Lab-grown 'mini-brains' do mimic human brain development - <AUTHOR> https://spectrumnews.org/news/toolbox/lab-grown-mini-brains-mimic-brain-development/ <comment><USER2> Title is an exaggeration, all they found was structures that looked similar to structures in our brains. They have no idea what these structures actually do, and even said there is huge amount of variability in the structures.

As an aside, this:

 _" They first froze the mini-brains and cut them into ultra-thin sections, which they mounted onto glass slides. They then labeled the sections with different combinations of colored fluorescent tags that are specific to certain cell types, and imaged the sections using an automated scanner."_

Shows just how immature the neurobiology field is. I imagine that slicing, and then manually re connecting the slices in a 3d program, must be a pretty painstaking process. Not to mention you are left with no idea how data traveled round the structure. A code analogy would be having a huge codebase handed to you in little chunks, and you have to connect up the pieces by hand. And at the end of it, not even being able to debug it and see if things even work as expected.

<comment><USER3> I worked in a lab where we had a similar problem reconstructing 3d images from manual sections via the same procedure.

Not only is it a painstaking process, but some slices are lost due to human error while sectioning and the tissue is mechanically distorted when placed onto the slides (squished between the glass and the cover slip).

The solution was simple, albeit much more expensive than sectioning: just MRI scan the organ.

<comment><USER4> If the sample is small enough you can always use an optical coherence microscope. You can get optical microscope resolutions in 3D of in-vivo samples. It's similar to a confocal microscope but with much higher resolution. Only thing is they can be dang expensive but nowhere near as much as an MRI.

You can also get OCT devices for pretty cheap. They use them in optometrist offices for imaging retinas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I like this at a conceptual level, I'm struggling with it on a personal, perhaps moral level. A real brain, trapped, prisoner in a vat... if it's a real brain, it's going to have some level of sentience, just like the rest of us. Yet it is a slave. This is somewhat horrific to me. AI never really bothered me right up until I read this...

<comment><USER6> > if it's a real brain, it's going to have some level of sentience

Without a sensorimotor apparatus for the brain to manipulate and receive reward-signals from, and thus train to control, there is very likely no "thought" as we would consider it—nothing coherent, no _train_ of thought, no high-level patterns. It's more like the sort of "thought" a foetus would have before its first moment of conscious awareness.

<comment><USER7> I'm inclined to agree that such a mini-brain at this stage is _most-likely_ non-conscious and incapable of suffering, but how would we know?

Organisms with far "simpler" brains than ours appear to be capable of suffering. I'm unaware of the extent to which human embryonic brain development follows expected principles of evolutionary developmental biology, but if that holds, a sufficiently developed brain should at least be given equal ethical consideration as an animal. Vertebrates are commonly born with a capacity for suffering, so I question how much external input is required. If the necessary brain structures are there, those same structures should suffice for achieving brain-states equivalent to percepts of suffering.

Looks to me like we're not quite there yet, as these cerebral organoids are pretty darn small and comparatively disorganized, but it's only a matter of time before the ethical questions need be faced.

With a little searching, I found similar views from neuroskeptic. [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/09/02/th...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/09/02/the- case-of-the-tiny-human-brains/#.WQOYINLyup0)

<comment><USER6> Maybe I used a very bad and distracting (and political) example. "Suffering" wasn't really something I was trying to talk about, here. (To be clear, pain is a matter of instinct, which is to say, a predefined brain structure that "works" from birth—and maybe before-hand—whenever it shows up.) Rather, I was _specifically_ talking about this thing we call "thinking." The thing that humans do when they're awake and lucid, and _don 't_ do when they're asleep/unconscious/in a dissociative fugue. The thing that the courts care about as _mens rea_.

Many higher-level vertebrates develop some capacity for "thinking"—that is, for planning/strategizing, puzzle-solving, learning and synthesizing information, forming concepts and abstractions, _overriding_ instincts with beliefs based on evidence, etc. Humans and all other primates do this; as do crows and their relatives; as do dolphins; etc.

But none of these animals _start_ with that ability from birth. "Thinking" has never been observed as behavior available instinctually to any animal. A newborn crow or gorilla, despite being rather self-sufficient with a library of instinctual responses, won't be able to solve the puzzles that we get the adults of those species to solve and which we cite as proof of their intelligence. They _grow_ that ability from months/years of life experience.

In fact, almost by definition, "thinking" is something you have to _build_ : it's a big conceptual hierarchy with sensory data at its base. And—as far as we know—instinct can't pre-bake the needed raw sensory data into brains. (It can bake in higher-level associations, like scent- or pattern-associations for predator avoidance. But it doesn't include these in low-level "raw" terms where a brain can derive any of its _own_ interpretations or abstractions from them.)

Without accumulated experience, a brain is still experiencing the world, and _reacting_ to the world, and experiencing _reward signals_ from the world—like most animals do—but is not yet _thinking_ about the world. Thinking is a matter of updating beliefs about schemas/models/concepts; and those things only _exist_ when derived from sense-data "evidence."

<comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I recently had a discussion concerning animal sentience and was having trouble articulating my thoughts. You have managed to concisely convey "thought" in an eloquent fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How long until we can use these for machine learning?

<comment><USER10> After Elon Musk's Neuralink figures out a scalable way to interface with neurons. Need probably millions of electrodes, not just a few hundred like we use today.

It would be kind of crazy if we develop full AI by literally using brains in vats. But it makes sense (even if it is horrifying). Meat is cheap, and the brain is like an exa-OPS computer running on 20 Watts of power. If you could solve the interface problem and figure out how to actually use it practically, brain is like 6 or 7 orders of magnitude cheaper than the next-cheapest computing substrate. That's like half a century of Moore's Law (and Moore's Law is basically over now... much slower pace, at least).

(Here's an example using rat neurons: [https://singularityhub.com/2010/10/06/videos-of-robot- contro...](https://singularityhub.com/2010/10/06/videos-of-robot-controlled- by-rat-brain-amazing-technology-still-moving-forward/) And this one: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells- in-a...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a-dish- fly-fighter-plane/) )

<comment><USER11> However, wetware still ages, gets diseases, needs life support, and is fairly non-serviceable.

If I could pick what platform _I_ run on, it'd be hardware (and I hope such hardware eventually comes along).

<comment><USER12> Sure. But if they're cheap to grow, just make more.

"Cattle, not pets."

(I do realize the pretty horrific undertones of this discussion.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Getting spooky and ethically tricky.

</comment><comment><USER14> put a neural net in those</comment>


Ask HN: How to master english language from intermediate level - <AUTHOR> Dear HN Readers,
 English is my second language, but I'm using it for more than two decades. I want to take it to next level where my language is good enough to write scientific journals or a thoroughly professional business documents. I know it would not be easy, but I'm drowned in various online resources. I would really love to know your advices/suggestions/comments which may help me in this regard. <comment><USER2> The fastest way is immersion. Live for 3 months in a country where English is the primary language spoken. Spend your time among people who do not speak your first language at all.

Failing that, spend at least half an hour every day speaking with someone whose first language is English, even if it has to be over Skype.</comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate the testing of your websites? - <AUTHOR>

From unit testing to link checkers.  Is it possible to automate testing of display and layout issues from release to release? <comment><USER2> <http://seleniumhq.org/> is great for system testing. Easy to start using with the firefox plugin (selenium IDE), more advanced features (Selenium RC, Grid) and tests can be written in a number of languages.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://browsershots.org/> is useful for checking layout on every browser/os combination imaginable.</comment>


3D Images of Taiwan to Be Pulled from Google Maps - <AUTHOR> http://focustaiwan.tw/news/ast/201902230019.aspx <comment><AUTHOR> This seems a bit asinine. We will remove your military installations from view, sure, but that means removing the whole 3D setup for everything. Really ?

<comment> T-A The alternative is Taiwan notifying Google every time they build or move something sensitive, which does not seem like a great security model. Even in the absence of leaks, a would-be attacker would just need to look for flat patches in the sea of 3D to tell where the interesting stuff is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I still don't understand. How does it work with normal maps when they blur or obfuscate sensitive information upon governments' requests ? Surely they don't remove the whole map.

<comment> T-A Last year I was jumping around the world in Google Earth VR, standing on skyscrapers in Tokyo and such, when I decided to go have a look at Washington DC. Surprise: for miles around the White House, there was no 3D info, just flat, blurry satellite photos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, yes, and that makes sense. They have an obfuscated area, which is what I would expect in this case too, instead of removing the option for the whole of Taiwan. Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan and Taichung are not exactly tiny villages where only a couple of geeky nerds used 3D, either.

<comment> T-A No, but in Taiwan's case the concern is not the cities (everybody knows where those are), it's this kind of thing: [https://thediplomat.com/2014/09/taiwan- asias-secret-air-powe...](https://thediplomat.com/2014/09/taiwan-asias-secret- air-power/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Very informative. Can't quite square the 'there's more than meets the eye' in Taiwan's supposed military might and preparedness from the article with the soldiers fumbling with missile systems and shooting one across the strait towards China by mistake a couple of years ago, but hey...

