing the right thing often does. The decision has to be made at a pre-investment stage, because you don't want to be placed in a breach-of-contract position later. ~~~ arethuza This was a while ago (about 10 years) and I only had a vague idea that patents were a bad idea from a practical perspective - I was mainly motivated to try and avoid doing them because it was a huge amount of work, I hate reading "legalese" and I thought there were better things I could be doing. So my objections were mainly selfish rather than principled. I like to think these days I would act on principle... ------ chmike I'm currently examining the following patent proposing the use of mail quota. [http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=mFrNAAAAEBAJ&dq=s...](http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=mFrNAAAAEBAJ&dq=spam+mail+quota) This patent is filed in 2000 and issued 10 years later ! In 2006 it was apparently extended to international. Does this mean the validity of the patent is 20 years starting from 2010, or is it from 2000 ? This is weird. Note that I'm in europe and don't know US patent particularities. ~~~ cpeterso If email quota is patented, does that mean webmail providers like Gmail and Hotmail are no allowed to limit my email inbox size? :) ~~~ chmike The quota is on the ongoing mail, not the storage. Many ISP are using this method to limit spams or virus propagation from their clients. I think google does it too. But this is not original. On the net I found Freedom, initially published 23 nov 1999 which includes outgoing mail quotas ([http://www.homeport.org/~adam/zeroknowledgewhitepapers/arch-...](http://www.homeport.org/~adam/zeroknowledgewhitepapers/arch- notech.pdf)). For the initial date, check at the bottom. ~~~ chmike I ment outgoing mail. I can't edit anymore. Sorry. ------ terinjokes If you scroll to the bottom, it was amended so that claims 1-20 were cancelled. There were only 20 claims. ~~~ Yzupnick True, but it took four years for that to happen. ~~~ uriel And as somebody else pointed out, they were cancelled due to prior art... in other patents! ------ brown I didn't believe this at first. Sadly, it is real: [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6360693.PN.&OS=PN/6360693&RS=PN/6360693) ~~~ mono If you're in need of a good startup idea: Claim a patent for crossing fingers to build a luck generator. ~~~ drndown2007 My son saw this and wants to patent bricks now. I'm so proud :) ------ Vivtek Yup, an appropriately shaped stick seems to be claimed in claim 1. You might be able to hit that "adapted to float in water" - does "adapted" require a process in patentese, or can you simply discover a "pre-adapted" stick, for example? Good find. For certain values of "good". ------ pinstriped_dude Its not just the US. A man in Australia once patented a "circular transportation facilitation device", yes a wheel! [http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/07/02/austr...](http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/07/02/australia.wheel/) ------ yason We would be better off if we turned the patent office into a mere notary service where you can just timestamp descriptions of your innovations, and then go to court yourself fighting for them if you think you have a chance to win. ~~~ adrianbg The patent system ensures that your description is defensible so that when the time comes to defend it you don't suddenly find out you're screwed. ------ EGreg Thanks, this is another illustration of my point that I often make. Intellectual monopoly needs to be re-addressed. ------ lotusleaf1987 Everyday it becomes clearer and clearer how completely broken the US patent system is and how deeply it needs reform. How much worse is it going to get before it actually gets better? ------ buzzblog Patent attorney at link below explains why this stick patent is useless in addition to being silly. He also notes that it is no longer held because the "inventor" failed failed to pay a fee. <http://ipwatchdog.com/2010/10/06/animal-toy-patent/id=12711/>
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Making QUIC Quicker with NIC Offload - ederlf https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3405796.3405827 ====== secondcoming > We find that the kernel to userspace communication, ... often the cause of > application performance degradation Assuming they're talking about Linux here, I wonder if they used io_uring. ~~~ muststopmyths >Lesson #1: Data copy between user and kernel space costs around 50% of total CPU usage. This can be avoided by using kernel-bypass techniques as adopted in Quant. >Lesson #2: In the presence of a kernel-bypass optimization, crypto operations become the new most expensive operation, requiring up to 40% of CPU resources per connection. I suppose they did an equivalent optimization ? I have no experience with io_uring, but I assume the gains are similar to kernel bypass optimizations. ------ dsimms This gets reinvented as a system matures, I think. IBM mainframes had TCP offload in the early 90's at least. (The NIC in that case was a PC running PS/2 plus some routing software. Worked great.) ~~~ dsimms and they surely weren't the first to do that either, I assume now. ~~~ Cyphase FYI, it's possible to edit comments to add further thoughts. :) ~~~ salawat Only for two hours. As it turns out, my average time to return from distraction to proofread is a little bit more than two hours. ~~~ Cyphase Indeed, that does seem to happen often. Though in GGP's case the reply was posted within a minute of the original comment. ------ exabrial Have we addressed the privacy issues with QUIC? ~~~ 10000truths What do you mean by privacy issues with QUIC? As I understand it, it’s just another application layer protocol. ~~~ exabrial Iirc, Brave browser began disabling QUIC because the connected server was able to fingerprint the connecting party, and they deemed it an intentional part of the protocol design. Essentially connecting anonymously to a server is not possible. I'll try and dig up the blog post. ~~~ salawat This one? [https://content.sciendo.com/configurable/contentpage/journal...](https://content.sciendo.com/configurable/contentpage/journals$002fpopets$002f2019$002f3$002farticle-p255.xml) ------ gojomo Hmm, researchers with the 'National University of Defense Technology' propound on the benefits of offloading encryption/decryption to a separate processor/FPGA on the Network Interface Card. Just for speed, I'm sure! ~~~ trasz This has been done for years, eg with Chelsio NICs, and indeed it can speed things up quite a bit. ~~~ sbierwagen Wiretapping has been done for years, yes. NOBUS encryption compromise has a long history, and speeds things up a lot. (for the NSA) ~~~ aseipp How do you imagine this wiretapping works? This NIC is installed in your servers, and is fed AEAD keys that are derived from key exchange with a client by your TLS stack (and so private keys exist on the host, not on the NIC). This allows the NIC to decrypt/encrypt flows that pass through it and free up CPU cycles. QUIC requires forward secrecy for key exchange, so every flow will use a different AEAD key already, meaning any snooped key can only be used to decrypt the current flow, not any others. Every modern offload NIC uses this basic design, more or less. Where's the wiretap? Is the NIC going to somehow store every intermediate AEAD keys and escrow it to the NSA somehow? What does NOBUS have to do with any of this? And why wouldn't they just backdoor the motherboard/OS/CPU itself to acquire private keys directly? ~~~ takeda Since NIC is used to encrypt the traffic, it can purposefully have vulnerability that NSA knows about? Fixing NIC is not as easy as fixing software. ~~~ aseipp Okay, but I'm asking what does it look like? What kind of vulnerability? They presumably aren't using SuperDuper Secret Wifi to mirror data wirelessly to the moon, right? There are a limited number of outcomes at some point. They can't exactly change the encryption algorithms, otherwise clients fail to connect, and modern TLS (and QUIC) are designed to reduce algorithm agility in the name of preventing downgrade attacks and insecure suites. And they can't just break AES with an alien computer, because if so, why bother with the NIC at all? And again: How do they _escrow the data_ they want out of the network, considering the extremely variable (and potentially secured, unknown, hostile) network conditions? If they can do that with some kind of host exploit or whatever, why not just take private keys in the first place? They could just snip ground cables then and be done with it, which is exactly how they got Google. (The most realistic case I can think of is somehow compromising entropy generation, perhaps.) And finally, why do _any_ of this when you can almost definitely just issue a gag order to a legal council, or behind-the-door threats to a foreign government agency to tow the line, or any number of things? You're dealing with governments who have immense global influence, not scrappy hackers who only have their wits and old laptops about them. I'm not saying agencies don't have exploits, or they don't use them, or they don't spy on a lot of data, or that even some backdoors aren't real. But if you're looking a NIC offload device, immediately claim "Wiretapping", and can't actually explain how it wiretaps anything or what the attack model is, it's really just random speculation and fear mongering. ~~~ predakanga While I don't think it's likely, it's not hard to conceive a scenario where the NIC purposely weakens the security for attackers in the know. Purely theoretical (and I'm not a crypto guy, so please do correct me if this is nonsense), but imagine a scheme whereby the IV is chosen to be the first few bytes of the private key xor the port tuple. This could reduce the difficulty of brute forcing the key, and no extra traffic need be generated - we already know that the NSA operates passive observers, and has even placed such systems inside corporate networks in the past. EDIT: As to why they'd do this instead of getting a gag order - because they can? Because there's less oversight? Safest to assume that any technical capability will be abused sooner or later. ~~~ aseipp > but imagine a scheme whereby the IV is chosen to be the first few bytes of > the private key xor the port tuple. Again, the NIC doesn't choose the IV. It is given an IV by the host system, which is derived from key exchange in software, and that IV must match what the other side of the link derives from its own key exchange operation. It has no choice but to use the IV given. Otherwise, the two parties can't communicate. So the NIC would have to attack the host system somehow to engage in this attack, but then it could just steal a private key anyway and get all communications forever. This is basic Diffie-Hellman/TLS 101. This kind of "I'm not an expert, but let me make up a scenario completely divorced from reality..." thing is what I'm talking about when I say speculation/FUD. It sounds sufficiently "techie smart" to pass a trivial smell test but otherwise instantly falls apart. > As to why they'd do this instead of getting a gag order - because they can? > Because there's less oversight? Safest to assume that any technical > capability will be abused sooner or later. Any person in your life that you know could suddenly commit a horrible crime, just "because they can." Do you think they will? Is that reason to _assume_ they will? "Because they can" ignores a basic aspect of how decisions are made, which is understanding their motivations and reasoning. And less oversight from what? These gag orders are already enforced in secret courts. Governments exert pressure on each other, behind closed doors and through agreements like trade sanctions, to force other governments to comply. Theres's _already_ "no oversight" in the process, by design it avoids oversight. Spooks can literally walk into your datacenter and pull a rack out of the cage and there's nothing you can do about it unless you want to get thrown in a dark hole for 500 years. Even if they had to resort to techie tricks, why is the scenario you imagine any more plausible than a thousand simpler, alternative options? Multi-million dollar corporations get ransomware'd all the time, and it's not like the culprits need hardware backdoors to do it. Again: these agencies have exploits, and for a reason. They certainly use them. They have backdoors. That doesn't mean we just get to turn our brains off the instant something we don't understand mildly spooks us and assign complete impossibilities as the culprit. You're not far from just doing high- brow "lizard people control society" stuff at that point.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Fast AMF0 library written in pure TypeScript - Zaseth https://github.com/Zaseth/AMF0-TS ====== tonetheman If only somewhere on the page it explained WTF amf0 is ... ~~~ dragonwriter My guess is that the people a fast amf0 library is trying to reach know what amf0 is. For the rest of us, there's always [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Message_Format](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Message_Format)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How did Europe become the richest part of the world? - pepys https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-europe-become-the-richest-part-of-the-world ====== ttsubotai The article overlooks a very important factor, that only Europe had colonies in the Americas, and that brought massive wealth to the continent since the XVI century. Before that, the Middle-East, India and China were , in general, more technologically and scientifically advanced than Europe. ~~~ jcranmer Well, the key question is why did the Arab World and Asian civilizations fail to do the colonization that the Europeans did. Also, the parity between Europe and the rest of Eurasia was largely achieved around the 1400s, which is to say, prior to the first wave of colonization. ~~~ bluedino >> why did the Arab World and Asian civilizations fail to do the colonization that the Europeans did Perhaps because of the sheer size of Asia. Western Europe isn't exactly large. ~~~ clort Western Europe? Do you mean the landmass that extends all the way from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific? You can walk all the way from the Bering strait to the Atlantic Ocean, and down to the tip of Africa.. thats a pretty large landmass and there was no gulf between Asia and Europe. (its pretty inhospitable in parts I agree, but the Mongol Empire reached the Mediterranean) ------ flukus > The costs of European political division into multiple competing states were > substantial: they included almost incessant warfare, protectionism, and > other coordination failures. Many scholars now believe, however, that in the > long run the benefits of competing states might have been larger than the > costs. In particular, the existence of multiple competing states encouraged > scientific and technological innovation. I wonder if this is still true today and if globalism will ultimately make us worse off? ~~~ anotherarray So, should we give up on relative peace for the sake of scientific and technological innovation? Not an attack, but an actual question. ~~~ reacweb About utopian world, this may interest you: [http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-rats- turned-their-private-paradis...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-rats-turned-their- private-paradise-into-a-terrifyin-1687584457) ------ mercer While I only just got started, there's a Cousera course named "The Modern World"[1] that, based on the introduction, explores this topic (among others). [1]: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern- world](https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-world) ------ pan69 There is an interesting documentary series by Naill Ferguson on this subject. In his series he discuses the "6 killer applications" that made the West dominate the rest: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR6SFLhD32Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR6SFLhD32Q) ~~~ vyodaiken Seriously, Naill Ferguson is a poor historian. [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/before-european- hege...](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/before-european- hegemony-9780195067743?cc=us&lang=en&) also [http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Pomeranz2000.pdf](http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Pomeranz2000.pdf) ------ hugh4life I remember coming up a book one time(maybe reviewed by Razib Khan) that made this exact point that much of Europe's progress came from it's internal conflict but I have not been able to find it again... does anyone have a clue what I may be thinking of? ~~~ fbonetti You might be thinking of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" ~~~ UncleMeat Note that GGS is not actually held in high regard by academic historians. Its pop history. ~~~ woodandsteel That's really not true. Do you have any specific arguments against it? Is it your view, for instance, that non-euasian continents could have achieved the power of eurasia, in spite of their lack of suitable plants and animals, and if so, what accounts for what actually happened? ~~~ UncleMeat This just comes with close personal association with a whole bunch of history PhDs. I myself am not an expert on the topic, but they talk about this book the way that psychologists talk about Gladwell. If you want an example of respected history that follows this sort of geographic history model you should read Braudel. ------ FreekNortier Europe was great before she had any colonies. Living in Africa my entire life I can see that Europe and the countries where her children settled(USA, Canada, Aus, Nz) are the light of the world. ------ snambi Simple, because they stole from the rest of the world. ~~~ pm90 Not that simple, I'm afraid. ~~~ Cuuugi FALL IN LINE WITH THE NARRATIVE. WHITE MEN = EVIL INCARNATE ------ ThrustVectoring The article does not even mention geography, which is extraordinarily important for generating wealth. You need to feed people and ship goods in order to make stuff, and it's way cheaper and easier to use navigable rivers through arable farmland than any alternatives. This represents a huge chunk of free capital, and the network in Northern Europe is one of the largest ones (iirc, second to the Mississippi River). ------ woodandsteel The author mentions that there were a great many lucky accidents involved in the rise of the West. That is a factor that I think helps explain the Fermi Paradox. It is not enough to have an intelligent species, what they produce over the long term would seem to be civilizations that lack the sort of self- perpetuating technology dynamics that we have had in the West. ------ lazyjones Interestingly, they completely ignored the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful economic and political entities for centuries: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League) Perhaps it was one of the most important contributing factors to Europe's success. ------ dzonga Simply, the quest to kill your enemies or paranoia of getting killed by them. Internet, GPS, Drugs etc to have an advantage in warfare ~~~ distances I have a feeling you didn't read the article. ------ kartan No. War is not progress. War has cost a lot to European countries, being WWII one of the major loses in history in human lives and resources. I have hear other, more plausible, explanations. Weather is one. The fact that Eurasia is wide means that it has similar conditions in large portions of land, so you can reuse technology for agriculture across all of it. In Australia and Africa weather is not so good for agriculture. America is rich, but being narrow you need to create new agriculture techniques as you move south or north, as the landscape, weather and other factors are changing. War is present in all cultures. So some more unique qualities should be looked for. And luck can't be discarded. ~~~ arcanus 'In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.' -Harry Lime, 'the third man' ~~~ rsync "In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Well, they also produced _switzerland_. Have you been there ? It's the best place in the world - and not just the scenery. ~~~ geodel Best for those who are there. Others with wrong-{skin color, religion, continent etc} must stay away. ~~~ rsync That's not true at all. I suspect that, unlike my own country, they enforce and respect the immigration laws on the books - truly a shock. However, even outside city centers you run into people of all types. On my last trip I found myself in Gruyere and there were muslim families and east asians touring at the rest stop. Inside Zurich there's a roughly Minneapolis-level background of racial diversity. ~~~ senthil_rajasek "Minneapolis-level background of racial diversity" Here is what the Minneapolis Fed bank president has to say about that, [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-kashkari-shocked- black...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-kashkari-shocked-black- unemployment-isnt-better-understood-2016-08-31) ~~~ rsync He's talking about national statistics. He just happened to be working in MPLS at the time: "Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said Wednesday he was “shocked” that the persistently higher national black unemployment rate relative to the rate for whites was not better understood." People who live in MPLS know that it has a huge immigrant population of somali and other east africans as well as (I think) the largest Hmong/Cambodian population in the United States. That is, in addition to the inner-city diversity of american blacks. Also, unlike many other cities, there are native americans. So it's not NYC or LA, but it's not Denver either. In fact, I think my original comparison may be off - MPLS is probably more diverse than Zurich. (I have lived in MPLS on two different occasions - 6 and 5 years each. I own a business in Zurich.) ~~~ senthil_rajasek I am saying having racial diversity without equity is not a desirable outcome. ------ pm90 > The Indian subcontinent and the Middle East were fragmented for much of > their history, and Africa even more so, yet they did not experience a Great > Enrichment. eh what? The Indian subcontinent was one of the most productive regions of the world, accounting for almost 25% of the world GDP right before being colonized and having its creative/artisan class decimated. If no deliberate effort had been expounded to destroy its artisan/merchant class, Enlightenment ideas might have spread faster and created a much more dynamic economy. ------ fauigerzigerk This sounds like little more than pure speculation. Based on the exact same factors the article very selectively chooses to highlight, you could just as well claim that it wasn't competition but a very high degree of integration that has made Europe so successful and that all the competition and war between states has just obscured this fact. You could then go on and invoke the example of the United States to show that even deeper integration without too much internal warfare resulted in an even better outcome in terms of wealth. This is nothing but fluff. You could pick and choose your variables to prove anything and its exact opposite based on that sort of reasoning. What's the empirical basis for any of this? Why should we believe this theory and not some other theory? I don't see it. ~~~ hodgesrm History is like that sometimes. The root causes are tangled and we have to do the best with what we have. That said, I don't think this article is framing the question well. If you focus just on one part of the wealth, namely industrialization, it's clear that different countries have done this in different ways. For example if you compare England (first mover) vs. Japan (catch up driven in large part by defense) the outcome was still quite similar in that both countries successfully mastered mass production with corresponding economic benefits to the country as a whole. Yet the details of the societies at the start could hardly be more different. It's hard to escape the conclusion that many regions would sooner or later would have met the conditions for rapid economic growth. The question of why it happened in Europe is not necessarily the most interesting one. ------ stuckagain By defining "rich" in such a way as to put themselves at the top. ------ kenning Welcome to the social sciences ~~~ dang Please don't post snarky dismissals to HN. The comment you replied to was fairly substantive, so your reply takes the thread in the opposite of the desired direction. We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13670932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13670932) and marked it off-topic. ------ vyodaiken Go to any major European city. Look at all the loot in the museums. Figure it out. Mea culpa - too snarky. But there is a lot of research in this field and way too much self congratulatory material. A look at the Opium Wars should be enough to convince that more guns goes a long way to an explanation. Also Graeber's "Debt" gives some sense of how Europe managed to construct an economy that produced a desperation for loot that was quite remarkable. ~~~ mafribe This begs the question: why didn't nobody else succeed in looting the Europeans. It's not like the other Empires around the world were Gandhian paradises of peaceful coexistence. They were waging war on each other, looting, and going on slavery raids just like Europeans. Go and look at Aztect ruins in Mesoamerica sometimes and marvel the the monuments where the prists were sacrificing humans. Yet, despite the experience with war and violence, they (almost) never managed to beat Europeans, and certainly never colonised Europe (after the Muslims were thrown out of Europe ... Well ... depending whom you ask, the (descendants of the) Ottoman Empire are still colonising parts of Europe today ... Just ponder why Constantinople is no longer called Constantinople). Why? What did Europe have they didn't? ~~~ arjie Does the question make sense? The idea of a unified Europe is modern. Rome conquered Gaul, Serbia was in the Ottoman Empire, the Mongols traveled quite far west. The idea that Holland invading and capturing Britain meant different things then than it does now. Now they're both European nations. Then they were just two different nations. At least two books that provide hypotheses with some supporting evidence are: _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ ; and _A Splendid Exchange_. One thing that I found incredibly interesting in common was superior technology and the positive feedback loop with that. By this, I mean financial technology (loans, trade, financial derivatives) as well as weapons and mills. ------ skookumchuck One explanation is the book "Triumph of the West" by Roberts. He makes the case for it being the culture. ------ elevenfist Looking at the comments in this thread, I'm really starting to get sick of the stupidity and ignorance of the hn community. I hope you're all just paid provacateurs. War isn't some special attribute of european history or success. While some people (mostly on the narc spectrum) are motivated by competition, many aren't Historical Counterexamples: Chinese warring states periods, Japanese warring states periods, post gupta and mughal empires in India, west African pre colonial history, and there's many more.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Affordable counseling by future psychologists for people in tech - selimjeffrey http://www.talk-buddies.com ====== selimjeffrey Hi everybody, I noticed there where so many people in my environment who suffered from psychological problems like a burn-out or feeling down but couldn't find the right help. Cause psychological help is expensive, there is a long waiting list, and often no chemistry with the psychologist. At the same time you got so many skillful students psychology who have a master psychology but can't find work. Talk Buddies are students or young professionals with different backgrounds that have a BSc or master degree in psychology or are finishing their masters. No life coaches or volunteers, but real skillful conversation partners. The concept is that a user can chat with different Talk Buddies until he/she finds the one that he/she has the most chemistry with. For a affordable price. Love to hear your feedback ,ideas, comments and suggestions!
