IM Chat Interface Designs for OSX Applications - <AUTHOR> http://www.designtickle.com/2012/08/chat-ui-design-osx-applications/

<comment><USER2> "Interface design" should encompass more than just visual aesthetics. These are largely concepts focused on making something that looks good, not concepts that break away from an IM client convention to actually improve usability.

It's useful to see these as launchboards for a visual aesthetic, but it'd be really cool if showcase posts like these (or designers on dribbble) talked about the pros and cons of different design decisions they made, why they chose to style an interface element differently, why a particular design is an improvement over what exists…

This is, sadly, pretty rare.</comment>


Darpa wants a new language to explain everything military - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/darpa-wants-a-new-language-to-explain-everything/

<comment><USER2> Submitted 11 days ago, to a thunderous silence:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2099587></comment>


The Workplace of the Future - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.bnet.com/ceo/?p=2798&tag=homeCar

<comment><AUTHOR> This might be taking an extreme viewpoint, but the flat organization concept is something that I believe is already becoming visible in our society. Generation Y (WOAH WOAH!!!) is beginning to have an influence in companies of all sizes because of our inability to "play by the rules" and our desire to "hack" the system. We believe that if there is a will, then there is a way, and we do not want anyone to "tell us" what to do. As a Gen Y-er I am always open to intense brainstorming sessions, but EVERYONE's ideas need to be considered regardless of AGE or EXPERIENCE. This is the workforce of the future...what do you think?

<comment><USER3> I always thought my tendency to skirt processes (to just get things done, using the philosophy its easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission) was a negative aspect of my personality... not a property of my generation :)

of course I only had to do that at the two previous companies I worked at (both fortune 500 large enterprise environments) my new company is small, typically I just tell my boss I have an idea, and hes ok with it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our society and business model has to change to produce results. I believe corporate model will be extinct. It is correct about Generation Y which is ambitious and want make its own rules. One might think it creates chaos what it might but this is how invitations happen and how we evolve. 3D and Virtual computing is a little bit far away but will eventually happen, 50 years ago we could never imagine that all our life will be so much computerized and depended on internet and other invocations so it is hard not to foresee even bigger changes going further.

</comment><comment><USER5> All of his predictions might be right. However, the times until they happen are going to vary _greatly_. The first two might really arrive tomorrow. But the third?

> Everything will be 3D, virtual reality, ....

Having done research in VR, I can tell you that there are some very hard problems relating to focusing (VR is annoying to use), touch feedback (VR is not believable), and UI design that are still very much unsolved after 20 years of work on them. It will be a long time, I assure you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Flat organizations have arrived in tech. When I took a tour of Facebook last week, I was shocked at the lack of visible structure in regard to closed offices, etc. Everything was open and collaborative, it was pretty sweet - especially all the snake boarding. :)

To an outsider it was a bit overwhelming, like walking into an active bee hive. The volume of pure talent that place contains does not thrive under micromanagement.

<comment><USER7> lack of micromanagement != flat organization

the appearance of flat != lack of hierarchy

I work in an open office (looks pretty flat if you're just walking by), but there certainly is a CEO - VP of Marketing/Sales - Sales Director - <USER2> Person structure, and we only have about 35 people working here. No one is micromanaged, but the organizational structure attempts to make individuals responsible for their team(s).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mailing documents will no longer be necessary?

Winston may have something to say about that. [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9j4th/winston_th...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9j4th/winston_the_pigeon_carries_a_4gb_memory_stick/)

</comment><comment> onreact-com While this is an interesting read one thing will never happen:

"3D virtual reality meetings will all but eliminate business travel."

As some people only trust you when they actually meet you in person.

<comment><USER9> Plus, it may seem crazy, but some people LIKE getting out of the office and traveling.

<comment><USER10> I'm one of those types. It's like a mini vacation and a great way to build up airline miles for personal trips.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is the HN front page having technical issues? - <AUTHOR> It seems like everything on the homepage is at least 11 hours old. <comment><USER2> We're debugging an issue with ranking. Last night we rolled out new code that appeared to work, but apparently didn't update the rank of items.

Since it's now fixed, when anyone votes on an old article it will be re-ranked to its correct position. Since they've not been re-ranked for hours, most of the moves will be pretty drastic.

Update: We're now discovering that a side effect of this was the automatic killing of a number of submissions that should not have been killed. We're going through logs and addressing those.

Update: Improperly killed submissions have been restored.

Final Update: Turns out it was actually an issue with voting. We were correctly recording all votes (so you saw the arrows disappear), but not correctly counting them. If you're wondering how that's possible, you can thank denormalization.

We've now identified the bug and deployed the updated and fixed code.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) makes the problems much more obvious: a lot of stories have been killed (turn on showdead for hckrnews.com), and very few new stories have shown up today. OTOH, this one hasn't made hckrnews.com yet, either.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it looks like 7 consecutive stories hit front page and then were killed. Seems very strange.

..... and this was just killed. I'm going to email dang about it.

<comment><USER5> > I'm going to email dang about it.

Thank you very much for doing so. We often read the emails much sooner than we have time to reply to them, especially if there's an urgent action to be taken, so please don't assume that your message has had no effect if you don't hear back right away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for asking this...I was wondering the same thing. not everything is that old (the Oculus Rift story with 4 upvotes in the last hour is near the top), but HN overall seems very stale, as if I was reading the /best list, except with many non-best things included.

The /new list seems unusually inactive..even at 4AM, even links less than 15 minutes old can accrue a few upvotes. I just checked the /new list and nothing has more than the initial upvote (except for the Source Sans link, which I just upvoted to test)...

[http://imgur.com/w4PamQC](http://imgur.com/w4PamQC)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah something definitely feels off. The only 'recent' item on the frontpage is an internal HN job posting which works outside of the upvote/downvote algorithm. My guess is that a cron job that updates/counts the up/down votes and refreshes the homepage hasn't run in 10 hours. Just a guess :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Over the years, I've noticed from time to time what appear to be substantial moderations that clean out 'lesser' stories. It often corresponds with about the time offices are opening up on the West coast.

It could be algorithmic. It could be a group of users whose first action on the site is to flag weak submissions. It could be an individual with moderation powers. It could be each of them at different times.

Over the years it's been particularly noticeable on _Ask_ , but not uncommon on the front page. But more recently it has been more noticeable on the front page. Personally, I'm all for it. Algorithms can only go so far before they are subject to gaming.

If it is algorithmic, perhaps it is triggered based on trends with new submissions - e.g. such as when few are gaining meaningful adjusting the gravity curve to favor older more popular submissions. This would maintain the quality of the front page and perhaps encourage more effort toward finding quality submissions or bring the focus to discussions.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks that way...? And not just p.1, for the first ~60 stories there is not much newer than the 18 hours give or take.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've also seen lots of CloudFlare errors for a few weeks here in Asia.

</comment><comment><USER10> I T237nk the@#$s som3 prob@#$ wi%! 4*e encodi13ng</comment>


Add Support for 80+ Filetypes to your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.doctapeviewer.com

<comment><USER2> Is this an ad?

Any idea what the 'pro upgrade' adds? Doesn't say on the page. Being a free app I wonder how restricted it is without the upgrade. Support for 80+ file types would require a lot of time invested, unless most of them are built into iOS or have a free library. (I'd bet text/RTF files, PDF and common image types are counted in the 80+)

<comment><USER3> Hi there. We're leveraging our existing conversion infrastructure for supporting those 80+ filetypes.

The Pro Upgrade removes the limitation of 2 remote conversions/day.

You can read more about it on our blogpost: [http://blog.doctape.com/the- future-of-doctape-where-do-we-wa...](http://blog.doctape.com/the-future-of- doctape-where-do-we-want-to-go-tomorrow/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its pretty rare that a file converter does a decent job. ie if you want to know what a PDF really looks like... use Acrobat. If you just want a glimpse this might be ok.</comment>


The 15 Best Websites, According to Redditors - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/11/29/reddit-favorite-websites/ <comment><USER2> It must be a slow news day for Mashable if all they have to write about is a thread on reddit.

<comment><USER3> its the weekend.. you should know better by now</comment></comment>


Adobe to Kill Off Flash in January's Creative Cloud Update - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/adobe-to-kill-off-flash-in-januarys-creative-cloud-update/ <comment><USER2> The headline is scary. But then if you read carefully - "Not the Flash Player..but Flash Professional, the main authoring tool used to create Flash animations". So nothing to panic right away. Adobe is moving towards a better world.</comment>


We Should Stop Using Terminologies Like Master-Slave To Make Progress In Tech - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1038081592986464256 <comment><USER2> If you want to make progress in tech, don't let "progress" (in quotations) live rent free in your mind. Focus on actually building stuff.

