The Cloud and Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2019/09/21/AWS-Open-Source-People <comment><USER2> His conclusion reveals the intentions pretty clearly.

> Google Cloud's recent Open Source partnerships are interesting. I look at > that list of companies and it's not obvious to me that they're going to > offer better operational excellence than Google's, but maybe I'm wrong. It's > an interesting and probably useful experiment.

This is true spirit of Amazon i.e partners are competition to be killed.

> At the end of the day I'm not that worried. Most of us who've open-sourced > stuff love the creative process for its own sake; touching and improving > other engineers' lives. The skillset evidenced by having done so will > probably help you get really good jobs.

Wow I am just amazed at the callousness of this suggestion. So he wants developers to create good software out of love and free of cost and then toil for his company while he mint the customers. At least he is transparent about his intentions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a lot of respect for the AWS team, but...

> one insanely-complex routine task that we do all the time is hiring. You > know what the LPs are at hiring time? A checklist. Now even the typical all- > day interview marathon isn't gonna reliably dig into every LP, but we do an > acceptable job of taking a close look at enough of them. I believe that's > very helpful in bringing down the asshole ratio.

In my personal and second degree experience with Amazon and AWS hiring, the application of the LPs by interviewers doesn't work nearly as well as most of them seem to think, and it often devolves into a mostly arbitrary hazing ritual. I'm willing to believe that AWS has fewer assholes, and that you can't excel at operations while an asshole, but I've seen too many bar raisers who acted as arrogant know-it-alls and made completely capricious, arbitrary and damaging decisions.

<comment><USER4> > I'm willing to believe that AWS has fewer assholes, and that you can't excel > at operations while an asshole...

Having spent a two year tour in AWS, I think it's fair to say AWS has a pretty decent monopoly on assholes, and that they excel at operations despite that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What an incredibly self serving glimpse into the the mind of a member of the empire du jour.

I'm sure Microsoft engineers felt similarly about democratizing computation in the 90s. Then the quote would have been "People just want point and click ease... They don't care about who their software dollars go to".

And yea. That's right. People don't vote fairly with their dollars. That's where regulators come in to ensure a level playing field.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish". Never forget. We've seen this show before.

</comment><comment><USER6> This strikes me as a bit of a straw man -- "AWS has operational skill. Open source companies with managed service offerings of their software probably do not." The operational skills that AWS has are primarily at the infrastructure layer. If my experience with their managed software services and the tons of complaints in their support forums are any indication, their operational excellence drops off dramatically at the software layer. I don't fault AWS for trying to move up the value chain, but bashing on open source companies as "not a viable business model" distracts from the real question of who can delivery a better managed software offering on top of AWS's (or GCP's or Azure's) managed hardware platform.

<comment><USER7> So you're judging quality by support forum posts? Isn't that the very definition of a self selected sample? Who goes into a _support_ forum to post about how well something is working?

<comment><USER8> You can see how the company responds to customer problems though.

<comment><USER7> Not really, in the case of AWS, if you're running a business depending on it, you're not depending on getting help from a public forum, you have at least a business support contract where you get immediate, live support from people who can see your account, do a screen share with you etc. my experience with AWS is that they are batting close to 100.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So AWS, if your chief advantage is your operations, then why not open source both improvements you make to third party open source products and your own products? It seems like it wouldn't help your competitors that much since they don't have your operational expertise, and it would help your customers a lot, since they could have a better understanding of how the products work, and even make contributions to fix bugs that effect them, instead of waiting for the amazon team to make it down the backlog.

I get not wanting to pay for the open source software you use. I don't get why so little code is contributed back upstream.

<comment><USER9> Why would you open source the thing you're selling as your competitive advantage?

Amazon is a business, not a charity.

<comment><USER8> The software is not what Amazon sells, and from what I can tell as an outsider AWS's competitive advantage primarily comes from infrastructure, operational skill, and economies of scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Point taken -- AWS is better at ops than the developers who create open source tools.

Then why not pay a fraction of the money you're earning on offering these tools back to the open source community? Using something like GitHub's new funding tools?

<comment><USER11> And why not contribute changes made to these projects back to the community? This is robbery at best camouflaged as benevolence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's an interesting story re: early twitter. Are you certain a MySQL SLA- level support contract would have solved their scalability issues? My understanding is that it was high volume of highly followed participants that led to congestion. I.e. a design problem. Eventually solved by caching and fanning out replicated tweet data to all followers.

To see the issues around cloud and open source right now, you only have to look at who's winning: enterprise consultants such as Dell EMC, HPe, Accenture, IBM, etc.

They are the ones pushing broad K8S adoption at the edge. And in the next generation it will probably come down to a new crop of ISVs to solve issues around data portability, vendor lock-in, security, pricing arbitrage, and training.

<comment><USER13> > Are you certain a MySQL SLA-level support contract would have solved their > scalability issues?

This pitch may have been mentioned in passing to me but I don't remember. From the perspective of I and many others who ultimately solved the scalability issues, the MySQL boat was simultaneously sinking and on fire, while nobody knew who the captain was supposed to be. An insurance policy that promised that somebody with a badge would dedicate 8 hours a month to buffing out scratches was not useful.

It was less "it's OSS, we don't need to pay" and more "only God can help us now".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I give AWS employees the benefit of innovation eg. inventing "the cloud" as we know it today, but what's in there for developers? What are the incentives for F/OSS software developers if all they contribute to is monopolization, lock- in, and attention economy? tbray wants to appeal to an F/OSS ethos that has run its course and just doesn't make sense in the cloud economy. I'd go further and say F/OSS has ruined the software industry in that it has made software a commodity, so the only way to make a living is by operations, taking away economic value from developers, and giving it to cloud providers instead. That's obviously not a sustainable model for software development going forward, and creates incentives that are neither aligned with those of developers nor customers.

Well, AWS at least offers the marketplace for indie developers to offer their images (with a markup for billing which is ok I guess). If AWS is serious about a sustainable economic model for software developers, then they could start to expand this offering and make it more prominent (I haven't heard much about it in a long while), building it on mainstream Linux distros rather than AWS Linux, etc. What I'm seeing on AWS marketplace and places such as DockerHub, though, are mostly repackaged F/OSS convenience builds rather than original applications. And AWS could have made a stance here by selling eg. Mongo DB images from the marketplace rather than going for Mongo's customers with their own offering. I guess it's better than on Azure and Google Cloud at least, where you need a partnership deal to even be able to sell images.

</comment><comment><USER15> what's the point of this? open source is not a business model, or it's not relevant, or you shouldn't expect it to be a career... or something? does it matter perhaps that AWS and most every other cloud company is running most of what they have on Linux which is...um, open source? I was not able to follow what point this article was trying to make. something about if you're not a nice person you can't do ops....OK ? being a nice person is generally helpful in a lot of ways, right?

<comment><USER11> He's saying that the schmucks who created the open-source software are not smart enough to operate it or make a business out of it. Only AWS with all its operational expertise is capable of operating it. The open source developers shouldn't even try to make a business out of it. Rather than going to Confluent and saying "I don't want to worry about Kafka again", they want the customer to come to AWS which is fine except that AWS did zilch to contribute to Kafka. If the creators of the open source software want to make a business out of it, who's Amazon to come and say that they don't have operational expertise?

<comment><USER16> Also they contribute to open source too. 'Cause ops wheel. Game changer, 2020. Don't laugh.

Seriously though it's hard to not read between the lines on this. There seems to be more between the lines than lines somehow. I need a shower to rinse the bias off me now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You know what I like about Amazon? I'm a <i>customer<i>. I pay my money (not much) and you give me what I want (enough for me). I deal with Google and lots of other Big Tech companies too, but I never forget that I'm not the customer there. "The TV business is like the chicken business: the chickens think that because they get fed, they're the customers."

