Why jQuery.proxy rocks my world - <AUTHOR> http://www.makuchaku.in/blog/why-jquery-proxy-rocks-my-world

<comment><USER2> This sort of thing happens a lot when people learn jQuery but not Javascript. This fascinating "jQuery feature" is just a wrapper for JavaScript's built-in functions call and/or it's brother apply.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Function/call)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Function/apply)

<comment><USER3> Or rather, it returns a new function that wraps call/apply with a "baked in" value of 'this', so that it can be passed as a callback and retain the correct 'this'. That's a bit different than just being a wrapper for them - it's shorthand for using something like "var that = this" and a closure.

When we start seeing people using (jQuery.proxy(xxx)()) - then they've learned too much jQuery and not enough Javascript :-)

<comment><USER4> Exactly. It's a Function.bind clone:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Function/bind)

Unfortunately, bind is a 5th edition feature, not widely available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since the app is apparently written using backbone.js, the _.bindAll method would be a neater solution here (as I see one of the commenters on the post points out).

<comment><AUTHOR> Other parts of the app use Backbone. FBNotificationWatcher is a simple implementation based on JS.Class - <http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/classes.html>

<comment><USER6> JSClass seems to provide this too :) <http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/binding.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I prefer to just use a closure - but that just might be because I've used them so long that my brain thinks it looks nicer.

Another nice context-setting trick is to set the context manually when you do ajax requests - then callbacks will have the context of the object you did the request in:

      var myobj = {
        done: "I'm done.",
        load: function(){
          $.ajax({
            context: this,
            success: function(){
              alert(this.done);
            }
          });
        }
      };

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm... Nice idea. But what if the closure is to be called from somewhere else as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know when jQuery added this method, but for the longest time they didn't have it and made you use closures even while most other javascript libraries had similar methods. Their argument was that you should know what's going on rather than just using a convenience method all over the place (and likely in situations where you don't need it).

</comment><comment><USER9> That looks like a Class in MooTools. Difference seems to be that it is a single lib dependency and "proxy" is called "bind"

It would look something like this

        var FBNotificationWatcher = new Class({
            Implements: [Options],

            options: {
                timeout: 500,
                url: 'http://dot.com',
                onRequestComplete: function(response){}
            },

            initialize: function(options){
                this.setOptions(options);

                this.request = new Request({
                    url: this.options.url,
                    onComplete: function(resp){
                        this.processNotifications(resp);
                        this.options.onRequestComplete(resp);
                    }.bind(this)
                });

                this.getNotifications();
            },

            getNotifications: function(){
                this.request.send({//data});

                return this;
            },

            processNotifications: function(rawNotificationData){
                //do stuff
                this.getNotifications.delay(this.options.timeout, this);
            }
        });

I'll check out backbone if I'm doing some jQuery dev.

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess this is kind of surprising/interesting if you haven't taken a functional programming course in university, but as others have pointed out, proxy is just a simpler wrapper on top of 'apply'/'call'. You should read the docs on those two functions, as the difference in the way they work is subtle but worth understanding.

</comment><comment><USER11> IIRC, .bind(this) was used in the exact same way in mootools years and years ago, and maybe even in Prototype before that.

Oh how I wish mootools had won the JS library war...

<comment><USER12> The difference is that MooTools and Prototype modify the built in Function. Because of this, old versions of MooTools, and Prototype don't play nice with current browsers. This a a big reason jQuery won the war. function() {}.bind() is more convenient and cleaner, but $.proxy() will work regardless of whether Microsoft incorrectly implements a built in bind in their latest browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice technique but it definitely illustrates the problems which Javascript's ill-defined this-keyword brings about (which was discussed here a few days ago).

This same problem could easily have been solved by setting a private variable (self, _this, cx, whatever) to this upon instantiation and referring to that instead of this.

In fact, I find myself using that technique (using self-defined variables instead of context) , especially for namespacing.

        var myNamespace = {};
        (function(cx) {
            cx.myClass = function() {
                var self = this;
                self.action = function() {
                    self.foo = "bar";
                }
            };
        })(myNamespace);

It makes your code easier to refactor with fewer hard-references to maintain. I'm about to completely give up any usage of "this" for a "var self = this;" upon object-creation.

Javascript context-handling is really just too messed up to be dependent on, and while it allows for lots of "cute" hacks, I personally find it creating a lot more problems than it solves.</comment>


Looking For a New Way to Live: neighborhoods that generate power, grow food - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/business/james-ehrlich-environment-neighborhood.html <comment><AUTHOR> _... a far-reaching plan to create new neighborhoods that will generate their own power through solar photovoltaic panels, biomass and biogas from material, food and animal waste, and geothermal sources, to name but a few. The communities will also grow their own food largely from aquaponic farms, which essentially combine plants with fish cultivation in water._

OK, so far, so good...

 _At the outset, the communities that ReGen hopes to build will be within an hour's travel from major cities to attract those who must commute to work._

Fail. Expensive land within commuting range, but remote workers don't need to commute. Expensive land near supermarkets, so what's the incentive to "farm"? Kids need to be driven to baseball, but your car is a 10-minute schlep from your house, and it's raining.

Here's a better idea: Bring a few key urban amenities to any thousands of actual existing but fading exurban and rural villages: produce market, bakery, well-equipped playground, car charger, decent fiber line, bookstore cafe/co- work space, weekend evening bus into town and back so you can have a couple of glasses of wine.

It's funny to call a project that prominently features waste biomass and swimming pool aquaponics "glam" but that's what it is and why it won't change the world. ReGen could make an actual meaningful difference if it spent a fraction of the investment it hopes to raise on actually learning how people live and making strategic improvements to their existing environments. This takes time and is gradual work with an unglamorous mix of success and failure, uninteresting to investors and unlikely to get you featured as a "visionary" in the NYT. People and their bullshit, SMH.</comment>


Really Simple Tax - <AUTHOR> http://andorjakab.blog.hu/2012/07/15/really_simple_tax

<comment><USER2> The author failed to answer an very important question about RST: is it revenue-neutral? By which I mean, does the government receive equal revenue under RST as under the complex system it replaces?

The "revenue neutral" question is very important -- it frequently makes or breaks tax reform measures, on the ground that anything but revenue neutrality hands a reform measure's opponents an easy basis for criticism.

Revenue neutrality, if true, would greatly increases the practical value of RST. By contrast, if taxpayers pay half the old rates, but the government receives half the revenue, the system seems less a reform than a gimmick.</comment>


Vulnx – bot that detect vulnerabilities in multiple types of CMS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anouarbensaad/vulnx <comment><USER2> Really nice tool. Maybe this will finally change my boss' mind on using WordPress for all the landing pages...

<comment><USER3> why dont use wordpress? its an easy and powerfull cms. just dont install themes with tons of plugins of 3rd parties that dont care about security and updates.

<comment><USER4> The whole point of WordPress is themes and plugins. If you aren't going to use them, why even bother for a landing page. Just throw together some static HTML.

<comment><USER5> Well, the other "whole point" of Wordpress is that non-technical people can modify their website without involving a developer.

I wonder how many newbie contractors learn this every year when they set up a static site generator for their first client's brochure website and then realize that static site generators are for developers, not someone who just wants to keep their restaurant menu updated every month.

<comment><USER6> There is a middleground, with flat file CMS. I setup a Kirby install for a client not used to any sort of online administration and they're doing just fine.

<comment><USER7> Kirby looks interesting[1], and the $109 flat-fee license shouldn't be too much for most businesses, it is probably more than most individuals would pay to set up their holiday photo blog etc. I wonder if they considered a free- for-noncommercial license? I guess they do let you run it locally to see if it works for you, which is friendly.

1: [https://getkirby.com/](https://getkirby.com/)

<comment><USER6> While it technically does require a license, they never go after you or restrict what you can do with the software. I think if you email for official help they won't assist without a valid license number. I do think it's bad form that they discontinued the personal/non profit license which was about 30% cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like someome made a wrapper for joomscan and wpscan...

</comment><comment><USER9> There's a new one of these every week. How is this one any better/different? Does it perform any better than a simple curl loop looking for the existence of a plugin? Or grep?

</comment><comment><USER10> vulnx now has an interactive mode to easily interact.</comment>


Ask HN: OSM-based GPS replacement for Google/Apple maps? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The only one I know of is Scout: [http://scout.me/](http://scout.me/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Do you know a good alternative to JIRA in terms of configurability? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a project management tool that would allow us to have custom workflows, custom fields, workflow triggers + web hooks and some REST api.<p>We want to automate couple of processes we run at the company. JIRA is so complex and bloated and I wonder if there's anything competitive on the market. <comment><USER2> Can you give some examples of what you want to automate?

I found JIRA really clunky and overly complex. I much prefer Trello at the moment. It has fewer features but I find it is far faster and more intuitive to use. It does have web hooks and third party site integration but it depends what you want to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the things we would want to automate is incident handling the workflow includes things like sending SMS when the accident happens (plus email messages), connecting to a remote service to obtain accident details, up to a point of creating a summary with all the details from different system that would preferably go to some Confluence page. We handle it with JIRA currently with workflows + custom workflow functions + webhooks but it becomes harder and harder to maintain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Had anyone tried Mingle? [https://www.thoughtworks.com/mingle/](https://www.thoughtworks.com/mingle/)

I use it and it's quite good. Not free though.