I hate to use oppression Olympics as an argumentative avenue but I'm a Slav, the word slavery comes from the enSLAVement of Slavic people.

It's often an accurate description of the relationship and even if it's just slightly inefficient, still works great. Why pollute your mind and thought stream with such trivial qualms. Build. Learn. Don't sweat dumb crap.

Same with whitelist / blacklist. From an English perspective these and master/slave have been archetypes for as long as the language has existed. Don't make problems where there are none, and don't TRY to pollute my mind by making me think there are problems, where again there are none. Enough people outside of tech are doing that to the populace.

</comment><comment><USER3> The "political correctness" in our society is extremely obnoxious.

We are criticizing perfectly appropriate and meaningful terminologies for the most ridiculous of reasons.

The argument that there is a clearly better terminology has no basis or evidence.

If an argument was made that modern tools are slowly migrating away from "master-slave" and Redis should keep consistency with that, it would need evidence.

The "connotation" mentioned by dhh has no business whatsoever to be mentioned in relation to the technical terms, and any argument that mentions it should be just ignored.

</comment><comment><USER4> Should orphan processes be renamed as well? What about brainfuck?

Terrible connotations don't mean anything when you treat a word objectively and technically. I am not thinking about people when I am having issues synchronizing a slave db.

The same terminology is still used in bdsm and I would argue most instances of partners engaging in the specific dynamic is out of love.

I do agree that better terminology is available and should be used. Negative connotations, however, do not apply when the application in computer science is so far removed from what the author alludes to.

</comment><comment><USER5> Random white dude here. Nobody cares about my opinion on this. But I thought the opinion of the African-American developer down the hall might be interesting, so I asked him. He saw nothing wrong with master-slave as a term for hot spares for databases and such.

Just one opinion, but he's got more right to be listened to than I do as to whether the term is offensive.

</comment><comment><USER6> >Also, I know Twitter is a supercharged environment for carefully discussing these things.Happy to switch to email. Again, I recognize the impulse to digging in when attacked in public.

aka "I knew exactly what I was doing when I put you on blast, now I'll save face in public and claim respectability by retreating to the higher ground"

</comment><comment><USER7> Antirez is taking a considered approach to this and weighing the very real time and technical cost to making an api change to a project the scale of Redis.

He has stated that if he were to start today, he'd use different terms. It's important to remember that even 10 years ago, life hadn't become as politicized as it is today. Master/slave was and is a very common technical term that does accurately describe the relationship.

All that being said, attacking open source developers of popular projects with politically motivated requests seems like a horrible idea. This guy did a ton of great work that many people have benefited from (for free) and now he's being bullied for even questioning if whether changing the API for a non- functional reasons is worth it.

We should treat the people who created something and offered it to the world for free with a bit more respect.

<comment><USER8> This was a thing in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and now. It's a thing anytime someone wants to try to make a point by hijacking something they have no real stake in, and where they have nothing useful to say or add. It's better not to feed the trolls.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Antirez opened an issue in Redis repo for Changing Redis master-slave replication terms with something else: [https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/5335](https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/5335)

I think it's best if we give our thoughts there.

</comment><comment><USER9> it helps that the computer science concept is so simple that it has multiple plain english correlations. If it were put to a vote, I'd put in for Dom-Sub :P

</comment><comment><USER10> The only way forward is to use a term that confuses and irritates in some other way, yet remains somehow aligned with the ideals of the agitators. So, try something like...

      master -> becomes: vegan

      slave  -> becomes: enabled

It needs to be treated this way, so that with every decision made going forward, someone is forced to remember the cognitive burden of considering the potential transgressions of cultural misinterpretation and insensitivity.

Now, when someone needs to debug production issues, their minds will weigh the consequences of a history that will never leave anyone alone, no matter how distant or removed from our current circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is this concept legacy?

Disclaimer: I fully expect this response to become very light gray, as this is only partially a technical topic.

Traditional slavery required the slave owner to provide lodging, food, clothing. Modern slavery requires the slave to purchase their own home, clothing, food and pay compounded interest for most of their unnatural life.</comment>


Continuous Delivery Foundation Launches with Jenkins and Spinnaker - <AUTHOR> https://cd.foundation <comment><USER2> This is really interesting and hope to see where it leads as Jenkins, Jenkins-X, Spinnaker and Knative all have something in common but actually very different products</comment>


Scottish Power to build vast battery - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/10/scottish-power-build-vast-battery-improve-wind-energy <comment><USER2> An added benefit for a renewable operator is that you get to use the grid connection for a longer period of time. The cable/power line can be very expensive to build and under-utilized due to the intermittent nature of wind. That is probably driving this kind of co-location more than the precence of the wind farm. The batteries could just as easily be located hundreds of miles away and perform exactly the same role, but without being able to share the grid connection.</comment>


An archive of all-fiction pulpwood magazines from 1896 - 1946 - <AUTHOR> http://www.pulpmags.org/default.htm

<comment><USER2> All the covers seem to be low-res unfortunately

See also: [http://comicbookplus.com/](http://comicbookplus.com/) for many comics that have gone into public domain. Recently used some cartoon images from there for a presentation in lieu of standard clip-art.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the highlights is reading the long-copy advertising on the back covers

</comment><comment><USER4> I could see pissing away an awful lot of time on this. It's almost like I'd rather wait until I'm 60 to dig in. :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a bunch of really amazing SF writers mixed into much of the pulp, like Philip K. Dick, Lovecraft, Poe, etc. There seems to be a lack of a large amount of the old serials but a few of them remain.

Weird and annoying: The copyright expired on much of the works, yet some of the archives refuse to display the text on copyright grounds. Take for example "The Variable Man" [1], which Wikipedia [2] claims copyright already expired on due to lack of renewal. So probably a bunch of these issues could be released if they reviewed the records. (Luckily the Gutenberg Project has a copy available [3])

[http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmazingSF](http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmazingSF) [http://www.unz.org/Pub/WeirdTales](http://www.unz.org/Pub/WeirdTales) [http://www.pulpmags.org/weird_tales_page.html](http://www.pulpmags.org/weird_tales_page.html) [http://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasticMysteries](http://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasticMysteries) [http://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasticNovelsSF](http://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasticNovelsSF) [http://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasySF](http://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasySF) [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/ADT1736.0001.001?c=moa;c=moa...](http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/ADT1736.0001.001?c=moa;c=moajrnl;g=moagrp;rgn=full+text;view=toc;xc=1;q1=Weird+Tales)

[1] [http://www.unz.org/Pub/SpaceSF-1953sep-00006?View=PDF](http://www.unz.org/Pub/SpaceSF-1953sep-00006?View=PDF) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Variable_Man#Copyright_sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Variable_Man#Copyright_status) [3] [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32154/32154-h/32154-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32154/32154-h/32154-h.htm)</comment>


Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/nyregion/auschwitz-love-story.html <comment><USER2> The question: Was she the reason he was alive today?

Screw clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER3> A terrible, cheap headline on a rather poignant piece.

</comment><comment><USER4> Let's save the clickbait and mystery for movie trailers.</comment>


How Jack Dorsey used Square to con VCs - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/11/how-squares-jack-dorsey-used-to-con-venture-capitalists/

<comment><USER2> It is sad that this got 13 upvotes so far. It is scary that this is on the front page of hacker news... the main quote is obviously tongue-in-cheek.

<comment><USER3> The video is far more relevant and interesting.

I propose: "Square founder Jack Dorsey's talk at Standford (video)"

<comment><USER2> I will have to watch the video once I can (blocked at work). Thanks for the info!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Either Jack Dorsey is a con man, or VC's could care less about losing $5 to $50.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Square card reader is an amazing device. I do wish my Android phone had the equivalent of a dock connector to allow higher powered accessories, but barring that I'm really excited about the potential of using the phone's audio jack for power and signalling.

This one's been linked on HN before, but if anyone hasn't seen it: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/01/project-hijack- use...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/01/project-hijack-uses-iphone- audio-jack-to-make-cheap-sensors.ars)

</comment><comment><USER6> Misleading title!!

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't see any "con" here, just a great demo.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, the title is tongue-in-cheek I'm pretty sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a badass.

</comment><comment><USER10> _And I loved this because I would go around to all these angel investors and VCs and charge them $5 or $50 to show them my new idea._

Great litmus test. Anyone willing to pay to see an idea is probably too naive to be a dependable business partner.

