Master the Istio Service Mesh - <AUTHOR> https://www.learnistio.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN!

Learn Istio service mesh is a course I've been working on for the past year. Originally, it started as an e-book and recently I added more than 2 hours of video content to accompany the book.

I've always liked courses that teach concepts through practical examples. The theory is definitely something one needs to understand, but I feel learning from practical examples and scenarios is what helped me to really grasp the concepts and that's how I built this course.

I'd love to answer any questions you might have about the course and don't hesitate to contact me at peter[at]learnistio.com.</comment>


Ask HN: What's it like having a significant other who is also a programmer? - <AUTHOR> Just curious about your experiences. Pros/cons compared to being with someone who doesn't understand software at all. Amusing stories, etc. <comment><USER2> I really enjoy it - my partner and I will talk about code, I'll explain concepts and share things I'm excited about. I guess if you want more of a clear separation between your work and your home life that could be a bad thing, but being able to share what I'm passionate about with someone who understands it is a big plus to me.

<comment><USER3> Me too. I'd be really unhappy if I could only talk about my day with my husband in terms of "the computering went well" or "the computering went badly."

<comment><USER4> It's not so bad. My wife isn't very technical, so I tend to frame my day in terms of projects and the people I work with. She works in a field that I understand about as well as she understands software, so she does the same when discussing her day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's great that we think about non-technical problems in a very similar manner. For example, when buying a home, we used a check-list categorised into the must-haves, nice-to-haves and undesirable features. We agreed that they were our acceptance criteria. We allowed ourselves to develop emotional connections with properties that we viewed, but the check-list was always there to drag us to reality and so a complex, stressful life-change was remarkably friction-free for us both.

We both code, but have different specialities. My partner specialises in the RDBMS interface, but I distrust every ORM that I've ever seen. I think the most powerful layer of the stack is the UI, she actively avoids any kind of presentation layer, let alone HCI. And yet, she is far better at interacting with humans than I am.

We bounce ideas off each other but in the end, the fact that my partner codes is not too relevant - what is important is that I've found a super-smart, fun person to share my life with. I wish you the same.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've tried dating non-technical people and this experience sums it up:

My friend and I are white boarding algorithm challenges for fun, having nerd talk. My boyfriend says, "I'm going to play video games while you guys do nerd stuff. I don't understand it anyways"

It's funny but it would be nice to have a partner that can join in. ><

</comment><comment><USER7> I did it once in college. It was terrible. Especially if you are the better programmer. Every encounter with your girlfriend feels like a tech support session. I'd much rather come home, ramble on for 10 minutes and get a "good job" or "you'll have a better day tomorrow" response.

</comment><comment><USER8> I kind of like it that my husband is a programmer. We are able to brainstorm about a lot more things as our backgrounds and day to day challenges are similar. I am not sure how it works out if two people are in completely different professions, but I think work does fill up a lot of our lives, especially as we get older. So its nice to be able to speak the same language (pun intended :-))

</comment><comment><USER9> Both my parents were programmers. It was useful because they could help each other with learning and career advancement.

Personally, I'd prefer a non-programmer girlfriend. I like variety and I think it's really important to be exposed to different kinds of people.

</comment><comment><USER10> We both have a programming background but we specialize in different areas. So we have enough in common to understand each other's joy and pain, while our specialization helps us to fill in where the other lacks.

This has been very useful as we have started our own little business in software.</comment>


Ask HN: How do online marketplace platforms acquire an initial user-base? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN. I am developing an online platform, where users can find other users to perform a specific service for them; similar to Fiverr but a lot more niche.
These types of platform can only work if there is a healthy portion of users that provide services and a decent portion of users who want those services.
As such, how do you launch such a platform with zero/little users?
You could acquire the service providers prior to launching (e.g.: via a pre-lease sign up page and a marketing campaign to go alongside) but that has its own issues: for starters, no-one will have any reviews, and from a technical perspective you'd have to implement a way for those users to complete their profiles before launch.
I have seen suggestions of faking a user base, but that does not sound appealing to me and I am not sure of its legality. <comment><USER2> You launch with very little content and build from there by marketing directly to the audience that you need to join, and hope they're receptive. It helps to have a good reputation with one side of your market beforehand.

Also note that most marketplaces take a relatively long time to really get going. For example, Etsy has been going for 14 years.</comment>


Why Ending Birthright Citizenship Would Be Terrible for Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/birthright-citizenship-tech-community <comment><USER2> It's not just Silicon Valley it'd be terrible for, it'd be terrible for our entire country.

This isn't a serious policy proposal by the GOP, it's just an attempt to generate interest in their campaigns.</comment>


Programming: Love It or Leave It - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001202.html

<comment><USER2> Atwood gets a lot of mileage from summarizing Steve Yegge's and Joel Spolsky's blog posts.

And having sad that I feel a bit silly commenting here. But there are a few things worth repeating.

As a commenter on Joel's blog mentioned, Sturgeon's law applies: 90% of everything is crap.

And everything includes programming jobs AND the jobs in any other industry you might be considering.

If your crappy programming job has you down, change jobs before you change industries.

Start your own company or even try working for someone else, use your crappy source of steady income to look for a better job.

Another thing worth mentioning is that if you truly deeply _love_ programming then perhaps commercial programming of any kind is worse then not programming.

If you truly look at code as art, then digging ditches by day and writing beautiful open source code by night, might be preferable to churning out crap code for pay.

Lastly ageism doesn't apply if you work for yourself and it also does not apply with legacy code.

Quite the opposite in fact, anyone who has a lot of legacy code (And boy are there A LOT of legacy computer systems out there!) is active looking for older programmers.

But then you wouldn't be working in the sexy exciting web 2.0 circus.

<comment><USER3> > As a commenter on Joel's blog mentioned, Sturgeon's law applies: 90% of > everything is crap.

As I asked in the other thread too, are we prepared just to accept this as a truism. There is a fine line between fundamental law of the universe and self- fulfilling belief. Because the result is the same, you won't know whether to look to see if the latter cause is culpable. Is it possible that 90% of everything is crap because 90% of what we believe to be true, and thus act on, is crap.

>Start your own company or even try working for someone else, use your crappy source of steady income to look for a better job.

I might be getting the implication wrong, but I wouldn't advocate starting your own company just because all the other options suck worse. Do it because you are driven to, not because _just_ want to avoid the other options, but are apathetic otherwise.

> If you truly look at code as art, then digging ditches by day and writing > beautiful open source code by night, might be preferable to churning out > crap code for pay.

What stops you from churning out code during the day, and then churning out other code later on in the evening? And why the assumption that the alternative to crap code for pay is ditch-digging? Perhaps the alternative is advocating for good code? Robert Martin has a whole section in _Clean Code_ where he argues, and well so in my mind, that crap code is our fault as developers. To bail to ditch-digging is a tacit admission that it isn't, and that we were made to write crap by force. Which brings on a more general thought.

Through all of this, I have yet to find anyone advocating for the other option besides either putting up with crap or getting up and walking out of your current employer and perhaps the industry as a whole. It seems that the unspoken assumption is that speaking up and being assertive where you are now is an unavailable option. This leads to several questions regarding the validity and basis of that assumption. I understand it is common wisdom to shut up and get back to work, but I've not always found common wisdom to be that wise.

<comment><USER2> Good point about putting up with crap. I've definitely made that mistake.

And it is worth confirming that you shouldn't start your own company just because the coffee at your current jobs is crap.

But I have to disagree on clean code. I've seen Uncle Bob speak, he is very convincing but 90% of the time he's preaching to the choir.

