Instagram Web Interface - <AUTHOR> http://instagram.joshink.com Anybody know why Instagram doesn't have a web interface? I made this one up 2 nights. It doesn't do everything that the app does (yet), but at least you can view your feed, your photos and popular photos. <comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to gather some feedback for <http://instagram.joshink.com>. It was built for the fun of it, but it's been gaining quite a bit of traction and I'd like to hear from the people using it:

what do you like, hate or want to see added?

I'm planning on rolling it out its own domain and I would like to add the top features requested here.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great as it is and should really be how Instagram do their own site. The only thing you could possibly add that wouldn't just be noise is a notifications part such as followers or photo comments, if it's not in there already as I don't get many comments or follows to have tested this :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, Instagram hasn't released an API for accessing the news feed. Apparently they're making quite a bit of changes to it before they release it. I agree, though. That would be awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Only two real complaints are:

\- no "Load More" button on the main feed

\- no way to Like a photo without clicking on it first

(if there were an Ajax-y way to comment on a pic without leaving the main feed, that'd be cool too. But the Liking seems more feasible and necessary.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with both points. The only gotcha with liking the photo before drilling into it, has to do with the fact the their API returns a truncated result of all the likes on the media when using any endpoint other than /media/{id)/likes.

The reason that's a problem, is that there's no way for me to know for sure if you already liked something or not. I could A) Assume most people are only clicking on the heart to like something and not to unlike something they already liked, or B) Make a request to /media/{id}/likes for every image on the page. Given the two, I think it'd be safe to assume they just want to like something.

Leaving a comment should be pretty simple ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will webfonts ever be good enough? - <AUTHOR>

How do we get webfonts to have all the benefits of system installed fonts with none of the downsides? <comment><USER2> one thing you should wonder, do you think is good enough to leave a image to represent a heading? you might think, oh cool that look nice, but remember it affects SEO, there is another solutions for this workaround (cufon) but is not as flexible as webfonts, i think that webfonts will never replace a system font, but the web designers need to get a fallback, a reliable fallback.

Answering your question, i think is not possible to get the benefits from a webfont, but one possible solution for your problem related to the downsides is to ask the visitor to install the font required, but it would be not practical.

<comment> workhere-io _do you think is good enough to leave a image to represent a heading? you might think, oh cool that look nice, but remember it affects SEO_

Having an image for a logo often consumes less bandwidth than a web font (because there's a lot of CSS and a font file involved with a web font). SEO shouldn't be a problem if you use the "alt" attribute in the image tag.</comment></comment>


SpaceX Starship SN4 launch vehicle prototype explodes after static engine test - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/29/spacexs-starship-sn4-launch-vehicle-prototype-explodes-after-static-engine-fire-test/ <comment><USER2> If you catch the audio on this from the nasa space flight forum (I think?), it was pretty funny. They were speculating if it was a lox purge (vs a methane purge). They assumed lox, since if it were methane, the flare would..... BOOOM.

The timing was very perfect.

EDIT: [https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/12664420878489600...](https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1266442087848960000) has the audio with it.

<comment><USER3> A bit later they run the tape back frame by frame and determined the fire definitely didn't come from the flare stack. (Though in realtime it happens so fast they weren't sure.)

<comment><USER4> That video was almost certainly taken with a telephoto lens a long distance away, and telephoto lenses tend to compress distance. The flare could've been a long way away from the rocket, and a telephoto lens would make them look much much closer.

<comment><USER5> Best illustrated with dolly zooms. Even side-by-side stills don't quite capture how significant the effect is.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeyjyZ6UZII](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeyjyZ6UZII)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disappointing to be sure, but it's why they already have SN5 (nearly?) complete and SN6 is well on its way.

I like how Elon Musk contrasted past and currently planned human space activity as 'Apollo' and the potential future as 'D-Day'.

The goal is to cheaply and quickly mass manufacture interplanetary space craft. I think that imploding/exploding early serial numbers are an expected early part of that path.

<comment><USER7> Not disappointing - the more things that go wrong during the extensive series of tests developed and cataloged over the past several decades, the more we can correct and cement into permanence.

I'm looking forward to SN747 (the number corresponds with one of Boeing's standardized atmospheric flight models) sometime in 2024. I'm probably not thinking big enough though.

<comment><USER8> Believe me, it's absolutely disappointing. Not _unexpected_ , mind you, but people would definitely prefer to not have things blow up.

<comment><USER9> Musk was pretty clear in an interview that he _does_ want things to blow up. He wants the testing to push and exceed the limits so those limits become well defined. It sounds quite reasonable.

<comment><USER10> > Musk was pretty clear in an interview that he does want things to blow up.

I get that fanboys are excited and they see the Musk world through rose- tainted glasses.

But SpaceX was planning on flying this vehicle. And it exploded.

How does anyone anywhere believe in that? Obviously this outcome was not planned. If anyone wants to fly a vehicle to test other stuff, they don't want it to blow up prior to it.

<comment><USER9> I'll reiterate a point I made deeper down: obviously the failure wasn't planned or intended. But the overall process of being failure tolerant and having a high rate of failures, was.

You can spend your resources on doing careful modelling and over-engineering and conservative testing to always stay within limits, or you can go fast and loose and discover those limits the kinetic explodey way. SpaceX chose the latter strategy.

Also, not a fanboy. On a personal level the guy's a prick. But the strategy that SpaceX is employing is sound and tested. It's the same R&D strategy that was employed by Skunkworks, which is arguably the most successful aerospace R&D story in the entire history of our species.

<comment><USER10> > You can spend your resources on doing careful modelling and over-engineering > and conservative testing to always stay within limits, or you can go fast > and loose and discover those limits the kinetic explodey way. SpaceX chose > the latter strategy.

Again, this baseless assertion is just plain wrong on many levels, and flies in the face of basic engineering practices.

At best, you're confusing a consciencious choice of allocating piles of resources to avoid bottlenecks and time constraints, such as losing a prototype which is a project death sentence to your general aerospace research project, with plain old incompetence.

Engineering 101 teaches that when in doubt err on the safe side. Your assertion is the exact opposite because... Because what? What do you believe is the trade-off of wasting time and resources trying to fly intentionally half-baked designs that define the critical path of the project?

Please spend a moment thinking about what you've said to try to see how absurd it is to waste time and resources for nothing at all.

<comment><USER9> > Engineering 101 teaches that when in doubt err on the safe side.

Nonsense. You can't discover limits if you always stay within them. Commercial engineering, sure. But R&D is by definition the process of exploring an unknown parameter search space. And considering that spaceX have achieved what STS has failed to do with 1/10th of the STS budget, I'd say they're not doing terribly badly with their chosen R&D strategy. You seem to have a deeply ingrained misconception about what R&D actually entails and how it's different from both commercial engineering and designed experiments.

Erring on the safe side is what they're doing with their manned missions. Cargo missions are medium risk and occasionally do dirt-cheap launches to deliberately try risky scenarios. R&D ops is deliberately high risk and low process overhead. They rather someone just try something and see what happens instead of spending 6 months writing an experiment plan and getting it validated etc. as you would see in the pharma industry for example. I'm not sure why you're struggling to comprehend this fairly simple and fairly standard strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would it have really killed their schedule so much to push this until _after_ tomorrow's crewed flight? They're obviously unrelated, but it sucks to have this is the headlines the day before they launch astronauts.

<comment><USER12> The astronauts are both veterans and one would assume they understand that this was not only a prototype ship but a prototype engine. Falcon has 50+ successful flights over four years since its most recent failure.

Hopefully they're not phased by this.

<comment><USER11> > Hopefully they're not phased by this.

I doubt they are - my comment is about the PR impact.

<comment><USER5> I get cynical about people sometimes, but I have to believe the average person can understand the difference between a bleeding edge test and the launch of a proven system. They don't stop driving when someone dies trying to break the land speed record. I don't see a PR problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the 4th Starship that has imploded or exploded. They only lost 3 Falcon 1's before their first successful flight, and Elon has publicly stated that a 4th failure would have bankrupted the company.

Those three Falcon flights were attempts to reach orbit with rockets that weren't prototypes so the failures were more significant, and they probably blew up a bunch of Falcon prototypes behind closed doors prior to the launch attempts, but it's interesting how three failures on Falcon was a big deal but four failures on Starship isn't. SpaceX is certainly in a different and much less precarious position now than it was in 2006-2008.

<comment><USER14> The difference between some test parts on a stick vs. a full rocket is so vast that I don't think you can make any coherent/interesting comparison of the numbers.

It's like comparing 4 millimeters to 3 inches. It doesn't matter at all that 4 > 3.

<comment><USER15> Wat? It's totally meaningful to compare two length measurements, Even if expressed in different units.

I get what you're trying to say (and you are right!), but that's a bad analogy.

<comment><USER14> You compare the actual length.

Not the _raw number, with unit ignored_.

What's wrong with the analogy? Please explain.

<comment><USER15> Comparing the test rig to a full rocket is more like comparing 4 liters to 3 inches. They're simply not comparable.

<comment><USER16> Both analogies are correct and usable in this context

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Too bad, especially because only yesterday they put a weight simulator onto it. So it looked like it was going to fly.

Well, it did fly, just not in one piece.

<comment><USER18> rapid unscheduled hop

<comment><USER17> ... multi-directional hop

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Rocketry is unforgiving. That's why they test.

<comment><USER20> Best way to figure out how complex things fail is to keep pushing them to their limit and observe

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This on definitely started at the bottom. It almost looks like a leak created a FAE (fuel air explosive) mixture around it.