</comment><comment> thomas-b Phabricator can probably do all that through its event system (herald), but a few part of the CI (harbormaster) is partly a prototype application which makes the support/doc limited.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tuleap ([https://www.tuleap.org/](https://www.tuleap.org/)) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks but that seem to be a project management tool only, without any way to customize it (as far as the web site tells). I know there's source code available but I would prefer not to create a custom solution.

<comment><USER5> It's a full featured ALM (incl. source management, CI, code review & all).

For the tracking part, everything is configurable trough the web UI and per project (contrary to Jira). You don't depend on a site admin to customize your templates, as project owner you are 100% to create as many tracker as you need with the layout you want.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't mess with the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/dont-mess-with-the-internet-billboard-in-lamar-smiths-home-district <comment><USER2> this has been our fastest campaign to break $5k so far (2 hours).

not saying a whole lot since we just launched last month, but pretty awesome to see (and is a cause we're really glad to be a part of)..props to alexis and the reddit community.</comment>


Logo design trends of 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.logolounge.com/articles/2018-logo-trends <comment><USER2> We changed the URL from [https://qz.com/1292403/the-dark-age-of-soulless-sans- serif-l...](https://qz.com/1292403/the-dark-age-of-soulless-sans-serif-logos- is-coming-to-an-end/), which points to this.

Some comments below might make less sense outside the context of the qz.com article's polemic. But it's more substantive (not to mention fairer) to link to the original source.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The traditional excuse for stripping away ornament has been about improving > legibility, especially for small screens. This is a fallacy

No, serifs really do have legibility issues, but not for small _screens_ ; they cause problems at (very) small font sizes where glyphs are only a handful of pixels tall.

> You can render a serif letter in seven pixels

Yes, but that's pushing it and the legibility will depend on the quality of the font hinting, how the font rasterizer antialiases, and the way subpixels are utilized[1]. Legibility will even depend on the display technology: low resolution fonts on a CRT can be a lot harder to read compared to an LCD. (a shadow mask means phosphors do _not_ align 1-to-1 with pixels[2])

Of course, legibility is in the eye of the beholder, and many people find serifed fonts to be easier to read, while others prefer sans-serif, and some people just don't care. For some people, anything smaller or more complicated than high-contrast 96pt simple sans-serif is unreadable.

> drops the serifs from its logo

A logo, however, is probably (much?) larger than the small font sizes where serifs often have legibility issues.

[1] [http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h...](http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea6tw- gulnQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea6tw-gulnQ)

<comment><USER4> Who is using CRTs? Mobiles have incredible pixel density, high-pixel-density displays and TVs are becoming the norm, etc. Is this even an issue? Who only has 7 pixels for their text?

<comment><USER3> Serifs on low resolution fonts didn't gain legibility when LCD market share became dominant.

> Is this even an issue?

Yes, to some people on some devices. While less common than it was a decade ago, old hardware exists[1], poor quality displays exist, and broken hardware exists[2]. However,

> Who only has 7 pixels for their text?

Everybody that used an Apple II, Atari 400/800, Commodore 64? Most 8-bit computers in the era before framebuffers were common used low-resolution hardware fonts[3].

[1] The last time I bought _any_ kind of computer hardware was ~2011; my CPU and LCD monitor are vintage 2008. Wile my LCD displays small fonts very clearly,

[2] I know multiple people that have been stuck using a broken LCD because they cannot afford to replace their old (PowerPC) macbook.

[3] [https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits- sys...](https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-system-fonts)

<comment><USER5> At some point you have to be okay with leaving people behind in some way or another. Where you draw that line is going to depend on your goals, market, etc. but if you want progress in design and/or technology you have to draw the line somewhere.

I hope I'm not coming off as brusque with that attitude. I just think it's practical. I'm intimately acquainted with using older hardware. I was lucky to have a computer and an internet connection at all as a child but I won't pretend that it wasn't a punch in the gut every time a website would take ages to load, crawl when it did load or a game wouldn't run at all. It hurt when the line was drawn at broadband or faster CPUs/GPUs but I'm glad they didn't wait for me to catch up.

There's a tug between creators and consumers but the drive toward new technology is a good thing. Eventually it becomes more affordable or can be had for reasonable prices second hand.

That said, I don't think that precludes reasonable accommodation. If your website isn't an application it should be readable without JavaScript even if it's ugly, screen readers should work, users should be able to adjust their font size even if it's ugly, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is from one section of the logo trends article ([https://www.logolounge.com/articles/2018-logo- trends](https://www.logolounge.com/articles/2018-logo-trends)). If you look through the pictures of logos in the full article, all but a very few use sans serif fonts.

A more accurate title may be, "A few new logos use serif fonts".

</comment><comment><USER7> > Our infatuation with the creation of implied heritage really deserves > greater attention than these two paragraphs allow. The new culture of small > shoppe business and personal attention are fiercely fighting the truly > established bluebloods for the same share of consumer attention. Heritage > that's only inches deep is winning through smart design, even when the > identity reads ESTB 2018.

I find this really interesting. Although it might just be a design fad in some cases, it does make me smile a bit to see an "Est. 20xx", because it reads as a desire that the brand (often a physical store) intends to stick around long enough for that declaration to mean something.

</comment><comment><USER8> Got excited when I thought this read "Lego design trends of 2018"

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems that minimalism is finally on the way out.

<comment><USER10> Good riddance. Can somebody please inform Taco Bell before they impose their new blinding-white color scheme on any more stores?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll wait until Gothic becomes a thing again.

<comment><USER12> Blackletter or bust.

<comment><USER13> ℑ 𝔞𝔤𝔯𝔢𝔢 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔭𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔢𝔩𝔶. 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔠𝔨𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯 𝔦𝔰 𝔠𝔢𝔯𝔱𝔞𝔦𝔫𝔩𝔶 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔴𝔞𝔶 𝔱𝔬 𝔤𝔬 𝔱𝔬 𝔤𝔢𝔱 𝔫𝔬𝔱𝔦𝔠𝔢𝔡.

𝔓𝔩𝔲𝔰 𝔦𝔱 𝔴𝔞𝔰 𝔟𝔞𝔫𝔫𝔢𝔡 𝔟𝔶 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔑𝔞𝔷𝔦𝔰. 𝔜𝔬𝔲 𝔡𝔬𝔫'𝔱 𝔴𝔞𝔫𝔱 𝔶𝔬𝔲𝔯 𝔩𝔬𝔤𝔬 𝔦𝔫 𝔞 𝔣𝔬𝔫𝔱 𝔰𝔲𝔭𝔭𝔬𝔯𝔱𝔢𝔡 𝔟𝔶 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔑𝔞𝔷𝔦𝔰, 𝔡𝔬 𝔶𝔬𝔲?

<comment><USER14> How did you even?

<comment><USER15> Hidden in the vast expanse of unicode.

[https://sheep.horse/2012/5/blackletter_- _unicode_abuse.html](https://sheep.horse/2012/5/blackletter_- _unicode_abuse.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> All I know is that I am sick of everything looking like everything else. Everyone line up to contribute more derivative crap to the pile!

<comment><USER17> Though tedious, I've enjoyed the process of collecting high-res SVG logos for all projects and products in the cloud native space. There's a lot of variety!

[https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=no](https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=no)

<comment><USER18> Neat! It's fun looking through these and seeing which ones catch your eye. I think the Redis logo might be my favorite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not sure why sans-serif minimalism should be considered soulless. I don't think I'll ever tire of solid no-nonsense Swiss design, but variety is the spice of life for sure.

<comment><USER14> I think what happens in Switzerland is that grid-design and sans-serif minimalism is applied with good taste all over the place. It stands out when something is poorly done. In North America, the variety of other styles are applied with no taste or consistency, including those styles taken from the swiss. I'd love to see a very culturally/aesthetically diverse urban landscape with good taste applied to many styles of design.

Edit: Walking around Zurich gave me a weird sense that everything was so consistent as to be too refined and rich. Every woman had the same highly fashionable style, everything cleanly cut, everything sanitized. I'll admit it was a little creepy. Every person I spoke to was more or less a delight, but I felt as though speaking to people would be taboo. Much more so than Downtown Vancouver, though the vibe is often described similarly.

<comment><USER20> I went to Swiss by bike and I can't shake the feeling the whole country had this graphical idea throughout. Felt quite unreal though enjoyable.

<comment><USER14> By _this_ graphic idea, do you mean the one I described or a different theme that you noticed?

<comment><USER20> No no the one you mentionned. It's like there was _intent_ behind colors and shapes.

<comment><USER14> As if everything is deliberately designed. I did notice that Bern is a little different, being a bit of college town I guess lends itself to having slightly older character to it.

<comment><USER20> > As if everything is deliberately designed.

Exactly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > The more humanist quality of some serif fonts are playing directly to a > generation looking to find personal value and worth, or a warm place to feel > comfort.

In other words, a low-level oscillation from an old generation of companies to a new generation who want to look different and nicer.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hilariously the title of the article is sans-serif.

<comment><USER23> I guess one could argue an article title isn't a logo, except that the Quartz site uses sans for it's logo and menus, and links, and all kinds of other elements, however you want to break them down.

No doubt the author would change some things if she got the chance!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Soulless

Or, you know, Sleek, Modern, Minimalist...

</comment><comment> d--b Quartz's logo seems pretty sans to me

</comment><comment><USER25> Minimalist design is overrated.

~ Khayri R.R. Woulfe

</comment><comment><USER26> Good bye dumb old fad, hello new dumb fad.

Can someone tell me if this is because designers like to copy whatever look is in season? Or is it mostly the clients / managers who are afraid to have their brand identity be too different?