Edit : That one didn't reach the mainland, of course.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Big Three – Scala, Clojure and Groovy - <AUTHOR> http://thecodegeneral.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/the-big-three-jvm-languages/ <comment><USER2> A bit OT, but: checking popularity with indeed.com is a fishy thing. First there is a trend even for simple PHP-only shops to post ads with the phrase "Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Clojure knowledge is a pre" (Yes, the "beating the averages" effect reached recruting years ago)

Haskell as an example: Haskell County healthcare and the company Haskell & White and more like these are occupying the first three pages of haskell results before there is a Java dev ad using the "at least one of { Scala, Erlang, SML, Haskell, Prolog, Lisp, Clojure }" phrase.

Clojure: on the first page I count three real clojure jobs and seven "at least one of ..." mentionings.

For Scala the indeed search turns out to be more relevant.

Conclusion: Get out of my face with indeed.com, their data is next to unusable for PL connected job trends.

<comment><USER3> While there are many corner cases which you have outlined, in the grand scheme of things job advert data is a reasonable indicator (and one of the few we have). In the case of languages with limited commercial adoption (Clojure, Haskell) there will be more noise due to the small sample size and low adoption. The indeed.com data indicates that Java and C# are popular languages. Do you believe that to not be an accurate reflection of reality?

What is interesting about the blog is that it also correlates the results with results from polls among developers.

<comment><USER2> The big three are Java, C# and C(++). But I do not need to go to indeed to know that.

Indeed is used often to show that language a has more adoption than language b. a and b being languages in the non- or pre-commercial domain. I'm only arguing that statements like "haskell overtakes prolog, statical typing > declarative programming" cannot be inferred from indeed data.

As for the "reasonable indicator": if the average java/php job points out that "haskell/erlang/prolog is a pre" , job ads might only be a reasonable indicator for the languages we already know to be at the top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If Java itself were included in the poll, then a logarithmic scale would be required :-)

Personally, I really enjoy Clojure development, but Java is still the elephant in the room. Also, even though JRuby doesn't rate as high as the "big three," JRuby is incredible useful for merging work done in Ruby and Java, and for taking Ruby web apps and deploying them on the JVM.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have they considered what the languages are being used for? Scala with its intensive static typing is more likely to be used for serious systems, while Groovy for quick scripts to test stuff. And then there's JRuby not mentioned, because its lumped under Ruby: who knows what proportion of that is JRuby and what is Matz's Ruby?

<comment><USER6> I find it unfortunate that we now equate "intensive static typing" with "serious systems." I know of almost as many serious systems written in Clojure as I do in Scala, and I think it's fair to say that they're pretty much polar opposites as far as typing goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting to see how three JVM languages have emerged from the pack. Scala and Groovy proving popular amongst Java developers. Clojure also with a substantial following, but less commercial adoption.</comment>


Bulgaria Passes a Law Requiring Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bozhobg/bulgaria-got-a-law-requiring-open-source-98bf626cf70a#.np5mz0heu <comment><USER2> You wouldn't know the background motivating this decision unless you have been a frustrated user of the nearly non-functional software of Bulgarian state institutions.

Ludicrous amounts of money are paid by the government to a selected niche of companies for developing all kinds of useless websites which barely work under load and have abysmal implementations with blatant security holes. This law can act as a safeguard against such "epic failures", so that the taxpayers can be aware of what they are actually paying for. 300k euros for a static website? Let's hope it's over.

<comment><USER3> I hope it helps, but it doesn't seem like a sure thing on the face of it. To the extent these big, expensive government projects are similar to smaller "dumb-customer" projects, I don't think this will help.

Anything that requires working with a hard to work with organization is "expensive" in one way or another. You need to sell them the project, which could take months or years. You need to figure out what they need, which will be difficult and you'll be wrong because no one knows, nevermind articulating it . You'll be forced to take numerous long cuts to meet unnecessary requirements. There will be iterations, slow progress, long waits for client input, training…

The companies who succeed at this are the ones who are experts in this process. They sell well. They're good at "managing the process" and winning when a project is 3 years overdue, over budget, the spec is on iteration 46, and no one can remember the original goal.

OTOH, if the government is developing software, why shouldn't it be open source. At the least, its good transparency.

<comment><USER2> Yes, this is mostly about preventing taxpayer rip-off for trivial software. Similar fraud schemes are exploited in almost every infrastructure development project. The government would repave a road with 1/3 of the official budget and the rest would be shared among the officials and shady business owners.

The Bulgarian government is unable to undertake a surveillance project of any substantial scale simply because it lacks the technological expertise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember the CEO of Information Services JSC (the de-facto Bulgarian monopolist in governement software procurement), prof. Mihail Konstantinov, making the ridiculous claim on TV that "We can't release the source code of the elections counting software. Anyone who has the source can hack into the system, even children know that. If you don't understand that, you should tear your diploma". Glad to see that morons such as him will no longer have the final say.

<comment><USER5> If it makes you feel better, the Australian government said the same thing:

"Ronaldson refused to table any documents relating to the case, stating that publishing the source code could lead to the EasyCount software being hacked. "In relation to the source code for the Senate counting system, I am advised that publication of the software could leave the voting system open to hacking or manipulation," he said. "In addition, I am advised that the AEC classifies the relevant software as commercial-in-confidence as it also underpins the industrial and fee-for-service election counting systems."" [1]

Australia's federal senate vote count software is a Visual Basic application. It was developed when an upgrade to Windows 2000 broke the previous COBOL application. [2]

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/government-blocks-aec-source- co...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/government-blocks-aec-source-code-release- on-hacking-fears/)

[2] [http://www.itnews.com.au/news/the-tech-behind-was-senate- rec...](http://www.itnews.com.au/news/the-tech-behind-was-senate- recount-360504)

<comment><USER6> These politicians are right - simply opening the existing source, with all it's flaws, bugs, and security holes, _would_ be dangerous. It would be a huge help to any malicious party. I don't think they're suggesting open source is worse from a security point of view; they're saying that you can't open up an existing product without doing a lot of work first.

Where they are wrong is in the assumption that keeping the source closed makes them safe from an attack.

<comment><USER7> To some extent yes, but this is only good if you can make sure that not a single malicious adversary has access to the source code. My assumption would be that in the voting case, the ones in power do have access to the code, which is actually worse than open sourcing it. Offtopic: IMHO, the only way to fix the voting software issue is to deanonymize the voting process to some extent, which is a hard problem by itself too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It means that whatever custom software the government procures will be > visible and accessible to everyone. After all, it's paid by tax-payers money > and they should both be able to see it and benefit from it.

I've been thinking that way for a long time, nice to see I'm not alone. Let's hope other jurisdictions follow suit.

</comment><comment><USER9> Would be nice if bigger nations like USA, UK/GB, Germany would adopt this policy and have to open source the exploits and root kits that where develop with tax payers money.

Open source XKeyscore, yay!

<comment><USER10> The UK government's digital services implement Open Standards for most of the code they develop. While this isn't something that third party vendors have to do, GDS/PDS/MOJDS/HMRCDigital are all rapidly reducing the amount of work external vendors do for government anyway.

[https://github.com/alphagov](https://github.com/alphagov)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, in the linked presentation I mention GDS as a good example. The US also has a lot of opensource projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The fact that something is in the law doesn't mean it's a fact, though."..."companies will surely try to circumvent it."

Yeah, this is very well said. Most laws in Bulgaria are either not enforced or "avoidable" :)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is very interesting, I wish more countries followed suit.

In my ideal fantasy world, at some point other countries might have a look at one of the open source projects of Bulgaria and collaborate when the goals align closely.

<comment><USER13> It would be cool to have a Bulgarian version of the US Government's 18F:

[https://18f.gsa.gov/](https://18f.gsa.gov/)

They have public standards for government websites, server HTTPS configs, website user interfaces, etc. On GitHub!

[https://github.com/18F](https://github.com/18F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It mentions "OpenOffice", which is now defunct.

In any case it is good. Future procurements will show how well the law is applied.

<comment><USER15> OpenOffice isn't defunct, it is still in development: [https://www.openoffice.org](https://www.openoffice.org).

<comment><USER16> It's nothing, compared with LibreOffice development pace.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but it is still alive. And even LibreOffice copied feature introduced in Apache OpenOffice by IBM(sidebar). But OpenOffice cannot copy code from LO due to license incompatiblity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've personally seen the Dutch government spend millions implementing open source software. This was something that could've been fixed for a fraction using a closed source solution. After a couple of years, the project was canceled and the closed source solution was implemented anyway.

I'm not saying that using OSS is a bad thing. I don't, however, think that 'OSS only' is the solution to the problem at hand.

<comment><USER18> More background please? Because unless they were cutting corners in a _huge_ way (probably security-wise), I don't see how open source would be so much more expensive than closed source. The statement that "[it] could've been fixed for a fraction using closed source" seems very weird since there are no fundamental differences in how one writes open or closed source code.

<comment><USER17> They were implementing an ESB. There wasn't any internal knowledge on it, so they had started a joint venture with a business that provided consultants. For some reason (not exactly sure why), the project went past its deadline by about 2 years. My own employer at the time also provided an ESB, though it was closed source. We had a lot of experience with the product, and therefore could've implemented it quickly and for a fraction of the price (like we'd done before). Unfortunately, no information on this is available online, for reasons I understand.

When they canceled the project, apparently they ended up hiring my employer anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That is great news, hope it works out well.