As hard as it is to believe there are plenty of places that will actively prevent you from turning out anything other then crap. It's hard to image if you have not worked in it yourself, but it definitely exists.

And obviously ditch digging isn't the only option, you could teach programming at a local community college or whatever.

But coding 8+ hrs at work and then coding some more at home is something I've never been able to do.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes the choir needs to be preached to, though. It helps to hear someone else put into words what one might be thinking intuitively. It also helps to know that more people are thinking the same thing than any individual might give credit for.

The flip-side of this is that people like Robert are not just preaching a dreamland ideal that people should aspire toward but accept up front they'll never be able to reach. The expectation is that people take what is being preached and put it into practice; but that's not what I usually see. I normally see people who will arm-chair philosophize about, but will either succumb to peer pressure or fear before actually pushing for what they believe is a good thing. At that point, the believe is completely useless.

The upshot of this is that places that actively prevent people from turning out anything but crap need to be actively prevented from turning out _anything_ , if we expect conditions to change at all. But it's a risky position to take, and most people seem under the impression that the thing it puts most at risk is the livelihood of their families. While I think that risk assessment is melodramatic, I will admit it does put one's social class at risk, which ties directly into the relative creature comforts of their family. Knowing why people prioritize this latter matter so high is something I've been struggling with for a little while, but maybe it's just because I lack the context of a family to support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quite the opposite - anyone that plans to do one thin their entire life probably isn't very interesting. I love programming and am fascinated by the field, but I certainly don't intend to do it all my life. There's simply more to life than making computers do cool things.</comment>


Ask HN :How to become a low-end big data consultant? - <AUTHOR>

I want to earn some money for living.
Big Data is booming, and I want to strike the rod while it is hot. Just want to make some money, doing low end consultancy.
I have 2 years of professional python development experience, and freelancing with django/flask.
Big Data will fetch more $s per hour. So I want to shift to big data. Could someone please throw in pointers, as to where should I start, so that at the end of say 2 months, I start doing some low end freelancing on big data plucking some low hanging fruits.
I am not looking for shortcuts, but then I do not want to be researcher. My goals are simple, learn which shall be able to fetch me revenue.
Let me know what and how much, and I shall put in efforts.
It will be good of people to tell me the areas I should focus on, maybe start off with a problem itself, and learn whatever it takes to solve the problem, thus acquiring the skillsets, and using those to charge clients.
Also where would I find clients?
Please let me know, thanks. <comment><USER2> I would suggest the following topics (forgive me if this is a bit disorganised)

Languages:

        R, Python (pandas, numpy), C++ or Java, Matlab/Octave

Stats & Machine Learning Topics:

        Neural Nets,Decision Trees,SVM,

        Regression (Linear, Nonlinear, Logistic)

        Clustering (K-means, Fuzzy C-means, Mixture Modelling, etc.)

        Time-series Modelling/Prediction (AR, ARMA, ARIMA, Exponential Smoothing)

        Bayesian Techniques

        Statistical Model Development

System experience:

        Linux administration

        Big Data Libraries (hadoop at a minimum, Mahout, Hive,

Storm, Yarn as well)

        Data cleaning and large scale data management

</comment><comment><USER3> You already know Python which is great. It has become the dominant language among data scientists. Most of the best data science tools are in Python or R, and R can be easily integrated into Python.

The best way, in my opinion, to start is taking random, public data sets and converting them to a form that is useful using Python. For example, take a HTML page with a spreadsheet on it.

1\. Extract the spreadsheet from the HTML page. 2\. Convert that spreadsheet to a CSV format. 2a. Reorganize the columns (optional). 2b. Clean the data such as fix misspellings, reformat data such as an address to a standard format, etc. 3\. Import the CSV file into a relational database. 4\. The data set is now ready for use.

You could make 2a,b to be 3a,b instead if it is easier for you. The above is what I would consider "low-end". If you cannot do the above, then statistics, R, Tableau, Hadoop, etc will not help you much.

It turns out I am looking for people do this. You can check out my company ([https://www.datalanche.com](https://www.datalanche.com)) and message me through the feedback form if you are interested. The job is to do the above for several public, healthcare data sets.

<comment><USER4> That sounds almost embarrassingly low end.

I have heard plenty of big data, but according to you ETL still seems to be the biggest problem (closely followed by unsafe assumptions)

<comment><USER3> I am curious, what are my "unsafe assumptions"? I would love more detailed feedback.

ETL is not the biggest problem, but it is very time consuming, tedious, and costly because the tools overall suck. That is why I started Datalanche although to be fair we so far only solve part of the problem (storage, query, sharing).

Anyway the OP wants to learn how to do big data and make money. Well even if you are doing the cool stuff such as analytics, you still need to know ETL basics. I offered to give some experience doing that.

<comment><USER4> Not your unsafe assumptions but in stats almost every blind alley and wrong turn is an assumption that bit back. Assumed that the data we have is a representative sample of all purchasers etc etc

I have no real knowledge of the big data market so am happy to defer. I assume you are taking data sets covering g them same thing in hundreds or thousands of hospitals nationwide and outputting nicely mapped nationwide data?

Please do give as much info on the market as you can - always interested in hearing from on the ground "troops"

<comment><USER3> Just to give you a more concrete example.

The CDC has made available two datasets which are of de-identified medical records going back 20 years which are updated yearly. Unforunately it is extremely difficult to find the data. In fact, I went to the correct web page and missed it. One of my colleagues found it instead. The data is in a custom text format which needs a custom parser, and the format changes slightly every year. Then codes and abbreviations are used everywhere in the data set which need to be determined and converted. Then you have the usual misspellings, etc that are common in government data sets.

It is truly a pain to use these CDC data sets even though the data itself is great.

<comment><USER4> Can you answer why it's so bad?

I can guess at a lot of answers but which particular strain of corporate pathology CDC suffers from

<comment><USER3> I don't really know. I have an educated guess for the custom format though. They started collecting data before XML, JSON, etc were widely used and/or existed which explains the custom text format. Since their systems already handle their custom format, there is no real incentive to change it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure if I'm correct or not, but I see 2 types of big data guys. First there are the guys who know the tools - perhaps this is the "data engineer" referenced by rdouble. This guy would know all the tools, how to map data in and out of say something like Cassandra or HBase?

Then there are the guys who can properly analyze the data and turn that into something that can save an enterprise money. This is probably where the big bucks come in.

At my weekly codeandcoffee gathering we are discussing some problems we think can be solved by big data analysis. The actual underlying technology is merely an implementation detail, the value will come from the results. Our goal is to save a target enterprise 1% a year, and given our target customer is a $40 billion company, that is a lot of money we can charge. We're just discussing what ifs at this point.

</comment><comment><USER6> With your current skills you'd get likely get stuck in a "data engineer" role which honestly kind of sucks. IMO you are better off buckling down to learn statistics and then some front end analysis tools like R and Tableau. Unfortunately there is not really a shortcut for learning stats.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not looking for shortcuts, but then I do not want to be researcher. My goals are simple, learn which shall be able to fetch me revenue.

Let me know what and how much, and I shall put in efforts.

<comment><USER6> In my experience, even though data science is touted as a hot field, the reality is that it's kind of boring and doesn't pay more than other types of programming. It's hard to give specific advice because I think you're operating on incorrect assumptions.

<comment><AUTHOR> what according to you are the incorrect assumptions which I am operating on. My goal is to make somewhere around 60 - 70 USD/hr. and am willing to invest 2-3 months of learning.

And I already have 2 years of professional programming experience in Python.

<comment><USER6> The incorrect assumption is that I don't think you'll necessarily make more money by being a data science consultant rather than a django/flask developer.