</comment><comment><USER18> New business model idea: write open source software with a license that requires, well, a license to _operate_. It's free in all the typical APL2 senses, except that you can't sell it "as a service" without signing, effectively, a "lease." Now, supposing the project gains sufficient popularity / community / traction, all you have to do is wait for Amazon to take note of the project and contact you for a lease. You ask for 30% and retire. And if they invent a competing project that is at all API-compatible, they have to prove in court that they haven't plagiarized any of your open source code; but, that wouldn't happen anyway, since by their own admission, they're not focused on writing software, they're focused on operating it.

Someone with experience/knowledge in this area tell me if I'm off my rocker. I know it sounds too simple. But why wouldn't this work?

<comment><USER19> Aren't you basically describing SSPL? That's MongoDB's license that does pretty much what you're describing, except it's not considered open source [1]. And in response, Amazon created an API-compatible alternative called DocumentDB [2]. There's also the Commons Clause [3], which I think Redis Labs uses to license its Redis satellite products.

[1] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/mongodb-open-source-server- sid...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/mongodb-open-source-server-side-public- license-rejected/)

[2] [https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/](https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/)

[3] [https://commonsclause.com/](https://commonsclause.com/)

<comment><USER18> This looks like a great case-study. Basically, it seems that if the licensing isn't in Amazon's favor (take the OSS project, put it into operation, sell it as a service), then Amazon is likely to simply build their own implementation that is API-compatible. It remains unclear whether the ROI for this exists, especially for larger/more complex projects, but the precedent is very discouraging for my idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You've got to be kidding, for 99% of the projects out there a dedicated server will have the same uptime as an EC2 VM, for a tenth of the price, and unlimited bandwidth. AWS is a plain ripoff and any field expert with a bit of critical thinking would not fall in the trap for long.

</comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr "Fuck you but thanks for the software"

</comment><comment><USER22> I use and contribute to open source, and I know I can't compete with Amazon in terms of operational excellence, and that operations is where the value lies in this unregulated cluster-fuck of douchebaggery that is the modern software world. I'm already very aware, Tim, that if I make something useful, and I open source it and try to make a business out of it, some asshole like you will come along and deploy it at scale and market the hell out of it and tell me I'm cute for even trying, and that you just might throw an Amazon job my way if I'm lucky. This kind of arrogance makes me think twice about contributing to open source, and it makes me hope your arrogance runs up against something intractable, and soon.</comment>


Firm 'hides' university when recruits apply - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34384668 <comment><USER2> School: ______________*

Extracurriculars: Staff Writer for the Harvard Crimson; Summer Internship with Professor David Malan CS50

<comment><USER3> In the UK I can imagine non-Oxbridge Universities having "Oxford Clubs" for people who applied but didn't get into Oxford... (and Cambridge clubs as well - membership would presumably be mutually exclusive).

NB even 20 years ago there were clubs that solely seemed to exist so that the members could rotate the top job between them so they could all have "President of the XYZ Club" on their CVs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if a form of Gresham's Law (bad money drives out good) [1] may come into play. Basically if all university diplomas are effectively considered equal, then candidates from top tier schools will instead apply to places where they perceive their diploma carries more weight. In other words, if we think of a diploma as a form of currency, candidates will prefer to spend it at a place where it is valued more highly.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law)

<comment><USER5> I cannot think of a happier outcome than companies who value fancy credentials over effectiveness ending up with the employees who would be upset that they're being evaluated on how they actually perform rather than the prestige of their degree. Then I'd never have to work with anybody like that again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This has been proposed as a way to fight rising college costs [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip- subsidies...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting sentiment and maybe well intentioned. But regardless of whether you like it or not, the university provides a strong filtering mechanism on the quality of your applicants. It is highly correlated with successful application. So they may try this, but quickly back off at having got rid of a very highly correlated screening input.

<comment><USER8> "Having attended a specific university" isn't as strong a predictor of performance as you might think. Even "having attended university" isn't a particularly strong filtering mechanism, as E&Y recently dropping the degree threshold shows: [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ernst-and-young- dr...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ernst-and-young-drops-degree- classification-threshold-graduate-recruitment)

<comment><USER9> As an aside, it's funny that both articles use the same stock image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note that this is the BBC, and applies to Deloitte UK. It is unclear if it applies to Deloitte worldwide.

The university system in the UK is completely different to in the US, so hypotheses around it being to do with the cost of university or student loans need substantial adjustments to make sense in the UK context.

<comment><USER11> Can you say more about the differences? I don't know what they would be at all - I thought they were very similar.

<comment><USER12> 1) Many degrees are 3 years rather than 4.

2) Tuition fees for UK/EU students are capped at 9k GBP (13.6k USD) per year.

<comment><USER10> Also, student loans are pretty different[1]. For example, the only company allowed to give them is a non-profit, and they get cancelled if they have been outstanding for a (fairly long) period of time[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_Ki...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_Kingdom#Repayment_and_interest)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 10 days ago EY drops the 2:1 degree requirement [1] for UK applicants...now Deloitte feels the need to one up them by removing college branding from the consideration altogether. Next up is PWC rejecting any applicant with a college degree and poaching them right out of high school instead :)

[1] [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ernst-and-young- dr...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ernst-and-young-drops-degree- classification-threshold-graduate-recruitment)

<comment><USER14> PwC, and other Big 4 and even small accounting firms in the UK already have a school leavers program.

You join the firms out of school, they will ask you to register with ICAEW/ACCA and study to become a chartered accountant (CPA in the US), the firm will provide you with books, exam fees and tuition fees while you earn on the job. After three years while your peers finishing up at university you will have a solid work history with great qualifications with no debt. You can even get a degree if you join ACCA for just ₤200 for submitting a thesis and no additional exams.

While in the US, to become a CPA, you would need masters level education in most cases to even appear for the CPA exams. UK and almost all commonwealth countries have programs and institutes that offer professional qualification opportunities with even more prestige than the average university route. Accountancy is one of the few fields where one can get-qualified-on-job in the Anglosphere (US, Canada excluded).

ICAEW : [http://careers.icaew.com/school-students- leavers](http://careers.icaew.com/school-students-leavers)

ACCA : [http://www.accaglobal.com/uk/en/qualifications/accountancy-c...](http://www.accaglobal.com/uk/en/qualifications/accountancy- career/ukschoolleaver.html)

ACCA + B.Sc (Hons.) :[http://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/help/oxford- brookes.html](http://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/help/oxford-brookes.html)

<comment><USER15> > While in the US, to become a CPA, you would need masters level education in > most cases to even appear for the CPA exams.

Source? This sounds ludicrous.

<comment><USER16> [http://www.ais-cpa.com/outside.html](http://www.ais-cpa.com/outside.html)

"Most states have adopted a 150 university semester hour educational requirement. A few states require only a four year university degree." Depending on how your hours are calculated, I think 150 might require a year of grad school generally. My school does 3 hours of class per week x 5 classes per semester x 8 semesters = 120 hours.

On the other extreme, the CFA institute requires 4 years of experience to sit the CFA exams.

<comment><USER14> I just checked the CFA Institute website. They say you must have a "bachelor's (or equivalent) degree or be in the final year" of one OR four year work experience (in any field) OR combined education + work experience of four years.

I think what you are saying is true for using the designation (becoming a chartered holder)--you need to have the practical experience of four years.