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech? - hsikka I was rewatching movies in preparation for the new Marvel movie, and I felt some nostalgia and childhood fascination when I saw the depiction of Jarvis in the Ironman movies.<p>I work in ML research and am currently in graduate school, and I know we&#x27;re nowhere near real intelligence. But some of those features, question generation, voice commands, object detection, image reconstruction, and others are certainly doable.<p>Do you think we could build something starting to approach Jarvis in 2019, at least in function i.e. helping your everyday work? ====== escapologybb I'm pretty much doing that very thing. I'm quadriplegic, so every single action I want to take in the world has to be mediated through a third party. That said party is anything from another person to one of the digital assistants. As another poster mentioned I think, I control pretty much everything in my house including but not limited to unlocking doors, windows, climate control, the lights, posting to Twitter and on and on and on with a cobbled together solution of many different components from different companies. It's done with a combination of all three of the digital assistants, various scripts and the very wonderful Home Assistant[^1] mostly gluing it altogether. It is by no means a single complete solution, but when I'm controlling the house using just my voice and somebody sees me doing it they react as though I'm some sort of dark wizard. I love having an automated house and I think Home Assistant is probably one of the best solutions for making all of the different IoT devices communicate at the moment, I think the further down this road we go the more a single solution will probably evolve. I would have to say though that the home automation stuff that enables me to call for help in an emergency is the most important thing that it does, I can flash the lights different colours when I need help depending on the level of assistance I need. Or if my Fitbit notices that my heart rate has gone below 40 BPM for more than 10 seconds I get a notification, as it is almost indicative of an attack of Autonomic Dysreflexia. I can honestly say that this home automation system has actually saved my life without an ounce of hyperbole. [^1]: [https://Home-assistant.io/](https://Home-assistant.io/) ~~~ oulipo And if you want to add a 100% offline and private-by-design Voice AI which can run on a Raspberry Pi 3 (and iOS, Android, Linux), take a look at what we are building at [https://snips.ai](https://snips.ai) (it also integrates to Home Assistant) It works for english, german, french, japanese, spanish, italian, and more coming soon! ~~~ guzik Looks awesome! Any plans for FreeRTOS? ~~~ dvndvn Snips.Ai runs as docker container in home assistant. I'm sure you can docker stuff on FreeRTOS ------ setquk Siri is still half deaf and tries to send me to the chip shop when I ask it to send a message and they have a ridiculous amount of budget behind that so probably not. At the moment our technology is like Zorg’s desk in Fifth Element. Stuffed full of toys but ultimately will let you down too often to be relied upon. ~~~ arethuza "send me to the chip shop" Do you have an accent by any chance - pretty much all voice recognition technology (Android, Apple, cars...) appears to be utterly flummoxed by my fairly mild Scottish accent. [Edit: to be fair, my accent is probably fairly mild by _Scottish_ standards, not compared to RP]. ~~~ hondadriver Must be it, a golden oldy about Scottish speech recognition (2010): [https://youtu.be/NMS2VnDveP8](https://youtu.be/NMS2VnDveP8) ~~~ arethuza I have to stop myself posting that every time the subject comes up (I know what it is without opening the link) :-) ------ ovi256 You could probably get 90% of the utility with a janky collection of shell scripts fronted by a voice recognition engine. Think Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri/etc with a bunch of company- or task- specific scripts. I purposefully ignore the robot-arm in an open universe capability, because that's still too far away, AFAIK. Jarvis in the movie was Hollywood smooth: made to look _great_ in a movie. Even the goofs were great, and it behaved like a puppy, to be likable to the audience. You don't need that in a work assistant. But if you remove that, plus the robot-arm, you're left with a voice controlled Outlook assistant, which is useful, but not sexy. ~~~ threeseed Actually you could've built Alexa/Siri etc back in 1997 with DragonDictate and a whole bunch of scripting. And in many areas it would've been just as good as what we have today. ~~~ TeMPOraL I had a better UX around playing music with WinAMP, Microsoft Speech API, and a little program I wrote to glue the two together via Win32 API WM_ messages, in 2007, than I have today with Google Now. Today the problem is a) the voice recognition part, which happens on-line though it shouldn't (introducing large latency and unnecessary Internet dependency), and b) scriptability, which is something none of the voice assistant vendors want to give to you, for business reasons. A better reality would have voice parsed on-device (possibly with models from on-line service providers), and available as a voice-to-text API that could be easily accessed by local scripts. ------ undecisive I'm guessing this is where the Dragon Helmet [1] is headed - it has software (open source) that hopes to fulfil the responses and command execution. And of course mycroft [2] et al. I think the real problem is getting the computer to do things that you haven't programmed it to do. If you imagine an Alexa / Google home where you have a conversation like: "Hey Homexa, do a web search for an image of a piece of cheese, enlarge it to 2000x1500 pixels and email it to me please" If it then came back with "Ok, please tell me how to enlarge an image" and you could give it step by step instructions, that would be amazing. But I don't think the comprehension required is quite there yet. But when we do, and especially if we can crowdsource the learned commands, things could get very, very interesting. [1] [http://dragon.computer/](http://dragon.computer/) [2] [https://mycroft.ai/](https://mycroft.ai/) ------ basetop I don't think we are anywhere close to Jarvis which is general AI ( aka real AI aka "conscious" AI ) no more than we are anywhere close to building Ironman's nanotech suit. But we are improving on "dumb/unconscious" AI like Alexa, Siri, etc that could help with day to day life whilest spying on you 24/7. ------ harrygeez I think before we talk about capabilities we should talk about UX. Even the first version of Jarvis shown in Iron Man 1 was way ahead in terms of understanding speech and context compared to the cutting edge we have now that is Google Assistant. At least Google Duplex sounds super natural now. I think when digital assistants can really understand us, adding all those capabilities is just a piece of cake. But I have a feeling we are just probably at most a decade away from something that vaguely resembles that, and I'm super excited about it. ------ _bxg1 The movies (and the major real-life assistants) tend to focus on the idea that you're talking to your computer as if it were a person, but this makes the problem an order of magnitude more difficult than it needs to be. What if we looked at it more like a vocal command prompt? What if we applied the Unix philosophy of composing programs and data transformations into more complex use-cases? You'd have to memorize the commands (though there could be vocal "man pages" too), but could finally do more than toggling lights and asking what the weather is like. There's some precedent for this; in Avengers Endgame (I'll keep it vague), Tony gives some very precise and technical commands to the system when running a scientific simulation. He's not conversing and quipping, he's basically calling parameterized functions with his voice. I think that would be very doable today. ------ guzik Ha, this is how we've been advertising our wearable, personal assistant (aidlab.com) during the launch on Facebook (such a copyright infringement!). We've been facing the hardware limitation to add the NLP directly on the MCU, as we wanted to omit the 3rd parties. Secondly, adding ‚reasonable’ voice commands like setting appointments, wiki search or alarms is nothing we could have done alone, so we’ve discontinued this idea for now. If we define J.A.R.V.I.S. as a pseudo-intelligent assistant, with a basic understanding of voice commands and biosignal tracker then it’s certainly doable, as there are some commercial implementations. Otherwise (like real- time voice chat, or even accurate suggestions based on every-day habits), it is still too soon IMO. ------ harperlee I think we are closer than we think. The problem is that all voice control up until now is a closed app with simplified intents. In my opinion what we need is a programming language whose REPL UX is voice- oriented, that eases the separation between using and extending the system. Prolog or a lisp could be quite near but we would require some changes such as: syntax easily read (:- in prolog is not very good), the ability to manage ums and ahhhs, the ability to “play” or “test” with functions through voice, etc. ~~~ decasteve We need some type of Structured Query Language, call it SEQUEL, or maybe abbreviated SQL for short. /s Jokes aside, maybe a LISP-like Sentence Processing Language might be the future of this type of HCI. ~~~ harperlee Look into Attempto Controlled English for an alternative closer to what I was thinking about :) ------ silversconfused I wrote a little shell script that lets you move the mouse around with your voice, ask what time it is, etc. My thinking for future applications is that specific appliances should take specific commands, so there would be little intelligence needed. Oven: preheat to 350 degrees. Lights: on. Music: off. Etc. ------ new_guy Sure you can. Services like Alexa are just glorified paperweights and aren't reflective of real world capabilities. If you want to build your own Jarvis, don't listen to anyone else just get stuck in. You'll be surprised just how far you can get with it. ~~~ kaybe You could also build on top of one of the open source versions, eg Mycroft. [https://mycroft.ai/](https://mycroft.ai/) ~~~ krick That's interesting. Basically the only reason I don't use Alexa or something like this is that I don't want 3rd party listening to me 24/7, so an open source alternative would be of great use. But I don't understand: it says it's open-source, yet the first thing I have to do is to create an account on _their_ platform. So, what's that "open source" thing I ought to download and install, is it just a client? Can I use the thing completely self-hosted? Also, how does it compare in terms of usability to Alexa/Siri? In fact, I'm not even sure I've seen a good open-source TTS at this point, nothing comparable to proprietary stuff. Is this mycroft thing better? ~~~ ewang1 I've recently started playing with a Home Assistant set up and came across Snips ([https://snips.ai/](https://snips.ai/)). A bunch of Raspberry Pis with microphones running Snips is what I'm looking to try next. IMO, the offline/on-device processing is a key differentiator. ------ sandreas Well, for the speech detection part, I think, there are some projects that look promising. I recently found [https://github.com/gooofy/zamia- speech](https://github.com/gooofy/zamia-speech), which works for english and german. German is pretty bad atm, but english should work fine. Nice part: You only have to spin up a docker container and a python script and can perform offline speech to text :-) Microphone input is also supported. ------ rsyring If you are really asking for it to be like Jarvis, where "like" implies some reasonably similar approximation, then: No. Absolutely not. Not even close. ------ thewhitetulip Surprised that nobody mentioned this [http://jasperproject.github.io/](http://jasperproject.github.io/) ~~~ synesthesiam Shameless plug: [https://github.com/synesthesiam/rhasspy](https://github.com/synesthesiam/rhasspy) Rhasspy is inspired by Jasper, but works by having you specify intents/voice commands via a grammar (rather than via Python). It then trains a speech and intent recognition system together to recognize those commands. Recognized commands are published over MQTT or POST-ed directly into Home Assistant. ------ alexheikel You would be able to integrate Hal ([http://halisback.com](http://halisback.com)) that’s is the best assistant out there to all the different components from different companies and make him do basically everything ------ overcode If we could, we would have. But we haven't, so we can't. ~~~ krageon Without context, this statement means nothing new should ever be done. It's a terrible axiom. Even within the context of this question, if we used this reasoning for the next 500 years we would surely never solve it. ~~~ overcode Oh sure, but that's why you have the context. My point is that the time gap between a tool like this becoming technically possible and someone executing it successfully will be incredibly small. So the chances of the current moment in time being in that gap is tiny. ------ kthejoker2 Everyone here is focusing on the voice assistant and IoT piece, but the thing that's really missing is the idea of a contextually rich personal API and some POSSE mechanism to selectively share that API with others and vice versa. Quantified Self movement is maybe 30% of the way. Until this space matures we're kind of a standstill. Commercial options have to be generic or face the wraith of GDPR, data breaches, and privacy advocates. The only way to square the circle is let people own their data completely and then incentivize them to share with your service for the benefits you provide. I think the killer app is an Alexa/JARVIS clone that "spies on you 24/7" but keeps your digital twin 100% offline and owned by you. It's the learning and the "personal schema" that's compelling. When it knows _why_ you want to turn on the lights we're getting somewhere.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Catalonia Declares Independence as Spain Gets Power to Hit Back - merqurio https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/spanish-senate-gives-rajoy-the-power-to-oust-catalan-government-j99z8pj1 ====== ColinWright Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15568078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15568078)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Games from a jam with a 1 BTC prize - jajoosam https://gamejam2019.repl.co ====== jajoosam This is a gallery featuring the winners, along with all other entries in the repl.it game jam, where the winner won a Bitcoin. There are some really amazing games in thee, many built by high school students using repl.it! Some more info on the jam: [https://repl.it/jam](https://repl.it/jam)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Binary tree traversal in Python with generators - pkrumins http://thatmattbone.com/2009/09/binary-tree-traversal-in-python-with-generators/ ====== pkrumins This is a test. I had my previous two submissions go [dead]. No idea why. So I test one more time with a random URL.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Chime - A Notification Center for the Web - trq_ http://www.chimeapp.com/ ====== Yzupnick This looks great, congratulations. 1) Do you have any plans to allow arbitrary RSS as notifications, or integrating with ITTT? This could allow people to create notifications for services that you don't support. 2) While I don't believe everything has to be monetized, I was wondering if you do have a plan to make money, and if you do, would you mind sharing? ~~~ fananta Thanks and great questions! 1\. We're currently looking at creative options to support personalized notifications. One possibility is something similar to what Rapportive did and provide sites with a way to deliver notifications. 2\. We honestly did this because it was a need we had. We're looking at a number of strategies. The most likely is a set of premium features for a one- time fee. That said, we might just leave it free too. ~~~ victoknight What about limiting the number of services for the free version; say the first five are free, then a one time fee to unlock additional. ~~~ fananta This is certainly one option and we're still thinking. Our main goal is to make cool stuff that people love, and then we'll focus on monetization. :-) ~~~ k3n That's the only way to go about it, IMO. It seems that in today's world, too many companies get a hair-brained idea from some executive that thinks they've got it all figured out, spend 100's of thousands building it, and millions to market it... only to discover that nobody actually likes it and/or will ever use it. I don't want to name names (as I'm not looking to start a flamewar), but off the top-of-my-head I can think of several very prominent, very successful (historically) corporations that seem to use such a marketing-driven approach: instead of letting users fall in love with the product by their own devices, instead the corp tries to make the product and only then do they try to sell the user on why they should love it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when it doesn't it can be a costly mistake. When you have a compelling product or service, marketing is minimal; word-of-mouth is king! Cheers, your service looks very cool. ~~~ fananta Really appreciate your comment! I really do agree with your sentiments. ------ trq_ Just launched 5 days ago! Over 100k notifications served. We're completely client side, so there are no privacy concerns. ~~~ aam1r Congrats on the initial success! If you are completely client side, how are you tracking the total number of notifications served? I would assume you would have to send some data back to the server to keep track? ~~~ gurumx Haha, that's true. We use google analytics for anonymized data. ------ Erwin I read that as "Crime" for a moment, thought it would be some kind of real- time notification centre for when a crime is happening near you. I suppose police radios are encrypted these days, otherwise it could be interesting to recognize location from the calls, and show a pin on google map say: "bank robbery in progress 2.1 miles north of you; adam-4 responding". Then you can also add a social element: like foodspotting... but for criminals. ~~~ fananta Hmm.. foodspotting for criminals. I like it. Do they get OpenTable integration? haha. ------ dylangs1030 This looks fantastic. Just one bit. Are you proudly developing this only for Chrome, or is that just a support limitation right now? I ask this because you didn't write something along the lines of expecting it to be released elsewhere soon - you wrote "exclusively" for Chrome. I ask this because I currently use Firefox most frequently (although I installed Chime on my Chrome installation to test it). It might be a bit of a market limitation later when you try to monetize this if you only develop on Chrome. And also, do you have any plans to allow independent hackers to write in their own notifications? Will I be able to write in notifications for platforms too obscure or unpopular to make a mainstream update for? EDIT: I forgot one thing. Would you consider doing this for desktop applications as well, like Growl on Mac? ~~~ fananta Thanks! We developed Chime for Chrome first just to get it out in the hands of our users. Based on the responses in the first week since launch, we're already looking at support for Firefox/Safari. I also mentioned this elsewhere in this thread, but we're hoping to create a way for other sites to deliver notifications through Chime. Haven't considered independent hackers just yet, but it is something we'll keep in mind. ~~~ ricardobeat There are platforms like CrossRider[1] or trigger.io[2] that allow you to deploy cross-browser add-ons, should be easy to port to since it's already in javascript. [1] <http://crossrider.com/> [2] <http://docs.trigger.io/en/v1.4/modules/browser/index.html> ------ martius Exclusively for Google Chro(Ctrl+W). (But I liked the screenshot). ~~~ fananta Haha, that's alright. We're considering support for Firefox and Safari soon depending on the initial response. Thanks! ~~~ martius Happy to read it, I'll give it a try when it's available :) ~~~ fananta Awesome, make sure to follow @ChimeApp on twitter to stay in the loop ------ k3n One feature that I can see possibly being valuable here is the ability to filer, prioritize, or otherwise throttle the notifications. An example would be my usage of Google Reader; there's a Chrome app[1] that shows notifications for new items, but I haven't been under 1000 new items in years ("1000+" is as high as it tracks). Yes, I have many feeds I need to prune out, but even then, I may get upwards of 100 new items a day in my reader and I sure as heck don't care about them all. I really just care about items from a few select sources, but without a way to filter out the noise it's useless. I'm not sure if that use-case would be very common for your app, although there's times when I make a popular FB post that I tend to ignore the notifications once they get past about 10. 1\. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-reader- noti...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-reader-notifier- by/apflmjolhbonpkbkooiamcnenbmbjcbf?hl=en) ~~~ fananta Hmm.. this is interesting, something we'll look into for the future of Chime. For now, we only have filtering by sites. ------ wamatt Color me impressed gentlemen. A useful idea with great execution. Now how about: 1) Ability to sleep/snooze on notifications. The use case would be when we are working in the browser and require focus. Some of us feel overly compelled to click little red notification badges, which can be distracting. Yes shame on us! :) 2) Make coffee and walk the dog ~~~ fananta Thanks! 1\. This is definitely in the works. 2\. Uhh... yes, we'll put that on our "backlog" :-) ------ ne0phyte All my Gmail notfications are 43 years old. I'm in europe so maybe it can't handle the 24h time format? Apart from that it's really great! Would love to see some common forums supported (but that would be tricky as you would need access to many different domains). ~~~ fananta Thanks! This is something we've had a few reports about this morning so we're working hard to fix it right away. ------ Swizec This looks really cool, but one thing I'd love to see/know before I install. Do you send me a notification whenever something happens, or can you pool them together and only interrupt me every few hours? Hint: I want the latter. ~~~ gurumx Right now we send a notification as soon as it happens. We're looking at implementing a pause mode, so you wouldn't get interrupted by notifications when you need to focus. Pooling notifications is interesting, we'll definitely be looking at that in the future! ------ josscrowcroft Beautiful, thanks very much. Is it possible to not receive popups when new notifications arrive? I prefer notifications to be totally silent until I decide to look at them.. ~~~ fananta Thanks! Of course, click on the Chime pop-up ==> Settings ==> turn off desktop notifications. ------ bluetidepro Wow, this is a slick interface. I love the Windows Metro look and feel. Great job with this, I'm excited to use this and not have to worry about keeping a bunch of tabs open! How often does it check for new notifications? It would be nice if you could set a variable to check for new notifications every 1 min, 5 mins, 15 mins, etc. Do you have a donate link or something? I would love to say "thank you" with a little money gift to thank you guys for your hard work! :) ~~~ gurumx We added a small donation link to the bottom of our Help page: <http://chimeapp.com/help> Great to hear that you like Chime! The frequency is different for every service, and is also based on a few other metrics. It'll pick up notifications within a few minutes, usually. ------ edparry Always the simple products that come through. Quick question: I'm logged into multiple Gmail accounts - will it grab from both, or just the active account? ~~~ fananta Currently, just the active one. We're definitely working on multiple gmail accounts, so hold tight! ------ pioul This definitely looks like a great piece of software. However, I believe different services, hence different types of information, should have their own way of being displayed. For example, seeing a one-line summary of an email doesn't appeal to me that much. That's why I always prefer using the web app itself (or a dedicated extension in the case of Gmail). ~~~ fananta Thanks! We tried to cater to the way users interact with different services. We can look into adding more options to customize notifications down the road. ~~~ pioul That'd be nice. Is there a way to be notified when such a thing goes live (mailing list)? That'd be a shame if you didn't, seeing all the coverage you're having! ~~~ fananta You can follow @ChimeApp on twitter! If you have Chime installed, you'll see the updates automatically. :-) ------ slajax I didn't realize how little was going on in my extended internet life until I installed this app. ~~~ fananta I felt the same way... Thanks for the comment though! ------ will_work4tears Looks pretty amazing so far. I've gone through a couple Google mail extensions, and using Chrome for Linux and Chromium for Linux with my google sync setup, I've had trouble finding one that works properly. This seems to work great for Chromium on Ubuntu. ~~~ fananta Thanks! The three of us working on it are all using different platforms and we've had awesome beta users who have helped us out a lot! ------ bitskits Love this idea and execution. Any plans to add rich notifications for G+? It would be great to see info about the notification (and ideally interact with it) from the extension (vs a notification page or redirect to plus.google.com). ~~~ fananta So we spent a good deal of time trying to do this. Google explicitly does not provide notification details for G+[1] so our hands are bit tied here. Chime does its best still convey your new G+ notifications with that limitation. [1] [http://code.google.com/p/google-plus- platform/issues/detail?...](http://code.google.com/p/google-plus- platform/issues/detail?id=96) ------ CWIZO I like this! One problem though: if I click a notification for gmail (probably others too) it opens a new tab. I already have gmail opened (I have it pinned), can you please use my existing tab to open the email in (or make it configurable)? ~~~ fananta Thanks! We've heard this feedback from a few others and probably will add a few different configurations in the next update :-) ------ bmuon Why Chrome only? This looks like something that could work just as well on Firefox ~~~ fananta Yup, we built Chime for Chrome just to get the product out in the hands of our users. We've realized the response for Firefox/Safari is overwhelming so we'll be looking into support for those browsers as well. ~~~ bmuon Ah ok. Sounds great then! I was just surprised to read "exclusively for Google