I don't know where you live but where I live you can make 60-70 USD/hr with the skills you already have. Like, make json API server for a mobile app with Flask, that pays anywhere from $50-150/hr in my experience. As someone else mentioned, what you get paid has more to do with where you live and who you work for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, you're unlikely to get your hands on any data sets (or paychecks) that could really be considered 'big' without (1) an understanding of how to translate research questions into code & (2) the ability to tell your client why the results matter in any way. Why not just do freelance dev work?

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://blog.zipfianacademy.com/post/46864003608/a-practical-...](http://blog.zipfianacademy.com/post/46864003608/a-practical- intro-to-data-science) might help with the skillset. When you feel ready, update your linkedin profile to match.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know if that's the right or wrong way of seeking out what to do - searching for "low hanging fruit" to pluck. By definition, they are easy to reach, thus by the time you become aware of such opportunities, usually, you're too late.

</comment><comment><USER10> Where are you based ?

Generally where you're located has a much bigger impact on your earnings and potential clients than your skill-set.

<comment><AUTHOR> the land of "outsourced work" \- India.</comment></comment>


Typing the nix language - <AUTHOR> https://www.gofundme.com/typing-nix <comment><USER2> A type system for Nix would be pretty neat, but a lot of unfortunate design decisions were made in the absence of one that may make this a difficult project.</comment>


Kernel Drivers Compiled to Javascript and Run in Browser - <AUTHOR> https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/kernel_drivers_compiled_to_javascript

<comment><USER2> [http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/kernel_drivers_compiled_to_...](http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/kernel_drivers_compiled_to_javascript) (without ssl) seems to work better

</comment><comment><USER3> So this is another step toward the hypervisor-browser hybrid? The HyperBrowser.

We'll be able to spin up servers inside browser windows on our Chromebooks and tablets, whose OSes are loaded off other servers which are hosted on other Chromebooks and tablets.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad this was posted just so I could learn about the NetBSD rump project.

</comment><comment><USER5> mirror [http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/...](http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/kernel_drivers_compiled_to_javascript)

<comment><USER6> Getting not found.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: are soft lies in sales okay? - <AUTHOR> http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/are-soft-lies-in-sales-okay.htm

<comment><USER2> Nothing busts my trust faster than lies. Indeed, the company mentioned as an example (Microsoft) lost my trust by overpromising and underdelivering with some releases of Windows back in the day.

<comment><USER3> I think this community is special in that regard. I feel the exact same way, and I'm sure a lot of other people here do as well. But the thing is that it works and it works well. Microsoft are doing incredibly well.

Apparently there are a lot of people out there who are easily convinced by lies, or marketing as some might want to call it.

<comment><USER4> But I'd suggest that the disappointment people felt with MS products was at least part of what spurred open office & ubuntu (for example) - and open source software certainly threatens MS's revenue stream.

<comment><USER5> ... 20+ years later. Personally I couldn't live with doing business dishonestly, but you can't really say that it didn't work out well for Microsoft.

<comment><USER4> I agree - the point I was making was about damage to the long term franchise, which I guess an individual salesperson wouldn't care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In enterprise software, there is another angle to this problem. If you know that the deployment process is going to take 3 years, should you tell your customers that there are features in your product that are right now sitting on your immedidate roadmap? what about medium term roadmap? How do you determine where the line is?

Also, if you know the base feature is there; but you know there are customizations and configurations that will need to be done on top for the deployment, do you say its there out of the box? or do you say it can be done? (Note that nothing really works out of the box in the enterprise; and if you keep saying 'can be done' to everything, you are going to lose the sale to a guy who says out of the box.)

<comment><USER7> As a guy who works at an enterprise vendor that works very, very hard to never lie in the sales cycle . . . in the long run, having a reputation as a vendor that delivers on their promises is a huge asset. Most enterprise software vendors have terrible reputations, and 100% customer referencability is an asset that's much, much harder to copy (or fake) than your product is. Protect it at all costs. That might cost you sales in the short run, and it means you have to walk away from deals if the customer isn't a fit, but your reputation is probably the single most valuable asset that you have in that space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It depends entirely on what your goal is. If you want to create a billion dollar company it's probably essential. If you want to sleep well at night it's a mistake.

<comment><USER8> This is a very cynical way to view the world. I reject it completely. Being dishonest might benefit you in the short term, but building a reputation for honesty is a huge long term advantage.

<comment><USER3> You're right, it is very cynical. Unfortunately it's also true. I have seen people rise to fame and fortune, and very few of them have done so by building a reputation for honesty. It appears to me that 80% of the people that "make it" financially have done so by lying or cheating at some point in the game. The remaining 20% have made it by having an impeccable reputation that they build on. It's not the norm though. There seems to be differences in these numbers depending on what industry you're in. Construction appears at one end of the spectrum to be thoroughly corrupt, Software appears at the other end to be very trust and reputation based. That said, I know people in the software industry that have lied and gamed their way to their fortune. I don't particularly like it, I just observe the world I live in, and not the world I would like to live in.

<comment><USER8> You can effectively live in the world you want, by choosing how you do business and who you do business with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As I understand it, "Ask HN" posts are supposed to be local, not on another site. But perhaps that was a white lie in your perspective?

<comment><USER10> _"Ask HN" posts are supposed to be local_

Why? What if you want to include a chart or a picture in your 'Ask HN' post?

<comment><USER9> I guess it's a convention that comes with the fact that people (in many cases) look more kindly on "Ask HN" types of posts and upvote them more generously than external articles.

<comment><USER10> Looks like you taking your opinion and extrapolating it into "... the fact that people ...", then implying that hence it is immoral ( _"But perhaps that was a white lie"_ ) to ask a non-local 'Ask HN'! Or may be you are just being witty. If anything, local 'Ask HN' is discouraged here by displaying it as gray on gray text.

<comment><USER9> You may well be right. I didn't mean to be offensive, nor did I mean to be witty. It was just an observation.

<comment><USER10> Oh okay. Sorry if that sounded argumentative. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you make a sale, you've committed yourself to making the lie come true (or at least hiding it's lack of truth). Say goodbye to your development schedule and/or your tech support budget.

Of course, hardcore sales people who don't mind lying will cheerfully say 'all's fair in love and war, and no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy!'. Lots of business people love war metaphors because competition justifies all sorts of things, and when someone asks whether customers are the bombed out civilians in this scenario they can say 'it's only a metaphor, don't take it so seriously!'.

If it's a question about your product, don't, although it's OK to say 'were looking at it - and that's all I can tell you'. If it's a question about your company the answer is don't, but nor should be afraid to assert your privacy. If it's output rather than response to a question (eg a whiff of bullshit in your sales literature, I'd say avoid anything more specific than 'our product is the most awesome' that can't be justified.

<comment><USER11> tl;dr it's ok to lie to competitors, but not to your customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Run your question through the argument in "Be Good": <http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html> Quite apart from your self-respect (value: priceless), telling soft lies is not going to help you be good, and there's a reasonable argument it may harm your company.

</comment><comment><USER13> I happened to write an article about this a few weeks back. My answer is a concessional yes. But in my limited sales experience I don't do it myself. Thus making me a poor salesperson. See excerpt:

"These tactics are part of all sales. To large degree, it's accepted and understood to be part of the game. It usually works out in the end since many if not most companies provide valuable services to their customers. At times customers just need a little encouragement to get over their hesitation to commit to buying. For better or worse, these little lies and half truths keep the economy churning."

<http://stephenegibson.com/2009/05/25/when-is-wrong-wrong/>

</comment><comment><USER14> Depends on the definition of "soft".

Sometimes you have to be very optimistic (better term: aggressive) regard product features and schedule. This will drive you further and faster towards your goals.