I knew a designer who couldn't tell you what made text legible, or how a grid system worked. But they were good at copying certain styles that were popular. They would read those articles like "20 stunning sites with flat design," pick a few to copy, and then give the client a look-a-like site, regardless if the design made sense for their business. Always thought they were a hack, but they were employed, so good for them.

Edit: Just wanted to point out that the return of serifs is probably a good thing - good designers seeing that minimalist logos are overdone and wanting to stand out. My comments are more directed at what is inevitably to come - hordes of smaller companies copying the most superficial aspects of this trend.

<comment><USER27> Typography and logo design have fashions just like almost everything else. There are good reasons for the relatively simple logos and wordmarks you see today--mostly around legibility in small sizes because of mobile.

But, unless someone's deliberately cultivating a retro look, consider any batch of random logos from 20 years ago and compare them to a batch of current ones and you're going to see a lot of common patterns.</comment></comment>


I somehow made $110k this morning and I'm still not totally sure how - <AUTHOR> https://np.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/7w6cq0/i_somehow_made_110k_this_morning_and_im_still_not/dtyu5fo/?context=1000 <comment><USER2> Now take the 100k to create an infomercial on your remarkable system for making money over night.

</comment><comment><USER3> Day trading is pretty much gambling. This guy could have ended up with a $500k loss.</comment>


Mastering AWS CodeDeploy with Jenkins and Puppet - <AUTHOR> http://www.emind.co/how-to/mastering-aws-codedeploy-with-jenkins-and-puppet

<comment> kiril-me Are there open source alternatives to AWS CodeDeploy?</comment>


The Creepy New Wave of the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/creepy-new-wave-internet/?

<comment><USER2> Rifkin's comments are creepy. Yes it's true-- throughout most of human history privacy didn't exist and people lived their lives in public. Yet it's also true that much of human history was utter stagnation and conformity where nothing much happened.

He also makes the common mistake, also made by Thiel when he discusses the ethics of Palantir, of assuming that the panopticon is symmetrical. In reality those with money, connections, or the criminal ability to break into systems have access to _far_ more information than the average person. The loss of privacy is extremely asymmetrical as well-- those with either the money or the technical ability to hide can still do so.

<comment><USER3> This underscores the fact that the word "privacy" is generally used as a euphemism for power. Knowing this, you can safely substitute the word "power" for "privacy" nearly everywhere it appeares.

The first thing you'll notice is that the vast majority of knotty questions or issues in doubt clear themselves up quite quickly once you start discussing the problem in honest, accurate terms.

<comment><USER2> Whack!

Wow. I'm not even sure where that ball went. :)

<comment><USER4> It'll make more sense when you know what time it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me very much of the Adam Curtis documentary "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" (2011), which gives an interesting narrative of this movement's beginning.

</comment><comment><USER6> I should make a bot that posts when Ray Kurzweil is mentioned or used as source material for a HN post so I can save 30 seconds and a heavy sigh.

<comment><USER7> .... is this the aforementioned bot?

<comment><USER8> The bot whose only purpose is to yearn for its own existence; a Pinocchio who wants to be a wooden puppet.

<comment><USER9> A massively emasculated version of Roko's Basilisk.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gatwick drone police say 'there may never have been a drone at all' - <AUTHOR> https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/gatwick-drone-police-say-there-13772183 <comment><USER2> Well, this is an interesting turn of events. I did consider this a possibility of mass hysteria. It might not have been, but the fact that the police considers this a possibility does impact the scales a bit in my view.

I am a bit surprised though because if 67 people reported these sighings, _something_ had to be there that prompted them.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is gross incompetence (in either case: the drone existing or not), multiple people here should be stepping down or be fired. What an embarrassment to Gatwick, to Sussex, and to the UK.

Prediction: no one will be fired.

<comment><USER4> From what I can gather, reading this and the linked to article:

[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/gatwick-drone-boss- man...](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/gatwick-drone-boss-man- arrested-13771951)

The arrested guy _once_ possessed a drone (that he sold a few months ago).

He and his wife were arrested (and their house raided) seemingly only based on a tip-off:

>Mr Tingley said the arrests made on Friday night were as a result of a tip- off from a member of the public.

>"I'm completely satisfied the arrests were lawful, bearing in mind the burden of proof and likely suspicion at the time of arrest," he said.

It seems to me a lot like a case of (possibly mass-hysteria originated) UK "swatting" (hopefully without an actual SWAT team breaking in).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> GDPR compliant: [http://archive.is/6tSgg](http://archive.is/6tSgg)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems relevant to the drone discussions here</comment>


Today is Aaron Swartz Day. 2019-11-09 - <AUTHOR> https://www.aaronswartzday.org/ <comment><USER2> [https://rense.com/general96/the-epstein-funded-child-porn- hu...](https://rense.com/general96/the-epstein-funded-child-porn-hub-mit- media-lab-that-murdered-aaron-swartz.php) sounds like science fiction, but the circumstances around Aaron's death are suspicious enough that it warrants a read.

<comment><USER3> Oh geeze, I just read the title & am skeeved out. Def'y fodder for conspiracy theories, will read it shortly. For clarity, I don't mean to imply all CTs are untrue. Sometimes they prove to be profoundly prophetic.

I was coming to posit my own CT as to how fast this story dropped from 1st two pages on HN yesterday despite it's active upvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> RSS feeds and Google Reader</comment>


There are no dumb users, just dumb products - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsgrape.com/a/DJay3K8qcR4Zuwe4tF4cJg/there-are-no-dumb-users-just-dumb-products/

<comment><USER2> Obviously there are dumb users, so you have to design accordingly.

I wish this headline was true though.</comment>


Living vs. Creating - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@AGPane/living-vs-creating-740c4b1f3c39#.1mif965zl <comment><USER2> Honestly, I have to respectfully disagree.

I do not believe "...being creative requires solitude, introspection, and deep imaginative thought." In fact, I would argue it very much requires the opposite in that being exposed to different trends, perspectives and ideas forces you to think differently, open your mind and otherwise enables you to approach an idea from numerous angles.

You miss this by seeking solitude.

<comment><USER3> I would be more nuanced: I feel like the solitude, introspection and deep thought are needed to _gather_ your creativity so to speak. Being exposed to different trends and perspectives only exposes you to _other people 's_ creativity, and while it might allow you to see things from different angles, I would argue that that is independent from being creative, which to me is very much a unique and personal thing, almost tied to identity. Other people might spark your own creativity, but it's still _your_ creativity.</comment></comment>


First real alternative to Photoshop launched - <AUTHOR> http://www.creativebloq.com/computer-arts/first-real-alternative-photoshop-launched-and-its-free-21514137

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately it misses one of Photoshop's main selling points (for me at least)...cross-platform Windows and OSX.

I work on mostly Windows machines but sometimes I'm on a Mac of some sort. From the start, a big reason I've used Adobe's software (for video and audio as well) is that I can use it on any of the machines I tend to work on. The various Win-only and OSX-only packages cause issues when I need to work on a computer at work or at home that is running a different OS.

I love trying out new software in this field and am open to finding new favorites and new useful tools as they are developed but I always hesitate to put much time into something that isn't cross-platform.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It's actively aiming to steal Adobe's market by creating a product that they > claim is better than Photoshop in a number of ways.

I will give it a try and I'm sure the developers put a lot of effort into such specialized product, but if this is their actual goal, imho they are setting up for failure.

On a side note, I really don't understand the whole Adobe hate. They've been polishing their product for years and their package (InDesign, Illustrator, Bridge...) is well integrated in today printing standards and processes.Why should I choose a close source alternative which has none of the above benefits?

</comment><comment><USER4> What a dishonest headline. For many use cases the The Gimp is a very real use case. To me at least it is significantly more real than something that is in beta and for Mac only.</comment>


Khan Academy now supports tau - <AUTHOR> http://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/26083003300/happy-tau-day

<comment><USER2> Tau is clearer in some domains and pi is better in others. The mental overhead from switching between the two is too much, so just pick one already. And let the rest of us know, so we can go back to having a clear standard and not requiring the mental overhead of switching while studying different authors.

Oh yeah, we went through that 2000 years ago and the winner was pi. I haven't seen any compelling reason to switch yet. (Says the guy who uses "j" for the imaginary constant. :P)

<comment><USER3> In which domains is pi better? And was there a discussion 2000 years ago that led to pi "winning"? (If so, it'd be really fun to read its reasoning.) [Both of these are honest questions; I'm not a mathematician.]

<comment><USER2> <http://www.thepimanifesto.com/>

The Pi Manifesto has a few examples of pi beating tau (statistics, polygons, and complex numbers mainly), while also pointing out how silly and biased some of the tau examples are. However, the argument isn't very convincing from either side.

And as to your second question, I have no idea. I just know the idea has been settled for a long time now and I think this whole debate is needlessly distracting. Not that it isn't fun to watch or think about, but it confuses people who are just trying to learn and use math.

<comment><USER4> Their argument about the normal distribution is completely off though. There is completely no reason to group the two with the standard deviation. Their biggest argument seems to be that the area of unit circle is exactly pi. Sadly, there is absolutely no need to work with fractions of areas of the unit circle, while if you're working with angles the unit circle is a most natural standardisation. The normal distribution has been a lot clearer to me since I've understood the two should be grouped with the pi.

Their argument about trigonometric functions is completely wrong and obviously so. Trigonometric functions work with angles and it's already shown (and pimanifesto readily admits) that tau shines there.