Chrome" ------ cheez Any plans to add other "social" source code hosting services? ~~~ fananta We have Github already, but have had an overwhelming amount of requests for Bitbucket. So it's on our radar! ~~~ cheez Excellent, that was the one I had in mind. ------ notatoad For people who don't want to be productive ever again. Sorry, I shouldn't be so negative, it looks like a great app. I just know that's the effect it would have on me. ~~~ Zak I've actually found that having instant notifications about events on distracting sites keeps me from _checking_ those distracting sites and coming across other distractions on them. Net win. ~~~ fananta I agree with you. Having my FB notifications delivered through Chime, I rarely have to actually go on Facebook now. That said, everyone has a different preference for their notifications. :-) ------ Meai Not sure how this would work, but if I want notifications from everywhere, this would need to include IRC chat when people ping me with my name. ~~~ SnowLprd Perhaps the Chime folks would be kind enough to write a ZNC module to allow for that type of integration: <http://wiki.znc.in/Modules> ~~~ fananta Perhaps... ------ the1 can I have Microsoft Exchange OWA integration? ~~~ fananta Thanks for the feedback! We're definitely considering putting this on our roadmap. ------ floydpink Great work. Really love the well refined interface. Not that I care about it much, but as a feedback, I am not able to get LinkedIn to work. ~~~ fananta Thanks! Can you send us an email at support@chimeapp.com describing the issue that you're having. Are you logged-in to LinkedIn? ~~~ floydpink I am logged in, and I tried a browser restart, and a logoff-login as well, to no avail ~~~ fananta Send us a note support@chimeapp.com with a screenshot please of the "All notifications" page :-) ------ jmduke This looks awesome. What plans do you have for other services (off the top of my head, I'd love Dribbble and Tumblr)? ~~~ fananta We're looking at adding some of the most requested services (like multiple Gmail accounts) first. We'll definitely add any requests to our backlog, so I'll put your requests on there as well. ~~~ Zarel I've been trying to find a replacement for One Number, a Chrome extension that notifies for Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Voice. Google Voice notifications aren't a big deal since I get them in e-mail anyway, but having Google Reader notifications would be really nice. ------ factorialboy Is it open source? Can I see the code? Edit: Specifically I want to validate the claim "all my data stays on my browser" ~~~ trq_ Feel free to inspect the background page and look at the network requests we're making. We're doing requests to Google Analytics to store counts (e.g. how many installs we have, how many notifications are clicked, etc.) but there is absolutely no data from the notifications or any personally identifying information about you. ------ extesy I get this error on Chrome 26.0.1403.0: "Could not install package: 'COULD_NOT_GET_TEMP_DIRECTORY'" ~~~ fananta Please ensure you're logged into Google Chrome as this is enforced by Google. This may also be due to the instability of the nightly build for Chrome Dev. ------ gingerlime Looks really neat and professional. Any chance to get notified about HN comments/karma changes? ~~~ gurumx Hey gingerlime, unfortunately hn doesn't offer notifications itself, so that would be difficult to implement, and outside the scope of Chime. I'm definitely feeling your pain right now, though =P ------ est Reminds me of Friendfeed. Few quick mashups could do the same in the good ol' Web 2.0 way. ------ slajax Would love to have this on my iPhone lock screen with intelliscreen. ~~~ fananta We would love to be on your iPhone's lock screen. That would mean a different type of app for us though, with a server and all. ~~~ gurumx Heaven forbid we have to actually _use_ a server. ~~~ slajax I'll provide the server, you provide the client. _deal_? ~~~ fananta Possibly haha.. Feel free to email us feedback support@chimeapp.com or tweet us anytime @ChimeApp ------ dailyrorschach Anyone else seeing the error: "Download was not a CRX" ~~~ fananta It means you're not signed into Chrome on the webstore, which Google requires. Are you sure you're running the most updated version of Chrome? If you're still having trouble send us a note support@chimeapp.com :-) ~~~ dailyrorschach Thanks, never saw that before. Was logged in to Google Account on the browser sync, but apparently not the store. ------ binarymax This is so awesome. Any chance of yahoo mail? ~~~ fananta You're the second person to mention this (the first was my dad), so we'll definitely look into it.. :-) ------ ricardobeat The "Clear All" button is not working for me. ~~~ ne0phyte I did a "Clear All" and the notifications just disappeared from the extension, my Gmail mails are still unread. ~~~ gurumx Clear all will just hide all notifications from Chime. Marking them as read is too undo-able, we wouldn't want users to accidentally mark a ton of important emails as read. Perhaps we should change it to "Hide All"... ------ swlkr This is really cool, nice job! ~~~ fananta Thanks! ------ mehrzad This supports the only browser thats ruining the Internet. Oh well. It looks nice though. ~~~ gurumx Hmm, why do you think that it's ruining the Internet? ~~~ mehrzad It's creating a Google monopoly over the web. Chrome's not open source. Chrome has light to moderate tracking issues. Developers are starting to only support one or two browsers (talking about websites not extensions) , which I think is absurd and it reduces competition. I think Firefox is a better browser than Chrome/ium in a few ways and vice versa. You're the developer I'm assuming. You've made a great product for a popular browser, so there's nothing to worry about for you, but I think if people switched to Firefox, the Internet would be a better place. Good luck! ~~~ mehrzad Whoa, sorry for all the super short sentences, I can't seem to figure out linebreaks, I don't comment often. ------ filipmares This is awesome Fahd! ~~~ fananta Thanks Fil!
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The reason riding a unicycle is difficult - mariorz http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/07/the-reason-riding-a-unicycle-is-difficult.html ====== RiderOfGiraffes That's only true if you learn unicycling purely by trying it until you get it. I've taught dozens of people how to unicycle, all of whom felt they were constantly making progress, all of whom could see the goal getting closer and closer. I wonder if Seth actually unicycles, or if he simply picked this as a charicature of something difficult. Main lesson to learn - don't talk about something of which you're ignorant. And even if he _does_ unicycle, clearly he doesn't know how to teach it.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amazon becomes fastest-growing music streaming service - artsandsci https://www.ft.com/content/60633178-a282-11e9-974c-ad1c6ab5efd1 ====== UMBReate Can I read this without a subscription?
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Forget silicon – SQL on DNA is the next frontier for databases - LopRabbit https://www.zdnet.com/article/forget-silicon-sql-on-dna-is-the-next-frontier-for-databases/ ====== not_a_cop75 Encoding what is essentially able to produce random proteins by backing up data to it. What could possibly go wrong? ------ epiphanitus "Simply put, at this pace, there soon won't be enough data storage and compute material to go by. Which is why people have been looking into alternative storage media for data for a while now." If this is true, then why is cloud storage so cheap? What's wrong with just building bigger data centers? Does anybody know what the technical benefit of this technology would be? In any event, there's something amazing about humans using the same data storage that living organisms use. ------ rdrock [https://brandonsanderson.com/books/legion/legion-skin- deep/](https://brandonsanderson.com/books/legion/legion-skin-deep/) Legion: Skin Deep is a modern-day thriller/mystery with some science fiction undertones. In this story, Stephen is taken on a case to find a corpse with important information encoded in its DNA. ------ basicplus2 Make a great movie plot.. data base written.. creating new killer bacteria that wipes out humanity.. ~~~ mywittyname Alternatively, a dystopian future where big media companies mine human DNA for copyright infringements and courts will order said people to purchase licensing rights to exist. With the alternative being slavery, suicide, or having the offending portions of DNA removed. The act could be called the DNCA. ~~~ TomMarius Or because of patent infringements... some biotech corporation might have these
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Gut bacteria may change the way many drugs work in the body - idl3Y https://www.sciencenews.org/article/gut-bacteria-may-change-way-many-drugs-work-body ====== tachyonbeam Not to take away from these findings, but in general, individual genetics can radically change the way many drugs work, and even doctors seem blissfully unaware of this. Caffeine, for example, has a different elimination half-life based on your genetics. There are also genetic polymorphisms in adenosine and dopamine receptors that can change its effects: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4242593/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4242593/). Another obvious example is how some people can't process alcohol. If you think about this for a minute, it sheds some light into how primitive medical research is. We generally assess the effectiveness of a drug based on how it affects one metric _on average_ for a large group of people. It could well be that a drug is helpful to some and detrimental to others based on genetics, microbiome, etc. It follows that we are very likely to be giving people drugs that are harmful to them, and rejecting drugs in medical studies that could be helpful to some but are unhelpful to most. ~~~ Medicalidiot These are all salient points and I would like to comment as someone who has experience in medicine. We are truly on the precipice of so many breakthroughs in the medical field. Cancer is going to be a chronic condition soon. HIV will likely be gone in our lifetime. Congenital diseases will be eradicated very soon. What's going to also happen that mainstream media has failed to grasp the gravity of is pharmacogenomics/pharmacogenetics. Essentially what we are going to do the second you enter the ED/PCP/PreOP is sequence your DNA. Then we will tailor your drug regime based on your phenotype (What traits/characteristics you have expressed). This kind of thing was just imaginary, but last year I listened to one of the world's leading pediatric pharmacogenomicists that had a half dozens cases he shared; one of them was having a 16 y/o female that presented with depression that was not ameliorated with first line SSRI. Upon sequencing her genome they realized that her phenotype was incompatible with this SSRI, switched her and upon 4 week followup her symptoms were significantly reduced. The 20th century was the century of physics, the 21st will be the century of biology. ~~~ Thebroser It truly is incredible! The cost of sequencing one's genome is only getting lower (like this company that sequences it for $999 >> [https://www.veritasgenetics.com/myGenome](https://www.veritasgenetics.com/myGenome)) and the possibilities that this brings to designing custom tailored interventions is something we have never seen before. I'm currently involved in some synthetic biology research and I still can't believe that we are getting to the point where hijacking the very machinery of cells and other living organisms to do things we want them to do like say act as biological sensors for a disease or have them synthesize and deliver compounds on their own could become as commonplace as taking a pill. We are still a ways off, but we are getting there fast and like you say, it seems that outside of academia/the medical field not many see the impact this sort of tech is going to have. ~~~ mariushn > I'm currently involved in some synthetic biology research What is some open source software that I can contribute to in order to make these easier? I'd prefer your recommendation for something actually used/promising, instead of simply searching github. Thanks ------ wpasc I'm really glad to see the microbiome and the immune system finally getting their due respect insofar as their contribution to literally every bodily function. I suffer from an autoimmune disease (ankylosing spondylitis) and I've anecdotally felt like the immune system has been neglected research-wise because it is such a difficult, complex system to understand. Three cheers for microbiome and immune system research :) ~~~ shdh Lupus has been shown to have a correlation with gut biome balance as well. [1] It makes sense though, certain bacteria's feed off of the sugars in our gut and release harmful chemicals. Beneficial bacterium do the opposite. [1] [https://ard.bmj.com/content/early/2019/03/01/annrheumdis-201...](https://ard.bmj.com/content/early/2019/03/01/annrheumdis-2018-214856) ~~~ wpasc IBD [1] as well but I guess that association is more obvious :) My hope is that ankylosing spondylitis, which has a significant genetic overlap with crohns and UC (combined referred to as IBD) and they have significant incidence overlap, may also be treated or at least ameliorated through the microbiome. My larger hope is that all autoimmune diseases can be treated via the microbiome. All the current autoimmune treatments we have are blunt objects targeting major pieces of the immune system with very undesirable side effects. [1] [https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/05/new- findings-...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/05/new-findings- from-harvard-reveal-how-ibd-disrupts-gut-bacteria/) ~~~ will_brown What kinds of things do you do personally to promote a healthy microbiome and/or combat IBD? I’ve really been experimenting with my diet in the past few years to improve my running which I just started about 5 years ago. At one point when I was really focused on my microbiome (to the best of my ability with limited knowledge), i experienced changes that made me realize I’d kind of always unknowingly had some symptoms of Chron’s, and I only realized it when they went away. I have long since adapted my diet losing focus on promotion of a healthy microbiome and these symptoms have returned. Coincidentally at the time I was also taking creatine (not as part of my focus on the microbiome) and I subsequently read some antecdotes (no formal studies) of people with Chron’s who got benefits from creatine. But I feel I had similar benefits as they described, only I haven’t previously got them with creatine when on different diets. Another anecdote I wanted to share, there’s a famous retired UFC fighter, GSP, who got UC and has been very outspoken about it and his recovery (you can find multiple interviews on youtube). He has really found success with intermittent fasting and time restricted eating. I’m not sure if they have formally studied it in humans but there have been formal studies on mice and the benefit of fasting and their microbiome. One really cool study they did was they fasted mice to promote more brown fat, they then transplanted the fasted mice microbiomes into non fasted mice and they too began recruiting more brown fat, that’s mice but it’s amazing to think you can possibly transfer some of the benefits of fasting to nonfasted people through a microbiome transfer. ~~~ wpasc I had no idea GSP had UC. Personally? I don't think I do enough, but when I'm fully adhering to my own protocol, I: -Don't drink alcohol -Follow a paleo-autoimmune protocol (with the inclusion of white rice). I can't promise it works but I encourage self experimentation. There's been research around SCD (specific carbohydrate diet) and GAPS diet which you may want to look into because of its effects on crohn's (somewhat researched). -I eat fermented foods (no affiliation to the company, but I eat from realpickles.com [seriously no affiliation, just sharing where I get from]) -Because my joints are in pain, I can't exercise much so I do pilates. Kinda funny, 26 year old male with a bunch of ladies in their 60's, they find it funny and so do I -Try to sleep enough and meditate for stress levels. -I intermittently fast, but not through much effort. I just skip breakfast which naturally leads to ~6-8 hr feeding window. ------ octosphere I made an effort to help my microbiome by eating/drinking various things. I consume all the following: \- Kimchi / Sauerkraut / Pickled red cabbage (or anything fermented) \- Apple cider vinegar (Actually a 'pre-biotic' not a pro-biotic) \- Kefir grains grown with organic milk and then separated (and drunk) each night \- Greek yogurt \- Kefir water drinks (you can buy these at the health store) \- Pro-biotic drinks (you can buy these at the health store. Note: avoid the ones made with sugar) ~~~ lymeeducator Fasting, water or dry, has been quite beneficial for me. Nothing longer than 48 hours yet. ~~~ wincy I have terrible sweating problems even at comfortable temperatures. I’m just always sweating. If I fast this problem ceases. ~~~ andy_ppp I wonder if your body is desperately trying to get rid of something in your diet (like organophosphates?) - have you also tried regular saunas? ------ hangonhn I was recently at a lecture given by a colleague of the Yale researcher. Apparently the Yale cancer center is going to re-run most if not all of their drug trials because of these findings. So drugs that didn’t do well during the trials may actually have some efficacy if the protocol were changed to take into account gut biomes. The work in gut biomes are having a huge impact on medicine. ------ rolltiide I wish that nutritionists were able to do this level of research. The general underpinning of their holistic approach is understandable, where they need to treat an individual's body as an individual system. I understand why it is therefore impossible to follow known practices of peer review and repeatable results. But it is then used to rationalize extremely random remedies or preventative dietary regimes that no two nutritionists would ever independently come to. There is seemingly no body of research or work toward any other method, instead just a general rejection of the words "science", "drug" and "pharma", to rationalize any procedurally generated remedy. ------ inflatableDodo The inverse is also true. I can actually digest things properly now since quitting drinking. ~~~ stronglikedan I was never affected by drinking per se, but IME, cutting out sugary drinks did wonders for my digestion related issues. I wonder if that's related, since most alcohols contain a good amount of sugar. ~~~ inflatableDodo I think it was largely the quantity of spirits I was consuming. I loved things like brandy, tequila, rum, vodka and whisky, but they all loved me back a bit too much. I also realised that there is no real need to play life at the hardest difficulty setting all of the time. ------ lpolovets Here's an example of a YC startup that's exploring this area: [https://persephonebiome.com/](https://persephonebiome.com/). They are developing microbiome therapeutics that improve the effectiveness of certain classes of cancer drugs. (We're a small investor.) ------ joncrane Not only that. Drugs often change your gut bacteria.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
2 California men fall off edge of ocean bluff while playing 'Pokemon Go' - elmar http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-pokemon-go-players-stabbed-fall-off-cliff-20160714-snap-story.html ====== Cpoll Tunnel vision is a scary thing. On the other hand, some of the other anecdotes are, I think, completely coincidental. With such a large adoption rate, some people are inevitably going to have bad things happen to them while they're playing Pokemon Go. ------ J_Darnley Natural selection at work. They were not a good fit for their environment so their environment killed them. ~~~ bertiewhykovich They survived, dude -- sorry to frustrate your ghoulish glee. ~~~ qbrass Natural selection at work, they were sturdy enough to survive the hazards their ignorance lead them to.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Experimenting with sweet.js macros - int3 http://jezng.com/2012/11/experimenting-with-sweet-js-macros/ ====== int3 For those who don't know what sweet.js is: It's a macro system for Javascript, designed by the folks at Mozilla. With any luck it'll pave the way for macros in post-ES6.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why humans can't draw - KennethMyers http://techno-anthropology.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-humans-cant-draw.html ====== Jupe _Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ is an excellent book. I still use some of the techniques to "turn-on" my right brain, and turn off the analytic, sombol-based left-brain (comes in handy when you need it). As i recall the boldest statement from the book: "If you have enough dexterity to write your name, you can draw. You just need to learn how to see." I'd suggest this book to anyone - whether you want/need to do "life drawing" or not.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why we made Vorlon.js and how to use it to debug your JavaScript remotely - codepo8-hn http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eternalcoding/archive/2015/04/30/why-we-made-vorlon-js-and-how-to-use-it-to-debug-your-javascript-remotely.aspx ====== orand How is this different from weinre? [http://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/docs/latest/](http://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/docs/latest/) ~~~ nyam maybe vorlon is usable ------ NoMoreNicksLeft I tried to use this, but I kept getting mysterious error messages like "the avalanche has already started it is too late for the pebbles to vote" and "divide by zero". ------ archgoon So, when does Microsoft release their Genetic Algorithm / Z3 based Fuzzer called 'Morden'? It's what I want at least. ------ kodeninja I cloned the project from [https://github.com/MicrosoftDX/Vorlonjs.git](https://github.com/MicrosoftDX/Vorlonjs.git) to play around with creating a plugin. The code in the plugin TS files (e.g. `Plugins/Vorlon/plugins/sample/sample.ts`) keeps reporting errors like `Cannot find name 'Core'`, `Cannot find name 'RuntimeSide'` etc. Is that expected? I have run `npm i` from the project root. $ node -v && npm -v v0.10.36 1.4.28 ~~~ deltakosh Can you please try a npm install at the root folder level? ------ endergen I was hoping this was finally a release of Microsoft Research's Rivet Debugger: [http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1618...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=161835) ~~~ endergen Here's a more entertaining video of Rivet: [https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc12/technical- sessions/p...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc12/technical- sessions/presentation/mickens) James Mickens is a crazy productive/smart dude. ------ gpvos I'm still reeling from a Microsoft web page showing commands at a Unix prompt. ~~~ teddyh [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix) ------ decasia Anyone know what sort of auth or security provisions are involved? It seems great for developers, but if I were a user, I would worry about giving someone a remote session at my browser's javascript console. ~~~ tracker1 It won't have any access the hosting website doesn't already have... It's just interactive instead of strictly the delivered JS. ~~~ decasia I'm sure that's the intended state of affairs. But there's a difference -- at once psychological and technical -- between "trusting someone else's application code" and "letting their developers have remote debugging access to your machine." ~~~ tracker1 They don't have any remote debugging access they wouldn't have... the JS still runs in your browser, sandboxed to the window with their website in it... it can't do anything else that any JS could do... it may be a psychological difference, but it's not a technical one... I've considered a number of times about actually shipping dom-diffs so that support could _see_ what a user is seeing. This technology has been around for a while. ------ brandonjlutz I'm getting the following popup when I visit the page: The page at blogs.msdn.com says: The target of the callback could not be found I really want to like Microsoft, but it's the little things like these that make me uneasy. Especially when you're blogging about debugging javascript. ~~~ deltakosh Really sorry about that. Our blog platform is a crap. You can directly go to www.vorlonjs.com for more info and better web site:) ------ mkj Anyone see what clients it supports? Could it be used to debug IE6? ------ angersock _Based on this, the second reason is because the Vorlons are one of the wisest and ancient race of the universe and thus, they are helpful as diplomats between younger races._ What? No. That's not how the Vorlons worked _at all_. Also, Javascript is basically the Shadows (mordon.js lol). Wonder what langauges/frameworks map onto other Babylon 5 concepts? Angular -> Earth Alliance? Enterprisey but not super elegant, and collapsing under its own weight and propaganda? ~~~ doktrin > What? No. That's not how the Vorlons worked at all. Maybe OP has only watched through season 3 ~~~ xenophonf Dude! Spoilers! ------ nickhalfasleep I'm disappointed if like it's namesake it doesn't give vague, disturbing, portent information to the console. "If you go to 'undefined', you will die" ~~~ angersock " _this_ is a three-edged sword." ~~~ krapp "You are not ready for immutability." ~~~ tarice "What's inside there?" "One moment of perfect Javascript." ~~~ doktrin "I will not be there to help you when you pollute the global namespace"
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Should external links open in the same browser tab or new tab? - srisaila I know links opening in the same page is the default behavior. Do you set same behavior (links opening in same tab) to both internal and external links? ====== lsiunsuex As a web developer, I feel external links opening in the same tab / window take the user away from my site (or the site I'm building) so I generally always force external links to open a new tab. The goal is always I think, to keep people on your site as long as possible. Opening an external link in the same tab stops that - maybe from the external link they find something else they want to read / do and don't come back? That would suck. As an internet user - I'll generally force a link (command click) that might look external to open in a new tab so I can come back to reading what I was reading without having to reload the page. ~~~ srisaila I agree with your points. I do not think even most users would want a link to take them away from the page they are on. I am wondering why links on HN let go of its visitors!