You can't always make all deadlines and keep all promises. And in business (at least in the technology business) nobody expects you to.

If, on the other hand, you make this into a habit -- you will loose trust and customers will be looking elsewhere.

However, I do not necessarily agree with others regarding "long-term" loss of trust. Companies exist to make money and when/if you have a good product that will save them money, you will be able to regain that lost trust.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you have to ask if its okay, it isn't for you.

<comment><USER16> I don't think that this sort of blanket statement is universal in the way that your tone implies.

<comment><USER15> If you question the ethics of something, you have an ethical problem with it, after that it is all justification of why you can allow yourself to do something you find at the very least, morally ambiguous.

purely personal; there was no universal 'you' intended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Never. Trust lost is trust lost forever.

Reminds me of the parable of a man who sometimes stretched the truth in business. He went to a guru for help with his "problem".

The guru's advice: "Take these 10 feather pillows, slash them open, and release the feathers to the wind. Then come back tomorrow."

The next day the man returned for more advice, "Now go get the feathers."

<comment><USER9> I don't get the story at all. Could you explain?

<comment><USER17> The feathers are a metaphor for words you wish you never said. It's pretty hard to take them back.

<comment><USER9> d'oh. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> No. (fullstop)</comment>


Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/scientific-wasteland-problems-psychiatry-harrington/ <comment><USER2> _" Advances in genetics, neuroscience and psychopharmacology all at once reminded psychiatrists that biology ruled, that talk could be dispensed with, and a truly medical psychiatry could finally emerge"_

I don't know if this is true for a good chunk of mental illnesses, tbh. How does one use a purely biological model and treatment for PTSD, BPD, ASPD, etc?

<comment><USER3> We struggle to model individual proteins in full, and we think we can apply a comprehensive biological model to the mind?

I can say with confidence that the abstraction of chemistry in physiology is not watertight (is that a pun...?) and we still barely understand physiological chemistry in any kind of way that any self-respecting scientist could describe as rigorous.

The hubris of some people in their fields...

<comment><USER4> People build abstractions all the time on top of things they don't think biochemistry is going to teach us much about IRL psychological issues.

Humans have excellent pattern matching, reasoning, and lots of research into the subject. I do believe there is value in doing it.

That said, I'm highly skeptical of a lot of talk therapy, beyond the simple gains of saying things out loud to a 3rd party and challenging your mind and assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Freud dealt with the realm of ideas. As much as he got wrong, his approach of dealing with the ideas in one's mind on their own terms, and finding and sussing out the bad ideas to be replaced with good ideas _did_ , eventually, yield beneficial results -- like the big wins of cognitive behavioral therapy.

<comment><USER6> I don't agree that it was mostly about ideas, Freud's main insight was to deduce the existence of the subconscious mind: i.e. the idea that we don't have direct access to our entire inner world.

It was a big departure from the way the mind was conceived till then.

<comment><USER7> Is current consensus that this "subconscious mind" is an actual thing that exists?

<comment><USER8> No. Nothing of Freuds is actually testable. He asserts that there is a "conscious mind" and "subconscious mind" but only in concept.

You might as well try to build an alternative theory of mechanics based on an assertion that all objects have a conscious and subconscious mass, and that gravity actually act on the subconcious mass and only moves the whole because the two are interconnected.

<comment><USER9> This seems to be the crux of all of the scientific issues with psychiatry and studies of personal and social behavior more broadly. Strict definitions of what is being measured and ways to go about measuring those things without administrator or self reporting bias don't seem to exist, or at least they don't seem to be employed that often.

There are clever ways to get around those issues and tie theories about behavior to observed action in the real world, and there are a number of psychological theories that come up with a plausible sounding evolutionary history to certain thoughts and behavior that _seem_ correct, but a lack of good measurement instruments seems to be a very big problem preventing more concrete answers to a lot of different questions about the mind. When talking about things other than motor or perceptual related studies of the mind (bionics related stuff), the most common measurement tool seems to be self reported surveys, and although I think there are tricks you can do when wording questions and statistically analyzing results to try to account for patients trying to answer in ways they feel like they should that aren't necessarily accurate/make sure people don't misinterpret questions, that whole way of investigating claims seems to be very very shaky.

It's a common complaint about the field, and I'm sure a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists are sick of hearing it, but I haven't felt like I've ever gotten an adequate response about why it's not a valid complaint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pay-walled, for me.

</comment><comment><USER11> I didn't get much past the paywall, but it looks like a book review of this book: [https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Fixers-Psychiatrys-Troubled- Biol...](https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Fixers-Psychiatrys-Troubled- Biology/dp/0393071227)

There are other reviews like [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/mind- fi...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/mind-fixers-anne- harrington/583228/) (discussed previously at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435815))

</comment><comment><USER12> I didn't pay the $27.95 to read this, but the abstract is alarmingly wrong.

The analogous thinking is that software bugs, in particular data storage errors[1], are best understood as hardware malfunctions, and that precise interventions at the hardware level can solve them. It's not exactly wrong-- for any given software issue, you might be able to devise hardware changes that correct it. But. I feel like I don't need to continue to make my point.

[1] In reality the lines blur between software and data, so the analogy might be better more solid between trained ML models and hardware, where trained ML models are both software and data in a way that can't be meaningfully distinguished. So we're talking about correcting a trained ML model via a precise hardware edit.

It's not wrong per se, not even insane in some cases. But the dismissive tone in the abstract of taking the trained model of the human mind on its own terms, versus as a purely biological object boggles my mind with how wrong- headed it is.

<comment><USER13> I've never been convinced that the software-hardware analogy is especially enlightening when it comes to the brain and the mind, in my informed opinion.

<comment><USER14> at one point I decided to disagree with the idea that the mind is just the brain.

<comment><USER9> What else so you think there is? It seems patently obvious at this point that our brains house our minds, given how manipulating someone's brain causes them to act much differently and report perceptual and behavioral changes.

Your post sounds suspiciously new age to me. I'm aware that our bodies feed into our minds, and that things like hormonal levels, nutrition, gut flora and fauna, etc all have a fairly profound impact on things like mood, but that's different that saying the mind is not the brain. Social isolation and long periods of darkness also have profound impact on the mind. That doesn't mean that the night sky or society somehow "is" our mind, or that our minds are somehow housed outside as well as in our brains.

There's a tendency to belittle things that we understand mechanically, which is why I believe people tend to believe the mind is somehow "beyond" the brain. But we can still have deep respect for the sovereign, spiritual like divinity associated with consciousness while recognizing that it's all happening within the confined, physical space that constitutes a person's brain, and that there's a physical basis for it.

<comment><USER14> > I'm aware that our bodies feed into our minds, and that things like hormonal > levels, nutrition, gut flora and fauna, etc all have a fairly profound > impact on things like mood

it's pretty much that. the mind is the entire body. although it's mostly the brain it is NOT entirely the brain.

> That doesn't mean that the night sky or society somehow "is" our mind,

but our mind is formed by what we learn from society (culture) with our brains (the software gets installed hahah)

> while recognizing that it's all happening within the confined, physical > space that constitutes a person's brain

maybe all the language and the words form within the physical bound of the brain, sure, but the mind more than just what we do with our brains.

In the end, thinking this way has led me to take better care of myself, not just my "brain" (i.e. eating better and exercising the rest of the body a little more)

<comment><USER9> While I think I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, I take issue with some of the semantics. What you are describing as "Mind" seems closer to "Self" than what I would call "Mind". I consider the mind to be the abstract entity we use to experience the world. In my view, the mind is very much coupled to the brain.