CFA Enrolment eligibility : [https://www.cfainstitute.org/programs/cfaprogram/register/Pa...](https://www.cfainstitute.org/programs/cfaprogram/register/Pages/index.aspx)

Experience required : [https://www.cfainstitute.org/community/membership/process/Pa...](https://www.cfainstitute.org/community/membership/process/Pages/work_experience.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are they doing this just for social aspects? The article doesn't cite any hard reason why they'd do this. You'd think that with so many applicants and positions, they'd have lots of data that'd let them know if university attended is a good predictor of performance.

As well as the opposite: If folks of different background really "innovate differently", then again, they should have the data to prove this. Like "while Xs only make up 5% of our workforce, 15% of all good-whatevers come from them".

Or at least, they should investigate after this experiment is tried out and determine if it had real impact.

<comment><USER18>
      You'd think that with so many applicants
      and positions, they'd have lots of data

It's easy to gather data about whether the hires you made were good hires.

It's difficult to gather data about whether the rejections you made were good rejections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is interesting as an accounting student. The big 4 audit firms which hire the bulk or entry-level accountants have traditionally played favorites with schools. This comes as quite a surprise to me because they haven't really shown any effort otherwise about not picking favorite schools. Although this is across the pond, so maybe it'll be different in the US.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've about to hire and I've been thinking trying to build a process that blinds to as much as possible: gender, race, age, university, previous employers. What else? If you're doing this, please get in touch, I'd like to talk about how you go about it.

<comment><USER21> Picture, name, address and family situation.

The term for that process is "anonymized application" in German speaking countries. In Switzerland they made good experiences with that (German article: [http://www.3sat.de/page/?source=/nano/gesellschaft/149883/in...](http://www.3sat.de/page/?source=/nano/gesellschaft/149883/index.html)).

In my opinion, the best way to ensure that you are "blinded" properly: Find someone from a minority who is conscious of the obstacles people from minorities face. Tell that person "I'm a racist, misogynist, idiot full of prejudices. Make sure I can only hire based on qualification." Have that person screen all applications and black out all revealing information. This could be a perfect short-term gig for a 2nd year student in a relevant field (relevant to the social aspects of the hiring process, not the positions you hire for).

PS: Explicitly listing the things you do not want in an application in the job post will probably help out weed people who cannot even follow simple instructions ;)

<comment><USER22> Why wouldn't such a person that you hired ONLY pass along resumes of minorities (or edit and sabotage the resumes of the majority candidates)? After all, you've hand-picked them to be someone conscious of the struggles AND told them that you're racist, misogynistic, prejudiced, and an idiot...

<comment><USER23> Get an envelope. Put the number of resumes in it on the front. Sign it. Get back that number of resumes.

Seriously this isn't a hard problem to solve.

This should be standard practice for all businesses though I don't think that it will happen any time soon. All application processes should be as double blind as possible. So 2 people collect the resumes they number then and send it off to the redactor. The redactor send the envelope to HR/hiring manager. Then from that people should be selected. When interviewed people should be administered a test to look for competence if necessary and if not only then the interview should be conducted in such a way that the persons background, race, and gender should be obscured.

I understand that much of the value of a person on a team is how well they get along with the people who they work with so this needs to be addressed. Either with some kind of trail period where their coworkers can file complaints but they have to be weighed against their productivity as judged by a neutral party so people can't just vote minorities and/or genders off the island per say.

This is infeasible to implement but would be fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They seem to focus their campus recruitment events ([http://www.deloitte.co.uk/aem/student-events- calendar.cfm](http://www.deloitte.co.uk/aem/student-events-calendar.cfm)) heavily towards the Russell Group universities (Oxbridge, London, Durham etc.) If they want a more diverse talent pool, why don't they hold more events further afield?

</comment><comment><USER25> huge reflection of the commoditization of education. Essentially the only thing they're checking for now is 'did you go to college?' The top 10-20 schools will continue to standout, but outside of the 'name brands' the education is perceived as all being on the same level

<comment><USER26> Who's to say the top 20 schools are really that good, though? They're on top thanks to arbitrary, 'commodity' rankings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why is half the article in quotes?

<comment><USER28> It must be quoting from some source that isn't linked. If anyone can find it, we might change the URL to it. HN generally prefers original sources.

<comment><USER29> The article appears to be based on this press release: [http://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/press- releases/articles...](http://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/press- releases/articles/largest-british-business-to-adopt-contextualised- recruitment.html)

<comment><USER28> Somehow I can't bring myself to switch to that corpspeak. If people disagree we can do it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This graph says everything you need to know about higher education: [http://www.businessinsider.com/inflation- update-2011-1](http://www.businessinsider.com/inflation-update-2011-1)

I would suggest that academia is in a bubble, but many of the top Universities are sitting on massive endowments. They have a nearly endless supply of cash.

<comment><USER31> Government involvement in student loans is the direct cause of that.

<comment><USER32> Are you saying governments shouldn't create policy that allows student loans?

<comment><USER33> No they shouldn't when loans are guaranteed to cover your tuition and for the most part you are guaranteed a loan prices soar because there is no incentive to lower the costs, the uni's make more money, and banks and the government makes more money, and student are stuck with the bill.

This doesn't mean that governments shouldn't fund publicly accessible higher education, it just means that they need to do it in a smarter way.

Picking up the cheque (permanently or temporarily) always results in inflation, we see this in health care, we see this in housing, we see this in education.

<comment><USER34> I agree that student loans don't do the student much justice and there must be a smarter way of funding education. In Australia our HECs loan system essentially funds research which may benefit society as a whole but hardly benefits students when course content is in some cases years out of date. As it's a loan system that graduates don't repay until their income reaches a certain threshold (essentially an extra tax), with government approval this has allowed course fees to creep upwards.

I don't agree with the general comment on inflation. For instance, I'm not aware of Australia's medicare system leading to higher medical treatment costs. If anything it provides a base level of care and limits the amount that any private medical provider could provide.

In any case I'm certain that private insurance companies facilitate the same kind of inflation as they don't seem too concerned about the cost of services rendered when they can simply pass that onto their customers as a higher premium (which they in turn benefit from). At least where government spending is concerned, inflation can be managed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Russian Academy of Sciences becomes property of Putin government - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/duma-vote-seals-fate-of-russian-academy-of-sciences-1.13785

<comment><USER2> One of the nice things about corrupt dictatorships is that they're own incompetence limits their ability to become global powers and project outward. An insular Russia is good for the world. Keep up the shitty work Putin.</comment>


The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.eightprinciples.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Each of these 8 principles could also be applied to being a founder and building a startup. Take 5 minutes and check the video out.

1\. Get Focused: Stop hiding who you are and turn up the volume

2\. Get Focused: Start being intensely selfish

3\. Be Creative: Stop following the rules

4\. Be Creative: Start scaring yourself

5\. Use Your Wisdom: Stop taking it all so seriously

6\. Use Your Wisdom: Start getting rid of the crap

7\. Take Action: Stop being busy

8\. Take Action: Start something

<comment><USER2> To be honest I've seen more inspiring stuff on the back of a pack of Coco Pops. As ever general advice is easy, the details and stories is what makes stuff interesting. This has neither.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here is the original source <http://www.eightprinciples.com/>. And it doesn't have the horrible buzz in the background.</comment>


Ask HN:Review my quick app for the socially awkward - <AUTHOR>

This is a very basic app to help you converse with people you work with or loosely know but never know what to talk about. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts, any feature requests, any issues etc<p>www.chaikar.com <comment><USER2> You probably want to make registration email-free or better, require no registration so people can take a look at it easily.