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: 5400 TED talk texts open sourced - svig https://github.com/saranyan/TED-Talks ====== levistoddard I have a cool way to use these transcripts. One question... I noticed the MIT Licence... but did TED authorize this? or have these just been scraped without explicit permission? (No judgement, but wanted to know this before using the texts in a project) ~~~ svig Hi, no TED did not authorize it. Neither, they said otherwise. I tweeted a note to Chris with a link to the project. ~~~ svig BTW, I built this on top of the data. [https://ted.saranyan.com](https://ted.saranyan.com) ------ spog314 hi svig: What you did with TED talks is cool. I'd like to know how you did this? Please share technical details. Thanks in advance.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
NASA's $1B Jupiter probe takes mind-bending new photos of the gas giant - MilnerRoute http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/NASA-s-1-billion-Jupiter-probe-has-taken-12478909.php ====== SHAKEDECADE Oh man, I want to find some High-res versions of these.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
“Nearly 25000 allocations are made for every keystroke in [Chrome's] Omnibox” - dustingetz https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromium-dev/EUqoIz2iFU4/kPZ5ZK0K3gEJ ====== dang Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704318). ------ teraflop Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704318) which is also on the front page.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit - luu https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Results-of-car-free-Market-Street-so-so-for-SF-15087210.php ====== Symbiote The linked article (1) says the redesign will have "sidewalk level bike lanes". If there's a way for local people to comment on this, please encourage these to be changed to in-between-road-and-sidewalk level. (Or road level with a continuous kerb in between). This makes it much, much easier for pedestrians not to accidentally wander into the lane. (2) 1 [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Car-free- Market-...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Car-free-Market-What- happens-to-the-side-14999923.php) 2 [https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/copenhagen- denmark-...](https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/copenhagen-denmark- april-28-2015-people-273751205?src=r5lx0IqAiK-ujRzrOcMg6Q-1-1) ~~~ brnt As a Dutchie blunders like the one you mention are so stupifying... Takes you a ten minute visit to NL to figure out why you need to separate modalities consistently, yet even as close as Germany and France cities are designed so obviously by people who never ever bike. ~~~ ChuckNorris89 Same in Austria, we simply grew accustomed to bikes sharing the road with cars, busses and trams which I'm sure would be terrifying to someone from NL. The problem is, after the post war boom, the cities were planned for cars and now there's simply no space left for cycling lanes unless we ban cars which as much as I wish for will never happen in my lifetime. ~~~ Quequau I live in Graz and I'm hard of hearing. Hearing aids make locating where some kinds of sounds come from difficult, so I miss a lot of acoustic cues that pedestrians use to navigate their way through busy places. I've been run down once by a bicyclist and once by a skateboarder while I was walking on mixed use pathways. The skateboarder took a harder fall than I did, still helped me up, and sincerely apologized. I fractured my wrist in my fall when the bicyclist hit me and not only did they not stop, they yelled at me as they cycled away. Anyway, I too would support limiting the use of cars as well as on street parking in city centres and other similar zones. ~~~ close04 Bikes shouldn't share the lane with pedestrians any more than they should share it with cars. In an ideal world they would look more like Danish ones, with all 3 separated by at least a small kerb. This helps pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike. Cycling in Denmark was the best cycling experience I ever had relative to the way bike lanes are designed (definitely not related to the cyclists that were sometimes falling like bowling pins when the huge crowd was starting to move at a green light). Getting used to some bad compromise hardly makes it good. ~~~ ehnto Bikes can certainly share pedestrian areas, they just need to ride slower, the walkways need to be wide, and the walkways should be easy to enter and exit in the case you need to ride around groups of people (shallow curbs you ride up and down). Look at Osaka, you have almost free reign on a bicycle there. Bikes are slow, cars are slow, but it all flows. Bikes even join foot traffic in shopping precints. But when it's too busy people are no longer on their bikes anyway, because the whole place is walkable. It takes a level of empathy and cooperation I think doesn't exist in the bike versus car debate, because it has become an "us versus them" debate and everyone is trying to win not collaborate. ~~~ labawi Cars can certainly share cycle paths, they just need to ride slower, the paths need to be wide, and they should be easy to enter and exit in the case you need to ride around groups of cyclists. Pedestrian areas, yes - people usually don't commute through there. Sidewalks vs. cycle paths vs. car lanes - not a good idea. When people propose path sharing among pedestrians and cyclists, they often mean cyclists slowing down to speeds (e.g. 10km/h, or even 5-7km/h), which they would find unacceptable for cars, even if multiplied x3 (try telling drivers to go 30km/h so they share with cyclists going 15-30 km/h). ~~~ ehnto I want to be clear, I'm talking about the city metro areas. Not commuting from suburbia. We should have fully separated bike paths for longer distance commute bike traffic, because mixed speed traffic with cars just doesn't work when cars are going faster, and unprotected bike lanes are just a bandaid solution to that problem. But once you're in the metro area, everyone should slow right down. The dominant traffic in the city is foot traffic. Cars go at 50km/h through my city, meaning they need to be separated really strictly. Slow them down to 20km/h with narrower roads, and you can reclaim the area for mixed pedestrian traffic, allowing more free movement for everyone in the city. Something as simple as crossing the road shouldn't take 10 minutes for 200 people just so five cars can cross the road. With narrower streets and slower traffic, you can reasonably cross the road anywhere you want. That also allows bikes to move reasonably along the road but slowly on the footpaths, you open the whole area up for the people using the city. It's all a balance, not everywhere in a city should be like that. I'm just advocating to move away from the heavy car-oriented lean many places currently have for their city centers. ~~~ brnt There is no difference between city centers and suburbia in much of Europe. Apart from that, the Netherlands has a few bike highways now to cater to faster intercity transport. What you want to do is enable fast biking everywhere (so a bike first infra) and seperate modalities for safety and comfort. Any urban transport research will show that bikes in foot traffic is a Very Bad Idea(tm). ------ Tepix Just the fact that riding a bicycle got more attractive and 25% more people are using their bicycles now means that there will be less people left stuck in traffic in their cars. Not to mention the people who are exercising by using their bicycles will have health benefits as well. ~~~ TheSpiceIsLife Will 25% more cyclists have much of an impact on the number of cars on the road? 25% more of a small number is still a small number. ~~~ abyssin It will have an impact on congestion. For instance in Brussels, a 10% reduction in number of cars on the road translates to a 40% percent reduction in traffic jams. ~~~ bagacrap Which seems like it would translate to at least 10% more people being willing to drive... ~~~ rcMgD2BwE72F And yet, even more will discover than riding a bike is more pleasant than driving a car once the city has been designed that way. I'm one of them, and many of my friends are just waiting for the infrastructure to be further improved to make the switch. More space, better markings (…), just more reasons to drop the expensive, polluting, stressing space-taking cars and take a breath of fresh air while commuting. ~~~ u801e > And yet, even more will discover than riding a bike is more pleasant than > driving a car once the city has been designed that way. Most people aren't going to find cycling more pleasant than driving in inclement weather, cold weather, hot weather, low traction conditions, uphill, or carrying cargo. ------ stevenwoo There was a world wide meeting on transportation similar to the Paris climate change one, same result, almost everyone but USA committing to better standards for future - [https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/02/1057721](https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/02/1057721) The USA response that the market and self driving cars will fix this was pretty delusional. ~~~ J5892 Any responses from the US from about 3 years ago to between 1 and 4+ years from now are going to be delusional. ------ tiku Studies? Just check out how we do this in the Netherlands. It works great here in most bigger cities. ~~~ asjw You live in a flat country, were cities are quite densely populated and you don't have to travel a lot. Mine is not. ~~~ re-actor The flatness is almost entirely canceled out by the relentless 20km/h+ wind ~~~ chinesempire You get pretty strong winds in southern Europe as well, without the flatness ------ scarejunba I thought it would be mayhem but traffic overall didn't change at all. It's exactly the same. ~~~ wahern That's because most cars were taken off Market St in 2015: [https://www.sfmta.com/project-updates/turn-restrictions- mark...](https://www.sfmta.com/project-updates/turn-restrictions-market- street-going-effect-aug-11-2015) Since then most cars on Market St north of Van Ness seem to have been Uber and Lyft. Now they're finally banned. If buses are actually running faster--not just a consequence of less traffic during the winter months--it goes to show how much Uber and Lyft have contributed to traffic in the city. They drive slow, erratically, and stop in the middle of the road on main arteries to pick people up and drop them off. ~~~ Areading314 It still doesn't make sense that they let the "yellow" taxis continue driving on market. They are on average much worse drivers ~~~ new_realist There are fewer of them and they are more efficient, running at higher passenger utilization. ~~~ thedance This can’t be true. Taxis often run with zero passengers, whereas a private car never does. ~~~ wahern I could only find two studies on capacity utilization: * Judd Cramer, Alan B. Krueger, "Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber", 2016, [https://www.nber.org/papers/w22083](https://www.nber.org/papers/w22083) and * Y.M. Nie, "How can the taxi industry survive the tide of ridesourcing? Evidence from Shenzhen, China", 2017 [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X1...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X17301018) Both seem to confirm that ride-hailing has better utilization rates, though Nie qualifies that--e.g. sometimes too many private cars might turn out. However, at least in San Francisco all the licensed taxi cabs also use ride- hailing apps, so their utilization should be at least as good as unlicensed cars. The real issue with ride-hailing is induced demand. In places like San Francisco public transit took a huge dip, and ride-hailing simply isn't anywhere as efficient as mass transit. Studies have shown that ride-hailing has contributed to a _substantial_ increase in traffic and traffic delay: [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaau2670](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaau2670) Ride-hailing can even be worse than personal cars because a personal car has a 100% utilization rate at minimum, whereas the average utilization rate for ride-hailing, even accounting for multiple riders (e.g. >100% for any particular trip) is <100%. Ride-hailing only pencils out for the last mile--to and from transit hubs in a local vicinity. But too many people take it to cross town. It's hard to blame ride-hailing companies, though. Cities need to be build more subways. Perhaps companies like Uber, if they were allowed to build subways as cheaply as The Boring Company can do (i.e. small diameter tunnel, though still larger than London and Budapest; no red tape; no extravagant stations) and to capture the revenue, would invest the money. They'd finally be able to ditch drivers, too, because driverless cars will probably only ever work, if they work at all, in moderately dense residential areas. ~~~ eru Personal car usage doesn't have a 100% utilization: lots of time is spent cruising for parking and coming back from some out of the way parking. You can't really count that as being productively utilized. It's the opposite. ------ closeparen Market St. has never been a significant thoroughfare for private cars. Of course there’s no traffic impact. Try the same thing on Mission, Howard, Folsom, Harrison, Geary, Van Ness, etc. and you’ll see a very different story. ~~~ rabeener Can you clarify your point? I read the article but don’t see any mention of trying this on any of the streets you listed. It looks like the city of SF made a good call here and the first part of your comment supports that. ~~~ closeparen Doing this for Market St. is basically free. There are no real risks or tradeoffs. Of course it’s a good call. But to frame this as a triumph against critics predicting doom is just weird. No one was seriously predicting doom on this one. The only people driving on Market are confused tourists. But then it’s going to be held up as an example for other streets that actually _do_ have risks and tradeoffs. ~~~ jvagner The news media kept hammering the potential for cArmageddon.. which was weird. It was a non-story, and it still is, but I guess someone needs content to promote. ------ rhn_mk1 There are numbers on speed, but are there any on throughput? ~~~ thedance Throughput doesn’t change with speed, just like with cars the rate is the same at 5 or 75MPH because the spacing in terms of time stays constant. What improves is the latency for individual riders, and the reliability of the bus arriving on schedule. ------ hamandcheese I take the 5R nearly every week day. Anecdotally, it seems like it’s been better lately (though it’s always been adequate), but I didn’t connect that with the market street car ban until now. ------ tmpz22 Great for buses, bikes, taxis, cars that accidentally make a wrong turn, and bikes running red lights to slice through crossing pedestrians (sometimes avoiding collisions sometimes not). ------ flyinghamster Chicago tried this decades ago with the State Street Mall project [1]. It turned out to be an overall flop, with stores seeing reduced traffic, and by 1993 it was gone and good riddance. As a pedestrian, I hated it when I worked downtown. Maybe they'll do something on Market Street that will work better, or perhaps it might be a better fit there than in Chicago, but I wish them luck, because they're going to need it. [1] [https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct- opinion...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion- flashback-state-street-pedestrian-mall-20191025-cos5svz7w5dvzgznqouu2xqimu- story.html) ~~~ lotsofpulp The weather in Chicago is markedly worse for being outside for half the year. ~~~ rconti Probably more like 10 months. I imagine there's a shoulder season in the spring and fall where Chicago is more desirable, from a weather standpoint, than cool and windy SF, before it gets too hot and humid in Chicago's summer. ------ gok The main problem with Market Street for pedestrians is the heroin and poop, not cars. ------ iblaine There is an impact for some retail businesses. I tried shopping near market street for items that require a car to transport. I gave up trying to get through traffic, and instead did my shopping online. This is an acceptable trade off for me, and demonstrates how some retail businesses may need to adjust. ------ Camillo The only redeeming feature of that part of Market Street remains the subway. ------ turbostyler I don’t notice any difference on Market from before the car ban. I also see cars driving on the street all the time. ------ Traster >His conclusion: When cities shut streets off to cars, people drive less. The myth of a “carmageddon”-style traffic jam is apparently overblown. This seems to completely ignore the fact that what actually has occured here is that the reduction of drivers is a negative for those drivers. Those drivers now either have to cycle or use public transport instead of their cars or have to move. That might seem positive to the people who don't have to make those sacrifices, but it's a massive negative impact on the people effected by this. ~~~ dbingham Well, and the externalities of the driver's carbon emissions are a massive negative impact on all of us. In a city as dense as San Francisco, transit, walking, or biking can easily cover most people's transportation needs. The more we build safe and effective infrastructure for those modes, the more people will use them. And that will be good - in the end - for the remaining few who do absolutely need to drive (though I believe that if we get creative, with things like bike rikshaws, we can even cover that segment with out cars). If we don't change these sorts of habits, the climate will change them for us. ~~~ Traster I'm not advocating for designing life around increasing car ownership. I'm pointing out that re-designing existing systems to disadvantage a specific group of commuters is more than a little problematic. Let's put it this way - how would you feel if we shut down your nearest train station and used the money saved to give everyone a tax break. We can also decrease carbon emissions by just shutting down every power station in China, but targetting a single group of people to take the vast majority of the cost of fixing climate change is not reasonable. ~~~ wpietri Your point is that changes can be bad for some people while being good for others? I'm pretty sure everybody knows that. Given that they spent 10 years planning this, and given the enormous infrastructural support cars get, I'm quite sure the city was aware. ------ UI_at_80x24 Am I the only one disappointed that the author was NOT referring to the PC game Carmageddon in the title. Expected summary: "Well, we were pleasantly surprised that shutting down the streets didn't lead to a rage-induced, car-killing-spree murder rampage." ------ yellowapple Translation of the first couple paragraphs: "SF street traffic is already abysmal, and yet we still managed to make it a little bit worse." Market Street was already pretty devoid of non-bus/taxi traffic before "a month ago". If you want a better test, try closing off Van Ness or Embarcadero and see how well that goes for y'all. "No carmageddon"? SF is _already_ a carmageddon. ------ everyone A big traffic jam would be nothing like 'Carmageddon' An extremely popular series of computer games starting in 1997, where u race around smashing into other vehicles and running over pedestrians. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmageddon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmageddon) Why do they keep saying carmageddon???? ~~~ wpietri I think you could call that moderately popular at best. 20+ years ago. They keep calling it that for the same reason the game got that name: it's a cute term that quickly conveys "giant automotive disaster". ------ pleasecalllater I'm always wondering what about people with disabilities, older people with problems with walking, pregnant women, families with four kids, etc. Sometimes the public transport for such people is problematic and using taxi all the time is too expensive. Total banning cars makes a great space for the healthy ones, the rest is happily ignored. And this is sad. I like decreasing the number of cars, not forbidding them at all. ~~~ 99052882514569 >people with disabilities, older people with problems with walking, pregnant women Are precisely the kinds of people _less_ likely to be able to drive. Accessible and convenient public transit is a better option for them, provided of course that it's accessible and convenient throughout their journey - that means sidewalks, intersections, transit stops, building access, etc. If families with 4 kids don't need a vehicle at all, it's a huge financial benefit for them. Here in Canada a mini-boat on wheels large enough to accommodate such a family is friggin' expensive. Cities tend to have free or very cheap tickets for kids, so if you can get away with doing commutes by transit and have a Corolla for weekend errands and groceries that you don't have to shove all 4 into, you win $1000s every year. ~~~ Valgrim I'd like to add another thing to consider: good urbanism, specifically mixed- use development, which reduce the distances immensely. I live in Montreal and I use my old used "mini-boat on wheels" maybe twice a month to see my family outside the city. I intend to sell it actually. I travel to work on public transport because most of the city is covered 24/7 with a pretty acceptable bus and metro. Everything is close enough that I can simply walk, even in winter. There are 5 schools, 4 parks, 3 pharmacies, 2 grocery stores, a bunch of shops and restaurants, two medical clinics, two metro entrances, several of my friends, etc, all within 15 minutes on foot. And I don't even live in a "dense" area. It's actually considered a food desert compared to the rest of the city. ------ ARandomerDude It would be awesome if you had something like a bicycle, only more comfortable that could hold you, a friend, and some of your things. You could enclose it to protect you from the weather, too. For longer distances, or people with disabilities, you could add some mechanical contraption in case you can't pedal that far. That'll be the day. ~~~ r_klancer Some of those already exist! At increasing levels of car-like-ness: * [https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-electric-cargo-bikes/](https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-electric-cargo-bikes/) * [https://www.contemporist.com/5-examples-of-enclosed-bike-des...](https://www.contemporist.com/5-examples-of-enclosed-bike-designs-that-are-taking-over-the-roads/) * [https://www.arcimoto.com/](https://www.arcimoto.com/) (Studiously ignoring parent's intended snark) In all seriousness, I'm expecting an explosion of these new light vehicle body types in the coming decades, as global trends of cheap electric drive + batteries, increasing urban congestion, and less car-oriented urban planning trends converge ~~~ paradox101 "I'm expecting an explosion of these new light vehicle body types in the coming decades, as global trends of cheap electric drive + batteries, increasing urban congestion, and less car-oriented urban planning trends converge" Don't motorcycles already serve that purpose? Its already the chief form of personal transportation in most of the Earth's population. The problem I see with all the concepts you posted is that they have all the drawbacks of a car and a motorcycle. They would fare as well as a motorcycle in a crash, and have almost the same footprint as a small car. Also, a motorcycle will handle much better than a trike with narrow tracks and short wheelbase at higher speeds. Then, there are electric assist bicycle. They have two main problems that small motorcycles/scooters don't suffer from. A 350lb scooter/motorcycle is much harder to steal than a 50lb electric bicycle. I own a rather expensive electric assist mountain bike that I don't feel comfortable parking it out of my sight. You can't travel on the highway with electric bicycle unlike motorcycles. ~~~ kqr I think you might be underestimating the size of a modern car -- they're _huge_! ~~~ paradox101 By small car I meant Smart ForTwo, or Fiat 500. These not-a-car trikes/quads have comparable footprint to these cars. Which isn't small enough to fit in- between 2 lanes. ~~~ kqr Sure, but those are exceptions to the modern car size, and the median car size on the street is far bigger than that. If everyone would switch to Fiat 500 sized cars, that would be an amazing start.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The SF Hacker Loft - newy http://euwyn.com/post/4087921596/the-sf-hacker-loft ====== neurotech1 Noisebridge, another hackerspace is in SF. (www.noisebridge.net) It's located at 2169 Mission St (Between 17th and 18th) Drop by. I'm a member and regular visitor. ------ hparra It's this "let's hack together" mentality that seems to be lacking in Southern California, where so many schools & companies still insist on cubicles. Time to take the train up to SF... ~~~ dweekly There are a bunch of people in Santa Monica who are looking at starting a Hacker Dojo... ~~~ billpaetzke Sweet! I would be all over that. There's really only one good coworking space there: CoLoft. But it's marketed to all freelance/remote workers--not just hackers. Would be nice to get a dedicated hacker place. ------ jdavid I live in soma and would love to find a place to hack. find me on twitter. @jdavid ------ yan Ah sweet. I met Euwyn in NY in the '09 HN meet, I think in January. Awesome that you're now in SF and hacking away. (Unless I'm thinking of a totally different Euwyn Poon) ~~~ newy Yup, that's me. Great hearing from you Yan. I left NYC for SF for YC last summer :) ------ baberuth Hi, I've been in NYC and I'm hacking obsessively and around the clock. My biggest problem has been finding a place where I can seriously plunk down and work without distraction. Would LOVE to be in a space with like minded people trying to hack and would also love an excuse to go out to SF. I've been largely very impressed with the NYC tech scene and would love the chance to hack out there for a while too. ftlogrtmfb@gmail.com ~~~ brianbreslin Want zero distractions? The stacks in the basement of any college library would be perfect ------ krakensden You should change Opzi's web page, it still refers to you as headquartered in Palo Alto. ~~~ newy Great catch. We're in the process of updating the site :) ------ dweekly Awesome, Euwyn! This feels like maybe the start of an SF Dojo...? :) :) ------ enki hanging out here right now, discussing backbone.js and getting work done! the opzi guys rock! :) ------ DarrenLyman Interested.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