Tying all of our experiential world to a single organ in the body doesn't really do justice to the magnitude/scope of that experience, sure. But I think it's wrong to call that experience "Mind".

Obviously I don't want to interfere with your self care, and think it's very important to have a holistic view of self and your relationship to those around you when trying to be healthy, I just don't think "Mind" is the right word to use for what you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> OP, please conform with HN rules by providing a workaround to the paywall. If there is no workaround, the pay-walled article is not permitted here, per the rules. Thank you.

edit: I see this was downvoted. Interesting.

October 3 2019 HN rules: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:40QUas...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:40QUastnyuMJ:https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

 _> Are paywalls ok?_

 _> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds._

 _> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic._

October 10 2019 HN rules:

Paywall rule has been removed. Paywalled articles with no workarounds are now OK. Pay up or get out.

Thank you for the correction and the tip about the new rules changes implemented this week.

<comment><USER11> This works for me in Firefox's console:

      $('.body-copy')[0].innerHTML = JSON.parse($$('script[type="application/ld+json"]')[0].firstChild.data).description

And I still see the paywall rule in the FAQ.

<comment><USER10> How did you come up with that snippet?

<comment><USER11> I did a search in the page source and there was the script tag with the article content, then I just built it out. A lot of small sites seem to be trying to obfuscate their content so they get SEO rather than really paywalling it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dear Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Jews - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/human_nature/2012/09/mohammed_movie_embassy_attacks_don_t_let_internet_videos_drive_you_to_violence_.html

<comment><USER2> Given religion has had a history of insulting non-religious people I can't help feel that some double-standards are in play.

That said picking on anybody who has any form of mental handicap is just wrong and in that I can understand why they are upset and some are unable to rise above it.

Idiots be they religious or non religious are still idiots and sadly that is nothing new and that is what we are seing, being upset is one thing, overreacting is something else and when you take away the religious aspects you are just left with a bunch of idiots making films to offend another bunch of idiots who overreact and justify violence.

Religious people need to accept that not everybody reads from the same page as much as non-religious people have to respect that not everybody reads the same page, anything else is just wrong.</comment>


Ask HN: From C++ to C#? - <AUTHOR> I've almost exclusively coded in C++ for a few years, however I'd like to switch over to C# for job reasons. What's the fastest way for someone like me to get acquainted with C#? <comment><USER2> JavaScript. Worst shit.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manager your passwords? - <AUTHOR> I know people range from using one password, to a bunch of solutions.  How do you manage all of your passwords? <comment><USER2> I use iCloud Keychain, and 2FA wherever I can. For this I've mostly used OTP Auth.app: OTP Auth by Roland Moers [https://appsto.re/th/i4ovN.i](https://appsto.re/th/i4ovN.i) but I'm also interested in the Hurricane Electric 2FA tool in their network app: HE.NET Network Tools by Hurricane Electric, LLC [https://appsto.re/th/UQ7jZ.i](https://appsto.re/th/UQ7jZ.i) as it uses the iCloud Keychain for sync, rather than their own storage format.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use 1Password with DropBox in order to share between my Windows desktop, iPhone, iPad and Macbook Pro. I also use 2FA with any account that makes it available.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you use 1Password with DropBox? Just looked up 1Password for the first time. Does it seem worth the $5 a month?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've got them in a gpg-encrypted org-mode file. Emacs automatically decrypts it when I open it & automatically encrypts when I save. It works well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Pass [https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> 1Password

</comment><comment><USER7> Google Drive + KeePass

</comment><comment><USER8> vim -x creates an encrypted file password protected

</comment><comment><USER9> Dashlane</comment>


NCDevCon 2015 – North Carolina's Premier Web and Mobile Conference - <AUTHOR> http://ncdevcon.com/ The NCDevCon Conference is held annually on the Centennial Campus of NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina and covers a wide variety of web development and design topics. <comment><AUTHOR> The NCDevCon Conference is held annually on the Centennial Campus of NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina and covers a wide variety of web development and design topics including Web / HTML5 / CSS, Mobile, Javascript / jQuery and ColdFusion. September 26-27, 2015.</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite encrypted VPN provider? - <AUTHOR>

I'm considering subscribing to a VPN service for increased security and privacy.
But the reviews I found are confusing and contradictory, making it very hard to pick a provider (f.ex. strongvpn.com is both "great" and "horrible". Same for perfect-privacy.com).
I trust this crowd a lot more than random online reviews, so I'd like to ask what's your fave VPN provider and why?
Ideally: Very fast using Canadian and US servers, would work well on OS X (better if doesn't require additional software), would use strong encryption, and have a solid privacy policy.
Thanks in advance for the help. <comment><USER2> I pay $8/mo for a VPS and run OpenVPN [1]. There's a nicely-done OS X client [2], and OpenVPN will run on whatever port/protocol combination you need. You also get the benefit of a shell account on your own little corner of the internet, a lightweight server to toy with and full ssh access to play all sorts of games with ssh port forwarding [3].

1 - <http://openvpn.net/>

2 - <http://viscosityvpn.com>

3 - [http://www.ssh.com/support/documentation/online/ssh/admingui...](http://www.ssh.com/support/documentation/online/ssh/adminguide/32/Port_Forwarding.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'll look into that method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Get one that pushes everything over SSL / TLS / port 443. Other protocols / ports are often blocked in random and public settings.</comment>


Martin Shkreli is trying to use the coronavirus pandemic to get out of prison - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/06/martin-shkreli-coronavirus-prison/ <comment><USER2> What is Bernie Madoff's take on Covid-19?</comment>


First Known Interstellar Object Gets Unexpected Speed Boost - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/our-solar-system-s-first-known-interstellar-object-gets-unexpected-speed-boost <comment><USER2> FWIW, if you're curious about the naming scheme (which extends the naming scheme for comets), see

[https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming/#comets](https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming/#comets)

and

[https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/CometResolution....](https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/CometResolution.html)

Not being familiar with astronomical nomenclature I wasn't sure whether the "1" in "1I/" was a unique ordinal number assigned to each object. In the first link above that particular number isn't included in the 4 enumerated components. Item #4 of the second link explains that it does reflect the order of discovery of all comets, such that the next interstellar object will have the prefix "2I/".</comment>


Explaining React's license - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining-react-s-license/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of topic with more points and more comments (before being marked a dupe of this): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15050841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15050841)

<comment><USER3> Can someone explain why the bigger discussion, which was on #1 of the front page, was marked as duplicate, making it disappear? This discussion doesn't appear anywhere on the first ten pages. I am guessing there is a policy about preferring the older thread, but this still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.</comment></comment>


What's new in TeX - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/662053/1729d17e91b68d47/ <comment><USER2> Good HTML output for TeX does exist in various shapes and forms, and in fact Pandoc is one of the weaker converters out there in therms of TeX coverage.

You would get better mileage with tools such as LaTeXML[1] or TeX4HT[2], which cover very substantial subsets of TeX, if not yet 100% feature-complete.

My own take on "Should LaTeX survive on the web?" is "yes, if it evolves to meet the paradigm shift". I wrote a detailed version of that position at [3].

\- [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeXML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeXML)

\- [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX4ht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX4ht)

\- [3] [http://prodg.org/blog/latex_today/2015-03-16/LaTeX%20is%20De...](http://prodg.org/blog/latex_today/2015-03-16/LaTeX%20is%20Dead%20%28long%20live%20LaTeX%29)

<comment><USER3> I cannot thank you enough for the work Bruce Miller, you and others are doing on LaTeXML.