Also, Comic Sans?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeh i need to add persistent login, the reg literally takes 5 seconds. email validation hasn't even been addded

regarding the comic sans, i wanted to go for the simple and light hearted look, maybe i missed it :/

<comment><USER2> Comic Sans has built up such a reputation for both ugliness and misuse (just take a look at its Wikipedia page for a brief summary and links about the kind of passions it raises) that using it non-ironically and without it being a distraction is probably impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good start. A couple things:

1) If its a password field, make it a password field. Typing in a password and seeing the text is a little weird.

2) When typing "@name likes blah," it becomes obvious when viewing the topics that you use @ as a delimiter and just take whatever is before it for the note, as the note was empty.

3) Try to make the input more robust - such as allowing name first, most of the time people will want to type in the topic (in this case, the person) first.

4) I'm sure you are working on it but a more informative interface about the notes you've kept would be nice. If a person is socially awkward they may not even remember names - much less who they've put in the system.

5) I'm not sure what your proficiency with HTML is or if you were just lazy because this is a throw-away app, but I'd look into doctypes and W3C validation. You use an xml style line break so I get the feeling you know a little about it, but for such a simple interface there shouldn't be any reason to have 25 errors on it.

I hope this criticizing wasn't too harsh - I aim for it to be constructive.

Neat idea too, I know a guy I work with that could totally use this.

<comment><USER4> I'll add one more:

* Can you support Twitter OAuth, or FB Connect, OpenID, clickpass .. ?

We're all tired of signing up for yet another site. Usually if it's a rather prominent site whose value I already understand and I know the value will be useful to me, I don't mind biting the bullet and registering. I forget where I read this, but there was this speaker once who said "Customers don't just pay with money. They pay with their time and angst" (paraphrased).

For more obscure sites I don't want to register because I don't know what they'll do with my email address, plus mentally I am trying to figure out if my annoyance of having to sign up for yet another site is going to actually pay dividends back to me at all. I don't want to waste my time.

Basically the registration part is barrier to entry for me, and I think it will help if you remove that friction from the sign up process.

Kind of like <http://CofounderGoogleDocs.com> \- the Google Docs spreadsheet for co-founders I posted here on HN recently. Many people jumped in because there was no friction. You just go to the page, and start adding your info (or start grabbing info)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is quite minimalist but interesting. I think you might get more traction if you spent some time writing up the "methodology" or workflow you're proposing here.

That is, if I understand it, I think what you're suggesting is that people use this app to take simple notes on acquaintances (e.g., "wife's name is Jane", "has three kids", "went to Penn State", etc.) and then use this app to recall those notes when you are about to meet these people (say, at a party or business function). A little writeup on this approach may help you clarify the value proposition for potential users, and should help you get some inbound links from productivity blogs.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's just a mostly empty web site with a login form. Not even screenshots.

<comment><AUTHOR> I kept it simple to load quickly on mobiles

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but to give at least some idea what to expect might be good?

<comment><AUTHOR> ok thanks i may add a screenshot

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clickable link: <http://www.chaikar.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> this seems.... odd.

No features, nothing working - just a login screen

EDIT: Ah. I see... I missed the last line of instructions

<comment><AUTHOR> there's a register page (only need email and password), takes 2 seconds to join. then the homepage where you login and make notes.

<comment><USER9> I was interested, saw i had to register, didn't bother.

note that i did bother to leave a comment.

lesson in usability.</comment></comment></comment>


The PHP Singularity (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/ <comment><USER2> The real sad thing is that we as a industry have not learnt a single thing from this. Deploying stuff on the server is still a nightmare with ever increasing layers of complexity and fragility. SSR on top of GraphQL on Npm on top of mongodb on top of kubernetes on top of docker on top of Linux on top of kvm. And we praise and promote this type of nonsense instead of simplifying stuff.

PHP still follows the very simple way. Install LAMP (perfected down to a simple one step script), run certbot, copy code and voila, you're done.

PHP and it's community on the other hand is learning from its mistakes. The popularity of Laravel and the clean code it forces you to write is a godsend. So is the work in the community to recommend it to every beginner.

</comment><comment><USER3> Make me wonder...

Is there anything like TypeScript or MoonScript for PHP? A source-to-source language that tries to mitigate the quirks and issues with the target language.

<comment><USER4> Just pick a better language (e.g. Python/Ruby/Groovy/C#). Period. And JavaScript was never as horrible as PHP anyway, in my opinion.

The thing is, you have more control over what language you can run on the server-side, whereas all your web browser clients run JavaScript. So it made sense to have a transpiler targeting JavaScript.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't trying to credit the language. Just curious about the state of the ecosystem.

I had the displeasure of PHP being the first "programming language" I came across. Most of my knowledge was gleaned from w3schools and various web pages scattered around the web. I recall doing a lot of Googling while trying to figure out edge cases and such.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Closes US Surface Factory, Moves Production to China - <AUTHOR> https://www.extremetech.com/computing/252743-microsoft-closes-us-surface-factory-moves-production-china <comment><USER2> > Microsoft's decision to shift Surface Hub manufacturing to China highlights > the difficulty in bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. > It's not just a question of opening a factory and hiring employees. There > are supply line considerations, source costs, and the simple fact that > American companies now produce many more products with far fewer employees > than they used to require in the 1970s, thanks to automation and improved > productivity.

Like with climate change, it's already too late.

<comment><USER3> Yep. Also,

> American companies now produce many more products with far fewer employees

PSA: You may have heard that American manufacturing is stronger than ever, it has just become automated. This story is largely result of funny accounting.

[https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about- manufacturing-...](https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about- manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/)

<comment><USER4> Which is apparent to anyone who doesn't have their heads stuck in some spreadsheets. Huge American manufacturing sectors (textiles, electronics, home appliances, etc) which were made in this country 30-40 years ago are no longer made here, or are made here in significantly reduced capacity.

So, its possible to talk about how efficient American manufacturing has become, but the average consumer doesn't see that as they walk the isles at Walmart. What they see is that its really hard to find anything actually made in the US. Those of us old enough to remember, _CAN_ remember a time when the clothing at the store said "made in America", or shed a little tear as we remove the 25 year old washer that has a made in america sticker and replace it with one that says made in Mexico or similar.

So, we may be making more planes and john deere tractors, but we definitely have had huge swaths of our consumer goods simply wiped out by cheap labor countries where hiring a half dozen people for 10 years to do final inspections on clothing costs less than putting a robot in a factory in the US.

The problem isn't that factory automation has been on a steady trend of reducing labor since Henry Ford. The problem is that now that those factories are located in cheap labor countries, they are still being slowly automated. So eventually when they reach 100% and the labor costs are strictly the cost of people programming and repairing the machines (see semiconductor fabs) they aren't magically going to move back to the US, rather they will stay in whatever part of the world managed to hold onto them during the final phases and still has the critical mass of supply chain.

<comment><USER5> Almost all of the high-value parts of an iPhone are made in the US. Yet there is a lot of hand-wringing about the low-value, labor-intensive work done on iPhones in China.

<comment><USER6> Screen&flash- South Korea, CPU - TSMC(Taiwan), frames - China.

Which high value part are you talking about is made in us?

<comment><USER7> The software, I would presume. The Snow Crash quote "America makes movies, music, and microcode" has never seemed more true.

<comment><USER8> I would bet Apple uses offshoring development sites like any corporation on the same league.

<comment><USER9> Not sure I make the same bet. Generally you don't outsource your core competencies. Design and software are Apple's core competencies. Assembling hardware is not.

<comment><USER8> You might be surprised how many core competencies are done by the major consulting firms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is dated July 20, 2017

<comment><USER5> ... and the title is wrong, it's about Surface Hub and not Surface (tablets and laptop)

<comment><USER11> The date is correct. This is an older article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It isn't mentioned in the article, but I think it would be reasonable to suggest that a 25% tariff on nearly every component that goes into these devices might have impacted the decision. The alternative is to manufacture the device outside of the US and then importing the completed device with no tariff applied.