</comment><comment><USER20> If facebook, google, twitter and others are able to run their world scale software on OSS solutions without being hacked, I am sure that OSS can power some national scale software as well.

<comment><USER21> They ARE being hacked from time to time :) But they also know that and they run bug-bounty programs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Every law passed by Bulgarian parliament serves only one purpose - to put pressure on somebody, so people in the shadows can get a slice.

edit: A new government agency is tasked with enforcing the law

Ah, I see now.

<comment><USER23> I know the people who stand behind this and believe me, they have 0 (zero) dependence on the oligarchy and moreover they are a team of experts who have been in the private sector until recently. This law is one against the status quo.

<comment><USER22> There have been plenty of experts with 0 dependency from the oligarchy. They all either failed or started dancing to the tune. Even if they have pure intentions, they will get manipulated, used and eventually thrown out while the agency will serve as a means to block companies who don't know the right people.</comment></comment></comment>


Open source game: Love Hotel - <AUTHOR> http://3sillyhats.com/lovehotel/

<comment><AUTHOR> Source code + data is available here:

[https://github.com/3SillyHats/LoveHotel](https://github.com/3SillyHats/LoveHotel)</comment>


community-centric content management platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.cylive.com <comment><USER2> I browsed the site for a bit and read their about section. I'm still unsure as to what the purpose of the site is and what specifically does it enable me to do. I read their 'What can you do with Cylive' list and it seems as if they're trying to do a bit too much. However, that's just like my opinion, man.</comment>


CoronaNotify – Get Notified When the Coronavirus Is Near - <AUTHOR> https://coronanotify.com/ <comment><USER2> I like giving these "services" a one off email address from my own catchall and then check in on it months later to see how they attempted to monetize the data. Would probably make an interesting time series info-graphic.

<comment><USER3> I do that with marathon entries. The worst offender by far has been the Rock N Roll series, who sold my email (firstname.lastname@example.com) to several races throughout California. I chuckle every time something occasionally comes in to that address. 9/10 would recommend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The right way to get notified when SARS-CoV-2 is near you is to follow the news and official sources, and whomever put this service up should be ashamed of themselves.

<comment><USER5> Ashamed? Some people prefer push over pull. Following the news is unhealthy in its own way.

<comment><USER4> Yes, ashamed. Prefer? This is not the time to have preferences, but regardless, there are official sources that send you notifications.

You _will_ know when the virus is near you before the operator of this service has a chance to update their data. The service is useless and any minimal false sense of security it gives could harm people by making them a bit less likely to follow official information sources and to prepare in time.

<comment><USER5> > there are official sources that send you notifications.

Feel free to link them. Brief googling didn't turn up any for me.

<comment><USER4> It depends on the country, in the US you should subscribe to CDC alerts and follow the news.

[https://www.cdc.gov/publichealthgateway/healthalerts/index.h...](https://www.cdc.gov/publichealthgateway/healthalerts/index.html)

In South Korea people get emergency alerts on their phones whenever they enter an area that is affected.

This strategy may be used by other countries too in the near future, so check if emergency alerts are configured on your phone.

<comment><USER5> Which one of those will tell me when covid 19 is in my city and not bother me otherwise? Supposing I'm not willing to bet that my government will be operating with the efficiency of South Korea's, I mean.

<comment><USER6> If there's no official data, the service won't have it either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron Fear as a Service

<comment><USER7> Morpheus: "Wha'tt if I said — we monetized it, successfully, Neo."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one service where I am perfectly fine if I never receive any notification

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool idea. It's a shame it doesn't accept TLDs like .party, though.

<comment><USER10> Nor does it accept "+" characters in the email address localpart, as allowed in RFC822 (1982).

<comment><USER11> I recently learned that single words are considered valid email addresses... e.g. "foo" or "root".

<comment><USER12> Isn't that how mail gets routed to local user mailboxes?

<comment><USER11> Yes, exactly. I just never expected an email parser to recognize those cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Its like nip alert, but somehow worse.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a fantastic example of "app marketing". Build a simple app that is genuinely useful, then include a small link to the app creator. It is a great, non-BS (cough cough content marketing/SEO) way to drive new traffic.

<comment><USER15> 50% of the app creator menu's links land to a 404.:')</comment></comment>


Simple Habit Is Hiring a Head of Design/Design Lead - <AUTHOR> Simple Habit is on a mission to help every human stress less and live better. It's an exciting time for the company. In just 1 year, we became the #1 meditation app and we're backed by top tier investors including YC, NEA and prominent CEOs in Silicon Valley who support our mission to make the world a happier, healthier place.<p>If you're interested in having a huge impact at a mission driven company, please apply! https://jobs.lever.co/simplehabit <comment><AUTHOR> [https://jobs.lever.co/simplehabit](https://jobs.lever.co/simplehabit)</comment>


The white flight of Derek Black - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-derek-black/2016/10/15/ed5f906a-8f3b-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_stormfront-658am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory <comment><USER2> I think a lot of people agree that the current political climate is very polarizing, with people rarely honestly engaging (and engaging honestly) with those they don't already agree with. I see this in myself and have been trying to fight against it. Reading an article like this reinforces for me how important this is.</comment>


SPDY server on node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/donnerjack13589/node-spdy With latest dev version of node.js you're able to use NPN extension of TLS. So SPDY server can be naturally run with usual HTTPS server.<p>That's basic protocol implementation that allows you to run SPDY server on node.js with fallback to HTTPS.<p>(Seeking for a collaborators!) <comment><USER2> from <http://www.chromium.org/spdy>

Python implementation of a SPDY server: <http://github.com/mnot/nbhttp/tree/spdy>

Java imlementation of SPDY client/server: [http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tomcat/trunk/modules/tomcat-...](http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tomcat/trunk/modules/tomcat- lite)

Apache module for SPDY: <http://code.google.com/p/mod-spdy/>

Ruby SPDY: <https://github.com/igrigorik/spdy>

node.js SPDY: <https://github.com/donnerjack13589/node-spdy>

</comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful code.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice work. And there's other implementations too on the project web page: <https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/spdy>. Seems all google sites are using SPDY for ssl now; that is evidently the lowest hanging fruit for speed gains.

You can see it in use in chrome by visiting chrome://net-internals/#spdy

No idea when it's going to be supported in any browser besides chrome, though ..

</comment><comment><USER5> Looking really good indutny!

For anyone interested, Fedor is also one of the co-authors of node-http-proxy ( <https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy> ) and an all around nice guy.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm just oozing with buzz-word juice.</comment>


Show HN: Kotlin-tutorial for securing a REST API - <AUTHOR> https://javalin.io/tutorials/auth-example <comment><AUTHOR> I recently finished writing a tutorial on using the AccessManager interface in Javalin ([https://javalin.io/documentation#access- manager](https://javalin.io/documentation#access-manager)).

I haven't seen auth solved this way in any other library/framework, so it would be great to get some feedback (both on the tutorial, and the concept of the AccessManager interface itself).</comment>


Ask HN: Are you afraid of the "big one" in California? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a developer living in California. While I enjoy many things here, news of overdue earthquakes like this one [1] scares the hell out of me. I really want to settle down, but the idea of paying for a house in a very expensive and earthquake-prone state really troubles me.
I work remotely and as a immigrant I have no family to hold on to. So I can live in another state if I want. Still, I like California (after spending time in several other states) and I guess I'm looking for a reason not to have to leave.
Do you scare of earthquakes? If you do, what keep you from moving already (except for obvious reasons like jobs and family)? If you work remotely and can live anywhere in the US [2], where would you live?
[1] The Really Big One http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
[2] If you think another country is better, please check out this question instead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10037690 <comment><USER2> Honestly, if you're well prepared and live/work in buildings that have been seismically retrofitted, you're probably better off in an earthquake than most other natural disasters. San Francisco is making a lot of progress in terms of earthquake preparedness (recently passed a soft-story ordinance, lots of new building codes around earthquakes), and a lot of the infrastructure has been retrofitted for earthquakes fairly recently (bay bridge, transbay tube...).

My advice would be to put together a good earthquake preparedness kit, move to an apartment that has been seismically retrofitted, make sure your big appliances are bolted to the wall, and move on with your life. Plenty of other things to spend your time worrying about.

</comment><comment><USER3> Many years ago, after agonizing over one too many flood victim stories, I went looking for a "safe" place to live. To my chagrin, I learned that humans habitually live near water so they don't die of thirst and can also grow crops. They also use water as a means of transport. Thus, most development is in areas at some risk of flood. Further investigation showed that every place has some kind of natural disaster. You can kind of choose which one bothers you less, but you cannot escape them. The Midwest has tornadoes. The East Coast has hurricanes. The far north has blizzards and ice storms. Etc. Etc.

I like California. My health is better here than elsewhere. For now, I expect to be here for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER4> Even if you find a place that's free of most foreseeable natural catastrophes (my own homeland, Uruguay, is such an example), you sometimes can't avoid political or human-caused ones (wars, dictatorships, the taxman :P etc.)

So the "be prepared" advice elsewhere in the thread sounds good. If I ever move to California I'll try to find an earthquake-safe place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No, not if you view it from the perspective of statistics. The chances of you dying in a traffic accident are still much higher. In fact, it seems like you're 20,000 times more likely to die from this than in an earthquake living in California [1]. And you can always increase your chances of survival by living on bedrock, or not directly on a fault line, or living in a newer building (skyscrapers are actually safer than a 1-story house due to higher requirements in safety).