<comment><USER11> Not really. It's a trivial amount, and it would seem rude to refuse.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't it seem much ruder to ask? Or not if you're Jack Dorsey?

<comment><USER13> I almost said the same thing, then I thought, I guess it depends on your attitude when you ask. Could be a playful thing. So I cancelled my comment. If he came off as rude, they never would have paid him, and this wouldn't be a story.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Robert David Steele and the Open Source Intelligence Paradigm - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/19/open-source-revolution-conquer-one-percent-cia-spy <comment><USER2> A book (The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust) referenced in the article is mis-linked. The proper link is [https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/the-open-source- ever...](https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/the-open-source-everything- manifesto/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Robert Steele has the distinction of being the only presenter to have presented at every HOPE[0] conference. He generally gives two talks, the first about Open Source Intelligence[1] and the next generally entitled improv[2] where he talks about his background in the CIA and marine intelligence.

[0] [https://www.hope.net/](https://www.hope.net/)

[1] The last one was called "Open Source Everything", and can be viewed here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qpg5qKa- OY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qpg5qKa-OY)

[2] The last one can be viewed here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOXqWMZXH8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOXqWMZXH8o)</comment>


Rewriting the Technical Interview - <AUTHOR> https://aphyr.com/posts/353-rewriting-the-technical-interview <comment><USER2> Clever, as usual. But, this could have been done in far less code in a language that already supports term rewriting, such as _Mathematica_.

<comment><USER3> Funny story--I am also a (recovering) Mathematica programmer! I'm not sure it's quite as good of a fit, for a few reasons.

One is that Mathematica's syntax is, in a lot of ways, already pretty C-like. It uses mutable assignment `x = y`, function-arglist syntax `Fun[arg1, arg2]` instead of a Lisp-style `(f arg1 arg2)`, commas for list separators (in Clojure, they're whitespace), braces `{a, b, c}` are a sequential construct, rather than a map, and semicolons `first ; second ; third` denote sequential expressions (in Clojure, ; is an end-of-line comment).

The second reason is that Mathematica, in my understanding, doesn't treat parentheses as first-class syntactic elements: they're used to control interpretation of the parse tree, but they transparently collapse, instead of being accessible as a reified _type_. (Are they? I know Mathematica is sort of an endless coal-mine of a language, and it's entirely possible I'm just not experienced enough to know about this!) If this constraint is true, I'm not sure how you would parse `func(arg1, arg2)` vs `func((arg1, arg2))`. Maybe it's inferrable from any symbol followed by a list, since `(arg1, arg2)` gives you a bounded context for the arglist, even if the parens disappear--and we can give up on having `(a,b)` for tuples or `()` as a unit syntax. It might also be inferrable from context, depending on what types of infix operators you allow, and how ; works as a separator. My license is long-since expired, so I can't test right now--perhaps you can give it a shot and show it off here!

I wound up cutting this from the post, but... the full version of this rewriter provides a Java-style OO syntax with property accessors and chainable method calls. A tricky thing in Mathematica might be disambiguating `obj.property` from `obj.method()`, if the `()` isn't reified. For that matter, what do you do about `fun` vs `fun()`...

One possible workaround might be to exploit (as I've done to hack around Clojure's insistence that "map keys be unique" and "maps have even numbers of elements") lesser-used Unicode codepoints, only this time, using alternatives for `(` and `)`, and to roll your own stack parser for arglist parsing... ideas, ideas. :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> previous entries in the series:

typing: [https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical- interview](https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview)

hexing: [https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical- interview](https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview)

reversing: [https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical- intervie...](https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-interview)

</comment><comment><USER4> A new entry in one of my favorite series of blogs? I must be dreaming!

This is some black macro magic, indeed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Or... how to be a total jackass during your tech interview.

<comment><USER6> What's inappropriate about the behavior here, I wonder? The interviewer got exactly what they asked for, and an awful lot more signal than they probably were expecting.</comment></comment>


Show HN: 50 state Covid-19 forecast - <AUTHOR> https://cv19.report/ <comment><AUTHOR> I would really love some feedback if you tried this. Is anything particularly interesting? What would you add next?

Thanks much!

<comment><USER2> You should label your axes.</comment></comment>


Concurrent Sieve of Eratosthenes in Go - <AUTHOR> http://play.golang.org/p/9U22NfrXeq <comment><USER2> This isn't actually the Sieve of Eratosthenes. My undergrad advisor published a short piece about a family of functional prime generators of this form, that don't have nearly the efficiency of the true Sieve: <http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve-JFP.pdf>

The gist of the problem is this: in the true sieve, each number is touched once for each of its prime factors. In this sieve, each number is touched once by each prime smaller than it (until a factor is found.)

There are a lot more primes that _aren't_ factors of a given number than primes that _are_.

<comment><USER3> I've used that paper as the impetuous for writing a few sieve algorithms (see [1] and [2]). While reasonably elegant in Haskell, my personal experience is that list-of-generator style programs cannot compare to array-based sieves for performance, due to the overhead of switching between generators all the time. Not to denigrate the main point, of course - asymptotic runtimes are far more important than implementation overheads for calculating primes.

[1] [http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2010/03/writing- efficient-...](http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2010/03/writing-efficient- seive-of-eratosthenes.html) [2] [http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2012/08/primes- part-2-segm...](http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2012/08/primes- part-2-segmented-sieve.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As ahh points out in their comment, this isn't a true sieve - it's essentially trial division, although sharded between goroutines.

For comparison, I've used Go to implement a segmented version of the true Sieve of Eratosthenes. It's a standard array-based sieve, chunked up. It takes advantage of goroutines for parallelism, and implements an efficient algorithm at the same time. The code is a lot longer than this one because it tries to do a lot more (memory efficiency, large number support, etc), but it should give you an idea what a full implementation might look like. [http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2012/08/primes- part-2-segm...](http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2012/08/primes- part-2-segmented-sieve.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Just for fun, I translated it to Haskell: <https://gist.github.com/4105055>

<comment><USER5> Hi, I added documentation to your code so people new to Haskell might understand what is going on:

<https://gist.github.com/4105864>

Even with extensive documentation it is only 3 lines longer than the Go version ;)

<comment><USER4> Looks good, thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An excellent long-form article about this type of algorithm in Go: [http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/11/13/the-go-i- forgot-...](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/11/13/the-go-i-forgot- concurrency-an/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. I ran this, adding a print statement into the Filter function so I could inspect `i` as the channels received inputs. I expected the prints to come relatively in random order but on repeated tries they didn't - and then realized I know nothing about programming with coroutines and explicit communication between threads. Thanks for the thought exercise!

<comment><USER8> Did you set the GOMAXPROCS environment variable?

      // By default, Go keeps only one kernel thread (m) running user code
      // at a single time; other threads may be blocked in the operating system.
      // Setting the environment variable $GOMAXPROCS or calling
      // runtime.GOMAXPROCS() will change the number of user threads
      // allowed to execute simultaneously.  $GOMAXPROCS is thus an
      // approximation of the maximum number of cores to use.

From <http://golang.org/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone have any benchmarks on how fast this will run?

For comparison C++ based implementations range from 13.5 seconds to 0.65 seconds when iterating over 1,000,000,000 elements on an Intel Core i7 860, quad-core, hyperthreading, 2.8Ghz cpu. (<http://create.stephan- brumme.com/eratosthenes/>)

<comment><USER10> Pretty slow. This is intended to demonstrate how Go concurrency works, so there's a lot of communication overhead.

Someone ported djb's primegen (uses the Sieve of Atkin) to Go, and got comparable performance-- .7s for primes up to a trillion. [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/golang-...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/golang- nuts/zRvkdfpeOY8)

<comment><USER11> Does anyone know which ballpark Go is in, performance-wise? In my mind, it's a bit faster than Python, whereas I would expect it to be closer to C. However, I have no clue how I formed this opinion, so actual benchmarks would help.

I wonder how it compares to pypy.

<comment><USER12> Well, there's lies, damn lies and benchmarks, but the Shootout has Go: <http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=go> (only the standard compiler, though. No gccgo)

<comment><USER11> That's very useful, thank you. I wish it had PyPy, though...

<comment><USER13> "If you're interested in something not shown then please take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements."

<http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/more.php#languagex></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Making games in Qatar: How a small team built a company in an unlikely place - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/5/13/5542406/qatar-girnaas-giddam <comment><USER2> There's game companies doing very profitably whose basic business model is - localization. [1] Word games work easiest for this case.