Their argument about Euler's identity is as inane as the tauists' is.

They don't understand quadratic forms.

I'm guessing this site is sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The proponents of tau that cite the ubiquity of the 2pi factor in maths seem to forget that it's an exceedingly huge swath of knowledge and thus any notion of ubiquity might as well be moot, or totally dependent on the region of maths this person frequents. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some domains of maths where even natural numbers are used rarely or almost never (formal logic springs to mind). That's why it's possible to cherry-pick favourable examples which support either side of pi-tau debate.

But you might say, of course, that those fields of mathematics which tau makes "easier" are the ones important in early math education (especially below the university level). Hence adopting tau would make them substantially friendlier and more intuitive to many people. While the idea of "fixing" math concept to make them more bearable to laymen should not be dismissed automatically, I would like to point out that the question of tau vs. 2pi is by no means the only issue of this kind. Indeed, there are a couple of more "warts" in everyday maths that could also warrant "fixing". Consider:

* The direction in which positive and negative angles on two-dimensional, Cartesian plane are measured [1]. Counter-intuitively, the measure increases when going _counter_ clockwise, while going clockwise decreases it.

* The main diagonal [2] of a matrix goes from upper-left to lower-right corner, which coincides with the shape of _back_ slash character.

* The established order of indices for matrix' elements is row-column, so that A_xy refers to element in x-th row and y-th column of matrix A. This goes against the habit of specifying the horizontal coordinate before the vertical coordinate when talking about XY planes [3].

* Definition of convex [4] and concave [5] functions (for R->R ones) do not agree with the intuitive associations based on plots of those functions. Clearly, the convex one looks like a valley, and the concave one resembles a hill or mountain.

I'm sure there are many more examples of such unreasonable, counter-intuitive conventions, so we really have a lot of work ahead of us. So, anyone fancies writing the Slash Diagonal Manifesto?...

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle#Positive_and_negative_ang...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle#Positive_and_negative_angles) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_diagonal> [3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system#Car...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system#Cartesian_coordinates_in_two_dimensions) [4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function> [5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concave_function>

<comment><USER6> * Counter-clockwise angles comes from making charts and graphs with the independent variable going from left to right, and the dependent variable from bottom to top. This is far too ingrained in the way we teach and learn about mathematics to change now, much more than the choice of pi or tau (though we do make y go from top to bottom in many computer graphics contexts). There's no reasonable way that we could integrate direction of reading on a clock with direction of reading typical charts with direction of reading text into a uniform system, and I don't consider changing all the clocks, texts, and charts in the world to be a reasonable possibility.

* What does the shape of the slash character have to do with anything? A slash is a fraction bar. Fractions and matrix diagonals are entirely unrelated, though in both cases numbers are read from top left to bottom right, in accordance with our typical reading direction in western texts.

* Matrix index ordering is a pain in the butt and will be confusing whichever way they're labeled. The logic behind the current system is to use the first index for the component that results when multiplying by a vector, and using the second index within that component. Picking the opposite convention would also end up confusing. Figuring out the proper ordering when dealing with non-commutative "number" systems in general is a pain, and I don't think there's any easy answer. We have matrices multiply column vectors on the left, because that's typically how we notate operators acting on some input. But it means that composition is multiplication from left to right, which is a bit confusing. There's no way to make the order be always left-to-right or always right-to-left. But much more importantly, matrices are a kind of painful abstraction to use in general. Mathematics education would be much improved in many ways if we used Geometric Algebra instead of matrix representations a lot more of the time. <http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMedalLecture.pdf>

* It's much easier to just call these "concave up" and "concave down". Problem solved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This brought me back to Khan where I previous did every math exercise, and I was a bit disappointed to see that not too much has changed with the instruction they offer. I keep wanting math exercises beyond elementary calc, but they just gave the same stuff a face lift.

I'm guessing they're heads down getting the Khan platform that we've heard about, but does anyone have any updates?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now we're focusing more on middle school–level math -- we're adding literally hundreds of new exercises in the topics that we are working on but haven't yet had time to work on calculus and beyond.

<comment><USER8> Hey, nice work. My daughters do Khan Academy at home in the mornings for a bit rather than their elementary school math class. They love it.

I wanted to tell you guys a story though, about your UI transition.

I walked in a few months ago to my 8 year old daughter slumped at the desk next to her computer, nonresponsive. When I was like "Oh my God, are you okay?" She told me, with many tears, that she was no longer to obtain I believe they were called "Master" badges in some future subjects, like Geometry.

She had earned one of the Master badges at great effort, and when the UI changed, you guys retired them for more granular badges. Overall, I'd say it was the right decision to make; gaining subject mastery is done on a smaller slice of content now, and feels more achievable.

That said, she was totally devastated that she wouldn't be able to earn those future badges. Oh man, it was tough. She recovered nicely and loves the new interface, but I was thinking what an impact a UI change had, and thinking that a) probably many adults feel the same way with a change, but don't communicate it as well, and b) some sort of way to notify / slowly introduce / help transition kids who use the tool intimately as changes happen would be pretty awesome.

Thanks for all the work! I wish I'd taken some video for your UI guys, she was really bummed, the sort of response you can't get out of a focus group. :)

<comment><USER9> Email me your daughter's email address used on Khan and tell her to keep her eye out for a special badge.

firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER8> Aww, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I still find it hard to see any practical, hard benefits of switching to tau. Perhaps you could argue that many things become "more natural" but at this point, pi is ingrained in mathematics, and it works perfectly well. I just can't imagine that switching to tau would allow us to reap any benefits that were previously inaccessible. I don't think there's any reason to fix what ain't broke.

<comment><USER11> I think the strongest argument is pedagogical. If tau makes the underlying concepts clearer (and I believe it does), then it makes sense to use it when teaching beginners.

<comment><USER12> This is a dangerous argument—sure, if (I did say 'if'!) it's a win for the beginners, then why not expose them to it when there's no baggage dragging them back?; but, on the other hand, in that case, in exchange for short-term gains you're giving them a long-term loss of ability to communicate with others who weren't taught that way.

(Essentially the same argument can apply to innovation; it doesn't mean that innovation is bad, just that it is rarely without cost.)

<comment><USER13> > a long-term loss of ability to communicate with others who weren't taught > that way.

I'm not sure that the difference between pi and tau is severe enough to cause a communication problem. Conversion is trivial and anyone familiar with one can learn to convert to the other in about ten seconds.

Existing problems with conversion from older systems into metric make a pi<->tau conversion insignificant - and even then people manage to deal with it just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just for answers? Lame. It would be noteworthy if they had an option to replace instances of pi with tau in all the practice problems.

<comment><USER15> That would be unbelievably confusing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd rather they concentrated on supporting openid so you don't need a google or Facebook account...

<comment><AUTHOR> As we've seen with Stack Exchange, OpenID is confusing for most users, but good news: you don't need a Google or Facebook account anymore! You can sign up for a Khan Academy account with any email address here:

<http://www.khanacademy.org/signup>

<comment><USER16> Cool - when did that happen?

Thanks for pointing out :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't remember exactly, but it was a few months ago. About a month ago we also launched the ability to create "child" accounts for under-13 users who aren't old enough for Google or Facebook accounts.

<comment><USER8> It would be cool to be able to transition accounts to the new child accounts; is that possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, it's not possible, but the main reason to create a child account is to get around the Google/Facebook requirement -- since you've already surmounted that hurdle, a child account probably wouldn't be of any more use to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Quite possibly because they hired Vi Hart :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not the only reason, though it might have been a small factor. Many of us here at KA are tau believers. :)

<comment><USER18> speak for yourself, infidel!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If tau means 2*pi, how do I represent torsion?

<comment><USER20> overloading variables is nothing new in math/science/engineering. Usual methods include picking a different variable to represent torsion, or appending a subscipt or superscript of some kind to differentiate between the two taus. you could also use a bar (like hbar and h in physics) or an apostrophe.

<comment><USER21> In macroeconomics, pi is commonly used to represent the rate of inflation. And, as in many fields, i is used as an iterator.

Which means that in your math, if you're assuming constant inflation, you need to deflate prices in year i by a factor of e^(i*pi).

<comment><USER20> beautiful, just beautiful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So let's see. There's pi, used for ~2300 years, or tau, some niche US-only fad (check for the tau wikipedia page in every language BUT english). It makes absolutely no fscking sense. Now could we move on?

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm still on the fence as to which is more correct, though I do find that tau eliminates a lot of the silly brainfarts I used to make at school.

But I do think this is actually quite important. Mathematics has a few 'special' values including; 0, 1, i, pi/tau and e, special because they turn up everywhere, so it'd be nice to know which of pi and tau is the 'correct' special number.

</comment><comment><USER24> Tau is a fad.</comment>


Ballmer Peak - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/323/

<comment><USER2> I've been meaning to pick up a breathalyzer.. but that's just asking for trouble if you've ever read that Tucker Max post about them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've experienced this, but there's a problem. I don't remember where I read it, but there's a programming rule I picked up somewhere. It's something along the lines of, "Debugging is harder than programming, so if you program the cleverest code you can, you won't be able to debug it." I've written killer code while moderately drunk, but if you need to modify or fix any, you may as well just do a rewrite. It'll save time.

<comment><USER4> Contradiction, there. If you can't modify or fix the code, it's not "killer".