JEP 295: Ahead-of-Time Compilation - yarapavan http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/295 ====== valarauca1 Seeing as nobody is reading the fine text * Only 64bit Linux on AMD64 is supported, so no ARM or Android support _currently_. * Files must be ran on computers they were compiled on, or identical hardware * Still needs GC, only G1 and Parallel GC are supported * No dynamic byte code (Lambda Expressions, Dynamic Classes, etc.) * The only supported module is java.base * No decrease to JVM start up times * Still need the JVM * Some decrease to spin up as there will be less JIT passes that require stopping the world. Effectively this just lets you pre-load .class files into the codecache directly rather then running the ~10k initial byte-code passes before they'd receive a JIT pass and that would happen. Lastly .so is just used as a container so I doubt we can expect to dynamically link against AOT compiled Java in C/C++/Rust land. ~~~ brianwawok This is clearly still great for a few places. For example in the trading industry, you would have a few seconds of being very slow when starting up for the week - or anytime you crashed and needed to reboot midweek. Also risk of "hot pathing" the wrong paths if the server comes up during say a market closed time... ~~~ OldSchoolJohnny I'm surprised to hear anyone running Java in the trading industry. Isn't speed a huge factor in that industry? ~~~ eternalban > Isn't speed a huge factor in that industry? Exactly. There are a lot of high performance system written in Java. For long running systems, the startup cost is irrelevant. And for networked systems (such as fintech) you are going to be IO bound. The main issue as far as Java and high performance is the GC related pauses and that is a concern shared with any GC'd runtime. ~~~ PeCaN And for Java it's actually much less of an issue thanks to the crazy manhours put into developing fast GC for Java. I suspect Azul Systems's pauseless GC is probably quite popular in HFT. ~~~ brianwawok They are trying to sell it for sure. They attend a lot of events. I am not aware of any trading company using it. May be some.. but the high perf people I know go other ways. ------ adamnemecek The great language convergence is happening! It seems like everyone is moving to expressive statically typed, compiled, functional, oop languages. Not that I'm complaining. This means that we might actually get a language that becomes the new c in terms of popularity. ~~~ duck2 functional, oop Do these have any intersection except Scala? ~~~ Sharlin Depends on how exactly how functional you want to go, but latest versions of C++, Java, JavaScript, and C# definitely qualify. Rust, too, though it's not strictly OO. And Python, Ruby, Swift. ~~~ belovedeagle If Rust is OO then the term is meaningless. No inheritance; dynamic dispatch only via explicit indirection (Boxed traits); methods are (therefore) just syntactic sugar for regular functions. ~~~ qznc Lisp CLOS does not have inheritance for methods either, but is OO by definition. Imho, OO is about polymorphism [0] and Rust provides that. [0] [http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/oop.html](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/oop.html) ~~~ belovedeagle Rust fails many of the other tests mentioned. As for polymorphism, is Haskell OO? If so, then I think my claim that the term is meaningless is justified. ~~~ qznc This is the punch line. Once you have a definition of OO, which fits all languages usually considered OO, the definition also fits Haskell. :) ------ bit_logic For the JVM experts here: how realistic is it for OpenJDK developers to add a command line "-useGreenThreads" option? In Golang, you can create thousands and thousands of threads and there's no issue. If I tried that in the JVM, it would quickly crash. But if there was a "-useGreenThreads" option, I could create Java Executor threadpool of size 50000, use existing http client libraries, and get full concurrency. ~~~ mi100hael > I could create Java Executor threadpool of size 50000, use existing http > client libraries, and get full concurrency. No, you'd get a slow illusion of full concurrency. The JDK ditched green threads ages ago because native threads were far more robust. ~~~ bit_logic I probably shouldn't have used the term "green threads" since that has history in the JVM. I meant whatever Golang is doing which is similar (M:N threading). With an AOT option for Java, this becomes even more of an option. Golang has shown this works, why can't Java implement the same idea and let all existing libraries benefit from it? ~~~ valarauca1 Green Threading is M:N threading. Go-Routines are M:N threading. Q.E.D. M:N threading isn't a new idea. Go just offers a backed (or compiled) in run-time that does M:N threading by default for you. While nearly every other Green Threaded language offered as an additional library/option. This hurt adoption. While Go just forces you to use Green Threading. With an AOT option for Java, this becomes even more of an option. Not in the slightest. why can't Java implement the same idea and let all existing libraries benefit from it? A laundry list of reason: 1\. Change what functions do and don't block can cause huge issues with down stream libraries/people who depend on system libraries behaving the same thing tomorrow as they did yesterday. 2\. Refactoring all code around system calls so they never block. 3\. Write a multi-core and multi-socket scheduler. 4\. Write a scheduler to balance multi-core and multi-socket thread load. 5\. Determine how you will do polling, and write a polling strategy to figure out what green threads are/are not blocked, then figure out how to communicate this information efficiently. 6\. Repeat the above 5 steps for EVERY platform Java runs on. ~~~ paulddraper Well, it was a runtime option that was requested, and runtime options don't have to be identical on every platform. ~~~ valarauca1 Actually they do. That is the entire point of Java. ~~~ paulddraper No, the point was to make compile-once run-anywhere software. It's natural for tuning runtime parameters to vary. The hotspot JVM will accept both -d32 (32-bit data model) and -d64 (64-bit data model) everywhere, but they will only work on certain platforms. ------ StevePerkins This is very exciting, but still a long way from what people probably think it is at first glance. This isn't "compile your application to an EXE", like Go or Rust. This is "compile some or all of your application to a DLL, and then have the Java runtime use that DLL". In other words, you still need a JRE available. The use case for this is simply optimizing hotspots in some very specialized situations. ~~~ pjmlp Anyone willing to pay for them, can buy a commercial AOT compiler for Java today, there are quite a few available. This is significant for those that want to AOT Java without paying for it. ~~~ dleskov Some info for those that want to AOT Java without paying for it: The entry-level edition of Excelsior JET is free (as in beer) since the end of August 2016. Licenses for the more senior editions have been available for non-commercial use at no cost for many years. [https://www.excelsiorjet.com/free](https://www.excelsiorjet.com/free) ------ alistproducer2 This is very exciting! Question for the experts out there, do you think this has the potential to do away with using the JNI in new projects for the speed boost? ~~~ teraflop This change has nothing to do with JNI whatsoever. The JVM has always (well, not always, but for 15+ years) run Java code by first compiling it to native code. The only difference is that the JVM will now allow you to optionally do the compilation ahead of time, in order to decrease an application's startup overhead. This actually hurts performance of the compiled methods, since runtime profiling is not available to the AOT compiler (but the document also describes a "tiered" mode, where AOT-compiled code can be dynamically replaced with a better JIT-compiled version at runtime). If you want to link your Java code with native code written in a non-Java language, that's a totally different requirement, and JNI will continue to be the way to accomplish it. ~~~ wtetzner > and JNI will continue to be the way to accomplish it. Although if you don't like JNI, you can use JNA [1] (which I believe uses JNI to link to libffi, and libffi for the rest). [1] [https://github.com/java-native-access/jna](https://github.com/java- native-access/jna) ------ samfisher83 C# had this for a while with ngen. ~~~ buster C++ had this for even longer. Assembler doesn't even need a compiler.. ~~~ FrancoDiaz Right, Assembler only needs an assembler ~~~ valarauca1 Still needs a linker ~~~ lomnakkus Pffft... you're using a libc, or something? Direct Syscalls[1] are where it's at. [1] [https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/X86_Assembly/Interfacing_with_...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/X86_Assembly/Interfacing_with_Linux) ------ shuntress Isn't java already compiled ahead-of-time? You give the JVM a .class file, not a .java file. Though this is a technicality. Java 9 will be able to compile java source code to java byte code then compile that java byte code to native machine code, correct? ~~~ mason55 It is compiled to intermediate byte code but not machine code. You still need the JVM to JIT the byte code to something the CPU can deal with. ~~~ jsprogrammer Not necessarily. Java byte code can be run directly on a JPM (Java Physical Machine). ~~~ jerven Are there any that support the current class file format? ARM jazelle is no longer being worked on. So I would be surprised if there is anything that can do Java SE directly. JavaCard of course being quite different than standard Java. ~~~ imtringued Java bytecode is too highlevel for it to be suitable to run directly on hardware. Each instruction can map to multiple machine instructions. A JIT or AOT compiler can optimize the code on a lower level. A hardware implementation cannot do inlining, loop unrolling, hoist array length checks out of a loop, etc... ------ erl Important restriction: _for the initial release, the only supported module is java.base_ I.e, we will not be able to compile our own code ahead of time just yet. ~~~ Alupis > I.e, we will not be able to compile our own code ahead of time just yet. That's not really true. From the same doc: > AOT compilation of any other JDK module, or of user code, is experimental. So it's "experimental", but possible to do. ------ aaron987 What, if any, effect might this have on Android, given that its all Java? ~~~ gleenn Android and Oracle's Java have been diverged for quite a while. There aren't any Java 8 features available to Android now, so you sadly shouldn't hold your breath for any Java 9 features either, it will probably be a long, long time. ~~~ ChemicalWarfare >>There aren't any Java 8 features available to Android now that is incorrect. [https://developer.android.com/guide/platform/j8-jack.html](https://developer.android.com/guide/platform/j8-jack.html) Just plopped this into my activity to make sure: someList.stream().map(String::toUpperCase).forEach(System.out::println); As long as minSdkVersion is 24 or higher you should be good. ~~~ pjmlp Except it doesn't work and is full of bugs. [https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/59gcr9/who_is_u...](https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/59gcr9/who_is_using_jack_how_is_it/)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is there such a thing as the NoMock movement? - sentiental http://henk53.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/is-there-such-a-thing-as-the-nomock-movement/ ====== boyter Pointless example. There is no value in testing the method for success. However how it deals with failures/exceptions inside the dependencies might be worth testing. Anyone with some amount of testing experience knows that testing isn't a silver bullet, and sometimes its not worth testing methods (straight getters and setters for example although there may be value there in a dynamic language). As with many things, people jumped from one extreme of test/mock everything to test/mock nothing. The correct solution is usually somewhere in the middle.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Does your startup use MSFT technology? - bootload ====== bootload _'... One thing that causes me more alarm, is that I see a lot of startups using MSFT technology these days. See, startups give you early warnings on trends of what people use. Something is going here. Startups are the early warning signs of on-coming floods. ...'_ Added this after reading this article (<http://marcf.blogspot.com/2007/05/microsofts-long-demise.html> ) from this thread (<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=214250> ) I thought the costs alone would have made this prohibitive? Unless of course your idea involves MS apps. ~~~ nostrademons I'm not seeing it, unless your app _has to_ use Microsoft software (eg. shell extensions, Winsock LSPs, IE toolbars). The small college-kids-in-a-garage startups I know tend to use Python or Ruby (or occasionally PHP). The better- funded enterprise startups tend to use Java. Once in a while you'll see someone using .NET, but it's usually because they _need_ to do a desktop client. ~~~ bootload _'... small college-kids-in-a-garage startups I know tend to use Python or Ruby (or occasionally PHP). The better-funded enterprise startups tend to use Java ...'_ Thats pretty much what I would have thought. Though I did run across a post here where someone wanted to work with an exclusive MS toolset. Seems using MS tools these days is a bit like trying to find people who remember "Get Smart" - you just get blank stares. ~~~ gibsonf1 " _who remember "Get Smart"_ " That was a seriously funny show! ------ SwellJoe I haven't seen a web application built with Microsoft tools since the first boom. But, I'm probably just not hanging out with the folks that think that way. They must exist...right? It just seems so counter-productive. The tools in the Open Source world are just so much better, and so much more widely varied. One of my consulting gigs involved lots of MS ware (desktop apps) a couple of years ago, and I was able to look at all of the development tools via MSDN. I just don't get the mindset that leads to Visual Studio and .Net and such. ------ sbraford That one web-based MS-Word knockoff startup used ASP.Net (no offense intended, they were the best in the space) - eventually they were bought by Google. MySpace also uses "MSFT technology". I'm personally not one to hate. If you can get your rocks off on MS tech, then so be it. FeedBurner rocks some incredible stuff out in Java, in amazing time. I personally wouldn't start something in anything but RoR or Python these days. ------ gibsonf1 Not our startup.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nice Read on Hardware Startups - nlolks https://blog.bolt.io/keurig-accidentally-created-the-perfect-business-model-for-hardware-startups-18e9c3b4e796 ====== appedus Good read indeed. Kindle example was good.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Self extracting tar archives - izabera https://github.com/izabera/selfextracttar ====== jepler I went and researched this before reading the link, and found a slightly different solution than the author. By taking advantage of python's 'tarfile' module, it was easy to create a (us)tar-compatible header. My solution is here: [https://gist.github.com/jepler/f86255a6e054d9b6ca540d0c7afe1...](https://gist.github.com/jepler/f86255a6e054d9b6ca540d0c7afe136b) ~~~ jepler .. only tested with gnu tar, but all the world's a vax eh? ~~~ izabera that's an interesting approach but your extracting script is limited to 99 bytes at most, right? ~~~ jepler yes.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Revolut Prepared for Brexit - aginovski https://blog.revolut.com/how-we-protected-our-customers-from-brexit/ ====== ChrisRR I'm glad to see someone is prepared, but it's annoying that they had to spend money to prepare for the possibility of a no deal brexit, just because we're past the deadline and people/companies still have no idea what's going to happen. It's unfortunate that so many companies have had to spend money to prepare for scenarios that may not even happen, or that companies are massively unprepared because the government has strung the negotiations out giving companies no time to prepare.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ZFS on Linux still has annoying issues with ARC size - protomyth https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ZFSOnLinuxARCShrinkage ====== twic There's a good lesson in operability here: log reasons for decisions! I have had to re-learn this lesson over and over again with my own software. "Tom, why did the system just do that?!" scream my users. "Er, let me check", i respond, already feeling that sinking feeling. "EDUNNOMATE" says the log. So, i add some logging around the decision (the data feeding into it, the choices made, the actions resulting), redeploy, and wait for my users to start screaming again, hoping that this time, i will be able to give them an answer. ------ mapgrep The author calls ARC autotuning “opaque” which surprised me given a well regarded paper has been published on it: [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast03/tech/full_papers...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast03/tech/full_papers/megiddo/megiddo.pdf) [https://youtu.be/F8sZRBdmqc0](https://youtu.be/F8sZRBdmqc0) ...that said the author has been writing on the ARC for more than 10 years judging from his blog links so perhaps that paper did not answer his questions. ------ higels Before I ditched ZoL for persistent storage for a few hundred NGINX caches, I saw this behavior too. Setting zfs_arc_min to something like 50% of arc_max stopped it from dumping the ARC every 10 minutes. YMMV. ~~~ m11r Out of curiosity, what did you happen to move to (and why)? Back to ext4/xfs, or to Btrfs or something else more involved? ~~~ higels I just mount each SSD as its own XFS filesystem and use NGINX’s split feature to fill them up. Not resilient on a system level, but refilling the cache is cheap. ZFS was generally pleasant from an operability viewpoint once we ironed out the quirks, but the perf hit from no sendfile was too much. ~~~ m11r That’s a good point; I never looked at what the perf impact of disabling sendfile would be on even a moderately-loaded webserver. It’d be really nice to see that fixed like the recent DIRECT_IO additions. ~~~ Quekid5 Of course the people around these parts tend to have very particular needs and use cases, but for anything resembling the "common case" the performance impact of not using sendfile should be negligible. (I'll just point of that using sendfile means that traffic is unencrypted... which is probably fine on an internal network, but I've started adopting the stance that even internal network traffic should be encrypted unless there's a very good reason not to do that. An absolute requirement for performance might be a good reason.) ~~~ atomt If nginx decided to support ktls they could use sendfile for encrypted traffic as well. Unsure if it is worth it just to make sendfile work however. ~~~ m11r I was going to mention kernel TLS hopefully enabling sendfile for mostly-HTTPS workloads, as that’s the direction everything is heading anyway, and without it we don’t get zero-copy for those connections. Now I’m more curious about the actual threshold where not having sendfile begins causing noticeable performance problems… at what point before you become Netflix? ~~~ namibj If your cache can face-tank a HTTP-DDoS, you don't need fragile fingerprinting techniques to distinguish bad from good, thus reducing the user impact (less accidentally-blocked users). The less cost you have for filling that 100 Gbit NIC with your TLS cache traffic, the more boxes you can afford. Internet exchanges are surprisingly cheap to connect to. Of course sharing resources between a couple services would be good, as NICs and switch ports are sill a way from free. ------ sneak I have very weird read performance issues on read using the stable ZoL in current Ubuntu LTS, on a box with over 200GB of ram and a few TB of L2ARC fast flash. The default settings for L2ARC fill rate are also super low. I haven’t had time to track down exactly why it’s so slow, yet. ~~~ blackflame7000 What’s the topology of your array? How many disks? L2ARC doesn't help with that much ram because your main memory will be faster than even mirrored nvme caches ~~~ sneak 8x 10TB HDD, 4x 512TB flash, all 6gpbs SATA. 256GB ram, 40 cores. The HDDs are all in raidz2, with the SSDs all as L2ARC. I have an ubuntu mirror on the machine that's around 150gb, and doing a `tar -c $MIRRORPATH | pv > /dev/null` shows lots of reads from the HDDs, even on second, third, fourth runs. It confuses me. ------ kissgyorgy I have the same problem. Sometimes it just drops the whole cache suddenly and I don't have a clue why: [https://walkman.cloud/s/zXLp7DF9sDFwr7z](https://walkman.cloud/s/zXLp7DF9sDFwr7z) ~~~ rincebrain You may find it informative to graph MRU/MFU - I suspect you will find that the MRU is being dumped. [1] I personally can't decide whether I think it's a bug or not, since if the MRU is all old items there is an argument to be had that you don't want it in cache any more...but dumping 100% of it strikes me as a bug either way. :) [1] - [https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/7820](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/7820) ------ cracauer I still have this bug. [https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/8396](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/8396) Page faults from NFS client side aren't served by the server when they should (readonly map, reading a page). I could imagine this is related.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Good Things Happen to Bad People - brendancahill https://brendancahill.io/blog-3/blog-post-title-three-epnlm ====== event-horizon Is this suggesting that only bad people get knocked off their horses? Or that everyone does. If it's the former - do you believe the universe is keeping track of and making judgements on people? If its the latter - would you rather not succeed at all? Seems like an easy way to console oneself about feelings of jealousy/regret but i'm not sure how effective that would be for me. Feels better to focus energy elsewhere. ~~~ Nonchalant Thats a good way to respond for me life is a game of choices I don’t believe in god but don’t get me wrong I believe in chance there is a possibility of there being one but let’s just say there was not one then we just do happen to exist in a place with no rules those in power made rules to better control the people and animals follow the rule of the jungle big fish eats small fish small fish eats shrimp one just has to accept that the situation one is in is because of your own choices and your wealth because of your ancestors choices don’t expect to be extraordinary by living a ordinary life and a safe life get out your safe bubble and you will see what I mean for me this is something I learned the hard way expecting something to change in a ordinary cycle of a peaceful life I wanted for things to change but did not want to change myself DONT fear the unexpected it’s what gives life it’s colors because it can’t be controlled one just has to accept and keep moving never regret on the past actions or dawn on your life Because it it’s what made you who you are difficulty is what gives ones achievements it’s felling of accomplishment because if all things where easy then nothing would be worth striving for