[1] [http://www.dartmouth.edu/~ears5/handouts/Prob_dying6_25_99.h...](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~ears5/handouts/Prob_dying6_25_99.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks all for offering your perspective. This comforts me a lot. I guess I would start by stocking up supplies and checking whether the apartment I live is properly retrofitted.</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you charge to speak on stage? - ben-gy I'm an early stage speaker. I've spoken on stage a number of times (https://onstage.ai/speakers/br). I like to qualify decisions I make in life using data, and I'm struggling to find case studies and data points to work out what the normalised transition is from not charging to speak at conferences and events, to charging a speaker fee any time on stage.
What do you charge to speak on stage? How did you make that transition to charging a speaker fee for speaking onstage?
Disclosure: I'm the Founder of https://onstage.ai - I built it last year because, short of building your own website, free/low-cost professional looking solutions for non-professional speakers were largely missing from the market. It's still pretty early stage - any/all feedback is welcomed :) <comment><AUTHOR> I've never been paid to speak, but I have had event organizers and/or my employer cover my expenses. For example, I got a "free" trip to Europe for speaking at a conference once.</comment>


Ask HN: Contacted by Google Recruiter - <AUTHOR> Hi, I was contacted by a Technical Recruiter with Google and it seems they work with Nelson Staffing. They wanted to talk to me the next day, and despite having given them times for next couple of days and 1 follow up email, they haven't responded at all. Should I be worried that they dropped the ball and my application will be forgotten? <comment><USER2> No.</comment>


The Device Firmware Update Cookbook - <AUTHOR> https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/device-firmware-update-cookbook <comment><AUTHOR> Author here -- I've implemented DFU too many times from scratch, and never until now did I put all of my various notes in one place. I'm sure folks here will have some feedback and additional ideas, excited to hear them!</comment>


Ask HN: Continous growth as a C++ developer - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN
tl dr: I'm looking for a good way to learn more in depth knowledge of C++, as well as something to motivate me to learn in my spare time. Is a course/certificate a reasonable option and can you recommend any in particular?
I know this might be a bit more of a "career programer" question than what's normal for HN, but I still thought it would be worthwhile to ask.
I've been working with C++ for about 1.5 years now and find my growth stagnating. During normal work hours I find myself solving the problem at hand and moving on to the next problem rather than allocating enough time for deep learning and really gaining an understanding of C++ internals. This is mostly since there's always more to do than we have time for.
I've been thinking about how to solve this and started thinking about taking a course/certification (probably in my spare time) that would allow me code in a more learning oriented way, while also forcing me to code in my spare time. (I read a lot of about programing and technology in my spare time but find most of my own projects fizzling out due to lack of motivation)
Do you think a course/certification is the right way to go? And if so can you recommend something worth taking? <comment><USER2> What courses/certifications are you thinking of?

When I was trying to improve my C skills, I worked on some projects with other people so we can learn from each other while staying motivated. I would also recommend the Effective C++ books by Scott Meyers if you haven't read them already.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure, I was mostly thinking of something that will involve a lot of coding assignments. The idea being that if I code to learn there will be less pressure to deliver something and move on, instead allowing me to investigate it at a different level. While still having a framework to get me working.

I guess what I'm thinking about is something like c++ for grandmasters ([http://www.cppgm.org/](http://www.cppgm.org/)), but less epic in scope.</comment></comment>


Gunnar Carlsson on the Shape of Data (2012) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kctyag2Xi8o <comment><USER2> I find the topic intriguing, but can someone who is well versed with _both_ topology and machine learning comment on what is the key innovation here?

On first glance, the methods here seem a lot like the toolbox of dimensionality reduction techniques (PCA, spectral embedding, or more general manifold learning, etc.) from machine learning literature.

What specific insights from the field of topology have helped further our understanding of data that we missed earlier?

<comment><AUTHOR> Prof Carlsson's ([http://math.stanford.edu/~gunnar/](http://math.stanford.edu/~gunnar/)) "Topology and Data" paper provides a good overview: [http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2009-46-02/S0273-0979-09-01...](http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2009-46-02/S0273-0979-09-01249-X/S0273-0979-09-01249-X.pdf)

My recent dive into the literature has enlightened my thinking in terms of database and systems design. It has led me to think more in terms of properties, invariants, intervals, constraints, and dynamic fluidity -- "there are no things" (only actions and properties): [https://edge.org/response- detail/11514](https://edge.org/response-detail/11514)

Maybe the antiquated abstractions we have been using for database systems is what limits us. Maybe we need to stop thinking in terms of things -- objects, partitions, and static state -- and start thinking in terms of millions of fluid dynamic processes. Maybe Jim Starkey is on the right track: [http://www.nuodb.com/about-us/jim-starkey](http://www.nuodb.com/about-us/jim- starkey).

Sussman seems to be converging there too -- see his talk "We Really Don't Know How to Compute" ([http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know- How-T...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To- Compute)) and his work on the Propagator ([https://github.com/ProjectMAC/propagators](https://github.com/ProjectMAC/propagators)).

The rapid flow of data id stressing our system designs is making this more apparent, and we're starting to see stream processing systems emerge like Google Dataflow and Apache Flink. Ideas from functional programming and immutable state are looking more prescient. Now our database management systems need to evolve.

      "At no period in human culture have men understood the
      psychic mechanisms involved in invention and technology.
      Today it is the instant speed of electric information that,
      for the first time, permits easy recognition of the
      patterns and the formal contours of change and development.
      The entire world, past and present, now reveals itself to
      us like a growing plant in an enormously accelerated movie.
      Electric speed is synonymous with light and with the
      understanding of causes."

      — Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

'okram's recent paper provides a new graph-based model for stateless functional flows that could be applied in other systems: See "Quantum Walks with Gremlin" ([http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06278v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06278v1.pdf))

And Vladimir Kornyak touches on some of these ideas in these papers:

1\. On Compatibility of Discrete Relations (2005) [http://arxiv.org/pdf/math- ph/0504048.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/math-ph/0504048.pdf)

2\. Structural and Symmetry Analysis of Discrete Dynamical Systems (2010) [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1006.1754.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1006.1754.pdf)

3\. Discrete Dynamical Models: Combinatorics, Statistics and Continuum Approximations (2015) [http://mmg.tversu.ru/images/publications/2015-vol3-n1/Kornya...](http://mmg.tversu.ru/images/publications/2015-vol3-n1/Kornyak-2015-01-05.pdf)

<comment><USER3> It's quite clear from the Ayasdi website that they're targeting enterprise customers. I wish they had an API similar to clarif.ai or wit.ai.

<comment><AUTHOR> Javaplex: Persistent Homology and Topological Data Analysis Library ([http://appliedtopology.github.io/javaplex/](http://appliedtopology.github.io/javaplex/)) -- primarily developed by the Computational Topology workgroup at Stanford.

<comment><USER3> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


StackExchange – Speak Up & Upvote - <AUTHOR> http://jessealtman.com/2013/10/salesforce-stackexchange-speak-up-and-vote/

<comment><USER2> I agree with that post!

A portion of HN is reluctant to down vote anything but the most obvious spam. But up voting, down voting, and flagging are important features of the site and should be used more often.

It's disappointing to see obvious trolls with no net down votes.

<comment><USER3> Down voting on here is vastly over used. Usually as shorthand for, "I disagree but am incapable of making a coherent argument".

<comment><USER2> People should stop doing that. I agree it happens.

But then there are obvious trolls making trolling posts that don't get down votes, and even get replies.</comment></comment></comment>


Deep Learning for Robots: Learning from Large-Scale Interaction - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/03/deep-learning-for-robots-learning-from.html <comment><USER2> This is the real "machine learning"...</comment>


Reusable static sheets that turn walls (or any surface) into a whiteboard. - <AUTHOR> http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> I've used these; perhaps not this exact brand but the same generic product. Sheets of thin white plastic that adhere using static to walls and other surfaces.

They work pretty well; you have to take care not to get crinkles or wrinkles in the sheet of course, and not be too decisive with the eraser or you'll pull the sheet around on the wall.

The major problem these can have is that there is no border; the sheet is very thin and its easy to slip up and draw outside.

<comment><USER3> > _The major problem these can have is that there is no border; the sheet is > very thin and its easy to slip up and draw outside._

I fix that by drawing a border (with a red marker -- hard to miss).

<comment><USER4> At last a purpose for those permanent markers that people use accidentally on a whiteboard now and then :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to say, this looks more attractive to me than the paint from the other thread.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how effective the static remains over time. Does anyone have any experience with this? Otherwise it does look like a pretty good product.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've used them before when teaching; not bad, but the surrounding walls may become filthy if your erasers are not spotless.

</comment><comment><USER8> It looks like a gigantic roll of cling-wrap/cling-film. How it is reusable (effectively) is the vital question.

</comment><comment><USER9> these have been around for 10+ years...</comment>


IBM Watson Acquires Technology from Blekko - <AUTHOR> http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2015/03/better-way-tap-big-data-gusher.html <comment><USER2> IBM needs an up-to-date web-scale ontology (Blekko has it) for Watson, it used Freebase (et al) which is closing down on March 31, 2015 (largest open collaborative knowledge base): [http://www.freebase.com](http://www.freebase.com) , [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase)

Freebase was acquired by Google in 2010 and powers their internal Google Knowledge Graph. Microsoft bought Powerset (company) in 2008.