<comment><USER5> It might be an overloaded "killer", with both the idiomatic and literal senses in mind.</comment></comment></comment>


How Google's new Logo is just 305 bytes - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/How-could-Googles-new-logo-be-only-305-bytes-while-its-old-logo-is-14-000-bytes/answers/15246728?srid=3a0v&share=1

<comment><USER2> This entire blogpost has sadly been plagiarized from a post by a different author here : [http://www.quora.com/How-could-Googles-new-logo-be- only-305-...](http://www.quora.com/How-could-Googles-new-logo-be- only-305-bytes-while-its-old-logo-is-14-000-bytes/answer/Ilya- Yakubovich?srid=3a0v&share=1)

Without even a link to or mention of the original source.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. We've changed the URL to that from [http://www.top5techs.com/2015/09/how-googles-new-logo-is- jus...](http://www.top5techs.com/2015/09/how-googles-new-logo-is- just-305-bytes.html) and banned that site. I wish we had seen this sooner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "How an Unvailable Simplified Version of Google's new Logo Could be 305 bytes."

</comment><comment><USER5> Clearly, though, this is not how Google did it. For example, their blog post, [https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google- ident...](https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google- identity/#google-g-construction) , states that the upper case G is not just a circle, but slightly modified to make it more visually appealing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Real reason for the redesign. Works for every screen. Loads fast. Aesthetic component is important but not so important. This is a real marriage of art and science for logos.

<comment><USER7> Shame it looks infantile

<comment><USER8> agreed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > While Google hasn't released the optimized 305 byte logo and it doesn't seem > to be available online, I believe that they got the size down to 305 bytes > as they claim.

Where do Google claim it is 305 bytes? There's no link provided. AFAICT there's no references in this article.

<comment><USER10> [https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google- ident...](https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google- identity/#broader-distribution)

<comment><USER9> Yeah it looks like the original article that this blog post ripped off included the link, the spammer just copied the text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of Paul Prescod's article from 2003 which specifically used Google's landing page as an example of performance improvements that could be obtained by a judicious use of SVG:

[http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/svg- prescod.html](http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/svg-prescod.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> It's quite interesting to see how the new logo can be deconstructed to simple shapes.

That said, shouldn't the link be directly to the article instead of through a URL shortener?

</comment><comment><USER13> His final "G" is pretty different from both of Google's new G's.

<comment><USER14> Well, he does mention that Google hasn't yet released its 305 byte variant of the logo, so we don't really have anything to compare it to yet...

<comment><USER13> I meant it differs visually. I suppose it's possible Google has a different looking G for a compressed variant, but that would just be even more odd from a branding perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does the size savings matter in comparison to the effort needed to identify (URL) and download the file? I mean to say, is this purely an exercise in graphics optimization or will Google see practical costs savings?

<comment><USER16> The savings is for the users who are on extremely low bandwidth systems in markets they are trying to break into. 305 bytes is going to download a lot faster than 14kb, which I believe is what they said their old standard logo was. Even the 2kb svg mentioned in the article would be slower.

<comment><USER17> Even more important, 305 bytes is only a small part of a packet. Much less chance of a packet needing retransmitted on a low/poor quality connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like they took something out of this guy's books: [http://bchanx.com/logos-in-pure-css-demo](http://bchanx.com/logos-in-pure- css-demo)

</comment><comment><USER19> Interestingly, the current logo I see on www.google.com is a 14K PNG (the previous one [from archive.org] was 8K, but lower resolution).

</comment><comment><USER20> (What's this weird 9m.no redirect?)

<comment><USER21> I'm surprised it's still being used (and a mod fixed the link now), but if you're curious, here's the discussion on 9m.no from 15 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7783239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7783239) :)</comment></comment>


Arithmetic operation in shell script can be dangerous - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/greymd/eq-can-be-critically-vulnerable-338m <comment><USER2> First I thought "it's your own fault if you use shell scripting in the (unsafe) web". But the sudo example got me. That's exploitable on Linux systems.

Modern Unix shells are so full of old weird features which are turned on by default. That's a bit horrific -.-</comment>


Know the neighborhoods in your city? Contribute to an open list - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tute/world_neighborhoods

<comment><AUTHOR> We were very surprised that this data was not already available some where ( I mean, it's just a list right? ) So we decided to post this to github and see if people would respond. Please let us know if you run into any trouble!</comment>


Bitcoin is falling - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg2ztgCzm1g10zm2g25zv sell sell sell seems to be the play right now <comment><USER2> No:

[http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgCzm1g10zm2g...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgCzm1g10zm2g25zv)

EDIT: I corrected the scale for you, but if you want more than a word and a picture, take a look at <https://class.coursera.org/compfinance-003/>, especially the parts about variance, then ARIMA in Time Series week 4. The data seems quite compatible with an upward trend high variance process with a negative autocorrelation explaining the ups and down.

I may bet on >120 on May 15, but even with my very limited understanding, I would not take a 2 days graph on something as volatile as Bitcoin and try to make a theory.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you

<comment><USER2> You're welcome.

I'm sorry to be blunt, but I have a problem with misleading content, ie stuff submitted which will waste a small amount of time for a large number of people while there are obvious flaws in the reasoning.

It is not about being overtly pedantic, nerdy or showing off, but spending at least 2 minutes to think before clicking on submit - here, this 120 seconds might have brought the insight that you don't predict nothing with a 2 day graph.

I'm not saying that to bash you or to single you out - I'm spending a couple of minutes replying with the sincere hope that you will realize why it would be a better idea to have acted differently, and upvoting you in the process because at least you showed you cared by replying to your own submission.

For some people, it seems to be a "write only" forum in a karma whoring process - for all I know, it could be to spam the first page, or to attract attention. Sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No, about the only thing I can say about bitcoin the past month or so is that it's been incredibly volatile.

This is good if you want to bet. It's not as good if you want to invest longer term.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another chart that might be related:

[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&date=toda...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q)</comment>


Since when has Craigslist asked for money when posting a job listing? - <AUTHOR> https://post.craigslist.org/k/dKHkncjZ4RGEI_pMrNrJsg/xWEcj?s=cat

<comment><USER2> Since always, that's how they make money. What did you think they're revenue model was?

<comment><AUTHOR> I could have swore that I posted before and didn't have to pay. Must have been a dream.

<comment><USER3> yep, as far as i know always. That's the way they make money. Not for offering your freelance services though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ? It's been that way for a long time. It's to discourage joke jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a good idea, I just don't remember it being like that before. Thank you for informing me, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> wow too bad. craigslist is just killing itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> wow didn't know that..</comment>


Using RabbitMQ and AMQP for Distributed Work Queues in Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://blog.yld.io/2016/10/03/using-rabbitmq-and-amqp-in-node-js/#.WFXXds4tHbf.hackernews <comment><USER2> The use-case for workers is usually heavy processing.

You would probably not like to do heavy processing in an online transactional service like a frontend web server, so you move that work to a worker...

node stays healthy only if you can keep the event loop unblocked. If you do really heavy processing, the event loop blocks and you can start seeing side effects like I/O starvation and such.

Usually doing heavy processing in JavaScript is not very performant compared to other languages... example: garbage collection, every number is a floating point number, everything is an object, etc... abstractions that are not zero- cost, plus, CPU/Memory profiling tools for node/JavaScript are not as good as the ones you can find for other languages.

Having said that, while the tutorial is fine... it really depends what you want to do with such workers. If it's CPU or memory intensive... I don't recommend node. If you absolutely have to, make sure CPU intensive tasks are distributed across ticks (break down intensive logic using process.nextTick) so the event loop doesn't block, and do some CPU/memory profiling.

Then, if not node, then what? My choice of tech for a problem like this would be Akka. [http://akka.io](http://akka.io) . Why Akka? because if you want to break down a computation into subparts, without the disadvantages of dealing with threads and message passing at a low level, the actor system takes care of that for you.

<comment><USER3> The actor model is not far from the AMQP pub/sub model. I have talked about this on Stackoverflow [1]. The real advantage for Akka would be not having to go over the wire when forking (aka recursing on a problem).

That being said AMQP has so many advantages particularly because there are so many clients and you could in theory have a thin facade over any AMQP library that does routing locally for certain queues (we actually do this for our Java message bus). It is also because of message reilability.

If you use AMQP you can have a very heterogenous environment. Infact I even wrote some consumers recently in Rust to replace some Java ones but are not production ready (still waiting for heartbeat support).

Yeah you could use Akka as a consumer but here is the shocker it actually isn't that good if your messages need to be reliable. This is because most Akka rabbitmq consumers are auto ACK. This is because RabbitMQ is actually a pull model when using prefetch + manual ack. Akka is not and will drop messages.

The reactive streams model [2] (rxjava2 and future akka stuff) is not as flexible nor as powerful as AMQP as there is no per message ACK but rather an ACK for a group of messages. Yes you could set the request/demand rate to 1 but that would hurt performance. Again AMQP shines for message reliability.

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5693346/when-to-use- actor...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5693346/when-to-use-actors- instead-of-messaging-solutions-such-as-websphere-mq-or-tibco)

[2]: [https://github.com/reactive-streams/reactive-streams- jvm](https://github.com/reactive-streams/reactive-streams-jvm)

<comment><USER2> Well, in Akka you can use journaling and persistence to prevent important messages from being lost in case of error. That is not a problem. [1]

If you want ultimate flexibility you can go with Apache Camel, which supports to turn auto acknowledgement off. [2]

[1] [http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/scala/persistence.html](http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/scala/persistence.html)

[2] [http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/scala/camel.html](http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/scala/camel.html)

[2] [https://code.google.com/archive/a/apache- extras.org/p/camel-...](https://code.google.com/archive/a/apache- extras.org/p/camel-extra)

<comment><USER3> > _Well, in Akka you can use journaling and persistence to prevent important > messages from being lost in case of error. That is not a problem. [1]_

No it is more complicated than just one step guaranteeing. Lots of things do that including Apache Flume and just about any log aggregator. Because RabbitMQ is a broker, has exchanges and transactions it guarantees multiple steps as well as properly load balances.