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Students Support Socialism, but not when it comes to their GPA - tomohawk https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=12038 ====== jimrhods23 They only support it because they feel like they will never be wealthy and won't have to pay the tax increases. This is also most people that I know that support radical changes to the current system which involve government-run programs funded by sharp tax increases on the wealthy/middle class. I feel like there is something wrong with our system when people get to vote on things that will not only never effect them negatively (IE: tax increases), but will get all of the benefits (free health care/money). ~~~ samayylmao I agree that "wanting free stuff with no cost or contribution" is as you put it "wrong". I would like to see what a government-run single payer healthcare system would look like;also, raise my taxes to cover this. rough math says the government would need to increase my taxes by over 10% for the increase in taxes to equal my current premiums. Right now we pay more for healthcare than other countries because our system is so flawed. we pay more for both services and the same exact prescriptions that other countries do. I work for a healthcare system and the amount of charity care and unpaid medicare bills are astronomical. If your'e interested I can share a publicly published report that breaks this down. These are also part of the reason that we pay so much more, the people that actually pay need to make up the cost for those that don't. on top of that, medical claims processing and billing is overly complicated, time consuming, and expensive due to multiple insurers. My premiums to have my family covered are almost as much as my rent. ( disclaimer: i live in a state with a very affordable housing market)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Peeping Tom: A free (open source) site pinger - duck http://terrbear.org/?p=253 ====== Roridge Excellent Terry, nice and simple and free, have bookmarked this for use very soon.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Reddit Is Down - ropable https://www.reddit.com/ ====== kevingrahl Works for me and their status page [1] looks good too.. [1] - [https://reddit.statuspage.io](https://reddit.statuspage.io) ------ ropable "Service Unavailable". Only noteworthy because it's Reddit, man.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Geomagnetic Apocalypse — And How to Stop It - ffernan http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/2012storms.html all I can say is:<p>AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!<p>Entitled "Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts," it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth's magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States "$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year," concluded the panel, and "full recovery could take four to 10 years." That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.<p>Needless to say, shorting out the electrical grid would cause major disruptions to developed nations and their economies.<p>Worse yet, the next period of intense solar activity is expected in 2012, and coincides with the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield, meaning we'll have less protection than usual from the solar flares.<p>The report received relatively little attention, perhaps because of 2012's supernatural connotations. Mayan astronomers supposedly predicted that 2012 would mark the calamitous "birth of a new era."<p>But the report is credible enough that some scientists and engineers are beginning to take the electromagnetic threat seriously. According to Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End," "I've been following this topic for almost five years, and it wasn't until the report came out that this really began to freak me out."<p>Wired.com talked to Joseph and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech, about the possibility of geomagnetic apocalypse — and how to stop it. ====== electromagnetic I personally love that people associate the end of the Mayan _short_ calender (most people claim it as their predictive end of the world, when in reality their long calender ended millions of years in the future) with the end of the world. The Mayans associated the end of the short calender as a party, because a new b'ak'tun was to them like the new millennium was to us. We're about to hit the 13th b'ak'tun, which some people claim is the end of the calender. However, it's generally regarded the count is supposed to go up to 19 b'ak'tun (they counted 0). Incidentally the end of the 20 b'ak'tun will be in the year 4,376. What all the end of the world nuts are too ignorant to see when they obsess over these things, is that despite the end of their calender being thousands of years in the future, they'd already fixed the problem. There's four larger integers in their calender: piktun, kalabtun, k'inchiltun, and alautun. If the b'ak'tun is in fact a cycle of 20 then each of these are also a cycle of 20. This puts the end of the world about 400 million years away, which is probably very close to when the Earth will actually be uninhabitable as in about 1 billion years the sun will have gotten so hot that the oceans will have evaporated. I give no credence to this guys argument, first he has no clue how the Mayan calender works, just like all doomsayers, they only see what they want. The fact that the earth hasn't ended in the 23 previous solar cycles that we've recorded, seems to lend credence that the 24th won't end it either. Just because it's the end of the Mayan short calender doesn't make it in the least bit more special. My prediction, this is another load of bunk, just like the predictions that the world would end in 1999, 2000 and pretty much every year. ------ russell We had a solar flare in 1859 of this magnitude. It caused telegraph wires to catch fire and would have fried the electrical grid, had we had electricity. Something like this could shut down civilization as we know it for years because replacement transformers and the like have multiyear lead times. ~~~ ryanwaggoner What isn't clear from the article is _why_ they have multiyear lead times...is it a materials or manufacturing constraint that can be overcome by incredibly desperate demand? Planes and bombs took a long time to deliver before WWII, but we needed them so badly that we converted factories and started cranking them out with remarkable efficiency. Granted, it would be harder to do that without a proper power grid, but I sometimes wonder if people misjudge the ingenuity of our collective society in the face of monumental disaster. ~~~ tlb Absolutely. In normal times power projects are planned years in advance so there's no reason for short lead times. But if the system was down, people would wind transformers by hand if they had to. It's not that hard. It does seem lame that the power grid is so close to capacity. Instead of all this smart grid stuff that lets us get from 97% to 98%, let's just add 50% more capacity and have no worries. ~~~ blogimus I'm pretty sure that the capacity problem is due in no small part to pollution control regulations, like the EPA effectively stopping new Coal power plants: [http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1859049,00.ht...](http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1859049,00.html) "The board's decision will force the EPA to consider CO2 when issuing permits for new power plants, potentially making it at least in the short-term all but impossible to certify new coal power plants. That's because the EPA will need to reconfigure its rules on dealing with CO2, which is found in greater concentrations in coal than any other fossil fuel" About half of the U.S.'s electric power comes from coal: <http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/figes1.html> I'd love a cleaner world, we need it, but there are trade-offs we need to face. Ask a Las Vegas area resident what he thinks of all the fresh water demands that the solar cells require because of cooling needs. [http://current.com/items/89979048_solar-power-and-water- issu...](http://current.com/items/89979048_solar-power-and-water-issues-in- the-southwest.htm) And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Want a nuke plants? where are you going to put them? and how long is it going to take to build? So yeah, it's lame that the power grid is close to capacity. And yeah there are potential new and evolving energy supplies but the solution isn't so simple as "add 50% more capacity and have no worries." To paraphrase Steve Yegge, "Have you increased the energy grid significantly and simultaneously reduced greenhouse gases ?" ~~~ ubernostrum Of course, it's not all environmental. I live in Kansas. There's a long-running feud going (several years now) over permits to build several coal-fired power plants in the western part of the state; the legislature keeps passing bills ordering the permits to be granted, and the governor keeps vetoing them (thus far the legislature's been unable to get enough votes to override her). While various folks here love to complain that it's just some sort of environmental agenda being pushed by our (liberal) governor, there's a powerful economic reason to say no to these plants: although they'll be built in Kansas, although they'll use resources from Kansas, although they'll dump pollution into the air and water of Kansas, not one single watt of power from them will go to homes or businesses in Kansas (the plants, if they're built, will be built by out-of-state power companies to produce electricity which will be used elsewhere, mostly in Colorado). Which raises a valid question: if Kansas is going to bear the cost of having these plants, why shouldn't Kansas get any of the benefits? They won't generate nearly enough jobs to cover the impact they'll have on the state in other ways, so I don't see how any sound economic argument can be made in their favor. From what reading I've been able to do on the subject of power-plant construction, it seems Kansas isn't alone in facing this sort of situation. Though it may feel like a variation on NIMBY, I think it's entirely reasonable for one state to ask why it should bear costs while another reaps benefits, and to refuse to enter such an obviously one-sided deal. ------ blogimus This is especially interesting in the light that there is now a more concerted effort to get automobiles "on the grid" Just for starters, see Shai Aggassi's blog <http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/> ~~~ TJensen I really want an EV, but the effect on the grid is a real problem that needs to be addressed as well. ------ mynameishere When I got to "1 to 2 trillion" I stopped reading. I'm pretty sure the treasury blew that much last weekend.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
An Introduction to Static Site Generators - azat_co http://www.mickgardner.com/2012/12/an-introduction-to-static-site.html ====== graue Previous discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2489040> The posting date says December 2012, but as you can see there, this article is over a year old. It looks like the author has migrated to Blogger and somehow ended up giving all the articles a December 13, 2012 timestamp. ~~~ theanalyst ya agree on that, remember reading the same article, probably not on blogger though ------ TazeTSchnitzel The bizarre thing about static site generators is they are nothing new. Online API docs have done this for years (Java, Python, etc.)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
China’s Grueling Formula for Success: 9-9-6 - shubhamjain https://www.wsj.com/articles/long-days-a-staple-at-chinese-tech-firms-1487787775 ====== koolba > Chinese labor law dictates a 40-hour workweek and extra pay for overtime, > but many companies circumvent those rules by asking employees to sign > contracts that say their jobs require flexible work schedules. Being able to supersede labor laws by _forcing^W_ asking employees to sign a contract that nullifies them is suspect at best. I get that office tech workers aren't the factory assembly line workers for which these laws were originally designed but the exclusions need to come from the other direction. > Huawei Technologies employees work on the last Saturday of each month, and > that earns them an extra 12 days by the end of the year that they can take > in pay or days off. A year into their jobs, Huawei’s Chinese staff can sign > a “dedicated employee agreement,” voluntarily forgoing paid vacation days > and overtime. That quote links to a different article[1] explaining this further: > A year into their jobs, Chinese staff may sign a “dedicated employee > agreement,” voluntarily forgoing paid vacation days and overtime. One Huawei > engineer said he signed the agreement four years ago to start receiving > shares as part of his compensation. The closely held firm says its shares > are owned entirely by its executives and employees. So the deal is " _Work an extra 12 days per year for 12 days of pay /vacation. Then give it up along with all the rest of your vacation days and maybe we'll give you some equity. Also, we can probably claw back the equity. Also, you'll probably never be able to actually cash it out._ [1]: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-founder-casts-a-long- sh...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-founder-casts-a-long-shadow-over- telecom-giant-1480715055) ~~~ sevensor > I get that office tech workers aren't the factory assembly line workers for > which these laws were originally designed but the exclusions need to come > from the other direction. Maybe they're not operating the machines, but even in the U.S., white-collar engineers at a fab will often find themselves working north of 60h every week. Because you're salaried, there's no overtime pay. Also, you'll carry a pager and be responsible for answering it 24 hours a day, every day. And since the fab doesn't stop on weekends, you either work a shift or rotate weekends with your team. PTO is usually approved, but using a substantial fraction of it will result in a bad review. A capped portion of the remainder gets cashed out at the end of the year, and the rest evaporates. And that's the United States. I'm sure China takes this to a whole other level. (Source: recovering semiconductor process engineer.) ~~~ anoonmoose Also, you'll make 2-3x the average salary in the US. TANSTAAFL ~~~ macNchz There are quite many routes to making 2-3x the national average salary that don’t require 24/7 pager duty. I’ve done on-call rotations, but being ‘on’ nonstop sounds like torture and a recipe for burnout. ~~~ avs733 I did 11 months of 24x7. My managers were so normed to it they actually documented it. No one seemed to notice my contract called for that time to be compensated. After I ended my employment they seemed shocked when I asked for that compensation to be paid out. They then denied that I had been 'actually on call' (note: managers, don't lie to your HR department - especially the investigations people). Thankfully I had documented all the listings of me being on call and pointed out that their policy required an on call engineer to be available and noted that no one else in the group was certified to be on cal. We settled before I had to take it to court. ~~~ sevensor Yikes, you were the only person in your group who was competent to answer pages? We had several, and there were a number of factors that determined who would get paged first for a given issue, including whether you were in a fight with manufacturing. (Don't ever get in a fight with people whose job description includes paging you at odd hours.) I usually got woken up a couple times a week. Sounds like you had it a lot worse. ------ rocqua Does anyone actually believe this kind of schedule is actually effective? I don't see how anyone performs well under these circumstances unless they are horribly overqualified for the job. In order for a programmer to be even 60% effective at this kind of schedule, the work has to be essentially trivial. I don't see any debugging happening in this kind of situation. The only explanation I see is that there is a 'social status' for bosses to have their employees work a lot. Because I do not believe this actually yields decent commercial results for anyone. ~~~ SlowBro I’m currently working from about 8am until 10pm every day, and usually in bed reading something that applies to my job between 10p and 12p and yes, 6 days a week. I’ve got a day job but am also spinning up a hardware manufacturing business. Been doing this for over a year. My clarity and productivity haven’t suffered that I notice, but I do not anticipate doing this forever. I’d burned out once before ten years ago doing even more hours and days. This is about my limit. You have a point though. Look at the crap China churns out. Edited to add: Having experience the burnout lesson the hard way, I do pace myself. Sundays are for friends, church, and family. I get all the sleep I want. I stop at times to read YC news and talk to others :-) I get bike rides and watch a movie now and again. Life is not all about work. ~~~ fnordsensei Passion and interest can keep you going at a high pace for quite some time. However, you're statistically more likely to eventually burn out with a job that you truly enjoy, than you are with a job that's easy to put down at the end of the day. There's more incentive to eat in to your long-term energy storage in the former case. In the case of 996, it's almost as if the employees are being asked to behave _as if_ they are wildly passionate about what they do, as if it is their destiny and calling. I can only presume that they will burn out all the more quickly. Although I suppose, if, as others have implied, the job is actually a non- complex assembly line-ish thing, then perhaps employees are easily replaceable, and it makes economic sense to use one up until it is empty, and then proceed to the next one. On the other hand, if the job truly is easily represented by some simple algorithm, why not teach a machine to do it cheaper and more consistently? Seems more likely that they are fooling themselves, and that the entire setup is there to give upper management a sense of satisfaction rather than to create actual productivity. ~~~ jcadam > On the other hand, if the job truly is easily represented by some simple > algorithm, why not teach a machine to do it cheaper and more consistently? Because in a country with a large population of poor people such as China, unskilled and semi-skilled (as in a typical factory job) labor has got to be dirt cheap, such that it makes sense to have humans performing trivial tasks that could be easily automated. ~~~ fnordsensei There's a lot of variables surrounding employing humans that can make automation worthwhile even if pay is very low. The "maintenance" of people, such as hiring, managing, loss of production because of absence—those sort of things. I'm just speculating, I've no idea how they are reasoning. But I do suspect it's more cultural/personal rather than practical or to maximize productivity. ------ throwaway77384 This is horrific, inefficient and stupid. Multiple speculative causes: \- Social pressure. The bosses want to be able to say "look at how hard I can make my workers work", probably without comparing productivity in any way \- Social pressure. People competing with each other for how hard working they are. This seems prevalent in many cultures. "Oh I am so tired / stressed". When you claim those things, you can stop worrying about other issues, like doing good work. I have always noticed that the busier I appear, the less people would hold me to account for problems. Ridiculous. \- A tired / overworked populace doesn't have the energy to get any revolutionary ideas. The status quo is maintained, no matter what the cost. This suits almost nobody, other than a select few. But, we do it to ourselves. Like the herd of bison running from the lion, we do not realise our power and instead accept whatever the oppressors (companies) force on us. So, we made our bed and are lying in it. No point complaining unless we are willing to do something about it. See points 1 and 2, this has never been about productivity. ------ welanes In the words of Alibaba's Jack Ma: “ If we go to work at 8am and go home at 5pm, this is not a high tech company and Alibaba will never be successful...If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat ten of them.” It's even more incredible watching him say it: [https://twitter.com/humanismusic/status/963714910269079552](https://twitter.com/humanismusic/status/963714910269079552) ------ redm The older I get, the more I find that making the right decisions, even in day- to-day programming, makes your far more efficient and effective than throwing time at a problem. ~~~ neor Years ago I read a blog that I always remembered, very summarised it stated that even though developers logging a lot of overtime are generally considered to be hard workers most of them actually are horrible at planning their work. The developers who don't log extra hours don't have to be less motivated, sometimes they are just a lot better at prioritising their work. ~~~ internetman55 Isn't prioritizing work a manager's job ? ------ pipio21 I had worked as an European engineer in China. I worked European hours and days. IMHO the secret of success of China, if there is one(China is way poorer than EU or USA), is accepting capitalism after centuries of stagnation with systems that worked very bad for most people(worked for Emperors, communist dictators and people in power thought). To say that working 996 is the secret to success is just manipulation of the wsj, which does not surprise me coming from this newspaper. Not accepting patents in practice like US did with England could be the secret of China industry advancing very fast but working too much is not. Chinese spend a long time in work, they even sleep there but the energy they have most of the time is very low precisely because of that. European system is far superior. ------ madengr Finally had a manager at my employer (in MO, USA) dumb enough to mandate 48 hrs/week in writing. It’s illegal in the state to expect continual, uncompensated hours > 40\. The managers with 2 digit IQs demand it verbally, once with a company wide voicemail. ~~~ seanmcdirmid Not just state law, federal law as well. ------ gaius Welcome to the race to the bottom ~~~ madengr It only takes a few smart managers to start this in the USA. ------ jrochkind1 I frequently see WSJ articles on the HN front page. Is there a secret for getting past the paywall that I don't know? How are y'all reading these? Or are many HN readers WSJ subscribers? ~~~ Arun2009 I just went on incognito mode and googled the title of the article. From google search results, I followed the WSJ link that showed up. ~~~ jrochkind1 Incognito, google title of article, click on it... I still get a paywall. Doh! ------ leemailll still better than a postdoc