Freebase has 2,751,614,700 facts, Wikidata has 13,788,746 facts. Wikidata may import some data of Freebase, but due its stricter guidelines (notability guideline...) many facts of minor will be lost/never migrated. A Freebase dump won't age well, in a lot of cases up-to-date facts from the real world are required.

Maybe some community project can rescue the Freebase community project before it is too late?

@downvotes: ?

<comment><USER3> What do you mean with "ontology"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We need more alternatives to google, not less. On the one hand, great for blekko to have an exit of sorts, on the other a huge loss for the web. Now it's more or less down to duckduckgo and the likes of gigablast.com (which is now open source).

<comment><USER5> Poor Bing. Hundreds of millions spent on advertising and still less mindshare on Hackernews than Gigablast.

<comment><USER6> Gigablast is alive and well at Diffbot! (founder here)

[https://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/diffbot-brings-big-time- search...](https://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/diffbot-brings-big-time-search- poobah-aboard-to-help-it-scale/)

<comment><USER4> Neat! Thanks for all the hard work over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Blekko was the only search engine I knew of that provided a no BS unlimited search api. You just had to add '/json' to any request, and you had it their results in json.

</comment><comment><USER8> I remember having an email conversation a long time ago with someone who wrote their own search engine in C++. I think that system was Blekko. Congratulations to Blecko for a (hopefully) nice exit.

IBM Watson absorbed AlchemyAPI a few weeks ago.

I helped a friend's company integrate IBM Watson into their product, and I have mixed feeling about IBM Watson: plenty of potential, but some rough edges.

<comment><USER9> C++? No way, Blekko's done in Perl. See the YAPC slides: [http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/blekko-yapc- na-2013-2.pdf](http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/blekko-yapc-na-2013-2.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Any reason for the use of Perl both in this and in DDG? I'm a recent Comp Sci graduate and haven't seen a lot jobs for Perl or use cases over say Python/Ruby which seem to more popular.

<comment><USER3> I guess the people who made them were already comfortable with Perl. Perl is also very good at text processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow - I'm a little surprised that blekko would be acquired by IBM, but I suppose IBM must see Watson as a huge business now. I think blekko was starting to struggle to stay competitive in consumer search (their backend technology was always pretty good, it's just they struggled to show those results well).

</comment><comment><USER12> Freebase is a database of things Blekko is a company that classifies things Watson interprets the relationships between classifications . This stuff is way beyond a search engine .

People talking about needing to building a better search engine better get to work because I think that space is almost abandoned .

A recommendation , an opinion , and a result are a hell of a lot different .

</comment><comment><USER13> Welcome ChuckMcM!

<comment><USER14> Saw the headline and wondered about his landing. Glad to know he's headed to another interesting project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't think IBM is gonna convince many developers to build applications on top of Watson, as open-source has never been in the top of their list.

My gut tells me IBM just needs some independent developers to develop some apps and then be acquired( as in that point they'd have no choice).

I may be wrong, but I'd rather not take that chance as I work on my projects.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting. IBM also acquired a startup I worked for (Vivisimo) because of the search technology. We never really focused on web crawling though. We dealt mostly with enterprise systems. Now we're a part of Watson too. Also the Alchemy API seems like it kind of touches parts of what we do which is another recent IBM acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER17> With Blekko gone there is a very limited number of alternative search engines if you don't want to use Google. Have a look though at Mojeek, a UK privately owned crawler based search engine producing its own results and without any tracing. It is certainly one to watch for the future

</comment><comment><USER18> Now that's a surprise. I didn't think Blekko was doing much more than reselling Yandex and adding some social features. Yandex has an $30M equity stake in Blekko - did IBM buy that out?

<comment><USER11> Blekko had a sizeable index of their own. Most successful meta-search engines (like DuckDuckGo) keep their own index because there's not a lot they can get from a Yandex api call.

<comment><USER19> My understanding is actually the opposite. While DuckDuckGo does have a small index of their own, they mainly rely on api calls to Yandex and Yahoo BOSS!

<comment><USER11> They do rely upon the API calls, but their spam elimination requires full web pages, not just what you get from an API call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So much for a graceful shutdown. Search capabilities gone immediately. If you created a slashtag, it's gone forever.

</comment><comment><USER21> Congrats to Greg and the team.

</comment><comment><USER22> Url changed from [http://blekko.com/](http://blekko.com/), which redirects (after a while) to this.

Should the title just say "IBM Acquires Blekko"? The article seems to stop short of saying so.

<comment><USER23> Here's what it used to look like, for those who had never heard of this product: [https://i.imgur.com/uIHcEN4.png](https://i.imgur.com/uIHcEN4.png)

<comment><USER24> So as a result of the acquisition, IBM has disabled the service? Seems odd. Their only interest was supplementing/enhancing Watson?

<comment><USER25> at least when Google acquires an existing service, it waits a few years before shutting it down

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oh Crap. IBM's AI is now buying companies?!?!

<comment><USER13> You Bitcoin people keep going on about DACs. Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational M&A machine.

<comment><USER26> Don't bin me in there, much of that stuff is somewhere between hopelessly naive and outright nonsense. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Hundreds of genes seen sparking to life two days after death - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2094644-hundreds-of-genes-seen-sparking-to-life-two-days-after-death/ <comment><USER2> Colour me skeptical (but curious) about the conclusions as it presently stands. Let me reason it out:

The quantity of mRNA of any gene is dependent on its synthesis and decay rates. This means that genes that decay at a rate lower than the mean decay (basically perish slower* than average), will seemingly appear to be highly expressed after passage of unit time.

Figuring out this pattern is not easy, as it relates to the complex relationship between the quantity of the decay rate of a specific gene, the expression levels of that gene (think of order of reaction from chemical kinetics), the overall decay of the entire sample (either of which is not necessarily linear), etc.

The authors point this out and talk about it a bit in the discussion, but I'm not sure it's completely convincing. And hence, if what we observe is nothing but a normalization artifact.

*how slow is another ball-game (read: order of reaction from chemical kinetics) altogether</comment>


Data-Driven Transformations in Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://mbostock.github.com/d3/

<comment><USER2> If you'd like to see more examples, here's my slide deck from SVG Open:

<http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111018/>

A while back, I also gave a talk on D3's force layouts:

<http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20110921/> (slides) <http://vimeo.com/29458354> (video)

If you have questions about D3, I'd be happy to answer them here or in the d3-js Google group.

<comment><USER3> I really want to use D3 but my target market is non-US (heavy windows use) and non-technical users. For that reason, it is hard for me to push them to change their browsers away from IE.

Do you have any recommendations for getting D3 (really SVG) to work on IE? It seems like there was a hacky way to do this in protovis but in d3 it is difficult. Do you assume people will simply not use SVG and use the DOM instead? Chrome frame?

<comment><USER4> Kind of related but we used D3 recently to make this visualization: <http://insights.truliablog.com/vis/rent-vs-buy-q3/>

To support IE we're just pushing around divs with D3 (no SVG at all) so IE gets the same experience, just without rounded corners :)

<comment><USER5> wow, it's very sleek. congratulations!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A weekendproject, disposable web chats - <AUTHOR> http://beta.mss.gs/#!/page/home Create a chat, copy the URL, paste it wherever you want. Perfect for those that would like to continue a discussion on a social network without having to sign up for anything.<p>http://beta.mss.gs/#!/page/home <comment><AUTHOR> Create a chat, copy the URL, paste it wherever you want. Perfect for those that would like to continue a discussion on a social network without having to sign up for anything.

You can find me here: <http://beta.mss.gs/#!/chat/424ad948f671dd032c4a2e89fb115763>

</comment><comment><USER2> This is very similar to one of my own weekend projects from several years back when I was trying out Google AppEngine.

[http://yakeze.appspot.com/chat/4d8079ff24d6ab02fcd9fd0e767a2...](http://yakeze.appspot.com/chat/4d8079ff24d6ab02fcd9fd0e767a21a5/)

Yours is much nicer. Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, congrats on having made this so long ago! Very similar indeed.

Thank-you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nicely done. Seems like the technology is there now to do this relatively easily. I did it too on Google App Engine. Took me more than a weekend though. Did it for my wife, she uses it on chinese gossip sites.

<https://monsterbagua.appspot.com>

I used jquery on the front and golang on the back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed it is :) It still was pretty much work to get it really finetuned to deliver an sleek and simple experience!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I also built <http://prompt.im> (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2457111>) around 1 year ago which is pretty similar (doesn't really work anymore). Good luck with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This opens the authentication discussion. To require authentication or to not require authentication.

The UI looks beautiful though, any plans with it :)?

<comment><USER4> Not currently. It was just a way to learn node.js and to see how fast we could build a somewhat useful app (took 24hrs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Similar to what I am doing with <http://chatfor.us> except I have been planning to add authentication sources to better identify people and control moderation. Your approach is interesting, easier to implement too. I may have to think about that.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're thinking about adding that as well, but didn't see that as a high priority prior to launching a beta!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> did something similar, with some twists <http://270rule.appspot.com> no (!) usernames, is a bookmarklet to use on top of existing sites, and has a feed for those sites and activities

</comment><comment><USER7> There seems to be a lot of chat related apps coming out of the works, this other one is pretty cool: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4000283> \- nice work dude.