For example lets say you have a consumer that gets a critical message and that machine (node, vm, docker whatever) gets completely blown away along with its storage than the message is lost.

With RabbitMQ the broker is the single point of failure. Of course this comes at a cost (complexity and partitioning problems). I believe Akka has a server model but from what I heard it is not very battle tested.

The other thing is Akka just like ZeroMQ and just like any other message platform can basically emulate (or imitate) almost any other message style/platform as well as chain them together (your point of akka + camel). The question is how robust and battle tested is the solution for the particular problem domain? Do you want smart pipes and dumb consumers (rabbit) or dumb pipes and smart consumers (akka, zeromq, rest).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is our approach: [http://www.jonnor.com/2015/06/announcing-msgflo-a- distribute...](http://www.jonnor.com/2015/06/announcing-msgflo-a-distributed- fbp-runtime/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Amazing stuff as always from Pedro T.</comment>


Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160531-set-proof-stuns-mathematicians/ <comment><USER2> > The paper soon set off a cascade of what Ellenberg called "math at Internet > speed." Within 10 days, Ellenberg and Dion Gijswijt, a mathematician at > Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, had each independently > posted papers showing how to modify the argument to polish off the original > cap set problem in just three pages.

This is a very interesting trend I've noticed. I wanted to cite a few papers on arXiv in one of my own research papers recently, but my advisor commented that none of the articles had been peer reviewed (since arXiv is a preprint server). I told him that in the last year alone, six papers on arXiv follow a "research trail" (i.e. a paper is put on arXiv in May that builds on results from a February paper that builds on results from December, etc.), and that the most recent peer-reviewed article in a published journal is so far behind the state-of-the-art that completing my paper without any mention to the arXiv works would put me significantly behind the rest of the field.

Of course, these papers all relate to math and computer science — whether a new algorithm or proof works is (usually) immediately evident upon implementation, and the papers on arXiv include the complete algorithm and often link to the author's code. Peer-reviewing their work yourself often takes no longer than a half hour or so (unlike, say, a research article in materials science, where a complete replication study could take over a year).

<comment><USER3> That has been common in physics for a long time, too. For hot new topics, the conversations are often happening through preprints rather than peer-reviewed articles. (The papers are usually eventually published in peer-reviewed journals, though.)

<comment><USER4> Building on research seems like it's a form of peer review, especially in math where you'd need to understand the entire proof before making incremental improvements to it.

<comment><USER5> While this _can_ be true it's also common to have "assuming X is true" where X is some very complicated hypothesis.

We saw this with Fermat's Last Theorem and it was with a great sigh of relief that it _was_ finally proven in the 90s. If the inverse was true then entire fields of Mathematics would have collapsed.

<comment><USER6> > If the inverse was true then entire fields of Mathematics would have > collapsed.

Honest question: what would've been the consequences of this?

<comment><USER7> The consequence is that a whole body of work winds up coming with an asterisk until people figure out what they can and can't trust. Papers may be looked at for inspiration, but won't be quoted for results. Eventually some of it gets proved properly, and the rest is abandoned. After that the older papers become mere historical curiosities.

A reasonably recent example of this is the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_school_of_algebraic_ge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_school_of_algebraic_geometry).

A possible place where this could happen is the classification of finite groups. It has been "proven", but the proof is long, technical, and never was adequately reviewed. Lots of papers these days start off using the classification in interesting ways. However there is an open program to produce an actual reviewed proof. If in the process of doing that, we found that the original result was long, there would be a fairly large project to figure out the consequences.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simpl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simple_groups) for more.

<comment><USER8> But when the results are useless anyway, it doesn't really matter if they are right or wrong...they just may be speculative of some alternate universe, or may still contain ideas that are applicable elsewhere.

<comment><USER9> Prime numbers used to be useless when first researched (edit: during the previous two centuries, when their properties was studied). We don't always know in advance what will turn up useful.

<comment><USER10> You say, "Prime numbers used to be useless when first researched," but when the Middle-Kingdom Egyptians were doing their initial research on prime numbers, they needed them for the algorithms they used to calculate with fractions. These were used in the Rhind Papyrus to calculate things like the volumes of granaries. You could hardly have picked a worse example.

<comment><USER7> No, he picked a famous and perfect example. He just didn't specify it well enough.

Over the last 2 centuries, number theorists developed the theory of large prime numbers. The numbers that they were dealing with were so large that they had no conceivable use in describing the physical universe.

Famously one prominent number theorist, G. H. Hardy, wrote _A Mathematician 's Apology_, a book describing and justifying his life. In it he famously described his field as being utterly useless with no practical applications.

Then cryptography came along, and the mathematics of finding large prime numbers, and factoring hard to factor large numbers, turned out to have practical applications of great importance!

<comment><USER10> Please don't blame me for refuting what he did say, instead of what he would have said if he'd known what he was talking about.

<comment><USER7> From my point of view, both of you demonstrated a lop-sided knowledge of math history.

Clearly you know more about the ancient history and origins. I'd be willing to bet that you know that the ancient Greeks knew 2500 years ago what prime numbers were, had proved that there were an infinite number of them, had algorithms like the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common denominator, had proven unique factorization AND had demonstrated that sqrt(2) was not a fraction. We don't actually know how much farther a lot of the knowledge goes.

On the other side he had obviously encountered cryptography, and knew that a whole lot of the necessary number theory dates back to Gauss, 200 years ago. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disquisitiones_Arithmeticae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disquisitiones_Arithmeticae) is the origin of concepts like modular arithmetic, quadratic residues, and so on. But he was not familiar with the ancient history predating that, or else he could not have thought that the study of primes only goes back 200 years!

He could have avoided the problem on his side by Googling for what he was going to say before saying things with glaring and obvious errors. Very few of us are so careful.

You could have avoided the problem on your side by giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he's probably not a complete idiot, then trying to figure out what he might have meant. You might or might not have figured out "cryptography", but you could have at least made your post in the form of a much more pleasant question. However that is fairly rare to find, and doubly so online.

As for me, I'm just lucky enough to know both halves of the history, so could easily sort it out.

<comment><USER10> Ben, I'd've thought you'd known me long enough to know that I'm familiar with RSA and the history of number theory. (Maybe I misremember; you seem to have started doing Perl after I left clpm.) I read _A Mathematician 's Apology_ last year (most of it, anyway), and my friend Nadia keeps publishing papers that factor large numbers of RSA keys in practice, the latest being CacheBleed. Your understanding of cryptography is surely deeper than mine — the most I've ever done myself is write an implementation of SRP — but it's not as if I haven't heard of the field.

I had thought that it was common knowledge that (small) prime numbers had a lot of practical uses (mental arithmetic in general, arithmetic with fractions, including with vulgar fractions, gear train design, that kind of thing) but apparently I was wrong. It turns out that lots of people don't know about this. So my inference, that only a complete idiot would not know this, he did not know this, and therefore he was a complete idiot, was ill-founded.

And so I came out looking like some kind of ignorant, arrogant know-it-all. I really appreciate the feedback, Ben. Natanael_L, I'm sorry I was such a dick to you.

<comment><USER7> I am familiar with your name, but hadn't tracked you well enough to remember anything more than, "He knows Perl." I left Usenet about a year before I learned Perl, so I was never in clpm.

So you just failed to register the cryptography reference and then backsolve to what he really meant. If that's the worst thing that you did last month, then you're a better person than I...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of the history of mathematics is summed up in the last paragraph of this very interesting article. "The fact that the cap set problem finally yielded to such a simple technique is humbling, Ellenberg said. 'It makes you wonder what else is actually easy.'" Mathematical progress comes about by some mathematician noticing a pattern that makes solving a formerly difficult problem more easy than solving it used to be. (For this purpose, innovations like place-value decimal numeral notation fit the preceding statement.) Of course the hard thing is being the first human being to figure out the easy way to solve the problem, and then to embed that understanding in a technique that other problem-solvers can learn. But the increasingly rapid collaboration among mathematicians these days (mentioned in a comment posted earlier) speeds the uptake of new techniques and makes more likely that new understanding will rapidly spread among mathematical problem-solvers.

</comment><comment><USER12> I did really well in school, and am a professional developer now, and my wife utterly destroys me at this game.

She can find sets in real time as the cards are being dealt, while singing along with music, it's maddening.

<comment><USER13> Could it be somehow related to better peripheral vision?

I met a woman once who could gather four-leaf clovers nearly instantly, at the same spot where me and my male friends had spent minutes searching.

I've seen written in some places (but could not find a worthy source) that women might have better peripheral vision due to food gathering in prehistoric times, but this might just be some old sexist construct (if anyone knows a good source to confirm or refute this, please tell me).

<comment><USER14> Funny anecdata: in my circle of friends, the trait that best predicts Set skill isn't IQ or gender or anything like that, it's musical ability.

This came up at a party. Six people playing Set, all of us from different cities, and the three that took band in high school utterly dominated the three that didn't. The reason? Field trips. The Band kids had all played Set for hours on buses, the rest of us had only played it once or twice and lost interest.