It also blew out the methane flare on the right.

<comment><USER22> Looks like the methane flare is what lit it, although it's difficult to judge distance in the video.

<comment><USER23> It didn't. You can play it back frame by frame and see that it started beneath SN4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I notice all the broken bits of rocket are in square panels.

That indicates the welds failed rather than the steel sheets in the explosion.

If you want to design something to be as strong as possible for the weight, you make the welds as strong as the sheets. In most cases, that means making the weld lines thicker than the rest, since the weld is typically formed in less ideal conditions so weaker.

There are tricks to doing that like zig-zag weld lines, overlapped sheets at the weld, etc.

Surprising spaceX hasn't done this, considering strength to weight is critical in rocketry.

<comment><USER25> Can you provide references supporting thicker welds as well as reinforcing patterns? I have done introductory welding and am genuinely curious of the ramifications of both.

<comment><USER25> Addendum: preferably video instruction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I know these kinds of explosions aren't _disasters_ per se, but at what point in development do these kind of destructive results become very unwanted? Or was that classic Calvin and Hobbes comic about bridge testing less of a joke than I had though?

[https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26](https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26)

<comment><USER27> When you start making the same mistakes over and over. As long as they learn new things with each iteration it doesn't matter if they blow up 5 or 50 ships. The actual material cost of these prototypes is probably in the low 6 figures. The biggest cost is the labor, but by iterating rapidly they are learning new manufacturing techniques, so if they weren't blowing up these prototypes they would be stacking them in a field or tearing them down anyways, since the value is in the process, not the final product, at this point.

Also, there are only an estimated 300 employees building Starships (although there are probably more working on engineering), so on-site labor costs are probably about a million a week. Since they can pop out a new iteration every few weeks they cost is probably only about a few million per ship. That's a lot of money in some industries, but it's a rounding error in rocketry. They could build dozens or even hundreds of prototypes for less than the cost of a conventional disposable rocket, like SLS.

The idea that the cheapest way to build a rocket is to blow up dozens of prototypes is a bit counterintuitive, but I believe it's the future. Organizations that move more slowly to avoid failures will fall further and further behind, since the tortoise only wins if the hare falls asleep, which SpaceX shows no signs of doing.

Civil engineers are able to use mathematical models to develop bridges because we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and they can build in huge safety factors. Fully reusable rockets have never been built before and can't afford the luxury of large safety factors due to the Rocket Equation, so testing to failure is the fastest way to learn, and when almost all of the cost is labor, fastest = cheapest.

<comment><USER28> The latest from the President and COO of SpaceX is that there are 900 employees working at Boca Chica alone.

<comment><USER29> > The latest from the President and COO of SpaceX is that there are 900 > employees working at Boca Chica alone.

Yeah, they expanded fast at Boca. Gwynne Shotwell doesn't get the attention she deserves unless you're in the know, but she really is a total badass COO. I really wanted to see her at the Cape for this momentous occasion but things are Hawthorne are he priority.

I still remember that shot from her and the Team at HQ going crazy after the first stage recovery, I threw my hands in the air like that watching the Live stream for ORBCOMM 2 and just kept yelling 'they did it!'

<comment><USER29> Well, she made an appearance this time, she's at Mission Control in Hawthorne, no surprise. Always cool to hear from her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> For some reason this link re-routes me to "advertising.com".

<comment><USER31> All links to Techcrunch go to [https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1_...](https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1_cc- session_<an) uuid> and Blockada [1] blocks them on my Android devices. I stopped visiting Techcrunch since they started to do that. I can always google the same news on a different site.

[1] [https://blokada.org/](https://blokada.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> You can't invent anything new without lots of fails. Let's hope they will blow them up as quickly as possible so we can see a flying one soon!

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder how many unfilmed explosions NASA had during the space exploration period.

<comment><USER34> I'd wager probably none or a handfew at most. Frame-by-frame video was and still is important to incident analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This thing should have blown up somewhere during launch, not while parked basically. People not happy.

</comment><comment><USER36> That's what tests are for.

</comment><comment><USER37> "That was not nominal"

Bloody brilliant. Hopefully they got some good data from that test

</comment><comment><USER38> Now, that's what I'm calling "move fast and break things"!

</comment><comment><USER39> Yeah given the delayed and soon upcoming actual human scheduled flight, this would have been maybe nicer to put off a couple days... just optics but still...

<comment><USER40> Agreed - my first thought too.

<comment><USER41> Watch this:

"It's actually good optics that it exploded, because it shows they aren't changing their schedules for the sake of optics. Political pressure to make the schedule fit the public's feelings was a major contributor to the Challenger disaster. So, having a tank blow up the day before a manned launch shows that SpaceX has overcome the challenges of the past."

(See? That spin makes the turbopump look like a stator. If I have a point it's that talking about optics is pointless, because you can make the optics anything you want by casting the right light.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Rapid unscheduled disassembly.

</comment><comment><USER43> Skip to "1:48 CT".

</comment><comment><USER44> All this time, I haven't been convinced that this steel approach is better in the long-run than going the advanced composite route.

</comment><comment><USER45> At some point during Research and Development, shouldn't you figure out the math first?

</comment><comment><USER46> Funny article, it stressed at least 4 times this is different from the normal flights ones they do regularly, otherwise covidiots/flat- earthears/conspiracists will fill forums with their cries. And I'm not sure they wont anyway.</comment>


Show HN: A Gnus Back End for HN - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dickmao/nnhackernews <comment><USER2> Insane! But in a good way. I've been very slowly working towards refactoring Gnus to use real OO classes to implement backends, and I always thought I'd know I was done when I could implement a HN backend without too much trouble. Both sad and happy to see that someone got there first. I will give this a try.

</comment><comment><USER3> The naming confused me. I love the name though. "Back End for HN" made me think it was another HN-clone. It's an Emacs client for HN if anybody is wondering.

<comment><USER4> Gnus is a venerable e-mail and newsgroup reader for GNU Emacs. What is new here is a backend (i.e. datasource) for Gnus to fetch from HN.

<comment><USER5> After seeing how the D forum is done, it might be interesting to see a HN->nttp bridge/server.

I mean, you could read hn with rn.

<comment><USER3> A news reader layer to Hacker News... I love it. I am to this day fascinated by the D forums. I don't know anybody else who does that. There's some newsreader client for KDE I was using and I was able to download every single thread from the D forums, so now I had them all available offline.

<comment><USER6> By "D forum", are you both talking about the D programming language forums[1]? Or what D forum?

[1] [https://forum.dlang.org/](https://forum.dlang.org/)

<comment><USER7> This is the software behind it: [https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed](https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yesterday only I set it up with B R command. But that just shows just three links - two to the comments, and one to the article.</comment>


Why Medium Failed to Disrupt the Media - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-05/why-medium-failed-to-disrupt-the-media <comment><USER2> Outside of the writing, I kind of don't like the design of Medium. I can't quite put my finger on why, but it looks light but feels heavy (as a reader). I also don't like that every post pretty much looks the same, with the exception of the header image; with other blogging services you could style it at least a little (for example, it's generally obvious when a blog is on blogspot, but there are times when I didn't know until I searched and noticed the URL. Tumblr is very customizable too.) I even prefer Livejournal's interface as a reader to Medium's.

As others have pointed out too, it didn't seem to get past the 'hipster SV writer, dad, astronaut, all around awesome sauce' style writing and showboating aspect. You can do that on other platforms too (add the tag line and write the typical 'Medium way') but it feels like on Medium it's really uncommon to see a post from someone who doesn't add too much to the tag line.

Medium would have to get over this mentality and make it more appealing for regular writers, not just appeal with the interface, if it were to become bigger.

</comment><comment><USER3> > No business model that involves selling content can get around a fundamental > fact: Content can only be consistently good if its creators can make a > living from it.

Not really. And this is probably why the 'professional' media is having so much trouble.

Because there are lots of people out there who are willing to provide high quality for free on a regular basis, and it makes people hesitant to spend money on the same from those trying to sell it.

All that high quality content being available for free is exactly why written content has so little value any more and why platforms can't monetise it. Because there will always be people willing to provide their work for less money than you.

<comment><USER4> the keyword is "consistently"

<comment><USER5> That's just a problem of finding the good stuff, we have many tools for that(search, recommendations, curation, etc) and i think it's the place we could improve - for example if Google(or someone else) had an option to filter for in-depth, quality content - that wold be very useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You gotta wonder about the whole vision speech. It would have been a better service to the world to explain where exactly did the idea get stuck: not enough volume, wasn't the platform big enough, is it a technology issue (ad management, the cms), was is the corrupt budget managers of various brands ... idk.

This whole bla bla "our vision is to be the saint content liberators" is a both funny and completely useless. It is not to say that Ev has no inner drive or that Medium is a company that doesn't stick to their mission or vision, but it is just that they communicate:

\- hey we tried to do better \- they didn't let us \- we're leaving

WTF :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I liked how this article described about monetization approaches and compared with other options (like Blendle). Any kind of content - be it writing or TV shows or movies - will remain tough to sell individually because nobody wants to spend their entire pay check on all these. Only some kind of aggregation and advertising (consumer money flowing back to producing content without the consumers realizing it or directly paying for it) have proven to work somewhat well.

I'd be interested in ad-free and ad-tracking-free options that provide more of a buffet kind of system than an à la carte option (the latter is what Blendle is trying with micropayments that don't actually look micro enough). But scaling this with millions or billions of customers to reduce base costs is not easy, especially for written content, compared to TV shows or movies (like what Netflix, Amazon and others are doing).