Trump's economic policies are doing the exact thing everyone suggested they would, forcing modern manufacturing in the US to move elsewhere or face a 25% increase in component cost across the board.

<comment><USER13> It is so sadly funny that the strongest economy in the world can be manipulated so deeply this fast and nothing happens. This makes me want to read more about the Mongols, Romans, and Persians history. This must be a great time to do analytical research on how to measure manipulation of the mainstream opinions about well anything. I like to see some good simulators on the matter. Maybe gaming industry can help!

<comment><USER14> There is a lot of historical data on it already. Also in markets much more similar to modern markets, but it's important to keep in mind that things are different depending on the period.

Today the most valuable parts of a country isn't raw materials or factories, but know-how, and know-how is a lot more mobile than any other resource.

Romans faced a different threat, in that their biggest resource was the materials and the factories, and because of that, they didn't want one region to have access to all of it. So they made their weapons in a different place than their food source.

I don't think protectionism or nationalism has ever really worked though. You mention the Roman Empire, but it thrived the most when it was the most inclusive, tolerating every region and culture as long as they all paid their taxes on time and accepted everyone else. One of the key reasons the Roman Empire originally was so tough on Christianity and Judaism was because the monotheisms didn't accept others.

I think it'll be alright though, America has been through worse than Trump and the alt-right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The documentary The Thirteenth mentions Microsoft (among many other companies) US uses prison labour - which allows the company to pay workers a pittance which is viewed as being a type of exploitation. After this was exposed, a few similar companies (Victoria's Secret) stopped doing this. Has Microsoft?

<comment><USER15> Reference: [https://www.gamespot.com/forums/offtopic- discussion-31415927...](https://www.gamespot.com/forums/offtopic- discussion-314159273/microsoft-and-nintendo-exploit-us-prison-labor-31964583/)</comment></comment>


Shown HN: Artificial Wisdom – Work in progress (personal project). Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> http://www.inspiragr.am

<comment><USER2> Protip: add Show HN: to your submission title - it's the community standard for projects you personally created and will help it get picked up by various aggregators of hn projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I just added "Show HN:" to the front of the title and updated the post. The "Show HN:" then disappeared.

Is this as expected or should I make a new post? Sorry for the newbie questions, it is obviously my first time here.

<comment><USER2> I see it - sometimes hacker news is a little buggy when it comes to seeing your own updates.

EDIT: It's show HN, not shown hn as you have to answer your original question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I don't know where that 'Shown' came from. Somebody else edited the title and I am now unable to update it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why am I unable to change the title to remove the 'n' from 'Shown'?</comment>


Dropbox + git - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vskr/dropbox-git

<comment><USER2> What's the difference between this and just running git init in a Dropbox folder?

<comment><USER3> This creates a remote (in this case just another directory on your local machine) and you have to push to it, rather than your commits and changes instantly being synced to dropbox

<comment><AUTHOR> ^^ Exactly.

<comment><USER2> Sorry but what would be the URL you push to?

<comment><AUTHOR> Script should generate the URL/URI. it is basically location of your backup in dropbox folder.

You can find out the url by doing the following 1\. Go to root dir (top dir) of project you are backing up 2\. run following command 'git remote -v'

It should show you the location where you are going to push to</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


We need a mandatory retirement age for professors - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-need-a-mandatory-retirement-age-for-professors/2019/06/28/322dd9fa-982f-11e9-830a-21b9b36b64ad_story.html <comment><USER2> I'll be honest, I haven't read the article, just the headline, but the hard- line being proposed(in the title) is just as wrong as suggesting we need term limits to prevent career politicians or age limits to prevent senile politicians.

One of the best professors in my Computer Science department was the oldest. He still used Emacs, he biked to work, he taught. I brought up politics because I see similar proposals to deal with Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Bernie Sanders. Fuck this ageism, counter the issues you find with a person without relegating an entire group of people to a forced retirement.

Now that I have saved my spot, I will read this article.

 _Edit_ That was a quick read. As I suspected the author is proposing a blanket ban without respect to ability, and even brings up the cummulative ages of three potential DNC presidential candidates and the date of the signing of the US Constitution to make some kind of point. They attack older academics who "love the work too much to give it up", but they mention none of the real issues in upper-level education(a trend towards profit) that cause the problem.

I don't know how I feel, as a thirty year old, about a sixty-five year old requesting the seventy year olds get out of the way for the twenty-five year olds, but it's definitely not enthusiasm.</comment>


Is Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) the Concrete of the Future? - <AUTHOR> https://www.archdaily.com/922980/is-cross-laminated-timber-clt-the-concrete-of-the-future <comment><USER2> I'd be concerned that any adhesives used in the lamination would outgas toxic chemicals. My understanding is that the adhesives in plywood release formaldehyde.

<comment><USER3> Not in significant quantities:

[https://apawood-europe.org/products-trademarks/plywood/new/](https://apawood- europe.org/products-trademarks/plywood/new/)

Cancer caused by formaldehyde exposure is shown to occur at high exposures:

[https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes- prevention/risk/s...](https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes- prevention/risk/substances/formaldehyde/formaldehyde-fact-sheet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related and recent: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182971)

<comment><AUTHOR> Also related (posted by me): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359347](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359347)

The documentary referenced in the comment was really inspiring and led me to post here (unfortunately it is in Dutch)</comment></comment>


Will 2018 be the year of the neo-luddite? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/will-2018-be-the-year-of-the-neo-luddite <comment><USER2> Lacking from this article is the discussion on SolarPunks. [1] Tech optimists for a green future vs cyberpunks and anarchoprimitivists like those mentioned in the article.

However, as with the closing remarks of the article, we have to be careful about how technology affects society.

> The realisation that technological change isn't always beneficial nor > inevitable is long overdue, and that doesn't mean jettisoning all the joys > associated with modern technology.

[1]: [https://solarpunkanarchists.com/2016/05/27/what-is- solarpunk...](https://solarpunkanarchists.com/2016/05/27/what-is-solarpunk/)</comment>


How Taiwan's Digital Minister solved a mask supply problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/how-taiwans-unlikely-digital-minister-hacked-the-pandemic/ <comment><USER2> Wow. I remember when Audrey Tang (formerly Autrijus Tang) -- now Digital Minister in Taiwan -- was an active figure in the Perl community. She started a bunch of Perl projects and even wrote one of the first Perl 6 interpreters (Pugs) in Haskell.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang)

</comment><comment><USER3> Without the donation of Maps credits from Google, findthemasks.com couldn't have happened exactly as it did. I can't imagine what our bill would have been otherwise. Donations from a number of companies were (and remain) essential to leveraging the skilled volunteer workforce into something awesome.

<comment><USER4> If really no companies were interested, maybe you would just have added new POIs on OpenStreetMaps and everybody could build on it

<comment><USER5> I'm not in Taiwan but Japan (not metropolis), here OSM is not enough detailed and not updated well. Is it different in other countries?

<comment><USER6> Certainly from my experience in the cities of New Zealand its as good as Google maps and in some respects superior. I just assumed it would be like that in Taiwan and so when I read about the Google bill I was thinking "shame they didn't use OSM". Certainly if I were to make a similar project for where I live I would use OSM for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, they have a 'Digital Minister' who's competent, which puts them way ahead of a lot of places ...

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://archive.is/eb54h](https://archive.is/eb54h)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to breathe that tech-democratic air for a while. Does anyone know of a graduate program, or a different way in which I could (go to Taiwan and) meet the right people?

</comment><comment><USER10> Audrey Tang! I know it was her even before reading the article.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great article.