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: What I think Elon Musk means by ‚reasoning from first principles‘ - benjohnson1707 https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.medium.com&#x2F;NqoAewqtT8<p>I wrote a (relatively lengthy) case study about Musk and his ‚physics-driven‘ approach to problem-solving (my own research and interpretations).<p>Feedback is very much appreciated - especially if you think it‘s kind of useless as a framework (and why). Thanks! ====== compressedgas [http://archive.is/z69K8](http://archive.is/z69K8)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ACLU Has Concerns Over Military Weapons Used By Local Police - OGinparadise http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/a-c-l-u-has-concerns-over-military-weapons-used-by-local-police/ ====== aethertap I was getting ready to go on a rant about how unfortunate it is that so much more money and effort is spent on what you might call aggressive tactics (guns, grenades, gas) versus peaceful resolution tactics (negotiation skills, psychology training, de-escalation techniques). Then I realized that I actually don't _know_ what the relative proportions are. Does anyone know where to find that out? ------ eksith Note, the case of the Michigan girl killed by SWAT : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Aiyana_Jones> This particular incident made national news, but when it happens to adults (usually less privileged adults), sadly, it often goes unnoticed except by local news. And then usually it's just a sentence or two on the local blotter. ~~~ huhhu "Less privileged adults"? The hell is that supposed to mean? ~~~ walshemj BME aka Black and other Minority Ethnic groups ------ walshemj Maybe police should have to obey the Geneva convention:-) cops are allowed to use ammo that would be considered a war crime if used by armed forces. ~~~ troels Really? What kind of ammunition is that? ~~~ jonchang Frangible rounds. ~~~ eksith Aren't they designed so they couldn't go through a target preventing anyone behind from getting shot by the same round? My knowledge of ammunition is inadequate by any measure, but I thought the frangible rounds were supposed to be more "humane", though I could have just been fooled by marketing. ~~~ jonchang Yes, that's one of the reasons why police use them. As for what kind of ammo is supposed to be more "humane", it depends on how you define the word. Keep in mind that law enforcement and militaries tend to use different kinds of weapons, and that changes the ammo they use. ------ forgotAgain It seems inevitable that as more and more highly lethal weapons are found among citizens, the police will justify militarization as the appropriate response. Like Joshua said "The only winning move is not to play". ~~~ OGinparadise You are gonna get all Rambo wannabes with tanks, IED proof vehicles and drones trying to act soldiers while arresting grandmas over not cutting the grass. I use grandmas to highlight the fact that most arrests, by far, aren't of the Al Qaida or Mexican drug cartel member caliber ------ lifeformed That flash grenade example seems contrived. The incident sounds like the result of poor decisions made by the police, not because of the usage of that grenade. ~~~ mtgx Don't give them military weapons and allow them to make such stupid mistakes. Would you feel any better if they "made a mistake" with a tank? ~~~ bicx A grenade that stuns your senses isn't even closely comparable to a tank. ~~~ aswanson His point still stands in principle. The more powerful a weapon given to an individual or group, the more irreparable damage they are capable of. It therefore makes sense to limit their ability to cause harm with their social charge and responsibility.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
160k+ students will only graduate if a statistical model allows them to - ishan_dikshit http://positivelysemidefinite.com/2020/06/160k-students.html ====== hvinayak1968 Very Well Researched and written.Your analysis points out the outcome pitfalls that IB and other educational institutions should consider and correct for. Here are some of the additional views to consider, based on my sense of data flow thru your model: \- the fact that your model can predict gender, race and socioeconomic status from the historical grades is rightly pointing out that today grades are indeed strongly (and very unfortunately) correlated with these extra- curricular environmental variables. This is a well established fact and many social programs have been designed in an effort to flatten this bias. \- so unless the model takes its own predictions and loops it back as X variables, it should not reinforce the bias. The model accurately predicts along the pattern of social bias that is Actually present today. \- If we are bold enough we can decide thru this model to introduce counter biases (feedback loop) against these factors so that we level the playing field and truly measure the raw intellect and not the Environmentally conditioned intellect - but that is debate for another time! All in all a great research and write up - wake up call to folks who Blindly assume predictions for truth! I will wait for your next part - “how do we correct for these biases”! Harsh Vinayak ------ mail2kakoo Fantastic effort in asking the question and raising awareness. Hopefully the universities would consider the shortcomings of the process for the IB results to base their decisions. ------ pankajk1 Loved the animated GIF of "the model" literally falling! The coronavirus has thrown a lot of curveballs and each has sent impacted groups looking for answers. As OP correctly concludes, there are no good answers. Only worse and bad ones. Besides the original problem, the OP's analysis is well presented and brings out the worse in this not so well thought out solution. I hope IB is listening and is willing to adjust their model to address issues pointed out by the OP. ~~~ ishan_dikshit Thank you - I appreciate it. Some people on another forum actually informed me of the fact that other educational boards in the UK are planning on adopting this exact same 'model based assessment methodology'. I do not understand why more people aren't upset about this. ------ macsj200 It's crazy the model can learn implicit biases even when you don't supply that data! ------ rdubey Use of statistical model to allocate grades to students may not be fair to many students. Models should be used for estimation and not actual allocation of grades. ------ ali_wetrill Wild that they're doing this - really great analysis ------ atuld I hope they relook at the model - wouldn’t want to see people suffering due to the wrong methods being used to grade their work. ------ anupamdutta Great analysis...IB should definitely look to tweak the model to eliminate or reduce the biases identified! ------ ovasilis It is crazy to think that this is happening in the world. Very well explained! ------ arun100 Good insights on the problems and issues with what IB thought was a good choice ------ santri2804 Explained well... loved it ------ navyadixit Very interesting! ------ spulle1 Great article. ------ sunitayc Nice write up ------ pujapant Great work ------ chunmun Well done ------ m1shti Brilliant!
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A dark day for the future of books - ColinWright http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/15/opinion/coker-book-publishing/index.html ====== ComputerGuru I will never buy an eBook when I can get an actual used copy of the same book in mid to great condition for a tenth or a twentieth of the price of the eBook, both from Amazon. eReaders may have gained acceptance (I have a Kindle and a Sony eReader) but they're not "better" than real books, at least, certainly not better enough to justify paying fixed prices w/ no opportunity for second hand sale (esp. for non-reference materials). With almost any popular, still-under-copyright book, this is what the pricing looks like on Amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Sorcerers-Stone- Book/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Sorcerers-Stone- Book/dp/059035342X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334507344&sr=8-1) Paperback: 8.79 dollars. Kindle: 7.99 dollars. Used: 1 cent. Used via Amazon Prime: 3.98 To save NINETY CENTS you get an arguably inferior copy that you cannot resell, pass on, share, touch, or truly experience. No, thank you. And don't forget that your Kindle cost a hundred dollars - you'll need to buy a hundred and eleven such books before you're actually "saving" money. ~~~ jstabbac To each their own I guess. Personally I love how awesome it is that I can have one book in many places. I can read from my laptop at work, on my phone on the go, and from my tablet at home. Each automatically syncs to the last read page and my notes/highlights move between them. Mind you I don't actually ever USE notes or highlights, but it's pretty cool that that option is there. Sure I like to hold a book in my hands, but the convenience of an ebook is really hard to beat. Plus if I have a moment to read and I want a new book, I don't need to wait 3-5 days for shipping, I can download it instantly. If I'm ever out of the country (as I am now for half a year) I can still get any book delivered to me instantly. For me that's just a convenience, however it's critical for areas that normally have to wait 15-20 days for shipping from a place like Amazon. EDIT: As a quick note to your edit, you're really ignoring some of the best parts of ebooks while pointing out their worst. I don't own a Kindle however read ebooks through Amazon on three different devices. ~~~ ComputerGuru Like I mentioned, I have a Kindle, and I've loaded it with tons of classics and DRM-free materials. It's nice and convenient, and I really like it. But buying something is different - buying is, by nature, a matter of value. The fact of the matter is, buying a second hand book gives you more value/dollar than buying an ebook at 3 times the cost. An ebook you read once but cannot resell is eight dollars literally lost overnight. You no longer have the eight dollars _and_ you don't have anything worth eight dollars. When you buy the book second hand, you get the same (or better) value of reading the book, but you also retain a residue value that lives forever. ~~~ jstabbac I contend that I get eight dollars of value out of the conveniences the ebook provides. Like I said, to each their own I guess. ------ homosaur I essentially find his argument incoherent. What's he complaining about, that publishers don't have the right to illegally fix prices? They can set prices to whatever they want but can do so on their own marketplaces. Amazon has the right to impose whatever it wants on their marketplace. You don't have to sell there. Now we can once again make this argument that Amazon dominates the marketplace and you HAVE to sell there to sell any books, but that argument is ridiculous. Plenty of small publishers are selling books solely by themselves or with limited agreements with independent marketplaces. This seems like sour grapes from more middlemen who are unneeded. This is why the music industry is so bitter--because the Internet makes them irrelevant. There will be a need for promotion, yes, but I'd rather pay a smart literary agent 15% or even 20% to handle that rather than some publisher where I'm basically getting dimes on the backend. I'm not aware of any promotion that Smashwords ever executed that reached me, so clearly they are not even doing a great job. It's a dark day for industry middlemen and that's it. BY THE WAY, I will pay a premium well over $20 if you distribute your ebooks in multiple DRM free formats. I just paid $40 for the InDesign CS5 Classroom in a Book yesterday which came with a PDF and an EPUB. If publishers are too lazy to do that, we have no use for them anyway. ------ jackfoxy _...the responsibility for pricing decisions should rest with authors and publishers. If they price fairly and competitively, customers will reward them. If they price too high, customers will migrate to lower-cost books._ I agree authors and publishers should set prices, but not in collusion. As for the argument consumers will migrate to lower-cost books, that may hold for some genres, but books are not really fungible. The books I am interested in are each unique works. ~~~ radicalbyte If I understand his argument correctly, @markcoker is suggesting that if Lord of the Rings is too expensive people will buy Eragon instead? Okay, could understand the lack of knowledge of basic economics, but I'd have hoped that someone who has started their own business would at least have read a couple of wikipedia pages on the subject. ~~~ tzs Are you suggesting that people will buy LoTR no matter how high the price? Or are you suggesting that if LoTR is priced too high for someone who wants to read it, they will give up on reading rather than entertain themselves with some other book? ------ jaysonelliot There are two major flaws with this article. The first is the author's reliance on the reader's understanding of the phrase "agency pricing model." A hyperlink to yet another article that presumably contains an explanation of the term somewhere within it is not the same as a simple one-sentence explanation. The second is his assumption that "customers will migrate to lower-cost books." Books are not fungible objects. If I want to read the latest Eric Flint novel, I'm not going to pick up a Danielle Steele book instead because it's cheaper. ~~~ Retric I read a _lot_ and I don't really notice or care who wrote most of them. Sure, I would be willing to pay 50$ to read the next _Jim Butcher_ novel right now, but I also get a fair amount of free novels on my Kindle. If it's good I am more than happy to buy something by the author, but there is a lot of free stuff out there and I don't feel the need to spend money just because someone was published. ------ jpdoctor > _By assuming responsibility for the roles once played by publishers, authors > are earning up to 70% of the list price as their e-book royalty versus the > 17.5% paid by traditional publishers._ I'm trying to figure out why this is a dark day for the future of books. It sounds to me like authors just got a sizable raise. ~~~ Hemospectrum Assume for a moment that all authors in a given genre are interchangeable. In other words, they're unskilled labor, and it's really the publishers who bring all the value to the table. Come to think of it, I am sure a lot of very successful people in the publishing industry view it this way. ~~~ jaysonelliot Since the author of this article is an "e-book publisher" (ugh), I think your assessment of his viewpoint is spot-on. He's a middleman who delivers a vanishingly small amount of value, and is worried about being made redundant. ------ muhfuhkuh I have an amicable solution. Don't let big publishing be a cartel setting prices willy-nilly, and if it bothers him that Amazon or whomever wants to have a sale on a book, they can negotiate a "bulk buy" of the paper or ebook with the author or publisher and then discount it however they choose. But, he's insane if he thinks collusion is the answer. ------ pgrote The publishing industry has a chance to actually make the transition into the electronic commerce world a success. What has worked in the past isn't going to make the transition. One of the larger problems is the lack of a second sale. Many people, especially in non-fiction, looks to second sales as a way to add to their knowledge base. Without second sale there has to be a more effective method of engaging these people and it is price. Collusion among the publishers ensures that the logical price dropping for ebooks wouldn't happen as it should normally. Smashwords has done a ton to ensure ebooks have entered the market by mitigating the normal distributorship model. I can see where they are coming from in terms of author royalties, but other publishers will look to protect the old business models. ------ dyeje One thing I've been noticing with arguments against this lawsuit is that people are saying "If prices are too high, just buy from another publisher." The thing is that it just doesn't work that way with books. If I want to read Moby Dick but I think the price is too high, I'm boned. That publisher owns that specific book, and I can't just get a knockoff book. There's only one Moby Dick. They are the gatekeepers to that intellectual property. ------ alecco Typical strawman. Authors and publishers are not a single group. Publishers are just gatekeepers. ------ ChristianMarks The author argues for a centralized command economy of e-book sales, in which large bureaucratic institutions set prices based on the consumption patterns of their executives.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit - lettergram https://redditprofile.com/ ====== yorwba If you want to find mods and bots, try searching for "please". It works on the HN version to pick out dang and sctb and it seems to work on Reddit as well. There are some false positives, however. E.g. a comment saying "Zuck Fuck" being interpreted as discussing "please" might be due to uncleaned word vectors. [https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/85y46f/facebooks...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/85y46f/facebooks_stock_tumbles_again_value_drops_by_more/dw1bxc4/) ~~~ jwilk I tried [https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=...](https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=please) to no avail; there's neither dang nor sctb on the first 5 pages. ~~~ lettergram So.. the system learns what the subject of a sentence is over time. It's since learned "please" is not a subject, so I imagine that's what's dropped them in the results. Still appear first for YCombinator, because that's the links they constantly post ------ ketralnis Fortunately I'm not the kind of person people would be searching for, but this just seems impolite. Posting to an internet forum on a topic that interests you is not an opt-in to have random internet people or reach out to you asking for free advice. If I were a domain expert I wouldn't _want_ to be searched for on Reddit using a tool like this because the implicit goal is to then be spammed about it. If I wanted to be reached out to, I'd say so on a web site somewhere ~~~ megamindbrian2 Neither is it proof of being an expert. ~~~ scopecreep But semi-anonymous posts on social media are? If so there's a lot more Navy SEALs than I was lead to believe. ------ wingerlang When I searched for my own account, it didn't show up. When I searched for a topic, it showed me a user with the same name as the topic. When I did find some users claimed to be experts, I found their mood over the year and the main link was to a HN comment of them. I am not sure how to use this, what makes a user a domain expert? It's all kinda confusing. ~~~ lettergram I only show accounts that were active in the past year (in the subreddits it’s tracking). Do you have examples of the errors? I’d love to try and figure out the issue. Regarding a domain expert it’s identified by the terms a person uses and related terms people are interested in. The learn more section might help clear some of that up. ~~~ wingerlang Not tracking all subreddits makes sense I guess. But I searched for "Jailbreak". But got a user with that username. Searching for "ios programming" shows me some guy wyager and the discussion link is to HN, not reddit. ~~~ lettergram Thanks for the heads up -_- The full blown system creates what I call "metaprofiles" merging profiles across various domains. Basically, it can identify people based on conversation (regardless of username or domain). One thing I do, is create these "metaprofiles" and will return the first linked account. Apparently, I forgot to add a "data source" as an input to the function, thus you may get some of the cross profiles. ------ DanBC I searched for "suicide". I got a list of people back who had interesting opinions in a thread about suicide, but who are not domain experts. It's an interesting idea though, and it worked a lot better than I was expecting it to. The limitations are clear from the description on the page ("note we only track a small number of subreddits"). ------ thethirdone A few characters (' ) ( :) (And probably more) lead to an error screen: [https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sea...](https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=%27) [https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sea...](https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=%28) [https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sea...](https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=%29) [https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sea...](https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=%3A) ~~~ lettergram Thanks for catching the error! Should be fixed now, for reference the error was because I was estimating the count. Turns out that couldn't handle _only_ special characters. ------ jwilk The same thing but for HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981) ------ CarVac I searched for photography and none of the regulars on /r/photography (including myself) came up. ~~~ lettergram FYI the system just looks at a subset of subreddits: /r/dataisbeautiful /r/news /r/worldnews /r/technology /r/programming /r/cars /r/stock market /r/cryptocurrency /r/all Basically didn't want to build an insanely large database for a simple demo. ~~~ chx Well that kills it. The gems of reddit are to be found in small subreddits. For example, awesome bag advice can be found in /r/onebag/ (41k subscribers) /r/ManyBaggers/ (783 only but don't let that fool you, the knowledge in that place is astonishing) and somewhat on /r/BuyItForLife/ (500k). Even that 500k is very small. ------ jsonne Interesting. As someone who has a marketing subreddit dedicated to my content that's about 3k people I wish this was a bit more inclusive outside large subreddits. There's a lot of value in the "longtail" subreddits as it were. ------ dewey Can you just use the name “Reddit” in your Domain like that? ~~~ chatmasta Probably Reddit could technically make a trademark enforcement claim, but it seems they are unlikely to, given the long existence of sites like redditlist.com ------ dimitry12 @lettergram In lettergram.com, when it says "{} opinion ({}) in {} separate discussions" \- are these discussions from Reddit and HN? ~~~ lettergram It’s what ever is fed into the system. So currently it’s monitoring 12 or so data sources. I could monitor more, but I figure I’ll scale it with interest. ~~~ dimitry12 Cool! What are they? Have you considered adding the feature of listing the conversations which contributed to the score? ~~~ lettergram 100% of the conversations on this website come from subreddits (main ones listed in another comment here). Overall I also monitor some forums, hacker news, and others for [https://projectpiglet.com](https://projectpiglet.com) which identifies company insiders then recommends trades. So I don't feel comfortable with sharing exact sources. Regarding the score - The paid version I'm offering to companies has said feature. It also has a bunch of other items as well, find duplicate accounts, automated related project notification, etc. ~~~ dimitry12 Thanks! I will consider trying paid version. ~~~ lettergram > The paid version I'm offering to companies has said feature. Should note! That is not the projectpiglet.com version (that wont show you any user information, don't want you to pay unnecessarily). I'm offering the paid version which can be hosted and deployed by a given company internally. To do that you'll need to contact direct via email. ------ mothsonasloth Interesting stuff, how do you calculate a users "mood". Are you willing to explain your algorithm? ------ klohto Everyone I searched for have an unhappy mood... ~~~ forgottenpass Semantic analysis belongs to the third category in "lies, damn lies, and statistics." I'm sure it's slightly better for Metacortex's real use case - which is an employee surveillance system - because people won't use strong language, hyperbole, share their real opinions, or talk about certain topics as much in professional communication. But I still find the whole domain to be a fraud with just enough signal in the noise to trick people. ------ dsfyu404ed This tool is interesting but it is fundamentally an exercise in turd polishing because Reddit is a completely terrible place to get "expert" advice. It's designed to be a place for show and tell with commentary and false appearance of consensus. If you want expert advice you should be asking for it somewhere that's properly formatted for long form discussion. You should also seek out advice in a specialized community, not a general one like Reddit. For every piece of good advice on Reddit there's ten pieces of terrible advice and ten pieces of mediocre advice you could find yourself on Google offered up by the riff-raff that happen to be passing through that day. Reddit is just polite 4chan. If you want expert advice to somewhere where only people who are interested in the topic you want advice on are (usually forums). Edit: Also this tool thinks I am an expert in hipsters. I like to think I'm an expert in calling people hipsters. ~~~ fhood Sigh. Reddit is not a completely terrible place to get expert advice. Yes, there is a great deal of awful advice to be found there. But there are also a fair number of subreddits that are the primary gathering place for that community, and thus the best place to go for advice on that topic. When I google something non-programming related, the correct answer is very frequently found in a Reddit post. Reddit isn't usually the absolute best place for advice on a topic, but painting it as "completely terrible" seems like hyperbole to me. ~~~ PascLeRasc Reddit's the best way to get lots of real people's opinions of stuff. Search for "best Windows backup tool" and you get a pile of sponsored pages and fake recommendation sites, and probably some malware. Search for "best Windows backup tool site:reddit.com" and you get people posting in sysadmin communities having real discussion. ~~~ Kagerjay "site:reddit.com {{tool name}} vs ______" is something I use fairly frequently. Its not perfect by any means due to astroturfing, but its better than nothing ------ indentit isn't "domain expert" and "reddit" contradictory? ------ josefresco Searched for "trump", site returned PoppinKREAM so this seems pretty accurate! ~~~ mfoy_ Love his write-ups. Shame the people who don't want to hear his message can just say "fake news" and carry on... :( ------ known [https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sea...](https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=HFT)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to get a job after a failed startup? - startuplife01 I worked it for 8 months. I&#x27;ve now completely exhausted my savings. Our product is live but the growth is super slow. There is no way I can see it reaching product market fit. Investors are not interested with such low numbers.