<comment><USER8> The article says the problem with Blendie is you have to make a decision for every article. What if the default was you paid a micropayment on an article if you just had it open for more than, say, 30 seconds, and in the relatively rare cases where you didn't want to pay you could hit a button to stop it. I think that would eliminate maybe 90% of the decisions and make it a lot more attractive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On Medium as a platform, somehow, to me it always seemed like a place for pompous people to write long articles ("Hey, look! I'm published on Medium!"). But like the rest of the web, there were many time wasters among the few gems.

I did like the typography and readability initially (and still do), but some of its design decisions, like blurred images coming into focus on scrolling, almost seizure inducing flashing GIFs and others really annoyed me a lot and put me off from visiting Medium links.

Lastly, it also bothered me that it could become one more large scale platform like Blogger or WordPress, concentrating content into one platform (many people wrote directly on and for medium.com, while a few used it with custom domains).

</comment><comment><USER9> Random cool thing:

They control a .gov (kinda)

greatagain.gov</comment>


Glimmer.js: What's the Deal with TypeScript? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tomdale/glimmer-js-whats-the-deal-with-typescript-f666d1a3aad0 <comment><USER3> What sold me on TypeScript was that it didn't just add features, it actively solved a problem I'd been experiencing.

Once a JavaScript project scales beyond what can fit in your head, JS's initial productivity boost crumbles because you have to constantly double back and make sure your methods/constructors/etc. are correctly used, which properties are optional, etc... A lot of the debugging happens in runtime and god help you if you try to make a breaking change to one of the major classes/apis in your project.

It's not unbearable, but the main reason for using JS is because of the productivity it allows.

With TS for the cost of taking the time to explicitly define your data you get a C#/Java level of debugging that has clear productivity gains and shifts your debugging from the browser/console to the IDE.

And when something doesn't fit the TS model you can just exclude it or only type the wrappers that integrate with the rest of your project.

That and async/await is a godsend over promises.

<comment><USER4> Have you tried Elm? Id love to know your experiences.

<comment><USER3> I haven't; I haven't tried Flow either which looked promising.

For kicks I tried the online Elm demo. Offhand it doesn't seem like Elm highlights errors inline(?). The syntax also looks a little foreign, whereas TS generally still looks like JS with a few exceptions.

I imagine Elm/Flow both have this, but another thing I like that TS does in VSCode at least with a watching task is collecting errors project-wide in a "problems" window.

<comment><USER5> Flow gets a good amount of the way there; it doesn't have quite the tooling of TypeScript but VSCode is actually able to bring a lot of that tooling to a Flow-typed codebase. Just yesterday I finished a major refactor that I'm not even sure I'd have attempted if we weren't using Flow. One giant action file feeding three insane reducers – yet I'm confident (with some testing) that it'll still work when I deploy today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's two things that really stand out for me on TypeScript. There are other positive attributes, but these are the two things I liked.

The first is that it made some specific workflows a _lot_ easier. In particular, I'm working on some pre-alpha libraries where there's movement on how the API interface is defined. TypeScript made that transition a lot easier. Yes, my testing would have eventually caught all the method arity mismatches, but TypeScript made this happen about an order of magnitude faster.

The second is how unobtrusive the types actually are. I did a fair bit of J2EE programming in the 00s, and types and interfaces can be really annoying. With typescript, interfaces are assertions about the shape of an object, rather than things themselves. That means, if you defined an interface as HasFirstName: { firstName: string } and function greet(person: HasFirstName), you don't actually have to put HasFirstName everywhere in the code that uses that function. You're not required to set up inheritance or anything. You just have to make sure that all arguments to greet have a firstName property. That's it. So I can say: const dude = { firstName: 'the' }; greet(dude) just fine. But if I try to greet(potato), it'll error.

Lexical typing this way gives you a lot of power while still staying out of your way in a language like javascript where it's super common to create consts as bags of properties without worrying about what particular interface they're instantiating. I really like that, as it is precisely the overbearing types of Java that annoy me.

<comment><USER7> For google-ability, TypeScript has structural types, in contrast with Java which has nominal types.

<comment><USER6> Ah, thank you - that's a set of names that I need, in order to express my love for TypeScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've done a few typescript projects. Some migrating an existing codebase, some starting from scratch. Every time it has been a nice experience, and with every release it gets nicer. Two of the projects had very complex requirements, and typescript was instrumental in being able to refactor them with confidence.

I think the upsides are quite well known by now. Honesty requires me to admit that I did run into some downsides:

\- Initially it was difficult to understand the exact mechanics of how typescript ... types. Definition files seemed like a bit of a black art, and how to annotate existing code so that it had the proper type wasn't always obvious, especially when you run into libraries with incomplete or wrong type definitions and when you want to do tricky stuff like creating typed mocks in unit tests. The typescript documentation is very good and I haven't needed much beyond it, but some extra real-world type definition chapters would help.

\- Setting up a complete dev toolchain is challenging. I wanted everything: source maps, in-IDE debugging with breakpoints, in-IDE unit tests with code coverage, tslint, gradual introduction into an existing codebase, and robust integration into the build of the rest of the app (which in my case meant SBT integration). I still don't have code coverage in my in-IDE unit tests. The way I see it though, if your javascript has any build step at all you already have this pain, so this isn't so much a problem with typescript as a problem with javascript build pipelines in general.

\- Convincing other developers typescript has value and isn't javascript's weird ugly nephew is an uphill struggle. Once you do a typescript project you end up understanding the value, even if you might not find it valuable for yourself personally, so it's only a matter of convincing developers to give it a go. However, getting to that point is a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

<comment><USER9> > Convincing other developers typescript has value and isn't javascript's > weird ugly nephew is an uphill struggle.

I feel the same way about Elm, F# and Fable, Facebook's ReasonML, and any other language that has an ML type system and compiles to javascript. I think the value becomes more apparent when: a) you work in a large codebase and have to refactor either a large swath of code and/or a critical piece of logic and b) you need to make illegal states unrepresentable. In both cases, I have found having a compiled, ml-typed language extremely helpful.

I think for both Typescript or an ML language, having immutable non-nullable types by default really cuts down on complexity - instead of having to specify everything that's immutable with something like a `const` keyword, you instead have to specifically point out which attritibutes on a type are mutable. That's a small win but has huge benefits - especially when you're trying to debug code.

That's just my two cents anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone got a link on how to transition existing large webpack/React/babel project to using Typescript? Googling I only found [https://medium.com/@clayallsopp/incrementally-migrating- java...](https://medium.com/@clayallsopp/incrementally-migrating-javascript- to-typescript-565020e49c88) but it doesn't use ts-loader and doesn't go into details on how to use typings. I tried following ts-loader docs, but things broke at `import flatten from 'lodash/flatten'` and adding typings for `lodash ` didn't help. Would be interesting what strategies people use to get it working in existing project.

<comment><USER11> ES2015/commonjs interop currently sucks with TS. This is how you only import flatten:

      import flatten = require('lodash/flatten')

TS expects any modules imported using ES2015 import to have the shape of a ES2015 module. This is an issue for many UMD/commonjs modules. In the case of lodash, it's effectively doing this:

      module.exports = flatten

And then you're importing it like so:

      import flatten from 'lodash/flatten'

and that is being transpiled to something like:

      var flatten = require('lodash/flatten').default

Note the default.

I haven't migrated to webpack 2, but some brief experiments suggest all modules get massaged in to ES2015 format.

<comment><USER12> I've been using `allowSyntheticDefaultImports` which does some magic behind the scenes for you to be able to use `import flatten from 'lodash/flatten'` making it really easy to use modules that don't define default exports.

So far (a bit unexpectedly) I didn't really run into any nasty side-effects or things that went wrong with it.

See [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/What%27s-new- in...](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/What%27s-new-in- TypeScript#support-for-default-import-interop-with-systemjs) for a (short) explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a project that uses Flow. I've had no complaints with it so far, but I've been craving the IDE support of TypeScript. What's the difference between the type system of TypeScript and Flow? Would it be worthwhile to switch?

Part of me wants to wait out the Flow team come up with better IntelliSense support. The `flow ide` command in the release 0.42 is a big step in the right direction. But it seems like TypeScript already has this, and if the delta between the two type systems is small, I might just go ahead and switch.

<comment><USER14> >What's the difference between the type system of TypeScript and Flow?

This presentation [1] was posted to HN recently and gave a pretty good overview of the differences between TypeScript and Flow.

[1] [https://djcordhose.github.io/flow-vs-typescript/flow- typescr...](https://djcordhose.github.io/flow-vs-typescript/flow- typescript-2.html#/)

<comment><USER13> Awesome prez! Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I haven't used TypeScript extensively, but I feel that there should be more of a push (maybe there is, please correct me if I'm wrong) to introduce whatever functionality people deem worthy that exists in TypeScript and introduce it to JavaScript.

You can already see the conflict happening as some people prefer Flow and others TypeScript. Perhaps later Google will throw their hat into the ring and introduce GScript. Then, you have three different languages that introduce similar functionality, that all transpile into JavaScript.

Sound familiar?

<comment><USER16> The flagship feature of TS is static typing. That will never exist in JS.