<comment><USER15> I like how you introduce a correlating attribute in the beginning of your comment, get me thinking about the relationship between musical ability and set-identifying ability, then clobber whatever hypothesis I was putting together just as fast with the confounding "field trips" variable.

Nice work :)

<comment><USER8> But why is set so popular on band trips, but not football trips?

<comment><USER15> I'd guess that the players on a football team would be reviewing the playbook all the way up until kickoff. Meanwhile the band isn't going to be practicing their performance on the bus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice to read about mathematics that involves Set! I found out about Set here on Hacker News several years ago, when I read Peter Norvig's blog post on the odds of not finding a set in the 12 cards [1]. I had never heard about the game before, but tried it and really liked it.

The simplicity of the rules, the mathematical nature of it, and the fact that adults and kinds can play together makes it such a great game. I continued with the analysis of finding the odds of not set in each round of play, and had fun doing so. It seems very difficult to find an analytical solution (and quite beyond me), but simulation was a nice project that gave some good insights into how the odds vary over the rounds played [2].

[1] [http://norvig.com/SET.html](http://norvig.com/SET.html)

[2] [https://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities- revisit...](https://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities-revisited/)

<comment><USER17> the similar but easier game "spot it!" works better for playing with kids, i find. (i prefer it as an adult too - i thought i'd love set, but playing it feels more like work than fun to me.)

<comment><USER18> There's some interesting analysis of the math behind Spot It! on stackoverflow [1].

That post mentions the Fano Plane, which, incidentally, I first read about in the book How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician quoted in the article about Set that started this thread. In the book, he uses the Fano Plane to explain how to pick numbers for a specific kind of lottery.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6240113/what-are-the- math...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6240113/what-are-the-mathematical- computational-principles-behind-this-game)

<comment><USER17> thanks, that was a beautiful thread! also a really good diagram explaining the projective plane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For those who check the comments first: Not clickbait. Title is literally accurate.

<comment><USER20> Oh come on,

The title and the article seem to be essentially accurate but are written in a breathless "we'll make this math stuff exciting, darn it" tone that some might like but which, as a math person, I find somewhat grating.

I think science/math writing of twenty or forty years ago was still reasonably effective and with that, we could get-by with a headline such as "A impressive result in the combinatorics field that uses the 'polynomial method'"

Edit: I appreciate that quantamagazine.org is doing a bunch of math articles. But we gotta admit it's injecting about every bit of "this is simply amaaaazing" rhetoric it can muster, which detracts somewhat from at least my enjoyment of it and actually it a harder to figure what's happening (from MA- level perspective).

<comment><USER21> As a grad student in math I read a lot of lifeless papers. Seeing the exact opposite is fun. I thought it was a good article. Why does math need to avoid breathlessness if we seem to embrace it with, say, a million breathless articles about Stephen Curry's latest game? It only seems bad because there's not a culture of excitement over math like there is for basketball, so it stands out. But if we want there to be such a culture, maybe we need to start by taking every bit of excitement we have and stretching it to the fullest.

<comment><USER22> Martin Gardner was very good at that, and I think Erica Klarreich (one of the main Quanta math journalists and the author of this particular article) is good at it too: she likes to focus on the history and context of a problem, describing mathematicians' expectations and hopes for a solution, and then how progress was made and what consequences it may have.

I guess there's some risk that many of these stories fall into similar patterns (something was hard and mathematicians worked on it for a long time, they didn't expect it to be solved soon, now it's been solved solved and people are impressed and see various applications), but it's nice to see the details and hear from some people in the field in their own words.

I feel like Klarreich tends to give more details than Gardner did when writing about current research; maybe that partly has to do with the web form, because she can include links to the actual papers and supplementary materials. It's also a nice counterpoint to the enthusiasm that her articles convey because the applications and consequences are _specific_ ; it's not like journalism that says "maybe now we'll get a pony/interstellar spaceflight/spooky quantum communications/faster computers!" without really showing how the discovery is going to enable that.

The fact is that mathematicians are excited by unexpected progress in math research, so hopefully other people can be too! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wonderful piece; what I like is that I remember this game being taught to me by the mathematics professors at my school, and I enjoyed the game but didn't ask any deeper questions about the game, such as its mathematical properties. Now here I see this way of looking at the game, perhaps even the reason for its existence, and it's like rediscovering an old friend.

</comment><comment><USER24> To me the most exciting part is that this may lead to a faster fast matrix multiplication algorithm which will be huge. The current bound is O(n^~2.372). They could very feasibly hit the theoretical limit of O(n^2+e).

</comment><comment><USER25> Maximal size of cap sets for games with up to six attributes -

2 4 9 20 45 112

[https://oeis.org/A090245](https://oeis.org/A090245)

</comment><comment><USER26> Another good link concerned with this problem is from OEIS:

[https://oeis.org/A090245](https://oeis.org/A090245)

"Maximum numbers of cards that would have no SET in an n-attribute version of the SET card game"

The OEIS links appear to have been updated to reflect the recent breakthrough of Ellenberg and Gijswijt, including their unified paper arXiv:1605.09223 from May 30.

</comment><comment><USER27> For your entertainment... [http://3e.org/set](http://3e.org/set)

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't understand the Alice imagery (nor the witch, not sure if that is also Alice imagery somehow) -- any ideas?

<comment><USER29> The witch appears to be the Red Queen. (Rotate her head about 135 degrees ccw and you get what is close to the symbol for a chess queen).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can anyone explain how these polynomials are generated? Are the constants or exponents based on the card characteristics? And if it is not understood why they work, then how can we use them in a proof?

</comment><comment><USER31> Again with the Ramsey theory! Every day, i'm reading about some amazing new result in Ramsey theory! It's like the microservices of discrete mathematics! Enough already!

<comment><USER32> I've been bumping into it a lot, too. I think it started with the ZFC- independent turing machines a while back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> IIRC "Elegance in mathematics is directly proportional to what you can see in it and inversely proportional to the effort required to see it" \-- S. Eilenberg

</comment><comment><USER34>
       > a different design with four attributes — color (which can be red, purple or green),

Was this game invented to annoy the colour-blind?

<comment><USER22> It was invented based on the file-marking symbols used by a geneticist for genetics research:

[http://www.setgame.com/founder-inventor](http://www.setgame.com/founder- inventor)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130313190253/http://www.setgam...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130313190253/http://www.setgame.com/set/history.htm)

You can play a variant of Set in a single color (which the rules suggest is easier -- but it's also more feasible for color-blind players).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> iOS app of the referenced game: [https://appsto.re/us/EXmoU.i](https://appsto.re/us/EXmoU.i)

Physical version of the game is available, I suggest adding it to your collection.

<comment><USER36> Variants exist on the web as well, e.g., [http://thebreretons.com/trifecta/](http://thebreretons.com/trifecta/)</comment></comment>


Security risks associated with Unicode - <AUTHOR> https://www.online24.nl/blog/security-risks-associated-with-unicode/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing the insight.</comment>


Israeli Startup Launching World's First Privately-Funded Moon Landing - <AUTHOR> https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/50846/israeli-startup-launching-worlds-first-privately-funded-moon-landing-technology-and-business/#v3QmbVdFb2f2kwYZ.97 <comment><USER2> Because Palestine was not enough...</comment>


A radical new idea erases quantum theory's weird uncertainties - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332440-600-quantum-weirdness-isnt-real-weve-just-got-space-and-time-all-wrong/ <comment><USER2> I remember reading a thought experiment awhile back (it was in the context of a discussion on Multiverse theory) about what it would look like for beings in a two dimensional universe when a three dimensional sphere intersected their two dimensional reality (essentially nothing, followed by a point, followed by a circle that first expands then contracts, then a point, then nothing). I couldn't help but wonder if this same sort of construct could explain what's happening in both quantum mechanics - particles popping into and out of existence are in reality just moving along an extra dimension that is not accessible to us (our entire reality is a single point on that dimension), and general relativity - spacetime is warping "into" that other dimension (think about the analogy of gravity where a bowling ball distorts the surface of a trampoline, there has to be one additional dimension beyond the trampoline surface for it to warp into). Of course, I'm probably way off base and just thinking nonsense.

<comment><USER3> This sounds like [http://www.math.brown.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/welcome.html](http://www.math.brown.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/welcome.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does someone have the whole article? It looks very interesting!

<comment><USER5> It's likely a teaser for his new book - don't have access to the whole article, but see: [https://www.npr.org/2019/04/19/714600205/einsteins- unfinishe...](https://www.npr.org/2019/04/19/714600205/einsteins-unfinished- revolution-looks-at-the-quantum-physics-and-reality-problem) as an alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Article is behind a paywall...</comment>


Dance Photography - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/dance-photography.html <comment><USER2> He truly his an engineer's mind. Engineering joy is, of course, a bit difficult.</comment>


Ask and It Shall be Given  - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2009/07/27/ask-and-it-shall-be-given/ <comment><USER2> I remember when I had my version of this lightbulb moment. I was the sole developer on a project that was chronically late. It had been passed off to me with the description of "there are three things left to do, do you think you can do them and launch at the end of the week?"

Of course, three more things popped up every week and the project slipped by months. I spent the entire project feeling guilty. Then one friday it dawned on me that there was a world of un-finished requirements that had never been captured. I had never done anything "manager-y" so I went to Borders, bought Rapid Development by Steve McConnell, and read it over the weekend.