However, LaTeXML is not 100% feature-complete at all (sorry if this is not what you were saying). For anybody not knowing how to improve LaTeXML itself (eg. by adding support for missing LaTeX packages), the only way to get it working is by using it from the beginning to avoid using anything that would not work out of the box in LaTeXML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Part of what bothers me so much about TeX is how obscure and opaque the language feels. I am familiar with ten programming languages, from C and assembly to Haskell, Perl, Lisp. But just the way that people write TeX macros makes everything so unapproachable. The only insight I have gleaned is that it's like one big fat state machine, which makes it extremely hard to code with principle.

I understand Knuth wrote a book, but reading through it has only made me wonder more about the bizarre choices.

<comment><USER5> The reason TeX can be so unapproachable is the fact that it's a very different language from pretty much any other programming language you've ever used. It's not a Turing machine, and it's not lambda calculus. It's not even Horn clauses (which is the model behind Prolog). It's a string rewriting system; basically a giant cascade of rules like "rewrite this string to this other string" applied over and over until the whole input is consumed.

As it happens, this is yet another Turing-equivalent form of computation. The closest analogy I have is programming in Lisp, but with the constraint that you can only use special forms and macros, no functions are allowed.

<comment><USER6> I was about to say: isn't that just another expression language?

I've sometimes wondered if Lisp-like languages wouldn't be a much better way of writing documents than our current markup languages of choice. If I'll ever seriously try to pick up Racket, it'll probably be to give Pollen a spin and see how it is in practice.

[http://pollenpub.com/](http://pollenpub.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As an instructor, I want to provide printed handouts, assignments, problem sets both printed and online, and having reflowing HTML is a great advantage for students when working though a problem in a split screen.

I was looking for a workflow that would produce PDFs and HTML, and I reached the same conclusions as the article.

I was hoping they had some sort of solution.

<comment><USER8> pandoc as another user suggested.

Examples:

\- [http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/lectures.html](http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/lectures.html) \- [http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11au- cs240h/notes/](http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11au-cs240h/notes/)

<comment><USER7> I had settled on AsciiDoc, but I'll reconsider pandoc. It seems to be very popular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> TeX's macro style of programming is too difficult. Nevertheless, people have done amazing things with it.

TeX has somewhere around 325 primatives, and one of the most important is the \def primative used to define macros. These primatives are used to define additional macros, hundreds of them, available in different so called formats. A basic format known as Plain TeX includes about 600 macros in addition to the 325 primatives. LaTeX is another format, the most widely used, but there are others, like ConTeXt, that are also very capable. Each of these extend TeX's primatives with their own macros resulting in different kinds of markup language.

TeX's primatives are focused on the low level aspects of typesetting (font sizes, text positions, alignment, etc.). LaTeX provides a markup language that is focused on the logical description of the document's components: headings, chapters, itemized lists, and so forth. The result is a system that does simple things easily while allowing very complex typesetting to be performed when needed.

In addition to the TeX core primatives and the hundreds of commands (implemented as macros) in a format like LaTeX there are additional packages, classes, and styles that are used to provide support for any conceivable document. LaTeX has a rich ecosystem of packages. Typesetting chess? There's a LaTeX package for that. Complex diagrams and graphics, there's a LaTeX package for that. Writing a paper in the style of Tufte? Writing a book? or a musical score? or building a barcode? there are packages for that. The documentation for the Tikz & PGF graphics package is over 1100 pages long! The documentation for the Memoir package is 570 pages.

The amazing thing is that all of this is built out of macros. Diving into this, and once one needs to customize the look of a document it's inevitable, you find yourself in a maze of twisty little passages.

Once upon a time, while writing assembly language for large computers, I enjoyed writing fancy assembler macros. I was facinated with Calvin Moore's Trac programming language based on macros and Christopher Strachey's General Purpose Macrogenerator. These were early (mid 1960's) explorations into the viability of macro processors as means for expressing arbitrary computations. Reader's interested in trying out macros for programming can try the m4 programming language (by Kernighan and Ritchie) found on Unix and Linux systems. m4 is used in autoconf and sendmail config files. Yet, TeX macros are in a whole other dimension.

All of these powerful macro systems have one thing in common: parameterized macros can be expanded into text that is then rescanned looking for newly formed macros calls (or new macro definitions) to expand as many times as one wants. This isn't just an occasional leaky abstraction; it is programming by way of leaky abstractions. Looking at TeX packages is some of the most difficult programming that I've done. It's unbelievably impressive what people have come up with (e.g. floating point implemented via macro expansion in about 600 lines of TeX), but it's also unbelievably frustrating to program in such an environment.

The LaTeX3 project is an attempt to rewrite LaTeX (still running on top of the TeX core). Started in the early 1990's it is still not done. I think its just that they are mired in a swamp of macros. They do have a relatively stable set of macros written, with the catchy name expl3, that are intended for use when writing LaTeX3. Here's a sample

         \cs_gset_eq:cc
        { \cf@encoding \token_to_str:N  #1 } { ? \token_to_str:N #1 }

This is described in the documentation as being a big improvement over the old macros and "far more readable and more likely to be correct first time". I can't wait.

I think LaTeX is absolutely without peer, but I wish improving it's programming method wasn't so daunting. I keep toying with starting a project to do just that, but so many others have tried and failed. It's disheartening.

Links:

[TRAC] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAC_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAC_\(programming_language\))

[GPM] [http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/3/225.full.pdf](http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/3/225.full.pdf)

[m4] info pages available on Unix and Linux

[Tikz & PGF] [https://www.ctan.org/pkg/pgf?lang=en](https://www.ctan.org/pkg/pgf?lang=en)

[Memoir] [https://www.ctan.org/pkg/memoir?lang=en](https://www.ctan.org/pkg/memoir?lang=en)

[expl3] [https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-1/tb94wright- latex3.pdf](https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-1/tb94wright-latex3.pdf)

<comment><USER10> wow, how many tasty information, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm currently working on a project [1] that aims to tie together a number of existing tools to make "TeX on the Web" as painless as possible. It's still in the ( _very_ ) early stages, so there's still a number of features yet to be implemented [2]. We're also working with the CorTeX project to bring this to existing collections of scientific publications like arXiv

[1] [https://davidar.io/TeX.js/](https://davidar.io/TeX.js/) [2] [https://github.com/davidar/TeX.js/issues](https://github.com/davidar/TeX.js/issues)

</comment><comment><USER12> One of the best looking HTML output from LaTeX can in fact be generated with [https://www.softcover.io/](https://www.softcover.io/) . Although it uses a limited subset of LaTex called PolyTeX (see [https://github.com/softcover/polytexnic](https://github.com/softcover/polytexnic)) I was able to convert my LaTeX documents quite easily to PolyTeX and generate good looking HTML output.

Some example output can be seen in the manual [http://manual.softcover.io/book/softcover_markdown#sec- embed...](http://manual.softcover.io/book/softcover_markdown#sec- embedded_math)

The softcover tools ([https://github.com/softcover/softcover](https://github.com/softcover/softcover)) are based on code developed for creating the HTML for [http://tauday.com/tau- manifesto](http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto) and [http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/). Internally Softcover uses [https://www- sop.inria.fr/marelle/tralics/](https://www-sop.inria.fr/marelle/tralics/) to convert from LaTeX to XML/HTML.

P.S.: I'm not affiliated with softcover.io in any way.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have much experience using roff rather than TeX? I feel like I have to install heaps of stuff to get anything done in TeX, LaTeX, or any of the *TeX, and it feels like a wobbly tower that collapses with minimal provocation. roff seems dead but I was encouraged to recently stumble upon this package of roff macros which makes me think roff deserves another look, especially for my simple needs.