<comment><USER17> I'd never say never. As I'm sure you're aware, JavaScript has had statically typed arrays since WebGL was introduced.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Type...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Typed_arrays)

<comment><USER16> It has _typed_ arrays, but they're still not statically typed. In a statically typed language, this would not run.

        console.log("hello");
        typedArr[0] = incompatibleType();

In javascript, it will produce "hello" as output, and then a run-time failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> TypeScript is amazing, enough said. If you're building any application with any amount of code that has to be worked on by anyone other than yourself, you want to use TypeScript (I'd argue even for yourself, use it, it'll catch enough errors to pay for itself in spades). Coupled with editors like Visual Studio Code which are cross-plat and have first-class tooling for TS/JS, it just makes you objectively more productive both as a consumer and writer of Javascript. Even the most die-hard pessimists I've met love TypeScript once they try it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ok, when Glimmer's motivation was only typechecking, why not just fb flow then?

<comment><USER20> Having used both extensively, TS is simply the better choice. Flow has multiple large bugs and issues, which many would consider critical, open and unsolved on their GitHub repo for more than a year(!) [1][2][3].

[1] [https://github.com/facebook/flow/issues/245](https://github.com/facebook/flow/issues/245) [2] [https://github.com/facebook/flow/issues/869](https://github.com/facebook/flow/issues/869) [3] [https://github.com/facebook/flow/issues/1528](https://github.com/facebook/flow/issues/1528)

<comment><USER21> I struggled with multiple blind spots in Flow in the past, but recently tried porting the same code to Flow and Typescript and I was surprised that Flow took less work than TypeScript. Flow 0.43.1 has become very fast and seems to need less type annotations compared to TypeScript with noImplicitAny enabled. I wonder whether Flow's happily infers any without complaining or whether its program flow analysis remains more sophisticated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only one who thinks typed Javascript, wether it's TypeScript or Flow, is a really flakey experience?

I really enjoy Swift, so I'm not put off by types. But I find the experience of working in a real typed language to be very different to working with Flow or Typescript, where the types are for pretend, and type definitions are wrong often enough to be a real pain. And I found my self evaluating npm packages based on their type definitions, and not their suitability for the task, which seems bonkers to me.

Also, I don't ever recall staying late to track down a bug that types would have fixed. But I've wasted many an hour tracking down bugs caused by mutations, and the state of Immutability and Typed Javascript is pretty grim as far as I can tell, unless I'm missing something.

<comment><USER23> Types are pretend in TypeScript and Flow the same way that types are pretend in any other typed language. Types are used at compile-time and not runtime in both cases.

<comment><USER24> In contrast to many typed languages, currently in Typescript, you can't do any kind of reflection so runtime really has no access to the type system.

Well, I still love TS though.

<comment><USER25> There is the possibility of decorators for stuff like this. Angular makes a lot of use of them.

<comment><USER24> But isn't that some sort of repetition? I don't know how Angular does this so I'm really asking.

<comment><USER25> Well, it depends on the sort of reflection you want. Decorators get a decent amount of knowledge about the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there a way for typescript to be used as PropTypes in React?

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone know when Ember will use TypeScript?

<comment><USER28> Post TypeScript 2.3 - <USER2> [https://twitter.com/tomdale/status/851924328220381185](https://twitter.com/tomdale/status/851924328220381185)

<comment><USER27> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> >At the end of the day, though, JavaScript is the language of the web.

And when webassembly arrives that will be over, and Typescript will be deprecated. I can't wait for a better modern language like Haskell, Python, Livescript, etc.. built on top of webassembly. Then we can finally stop trying to fix Javascript's flaws with new language features.

<comment><USER30> And I can't wait for the rude awakening anti-JS developers have when they realise the vast majority of issues (particularly, performance) come from the DOM, not JavaScript. (And the first version of WebAssembly can't touch the DOM anyway)

If people start writing Python for the web for no other reason than they just dislike JavaScript we're going to be forcing users to download a dozen different runtimes, just because of developer preference. This isn't a good thing.

<comment><USER4> What would you replace the DOM with?

<comment><USER30> I honestly have no idea. It does so much that I don't know where you'd start - but I suspect that's also the problem.

I remember seeing a demo of React Canvas a few years ago - basically, recreating a "DOM" of sorts inside a canvas tag - and the performance was crazy. Beautiful 60fps touch interactions. But, of course, it only does a tiny subset of what the DOM does. I'm still waiting for a good reason to use it myself to try out how the API feels.

<comment><USER4> I feel the same. Dunno wth we gonna do but we need something more performant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well, if we already transpile ES7 to JS then why not tanspile TypeScript instead because of all the added benefits?

<comment><USER32> Because eventually in a couple of years you can take your ES7 code and remove the transpiration and it will all work seamlessly. Not so much with Typescript.

<comment> vladimir-y Transpiling is going to stay, currently you transpile es6/7/typescript=>es5, later you will do es8/9/typescript=>es6/7, and so on, so this point is not relevant.

<comment><USER32> I meant it in the code's current state. Suppose the development stops or stagnates in a month or two. The product is complete. So you can remove the transpilation. Also we won't have to transpile current features in the future. That and code can go as is and have the benefit of native execution that it doesn't currently have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> TypeScript provides the same value as intellisense.

E: i didnt mean this as a criticism

<comment><USER25> It's a bit more than intellisense.

* find definition

* find usages

* auto import (never type "../../../../../dumb.js" manually again)

* er... types

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What turns me off immediately about TypeScript (and examples in the article show it) is the use of the class construct. If I could see some examples of teams writing TypeScript without falling into the use of classes I would feel a lot better about it. I am in full agreement with Douglas Crockford and others that adding pseudo-classes to JS was a big mistake.

<comment><USER35> I'm curious as to why you don't like the use of classes. Are you against classes in all languages or just JavaScript?

<comment><USER34> I'm not against classes in other languages, especially those that follow a typical OOP pattern (i.e. Java, C#, etc.). See above for my reason re: JavaScript.

<comment><USER36> So appeal to authority?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your emails may reveal text hidden in Microsoft Word - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/watch-out-your-emails-may-reveal-text-hidden-in-microsoft-word-7000025845/

<comment><USER2> Unless you really need the formatting, just copy-paste everything as plain ASCII. (This is a standard technique for de-classifying or otherwise releasing classified documents; convert everything into ASCII and then clear _that_ for approval. Cuts down on inadvertent releases of meta-data, hidden text, etc.) Tools like PureText

[http://stevemiller.net/puretext/](http://stevemiller.net/puretext/)

make copy-pasting as ASCII very quick and easy.

<comment><USER3> I'd suggest not to use ASCII at all unless you write in a language that doesn't suffer from sudden loss of characters that way.

<comment><USER4> Moreover, unless you know for a fact that the specific text you're using doesn't have any non-ascii characters. "It's English" doesn't quite cut it: what about façade, coördinate, '✓', or even '£', all of which are non-ascii.

(Of course, I'm assuming that you meant this, so it's not a correction -- I'm just taking the opportunity to explicitly mention it.)

<comment><USER5> Both "façade" and "coördinate" use orthographs which are not present in the modern English orthography. So they aren't actually "English".

<comment><USER4> Why don't you tell the New Yorker staff they're not writing English, and see how far you get?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Part of the issue is that for word, the key to start "hidden text" is CTRL+SHIFT+H [1] and the stupid placement of the CTRL key means that hitting it at the same time you hit shift is not necessarily a "rare" occurrence. So you go to start a line with 'H' and you end up hiding some text instead.

[1] [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211982](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211982)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm just mystified as to why someone would type up an email in Word and then copy-and-paste it to Outlook to send. Did I enter a wormhole and end up in 1998 or something?

<comment><USER8> Probably for the autocorrect options from Word.

Also, for a heavy Word user (writer, journalist), I guess it is normal to write in Word first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, I am a techie and I know how this works behind the scenes and I see it obvious. The system saves what you send but filters what receives, so the display:none or visivility:hidden is ripped out. And thanks god for it, scamers are very creative.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Europe safe for brown people? - <AUTHOR> I am thinking of working remotely / traveling to Europe for 6 months. My main concern is the anti-immigrant, anti-brown sentiments in the post Trump world in the US. Does these sentiments exists in Europe? or is it much open society compared to US? If you are traveling brown person in Europe, please let me know your experience. Thank you. <comment><USER2> Here in Germany, you might be in trouble if you look like a young male refugee from syria. Looking hispanic or african or asian will be a non-issue, though.

This has _nothing_ to do with Trump, but with our refugee crisis, and the way our media deals with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> >>Here in Germany, you might be in trouble if you look like a young male refugee from syria

Can you tell me more about your experience. How did you come to this conclusion?</comment></comment>


Serial -  a podcast exploring a nonfiction story - <AUTHOR> http://serialpodcast.org/

<comment><USER2> I just watched this video by The Guardian Comment is Free section about this podcast. Never heard about it before.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJYChWybhjM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJYChWybhjM)</comment>


Apple stock is Steve Job's Thriller album - <AUTHOR> http://devcodehack.com/apple-stock-is-steve-jobs-thriller-album/

<comment><USER2> And what would be Apple's equilavent of the Billie Jean song? The iPad 3?</comment>


Meet the fast-charging, affordable 'future' car that Elon Musk hates - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/02/25/meet-the-fast-charging-affordable-future-car-that-elon-musk-hates/ <comment><USER2> What a ridiculous characterization.

Elon Musk doesn't hate hydrogen fuel cells; he sees their very obvious physics-based limitations and calls them out for it. This is a very disappointing piece coming from the Washington Post. It's plainly anti- intellectual. They quote some very matter-of-fact statements from Musk, but their rebuttal is composed entirely of non-sequiturs.

Musk: Best-case hydrogen fuel-cells fail to meet the specs of current-case batteries.