<p>I am a product guy with moderate level tech skills.<p>Should I keep the startup on my resume (with reason for shutting down + lessons)? Or should I leave it out from my resume and instead add the product we built as a &#x27;project&#x27;?<p>I&#x27;m looking at product management jobs or software engineering jobs. ====== vladislavp I am trying to reconcile your question, with the one you just posted recently (16 days ago) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041836) >" ... Interests & life goals: Product Management, starting his own startup (or a profit making lifestyle business), reaching financial independence Recently graduated from an Indian college with computer science degree. Don't have too much savings but have strong experience under belt from working on several side-projects (with users) during college years. What career advice would you give? Also, would you suggest he look into moving and working in the West, (Germany or Canada) or stay in India? …" I may be totally misreading this, but it seems like are you are posting your resume + availability, under AskHN umbrella. With regards to your direct question on if a failed startup needs to be mentioned. I would say if you have things to show (eg a website/app link), and you feel comfortable describing your contribution there -- it should be mentioned. May be under 'other projects' section. ~~~ startuplife01 Thanks for your advice. No, I have no intentions of posting my resume on HN. I respect the HN community's advice more than any other software communities. So, it is natural for me to want to ask advice here. And I can't ask for advice without posting atleast some information about where I'm at. Also, I don't have any contact details on my HN profile. Moderators, if you feel the thread does not belong here, you may remove it. I can't see an option to delete the original post. ~~~ aosaigh Can you link to the startup? ------ seanwilson My side projects were usually the biggest positives when I went for interviews. Nobody is going to ask you how much money they made because it's not important for software engineering jobs - you've shown you can use your own initiative and finish projects by yourself. Not sure what you're nervous about. ------ jmcgough Put it on your resume if it's something you're proud of, even if it failed. The fact that you were willing to give it a shot is typically a positive signal. Be prepared to talk about it - a lot of interviewers will find that more interesting than working at yet another startup, so if you can talk intelligently about what you learned and the progress you made, it'll definitely score you points in an interview. ------ icedchai Focus on what went _right._ You designed, built, and launched a product. Also curious, how slow is "slow" growth in percentages? Maybe it's not as bad as you think... ------ Blakestr You still had "wins" and hurdles you had to overcome. I'd leave it there. If asked, focus on those wins. If I were building a drone company in 2006, I could say I overcame engineering hurdles to design the product but failed to reach market due to government restrictions, aka FAA. That way it looks like anyone would have lost that game but you still have talent. ------ JSeymourATL > I'm looking at product management jobs or software engineering jobs. Suggest looking instead for the person you can best help. Think Founders/COO's of early-stage firms. Try to connect with that individual. Linkedin is good for this. They'll likely relate to your story. ------ natalyarostova Everything is marketing. You can spin failures into successes if you do it right. ------ codegladiator > Should I keep the startup on my resume (with reason for shutting down + > lessons)? yes, experience is what matters, not success or failure. ------ dlphn___xyz how do you use a failed startup to pivot into a new industry (i.e. not tech)? ------ xFlaring Try to create your own.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Swift: Simple, Safe, Inflexible - aaronbrager https://medium.com/@getaaron/swift-simple-safe-inflexible-68ff6fa927dc ====== Someone _" Allow required initializers in extensions, and require subclasses to implement these initializers (even if they just call super)"_ Is that possible? The subclass could live in your application, and the extension method in a plug-in that isn't known to the application (needn't even be on the system or _exist_ when you launch the application) That may work, but I would have to think hard about all kinds of weird scenarios before being sure of it. ~~~ smosher_ At some point you'll end up with breakage unless doing this _causes_ the subclasses to implement the initializer with super (if not already present), not just require it. I don't really like that, but it might actually work. You shouldn't really get to mess with someone else's implementation... that's partly what subclassing is for and that's where it should get fixed. I'm not really familiar with the barrier here since Swift isn't available on my platform, but I can't think of a reason for it to be such a problem, unlike the the other road.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
New organ named in digestive system - DanBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38506708 ====== CarolineW In case anyone is interested there is some discussion of this over here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13308092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13308092) The same story has been submitted from other sources as well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315995) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13315751) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313220](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313220) There may be others, if you're interested in the different reports from different sources you can easily search for them.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Wix Code - dna_polymerase https://www.wix.com/code/home ====== jszymborski Man-oh-man did that take a while to load... You can always tell you've landed on a wix site when you're faced with blank screen for a while. Edit: 10MB... this page is 10MB. [https://i.imgur.com/uAoc05H.png](https://i.imgur.com/uAoc05H.png) ~~~ WhitneyLand But who cares? I don’t think their users do, and Wix is growing. Everyone here is disgusted by it because, it is in fact disgusting from the perspective of a developer. I spent a few hours with with wix earlier this year while needing help a family quickly get a funeral site up they could hopefully have some chance of maintaining themselves. Getting started is actually pretty slick. The designer software is easy to use and gets a basic decent looking site up extremely fast. Towards the end of the few hours I was hitting roadblocks left and right. Artificial limitations, edge cases not supported, things that could have been fixed on a real site trivially. Still, what they’ve built, what it in turn allows pretty nontechnical people to build quickly, is impressive. I think it may have been possible to do better on performance and flexibility without compromising for other users. My guess is it’s not mostly because they are just not obsessing on that part much. ~~~ flukus > But who cares? I don’t think their users do, and Wix is growing. Do Wix users even realize? If they're building their own website then they probably have enough of the javascript cached that they don't realize the performance issues. For other end users though, they care, they just don't know what's wrong or they can't articulate the problem. They think their computer is getting to slow, or the networks bad, or they have a virus. They'll use vague terms like that because they don't know there's 20MB of javascript running. If a wix site is slow then they're more likely to blame MS or dell or their ISP than to realize wix is the problem. ~~~ mercer I've found that many users of Wix and (shitty) Wordpress themes don't care, and are very happy to get a site for a fraction of the cost to get it made 'professionally' (or free, if they just do everything themselves). I've also found that there's been a steady uptick in clients who are having some success with/through their site, and who suddenly _do_ start caring, for all the reason that we are all aware of (performance affecting SEO, bad mobile experience, the 'visual page builder' not being able to do what they want, etc.). While it's not always fun work, I do think there's a huge market there for 'people like us'. I'm not sure what a good analogy would be in other businesses, but perhaps it's a bit like someone with a limited budget starting a cafe with IKEA furniture, finding success, and now having both the need and (some) means to actually buy furniture that can handle the demands of cafe use. And that's not even considering the huge number of potential customers whose Wordpress site got hacked and who need a solution _NOW_. What I like most about this situation is that it's not even entirely bad. Perhaps sometimes it _does_ make sense to start a bar with IKEA furniture because the chance of success is so small. I honestly tell many potential clients to not bother paying me for a good, fast site because all they really need at this point is a decent-ish Wordpress theme or Wix/SquareSpace site. EDIT: I'm not saying Wix specifically would be an option I would suggest to clients. My experience with it hasn't been too good, and I'm sure there's similar and better options. ------ eropple Database: some proprietary key-value thing. No performance descriptions. API documentation that looks written for people who are dimly familiar with APIs. "Dynamic Pages": whatevery CMS-ish CRUD frontend. "User Input": forms that dump data into that database. It doesn't get better from there. This is even more of a lock-in trap than Wix (and its similar competitors, like SquareSpace) usually is. These people want to _own_ you and whatever you're making. Avoid. ~~~ ioquatix When I see "tables" from a "database" in a web browser, I have a good laugh. I know it's not that impressive but our smallest non-trivial "table" has 100,000 records and our largest over a billion. Good luck trying to use a web UI to manage that. Parse was like this too - and they had a 1000-record limit in their APIs. Good times. ~~~ flukus It seems like just about every javascript table library I come across expects the filtering, ordering and paging to be done client side after retrieving all the data. The make for some nice looking demo's but then I have to explain to management (or other devs sadly) why things are so slow. ------ eranation On a side note... tried to use their beta sign-up page. Form looks very pleasing to the eye, but, sorry to be that guy, it's all sorts of terrible. What annoyed me first was that the tab structure of that form was all broken, instead of going to the next field, it just went to a random field down the road. It also was not responsive, it felt almost as if someone just dragged and dropped it on a visual form designer or something, you see where I'm getting at. I hope that form was not built with Wix Code. * A quick look at the HTML confirms, all fields and labels seem to be positioned absolute, each. Might be a good workaround for an MVP form builder, dragging on a grid and using absolute positioning is the easiest way to develop a visual form builder I guess... (although I think a tabindex property would have solved the tab issue, and a simple algorithm sorting divs by top / left would have been able to do it automatically, but this is just MVP). Maybe I'm wrong, maybe nice HTML doesn't matter, maybe they can fix the tab stop problem, maybe responsive forms are not important to most customers. But everything I was taught is wrong in a web form exists in the form that asks me to sign up for a beta to a tool that builds forms without coding. Maybe this is the way to MVP... maybe that form was built by an intern. Maybe accessibility is not important for a beta (or maybe I'm the only one pressing tab when filling forms) but this just reeks bad web design practice all over it. *EDIT: Yep, I guess it was, at the bottom it says: "This Website Was Created with Wix Code". Maybe the genius idea was just to build a fixed grid, forget responsiveness, and solve 99% of the problems of a WYSIWYG editor. All in all they built an MVP and I'm just ranting on HN, so perhaps they are onto something... ~~~ jlg23 I once ported a site designed in wix to plain html/css for a friend. Advice from the bottom of my heart: Wash your brain with soap after looking at the markup wix generates. Sandblasting might also be an option. ~~~ dom0 Sandblasting doesn't actually work that well with soft, spongy materials. ~~~ fencepost > Sandblasting doesn't actually work that well with soft, spongy materials. Is the markup Mythos-level bad? If so, sandblasting might still be appropriate. ------ stevenjohns Wix is a terrible company filled with some of the most incompetent people. Once I reported a notorious scammer who was using their platform to their support team. I provided tons of information (including investigations from the press) and explicitly told them not to pass on my details. That was actually a precondition before I had revealed any information, and they ensured me that they will not pass on my details. What do they do? They treat it as a DMCA request and give the scammer every single piece of information they had on me (which included my phone number). I woke up to a voicemail on my phone from the scammer saying he's "going to find you motherfuckers" and "kill all of y'all". After asking why the hell they did that, they basically told me to piss off and denied doing anything wrong. ~~~ Can_Not Do you think wix would be legally liable for sharing your personal details to a malicious actor? ------ suyash Staying away from this service due to their horrible Terms and Conditions. Read carefully before you sign yourself up for something you might regret later on. In short: All your code and IP belongs to WIX. [https://www.wix.com/code/home/terms-and- conditions](https://www.wix.com/code/home/terms-and-conditions) \-- AS IS from their T&C --- By participating in the Beta Stage, you hereby assign to Wix without any additional consideration, all right, title and interest to your Feedback and all proprietary rights therein, including, without limitation, all patents, copyrights, trade secrets, mask works, trademarks, moral rights and other intellectual property rights. You acknowledge that Wix retains ownership of all right, title and interest to the Wix Code, including without limitation, its design and documentation, derivatives and versions thereof, and all intellectual property rights therein and thereto (including without limitation, all patent rights, design rights, copyrights and trade secret rights). If requested by Wix, you agree to execute and deliver any documents, statement, instruments, recordings or filings deemed necessary by Wix to protect and preserve its right, title and interest in and to the Wix Code under applicable law. \---- ~~~ kevindong "to your Feedback" Pretty sure that just means that if you submit feedback, that feedback becomes property of Wix [0]. From a laymen's interpretation of that paragraph, your content remains your own. \--- The second paragraph sounds pretty standard for a SasS company. \--- [0]: They explicitly define 'Feedback' in their T&C as follows: > In consideration of the non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license > to use the Wix Code granted to you by Wix subject to the terms hereof, you > agree to serve as a “beta tester” of the Wix Code and to provide Wix with > useful input on the Wix Code, including on any problems, bugs, failures, > deficiencies and other challenges you may have encountered while using the > Wix Code, and other input and ideas you may have on how to improve, enhance > or upgrade the Wix Code, or any other feedback you may have and deem > relevant (collectively “Feedback”). ------ __bjoernd Unfortunate naming from a German perspective. 'Wixen' translates to 'wank/jerk off' here... ~~~ Zekio well luckily it is probably based on the surname Wix which is based off the english word "Wicks" ~~~ tyingq There doesn't appear to be much of a story behind the name. _" Back at the beach, the three brainstormed what to name their new company. Staying true to their idea, they had two requirements for the name: they wanted a three letter word that started with a “W” and something that was easy to remember"_ [http://www.rewindandcapture.com/why-is-wix-called- wix/](http://www.rewindandcapture.com/why-is-wix-called-wix/) ------ donohoe I generally avoid Wix like the plague and that seems like a good reason. One more reason: [https://ma.tt/2016/10/wix-and-the- gpl/](https://ma.tt/2016/10/wix-and-the-gpl/) ------ SOLAR_FIELDS Though this obviously isn’t the kind of thing that will appeal to the average HN reader, Wix does appear to be having success in the realm. How many of us have a friend or three that wants to bootstrap a small business but can’t afford proper web design/dev skills and are smart enough to figure something like this out? You might argue to them “learn how to code and do it properly”, but there is a group of people that are a large subset of the above group of which no matter how you try to educate will have some sort of allergy to writing actual code. This product is for them. Side anecdote, in college nearly 10 years ago I had an entrepreneurship professor that singled out Wix as one to watch for a good success story. I guess he was right on that bet. ~~~ coding-saints I think the answer these days should be "hire a programmer". Never would I try and do a profession I did not understand, especially if it had something to do with profit/income. While WIX does have a nice community paying for their WYSIWYG, I would advise anyone to pay an experienced developer to create/maintain their site over doing it themselves. ~~~ Silhouette _I think the answer these days should be "hire a programmer"._ The difficulty with that answer is that the market for web development is becoming bimodal. On the low end, you have the site builder tools: Wix, WP, Squarespace, and so on. These days you have to include Facebook pages in there as well. You can set up a basic online presence for next to no money with these, and in most cases you can buy a reasonably professional-looking theme to make your site look decent for not much more. Of course you're limited to common features and have few opportunities for customisation, but does a web page announcing your local church events really need any more? On the high end, you have bespoke development. Someone like me, or no doubt many others on HN, can build you a site that does more or less anything and adopts whatever distinctive branding you need. However, we're going to charge about as much for an hour or two of our time as the whole thing costs with one of the site builder tools, and your final bill is going to have at least two more zeroes on it to do roughly the same job and probably more if we're doing anything that makes it worth using us in the first place. There isn't much room in between any longer. The days of getting your neighbour's kid's school friend to build your company web site for $500 are gone. The site builder tools have commoditised the low end of the market, and for that kind of money they'll probably offer better results, while no agency nor even any established freelancer is likely to get out of bed for a gig that small. In short, hiring a professional doesn't really make sense for a lot of small business or community web sites any more. Either you need something truly unique and customised, in which case you need the time and money to match, or you're probably better off just using a site builder if you don't have the resources available to do it in-house. ------ jtchang I know lots of SMBs that use Wix. It's a solid platform to get started but can be kinda slow and hard to work with at times. For some background they are an Israeli company and a few years back they opened up a Wix Cafe space out near dogpatch area. It was totally free with a focus around the Wix platform (kind of like how Amazon has AWS popup lofts). It went away I think but the idea was pretty cool. Hell I didn't mind the free space. ~~~ elsurudo I'm sorry... can you explain that second paragraph? What is a Wix Cafe space with a focus on the Wix platform? what are Amazon AWS popup lofts? ------ nickstefan12 If you're looking for a website builder that doesn't load megabytes of JavaScript, lock you in to the platform forever, or feel like a Fischer price toy, check out: [https://www.brandcast.com](https://www.brandcast.com) ------ ertemplin Wow, that has to be the worst website I've visited in a very long time. The page was white for about 10 seconds, the videos were laggy/stuttering, the moving content below the first video had random black artifacts popping up. ------ foota "Home page was delayed by 14ms due to code" _crying emoji_ ------ yoodenvranx I feel kinda sorry for their German sales/advertising team that has to deal with their own company name. "wix" sounds _very_ similar to "wichsen" which is a vulgar term for "to masturbate. I don't think their service will ever be popular over here because of that name. When I saw the title "Wix code" my brain automatically translated it into something similar to "jerk off code". ~~~ dna_polymerase Well they actually try to use that as a marketing gag [0]. "Million people jerk off daily" "Jerking off changed my life." [0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AKDZmsy5yo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AKDZmsy5yo)
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Etsy: Crafting an IPO - sharkweek http://blog.pitchbook.com/etsy-crafting-an-ipo/ ====== jonathanpeterwu Interesting infographic on the history of Etsys history to IPO. Including details about their fundraising and what VC's participated in each round.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Interview: John McAfee Answers Your Questions - xpop2027 http://beta.slashdot.org/story/200403 ====== mindcrime Very nice. Maybe the best /. interview I've ever read. McAfee may be crazy (or not, I don't know) but he sure as heck is entertaining. I'd love to sit at a bar and drink with him sometime.
{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }