Five advanced Git merge techniques - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/01/advanced-git-merge/ <comment><USER2> `git pull --rebase` is very useful if you use git with an authoritative remote repo, treating your own repo as having disposable history.

In fact, you can make it the default! Just do: `git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always` and every branch you create from now on will be set up to rebase without needing the manual `--rebase`.

Existing branches you can switch by doing: `git config branch.[branch- name].rebase true` in the repo.

<comment> trust-me Ufff, I must be doing something very wrong. Once in a while rebase continue will just fail with cryptic error messages and nothing but a hard reset will let me continue using the repository. Never had a problem with regular git pull.

<comment> X-Istence What are the cryptic error messages?

The only one that I know if is the message stating that the commit is empty ...

In that case simple use git rebase --skip, to skip applying that patch. That tends to happen when after you fix the "merge" conflict after replaying a patch and the changeset is empty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe a bit off-topic, but still on the topic of git and merge conflicts:

Soon I will have to do a pretty big merge, with so many conflicts expected that I don't know if I can resolve them in one day. So usually when I have such a non-minimal task, I create a branch for it. Is there any sensible way to do a merge in a branch, and resolve the conflicts on a file-by-file base, with separate commits for each one?

Or maybe some other way to break down many merge conflicts into several small pieces?

(We have a heavily patched version of an open source project at $work, and whenever there is a new upstream release, merging is a huge pain. We do try to contribute some of our changes back to upstream, but many changes are simply too specific to go upstream).

<comment><USER4> Doing a big git pull frequently leads to trouble. The rerere command might be particularly useful for recurring conflicts.

[http://notes.envato.com/developers/rebasing-merge-commits- in...](http://notes.envato.com/developers/rebasing-merge-commits-in-git/)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2874968>

<http://git-scm.com/2010/03/08/rerere.html>

<comment><USER3> The conflicts aren't recurring, there are just many of them :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> rerere (`git config --global rerere.enabled true`) is a useful configuration that allows you to record the merge resolution. Especially useful when rebasing a branch several times to follow upstream or when working with a long-lived feature branch that you wish to ensure applies cleanly. It makes following rebases / merges much quicker.

<http://git-scm.com/2010/03/08/rerere.html>

[https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git- rerere....](https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-rerere.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Number five (rebase instead of merge) is what we started doing shortly before we started using Gerrit. If you've ever gotten sick of seeing all those "merging" commit messages in git, it's worth trying.

</comment><comment><USER7> So when I create a new branch, do stuff and want to merge back to master, I should rebase instead ? (assuming nothing else was done such as pushing elsewhere etc).

<comment> trust-me Yeap, the advice here is that you should use `pull --rebase` instead of `pull`. What that does is it eliminates the merge commit to the "central" branch (e.g. on github). That is it fakes the history to look as if you started to work on a branch with all the commits applied and so there were no merges necessary.

<comment><USER8> I suppose you are talking about making pull requests for an upstream repository owned by someone else (typically : making a pull request to an open source project), in which case you ask to merge your master in their master ?

When working on a repository where you make a pull request from a feature branch to master in the same repos (typically : your company private repos), I would rather merge the feature branch in master rather than rebasing it, at least to know at which point a dev work has been merged.

The same logic stand, though. If developer has used several branches to build her feature, I don't want to know about it : she must rebase them instead of merging them.

Additionally, I like pull requests to master branch to be in a single, well documented commit. So I encourage developers to make a lot of small commits, then use `git rebase -i` to squash them into a single commit with a long and detailed commit message (the one-line previous commit messages being used to write a changelog). Using github, this has the advantage that the commit message of a single commit pull request is automatically pre-filled as pull request message.</comment></comment></comment>


Watson sizes up one of his opponents before the show - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2011/2/15yudkin.html

<comment><USER2> No doubt IBM is getting mega-publicity out of this for a very reasonable price; it it quite the feat though in terms of the programming. Lot's of NSA implications I'm sure.

When I read this article, can't help hearing Sheldon's voice from the Big Bang Theory as opposed to Watson's. Is it just me?</comment>


A smarter SmartOS? (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://hypoalex.github.io/smartos/design/a-smarter-smartos.html <comment><USER2> The blog post is from 2016 and the referenced Github repo doesn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also there was some work done back in 2015 to use the NetBSD hier and illumos user land to start down this path . It was even shown to work back in 2006 using Solaris 10 and a super minimal install . I think both sites are long gone and someone would need to dig around archive.org to find it .

</comment><comment><USER4> You lost me at the linker part. Even now the GNU ld(1)/gold(1)/ld.so story is terrible. Limited or no support for filters and auxiliary filters, interposition control, etc? Screw that.

EDIT: Also, I rather like IPS packaging. Please explain how it sucks.

<comment><USER5> _Also, I rather like IPS packaging. Please explain how it sucks._

It's written in Python (because they wanted to attract developers) and it doesn't allow for pre- and postinstall scripts, nor does it allow pre- and postremove scripts. If you're doing very large scale configuration management with OS packaging, you're screwed really deep and really hard, because with IPS, all of that pre- and postinstall as well as pre- and postremove scripting has to be completely redesigned into self-assembly SMF methods, which is a gargantuan, extremely financially expensive effort.

It's slow, so the core parts had to be rewritten in C. Might as well have started with C to begin with.

Since they didn't want to allow scripting, they had to put in special hacks like "actuators" and driver hooks. At which point they might as well have put in scripting, but no, they remained stubborn. Another big sin. It's because both Hahn and Smaalders were/are for some bizarre reason absolutely convinced that scripting in packaging is bad and fragile, which is utter nonsense. So wrong assumption begat wrong, busted architectural decisions.

The design was actually an experiment by one Dr. Stephen Hahn. It had some good ideas like delta in-place upgrades (like SGI IRIX's inst(1M)), and incorporations (like IRIX inst(1M)'s depots) but the implementation sucks so horribly, with such horrible technical choices as Python that it should have never made it past the prototype stage. Apart from OmniOS and OpenIndiana, it is shunned by other mainstream illumos-based operating systems.

The automated installer which leverages it and was meant to replace JumpStart(TM) is an overcomplicated disaster.

The biggest sin of IPS though, is collateral damage: because IPS is so architecturally busted, sparse zones, a truly revolutionary and phenomenally useful capability had to be abandoned (to be brought back in SmartOS, thankfully).

I hate IPS with the burning passion of 30 trillion suns. Thanks, Dr. Stephen Hahn & Co.!

Post scriptum: I kept trying to tell them to license IRIX's inst(1M). They kept ignoring me. Now inst(1M) is bit rotting away in some vault and IPS is an obscure packaging mechanism preventing OmniOS from reaching its adoption potential. All around win-win.

<comment><USER4> Not allowing for {pre,post}-{install,remove} scripts is almost the key point. To be precise: IPS _does_ allow install scripting, just not immediately at pkg install/remove time but deferred so that such scripts only ever run in the context of the running OS.

Back in the days of SVR4 packaging, the scripts had to be extremely limited in what user-land features they could use because they had to be able to run in many different environments, including a) two minor releases back (so, S8 for S10 pkgs), b) netboot, c) boot media. This was insanely hard to support -- I know, because I was there at Sun.

By deferring execution of pkg scripts, IPS avoids the problem altogether. Instead, the scripts can only run in the running OS instance on which a pkg was installed (or from which it was removed).

This is much, much cleaner than traditional pkg scripting. So much so that I'm shocked this technique hasn't been more widely adopted.

<comment><USER5> _IPS does allow install scripting, just not immediately at pkg install /remove time but deferred so that such scripts only ever run in the context of the running OS._

This is patently wrong: if I'm running self assembly from SMF, that has _nothing_ to do with IPS. If I invested the tremendous amount of engineering and funding, I could do the exact same thing from SVR4 packaging, which I have done in some packages. What do I need IPS for then? I don't! But wait, there is more!:

 _Back in the days of SVR4 packaging, the scripts had to be extremely limited in what user-land features they could use because they had to be able to run in many different environments, including a) two minor releases back (so, S8 for S10 pkgs), b) netboot, c) boot media. This was insanely hard to support_

Auto- and thin client capability was ditched, so the very argument used to fuel this nonsensical course of action was made moot. And even with Auto- and thin client argument, that was not enough to justify the atrocities committed by IPS.

No thanks. If I can't have IRIX inst(1M) or HP-UX swinstall(1M), I'll stick with good old SVR4 packaging. Since Snoracle killed AutoClient and thin client support anyway, configuration management with SVR4 works wonderfully. I have my scripting in the immediate installation context for configuration management in tandem with SMF and it's great. IPS can remain an obscure packaging technology nobody's using anyway for all I care. And that is good so: it's a totally botched implementation of inst(1M) and swinstall(1M).

 _By deferring execution of pkg scripts, IPS avoids the problem altogether. Instead, the scripts can only run in the running OS instance on which a pkg was installed (or from which it was removed). This is much, much cleaner than traditional pkg scripting. So much so that I 'm shocked this technique hasn't been more widely adopted._

That is exactly what killed the adoption of IPS and severely handicapped the adoption of OpenSolaris and all operating systems which were IPS based. I cannot believe you (plural) are _still_ refusing to see it! As if the entire Solaris ecosystem didn't have enough adoption problems, this just piled on and made it far worse. To someone like me who grew up on and deeply, deeply cares about Solaris and illumos and SmartOS, it's absolutely infuriating. You made your own lives easier but it cost you the company ( _Sun Microsystems_ ), and it cost me having to primarly work on GNU/Linux based operating systems these days. We all lost.

Empathy is still a core engineering value. With IPS, there was no empathy. All your customers wanted was more freeware bundled with the OS and automatic dependency resolution for easier patching, things which could have been easily added to SVR4 packaging. They didn't need or want someone's doctoral disertation implemented as an experiment.

<comment><USER4> The SMF service that runs the scripts should really have been a first class feature of IPS, but whatever, it's there.

I don't even remember how many userlands had to be supported by SVR4 packaging at its peak, but it was a lot, and it was difficult to test. That some of those were removed eventually hardly matters: the problem remains, only slightly reduced in magnitude.

Moreover, I want less package scripting. So many Linux packages want to do stupid things like... interact with me when Ubuntu/whatever is just updating the system. It's never appropriate for, e.g., a PostgreSQL package to create a postgres account and configure a postgres service running as that account -- this is not how I want to run postgres, and if you stop this madness then suddenly a postgres pkg is just code and no pkg scripts. If doing stupid things in pkg install scripts is what you call empathy, then I want none of it.

And by the way, IPS had nothing to do with Sun's failure. That can be chalked to a long line of _terrible_ executive business decisions, such as:

         - suspending/killing x86 Solaris support in 2002
         - killing SunPS (especially considering how much money IBM made with theirs)
         - acquiring Cobalt and then promptly killing it
         - buying MySQL
         - not seeing the writing on the wall for Java ME when iOS came out
         - and much more

Oracle is not doing well either. They killed OpenSolaris, which was Sun's way to rebuild mind-share. Oracle is built on mind-share (and subsequent vendor lock-in) but they don't even know it. They gave the impression that they don't care about Solaris x86 (oops). And much more.

<comment> X-Istence > It's never appropriate for, e.g., a PostgreSQL package to create a postgres > account and configure a postgres service running as that account -- this is > not how I want to run postgres

I don't mind it creating a postgres account, but what I do mind is the package automatically enabling the service, and starting the service.

Even worse, on Linux, most packages will be helpful, for example upgrading the MongoDB package on CentOS? It'll helpfully restart the service for you.

Nevermind that you've just scripted this and it's being run on all of the servers all at once so instead of doing a nice easy rolling upgrade WHEN you are finally ready, it's done at the same time.

I hate this behaviour. Let me worry about the lifetime of processes, don't auto enable them, don't auto configure them, let me worry about making sure systemd knows it is time to start/stop them.

FreeBSD let's me upgrade packages all day long, and until I restart the service, nothing happens. That way I can upgrade the packages, make sure everything looks good, then restart the service.

<comment><USER6> I think packages starting services at install time or restarting them during upgrades is primarily Debian/Ubuntu weirdness; I don't remember seeing this behaviour with RedHat or Fedora.

Automatic startup on install is supremely annoying. There's a way to disable it on Debian at least, but it's terrible as default behaviour

<comment><USER4> SVR4 pkgs could and did do this too. I don't think it's so out of the mainstream, but it does suck.

<comment><USER5> Well, considering I'm the one with 74000 servers here for whom this automatic restart via package postinstall works and works wonderfully, we are going to disagree and I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing the way I've been doing it for the past 20 years across IRIX, HP-UX and Solaris since it provides total automation. You're welcome to continue theorizing but I'm the one here with a real world use case, and this approach works great. Since this is my specialty, there is a miniscule chance that I might know what I'm doing and what I'm writing about, however small and unenviable that chance might be.

<comment><USER6> I'm curious how that actually works in practice.

Do you package all software by yourself? I mean, if the vendor-provided httpd package for example started and enabled itself upon installation, how would you structure your configuration packages so that httpd does not start until it's actually configured? Or (theoretically) if you needed to deploy a configuration change and an upgrade simultaneously and can't restart the software before the new configuration is in place.

I see this being rather easy if the vendor package simply puts the binaries in place so you can have your own packages run whatever scripts it is you need and depend on the vendor package, but I don't see how it wouldn't be a headache if the vendor package contained scripts to manage the service as well, which is what primarily annoys me on Debian-likes.

<comment><USER5> The application package delivers only the application payload and integration with the OS; it does not start anything unless it sees its own processes running, in which case this must be an in-place upgrade, so restart the daemon(s) to unload the old and load the new code.

It is the *-conf package which depends on the application package, brings on the configuration and automatically (re)starts the application.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Computational Engine of Economic Development - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cesifoti/under-the-hood-the-computational-engine-of-economic-development-49bce1a7b151 <comment><USER2> I realize its not a technical publication, but this piece is real hand wavy.

Yes, a modern economy consumes energy reduces local entropy of atoms though agriculture, transportation and manufacture. This can be considered computation.

But then: "Late in the last decade, I developed a mathematical technique that can be used to characterize an economy's ability to produce products. This measure of economic complexity, which makes use of information about the diversity of countries and the ubiquity of products, explains a substantial fraction of a country's level of income, but it also explains future economic growth."

There is no substantial explanation of this measure and how it is constructed. If it can't be stated simply one suspects it is subject to manipulation and its predictive power might just be an artifact of its construction.

<comment><USER3> As you wish, a substantial explanation: [http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10570.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10570.abstract) It's referred at the bottom of the "piece"

<comment><USER2> Nice.

I take it back - the construction of the measure is pretty immune to tampering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I appreciate this perspective on understanding national economies. After the big meltdown in 2008-9 I started thinking that major economic events could also be seen as information processing events.

Some Tofflerian quotes from the article:

"under the hood, products are made of order — or information"

"the actions we use to make products are acts of computation"

"just as objects are a more fundamental form of economic value than currency, the ability to create objects is a more fundamental form of economic value than the objects themselves"

<comment><USER5> In the name of all that is holy. No.

Run this pass a trader on Wall Street and they will either laugh you out the door or play to your naiveté while trying to sell you some ocean front property in Arizona.

The "economy" is an abstract concept that people _refer_ to. It is not an actual thing. It is not a computer that has been programmed to do anything, like process events within the framework of information theory.

These "events" are simply the confluence of a bunch of smaller events that happen to be bad across the board. Every day there are just as many events occurring, but because they are not generally bad but are instead a mixed bag, well, we don't call it an "event". Yet, using your terms, "information" is continuously being processed.

God is not a watchmaker and the economy is not a information processing computer. From the article:

"The economy is made of people, networks of people and the things that people make. People and networks of people accumulate knowledge and knowhow, both individually and collectively, and they use that knowledge and knowhow to produce a variety of products that, in turn, augments people's capacity to produce new products."

The economy is made up of people... Dangerous. So Dangerous. What about the animals. What about weather. What about solar flares. These things all impact the GDP, the macro economic landscape, and market cycles. Hurricanes have been called a shot in the arm for our economy, because they trigger so much rebuilding. What then is something that does not impact the GDP? Is it not information? Is it part of a different information processing computational process?

If you want to go whole hog on the reductionist angle, well,look to quantum physics and chaos theory. Or, just watch the weather channel. Look, there is always info between the data points. And sometimes it ends up influencing the big picture. This is a fact. So, would you say then that the economy is an imprecise machine? I would say that it is simply a shared concept we humans all agree on when discussing these things amongst ourselves. I would say what is really driving it is, well, reality, the arrow of time, entropy (well ish, now we're back to information; but at least this time it's the physicists fault, not the economists).

The reason this sorta framework is dangerous is that it relinquishes responsibility. Any responsibility that we hand off to some abstraction (be it "god", "the gods", "luck", or "the economy") is responsibility we are shirking.

<comment><USER4> Looking at the economy as a decentralized mechanism for processing information is just that, a way of looking at it. I am not saying that the model is the thing. But I do think that something like the economy can be talked about and modeled usefully, even though it does consist of something quite messy (as does the weather, etc).

Without lenses, what we see simply won't cohere.

Also I think that talking about the economy abstractly does not absolve people of responsibility. The abstraction is merely a tool to understand and model what you know. It may even help us hold people and organizations responsible when they cause damage.

For example, in the aftermath of the crisis we know that complex financial derivatives contracts created overlooked interdependency, and caused a load of unexpected information processing during the crisis. This has induced lawmakers and regulators to enforce clarity and disclosure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very interesting indeed. But I wonder...why is Chile importing so many _centrifuges_ from South Korea? 1.9% of their exports?

<comment><USER7> Chile does a lot of agriculture, fish farming, mining. It is probably a mining thing. Can't imagine putting fish in centrifuges leads to anything useful ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related to this: are there any good approaches to economic simulations of economies at the individual and organizational level? In other words, literally simulate groups of people and the economic organizations that they belong to.

<comment><USER9> Isn't that what a lot of games do? They probably even have more fine-tuned models of economic behavior with more variables than actual microeconomic simulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This rephrases why education is important.

Also, they fail to explain that Europe has lots of computational power in IT, while the real monetization seems to be happening mostly in the US.

</comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't seem to account for things like bureaucracy or regulations that slow economic growth.</comment>


How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978) - <AUTHOR> http://downlode.org/Etext/how_to_build.html <comment><USER2> _" I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realise, They can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them."_

They detect the first lie, yes, but what about the second lie?

<comment><USER3> There's an excellent point being made – if you try to engineer a world by insulating children from the harsh realities of it, you'll make the next generation extremely vulnerable to the simplest exploitation or difficulty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really want to see that Paris TV interview with him and Norman Spinrad that he talks about. I checked youtube, nothing. After some googling I found this page[1] which notes that, "apparently a tape of this is available for viewing at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, in Paris".

So I searched the ina.fr site, but apparently they haven't digitized it. This is a long shot, but does anybody who speaks French want to ask them? Their contact info lists 'email@example.com'. It just sounds way too surreal and odd to be hidden away forever.

[1]: [http://2010philipkdickfans.philipkdickfans.com/frank/problem...](http://2010philipkdickfans.philipkdickfans.com/frank/problems.htm)

<comment><USER5> Here p.ex. [http://www.dickien.fr/dossiers/eantabi/Elizabeth- Antebi.html](http://www.dickien.fr/dossiers/eantabi/Elizabeth-Antebi.html)

<comment><USER6> Wow, replete with Pink Floyd soundtrack!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just > before I flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE > HUMAN BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose._

I really want to know what that was about.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this.

It was particularly interesting to me how PKD's themes of simulacra, Disneyland, and Watergate closely matched those of Jean Baudrillard who wrote[1], somewhat more pessimistically but very much in the same vein as PKD, in 1981:

      ... Watergate. You remember this. Nixon. Wiretaps in the
      plants. Deepthroat. All that jazz. Watergate was the exact
      same fucking thing as Disneyland—an imaginary thing whose
      only purpose is to distract us from the fact that every
      last thing is now imaginary. But where Disneyland is a
      fictional magic land, Watergate is instead a "scandal."
      The real scandal beneath the surface is that there is no
      difference between facts and bullshit. Both the CIA and
      the journalists from the Washington Post who broke the
      story use the same tactics. What Watergate did was create
      a fiction moral compass of sorts. All politics are
      permanently buttfucked, but if we occasionally point
      fingers at some buttfucker who is doing some serious
      buttfucking, it creates this sense that there are less
      serious degrees of buttfucking and even possibly regular,
      wholesome vagfucking. ...

[1] Kind of wrote - excerpted from a translation into modern vernacular of The Precession of Simulacra at [http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article...](http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/91)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TIL that Philip K. Dick had a touch of the Apophenia.

</comment><comment><USER9> A highly related introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. [http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html](http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is the first thing I've ever read that makes a kinda sorta coherent argument for Christianity. It's like the New Testament meets the Matrix.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love PKD's work, but every time I hear him talk, I become convinced he is totally insane.

<comment><USER12> A bit unpleasant to say that about someone we know had enduring mental health problems - hallucinations and delusions, and some drug-related stuff too.</comment></comment>


Never get too busy making a living that you forget to make a life - <AUTHOR> http://marquisweblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/never-get-too-busy-making-living-that.html

<comment><USER2> I've always thought that I'll make a life after I make a living. My day to day isn't all that rough but I've got a long way to go before I can really relax.

<comment><USER3> Like John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're just trying to slow us down! ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> :) I agree if its your own startup it probably demands as much attention as your personal life infact there is no demarcation. I by nature never had that demarcation even when I worked for others.

But you know when somethings go real bad, like in the above post or even in my own case, with mental states, emotions and relationships because of this work stress you would regret. So this is just a reminder to be on the back of the mind.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems common knowledge to most of us but something we most always miss out while we focus on winning the pseudo race.

A very candid post, an open book of life experience of a high achieving GSB grad. Many of us would have gone through this disturbing phase personally, its just a reminder to remember to live the life too. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> No thanks. I'm sleeping on the office floor every night, broadcast.com style; I hear it worked out great for Mark Cuban.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why do "making a living" and "make a life" have to be 2 different things?

Better yet: What would you do for a living if $ didn't matter?

I love to program and can't imagine doing anything else. Sure, there are _times_ where I'd rather be doing something else, but not very often.

I often think about one of my sports heroes, Jack Lambert of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who once said he'd play football for 50 bucks a game.

I'm not suggesting that anyone actually do that, but if you don't feel that way, you may be in the wrong profession.

</comment><comment><USER7> this is what I hear every time I visit my grandparents..

</comment><comment><USER8> Sure, if you equate "making a living" to "working for some guy who's going to get rich off your work", it's never a good idea to work so hard you forget to live. Only a fool would work hard for someone else.

If, however, you're making a company and not a living, this nice little rule doesn't apply anymore.

<comment><USER9> Man, that sounds familiar. I bet if you went back two years on this site, you could find comments from me that say almost exactly the same thing.

Anyway, as someone who tried making a company and is now happily "working for some guy who's going to get rich off your work", I want to say "Yes, but..." It _can_ be incredibly rewarding to work flat-out on work that's worth doing. I wouldn't trade my startup experience for anything - not even the chance to have joined Google in 2005 and now be more senior than 85% of engineers there, or the chance to be employee #2 at DropBox.

But you have to remember that the median startup outcome is zero. Zilch. No value created. You're not "working for some guy who's going to get rich off your work", because _nobody's_ going to get rich off your work. It just disappears into the ether when you find out that nobody wants it. And that's basically unavoidable, no matter how hard you work: you can certainly increase your chance of success, but you're not going to bring it over half.

The people I know who are most bitter about their startup experiences are those who are sure they're going to get rich. Because they don't, and then they realize they "traded in their twenties for a worthless pile of tech stock." Do a startup for the right reasons - either because you need to test your limits and see just what you can accomplish, or because there's a product that absolutely must exist and nobody else is making it happen. (The latter case is also the most likely to succeed, financially.) Don't do it because you "want to be an entrepreneur", "don't want to work for anyone else", or worst of all, because you "want to get rich".

<comment><USER8> What makes you think this is my first startup and what makes you think I haven't failed before?

Not everyone gives up after one. Not everyone is forced to work after failure because they weren't smart with their personal finances.

<comment><USER9> FWIW, I could've afforded to keep going 2-3 times as long as I did. The limiting factor was ideas: all my ideas were lame, so I decided to work for a company that was doing not-lame things, gain some experience, build some contacts, and try again.

I don't know what you're working on or what your goals are, so I have no idea how much this applies to you. But for _me_ , the idea of doing the same wrong thing over and over again is more futile than just giving up. So I decided to do something radically different, roll the dice in another way, and see where it takes me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hedge Fund Data Site (13F filings) - love your ideas what to do with it - <AUTHOR> http://jonsteinberg.com/2010/04/whalewisdom-hedge-fund-data-site-13f-filings/ <comment><USER2>
      1. Ads of some kind
      2. Cross-reference with campaign contribution data from FEC.gov or opensecrets.org
      3. I like maps
      4. ???
      5. PROFIT

Seriously though, politically active people love this kind of stuff and although the number of people who like to pore over such data is small they also love posting their findings which will result in regular waves - not many sticky users, but you can probably pick up some revenue by CPI ads or beachcombing the serious users with a freemium model.

The trick (if it doesn't consume too much in the way of resources) is to join up the disparate information - even though interested researchers could use your site and existing contributions databases to do so now, you'll only get a footnote credit. If there's a nice way to cross-reference the 13f data with other things, then they'll send people directly there, and a percentage of them will surf around and then announce discoveries of their own in a me-too fashion.

The reasons I think of political campaign contributions as a cross-reference: political people tend to be obsessed; they're usually quite partisan, so once they've found a resource they like such as yours, they tend to be loyal to it; election cycles, like SEC declarations, take place on a fixed schedule and are thus predictable (in terms of adwords or external marketing); interest is growing in this issue after January's Supreme Court decision to remove limits on corporate campaign spending.

Regarding maps, everyone likes them and they're more accessible than tables. but I'm also thinking of more abstract maps, like using processing.js or something to do dynamic node-based diagrams that would make it easy for people to surf the data without consuming much in the way of server resources. I love spreadsheets myself but that's because I'm OK at number crunching - for most people it's the equivalent of trying to make a picture using a mouse and MS Paint vs a tablet and Adobe Illustrator.

<comment><USER2> Oh, and find some underemployed quant to do monthly postings of whimsical high level statistical analyses, like Nate silver does with election and polling data, or that guy at OKCupid does with their dating website.

You know, 'which companies have statistically unusual shareholding distributions?' or 'does geographical location influence trading/portfolio composition, or only prices?' or 'why do so many/few funds hold x & Y at the same time (where X & Y are similar companies or unusual combinations of sectors)?'.

It doesn't have to be hardcore market intelligence, in fact it might be better to be quirky unusual questions that make for good dinner-table chatter/blog fodder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think looking at 13Fs is helpful but there are some caveats to the approach.

First, if a fund is known to trade pretty frequently/have tons of turnover, the 13F might be bad to look at. In addition, many funds are not simply long- only vehicles. A lot of them will be doing some shorting, stuff outside of the US, or macro fixed income commodity currency strategies that wont be reflected in the 13F positions.

Still, 13Fs are useful, especially from an idea-generation perspective. Definitely a cool tool, I use something similar.