WP: Hand-wavy quote from Toyota SVP alleging that you can't take Musk's statements at face value because he has a dog in the hunt.

Utterly ridiculous. Musk's statements are based in fact. Later in the article, WP glosses over what should be a real eye-opener for anyone looking at the matter with a critical eye:

"Though its emissions are greener, hydrogen is now mostly sourced from natural gas, which carries its own environmental impacts."

Granted, battery technology isn't exactly clean either, but hydrogen sourced from natural gas is a complete smokescreen. It is impossible to recover 100% of the energy available in natural gas when extracting hydrogen. The only reason to do it is so that you can feel good about the fact that your hydrogen end-user device is zero emission. It also has the down side of funneling dollars to the existing oil-based incumbents. It might seem irrational to base ones belief on what appears to be a vendetta, but the oil industry incumbents haven't exactly been good stewards of the resources they trade in.</comment>


5 Awesome Hardware Products That Will Change Your Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.trycelery.com/blog

<comment><USER2> Wow those projects are really cool. I hope they all work as well as they look.

</comment><comment><USER3> pretty cool, thanks for sharing</comment>


We can know whether we are in a simulation - <AUTHOR> http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2012/10/we-can-know-whether-we-are-in-a-simulation.html

<comment><USER2> No, as a matter of fact, we cannot know this. No matter how many people speculate about it, it's not a property of the universe we can determine in a scientific sense. It's empty philosophy -- but I repeat myself.</comment>


REST APIs –  Back to Basics - <AUTHOR> https://restful.io/rest-api-back-to-basics-c64f282d972 <comment><USER2> The most basic of everything is that REST assumes that you won't ever try to call an _operation_ on the resource, apart maybe from creating or destroying it (and God forbid running an operation that is not tied to any resource at all, or works on multiple resources at the same time). So your REST service is basically a passive data store. Once you go outside of this realm (and more often than not you should do so), you have remote procedures, and REST, being a _pattern_ instead of _protocol_ and working on _individual object_ , gives you nothing useful.</comment>


"CloudFlare review and how I reduced my bounce rate 94%" - <AUTHOR> http://developdaly.com/web-design/cloudflare-review-and-how-i-reduced-my-bounce-rate-94/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+developdaly+%28Develop+Daly%29

<comment><USER2> at first it's a fascinating claim. But in actual fact what you're doing is not reducing bounce rate or increasing pages per visit, you're just using a more valuable subset of your traffic instead of everything. Seems like an obvious choice for a google acquisition though given how deeply it's linking with analytics.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (not my site btw)</comment>


Show HN: Pixz – Instagram for Groups and Events - <AUTHOR> People are sharing less of their personal lives on social media. Only 39% report using social media to stay in touch with what friends and family are doing. Most people are sharing photos with MMS, which is time-consuming, inefficient, and get buried in lines of text.
I am the founder of Pixz: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixz/id1491306184
Pixz allows users to:
- Create private groups for any occasion and/or audience
- Take photos that are shared instantly and privately within group
- Upload up to 5 photos at a time with separate captions
- Crowdsource photos from group members at events without uploads or hashtags
- Schedule groups to prevent members from posting photos before or after an event
- Download full-resolution photos from group members
Whether you are planning a special occasion, hanging out with friends, or simply want to share life's one-off moments privately, Pixz allows users to easily and quickly share photos with one another. <comment><AUTHOR> 300% growth in 2 weeks. Read our first newsletter [https://mailchi.mp/2fa56a0eb3ee/introducing-pixz-weve- launch...](https://mailchi.mp/2fa56a0eb3ee/introducing-pixz-weve-launched)</comment>


What These Medical Journals Don't Reveal: Top Doctors' Ties to Industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/health/medical-journals-conflicts-of-interest.html <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to expand this reasoning to other STEM disciplines.

For example, would computer science researchers be more likely to express cynicism of self driving cars if there weren't lucrative jobs in industry or lucrative research contracts from car manufacturers (see [https://www.csail.mit.edu/sponsors/strategic- partners](https://www.csail.mit.edu/sponsors/strategic-partners) for an example)?

I mean there must be dozens of self driving car efforts thousands of highly compensated CS researchers. Millions of dollars in academic partnerships. Is that not influential?

Would there be more cynicism about the safety narrative of these cars? Tenured academic computer science and AI researchers are the __best positioned __in society to comment on how realistic those claims are. But I 'd argue the money has disincentivized them from saying so.

<comment><USER3> The FDA's regulatory process for the approval and marketing of drugs is a factor in how this disclosure system/mentality in pharmaceuticals came to be. U.S. drug companies cannot advertise drugs for uses beyond what they've been explicitly approved for. But doctors have the freedom to prescribe whatever they want — e.g. fentanyl approved for cancer-related pain could theoretically be prescribed by a doctor for migraines. The ostensible purpose of financial disclosure is to mitigate the problem of doctors being incentivized to prescribe inappropriate based on their ties to a pharma company.

Tech doesn't operate under such strict regulation, e.g. Tesla's Autopilot isn't forced to issue verbose disclaimers like the kind you hear for a TV drug ad.

<comment><USER4> While that's correct prescribing drugs outside of their approved protocols can open you to malpractice, the problem with painkillers is that as far as I know there haven't been any successful malpractice suits due to addiction in all honesty the best way to stop to over prescription of opioids isn't to take the pharmaceuticals to court it's to take the doctors.

A few cases that would set a precedence in pain management related addiction and doctors would be much less likely to prescribe them as freely as they do now.

I never understood this oddly American thing about "comfort" when undergoing medical procedures form dental procedures to surgery it seems like while the rest of the world is OK with some pain and discomfort in the US they'll pump you up with pain killers and anestetics until you don't feel a thing.

I got two root canals done with only a mild local anesthetic it wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't terrible and I see these videos of people coming out of the densit in the US high on I don't know what barely knowing where they are and it's simply mind boggling.

<comment><USER5> >I never understood this oddly American thing about "comfort" when undergoing medical procedures form dental procedures to surgery it seems like while the rest of the world is OK with some pain and discomfort in the US they'll pump you up with pain killers and anestetics until you don't feel a thing.

It was this oddly American thing about "comfort" that resulted in the invention of anesthesia for surgery in the United States. The reduction of patient discomfort has been one of the big themes of American medicine since.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work in Oncology. A mobile battery service came over to replace a flat car battery. I was chatting to the guy while he was changing it over, and he said quite casually "Is it true what they say, that cancer has been cured and the pharmaceutical companies are hiding it so they can make money?" [1].

Obviously this is a silly question, but scandals like this ongoing COI drama probably do disproportionate damage to the public's perception of cancer care. Varying degrees of this mistrust must be dealt with each time a patient sees their oncologist. For that reason, Burris and the rest of them should be punished, he certainly should not become the next president of ASCO.

[1] Never mind that I could have equally asked "Is it true what they say, that infinitely rechargeable batteries have been invented, and the battery companies are hiding it just to make money?".</comment>


Why the Piloted Flight Speed Record Hasn't Been Broken in 50 Years - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvj5vp/piloted-aircraft-flight-speed-record-1967-nasa-air-force-william-knight-x-15 <comment><USER2> This article is not complete without talking about the Space Shuttle. On reentry, "speeds are near 17,500 mph and the Mach number M is nearly twenty five, M < 25."[1]

Evidently the design of aircraft that can fly above the piloted flight speed record is available, and it can be made safe enough (ok, 2 space shuttles exploded but with further development can be made safer)

I agree that it's a matter of political and economic will, and the introduction of the unpiloted drone changes the picture, but at least for the time that the space shuttle was in operation, humans piloted aircraft for much faster than the official speed record.

[1] [https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/BGH/hihyper.html](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/BGH/hihyper.html)

<comment><USER3> The Space Shuttle isn't powered during re-entry, is it? I think in the context of records, "flight" usually is taken to mean self-powered flight, otherwise it gliding (or falling).

<comment><USER4> There are a number of sources that refer to the Space Shuttle Orbiter as a 'flying brick' and that it doesn't fly as much as 'falls with style'.

Sure it's fast, but nobody's sure if it flies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some of the ideas in the pipeline for high-altitude launch to orbit vehicles and hybrid vehicles employing scramjets may exceed this. Assuming the current arc toward private advance aerospace projects continues, I wouldn't be surprised to see things like sub-orbital passenger flights that exceed that speed. (Edit: that last may depend on what the precise definition of "entirely within the atmosphere" is).

</comment><comment><USER6> What defines a flight speed record? Why doesn't the Space Shuttle count (it was going four times as fast during reentry)?

<comment><USER7> The Space Shuttle lands as an unpowered glider.

<comment><USER6> So? It doesn't say "powered flight speed record."

<comment><USER8> I believe they're using a definition of flight that includes "powered". If you're gliding, you're always either losing speed, losing altitude, or both. In flight, you can increase those.

<comment><USER9> I agree. In one case you are "driving" the other you are just riding. Not sure whether "powered" or "human controlled" is appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At a certain point it becomes kind of pointless, as a suborbital rocket starts to make more sense than a hypersonic aircraft.

</comment><comment><USER11> I find it absurd that we are spending half as much on military spending as we did around WWII, despite not being in a World War. What value are we getting for our money? How am I supposed to feel that a significant amount of my taxes go to Predator drones bombing people across the globe, occasionally including innocent civilians, instead of feeding, clothing, and educating downtrodden people back home? How does this spending compare to other countries?