A tangential benefit: I learned about Taoist breathing practices, and Pol.is.

I also see that the global media is very reluctant to discuss Vietnam's success in handling Covid. I wonder why.

<comment><USER12> I strongly recommend this translation of the I Ching [https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/i-ching-book-of- changes/id4381...](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/i-ching-book-of- changes/id438132417)

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I will try this out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good article, but why are the titles always clickbait? She doesn't seem that "unlikely" to me, and she didn't hack the _pandemic_ – the hacking was to do with mitigation efforts, and not the actual virus or disease.

<comment><USER14> Ok, we've made her not be unlikely and have replaced the baity general bit with the neutral specific bit (opening paragraphs ftw), above.

<comment><USER15> nit(to me, maybe not to them): Audrey requests the use of 3rd person pronouns. Out of curiosity - how does that work in Chinese?

<comment><USER16> Gendered pronouns don't exist in spoken Chinese. Some such as 她, 它, and 牠 do exist in written Chinese, but they are neologisms, arising only relatively recently (nineteenth century). They're all pronounced the same (tā in pinyin). Prior to then, the word 他 (also tā) would be used to represent he/him/she/her/it.

I have heard that in modern times, some actually use the pinyin tā in a sentence consisting otherwise only of Chinese characters to represent the truly gender-neutral pronoun. However, I've never seen that myself; I've seen only 他.

Incidentally, this is why you'll sometimes hear a native Chinese speaker mistakenly use "he" or "him" instead of "she" or "her." It's a distinction they don't make in their native spoken language, so it doesn't come naturally to them.

<comment><USER17> > Incidentally, this is why you'll sometimes hear a native Chinese speaker > mistakenly use "he" or "him" instead of "she" or "her."

I know speakers of foreign languages with strong gendering (as in every person/object has a gender in their language) and they will still confuse she/he at times.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the history of [upvote] feature? - <AUTHOR> The upvote feature is arguably one of the best features of reddit/hacker news. Today it's adopted by many sites in the world, just like the "like" feature of Facebook. I am very interested in how it developed into the feature it is today. Could you people enlighten me with comments and links? <comment><USER2> The first place I remember seeing it is Slashdot - so perhaps start there.

It's weird how now it seems such a normal feature now despite the fact that in the past even major forums like SomethingAwful and TOTSE (hell, that goes back to the BBS days..) had no such feature and functioned perfectly fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> May I know the time?</comment></comment>


Robots, not immigrants, are taking American jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-robots-jobs-20170330-story.html?fbclid=IwAR3eZ11cWWSd7LZ50oxzLj44lgIdW5Kzco8kkUK98c93CH_Cvu64j_p1INw <comment><USER2> There is also a really good video on this topic: [1]

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU) "Humans need not apply."</comment>


Incarcerated Pennsylvanians now have to pay $150 to read. We should be outraged - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/incarcerated-pennsylvanians-now-have-to-pay-150-to-read-we-should-all-be-outraged/2018/10/11/51f548b8-cbd9-11e8-a85c-0bbe30c19e8f_story.html <comment><USER2> Being outraged about this one policy in one state is like focusing on a paper cut when the patient is a bloated corpse. Prison systems across the country are focused almost exclusively on exploitation of inmates and taxpayers for profit or political gain, making our world less safe. Rehabilitation is given lip service but is actually actively discouraged, because recidivism means more money.[0]

If the article gets people more outraged about the system as a whole, fantastic. If it just gets this one policy reversed, that's a positive, I guess, but it means people get to feel good about _that_ and pretend or forget about _all the other problems_ with these systems.

[0] - I am aware of many of the programs which are exceptions to this rule.

<comment><USER3> I definitely agree with your assessment, but I do think it's worthwhile to focus on smaller "paper cut" injustices. For one, the smaller injustices are usually microcosms of the overall systemic failures, and provide a digestible window into the greater problem. Two, if it's unlikely (if ever) that system- wide reform will be enacted, it's still worthwhile to relieve inmates of these day-to-day problems, which, over long sentences, can result in real harm at the individual level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the excuse they are using to push this? People building paper crossbows à la MythBusters?

I can't even see a paper thin justification they could use to sell this. I'd be interested to know who owns the company and who they are connected to in Pennsylvania government. And how much of a kickback the prison system is getting from this.

<comment><USER5> If this was the only article I read about this subject. I would agree with your comments, unfortunately this is another example of a one sided news article. I was so shocked by this story I looked into it further and it turns out that certain inmates and "donators" were using the book donation system to smuggle books who's pages were infused with drugs into the prisons. Not only that, this article makes it sound like the prisoners have no access to books at all, which is very misleading as all of the correction facilities have libraries and are going to increase funding to improving them in the wake of this new policy. I would agree that it seems absurd to force inmates to purchase an expensive e-reader and this also may be a form of censorship but I'm not sure I disagree with censorship in prisons. You lose many other rights when you are incarcerated and not being able to read everything you want seems very small on the list.

<comment><USER4> >it turns out that certain inmates and "donators" were using the book donation system to smuggle books who's pages were infused with drugs into the prisons.

I looked into that after another poster replied. I'm almost certain the problem is being exaggerated based on the quotes from prison officials, and removing the ability to deliver books to all prisoners is probably overkill.

Thanks for answering my question though. This sounds like the paper thin justification someone is using to get rich that I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just do not understand why American prisons have to be _so_ harsh on the prisoners. These people are already being punished by having their freedom taken away, where's the sense in torturing them further?

<comment><USER7> The love of money. It's legal slavery and the market masters have always loved that

<comment><USER8> The cost of an inmate is greater than the cost of a student, per year. The industries in Pennsylvania's state prisons mostly supply the inmates with textiles and soap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As usual, WP spins the story by leaving out a key detail: all mail is digitized for _free_.

So, just _mail_ the damn books (or whatever printed matter you like).

<comment><USER10> I can't imagine that the prison is going to scan an entire book mailed to a prisoner. Where can we read about that?

<comment><USER9> [https://www.cor.pa.gov/Initiatives/Pages/FAQ-New- Procedures....](https://www.cor.pa.gov/Initiatives/Pages/FAQ-New- Procedures.aspx)

"Will inmates or inmate families be charged with printing the mail?

DOC is printing the mail from Smart Communications _at no charge_ to inmates _or_ their families."

They may not do it _quickly_ , and they may not do it _well_ , but they are obligated to do it for _free_ under the contract terms.

(This is an _Opinion_ piece -- check the URL. WP does not fact-check opinion pieces at all.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This probably doesn't belong on HN, but it sure is outrageous. Our system is so messed up, we need federal guidelines and protections for prisoners.

<comment><USER12> It's the intersection of (mis) applied Technology, and incarceration. Monetization and Control of what prisoners read, through restriction to digital print. I think thats fascinating, chilling, evil. I bet what you read is re-read by the controller.

I wonder how long before people work out point-to-point covert channels using primitive cipher systems inside shared text corpus?

<comment><USER9>
      Control of what prisoners read, through restriction to digital print

In this case, there is NO content censorship applied to digitization _any differently from printed matter_.

And all mailed content is digitized for _free_.

<comment><USER9> Uh, downvoters: this, like all WP _opinion_ pieces, was not fact-checked.

If you look into the actual rules'[0] Q&A section, you will find:

      Q. Will inmates or inmate families be charged with printing their mail?

      A. DOC is printing the mail from Smart Communications at no charge to inmates or their families.

[0] [https://www.cor.pa.gov/Initiatives/Pages/FAQ-New- Procedures....](https://www.cor.pa.gov/Initiatives/Pages/FAQ-New- Procedures.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> All prisons should have free libraries. This is basic stuff. Reading is a good thing and should be promoted at all times. We can talk about edge cases for censorship (extremist stuff) but there is no reason not to allow them ready access to the books available at any local library.