</comment><comment><USER4> Take a look at alphaclone.com -- it is another startup centered around replicating hedge fund performances from 13F filings.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the mention. Let us know if you guys have any questions. In a nutshell, we make people better investors by taking them out of the stock selection decision loop. Instead we let the worlds best investors pick the stocks.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you organise your deployment code? - <AUTHOR> I've seen people put the CI code in another folder in the same repository, and include some build scripts in the main codebase folder.
I've seen people really separate out their repositories.
I've seen absolute messes.
How do you prefer to organise your deployment code? <comment><AUTHOR> I am not really fond of any of the approaches if I'm honest, but pushed, I will plump for a CI folder in the same repository, with a build script or two swimming around.

I don't love it, but an entire separate repository seems the wrong way to go about things.

</comment><comment><USER2> A separate branch with debianization, so I can actually build DEB packages out of the code.

<comment><USER3> Can you point us to a longer explanation of this? I'd be interested in the pros/cons.

I'm wary of deployment solutions that lock into a particular technology. That's why I prefer declarative infrastructure, like what you('re supposed to) get with Ansible.

<comment><USER2> You say you're wary of vendor lock in, but then you're using Ansible, which is locks your deployment procedure. Packages actually give you more flexibility.

If you don't put all the build process into debian/rules, but keep a makefile/rakefile/antfile/scons file/setup.py and run appropriate build tool from debianization, you get something that is quite easy to translate to RPM spec or some other packaging format (been there, done that, got a T-shirt).

The benefits from keeping such a package are numerous:

\- build procedure (its entry point) is stored in a Well Known Place[tm]

\- there is a Good Place[tm] to specify dependencies (including dependencies from OS and other languages!)

\- build process is only run once, outside of the deployment phase

\- rebuilding a package is repeatable (assuming that you prepare source packages, also for the libraries you use)

\- deployment is more repeatable and much faster than with rebuilding libraries for every installation

\- DEBs/RPMs are trivial to work with in all the popular (and less popular) tools, like Ansible, SaltStack, CFEngine, Puppet, Chef, or Dockerfile; the reverse is not true

\- DEBs/RPMs are easy to upgrade, downgrade, and to deploy an old version of your software in the first place

\- DEBs and RPMs give an easy way to verify correctness of their files

\- preparing an environment for development for a new team member is much, much easier (`apt-get build-dep mysoftware' and you're pretty much done)

I'm yet to encounter a drawback of this approach, apart maybe from lack of sexiness because of its age (it was invented two decades ago).

<comment><USER3> > _but then you 're using Ansible, which is locks your deployment procedure_

The good thing about Ansible is that it took about 5 min to find a pre-written YAML file, and it's easy to understand it and translate it into something else if necessary.

I have yet to find a solution that eliminates all vendor lock-in unfortunately. It'd be great if there were an open-source format for describing infrastructure, and it had lots of compatible build tools...

I'm going to try out the DEB option, though! Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Researchers accidentally turn carbon dioxide into ethanol - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/amp/2016/10/18/researchers-accidentally-turn-carbon-dioxide-into-ethanol/ <comment><USER2> previously on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733856)

</comment><comment><USER3> So this is the new AMP experience, 1.3 MiB transferred Load 20 seconds. Only to have random pictures blown up into my face. Five fonts, too.

Maybe we can just link to the original source

[https://www.ornl.gov/news/nano-spike-catalysts-convert- carbo...](https://www.ornl.gov/news/nano-spike-catalysts-convert-carbon- dioxide-directly-ethanol)

instead of this insult of an article. Of course you can only find that through the YouTube video, because all the links go to Engadget. The definition of blogspam.

<comment><USER4> The original paper has free access:

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/slct.201601169/fu...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/slct.201601169/full)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the "small amount of electricity" required to kickstart this reaction is less than the electricity generated by burning the Ethanol, is this a perpetual motion machine? It's still a chemical process but the wording makes me think it's a net energy producer.

<comment><USER6> Even if it produces more energy than it consumes, at best it would be an inefficient hydrogen powered engine.

Although this is still pretty cool if it could capture atmospheric carbon.

<comment><USER5> The main reason for my question is exactly that - if it's potentially self- sustaining we'd end up with less CO2 in the atmosphere without the expense of powering the system. Of course, we'd still have to figure out where to store all the Ethanol as letting it evaporate back into the air wouldn't be at all helpful.

<comment><USER6> I volunteer! I have a machine that turns ethanol into energy and a good time.

<comment><USER5> Hmmm ... it outputs CO2, heat and a bit of bio-sequestered carbon. The "good time" is probably worth at least a little global warming ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Useless for removing CO2 from the atmosphere if we burn the ethanol. There are better methods of CO2 sequestration. That tidbit seems to have been thrown in there because climate change. Misleading or ignorant.

</comment><comment><USER8> Popular Mechanics is NOT a science publication. It's bogus to the core.</comment>


Three Kinds of Code - <AUTHOR> http://agilefocus.com/2009/06/the-3-kinds-of-code/

<comment><USER2> "Code that's built to last. Well factored, well understood by the team, with strong automated tests, and generally meeting the team's standards for something they'd happily maintain forever."

Name an example of code of that kind?

<comment><USER3> Pretty much all code can potentially be run for a long time and be subjected many alteration requirements, making high quality dev practise worthwhile. But if you want a archetypal example: libraries.

<comment><USER4> Some libraries.

And then there are libraries like Prototype and Scriptaculous.

<comment><USER2> Are they good or bad examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another way to bridge the communication gap is to introduce the notion of "engineering debt" aka "technical debt". If you can quantify the day-to-day impact ("the interest payments"), amount of work it would take to fix it ("the principal") and the ongoing accumulation of crap ("the negative ammortization loan") you will be loved by both engineers and managers.

<comment><USER2> Still, there is the 90% rule that code can not overcome, either: 90% of everything is crap (except crap, 100% of crap is crap).