<comment><USER12> Our military expenditures are high, but not so amazingly out of proportion as people assume: [http://blogs- images.forbes.com/niallmccarthy/files/2015/06/2...](http://blogs- images.forbes.com/niallmccarthy/files/2015/06/20150625_Defense_GDP_Fo1.jpg). The U.S. is at 3.5% of GDP, less than Israel (5.2%) but more than France or the U.K. (both 2.2%).

Israel is an unusual circumstance, in that it's surrounded by hostile countries, but so is the U.S. We _de facto_ bankroll the western world's exercise of military force around the world. It's not like the U.K. or France don't care about terrorism--if we weren't in Iraq or Afghanistan, they very well might be.

It's also misleading to look at inflation-adjusted figures. Inflation does a poor job of measuring the changing costs of things that aren't mass-produced consumer goods. The cost of microprocessor fabs, for example, has grown far in excess of inflation over the past few decades.

Automation and Chinese manufacturing has driven down the cost of say furniture, but military expenditures don't scale like that. Even solider pay has far exceeded inflation: Bottom-rung pay for an enlisted solider was about $50/month back then, or $700/month in today's dollars. The bottom-rung pay today is about $1,700/month. Likewise, custom-made weapons systems are produced by ever bigger teams of scientists and engineers, whose own salaries have far exceeded inflation. To use a private-sector example: while the 757 was developed for about $5 billion in today's dollars, the 787 cost at least $15 billion.

Better to look at spending as a percentage of GDP. Today, we spend half as much in inflation-adjusted dollars, but also our economy is almost 9 times larger.

<comment><USER13> 3.5% of GDP. But something like 15% of our revenue. And more than 50% of discretionary spending.

So, of the money we get to direct each year to support American interests, half goes to the military.

<comment><USER12> > So, of the money we get to direct each year to support American interests, > half goes to the military.

Well no, because the portion of the budget that's non-discretionary spending also goes towards supporting American interests, and so does state and local spending.

Also, the relatively high percentage of the budget spent on defense simply reflects the fact that government in the U.S. is more limited in scope. _E.g._ the U.S. spends about 9.3% of state and federal expenditures on the military, versus about 5.9% in the U.K. But the U.K. has nationalized healthcare, and we do not. If the U.K. privatized their health system, their military expenditures as a percentage of their budget would go up; likewise our percentage would go down if we raised taxes to U.K. levels to fund a nationalized health system. But the appropriate size of each country's military doesn't change depending on whether healthcare is privatized or not. It's an entirely orthogonal issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Senators Want To Punish Nokia, Siemens Over Iran - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20090629_3881.php <comment><USER2> Get your own house in order

<http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying></comment>


Fixing Google Analytics for Ghostery - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/fixing-google-analytics-for-ghostery/ <comment><USER2> I'm not convinced the defined _track_ function is fixing what's described. If following Google's instruction for "installing" _ga.js_ [0], there shouldn't be any sites breaking that block _ga.js_ from loading. That is, Google suggests _var _gaq = _gaq || [];_ at the start of the script installation. If _ga.js_ never loads, __gaq_ is still an array and can be pushed onto to your heart's content. If you're concerned with an ever growing array of garbage, the suggestion in the comments is great:

      __gaq = __gaq || {push: function(){return 0}}

[0] [https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/asyncTracking)

<comment><USER3> If that's the case then there are a lot of sites that are willfully ignoring the correct snippet. Perhaps this was something new that they added recently - or perhaps there's a frequently-incorrect snippet that's copied?

<comment><USER4> No, it's not particular new or regularly misimplemented.

It's usually implementing cross-domain tracking that breaks things, not regular use of GA, because it does `return false` in an onclick handler.

I have some fixes for that here: <https://github.com/yahelc/GA-Better- Crossdomain-Tracking>

<comment><USER3> The issue you outline is tangential (but still important). The issues I'm seeing are actual exceptions occurring where sites are missing the reference to the GA object, not issues with _link tracking and redirects.

<comment><USER4> Can you provide live examples? `_gaq.push([]);` shouldn't result in any errors with Ghostery. I'm curious as to what's happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I see this more frequently, sites are adding dependencies on third-party Javascript for tracking, and when they are unresponsive (or blocked with something like Ghostery) the site's functionality breaks.

This is especially worrying for e-commerce sites, you don't want to prevent people adding things to the cart and losing orders.

<comment><USER6> I've seen that a couple of months ago on the page of a big airline. Since I had google-analytics.com domain blocked in HOSTS, it took me a while to realize the issue. However it was the only time it happened to me in many years (other than deliberate "please disable adblock to see the page"). Very soon they redesigned the whole page and now it works fine.

<comment><USER7> Was that United Airlines? A few months ago their reservation site broke for me with AdBlock/Ghostery. I just used a different browser entirely, but in retrospect I suspect it may have been Ghostery's fault.

<comment><USER6> Nope, it was LOT (national Polish carrier). Not that big as United ;) but significant in central Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was poking around at NoScript surrogates for GA the other day, I reformatted the code they're using in a comment here[1]

Seems to be using the special (to FF, at least) __noSuchMethod__ property[2] to catch all calls to the GA object.

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5182359>

[2] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/JavaScript/Referenc...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Object/noSuchMethod)

</comment><comment><USER9> I have not been so fan of most of google work. I do have Gmail account, but that's it. In the past I used use other services such as, search, websites, doc, Google+, ... but not any more. Even Chrome, I use it for testing and nothing else.

Few years back, Chrome has launched what is been described as Evil EUlA [<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+chrome+evil+eula>] because of what the EULA at that time contained, as fellowing:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Now its been changed: 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.

Although they clean their evil mistake but i never used Chrome, i lost respect for them.

As its clear Google search engine is the best even after Bing attempts. But still i don't trust them, I see they know more about me as user while using their search. I did not need that much time to find out they do collect data, track every thing I search for. Recently I ran into [<http://www.duckduckgo.com>] where they set them self different from Google as "We believe in better search and not tracking." Then i said bye bye google search.

I have ghostery installed in Firefox and I love it. Basically I block any script for Analytics, tracking, privacy and advertising. Check out what AdSense do behind the scene: [<http://www.ghostery.com/apps/google_adsense>]

Data Collected: Anonymous (Ad Views, Analytics, Browser Information, Cookie Data , Date/Time, Demographic Data, Hardware/Software Type, Interaction Data , Page Views , Serving Domains) Pseudonymous (IP Address (EU PII), Search History, Location Based Data, Device ID (EU PII)) PII (Phone Number)

Data Sharing: Anonymous data is shared with 3rd parties.

As you see while you are searching your info (which google got them for free, because you trust them or you don't know) is been sold for third parties.

I want to feel safe and not been watched for what I browse and search online. That's why I like my new trust search engine [<http://www.duckduckgo.com>]

<comment><USER10> StartPage.com is nice too. Others here, including me, do not like what Google does much of the time either. But I do respect Go, Android, and Gmail. The other stuff, not as much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One thing that you need to keep in mind -- if you back-off from CDN loading to loading a local copy, you'll almost never be testing that scenario so be careful that a massive influx of local requests in a CDN-is-down scenario doesn't melt things. It brings up a broader topic of reliability testing.. every one of these branches inserted into the code creates another point at which performance/load metrics change. Testing all the various combinations can be difficult.

<comment><USER12> Actually, a cool ghostery-like expansion would be replacing CDN links with things stored inside the extension. This would both save some web requests, and let me completely ignore google's CDN in case I feel particularly paranoid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> AFAIK, no site breaks, even if you block them totally via hosts or Ghostery.

<comment><USER14> Until someone makes a call to window.gaq which doesn't exist because you've blocked GA, which causes their JS to bail out.</comment></comment>


What can startups to do help in the Coronavirus pandemic? We have about 8 weeks - <AUTHOR> A hashtag: #FLUSTARTUP
Come on, there's 8 weeks of fairly-contained virus before the hockey stick goes vertical. Long enough for companies to form or pivot. Key areas:
1) education for kids who will be out of school
2) cheap, low-cost respirators - can CPAP machines be adapted? what about vacuum cleaners - run one as a pressure source, pipes and valves, serve 5 patients.
@lucasgonzalez
3) masks designed for prolonged use by entire populations. https://theconversation.com/copper-is-great-at-killing-superbugs-so-why-dont-hospitals-use-it-73103 CU adjustment tabs etc Copper is great at killing superbugs – so why don't hospitals use it? Lack of knowledge and perceived cost issues could be holding back the fight against the superbugs.
4) Apps to coordinate check-ins on elderly relatives - have somebody in quality flu-blocking gear look in on mom, make sure she has her meds etc. #PandemicPostmates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fureai_kippu if you want a currency aspect, it works in Japan
5) Everything remote work. Everything.
6) @Uber but what turns up is a Tesla in biodefense mode, with a driver who's taking his temperature four times a day with spare masks and hand sanitizer for passengers. Do this!
7) Same thing, but for grocery deliveries.
8) Expect supply chain problems. Sharing app for items?
9) Parents are possibly exposed. You need eldercare. You need to get the kids out of the house. Helpers who are immune to flu because they've had it once are ideal for these roles. A "survivor work register" could be really key to lots of jobs.
10) Who's quick-training nurses to do a lot of flu-related stuff that used to need doctors? Who's training former-patients to do a lot of stuff that used to be done by nurses? The longer this goes on, the more probably-immune survivors you have to work in these critical roles. <comment><USER2> Looking at online education and news feed curation; overloaded with data seems to be everyone.