Localizing international game is also a non-trivial task (especially from western to asian markets), but it can easily lead to ten-folding your profits. [2] [3]

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Fugo](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Fugo)

[2] [http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130423/191019/And...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130423/191019/Android_App_Stores_of_China_What_Western_Mobile_Game_Developers_Need_to_Know.php)

[3] [http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130717/196436/Saf...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130717/196436/Safari_PostMortem_How_an_Australian_Mobile_Game_Became_a_Chinese_Hit.php)

<comment><USER3> The 3rd article touches on this saying that there is more to localisation than just translation, but one of the hardest parts of localisation is how you actually charge people for your content. The issue is more than just a few places like China, outside of the main Western countries a lot of people don't have credit cards or don't want to associate them with their app store account.

"As an example Fortumo elaborates there are four times more mobile phones in the world than credit cards and in countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, credit card ownership is as low as 15%." [1]

One of the best ways (at least for the user) is operator billing, using this the charge is deducted from the user's prepay balance (or added to their postpay bill, but again contracts are uncommon outside Western countries). If they need to buy more Farmville stars they can just go to a shop and top up their phone. Google supports this on a limited number of operators, but even in places like the UK where operator billing is quite mature, they only support it on one. Companies like Fortumo are doing better, but there are still a lot of local payment options missed by this.

As much as companies such as PayPal like to say they are the solution for global payments, the problem isn't solved yet.

[1] [http://www.arcticstartup.com/2014/03/25/fortumo-opens- fund-o...](http://www.arcticstartup.com/2014/03/25/fortumo-opens-fund- of-e1-million-for-developers-to-intergrate-operator-based-in-app-billing)

<comment><USER2> Just unrelated addendum to Fortumo - they enable developers from countries where Google Merchant account is not available to charge for in-app purchases on Play Store.

We'll be using it in two of our upcoming games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This doesn't surprise me, much. We were approached by officials from Qatar for an SaaS of sorts, and we learned all about their culture or perhaps, more specifically, their funding. There's so much money in Qatar and so much of it being spent on putting them on the map, a nationalistic software push was bound to happen eventually.

</comment><comment><USER5> I live in flyover country and I'd argue it's easier to form and maintain a team of engineers in another country than here. In other countries, the talent can't get to better locales for immigration reasons, leaving them stuck on whatever team they're on. In flyover country, there's a constant lure of your hard-trained talent to the tech hubs.

</comment><comment><USER6> The game's pretty shit though.</comment>


Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/health/transgender-trump-biology.html <comment><USER2> Op-ed disguised as a science article. Ultimately gender now has two definitions: cultural/societal and biological — I suppose you CAN have it both ways but when treating a patient's anatomy such as breast cancer, prostrate cancer, or when it comes to treating a heart attack the treatment will vary by sex. Thus, there has to be a de facto gender designation when a "body" enters a hospital.

A pitch, a basketball court or an octagon could have its own definition of gender but is that a good idea?

[https://www.cedars-sinai.edu/About-Us/HH-Landing- Pages/When-...](https://www.cedars-sinai.edu/About-Us/HH-Landing-Pages/When- it-comes-to-heart-disease-women-and-men-are-not-equal.aspx)

<comment><USER3> You are confusing gender and sex, which are not the same thing.

Also, sex itself is much more complicated than people think[1]. It's not as binary and concrete as XX/XY, and there are also people born with both sets of reproductive organs.

1\. [https://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2015/02/sex- isn-t-...](https://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2015/02/sex-isn-t- chromosomes-story-century-misconceptions-about-x-y)

<comment><USER2> As far as my definitions are concerned, they are correct. Nothing is concrete or black and white. Sexuality is complex but arguing over semantics regarding outliers does not make a fact.

<comment><USER3> It's not arguing semantics when biologists are describing _two separate things_.

There are animals with two sexes and three genders. There are animals that can change their sex. There are animals that can change their gender, but not their sex.

We're talking about separate concepts, and it's not a silly, meaningless effort to define separate terms for them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Boeing patented a system for recharging drones in mid-air [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.blimpinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/0.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> More on the patent, Here's a video explaining how it works [https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=33&v=NGi7KjvR66M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=33&v=NGi7KjvR66M)</comment>


Theranos reportedly laying off 41% of its workforce - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/06/theranos-reportedly-laying-off-41-of-its-workforce.html <comment><USER2> I guess my main question here, is if they have been banned by the FDA from doing any testing at all for two years, what exactly is remaining of the business, and why haven't they been completely shuttered?

Bloomberg seems to indicate there isn't much left for any employee to do.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-08/theranos-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-08/theranos- s-ceo-holmes-banned-from-operating-a-lab-for-two-years)

<comment><USER3> I worked on a project where in the same building a startup was going under. It was totally clear that there was no hope but they kept burning through their VC money instead of closing.

<comment><USER4> I think that is fair. When a startup is successful a VC gets paid on 100% of their investment. When a startup is unsuccessful, why should VCs be allowed to cut bait and recoup the remaining investment? VCs get to have their cake and eat it too enough as it is already.

<comment><USER5> Because they funded the thing and took on far more risk than anyone else? I'd want my money back to; I'm not in the business of paying out white collar welfare.

<comment><USER6> Nope, they took on less risk than anyone else involved. Money is fungible, and they've likely got a lot of it.

The people there, day after day, they gave their _time_. That's something we all only have a limited amount of, and that's something you'll never get back.

<comment><USER7> They did not "give away" their time; they were compensated at a fair market value for their time. I believe this is what we call "employment."

<comment><USER8> At a fair market value -- except if it was an early stage startup it was discounted from market value, with subpar benefits, but with a "tonne" of (now worthless) equity.

It is in many ways personally more rewarding, but taking a job in a startup versus a well-established business is taking a risk, accepting subpar conditions today for a shot at a big prize later on.

<comment><USER7> The company has been around for 10 years, with hundreds of millions in funding through multiple rounds, so I would not consider this a "startup".

The employees were/are highly paid and not assuming any real risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only surprising thing about this news is that its only 41%, i figured it would be closer to 100%

<comment><USER10> Still this sucks for all of the people she lured to work for her earlier on before it was realized to be (the edison blood tester) fraudulent / incorrect due to the low sample size.

I can only imagine being one of the researchers or engineers there really believing you would be able to change the world and getting crushing news like this. It would really suck.

<comment><USER11> > Still this sucks for all of the people she lured to work for her earlier on > before it was realized to be (the edison blood tester) fraudulent / > incorrect due to the low sample size.

Hardware is hard. Let's go shopping. :)

However, that doesn't have to be the end.

You can narrow the usage to something like "Use for routine visits to collect data quickly but not for diagnostic reasons". Being able to do a very fast test without drawing much blood for every time you visit the doctor would be useful information over time. There's also a "Hey, that number is a bit high. Let's pull a real amount of blood and see what's going on." I suspect that if you correlate the information over multiple tests it gets much more accurate very quickly.

In addition, I suspect that the engineers would have eventually worked out how to correlate things correctly and figured out how much blood was required for what level of certainty.

Finally, most people in the biotech sector understand that it's a "pump and dump" scam. You invest, wait for the company to get some good news, and sell to the next layer. Biotech often takes long timescales and different investors toss money in at different points.

However, what doomed the company was Elizabeth Holmes _lying_. I could make other comments, but, really, Theranos would still be fine if she had told the truth. People know that biotech always runs into problems. Always.

Your CEO is one of the people who _must not lie_ (your CFO is the other). Your sales people can lie. Your marketing people can lie. Oddly, even your CTO can get away with some things, but normally the CTO is a shining beacon of truth compared to most people in a company. If your CEO always tells the truth, the CEO can say: "We've hit some snags, but the engineers think they can work around them" and people will believe because they want to believe.

But once your CEO is known as a liar, you are doomed.

However, I expect that Elizabeth Holmes will be back far too soon and will wreak havoc on an even larger scale. She is just Carly Fiorina writ 35 years later. She will fail upward because she is a not-unattractive blonde female with lots of rich family connections.

<comment><USER10> She's rich and will stay independently wealthy for the forseeable future due to this, however her name is heavily tarnished. Even if she does pull off the edison tech, she'll have a hard sell finding investors to the level she did for Theranos again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This leaves 220 people employees left at Theranos? Why? The company is over. The emperor has no black turtleneck. Move on.

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't wait until this whole saga is made into a movie.

I also can't believe anyone is willing to give them the time of day with a new product.

<comment><USER14> Well, it is being made into a movie: [http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/jennifer-lawrence- wil...](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/jennifer-lawrence-will-star-as- elizabeth-holmes-in-a-movie-about-theranos)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> And, related: Trump's pick for defense secretary has resigned from Theranos's board [1]

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/06/trump...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/06/trumps- pick-for-defense-secretary-stepped-down-from-theranos- board/?utm_term=.5016be822cf8)

<comment><USER16> Amazingly, I understand that the board had a lot of big and very well known names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> They'll probably have to change the name of the company if they want to get out from under the stink of sleaze.