<comment><USER5> That's just engineering nihilism speaking. :-) Surely the code you wrote last week was not 90% crap?

<comment><USER2> To be honest I assume that most of my code is crap. Otherwise I would never get started because I would be stuck with architecting for the next 2000 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the key to write fast code is to compartmentalize. Write someting crappy but that's walled off into a class, or file so that it can be thrown away later on.

I'm a bit tired of the notion that all code needs to be ready for a mission to the moon, or needs to be reusable. It doesn't -- it just needs to do the job. If part of the job is to be the foundation of years of work to come, then yes, it needs to be brilliant.

If the code you are writing is a quick hack to generate some images or to present some data on a single web page, time matters more than that is can be extended ad infinitum. Write something quick -- and maybe you can have the time to write some tests as well.</comment>


Objects Have Failed - <AUTHOR> http://www.dreamsongs.com/ObjectsHaveFailedNarrative.html

<comment><USER2> The article says: "In the face of all this, it's fair to say that objects have failed." The author appears to define "this" extremely broadly, including: "address[ing] the computing requirements of the future" (whatever those might be); dealing with "software evolution" and "wholesale changes" (again, not sure what that means), although that's claimed to be addressed better by open source (huh?); making programming easy; and lots of other things. Well, OK, objects also haven't cured cancer. I'm not sure what the point is, except that the author sure is pissed about Lisp being less important than it used to be.

Objects were certainly oversold -- what computing trend isn't? But I think they succeeded at the problem they were intended to solve. Objects are basically encapsulation and a sensible bundling of behavior and state. It's just the next step after structured programming. Before structured programming we had line labels, and goto statements, and every time you had to do branching or looping, you had to express the control structures in these primitives. Now you write if statements and while loops. It's better, it's not controversial. It didn't solve world hunger, but that doesn't mean it failed. Structured programming succeeded in the sense that it is just accepted and is no longer even noticed.

Objects are an improvement of that sort. Objects have state. That state can only be manipulated by a few pieces of code (methods). This way of organizing code makes it easier to structure and debug software. It organizes coding patterns that everyone was reinventing anyway and no longer has to. It's a modest goal, and objects have succeeded in meeting it.</comment>


The Heart and Soul Commitment Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://www.makeleaps.com/blog/en/2011/08/english-the-heart-and-soul-commitment-paradox/

<comment><USER2> I like virtually everything about this, but if I had a Twitter-sized time machine, this would be going to @patio11#2000:

 _If you're going to fail at something, at least fail by being too aggressive, rather than failing by default through passivity._

If you ever have the opportunity to come to a Tokyo HN meetup, you'll get to meet Jason, who wrote this and runs them. He's one of the few people at the sweet spot on the Venn diagram "personality is a force of nature" and "would gladly spend time hanging out with."

On the specific topic of getting a job in Japan: if this is really your goal in life, star the part where it becomes 100,000x easier to do this after you have some "in" in Proper Japanese Society (TM). If you are a force of nature like Jason is, then you'll end up getting one sometime between landing and convincing the Prime Minister's secretary that he should be having tea with you. You can do it in meek-friendly ways, or I never would have managed it. (I applied to an exchange program, got placed as a translator, and used a happy client as an introduction into the wonderful word of salarymandom. So that's a route. There might also be one that passes through the river Styx, in which case, use that one instead. But there are definitely options.)

Key take away, though: like Jason says, virtually anything you can possibly do here is more effective than the halfhearted typical resume spray-and-pray from abroad that most people who say they want a job in Japan do. Resume spray-and- pray is a terrible idea in general, but it's terrible-squared in the particular circumstance "foreigner wants a job at a Japanese company" because of the way gatekeepers work here.

BTW: You can get status in Proper Japanese Society (TM) by working for a high- status organization outside the country which you can convince to lateral you over to Tokyo. Think of a massively high-status US organization: they probably have dealings in Tokyo. There are a variety of ways to convince them to send you to Japan. One fairly straightforward one is to know more Japanese than you can find printed on a sushi menu, which will catapult you ahead of 99.8% of their US employees for that opportunity. The specifics of how to do this and how hard it would be depend on the organization: I have heard of places where Tokyo is considered a hardship post and have heard of places where Tokyo is considered the kind of place you kick butt and take names for a career to get a stint in. (And would have had ZERO luck identifying those prior to hearing anecdotes from inside. Sorry, can't identify them without breaking confidences.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sum it up this way: The difference between _good_ and _great_ is persistence.

Anyone can be good by ability, the great manifest it forcefully.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious where the author found 100 jobs to apply for.

Having tried it, my advice is _don't_ go to Japan and then look for work, unless you're lucky enough to be from a country with Working Holiday agreements (not the US), or have a lot of connections.

<comment><USER5> There are jobs everywhere. That's the paradox of the modern recession: lots of jobs, just none you're qualified for.

<comment><USER4> True, but it's particularly challenging when you don't know where to find them. Especially in Japan, where it's my understanding that the whole networking thing is much more important.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find the uncensored "How to Win Friends and Influence People"? - <AUTHOR>

PG brings this book up in one of his essays, and notes that the edition available today is the Bowdlerized one. Where might I get a hold of the real thing? <comment><USER2> Why is the new edition inferior?

edit:

 _If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. [8] When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.

[8] Buy an old copy from the 1940s or 50s instead of the current edition, which has been rewritten to suit present fashions. The original edition contained a few unPC ideas, but it's always better to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's a book from a past era, than to read a new version sanitized for your protection._

<http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html#f8n>

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=carnegie...](http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=carnegie&bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&sortby=2&sts=t&tn=win+friends&x=97&y=17&yrh=1965)

</comment><comment><USER4> I got mine on ebay.</comment>


Convicted 'eco-terrorist' freed amid claims FBI hid evidence - <AUTHOR> http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article5641188.html

<comment><USER2> I'll note that the headline is WRONG: the FBI apparently did hide evidence, tons of it. The DoJ agreed to a deal to sweep the whole mess under the carpet.