<comment><USER8> Pennsylvania's state prisons, the ones this article is about, do have free libraries.</comment></comment>


Software Transactional Memory in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://java.ociweb.com/mark/stm/article.html#Overview <comment><USER2> Are there any benchmarks for parallel algorithms done with/without STM? What is the performance hit?

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to learn about STM, I recommend Simon Peyton-Jones' _Beautiful Concurrency_ , which is a chapter of the _Beautiful Code_ book:

<http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/74063/beautiful.pdf></comment>


Why my website is better than yours: usability, performance, graceful fallback - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/hacker-daily/why-my-website-is-better-than-yours-85fc643ccc2f <comment><USER2> > The entire site is 81.4KB right now, and 76.8KB of that is the font.

This means that the website could have bean 17x smaller if there was just no font loaded.

This article reminds me of [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) and [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

I don't think that 5KB sites should be a standard, some pages just needs pictures or JS to give the experience the users needs. But a developer should always know what he is doing: If all you want to do is a show/hide toggle, then don't include a full blown JS library.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post, very informative on how to do webdesign</comment>


Think twice before naming your new programming language - <AUTHOR> http://guillaume-nargeot.blogspot.com/2009/08/think-twice-before-naming-your-new_21.html

<comment><USER2> I think this goes for a lot more than just programming languages. FOSS projects in general tend to pick some generic English words as names that make them really hard to find. I've even seen a few startups that've fallen into this pit.

Ironically, the fact that most "decent" domain names have been taken is forcing startups to put more time into coming up with a name which could ultimately help their searchability, though it does come at the expense of the "speakability" of their name.

<comment><USER3> _FOSS projects in general tend to pick some generic English words as names that make them really hard to find_

This is related to most F/OSS projects having a crushing deficit in the marketing skills department. Notice how most don't have a visual identity, either? And how they typically launch mostly undocumented, on somebody else's website?

I had a checklist for launching A/Bingo, and held off on it for a week past when the code was ready, because the marketing wasn't. Logo, slogan, landing page, usage documentation, install documentation, live demo, domain name. It practically killed me because I was/am proud of that project and wanted to start collecting feedback but I know it won't spread if I don't do a proper job of it.

There is no point in spending dozens or hundreds of engineer hours on a project if it languishes in obscurity because you were too disinterested to, e.g., put a logo on it. (Mine cost $210. Cheap at the price!)

Incidentally, even if you can't get the exact match domain .com domain name for your project, for OSS everyone is just going to Google you anyhow. Name the project well and you will rank for your own name very, very fast as a consequence of your normal marketing activities, since good OSS tends to collect authoritative links with laser focused anchor text. </freeSEOAdvice>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Similarly, I can only imagine the frustration of Jazz fans when they try looking for their favorite guitarist. :)

Although in this case the last name can help.

</comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft is the worst for this! .NET is a terrible name to search for. SQL Server Reporting Services is also awful. At least they've seemed to have gotten the clue with Silverlight.

</comment><comment><USER6> eg of what I think of a badly named language.* I think * clojure is a sorry name for the fascinating language it is.

In the words of Rich Hickey - It's a ploy on closures and is supposed to be pronounced as cloSSure (and the domain was available; fulfilled his requirements of combining c for clr, j for java). Many have been spelling it as cloJure, even stuart halloway(author of the only book available on clojure) has couple of podcasts with cloJure pronounced with the emphasis on J.

my little rant aside, the name(in context to the article) is instant seo juice. input just one word and google spits everything clojure, no distractions from random links.

I have taken a mid way to pronounce clojure - clozure.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think "Factor" is a good name for a programming language, it's memorable and it conjures up appropriate mental images. That the word has both of these qualities ensures that it will be used for many other things, and this will be true of most good names. Instead of worrying about the googlability of "Factor", can't we count on people to at least search for "Factor programming language"? And if Google isn't already returning good enough results for that now, I think I'd rather wait a little while for search technology to catch up than compromise on the names of my programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER8> What about Ruby? Python? Java? Those are pretty "normal" terms. The only reason search engines can come up with nice results for those languages is that there are thousands of pages out there which mention the word "python" or "ruby" or "java" in context of programming.

I agree that J and R are (and will be) very hard to search for, but not Factor. If/when the language becomes popular, a Google search for "factor" will be dominated by results that relate to the programming language.

<comment><USER9> I remember the first time I went searching for the Io and Processing languages, expecting that the generality of the names would make it hard. I got good results right away.

On the other hand, some names make it hard to talk about things. For example, much as I like the Sequel ORM for Ruby, having a aural discussion about it is more trouble than it should be because you have to be clear when you are talking about the RUby library or SQL. (Pedant alert: SQL should be pronounced ess que el anyway, but few people do.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> At least concerning R there's <http://www.rseek.org>

</comment><comment><USER11> Excellent point, but you can easily expand the list way beyond programming languages. Django is a nice one, sure it is a great tribute to a great musician, but I keeping having to tell google to leave out 'music' when searching for info.

Search engines ought to be smart enough to determine the general context of your searches across several searches in a row but it seems that that is not yet available.

</comment><comment><USER12> Part of the problem seems to be the programmer's habit of using the shortest possible variable names and commands: ls, cp, mv, and how many programs have variables a, b, x, and so on. There shouldn't be any drawback to using longer descriptive names (or funny, arbitrary names) for languages since you won't have to type them often; and they are much superior in searchability. The more unique the better for searchability, in fact. Also, can anyone tell me what he's talking about in making C "easy to search on the internet." Finding general information on C has been extremely frustrating.

<comment><AUTHOR> The following page explains the usage of the "+" operator on Google search, and mention that some common terms like "C++" receive a special treatment: <http://www.googleguide.com/plus_operator.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Look to the pharmaceutical industry: Aspirin, Pinex, Panodil, .............

</comment><comment><USER14> His advice would seem to distill to "invent a new word as a name for your language". Would this be a sensible thing to do?

What would some examples of "good" programming language names be? Most languages I can think of have names from {English words} or existing proper nouns and so _any_ non new name has a potential to clash on doing a web search at least till the language name becomes popular enough to rise to the top.

Do we really want new computer language authors to create nonsense phrases as names for their languages?

</comment><comment><USER15> These two searches seem to work: Factor programming language R programming language

So instead of writing "Factor tutorial" (for which btw Google asks you if you mean the language), write "Factor programming language tutorial". Being more specific about what you're looking for helps.

</comment><comment><USER16> I use a scripting language that was originally named "Small" . As you can imagine, searching for it was terrible. They've since moved to a slightly better name of "pawn".</comment>


Simple, seamless storage (up to 64GB) for your MacBook - <AUTHOR> http://theniftyminidrive.com

<comment><USER2> Have they fixed the quality issues with this? I backed the original run of these on KickStarter, and while they were neat, two of the three I received lasted less than a week. We were sent the newer versions, but they frequently had to be removed and inserted to get OSX to see them.

<comment><USER3> Yep. I was a backer too and received some early, crappy units. The latest revision is really good :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Needing a tool to remove it is a major flaw. An SD card that only protrudes by a few mm would be far more useful because you could remove it with your finger nail.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anybody comment on the speed compared to the internal SSD HD of a Macbook Air ?

<comment><USER3> Much slower. The flash chips in a microSD card can only do a few tens of MB/s.

The are now full size sd cards that claim 250MB/s, but not micro ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is this different from a 64GB SD card?