<comment><USER17> The good ol' Blackwater/XE Services/Academi gambit.

<comment><USER18> How's Accenture doing these days? (Not quite the same I know, but I did just discover today that Arthur Andersen relaunched last year, huh!).

In a fit of irony, multiple partners left the smoking ruins of AA to found a firm called, of all things, Accuracy.

<comment><USER19> How far back does the practice of renaming something after an infamous debacle go? If it's smoking ruins you want, then i can recommend Windscale, which was renamed to Sellafield not long after this little bit of excitement in 1957:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is anyone even still sticking around voluntarily? There is no chance of a lucrative exit and the company will probably die off on its own within 1-2 years.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why do people still work there?</comment>


Hype isn't a use case - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/liquid_chickens/hype-isnt-a-use-case-3a7 <comment><AUTHOR> ... "Using an old hammer doesn't keep you from building an awesome house" ...</comment>


Quantum Stealth Digital Camoflage - <AUTHOR> http://www.quantumstealth.com/ <comment><USER2> They know how to make a bad video. This looked interesting - at first. I get 1-2 minutes and then that obnoxious noisy video display interferes. If the hour of the video was going to be 15 minutes of that obnoxious prelude - pass. Put the crap at the front ONCE, and then close with it. Thus, I never saw the whole thing. If others agree, upvote? Parhaps he will make a concise version with all the info... minus the crap?</comment>


Is my startup worth pursuing? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, I set up a landing page for an idea I've been thinking about: http://fabricfit.com/. The basic idea is that people have clothes that fit them great, but it's hard finding clothes that fit you just as well and are stylish. So, you send the clothes to us, we measure your clothes, and send you your clothes and others that are similar in style and fit to the original one you sent us. What do you guys think about this idea? <comment><USER2> It's a good idea. A couple things:

1\. Sizing can be tough. For example, I have several pair of jeans. All the same brand and all the same size. At least 2 of the pairs absolutely do not fit, while the others are extremely comfortable. When I bought all of them they fit perfectly, but over time with wear and washing the fit on some has just gone out of whack compared to the others.

2\. This would be a difficult business to scale though. If all of your customers are sending garments in to be measured and then you are sending them back out along with other garments that are curated, it could be a labor intensive business.

Overall though I like the idea. I hate shopping, I hate having to go to a store and try things on. Then usually I get home and half the stuff I bought I never wear because, as @rbcoffee pointed out, there is some quirk that annoys me.

A feature you may consider adding would be that clothes a customer doesn't like could be sent in, you either buy them back or offer them a credit towards new clothes sent back out to them in the same style, but a different size.

This idea kind of reminds me of [http://www.belloverde.com/](http://www.belloverde.com/) or Astor Black which are online custom tailors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points, I was thinking about starting initially with jeans, so I didn't spread myself thin. I would ideally want the product to be open to everyone, but perhaps charging a high premium and focusing on a small number of customers would be the best way to scale. I like the feature you suggested as well.

<comment><USER2> Actually if you did a subscription based service, almost like a BirchBox, that may work better. The customer sends in the first set of clothes, you get measurements, and now you know size and style. From there each month you send them a clothing package with suggested items. They can either wear them for a bit and return (Netflix type model) or purchase at a discounted rate from you.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is essentially the model I wanted to start off with; Having the measurements and style of certain customer in a subscription business, gives you the luxury of continually learning a customer's taste and sizing creating a nice hedge to competitors and a healthier customer lifetime value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a good idea, as I prefer to try on clothes in a shop rather than buy them online. The weird thing about clothes is that even if the size is correct, the clothes sometimes don't fit, or just don't hang right. Most people don't feel satisfied after buying clothes from the net because there's always some quirk in the 'fit' that annoys them and the effort of sending it back proves too much.

TL;DR Size is a bullshit metric and people also look for 'hang' and 'comfort'.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve. I'm a skinny, lanky guy and trying to find jeans my size is a headache for the reason you stated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't like the idea of sending my clothes to some company, plus it will cause a logistics headache for you. you can just show a guide on how to take precise measurement of the user body and enter it online.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are two problems I definitely saw coming. The trust element is a big one, and I've thought about doing what you suggested so as to avoid the logistics, but different jeans and clothing brands fit differently. I think if I have people send in clothes and perhaps have a spreadsheet of how brands fit, I would eventually have an heap of data where I wouldn't need people to send in clothes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you use a cord bank? - <AUTHOR>

We are expecting our first child in August and have seen a lot of adverts for cord blood banking - the idea is that the blood in your baby's umbilical cord contains stem cells that might be useful for curing diseases later in life and so you should bank the blood as a form of insurance.  The ads and marketing literature are very compelling, but of course that's what they're designed for!  We've done a little basic research, and it looks like not everyone agrees that banking cord blood is desirable (e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cord_blood_bank).  However, as my wife pointed out, while the organizations in that wikipedia article who recommend against banking are the kinds of people who should know what's best for mothers and babies, they don't necessarily seem like the best people to judge the potential effectiveness of stem cell therapies.<p>I'm posting this in the hope that there are some biotech folks reading Hacker News who can cut through the marketing spin and give us a straight answer - would you do this yourself, for your own children? <comment><USER2> Before I read the summary, I thought a cord bank was a co-op where you could share all those electronics cables and cords you rarely need with others. I have so many cords the manufacturer included that I can't get rid of. Yes, yes I would use that. You should start a company on that model.

I'm not planning on having kids any time soon, if you couldn't tell. ;-)

<comment><USER3> What this guy said!

I tend to open a few HN topics at once in different tabs, and in the time it was taking me to work through the chafe I was thinking about the arbitrage between downtown real-estate and the ULTIMATE FLEXIBILITY OF ANY CORD AT ANY TIME!!!11OMG

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My wife and I had considered storing cord blood for our second child (now 1 year old). We ordered the kit and in the delivery room the nurse had begun unpacking and asked us to sign a form authorizing it. She briefly explained the process where, after delivery, she would cut the cord immediately in order to "capture" as much as possible for storage. I guess we hadn't thought the whole thing through because this concerned us. It is my understanding that it is recommended that the new born be left with the cord intact for as long as possible, until the cord goes white (empty) because that blood makes up a large percentage of all the blood the baby has, which provides the baby with what s/he needs for the first part of his/her life. So by not letting this blood flow back into the baby we were essentially jeopardizing it's health from the get go. My wife and I are not doctors and this is only my opinion but we decided to not store the cord blood and let the baby have all of it, hopefully giving her a head start to a happy, healthy life. I would suggest reading up on what possible problems may arise when the cord is cut too early. Just something to take into consideration.

<comment><USER5> After the cord is clamped, how is the blood on the other side expected to get into the baby?

<comment><USER6> You don't clamp it. You wait (IIRC) 15-30 minutes before doing anything to it, to give it enough time to drain. The immediacy with which the cord is routinely clamped and cut rose quite a bit in the 80's and 90's. It only makes sense that you shouldn't tamper with nature so much as to cut off the cord from the baby immediately after birth, while there's still blood flowing through it.

I'm not really sure why doctors started doing that, but it reminds me of our society's pressure towards having everything natural seem perfect and sort of sterile, like when our grocery stores reject all but the most flawless produce. We wouldn't want our babies to be handed to us with all sorts of icky, biological stuff like still-intact umbilical cords attached.

<comment><USER5> Are you saying they are supposed to leave the baby attached to the placenta while the afterbirth is delivered? I would imagine that remaining attached to the afterbirth as it is delivered is an infection and antigen exposure risk for both the baby and the mother.

<comment><USER6> There seem to be differing opinions on that. A bit of a Googling suggests that you wait until the cord has stopped pulsing, which might be as soon as a few minutes.

I'm not sure why the risk of infection would increase with the cord intact versus it being cut (where germs could potentially get in anyway). The baby's and mother's blood don't mix, so even if there were a "wound" on the placenta where it came unattached, that would be on the mother's side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My second child was born about a week ago. I kept both their cord blood in sepearate banks in separate cities in case of a disaster or an emergency.

I paid 20 years of storage for both of them also. I believe in the future their stem cells will be beneficial to them in at least one area of their lives, and I hope never to need the cord bloods for health reasons.

But there is one crucial point you should be aware of, make sure they are not sharing personal information or genetic profile with international third parties make sure the service agreement between you and the bank covers this explicitly, banks that I stored my children's bloods had no such clear points in their agreements and i made them add my own no third parties article for me.