Reviewing basic health practices

Curated neighborhood or otherwise localized systems for communication, right now it's in telegram or whatsapp groups. Standardized communications.

low cost air purification tech, is of high interest.

</comment><comment><USER3> Open source pandemic ventilator (strongly suggested to not actually build or use by medical professionals in thread.) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22453100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22453100)</comment>


Accurate iPad 2 Case from Dec-2010. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2010/12/09/yet-another-ipad-2-case-surfaces/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, another link, from engadget:

[http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/09/alleged-ipad-2-cases- show...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/09/alleged-ipad-2-cases-show-up-with- some-interesting-cuts-video/)

Surprised by this one. It's exactly right. Camera position, size and position of speaker, etc. Posted 5-Dec-2010.</comment>


Create web apps in JavaScript right from your browser - <AUTHOR> http://akshell.com

<comment><USER2> Thank you _so much_ for making this. I'm learning to program, and an intern at a place where I can't use my computer, can't install anything on their windows machines, and have a lot of free time. You just made my life a LOT better.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like you need to get a better internship =]

Mind you, if it pays well and you have enough spare time to pursue your own interests then it might not be such a bad thing overall!

<comment><USER4> Maybe we should start paying you for building Akshell apps for our clients? That way you can do what you enjoy and get paid for it, while getting your CV points as well ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You've no idea how good it is to see an IDE on an iPad. Editing doesn't seem to work, but so what; it's _there_

<comment><USER4> We are aware of this and are working on an on screen keyboard, kind of like this: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/integrating- virtual-k...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/integrating-virtual- keyboards-in-google.html)

To answer the question below: we would need a custom layout to ensure all the curly brackets and other common JS chars are one tap away

<comment><USER6> Why not use the buit-in keyboard-UI in the iPad?

<comment><USER7> It looks like the UI uses an editable div. I believe that editable divs do not trigger the built in keyboard on an iPhone, and there's no way to force it to do so.

<comment><USER6> Alright, but shouldn't the solution be to allow the user to use either Google's keyboard or the built-in(by using textarea)?

The built-in one has a dictionary and some autocompletion, which could be good or annoying... :)

<comment><USER4> Most likely annoying if you're writing code.

<comment><USER8> Yes, a custom keyboard for this kind of app should include the necessary buttons for JavaScript. Curly braces, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty good timing given we (Akshell) submitted to YC last night. Bad timing in the sense that I've only had two hours of sleep.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good work. As author of Ace (the source code editor) I'm always happy to see it being used. Do you guys have Cappuccino bindings for Ace you might consider sharing?

<comment><USER4> Sure, happy to share anything you find useful and thank you for the awesome work on Ace! Please send us an email here <http://groups.google.com/group/akshell> and we'll take it from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In a similar vein, people should check out Ares SDK from Palm for WebOS. It is an entirely browser based IDE for creating apps for WebOS, which are also written using their Javascript/HTML/CSS based APIs.

edit: <https://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> Can somebody who has used both Akshell and Cloud9 IDE post a brief comparison?

<comment><USER12> I didn't used both but gave try to bespin when it appeared (it evolved to cloud9 as i know) and liked. it's an advantage to have a universal gui, to not ignore users of other platforms.

btw, i put some effort to build an online ide 4 years ago. i stopped maintaining it because my dream tool was evolved to firebug lite. anyway, my died ide can be seen at vimeo.com/azer for some web nostalgia

<comment><USER13> Just a small correction, Bespin evolved into Ace (which Akshell uses as their code editor), which was created by the guys that created Cloud9 (Ajax.org). Cloud9 is the actual IDE that uses Ace as its code editor.

Find ace here: <http://ace.ajax.org> and Cloud9 here: <http://c9.io>

<comment><USER12> thanks for correcting. I've tried akshell also, it seems great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's really impressive. I've been working on a web only code editor for a few weeks (on and off), so I can appreciate the work gone into this.

They built it using Objective-J (according to the source code).

</comment><comment><USER15> It took a while before I could find anything about the possibility to run on own/3-party servers.

So far this is the most specific I've found:

        The engine will be open sourced soon to eliminate the
        vendor lock-in: you'll be able to launch Akshell
        apps on your own server.

Anyone else knows the details?

Edit: Found some more details: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261786>

</comment><comment><USER16> This is really cool. Your docs are well put together, and simple. It looks like you put a decent amount of time into them, which I really appreciate. Too many apps write the docs as an after-thought just before launch.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is it just me or is the Name field actually a single word "username"?

I tried my name with space, it did not work but a single username worked just fine! If latter, you might want to change the Name: field to Username:.

<comment><USER4> You're right, we're changing the copy to "Username". We also want to encourage people to use the same username as on GitHub to make way for tighter integration with GitHub in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Impressive. May I ask what libraries do you use for the menubar and all UI widgets?

Also, is the web a "pretty proxy" that redirect _everything_ to a node.js server which does the actual work?

<comment><USER19> It's a kind of a Javascript framework called Cappucino, I assume.

<comment><USER4> Correct, link here: <http://cappuccino.org/>

<comment><USER17> Just for the sake of references, the same is also possible with 280 North!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> yogsototh thank you for submitting this. We are seeing 150 or so concurrent users on the site due to this at the moment. I'm retweeting some of the other online reactions we're getting at <https://twitter.com/akshell_com>

<comment><USER20> Interesting tweet: "... someone made the old @heroku for node.js" -- did Heroku start out as a browser-based app builder?

<comment><USER21> Yes, Heroku was the first. I tried it out. It was fun, but I think they realised that though it was a novel idea, it was not the _Big Idea_, and they replaced it with what they now have. That's pretty inspiring when you consider how much work they threw away and how that decision has been rewarded.

<comment><USER4> Maybe the timing was just wrong? The browsers are fast enough now and users, including developers, are much more comfortable with web apps.

<comment><USER22> I think it was less about speed and more about trying to replace peoples' editor / workflow. People are very particular about the tools they use and putting the editor and deployment in the browser doesn't do much in terms of productivity (and probably more counterproductive than anything else)

Screenshot: [http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/2/7/write-rails-apps- in-y...](http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/2/7/write-rails-apps-in-your- browser)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cool, but as a developer I'm having trouble seeing the market fit.

Like many devs, I have my preferred IDE and I'm religious about it. And I'm fine with running my own server if it means I don't have to commit to a new proprietary framework; that's kind of a huge deal.

I can see the benefit to budding web developers looking to get started, but those are probably also least likely to be paying for dev tools. This seems to be your approach in the docs, though.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER24> The Akshell engine will be open sourced soon, it will eliminate the problem of vendor lock-in. We strongly believe that web-based development environment are the future; so we'll improve our IDE and add more advanced features to it to provide cool experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks great! Do you think you'll be including support for CoffeeScript?

<comment><USER24> Yes, we think about it. CoffeeScript support should be easy to implement and seamless to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great work, congratulations!

\- Can you make the save-preview-reload cycle (much) faster? I found out that command-S triggered a Save, that's great. Does "Preview" have a keyboard shortcut as well? Could you have tooltips (when 'mouseovering' the toolbar icons) show the keyboard shortcut?

In TextWrangler (and BBEdit in the past), I have F1 as the "Run" item of the shebang menu. It even works with unsaved files; developing/testing in Python gets addictive: type, F1, type, F1, etc. (yes, yes, I think before I type... ;-) it's still nice to be able to quickly run your code..!)

\- Will it be possible to console.log() strings and/or objects?

<comment><USER24> Thank you for the suggestions! We'll add shortcuts and tooltips. We were rather conservative about it because wanted to collect some feedback.

The IDE will have real-time console for logging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very cool, now if someone could just make a Javascript IDE that works on the desktop, I'm just beginning to work in node.js and do most of my PHP in NetBeans, I really want an IDE that recognises that a project can be JS!

<comment><USER4> We are considering HTML5 offline support. So essentially you could do all the editing locally and even test/run the modules that don't have core library dependencies from within the browser rather than on the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Took an hour and a bit yesterday to improve my eBay listings, like so: <http://tinyurl.com/67dou5n> (link to the app, not eBay).

<comment><USER4> That's neat Roman, didn't know you were working on this. I'll have to put you in touch with somebody else who wanted to build an eBay app on top of Akshell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Be nice to see a non-OSX skin. :P

<comment><USER4> You could write your own, the interface is fairly open and Firebug is all you need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Slick design, however, I don't understand the buttons. Why is 'eval' a joystick and commit a box?

Also, whenever I hit Preview I get a 500.

<comment><USER4> We're changing that joystick to a VCR like play button.

The commit one being a box hints at a shell or terminal, since we couldn't find an official Git icon. Could maybe put the GitHub Octocat there - what do you think?

<comment><USER31> How about the icon from the Git website?

        ---
        +++

<http://git-scm.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> * A little bit faster. It's just fine for typing, but the menus and toolbar are a little bit slow.

* Why only GIT? Support Mercurial with bitbucket if possible.

* Add a context menu when user right clicks the mouse. It's important to have a copy/paste feature for files for example.

... and I'll move my JavaScript coding to it.

</comment><comment><USER33> awesome work, but FWIW, the first thing I get in the git console for help is two lines of "undefined", and an internal server error for "lol" in the eval screen, using chrome on ubuntu. But you are probably being overloaded ATM so I'll just wait and try again later :)

<comment><USER4> Yes, we're being hammered pretty hard. Thanks for pointing this out, will look into it right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Stupid question but what colorscheme is used for the editor? It's so easy on eyes.

<comment><USER24> It's a standard colorscheme of the Ace editor <http://ace.ajax.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have Firefox "3.6.16pre," through Ubuntu.