<comment><USER7> This adapter does not stick out ~11mm</comment></comment>


Generics in C without void* or macros – enabled by psychec - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ltcmelo/psychec#generic-programming <comment><USER2> I don't really understand what the point of all this is, and why anyone would consider using this in a real-world application they're developing. There's already a C-like language which lets you write type-safe generic programs: it's called C++! And if for some reason you really want or need to restrict yourself to using C language features (almost) exclusively, you can disable RTTI, exceptions, and use a technique to avoid linking to libstdc++ (or equivalent). It really seems to me that the point of all this is just to reinvent the wheel, but maybe I'm missing something, I only skimmed the paper.

<comment><USER3> The problem with C++ is that in addition to generic functionality, it also brings a ton of other baggage that even if you do not use, you still pay for (e.g. personally i really dislike how slow C++ compilers are).

Though TBH i wouldn't use OP's preprocessor either as i think that void* and macros are perfectly fine.

<comment><USER4> One of the reasons C++ is so complicated is that you don't pay for the features that you don't use. If you wanted generics in C, you can easily use C++ without any of those other features (baggage, if you will) and not pay for it.

Heck, you could define a few macros and make it impossible to use any baggage features you don't like.

I've used C++ in a pretty tight embedded environment and it was great.

<comment><USER5> > I've used C++ in a pretty tight embedded environment and it was great.

I'd love to hear some details. I'm always looking for C++ stories that didn't end in disaster and what the people did that worked.

<comment><USER6> I've done similar. The Microsoft Band UI was written in C++. No templates or other advanced features, compiler was stuck on 2003 standard. We had templates but used the trick of implementing them in a .cpp file and declaring all the instanciations of them we'd ever use at the bottom of the same file. Had to write our own to guarantee 0 allocs.

It is quite do-able. Lots of static declarations, basically write C with classes. V-tables ended up being non-trivial in size, but what can you do, GUIs and all that. Possibly the best (only?) good use of inheritance hierarchies.

256KB memory, the UI only had 60KB or so available for it IIRC. We also had a scratch pad available over a super slow bus of a couple megs, but it couldn't be used too much or we'd drop frames and we loved our 30fps v-sync'd performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No void* or macros, but requires a special compiler frontend.

<comment><USER8> Yes, that was confusing. "Look, you don't need to use these C-features if you use another language than C."

<comment><USER9> C++ 14, Haskell _and_ Python.

One of the reasons I'm actually going for pure C in this modern day and age, is that I can just write a small program, without having any other dependency.

I'm sure the same could be said for C++, too, but for some reason, with my setup (GCC 5.1.0 with MinGW on Windows 7), I'm averaging around 800KB on C++ vs 80KB on C, for the (mostly) same code. _EDIT:_ It appears that exception- handling is one of the reasons the binary is bigger in C++ than C.

I mainly write code for embedded devices, so whatever programs I write on x86 is to interface with those devices, hence I'm quite comfortable staying with C.

<comment><USER3> Are you sure it isn't debugging information that bloats the executable? Try a strip --strip-all your.exe and see if it is still that big.

<comment><USER9> > _Try a strip and see if it is still that big._

...I guarantee that it is nothing short of _humongous_ xD

Joking aside, maybe, I don't know, it's been a while since I used some C++ code, but I'll have a look into it the next time around.

...though it's probably unlikely, I use Code::Blocks and exclusively use the "Release" candidate, and uncheck the "Debug" version, and I'm quite confident the CB authors know what they are doing.

<comment><USER3> I do not remember Code::Blocks' configurations, but a Release configuration may still contain debug symbols so you can debug your release executable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You should never typedef a pointer to an object. That's common knowledge amongst experienced C developers and an immediate red flag, even for myself normally welcoming of anything built with Haskell.

<comment><USER11> I'm not an expert C developer but can see some semantic benefits of typedefing a pointer.

Is this considered harmful because it hides the fact that you're dealing with a pointer in the first place?

<comment><USER12> As evidenced by countless examples of somethingPTR-types, it is done regularly. But the main problem is indeed that you hide the pointer.

If you apply qualifiers like const to your type, results might me unexpected.

It might have semantic benefits, but C developers should be trained to ignore all these strange *-symbols anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So to program C in this special way I need C++, Haskell, _and_ Python. No thank you. If/when I still work in C, it's with the aim of keeping bloat and dependencies to a dull roar at most.

</comment><comment><USER14> Type generic expressions [1] already exist in C11. You can do this without a special compiler front-end if you need it, you would just need to define each variant by hand. These are supported in GCC and Clang with the -std=c11 flag.

[1]: [http://www.robertgamble.net/2012/01/c11-generic- selections.h...](http://www.robertgamble.net/2012/01/c11-generic- selections.html)

<comment><USER15> I developed these ideas a bit further with the use of XX macros, which allow you to make a set of functions generic across some list of types. There can be real performance wins to this over void*: [https://abissell.com/2014/01/16/c11s-_generic-keyword- macro-...](https://abissell.com/2014/01/16/c11s-_generic-keyword-macro- applications-and-performance-impacts/)

<comment><USER16> That looks handy. I got bored one day and built a fluent interface: [http://flukus.github.io/fluent-interfaces- for-c.html](http://flukus.github.io/fluent-interfaces-for-c.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like C for the small set of basic rules and that it does not impose much cognitive overhead of learning too many new things for a given project I have to get to know. Typedefs were already too much and I prefer not to use them...

<comment><USER18> Typedefs are nice if you do not want to write 'struct' all the time...

<comment><USER9> Yes! Typedefs are definitely worth the time spent learning them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting link, but if anybody is interested in making real practical use of generics in a C-style language, then it's best to take a look at Zig.

<comment><USER20> Zig is not able to output c code that could be consumed by an alternative [optimized|verified/proofed] C compiler like Intel along with other questionable decisions such as "Zig does not support RAII or operator overloading because both make it very difficult to tell where function calls happen just by looking at a function body. Zig tends to avoid syntactic sugar except where it would have a significant effect on the semantics of a program. Zig does not have a C-style for loop, because you can just use the more general-purpose while loop instead with only a little bit of extra code. [1] The compiler is free to inline non-extern functions, change their parameters, and otherwise !!do whatever it wants!!, since they are internal functions." [2]

[1] [https://ziglang.org/download/0.1.1/release- notes.html](https://ziglang.org/download/0.1.1/release-notes.html) [2] [https://andrewkelley.me/post/intro-to- zig.html](https://andrewkelley.me/post/intro-to-zig.html)

<comment><USER21> Just a note for drive by viewers, there's a link here to 0.1.1 release notes but a lot has changed since 0.1.1:

* [0.2.0 release notes]([https://ziglang.org/download/0.2.0/release-notes.html](https://ziglang.org/download/0.2.0/release-notes.html))

* [0.3.0 release notes]([https://ziglang.org/download/0.3.0/release-notes.html](https://ziglang.org/download/0.3.0/release-notes.html))

* [0.4.0 release notes]([https://ziglang.org/download/0.4.0/release-notes.html](https://ziglang.org/download/0.4.0/release-notes.html))

0.5.0 is scheduled to be released Sept 30.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can you add existentially-quantified generics? Then OOP with dynamic dispatch would just be syntactic sugar. IMHO this would be way better than C++ since it would completely unify generics with the OO approach.</comment>


Dark triad - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

<comment><USER2> You might be interested in the results from this study by the Online Privacy Foundation and Kaggle into whether Twitter can be used to detect some of these traits in individuals and groups:

[https://www.onlineprivacyfoundation.org/twitter- psychopathye...](https://www.onlineprivacyfoundation.org/twitter- psychopathyexperiment-results/)

I'd imagine Facebook/Google could also possibly have explored similar analysis internally and/or as research partnerships, and they should have much richer data.</comment>