<comment><USER8> How much was it?

<comment><USER9> It varies depending on the bank. Public banks cost far less than private banks. Once you figure out which type of bank you want to use you really have to look closely at individual banks. Where do they store the tissue? What is their financial situation? How many successful transplants have been done with tissue that they've stored? Even the collection kit varies, with CBR claiming to be able to collect up to 30% more stem cells.

We ended up choosing CBR because if the collection doesn't meet a certain threshold you have the option to get a refund or store it anyway. They also guarantee a successful transplant or your money back plus $50000. It cost us just under $2000. We hope it's money thrown away, but if we ever need it it's a small price to pay.

Some banks can also store cord tissue. The way it was explained to me is that the tissue can be used for all the things the blood can be used for, but there's a much better chance it will be a match for the father. Apparently, the chances of the stem cells from the blood being a match for the father are quite low.

That said, I'm having some second thoughts based on some of the things I'm reading here. We have a few more weeks before delivery.

Here's a table of banks and estimated costs: [http://parentsguidecordblood.org/content/usa/banklists/summa...](http://parentsguidecordblood.org/content/usa/banklists/summary.shtml?navid=17)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the best option right now would be to donate the cord blood to a public blood bank if that option is available in your area. That doesn't cost you, and it benefits a child more immediately and helps to advance the research. I think there is a chance of benefit to storing it yourself, but the marketing from these companies seemed to be preying on parents' sense of guilt so much that it was off-putting to me. I can put those thousands of dollars to better use to benefit my children. Of course, if the money isn't a meaningful amount to you, your decision process may be different.

</comment><comment><USER11> You might be interested in ask.metafilter's discussion on the practice: [http://ask.metafilter.com/15638/Whats-the-deal-with-cord- blo...](http://ask.metafilter.com/15638/Whats-the-deal-with-cord-blood-and- farming-your-own-stem-cells)

</comment><comment><USER12> We didn't for our daughter who is two and a half now. It's expensive and provides dubious benefits. We're hoping to have a child next year and we won't do it then either. There's a lot to worry about when you're expecting your first child but this isn't really a big deal. I'd spend more time worrying about other things.

Congrats by the way! This is a very exciting time. My daughter is an absolute joy and I'm sure your child will be for you too. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER13> I work with people who do iPS (induced pluripotent stem cell) work. The technology is quite promising: take a skin punch biopsy, add Yamanaka factors, and obtain iPS cells. They have not supplanted embryonic stem cells for most purposes but someday they may (there are various scientific advantages and disadvantages to both).

I think the most honest answer is that even those of us in this field don't yet know if storage of cord blood will prove to offer something that iPS can't. Perhaps there is someone even closer to the intersection of those topics than I on HN who can weigh in.

</comment><comment><USER14> What does your obstetrician say?

<comment><AUTHOR> She was frustratingly noncommittal to be honest, but I only thought of phrasing the question in the "would you do this for _your_ children" way after our last appointment - I'll probably ask her that next time we meet.

<comment><USER14> I learned a few years ago that that was the best way to ask any doctor any question.

<comment><USER15> Ditto. Especially after one made a glib comment in front of his intern how a simple procedure (a nerve test) could potentially puncture my lung but it was my decision whether I wanted it.

"What would you recommend for a family member" gets a noticeable change of demeanor/gravity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wouldn't -- your baby can use that blood TODAY.

For more info, Google: benefits of delayed cord cutting

<comment><USER17> Also, ask your doctor about it, as medical professionals they should be able to help make sense of everything you're reading on the internet :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cord blood can today save the life of someone with leukemia or other diseases that require bone marrow transplants. While other cord blood stem cell therapies may be speculative, this one is real and already works to save lives. My sister has leukemia and we just found out that some kind person donated cord blood which matches her tissue type...I can't describe how grateful I feel now. Thank you, whoever you are.

In my case, for my children, I would certainly make sure the blood is saved. The only question is whether to do private cord blood banking or to donate the blood to the public blood bank. I would find out how rare is my child's human leukocyte antigen (HLA) tissue type as part of making the decision. If it's rare then it becomes much, much more important to bank known compatible blood.

One confounding factor: if your child turns out to have a blood disease later in life, it's not clear to me whether there is a risk in using your child's own stem cells. For example we know little about the causes of leukemia, it could be that even the cord blood cells are potentially cancerous. I'd suggest reading up on this and reaching out to researchers in the area on this front, since it's unlikely your OB/GYN would know the most recent results.

</comment><comment><USER19> Our first child is 11 weeks old now and we asked the same question to our pediatrician. Her answer was that "neither she nor any other pediatrician she knows would do private banking at the moment". I agree that public banking is the best idea and we were going to do that, but our child came 5 weeks early before we had a chance to set it up.

The thing that became clear during this whole thing is there were going to be MANY times in the coming years when spending "only $3K just in case" was going to be offered and this seemed like a bad precedent to set. The vast majority of children will never benefit from private banking, so go public!

</comment><comment><USER20> The chances of your child needing it are vanishingly small, but their is a chance it could help a child. So it's a great idea to donate to a bank but paying money to store it for your own use is probably a waste of money.

[http://www.marrow.org/HELP/Donate_Cord_Blood_Share_Life/How_...](http://www.marrow.org/HELP/Donate_Cord_Blood_Share_Life/How_to_Donate_Cord_Blood/index.html)

<comment><USER21> I feel like a lot of the arguments here boil down to the same fact: There is very little chance that this will be useful. Most of the time this is a waste of money, but on the small minuscule off-chance that this might help people put money into it. Its like snake-oil, can't hurt but can't quite prove that it can help, but people take it on the off-chance that it might.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I hear "stem cells" my first thought is "scam."

A lot of people want more from medicine than it is ever going to deliver. Just say no to another expensive procedure that has no demonstrable value.

</comment><comment><USER23> My sister's cord blood was stored. I cant remember details but just recently I read an article in the news about a child who was saved due to the doctors being able to use her cord blood to do something or other.

<comment><USER24> I have a friend who said his friend heard that his girlfriend's dad's mom thinks that your comment is pretty vague.

<comment><USER25> Probably the most polite way of expression I've seen on HN

<comment><USER24> Thanks. I thought the comment I was replying to had some value, but would have been better if the OP looked up a bit more information before posting. Saying that would have been boring though :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If it's inexpensive enough, why not? My sister just had her first baby about 7 months ago. They were talking about using a cord bank but didn't follow through with it. More out of distraction than anything else.

At this point in time you can't know whether or not it will be used later on. But if you don't save it now, if the event happens you won't have it to use. There is also the perspective that if your child never needs it, there might be other kids that it could help years down the road.

You are looking at long term storage of cells, so make sure whoever you go with is legitimate and has a long established history.

</comment><comment><USER27> I did this with my daughter.

</comment><comment><USER21> Would not do that. Currently they take YOUR skin cells and turn them into stem cells. A couple of years ago the process was discovered/perfected. I have a friend who has a degenerative eye condition and this was discussed with him very recently. Basically babies are not needed for stem cells anymore. Its why the stem cell research was allowed again in the US provided that the cells are retrieved using the skin -> stem cell method not the aborted fetus -> stem cell method.

<comment><USER28> That is not the reason stem cell research is allowed again.

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/09/politics/100days/d...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/09/politics/100days/domesticissues/main4853385.shtml)

<comment><USER21> [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2005/08...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2005/08/21/AR2005082101180.html)

Its an old post, but the point is you use your cells for this. I guess I was a misinformed in the reasons for the Obama bill. Nevertheless I don't see why there is no big push to show that you don't need to kill babies to get stem cells!</comment></comment></comment>


Parallel Programming, a book by Paul McKenney - <AUTHOR> http://paulmck.livejournal.com/23027.html

<comment><USER2> I've followed the development of this book for several years, and it has progressed quite well in that time. It currently has a good combination of "documentation nobody else ever bothered to write" on many forms of synchronization, from the simple to the cutting edge, with a bit of a peek beyond that. It has a ways to go before it could become a publishable book, but by the standards of software documentation it represents one of the best references I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER3> I need a good writeup on parallel (distributed?) data structures, that is, ways of storing and accessing lists and such across multiple nodes. I flipped to that section of the book and it was blank. Plus, this seems to assume shared memory. Does anyone have a good source? Does one even exist?

<comment><USER4> Not sure if this is what you want, but Chris Okasaki's "Purely Functional Data Structures" are data-structures that can be accessed in multiple threads because changes result in new versions.