[http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html](http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html)

<comment><USER14> Groff is definitely easier to use. For really simple stuff, just the standard macro packages me, mm and ms are absolutely fine. And they compile faster - much faster than pdflatex. The mom package is very good, but a bit more complex. I gave up on it a few years ago after having trouble building it on NetBSD, and it looked like it was abandoned. But that link shows Peter Schaffter is still maintaining it. Might have to look up my old groff_mom files and have another go.

And it looks like it comes with the standard Ubuntu installs. See man groff_mom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Article contains a mistake regarding the KaTeX library. KaTeX supports server-side rendering via node, but also rendering in-browser.

In the article it is stated, that it only supports serverside rendering.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was a lot into TeX and LaTeX back in the day while at university, however nowadays I just use Word and save to PDF for distribution.

For the multiple output formats, at work the documentation teams use Dockbook and DITA.

Of course they don't write XML by hand in such cases, rather use tools like oXygen, XMLmind, CORENA Studio among others.

</comment><comment><USER17> It would be cool if there was a javascript WYSIWYG editor that generated Tex under the hood

</comment><comment><USER18> the author should have tried other browsers as well f.e. firefox, which supports both hyphenator as well as ligatures... (need relevant config lines, disabled by default afaik)</comment>


Tips for Hiring Great Engineers, Faster - <AUTHOR> http://kenkeiter.com/2012/07/18/eight-tips-for-hiring-great-engineers-faster.html <comment><USER2> brilliant

</comment><comment><USER3> What is this?

Dead link.

<comment><USER4> WFM</comment></comment>


ASk HN: How would you make $25,000 if you had $25,000? - <AUTHOR> Here's a brain teaser for all you smart people. You are given $25,000 free and clear, and your goal is to make $25,000 more, for a total of $50,000. You have 1 month to accomplish your goal. How do you do it? <comment><USER2> I need 18 months. I would go to courthouse foreclosure auctions, partner with other investors, and buy the property for 70% of market, fix it up, and sell for market price.

30%/70% = 42%. Take away agent fees, closing costs, and repairs, I could have 25% if I'm careful. Turnaround is 6 months each time.

1.25 ^ 3 = 1.95.

1 month time horizon is silly. I assume you're looking for serious, practical, reproducible ideas. You won't get any that reliably returns 409600% annually.

If I were really held to 1 month, I'd go to Vegas and put it on red.

<comment><USER3> I can see buying at 70% off market, in this market... but you are going to have a difficult time turning around and selling for 30% more than what you paid, considering that 'market,' if trends continue, will be less 6 months from now than it is now.

If I had lots of credit and I was willing to risk it all, I would consider such a gambit, though my plan would be to buy, fix up, and hold (perhaps renting to cover costs) until the market started recovering.

For bonus points, if I knew anything about wrangling bureaucracy, I'd work on turning business real-estate into dual-use lofts. I'd really, really like to have a dual-use space here in silicon valley, but the nearest place they are plentiful is oakland, and I don't need dual-use space /that/ badly.

But then, I don't have lots of credit, and I personally suspect there might still be even more downside in the market than people seem to be predicting. Still, if I was going to do it, I'd do it here in silicon valley or elsewhere in the SF bay area. the fundamentals of this place are strong, and while I think it will get worse before it gets better, I'm certain it will get better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> depends entirely on your skillset. As other posters suggest, the idea is to take your twenty five grand and create something with more value.

Me, uh, I'd probably just buy servers for my current business, then require pre-payment. I don't know that I could sell that many pre-paid VPSs, but it'd probably be my best chance. speaking of, why am I screwing off here? I should be putting up more servers.

Other options, considering my skill set, would be buying server parts, assembling, and selling them... though clearing that much inventory would be something of a challenge with my sales skills, and margins on servers (unless you are dell or hp) aren't that high, so I'd need to go through several buy parts -> assemble and sell servers -> buy parts -> assemble and sell servers cycles in that month, in a business where net-30 is the norm, so that'd be pretty difficult.

but yeah... I think the key is "what are you good at?" then "how can I do using what I'm good at, plus twenty five grand, to make something worth twice that much?"

</comment><comment><USER4> Buy tickets for popular sport/music events, sell for double the money when the venue is sold out. Repeat.

Not that I agree with this kind of business from an ethics point of view, but it's easy money.

<comment><USER5> If one could make $25000 in a month doing this, then I think there would be quite a few people considering career changes.

<comment><USER6> A roommate of a good friend makes a very good living doing this. I'd guess he must be holding many tens of thousands of dollars of tickets at any one time, and significant effort goes in to acquiring the tickets in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Put the existing 25K in the bank. Bid on a fixed-bid web project for 25K and get it done in a month.

<comment><USER8> Where do you find fixed-bid web projects you can bid on for 25K? Do you have a go-to website, or connections with people who will solicit your bids?

<comment><USER7> I actually don't prefer fixed-bid projects and I wouldn't attempt to do such a large one in such a short amount of time. But I live in Boston which has a nice startup scene and people approach me to build web applications for their startups.

I've been meaning to build a go-to website for about half a year now, but I've been too busy with client work--they find me without the website, often through the Boston Ruby Group.

<comment><USER9> If a solid month of work for $25k seems like "a big project" then maybe you're not billing enough.

<comment><USER10> If you're making $25k * 12 = $300k just by working you probably have some kind of specialized skill. If everyone could do it, the price wouldn't be so high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Go to Vegas, you've got almost a 50% chance.

Find some other currency that's also called "dollars", that's worth half as much as the one you have.

<comment><USER12> Was going to be my comment too. Never put that much on roulette, but have done four figure bets in GBP before. Adds a bit of excitement to life :)

<comment><USER13> Last time I went into a casino I put 5 dollars into a machine and walked out with 500. I would be scared if the same happened if I put in 25,000!

<comment><USER12> Last time I was in a casion just over a week ago I'd been on roulette for about two hours, was up an ok amount, and had been putting a fiver on 29 every now and then... The friend I was with picked up two £50 chips of mine and pretended to put it on 29, we laughed then put them back in my stack... ball landed on 29 :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 1\. I just got 25k$ free and clear. Time to stop worrying for arbitrary goals for at least a month and enjoy life!

2\. I'll find an another brain teaser that gives me 25k$ free and clear!

3\. I'd do it exactly the same way I'd make $25,000 without being given 25k$ free and clear.

4\. If I really would have to do it using the money, I'd donate the money to a random charity and use the fame and good will to organize nationwide boyscout door to door fundraiser in order to match my donation. Nobody said I'd have to make that 25k$ for myself.

5\. Ok so I should make it for myself? I'd just add that 25k$ to my millions and millions of dollars, stash them all to a short period savings account and collect 25k$ in monthly interest. Nobody said you couldn't use your existing assets to "help a bit".. Why should skills be any different from capital in this respect?

6\. Ok so I have to make the money for myself, I have to use the 25k$ doing it and I can't use any other assets? Oh boy.. I'm really not smart enough to pull that off :(

<comment><USER15> loved your comment - tried to up it but no arrow beside your name. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The same way I would turn $25000 into $25001, use $25000 to create something with a higher value. The easiest route would be carefully purchasing $1000 - $2000 cars, get them running/AC/etc, then slap a $200 paint job and sell for $2500 - $5000. You'd have to be careful and selective so that your time and the parts line up for the margins you're looking for, and then the resale process. This doesn't scale since if you continually buy up low priced cars, you'll drive thw prices per car up in the region, but it's nice for extra cash to do 1-3 cars at a time.

</comment><comment><USER3> As suggested by all the posters suggesting straight up gambling, I think that doing this reliably; doubling your money in one month, is going to be pretty difficult.