</comment><comment><USER8> seriously cool. looks like chat is the new 'to-do list' and I mean that in a good way. if anything it is more fun and interactive to build.

i also did something similar except the chat room generation is automatic and based on your location. Basically <http://getyoucoffee.com/> will decide which chat room you are assigned to based on your location. it's pretty huge in cities with subways.

<comment><USER9> Imagine how useful a location-based video chat site would be for online speed dating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not working for me on IE 9

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll try to get it working on IE 9, but can't promise anything yet. We think IE 10 will pick it up better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really cool. What is the front and back end?

<comment><AUTHOR> We kept a simple stack.

Frontend: HTML5 CSS3 Javascript (jQuery)

Backend: NodeJS CouchDB

<comment><USER12> Why Couch and not Mongo?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our developer understood the views on Couch and simply couldn't get Mongo's views working with nodeJS. It's a human preference and works out perfectly - so far.

<comment> why-el Hey are you guys planning on doing a blog entry on how you developed this? I know next to nothing about Node.js and co and it seems like a good choice for a lot of my ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are now. Look out for next week!

<comment> why-el Where exactly? I wanted to subscribe but I couldn't find a blog url. Probably because of the language. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're actually pretty much starting the whole thing up so don't have a blog URL yet. When we do, those following us on twitter (<https://twitter.com/#!/mssgs>) will be the first to know where to find the blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great UI and very speedy, fantastic work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, wsg, we'll try to keep it that way :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> nice work, i can already guess that it is socket.io + node.js :D

I like the UI, very well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)! And indeed, socket.io + node.js

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the UI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How do I invite someone else to a chat that I opened ? Copy/paste URL to him/her ? Just wondering. A cool app overall.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we'll be adding an "invite friends" button soon.</comment></comment>


Firefox 62.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/62.0/releasenotes/ <comment><USER2> Coinciding with this release, Firefox 52 ESR is no longer supported, so no supported versions of Firefox support the legacy extensions.

I'm mentioning this here just so I can tell Vimperator / Pentadactyl / VimFx users that there are loads of options you can replace your old extensions with, some of which are... okay.

Links follow in increasing order of user-friendliness:

[https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl](https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl) [^]

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/surfingkeys_f...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/surfingkeys_ff/)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim- vixen/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium- ff/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/)

[^] Disclaimer: I develop this one. If you've tried it before in the past, now might be a good time to try it again. We've just pushed out a release that moved quite a lot of code around, hopefully eliminating a whole class of bugs, especially relating to ignore mode and multiple windows.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your work. I'm currently a tridactyl user. However I'd like to point out that _none_ of these replacements can currently compete with the previous extensions in term of usability.

Simply put, you cannot count on the keyboard shortcuts to work consistently throughout Firefox. They do not work in built-in pages (such as errors). They do not work when inside an input field in GTK. There's no way to consistently override built-in FF shortcuts that simply get in the way.

It's pretty sad for users which expect the keyboard experience to be consistent. I now mostly use FF's own shortcuts for most of the tab-management actions, since those are the only ones that work _most_ of the time when an error page is generated.

<comment><USER4> Worse is the unreliable working of vi-keys. Often enough focus ends somewhere on the page, and the vi-extension just stops working. I've yet to find a reliable way to gain input-focus again in those cases.

<comment><USER2> Sometimes this is our fault - there's a bug with our command line where it doesn't close properly and can steal focus (particularly `tabopen about:addons`). I am sorry about that. We're working on tearing it out and starting again as the command line has lots of problems.

Otherwise, it's usually YouTube. I just only interact with the videos using the mouse (or MPV via `;v`) and make sure to click outside them afterwards.

I do have a trackpoint on all of my keyboards, so I don't really notice having to click the mouse because it's just another keyboard button, so I might not be the most representative person here.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's just that bug. I have a userstyle to mark the displayed element, so I sometimes see when something is grabing the focus, and neither tab nor ESC or Alt-l helps in those cases. But after some reseach I found out F6 can help there. Till now I thought it's just the same as Alt-l and only focus the addressbar, but turns out it can also unfocus it and switch focus between the different areas of firefox. I tested it in the last hour and it really worked in several cases where I was stuck in focus-hell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With all these posters complaining, am I the only one who is totally satisfied with Firefox? I never had many issues using firefox. I did use Chrome briefly, but came back to firefox. If it matters, I mostly use firefox on Debian Linux and am also not a web developer.

<comment><USER6> I keep trying to switch. The thing that stops me is it chokes on big single page apps. Arguably the problem is the sites being choked on (too much javascript) but there's not much I can do about that.

<comment><USER5> What would be an example of a "big single page app"?

<comment><USER7> Google Calendar crushes FF for me. I can't leave it open very long or it slows down FF, eats CPU cycles, and drains my battery.

<comment><USER8> If you're on OSX and not using the "default for display" resolution, that may be the cause of the issue. Don't have the bugzilla handy, but I stumbled across it at one point and confirmed that that was the culprit for me. Unfortunately, I'm unwilling to use default display res, so I'm hoping that gets fixed soon. Would love to standardize on Firefox for my every day browsing.

<comment> dao- > Don't have the bugzilla handy

Here you are: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Removed the description field for bookmarks. Users who have stored > descriptions using the field may wish to export these descriptions as html > or json files, as they will be removed in a future release.

Does anyone know if there's an explanation for this somewhere? Between removing live bookmarks (a simple feed reader) and this, it seems like they're paring down user-facing features.

I don't think these are the features being referred to when people complain about "browser bloat", Mozilla. I expect Chrome to push me to use remote services, but I don't want that from Mozilla. I know it's a trope to complain about Firefox becoming a Chrome clone, but it feels truer every release.

<comment><USER10> The Firefox bookmarking implementation is unnecessarily complicated and I'm guessing very few features are actually used. It's a maintenance burden, I'm not surprised they want to slim it down.

To give you an example of a maintenance burden in the bookmarking system, the bookmarking system uses a bunch of synchronous APIs. Mozilla is trying to cut down or eliminate use of those APIs, to reduce UI hangs among other reasons, and in order to do that a bunch of bookmarking code needs to be rewritten.

You may have decided that you don't care about this particular kind of bloat, but all unnecessary maintenance burdens distract developers from doing work I'm sure you do care about.

Here is the bug for removing descriptions:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402890](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402890)

Here is a sub-bug that discusses issues with synchronous APIs.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1467996](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1467996)

<comment><USER11> The relevant comment from Bugzilla thread

> Nonetheless, I'd argue that it's a matter of PR among the subset of users > most likely to champion Firefox.

> When the reading list functionality just vanished on me one day and I rushed > to make a backup of reading-list.sqlite in case it got deleted later, it did > not leave me with a very good impression of Mozilla. (rather than, for > example, seeing that it had been migrated to a folder in the bookmarks > store.)

> (In fact, I'm currently working on an external utility, to be integrated via > WebExtensions, to store all persistent state which I don't feel I can trust > Firefox to preserve when 52 ESR drops away. This approach to retiring > bookmark descriptions only leaves me feeling more justified in the view that > I can't trust Mozilla with my data.)

<comment><USER12> Add to that rant the fact that for a while mozjs was the choice javascript engine for various projects that wanted a JS interpreter. Then one day they decided to literally break the API, every couple weeks, and its been going on for years. The language bindings aren't even the same now, and projects like gnome end up with these rather large patch sets every few months just to keep up.

<comment><USER13> mozjs was a pretty old codebase with some design decisions that made sense in the mid-90s but don't make sense now baked into the API.

The API needed to change to support things like a generational garbage collector. The set of needed API changes was quite large.

Now the project had two options: Make the changes incrementally or all at once. The incremental option would mean API changes with each release until all the changes got made. The all at once option would mean you'd need to do a complete rewrite of all the relevant mozjs code and all the relevant Firefox code all landing in a single release. Since the time needed for that rewrite was measured in years, that would mean maintaining a branch and dealing with all the merge conflicts from other ongoing work. In practice, it would have meant a much slower pace of web-facing JS feature development at best; more likely a complete stop to that.

Given those choices, the JS team went for the incremental route. Yes, it was painful for API consumers who needed to be running against current versions. But in this case, I expect it was the right tradeoff.

I should also note that V8 breaks API compat regularly, though not to the extent that SpiderMonkey had to, due to being designed 15 years later with many benefits of hindsight.

[Disclosure: I work on Firefox, closely with the JS team but not on the JS team.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a die-hard Firefox fan. While all my colleagues develop in Chrome, I'm the weird one who uses Firefox and always catches some problem in rendering when testing.

But recently I installed an 4K monitor. I use the Latest Windows 10 and have an GTX 1050 graphic card. The Firefox on this resolution is VERY slow. I have no problem in Edge or Chrome. Please, if any dev is around, check this use case.

<comment><USER15> Hi, dev here. :)

Can you capture a profile using steps from [0] and send them to us/me?

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7knnn4/firefox_qua...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7knnn4/firefox_quantum_is_eating_your_cpu_help_us_debug/)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for chiming in!

I have a question. Where are you guys at with this issue?