[http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris- Oka...](http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris- Okasaki/dp/0521663504)

<comment><USER5> The data structures in that book are also geared towards shared memory; actually, it doesn't cover parallel programming at all, it's just that functional data structures happen to be a good fit for concurrent access in shared memory systems.

You might have more success finding what you want in HPC literature, or maybe in the Erlang community.

That said, it's a decent book, although not exactly a light read; I did struggle to follow some of the numerous proofs. You'll probably find it easier if you have a CompSci background.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Direct link to book: [http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/perfbook/p...](http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/perfbook/perfbook.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Does a IRC or equivalent chat exist for HNers? - <AUTHOR> Ask HN: Does a IRC or equivalent chat exist for HNers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14208455 <comment><USER2> Yep. I think it's #hackernews on Freenode.

Not very active, though.</comment>


For Billionaire "Crypto-Whales", Puerto Rico Is the New Cayman Islands - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/technology/cryptocurrency-puerto-rico.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291211)</comment>


Imgur's technology stack in detail - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/blog/?p=2417

<comment><USER2> How can a site with almost no income afford to run 80 instances as well as petabytes of traffic/storage on a pricey platform like AWS?

<comment><USER3> I have no insight into this, but I suspect the ads in the sidebar bring in more revenue than you might imagine. Most of the bandwidth requirements will be handled by the CDN, keeping down AWS traffic costs. CDN pricing is almost certainly less than S3 + traffic costs.</comment></comment>


GitLab secures $20M Series B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/13/gitlab-secures-20-million-series-b/ <comment><USER2> "The company produces a soup-to-nuts development platform ..."</comment>


Royal Philips Software – Open-Source Projects Overview - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/philips-software/overview <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this.

We're starting to Open-Source software within Philips. We see a lot of value in the opening parts of our software. More projects will follow soon.

I did some talks ( f.e. Github Enterprise Summit ) on our journey to Open Source. [https://githubenterprisesummit- philips.now.sh](https://githubenterprisesummit-philips.now.sh)</comment>


The unofficial guide to migrating Google Rich Snippets to schema.org - <AUTHOR> http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/06/02/schema-org

<comment><USER2> "If you've been using microformats or RDFa to mark up your Google Rich Snippets, sorry, you backed the wrong horse."

I think that's supposed to be a joke, but it just comes off as insulting instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, if you used microdata, you have an easy migration path, and if you used some other syntax, you don't. You can call that whatever you like, but it doesn't change the facts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can you use this microdata with your own CSS/HTML markup or you can't include your own classes ? i.e. your formats must look identical to these ?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can fit microdata into any markup. It's just some HTML attributes, plus the values that are already visible on your page.</comment></comment>


With over 10k visits, Why only 15 new users created content on our platform? - <AUTHOR> We are building a product https://tymline.co/
(timeline based story blogging platform). Here, people create timelines to narrate stories of any kind like relationship, career, travel, hobbies etc as timelines which can be discovered basing on users interest.
We have been getting decent referral traffic to our platform but only 15 new people have created timelines organically. Others either read a story or check the platform and drop off.
Sample timeline:
https://tymline.co/SiddharthRam/siliconvalley?ref=hn
1. How to make the content creation more easy through timelines?
Any suggestions or feedback to improve the product would be helpful for us to iterate further.
TIA <comment><USER3> I had never heard of your site, so I went there. There was a way I could browse stuff and look around, check other's time lines or even a sample timeline with out creating an account, but it was not on the main menu - <USER2> was hard top-right on the screen and I did not see it at first. I have become averse to any and all sites that want my email address unless I am going to use the site actively.

So place the browse option at the top of the menu group and get more people.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1% rule.

 _" only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\))</comment>


For Sushi Chain, Conveyor Belts Carry Profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/business/global/31sushi.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

<comment><AUTHOR> More and more menial jobs being eliminated by technology. Clearly our current social order is not sustainable.</comment>


In the age of free AAA game engines, are we still relevant? - <AUTHOR> http://jmonkeyengine.org/301602/in-the-age-of-free-aaa-game-engines-are-we-still-relevant/ <comment><USER2> Mozilla has been a force for good here, working closely with the game engine teams for a couple of years on Emscripten porting to ASM.js, and sharing our open source experience.

Mozilla is bringing AAA gaming to the most widely deployed, free and open platform the world has ever known, the Internet. If you're looking for leverage and opportunity for further opening up the gaming industry, Mozilla should be on your short list of partners/friends/projects.

And no other project out there has more experience doing open source. (Mozilla was much of the inspiration for the creation of open source model as an alternative to the commercially-challenging free software model that came before.) [http://opensource.org/history](http://opensource.org/history)

So yes, "Get cozy with Xiph.org/Mozilla."

<comment><USER3> It's the web, not the internet. And the web is not the _most free and open platform the world has ever known_ , it is a comittee-designed disaster whose goals are regularly overruled by the interests of big companies.

I get it, Mozilla is doing this game native stuff now. Why not keep it at that? Baby steps.

<comment><USER4> Name a more free and open platform than the web. You can choose from any point in history.

<comment><USER5> GNU/Linux. A ton of platforms are more open than the web more that EME is part of the spec. It means that a full implementation of the web has to contain non-free components.

<comment><USER4> On the EME front we are agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The post mentions OpenGEX as a game engine data exchange format. If you're interested in 3d data formats and specifically good runtime formats, you might be interested in glTF too, which is a JSON+binary asset format specifically targeted at storing runtime-optimized data (as opposed to COLLADA which is more a editing-oriented format). It's backed by the Khronos group --the people behind OpenGL / Vulkan / WebGL-- and they have a COLLADA-to-glTF converter: [https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF).

Having spent some time working with the format, I hope it takes off and we see native support for it in most tools at some point. I've had great success using glTF to export models + skeletal animations from Blender and then import them for use with WebGL: [https://twitter.com/elisee/status/558238454962978816](https://twitter.com/elisee/status/558238454962978816). This is a little test project made with Superpowers, a soon-to-be open source HTML5 2D+3D game maker I've been designing with a couple of friends: [https://sparklinlabs.com/](https://sparklinlabs.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, I'm well aware of glTF, and it's a cool initiative. Just didn't want to overwhelm readers with new stuff.

Also, even though it doesn't have the same backing yet, I'm more optimistic about OpenGEX as an exchange format because it's not such a big ask. It serves the same purpose as FBX, but is completely open source. glTF on the other hand - and please enlighten me if I got this all wrong - is asking engines that already have their own tailor-made runtime format to support this one as well (or even instead). That's asking a lot.

I guess if glTF could convert FBX files as well as it converts COLLADA, it'd quickly become a lot more attractive. Maybe support glTF output in fbx-conv?

[https://github.com/libgdx/fbx-conv](https://github.com/libgdx/fbx-conv)

<comment><USER6> Looks like a FBX-to-glTF converter has sprung up recently (linked from the glTF repo README: [https://github.com/cyrillef/FBX- glTF](https://github.com/cyrillef/FBX-glTF)). I have no experience with it though so I can't say how well it works.

> glTF on the other hand - and please enlighten me if I got this all wrong - > is asking engines that already have their own tailor-made runtime format to > support this one as well (or even instead). That's asking a lot.

For our Superpowers game maker, we didn't end up using glTF as the actual runtime format but we have a fairly simple importer that reads glTF, scavenges for what it needs and builds the final data. I expect most engines would still need a "last-mile" conversion, still some processing but much simpler than working with COLLADA or FBX directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Games must never stop being weird"

Reading this kind of stuff heartens me and gives me hope for the games industry. I still spend a ton of time on gaming, and except for a rare gem, indie games are one of the only places you can see original thought, even if sometimes it is poorly executed.

<comment><USER8> About a decade ago I wanted to get into game development because I wanted to see more artistry in games. I thought, why try to use the technology to make things realistic, when you could make it unrealistic? I thought, there's an underground music scene, there should be an underground game dev scene.

I eventually gave up on breaking into the industry given the cost benefit analysis, but it's okay because everything I wanted to see and more came true anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let me tell you about a little game called American McGee's Grimm. This was a short and sweet, episodic little game with a lot of quirky-fun visuals and gameplay dynamics. You played a little gnome going around spreading darkness and mayhem inside a fairytale world and once you've covered the world in enough darkness and grossness, the fairytale ending would play out in a much more violent and gruesome way than how it began. OK, so far, so good. Nice casual game, would even be a decent mobile game.