As I was saying before, if you have some special skill to add to the mix, that helps a lot (remember, a top end SysAdmin around here can earn $14K/month contracting, before taxes and stuff, so you wouldn't be doubling the money in a month in that case, you'd be adding 50% value, still damn good, and paying yourself a good wage.)

The thing is, doubling your money in a month is a what, 1200% annual return? no, it's more, if it compounds monthly, quite a lot more. You can bet that any investment with even a small chance of that kind of return gets all kinds of money thrown at it, to the point where those niches where this sort of thing is possible are filled right quick.

But yeah. Maybe you can pull that off for one month (hell, if you really hustled, and billed out at top end rates without a recruiter, you can make twenty five grand consulting as a SysAdmin. I mean, I couldn't... I've gotten that kind of hourly rate for short gigs, but I lack the sales skills to do that for a whole month.) but doubling that fifty grand the next month? doing it again? yeah, your odds start looking more and more like a day at the races.

</comment><comment><USER17> An easy way to do it: Buy undervalued and poorly monetized but well- established sites on flippa, optimize advertising and grow traffic, resell on Flippa in a few months.

If you've got $XXXXX to play with you can pick up some incredible bargains for a quick flip.

EDIT: I didn't see that you only had one month. This is still feasible, but would require some paid traffic/PPC skill to pull off.

<comment><USER18> I've always been curious as to how this is actually accomplished. I have never had success in selling small websites.

Love to learn more about this. If you can elaborate on the process, please do..

<comment><USER19> I sold a website on Flippa for $90k. The site sold a single WordPress plugin I wrote and was selling for $97 per license.

<comment><USER18> Very cool, how long were you running the site before you sold it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> IMHO gambling is probably the WORST way to go, and well given the 1 month time limit - you will probably have 29 days left to try and make 50,000$ after losing all of it the first day.

The time limit pretty much limits what you can possibly invest in for such a big return in such a short time.

This does remind me of a different HN article i read a while back - If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours how would you make as much money as possible : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912105> .

I Personally would do some research on current stock options and try to build a strategy to double the money in the time frame i have left.

</comment><comment><USER21> With only a month, I'd bet it on black. It'd probably be the highest probability of doubling up in that short a time period with no personal effort.

With some personal effort, there a few ways of making 25k in a month. App building projects are very hot right now, you could outsource app building projects and manage their completion. Could you make 25k more in a month, maybe not in the first month. But after you had solid relationships and skilled developers as well as a smooth input project buffer you could conceivably generate 25k profit a month.

</comment><comment><USER22> Doubling in one month means 1200% annual return. That requires some insanely risky deals to achieve. Looks at the high risk, high return ventures.

\- Gambling.

\- Lotto

\- Stock options

\- Forex

\- Future trading

\- Illicit activities tend to have high return but highly risky. And also highly questionable.

<comment><USER23> 409600% if compounded!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Borrow it. $25K is unsecured personal loan money, so depending what I urgently need 50k for, I could probably get it then pay it back over a few years.

Why the 1 month time limit?

</comment><comment><USER25> I would stick with Stock options. You need to find compelling investment scenarios (Biotech FDA approvals, Quarterly Earnings, etc.)

This is very risky, obviously. There are not too many ways to double your money with a lower risk profile without actually working..

To me, this is much less risky than straight gambling. My last time I answered this with a Stock recommendation (ARNA) it has already been up 3x. So it can be done (see my previous comments)

</comment><comment><USER26> Buy 4 lottery tickets.

If one of them wins a sum >=$25004, then I've succeeded. If none of them wins, declare that I've failed, and pocket the $24996 leftovers.

</comment><comment><USER27> Poker would be one option. I'm pretty good at poker!

</comment><comment><USER12> For a safer gambling idea, split it into a number of bets on different sports matches that are all really shit odds (like 1-3 odds), you've got a decent change that they'll all win, and if they don't you'll almost certainly still have some left (if not more than you started) because you split it. Repeat until you hit the magic number.

<comment><USER28> There is zero advantage to making several bets at the same time. So really what your suggesting is to make a series of bet's until you reach your desired goal. Unfortunately with most bet's the expected value is less than 1 so the more bets you make the higher your expected losses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Buy 25,000 bags of flour @ $1 and sell them for $2.

(Didn't we do this in economics 101? Where you learn about overhead and loss, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER30> pay some teenage kids minimum wage to run sausage sizzles all over town.

<comment><USER3> you could start up a delivery food biz with that kind of capital? (Honest question, I don't know) - I think there's a market for good delivery or take out food that's open late here in silicon valley... The place is crawling with overpaid Engineers who can't cook and aren't expected to stumble in to work until noon, and yet nearly everything closes at 9pm.

Now, I haven't jumped on the idea just 'cause I know jack shit about cooking or restaurant management, but if you could seriously start up for twenty five grand, I'd be looking around for such a business to invest in.

<comment><USER30> Not sure. I think there's a good payoff from sausage sizzles, it's the kind of thing kids soccer teams and charities do to raise funds. That's just toy stuff, but I'd consider coordinating a dozen of those a day before I put 25k on red @ vegas.

Everyone who I know of in the cooking or catering business works pretty hard, and aren't millionaires, so I wouldn't think you would get into it unless you were in it for the long haul.

<comment><USER3> yeah, I think there's a market here... and if, say, you really could set up a business of that type for twenty five grand, I bet I could get four or five guys together to put in 5K each, not as a 'get rich quick' ploy, but more as a 'see to it that I can get someone to make me something to eat at 3am, without losing too much money' thing. I mean, I'd want to have a positive expected return, but I wouldn't be expecting facebook valuations.

Of course, then, we'd still need to find someone able and willing to actually do the work, which is another matter entirely. by even thinking about this I'm ignoring my own rules "invest in what you are good at" - though I guess I 'know' something of the market, just 'cause I'm a customer of that sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Roulette Table, Black.

</comment><comment><USER9> It frightens me how many of these responses are people describing the scams they'd pull off if they had the cajones to do so.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd buy some weapons, kill a few pimps, steal their hoes, and pimp em out. Price tag is probably like 2000 for the weapons/grenades, the money is for a while!

On the other hand if you want non-insane, I would buy an appartment building, flip it, and try to make long term money on that. With partners of course.

Honestly for 25 grand I'd live off the money for a few months and find a job.</comment>


Ask HN: Please (re)review my new social learning site - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys!  I submitted my site for review here last week and got some amazing feedback.  I have made a bunch of changes due to those suggestions combined with some user testing from www.usertesting.com.
I would really appreciate it if you guys could take a second look at it and give me a bit more feedback.
http://www.cafecourses.com <comment><USER2> I'd like to suggest supporting OpenID instead of making me create another user/pass.

<comment><USER3> yes, please do this. See e.g. <https://rpxnow.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> One more. I'd also like to see "sample course" that I can take that _doesn't_ require me to log in. A lesser alternative would be a video screencast of an actual course.

</comment><comment><USER4> Clickable: <http://www.cafecourses.com>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the clickable link. I plan on supporting a variety of OpenIDs via RPXNow in a future release. Thanks for the suggestion kailoa.</comment>


Deep Learning Isn't a Dangerous Magic Genie. It's Just Math - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/06/deep-learning-isnt-dangerous-magic-genie-just-math/ <comment><USER2> My rule of the thumb is that if an AI algorithm uses math beyond simple arithmetic, it's not an AI.</comment>


Video: Usability Test by Steve Krug - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/ui/usability-test-by-steve-krug/

<comment><USER2> Anyone who hasn't should check out his books, they're great.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just finished his book 'Don't make me think' which i highly recommend.</comment></comment>