The thing is, literally every retina resolution Macbook I've tried this on (3 different machines) resulted in massive CPU hog with 4 tabs open on a few basic websites. Let's say they are reddit, hn, and youtube.

The Awesome bar is slow, switching tabs is slow, computer warms up in 15 seconds. Fans kick in, the rest is history. New profile, existing profile, it doesn't matter.

That goes for every single release after 57, including Developers, Beta, and Nightly builds.

15 inch ones are worse than 13.

This doesn't happen when I use external screen.

My feeling is in order to reproduce the issue one has to \- Find a Macbook Pro released after 2012. \- Open Firefox with aforementioned websites \- Try to interact with the websites

Are there any active issues for it?

I remember this one: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042)

All dependent bugs are fixed, but alas, it made no difference.

Is there's anything I could do to help resolve this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Firefox Home (the default New Tab) now allows users to display up to 4 rows of top sites, Pocket stories, and highlights"

Yay, I always wanted to see more spam in it!

(had the "fun" experience of needing to figure out again how to disable new spammy things from new tab page on mobile despite having already done so before)

<comment><USER18> ...there's a little cog wheel at the top right?

<comment><USER19> Defaults matter. Firefox has this annoying habit of constantly devising new "interesting" things on the new tab page. It's to the point where you need to install an add on to override it to avoid constant surprises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not related to this particular release, but I wish Mozilla implemented tree- style tabs as core feature (or at least provided core API). The current "Tree style tab" plugin in indispensable for me, but has to be a hack, however exquisite, especially around tab context menus.

<comment><USER21> I'm still baffled at the number of people who have no idea that tree style tabs exist. If more education was given to people about this plugin, it would probably be a core feature of Firefox.

<comment><USER22> I have to check this out now. I'm one of those who haven't heard about tree style tabs until now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Been waiting for "Reopen in Container" for awhile. It's very annoying when I Ctrl+T to open a new tab for a site and it takes me awhile to realize I forgot to open it in the right container tab. Glad to see the feature finally added!

<comment><USER24> Also a huge fan of this feature, I lit up when I read it. I hope there is a way to turn it into a keyboard shortcut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is the feature I'm most excited about this time:

> "Reopen in Container" tab menu option appears for users with Containers that > lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container

This is going to make containers even more useful.

<comment><USER26> If you are using containers, New container tab [0] and Switch Container [1] were essential add-ons. Now with this feature built-in, the latter is unnecessary.

[0] Add Alt+C shortcut to open a new tab in current container: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new- container...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-container- tab/)

[1] Reopen current tab in container: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/switch-contai...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/switch-container/)

<comment><USER27> Now all we need is something to let us map shortcuts to open specific containers, e.g. alt+s to open a new tab in the shopping container. (I tried using Application Shortcuts on OSX, but a. they stop working after restarting Firefox and b. they don't work if a tab has full screen video because that hides Firefox's menu bar on all monitors.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> When are containers going to graduate to a built-in feature rather than an extension?

<comment><USER29> Containers used to be the other way around, baked into Firefox and then moved to an extension last year. It's better that a power user feature is not a part of the default installation.

<comment><USER30> Containers are the killer feature of Firefox over Chrome and the reason I recommend it to family and friends. In my opinion they're not a power user feature at all, everyone and anyone can get instant obvious benefit from them. Multiple logins on the same service, controlling how you are tracked, just to name a couple.

Attention and effort are expensive and 'install and just use' gets you a material percentage more users than 'install and then click through this menu system and install something else'. Containers should absolutely work out the box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really want to change to Firefox but a while ago it was a huge battery drain on my mac. It had something to do with it not using CoreAnimation, I think. Does anyone know if this is still the case?

<comment><USER32> Do you use a Retina display by chance? In certain setups, Fx is known to use more energy in HiDPI mode. Try disabling it and see if it fixes your issue.

To what I know, this issue is known to Moz and will be fixed in a few versions (it appears to be a complex issue that takes time to solve).

<comment><USER33> _> In certain setups, Fx is known to use more energy in HiDPI mode. Try disabling it_

"Hey, your laptop is too good, please cripple it!" is not a good answer, especially considering retina displays have been out for 6 years now (and I bet loads of Moz employees use them too).

I use Firefox almost exclusively, and still I wonder, sometimes, what the %$#%@ the "leadership" is thinking. They keep messing with crap like Pocket instead of concentrating on fundamentals like these.

<comment><USER32> I was merely pointing out troubleshooting steps, not suggesting you take that as a solution to the issue. As I said, it's been worked on and latest nightly seems to improve that situation a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why remove descriptions from bookmarks? I know they're not the most useful thing, but I don't get the benefit of removing them.

<comment><USER33> I suspect it's simply "one less thing to worry about when we sync with the cloud".

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> One thing I still miss from Safari is 'Show all Tabs' which would give you thumbnails of open tabs. There is nothing built into FireFox that is equivalent. I have looked at some of the extensions, and they are in various states of support or waiting for FF to implement some API. The dropdown menu showing the tab titles becomes pretty useless after a certain number has been reached.

I'm amazed in 2018 it seems tab management (> 20 tabs) is still so awful.

</comment><comment><USER36> With each new Firefox release, it gets farther and farther away from what the browser once was. I started using Firefox over a decade ago, now it's become just a different version of awful. I don't know exactly happened when Mozilla lost their perspective, but I do know when - the first introduction of Australis. And they should have figured out, when you name it after something upside-down, you should seriously wonder if it's upside down. WebExtensions is just piling error upon error.

And with each new release, more control is taken from the user, more decent features are removed. I swear, Firefox peaked at 4.0.

<comment><USER37> I think it really went downhill earlier than that; somewhere around 4 was when they stopped trying to work with the ecosystem and just started blocking things instead. Perhaps I've accidentally got rose-tinted glasses on though…

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My take on how Firefox is better than Chrome: [https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/entulho/firefox-vs- chrome.txt](https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/entulho/firefox-vs-chrome.txt)

(No politics, just the raw browser features. Also, I'm a long time Chrome user, switched to Firefox an year ago, then back to Chrome for a week and now permanently on Firefox.)

</comment><comment><USER39> I really like Firefox but unfortunately it doesn't run well on my machine. I have Ryzen 2700X, geforce 1080 Ti, running current Ubuntu but firefox is using 1 full CPU at 100% (load is moving from one core to another) and constantly lags. Researched a lot for any similar problems but couldn't find any solution.

Has anyone seen anything like this and maybe even solved it?

<comment><USER40> Have you considered submitting a bug report? That's likely to get more attention than complaining on some random internet forum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really love Firefox, and I'm still holding out for HiDPI support on Wayland. Currently it is a little awful to use...

</comment><comment><USER41> Is it just me or does the HSTS preload list not work in Firefox 62 (macOS 10.12)? I see a plaintext HTTP request when opening [http://www.google.com](http://www.google.com) instead of an immediate https connection to www.google.com.

</comment><comment><USER42> Youtube on Firefox for me is awful. I get constant buffering on 1080p+ content. Chrome is flawless. I have the same extensions on both browsers, curious if anyone else has experienced the same recently?

<comment><USER43> There was an article on HN about this recently. I'm on phone so can't search easily, but something about it using a polyfill for a chrome specific feature. There was a way to get the old behavior in the article I think.

<comment><USER44> You install the "YouTube Classic" Firefox extension to force YouTube to use its old (non-Polymer) layout. This extension won't help with video buffering issues, however.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube- class...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-classic/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is Pocket the only bookmarking service available? Seems a bit off that there is no public interface to this and the Mozilla seem to have some kind of agreement with Pocket?

<comment><USER46> [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires- po...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> If the status bar is still missing, I'm not interested in Firefox 62. They should never have taken that option away in their pathetic "make it look like Chrome" weakness of product strategy.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is no non hacky way to make chrome not close window when you close the last tab. That's enough for me to drop it as my main browser. That's like literally the only thing I look for in a browser

</comment><comment><USER49> > Added Canadian English (en-CA) locale

Not bad, Eh?!

<comment><USER50> Some thorough translator finished translating all the strings for a project of mine into en-CA, which triggered the build error for having two exactly identical files in the tree (since en-CA was entirely identical to en-US). Nothing is free! This is why we can't have useless things!

<comment><USER51> Yes but don't you think it's skookum (BC) and aboot time for Newfie-speak to be recognized, eh? But after awhile multiple locale files do appear more like vanity metrics in apps like LibreOffice, with 18 possible English locale settings. Even the OED simply incorporates regional variations in its inventory so the need for redundancy does seem questionable. And in spell checking or grammar, illustration of possible regional variations may be useful to authors. EG, a Brit writes to a Yank 'I am going to shop', with 'shop' treated as a noun. But to the Yank 'to shop' would be an infinitive so a grammar check could point out that ambiguity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Firefox 55 working great, most extensions supported and containers working

<comment><USER53> Note that they will be removing legacy extensions from their store soon: [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to- re...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-remove- legacy-firefox-add-ons-from-add-on-portal-in-early-october/)

<comment><USER54> The sad thing is that there still isn't good replacements for the old addons and mozilla hasn't shown much progress in adding the needed apis to webextensions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> >> Improved graphics rendering for Windows users without accelerated hardware using Parallel-Off-Main-Thread Painting

Because so many people run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware?!?!?! And yet Wayland support is still not up to snuff.