The problem is that American McGee has an ego so huge it interferes with his ability to properly market and position his ideas, and for some reason thought this was AAA title material or it should be worthy of a AAA development process. So step one was "license the Unreal Engine". Except the Unreal Engine, with its support for shaders and all that crap, made the game run intolerably slow even on PCs with on-mobo NVIDIA parts, let alone the shitty Intel graphics parts many PCs had at the time. Porting to Wii would have been fucking impossible; arguably, the game would have thrived on Wii as an interesting counterpoint to Hannah Montana's Wiggle-Your-Stick Concert Bash and the usual Wii fare.

So yes, there's room in this business for all sorts of game engines. And if you don't know how to write an engine that fits your game, or at least choose a fit from a wide market, maybe you don't know enough about the kind of game you're making and who would be playing it.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a lack of free open source state of the art game engines. The best one are based on the open sourced Quake 3 engine and Cube2, though they are 10-15 years old. Additionally such an engines needs a good WYSIWYG editor with an inbuilt shader editor like UnrealEd, CryEngine-Editor. The Quake3/Source- Engine editors are very basic and outdated. Game engines are written in C++, with game logic in a scripting language like Lua or JavaScript.

There is also a lack of web 3D engines that ate not based on ThreeJS. Every demo and tutorial is using ThreeJS, instead of WebGL. ThreeJS is an abstraction layer that made sense some years ago when WebGL wasn't around. ThreeJS is slow. One can compile C++ code via emscripten to ams.js, that's great - the downside is the JS filesize.

<comment><USER11> Just this past year GoDot went open source. Haven't delved too deep into it, but it looks professional, scriptable, and "actually open source" (i.e. they accept pull requests)

[https://github.com/okamstudio/godot](https://github.com/okamstudio/godot)

<comment><USER12> >(i.e. they accept pull requests)

Well, Epic accept pull requests too for UE4, you know, but they are not actually open/libre/whatever source.

<comment><USER13> The engine he linked to is MIT licensed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Still relevant"? Not to be a dick, uh, but who or what in that article was _ever_ relevant? The author? jMonkeyEngine? Open source (for games)? Pretty sure the answer is a resounding no to all three.

That said game devs are pretty open when it comes to open source, kinda. Were it not for fear of patent lawsuits you'd see a _lot_ more source code released. However our careers and livelihoods rely on copyright so you'd probably also see assets under lock and key like all the Doom/Quake releases.

<comment><USER15> There ARE games on Steam you can buy right now that were made with JMonkeyEngine. That makes it pretty relevant IMO...

<comment><USER16> Can you please link to the top jmonkey games?

<comment><USER15> They're all listed in the 'Showcase' part of [http://jmonkeyengine.org](http://jmonkeyengine.org).

The top 2 are on Steam, and many of the others are too (or on Greenlight).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's worth nothing Unreal Engine 4's source is available for free (before, you had to be on the $20/month plan). You can modify it as you please, and you can share your modifications as well. You can even sell plugins made by customizing the UE4 source code.

Sure, it's not GPL/MIT and doesn't meet the full definition of "open source," but this is a good middleground: a sustainable business model for the company, source code access for anyone.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think it's worth noting that Unreal Engine's source code is available free of charge, and they actively engage with the developer community on GitHub. It's an interesting cousin of Open Source, but nobody talks about this sort of business model.

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately, a lot of people (including myself) value true freedom, which neither Unreal nor Unity provide; on the other hand, you are guaranteed that both of these projects will not die soon, which is something that open source projects suffer.

<comment><USER20> _> a lot of people (including myself) value true freedom_

By all indications, the people who value this particular flavor of no-true- Scotsman'd "true freedom" is tiny and shrinking. The Apache License and MIT/X11 licenses have more or less supplanted the GPL and other hard-copyleft licenses in modern development communities. When I started writing open source, the GPL was almost the default largely because Linux used it as such; I don't remember the last time I saw a GPL project, or even LGPL, that I cared to use.

This is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned; I'd rather grant the freedom to do great things with the stuff I write regardless of whether somebody wants to hand it back to me. It doesn't hurt me, so, whatever.

<comment><USER21> Since the early days of home computing I used a mixture of free and commercial software.

Back in the days we had program listings, public domain, freeware, shareware, ....

Then GPL came along and many adopted. Personally I had a phase where I was 100% GPL and writing stuff like M$.

That is all gone for me now and I am even typing this on a Windows 8.1 system, but I do acknowledge that most likely Linux wouldn't ever happened if it wasn't for GNU and the whole (L)GPL eco-system.

Many of the open source advocates that are anti-GPL forget that without it, probably the choice today would have been between commercial UNIX systems and Windows NT.

Android extensions outside AOSP, LLVM derivatives for embedded systems, GPGPUs and most recently Swift are good examples of what happens when you join commercial interests with free code.

<comment><USER22> > Many of the open source advocates that are anti-GPL forget that without it, > probably the choice today would have been between commercial UNIX systems > and Windows NT.

Like Mac OS X and Windows 8?

<comment><USER21> Almost, imagine not having GNU/Linux on the server side or for IoT projects.

<comment><USER22> I honestly wouldn't much care. Prefer FreeBSD for servers anyway.

<comment><USER21> Because AT&T lost its case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This page is alarmingly unreadable. Light gray doesn't show up well on white.

And while I'm nitpicking, associating Stallman with "Open Source" always gets a chuckle out of me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, yeah I guess you're right about the color. Fine on my monitor but I've encountered similar difficulties on other sites, so I'll take your word for it. Better now?

As for Stallman and open source, yeah that can be debated, but he's definitely an idealist.

<comment><USER24> Stallman leads the free software movement, which holds that creating proprietary software in unethical. The open source movement, although sharing some ideals of free and open software, does not condemn or oppose proprietary software. Stallman is strongly opposed to the open source movement, and is surely annoyed by the confusion.

What both movements have in common is endless forking followed by awkward merging, combined with a lack of taste for naming things. Thus we get the term FOSS, that combines Free and Open Source Software into an acronym that sounds like something related to sewage processing.

<comment><USER25> I wouldn't say he's strongly opposed; he says what the open source movement does is good, just that it doesn't go far enough. Unlike what some people believe, rms isn't factionary - he doesn't think that you either commit 100% to the Free Software beliefs or you're the enemy. For him, anyone writing free software is to be lauded, even if they don't do it for the "right" reasons or even they also write proprietary software.

<comment><USER23> Yes, I think a lot of people only know of the caricature of Stallman. He has very nuanced views and while he may be personally eccentric he is consistent and usually quite reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article makes it sound as if UE4 was closed source or at least unwilling to take pull requests, which is not the case. Also, as far as I can tell from skimming, the UE4 source is really comprehensible and you _can_ fiddle around with it, add custom shaders and objects and learn from it.

Though I do agree that an absolute beginner should start with a less powerful engine. I learned a lot tinkering with Cocos2D-X that helped me grasp basic concepts of OpenGL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunate if I came off that way, that was not my intention. Just tried to keep things short by bundling all the 3 mentioned engines into "different brands of free".

UE4 is indeed open source, though not _open_ to the extent of your average open source project, YET. But I'm not at all trying to give them a hard time about it. I know these things have to happen gradually. What they're doing is great.

<comment><USER26> I think smaller frameworks like jME, LibGDX, Cocos-* will still live quite a while, exactly because of the community and contributors momentum the bigger engines lack.

BTW, I wanted to have a look at the jME source and noticed that the website misses a GH link, you should definitely put it up there.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have one on the downloads page, but this isn't the first time I've gotten this feedback, so I guess we ought to make it more visible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> i do genuinely worry that the big guys going free will help tech development to stagnate.

i don't see open source as an answer, because the philosophy attached to these projects usually insulates them from the bulk of the market. they exist in their own bubble, where linux is something more than a platform that a mere 1.5% of customers uses, and those customers refuse to pay for anything. where real world strategies for sales and marketing are ignored under the premise that 'if you make it they will come' type philosophies...

i think there is a lot of genuine improvement to be had in terms of cross- platform architecture, performance, visual quality and tools UX without better hardware, programming environments or gigantic teams. the same was true about 5 years ago too. i just can't see it coming from the open source community unless these sorts of ideals are suitably cast to the wind...

most importantly if you can't make money to pay salaries then intentionally growing the team behind a product is difficult. that shouldn't need explaining... it should be obvious.

<comment><USER28> RedHat Enterprise Linux is both Open Source and Commercial Software. There are nothing prevent it being done. Android is another example.

Also, Linux is huge in server world.

<comment><USER27> true, but it also might as well not exist on desktop. (~1.5% share iirc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> But... Java...

<comment><AUTHOR> Any other day I'd be happy to get into it with you, but Java is really besides the point here.</comment></comment>