When I showed up that Monday, instead of getting to work on the "last remaining three things," I hid out in an abandoned office and started specing and estimating the remaining parts of the project. Then I went to my managers with a full re-estimation that was months out. Of course, they weren't happy with the projection, but having data gave me the back-bone to stick with it.

Until that point I had thought my career was entirely dependent on being smarter, on developing programming chops like the gurus that I read about on Slashdot. Afterward I thought of it as being extremely dependent on what I consider "personality traits" but which seem to be trainable. For example, the initiative to fix something that's broken rather than just complaining about the status quo, or the calmness to stick to my guns without taking it personally that the people around me were wrong.

<comment><USER3> Great comment. I often wonder why my own employees frequently don't do something like this. I can think of many examples where one of our reasonably intelligent employees could get way ahead by just asking me for more responsibility in some area where it's clear that we're lacking, instead of focusing on their precisely defined job. I try hard to give everyone developmental projects and new responsibilities, but regardless it is true that I would be very susceptible to giving new and additional growth opportunities to people who ask for it.

<comment><USER4> I think a lot of it comes down to people just not knowing this is an option, not having many examples of how to go about it, or not having much success in trying. We are trained to stick to the job description, not to rock the boat, etc. and we are good at doing that but it tends to blind us to the bigger picture, and so we are not very good at taking initiative. However I would expect most people, even if they knew how, would not suddenly start asking for more responsibility - some just do not want that - but a small minority would and those are the ones you would want to focus on.

<comment><USER5> A lot of people know it's an option, but there is no reward for doing so.

Why make my job harder without getting anything for it? Only management benefits from it.

<comment><USER2> I think there's almost always a reward, especially for people in the tech sector. Either you get a raise and/or promotion at your current company or you get a stronger resume and better relations with coworkers who may be looking for jobs elsewhere. Plus there are non-financial rewards that can range from increased job satisfaction to your manager stops yelling at you.

But the other thing I wanted to point out is that a lot of time taking the initiative makes your job easier. Granted in the story above I did read a 300+ page book over the weekend, but after that I was able to do more of the work I wanted to do in the same amount of time I'd already been giving.

<comment><USER3> I agree -- and I've personally tried to create those incentives, whereby those people who have gone out of their way to improve things get the promotions and raises, and I make sure everyone knows why they're getting paid more. They see it going to the quiet guy who just kept tackling things he saw needed to be fixed, and then asking for more, and it certainly helped open some eyes. But not as much as you might expect.

<comment><USER2> One thing I did recently was go on a two week vacation where I was barely reachable. When I got back my company was in better shape than when I'd left and all of the people working for me had stepped up to do the things I had been doing. It was really eye opening for all of us.

<comment><USER3> This seems to be a common experience. Felix Dennis mentioned the same thing in his book - earlier on in his career, he'd just 'flip out' and go somewhere remote for a couple weeks, without even telling people ahead of time (more quirky and unplanned than your vacation!). But the same thing happened; he found that rather than adding tremendous value every second he was there, the company did much better when he got out of their way.

It's probably a good thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article -- and its lessons need not apply only to companies and entrepreneurship.

From the rather limited perspective constituting my own life, I have found a proactive attitude (coupled with a healthy disregard for "rules") tends to beget a considerable payoff.

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me a lot of a part of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture (<http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/>). One of his biggest pieces of advice was basically "if it's worth having, it's worth asking for". This is something that is surprisingly hard to live out, but the few times that I've consciously gone out of my way to ask for something I wouldn't have if I hadn't seen his lecture have paid off very nicely for me.</comment>


Ask HN: get traffic to a new dating site? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
We are considering starting a project in the online dating world. We are however kind of stuck with our traffic strategy.
Dating being a kind-of-but-getting-better-taboo topic, we don't think that word of mouth will be such a big driver, nor share-to-twitter/share-to-facebook as these have the same problem (do you want the fact that you are trying online dating posted all over your facebook wall?).
We think that these sites mostly get traffic through search or advertising. The latter is out of the question for us as we cannot afford to (apart from some guerrilla marketing). And getting a good spot for the dating keyword seems insanely hard.
Additionally there is the question of a subscription service. Starting of with a site that requires payment up-front sounds like a traffic-killer. We hate the current solution (spend 40 minutes to make your profile and then find out that you have to pay to message or reply).
So do you guys/girls have any ideas about this? Any past experience? How does a site like speeddate.com get started? How do you make a taboo site go viral? How do you overcome the fact that you have to charge people (for a product with such a bad reputation)? <comment><USER2> This is why I told people to dodge dating. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2171382>

OK, so let's say you've got a gun to your head and must do dating:

1). You don't have to appeal to everyone or the population average. You can start appealing to outliers in terms of viral spread ("Sure, I'll RT that I'm looking for a boyfriend, why wouldn't I?") and hope they have friends in the wider population.

2). Scalable content generation, the technique for all seasons when coming from behind in SEO. "online dating" is competitive, "20-something white guys in Ogaki" is not. Local search optimization for dating is an angle, although I know it has been plumbed before quite deeply (welcome to _everything_ about this space).

3) See the OKCupid link bait? Think you could come up with similarly juicy headlines without the data? I'm thinking the answer is "yes", since Cosmo has done it for years. Twenty Reasons Guys Don't Date Smart Women, etc. (It _will_ spread.)

4). Find an enemy, manufacturing them if necessary. If your marketing generates an emotional response it is less likely to fall into the background. A previously successful strategy for many dating sites has been "The world and our competitors won't let X do Y but we're different and love will win out, booyah."

5). Everybody in this space plays dirty. If you can't see the bloody knives in any competitor's hands, that is only because they're buried so deep in the body of everything right and good in the world. You will stoop to their level - and then some, because incumbents hold al the cards and their sins are buried in Google backups whereas yours will be fresh in Matt Cutts' inbox. You will be dancing on the knife's edge until you get your site burned to the ground, or you will never have enough traffic for that to even matter.

Seriously, do you _really_ want to do online dating?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey sorry about the late reply, we have had an insanely busy weekend. Thank you very much for the insight, especially points 2 and 3 and will keep 5 in mind, sounds pretty scary :-p

We are going to give it a try. It seems like there is enormous potential in the market.

Thanks again for the comments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > And getting a good spot for the dating keyword seems insanely hard.

Okay, how about this:

* Make a Windows desktop widget or executable that sits in the system tray and polls for active Internet connection. Whenever the user goes online, it checks with your server if any 'matches' for the user are available and if so, goes Coooo! (and notifies the user.)

* Make it available for free download.

* Submit it to all the freeware/shareware sites out there...

... and see your rankings (and PR) soar.

HTH

ps. If you're going to do this, do it fast, before your competitors do. ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks also for your comment. Since we are not going to match anybody this is going to be hard, but it may be interesting for notifications (ie. "messages")...

Thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Unique Things for Startup Offices - <AUTHOR> Tell us what unique thing your startup has for your office that you appreciate! Things that you really appreciate and think are money well spent, not just standard ping-pong, open office, etc. <comment><USER2> Sound dampening. Not as many places as it could be, sadly, but having to overhear only the conversations within 10 feet of you instead of every paper rustling in the entire 5000sqft office makes the open plan marginally less intolerable.

As davelnewton says below, if you really want to stand out, provide private offices. To everyone.

Ok, here's one more that doesn't cost as much: eliminate fluorescent lighting. If you can't replace the overheads, leave them off and give each employee their own desk lamp that they can turn on and off at will.

Must-haves: properly adjustable chairs (depth as well as height) and hydraulic desks. One size fits all desks are anything but. Your tall and short employees will have much better concentration and less RSI if even when sitting they can adjust their desk to a height appropriate for their own body. (Example: I can sit properly - without toes dangling - only at a desk 6-8" lower than the standard. The giraffe of a dude who sits next to me needs his 4" above the standard just to get his knees under it.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Open offices are the devil (for many people). They're loud, encourage interruptions, and essentially halt deep work. Quiet places where you can work: now _that 's_ unique.</comment>


Our Brand Could Be Your Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/our-brand-could-be-your-crisis/ <comment><AUTHOR> Whilst a bit rambling and somewhat repetitive about the film, the article does introduce some interesting perspectives on today's millennial culture. I think it is signalling an exciting future...</comment>


Steve Jobs on Successful Founders- Persistent, Passionate, and Talent Scouts - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wZfQENXtB4

<comment><USER2> fking LOVE it. love that guy.</comment>


Ask HN: Best-looking Documentation pages? - <AUTHOR>

What projects/services/software/languages have the most beautiful documentation pages design-wise? <comment><USER2> A nice compilation of webdev documentation:

[http://devdocs.io](http://devdocs.io)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In my opinion Stripe [1] has pretty awesome looking docs for API.

[1] [https://stripe.com/docs/api/php#create_charge](https://stripe.com/docs/api/php#create_charge)

<comment><USER3> I agree; I love the side-by-side explanation and json, and the ability to toggle from python to ruby, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like Vimeo's API documentation: [http://developer.vimeo.com](http://developer.vimeo.com)</comment>


Show HN: Popup Encyclopedia – A lightning fast popup encyclopedia/dictionary - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pncnmnp/PopUp-Encyclopedia <comment><AUTHOR> Most of the other extensions do not support encyclopedia ( or proper nouns ), hence the motive was to support both. Also the dictionary can be used offline.</comment>


Access and query your database from browsers - <AUTHOR> http://anydb.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you use a platform like this?</comment>