I use Firefox almost exclusively, but Mozilla seems to have some strange priorities. It's not just them, it's a lot of people out there doing what they want instead of what's good for their users.

<comment><USER56> From [https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/](https://firefoxgraphics.github.io/telemetry/):

Linux users are about 2.7% of Firefox users

Windows users are 93.2% of Firefox users

27.7% of Windows users don't have Direct2D

That means 25.8% of users "run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware". So it's entirely reasonable to prioritize these 25.8% of users over the 2.7% on Linux.

<comment><USER40> How many Linux users disable telemetry collection vs windows users (who are most certainly used to spewing telemetry to external parties)? I definitely disable it on all of my (Linux) systems where I run Firefox. I suspect I am not alone.

<comment><USER57> If you disable telemetry and then complain firefox is not prioritizing developing firefox for your system, don't be surprised if your complaints fall on deaf ears.

<comment><USER40> Please point out where I was complaining about firefox not prioritizing development for Linux. Thanks.

<comment><USER57> This comment chain is about Mozilla prioritizing a windows thing over linux / wayland work.

You're commenting in defense of the original comment, so while you didn't explicitly complain about it, you implicitly supported the complaint.

<comment><USER40> No, I was merely pointing that their data is incomplete. I couldn't care any less about mozilla's priorities, since firefox is not my main browser on the desktop.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Goldi: no more resumes, now you can apply for your next gig with a video - <AUTHOR> https://goldi.com/ <comment><USER2> The idea and the website, both, trigger in me a visceral discomfort that I cannot put into words. If this is for tech, I hope it doesn't catch on.

A resume is not soulless. If it is soulless, then a video is even more so.

Also, video is a horrible medium for most people. It takes time and effort to be good on video. Good developers may have spent their time and effort elsewhere. I would point to Ryan Dhal's nodejs regrets video on the front page as an example.

</comment><comment><USER3> This disturbingly reminds me of the Teleputer footnote / anecdote from Infinite Jest, in which it was imagined that for video conferencing, people's vanity and status competition would lead to essentially an elaborate arms race for third-party digital beautification products, like digitally-aware face- altering masks, because even though the spirit of video conferencing technology was to make it easier to share your personal, casual self in sincere, quick & easy conversation (just hop on a call), it would just get subverted by the feeling that one's true, unaltered appearance wasn't good enough.

Kind of like Instagram lifestyle curation because everything in your life must be a photogenic and epic Big Deal That Makes You A Somebody.</comment>


Arduino Door Bell with VU Meter - <AUTHOR> https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Door-Bell-With-VU-Meter/ <comment><USER2> Next challenge: Make that melody with only analog components!

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting for me as a beginner.</comment>


Where Twitter's execs went to - <AUTHOR> http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/01/25/twitter-twtr-executives-leaving-startup-moves/ <comment><USER2> For me, this is one of the more "fun" things about the Bay Area, where people are at company A for a while then move on to company B, C, ... When I arrived it was the big semiconductor companies that had engineers going out and building new things, then folks from Sun, from Apple, when the first wave of people left Google they created a mini boomlet in new ideas, now Twitter. I expect former Facebook, LinkedIn, Netflix, and Palintir folks to part of the next cadre. Join a company, experience its growth, figure out how you can do it "better" or "different" and move to a new company to do that. The nerd equivalent of the circle of life.</comment>


Steve Ballmer on how Microsoft is taking on Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.crn.com/news/mobility/240003421/exclusive-microsofts-ballmer-throws-down-gauntlet-against-apple.htm;jsessionid=nFYnESOH1SlgIMM1ngfh1A**.ecappj03

<comment><USER2> I can see why Steve Ballmer would say this with regard to Surface. It is a radical departure from their previous business model to compete with their own OS-licensing OEM customers.

But did he really mean "HDC" with regard to Windows Phone OEM customers? That's got to be a typo!

</comment><comment><USER3> So I guess they're too afraid to take on Google? Or is Bing still a hobby...

<comment><USER2> I see Bing as a black hole whose event horizon is strongly attracting those billions of dollars still in Microsoft's cash account.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My first android app Disha - <AUTHOR> https://market.android.com/details?id=com.rails

<comment><USER2> Not that it matters an incredible amount or that you can fix it now, but I highly doubt that you own rails.com . Your package name is meant to be a unique domain that you own.

<comment><USER3> You don't need to "own the domain", strictly speaking, you need to use a unique package identifier. Owning the domain and using it for package naming is a good enough convention and helps avoid conflicting identifiers.

Java package naming convention [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_package#Package_naming_con...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_package#Package_naming_conventions)

Useful Stackoverflow discussion [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6273892/android- package-n...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6273892/android-package-name- convention)

If you don't own any domain, get one, it will help you tons and you can recoup the cost by passing on a cup of coffee every other sunday morning.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow! Never thought it will make it to the first page. Since I am new to the whole android development. Can anyone suggest how to promote this app besides advertising it/sending an email out to friends and family? I will really appreciate it.

<comment><USER4> Some ideas for promoting the app:

Try to get linked from an official web site, whatever the equivalent of this is: [http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/Mobile_Device_Schedules.ht...](http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/Mobile_Device_Schedules.html)

That may require navigating some bureaucracy, but it may be surprisingly easy.

Also, try handing out fliers with QR codes or placing stickers somewhere where train riders with Android phones are.

You could also possibly leave Foursquare tips at every train station that you have access to. Hope this helps. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pay a friend $100 or get someone to make an UI design for you. If you can't afford that, have a look at the popular android apps, at the apps developed by google and at free/paid themes on the internet. I don't know what's the website for the indian rails system, but if you can get them to officially support you, try to get approval to use their design style. Basically, anything works, just make your app look better :) It matters much more than you might think.

Otherwise, I wish I had this kind of app for

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks zrgiu, do you have any recommendations from where you got the app themes or any designer recommendation who is not going to cost me a fortune?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice App! Just wanted to know one thing. How are you retrieving data from Government's site. AFAIK, Indian Railways restricts such data, and this information can't be used commercially without their permission. Right?

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean on some pages of the site it says that However, I am not sure how well they crack down on apps like this. If it becomes too much of a concern, I will take the advertisement out.

I just wanted to build something that will be useful without being rude on their site resources. For their site, the requests that come in are just like from any other client. This app do not put any extra burden on the site like crawling and such. Having said that, I agree that this a gray area.</comment></comment>


Why does everyone want to build a bill-splitting app? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@useledger/why-ledger-is-excited-about-bill-splitting-54dd440209a8 <comment><USER2> _Bill-splitting is exciting!_

Helloplease?</comment>


1999 Microsoft Store vs. 2009 Microsoft Store - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2009/10/20/1999-microsoft-store-vs-2009-microsoft-store/

<comment><USER2> Hehe, Microsoft stores. I proposed to friends to give out Linux CDs during the opening of the Windows Cafe. Yup, they are opening a cafe too, in Paris, same day as the stores (October 22).

Hope we'll get the Linux CD thing rolling. A bit of a troll, but could be a great laugh.

<comment><USER3> Make some live CDs, makes it easier for people to try out.

<comment><USER2> Oh, great idea. Lowering the cost of entry will increase participation.

I'm trying to find some local Linux non-profits, see if they have any CDs to spare.</comment></comment></comment>


An 8-minute introduction to Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/prodopsio/an-8-minute-introduction-to-kubernetes-1oi <comment><USER2> Does his article provide some value the official k8s docs or k8s quickstart tutorial doesn't?

One thing about building deploying and maintain k8s clusters from scratch over the past two years is the noise from these tutorials that effectively repeat the docs to give the author of the medium post street cred to get a better devops jobs, but as far as value add for.devops engineers deploying and dealing with edge cases and mvp case (Lua plugins for rate throttling in ingress controllers for example if you want more control than a gcp load balancer exposing ips to the public for which vpc peering native clusters didn't exist in GCP until late 2018) it is annoying self congratulatory noise that leave new devops engineers stray when they might be better off with the off with the original documentation.

If you have a cool short tutorial on how to iterate on an MVP or solve a security default setting for secure that might be helpful but I rarely see it.

A good example of this is how many articles I saw about how simple it is to share pvcs across an nfs server. 12 "senior level" devops engineers wrote about this and every single one left out the nfs storage class enablement on the gcp platform, a beta security feature presumably some other devops engineer who does more work and received less credit probably enable for them but would leave every devops engineer following their tutorials left stranded.

I used to think I was just a newb devops engineers but when I read devops posts like this I wonder if should just copy and past existing documentation, install some helm tarts via tiller with no rbacs in GUI dashboards enabled, call the data set "AI" and apply for a senior level position.

Sorry to go off on this post but there is no reason to have an 8min intro of the 5min intro on the k8s docs themselves which hyperlink any concept to drill down into with an interactive tutorial in browser that requires no local setup unless you truly desire to use minikube.

I am all for devops tutorials, but useful ones, of which I have barely found any during my two years of teaching myself how to deploy clusters from the ground up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does Kubernetes really need to be as complicated as it is?

<comment><USER4> As a new person learning Kubernetes I dont really think it is complicated.

If you are familiar with cloud computing and containers, it's pretty straightforward.

But the amount of additional stuff built around Kubernetes - THAT can be overw"helm"ing.</comment></comment>