When I try to access the app, it tells me that my browser isn't supported and sends me to mozilla.com to download... Firefox 3.6.15

Version check bug?

<comment><USER24> Have you tweaked the User Agent header? We just check for the 'Gecko' substring in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow, this looks really great.

One small suggestion: can you s/git// on the git shell? because I'm really used to type "git <cmd>" in a shell and it's hard to change the habit.

<comment><USER24> Thank you! We'll do something about it. May be we'll have a more universal console, where git will be only one of the commands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fantastic job. You made great progress on the IDE.

To get people's trust to invest work into your platform, it is essential to provide a solution running on a server of their choice.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty cool, we made a top tweet: <https://twitter.com/#!/hakimel/status/49800596823351297>

</comment><comment><USER38> Thanks, now I'm not going to pay attention in class... :)

<comment><USER4> What class is this? If it's anything programming related, perhaps we can introduce Akshell into the curriculum? I'm already talking to some universities in Europe.

<comment><USER38> Some worthless Communication class, I'm all for introducing Akshell into that class!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Great stuff. Thanks! It would be cool if left side panel be collapsible also not just draggable. In manner as it in visual studio.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've been thinking about building something like this, but haven't had the time. I'm glad to see someone did it!

</comment><comment><USER41> Well. This is a good way to make my JS looking insignificant by comparison.

<comment><USER42> Looks like it's built on Cappuccino:

<http://cappuccino.org/>

It's only recently become viable to use because of the performance improvements all the browsers have been making to their javascript engines. Last time I tried 280 slides it was painfully laggy (<http://280slides.com/Editor/>).

Not that I'm belittling the effort, it's pretty amazing work nonetheless.

But have a play with cappuccino if you want to see what's doable!

<comment><USER41> Yeah. I saw a 280North presentation at FOWA Miami a few years back. Those guys are great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Looks very well done. What I don't like is that is has a slow feel to it.

<comment><USER4> We're working to optimize it as much as we can. Which browser/OS/hardware are you on? If you're not on Chrome, can you try running it in that first and let me know if you see a speed increase?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Nice job. a portable js IDE !

</comment><comment><USER45> That's really cool.

</comment><comment><USER46> No love for IE9?!

<comment><USER4> It works, but there are slight rendering errors with popups. We wanted to make sure it was perfect before officially supporting it. If you're really keen to see it in IE, you can fake the user agent headers to pretend to be Firefox or Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> awesome stuff!</comment>


Ask HN: I'm looking for my first Elec. Eng. job, what should I ask? - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to finish my PhD in electrical engineering (communications area). I've gone straight through my education so I don't have much "real world company" experience, but I'm a very hands on engineer and I have a lot of experience actually building things. What sort of questions should I be asking of the companies and engineering teams that I'll be interviewing with? How do I identify the style of management and engineering? How do I figure out if the other engineers care about their jobs? <comment><USER2> I'm not from an EE background, but I would imagine that the questions I like to ask would also apply to you to help gauge a possible employer.

1) What's your day like? 2) What would you say are some of the biggest challenges you face today? 3) ( Maybe this is more IT oriented ) How does work come in? by Project? Ticketing system?</comment>


Unstoppable Domains - <AUTHOR> https://unstoppabledomains.com/ <comment><USER2> Unstoppable, unless you try to register "FederalReserve" or "BankOfEngland".

Unstoppable, unless you try to register in anything other than Latin script (the rest of the world exists, you know!)

<comment><USER3> Domain names have to be a subset of ASCII, so you have to use a Latin script. However, you could use Punycode to represent non-ASCII Unicode characters, if they do not somehow prohibit that, I suppose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can it be used with email and NNTP and so on?

<comment><USER4> As far as I can see from the developer documentation [0], the domains resolve to a set of blockchain addresses and some meta-information about the owner. Using this for email would be non-trivial, especially considering it's an alternate root and thus is not supported by any major email provider that I know of.

[0] [https://docs.unstoppabledomains.com/#tag/domain_name_resolut...](https://docs.unstoppabledomains.com/#tag/domain_name_resolution/paths/~1{domain}/get)</comment></comment>


Predictions about 2020 made in 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20100414011424/http:/angryhacker.com/blog/archive/2010/01/03/14-predictions-for-2020.aspx <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the line from Fredrik Pohl:

"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."

The author has focused mostly on predicting the car. But I think it's much more thought-provoking to try to predict the traffic jam.

For example, the author was spot on regarding batteries:

> There will be a massively noticeable jump in the battery technology. If > today, we are struggling to get the hybrid plug-ins on the road, in 10 > years, electric vehicles will rule. Why? Because right now there are way too > many people are working on improving the batteries – someone is bound to > make a breakthrough. Most new vehicles sold will be electric.

What traffic jam-like consequences happen when every car is electric? Unless solar makes the giant leap forward predicted by the author, demands on the power grid shoot through the roof. That kind of centralization can make attacks of the kind described in the new book "Sandworm" even worse. The book describes the ways in which malware is being used to bring down critical infrastructure like power grids.

This one's also worth mentioning:

> Facebook will be history. People will simply get bored with it. It will be > replaced by another fad.

Let's say it's true. What traffic jams could this cause? One that comes to mind is that what replaces Facebook is even worse along one or more axes. Less privacy. Greater addiction. Ever more centralization of the Web.</comment>


OpenGenera 2.0 Virtual Machine Environment - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ynniv/opengenera <comment><USER2> Fails to explain what "opengenera" is and why I would want to run it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right it should have an introduction where it does mention what it is. This project might be in need of some love.

Open Genera is the Genera OS[1][2] which used to be run on Symbolics Machine. Open Genera[3] is the Genera OS running in a virtual machine.

[1] [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GeneraOs](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GeneraOs)

[2] [http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/symbolics/](http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/symbolics/) (mentioned on the wiki)

[3] [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OpenGenera](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OpenGenera)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This emulator version does not work very well. Not really worth the effort.

One can buy an official version of Open Genera at:

[http://www.symbolics-dks.com](http://www.symbolics-dks.com)

<comment><USER4> No information except a set of very old (still interesting, but old) snapshots of what appears to be a catalog of their products, and an admonishment to contact a person to learn more.

This is usually understood as enterprise-speak for "we don't want to give you a price, and if you have to ask, you can't afford it."

<comment><USER5> The most recent price list I got from David Schmidt @ Symbolics (2/23/10):

"Thank you for your request for information about Symbolics and our products. Our Open Genera software for HP/Compaq/DEC Alpha workstations running Tru64 Unix costs $5,000 for a single CPU license. There is an academic discount for students and teachers that brings the price down to $999. You should have a 300 mHz or greater Alpha workstation with at least 500 MB RAM, 4 MB cache and 1 GB of available disk space. Besides selling Open Genera and maintaining the installed base of Symbolics machines, we also sell refurbished Symbolics hardware. There is no hardcopy documentation, but there is complete documentation available on the hard disk of each system."

As of a few months ago when I checked, he said they no longer sell refurb hardware, keeping the remaining stock for service contracts/warranty work/etc.</comment></comment></comment>


GitHub or BitBucket or GoogleCode - <AUTHOR>

Hello All,
I am thinking of writing some code for fun and learning part. I am not sure which one of the repository to choose.
GitHub seems to be more popular as it is used by Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo etc.
GitHub is build on Git revision system developed by linus torvalds while BitBucket is build on Mercurial revision which I have just used.
Google code:- I have 3 independent projects already hosted on them.
I want to choose on the factors of:- a) Availability of plugins for Mac and Eclipse.
b) Easy to share my home directory and projects when going for resume. Although, I am sure I am not coding anything great but who knows. Someday.
c) Great pricing plans: GitHub allows you to make unlimited Public repositories while BitBucket gives 1 GB of free private space.
d) Any other important factors which developers considering while choosing revision system.
I also like the social aspect in GitHub where I can follow users.
Any suggestions.
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> I would go with git because git is what the cool kids use. At least, this is why I chose it. Herding mentality generally isn't a good reason, but herding works in figuring out who you want to work with.

</comment><comment><USER3> GitHub is very polished and they add useful features like pull requests, issue tracking, code comparison view, etc. often.

They are very well setup for "social", open source coding projects. It's easy to fork someone's repo, add a fix then issue a pull request to them.</comment>


How much control should our users have? - <AUTHOR> http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/02/how_much_contro.html <comment><USER2> news.ycombinator should let us redesign arc.</comment>


CNN apologizes to Julian Assange after commentator calls him 'a pedophile' - angry-hacker http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/cnn-apologizes-assange-commentator-calls-pedophile-article-1.2935083 <comment><AUTHOR> Putting aside for a moment the mechanism of this particular error (seemingly a slip-of-the-tongue), how has "pedophile" become the "witch" of our age?

Not even "child-molester," mind you, but "pedophile."

My concern is that this phenomenon can quite easily be activated by fake network traffic - it seems quite plausible to me that a person can be targeted for demonization (or worse) simply by fabricating the appearance of child pornography being transmitted, and now not only is the accusation very difficult to disprove (and yes, the illusory nature of the presumption of innocence is another related topic), but also casts the accused into the worst possible social characterization.

<comment> angry-hacker Reminds me Daycare sex abuse and satanic ritual hysteria.[0]

First, it's hysteria and then it becomes some kind of a "regular insult". This horrible name is being used so often that it has lost its meaning, which in return if catastrophic for the real victims.

[0]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex- abuse_hysteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria)</comment></comment>