If this is the best the "anti-terrorism" people can do, why are we, the rest of the taxpayers and citizens, financing these weaklings?</comment>


Mozilla Tests VPN-Like Firefox Private Network for Firefox Browsers - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcworld.com/article/3438145/mozilla-tests-vpn-like-firefox-private-network-for-firefox-browsers.html <comment><USER2> Here is standalone client for Firefox Private Network: [https://github.com/Snawoot/firefox-secure- proxy](https://github.com/Snawoot/firefox-secure-proxy)

Also works outside US.</comment>


Show HN: Maria – iPad app for learning to read - <AUTHOR> https://www.maria.education <comment><AUTHOR> I spent a year developing Maria and just released it this month. I built the app for a local Montessori school and they have had great success with it.

The school was having trouble finding 'appropriate' apps for the classroom environment. They purchased many iPads but found that most of the popular children's apps were more like games than applications and were not suitable for a Montessori classroom.

The app is free to download and I'm hoping that it gains traction, although it has been very slow-going so far. I know that HN isn't an educational site but thought that some hackers may, nevertheless, have children that are at the right age for it. :-)

<comment><USER2> Nice work! Are you looking for contributors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have a 4 and 6 year old. The 6 year old is in immersion Spanish, but will definitely try this for the 4 year old! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> It wasn't totally obvious that the 5 colored boxes had videos when tapping them.</comment>


An easy way to boost a paper's citations: Cite and you shall be cited - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100813/full/news.2010.406.html

<comment><USER2> It seems quite possible to me that paper quality is correlated with both number of references and number of subsequent citations?

I hate when statistical analyses that turn up correlations are summarized by stories implying a causal link: in this case, "reciprocal altruism", and even worse, "a single extra reference in an article now _producing_ , on average, a whole additional citation for the referencing paper" (my emphasis), which doesn't seem at all proven to me. Everything the researcher himself says is of course either completely noncommittal ("If you want to get more cited, the answer could be to cite more people") or else a platitude ("Scientists are subject to social forces as much as anyone in any other profession" .... really now??!).

To discover a causal link here would require artificially and intentionally (but without telling anyone) adjusting the number of citations in some random set of papers to be published (probably by including or leaving out minor or tangential citations), and then seeing how one group compares to the other in the future.

My speculation about reasons (other than learned altruism) the amount of correlation between references and citations might have changed over time: (1) newer papers are in general treading in more developed fields, in which the top researchers must be familiar with a broader set of previous papers, (2) dissemination of papers is easier than it ever was before and so for example when reading a paper it is trivial to track down all of the papers it references and then cite those directly, (3) expectations about the proper number of citations in a paper have changed over time and modern journal reviewers especially in respected journals are stricter about suggesting that authors cite every previously known idea, (4) relatedly, academia has become increasingly bureaucratically output-driven and so individual researchers are writing more (presumably smaller-individual-impact) papers, (5) if number of citations is increasing over time, and in general most works are cited most often in the few years after their publication, the whole structure operates somewhat like a ponzi scheme, where each generation of papers provides more citations to the immediately previous one than that generation provided to the one before it.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. Correlation does not imply causation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Frankly, I expected more citations in her "References" section.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's taken centuries for academics to figure out what bloggers discovered in about five years?

<comment><USER6> I thought "Oh, so it's like Twitter."</comment></comment>


Penmanship and programming education (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://macwright.org/2016/08/28/penmanship.html <comment><USER3> > _}))}`] } }_

Yet only things called Lisp ever get flamed for this.

If it is just )))))) you only have to just auto-repeat ) until the editor indicates a match to the one you are trying to close. It's only "how many you owe", not "what kinds do you owe, in what order".

<comment><USER4> Because, in Lisp, getting it wrong means that you don't know which one was supposed to close _which_ opener. And which is a vector, which is a list, which is a hasmap, etc.

Clojure, in my opinion, did this right. You don't need very many alternate delimiters to get a lot of bang for the buck and break things up.

<comment><USER5> > getting it wrong means that you don't know which one was supposed to close > which opener

This is solved by "jump to matching", which every worthwhile editor I've used has had.

<comment><USER3> That causes the problem of knowing something you don't want to know. _That_ problem, in turn, is solved by not looking at what "jump to matching" is specifically doing, other than watching for it hitting your "target parenthesis".

Example. I have this, in the middle of a larger body of code with more open parentheses which are not shown:

              (foo (((((bar) ...
                  .....)) <-

Suppose that the point indicated by the arrow, I want to close _(foo_ , and only _(foo_. Perhaps I want to start another unit that is on the same level of nesting as foo:

              (foo (((((bar) ...
                    )) <-  must close this
           ;; (bar ... <-- want to start this; doesn't exist yet

So I just type ), or even auto-repeat. The jump-to-matching feature jumps backwards onto various parentheses that _I don 't care about_, getting closer and closer to _(foo_. That _(foo_ is where my eyes are; I stop when I see the backward jump hit _(foo_. If I overshoot, then I just backspace. Any good jump-to-matching feature works when you backspace to a parenthesis, not only when you type a new one. So after an overshoot, I can still keep my eyes on the _(foo_ and backspace until the cursor jumps to _(foo_. It's like keeping your eye on the ball or other target in a sport.

There is no value in knowing which of the other parentheses match which openers, and no value in having to interrupt the )))) to deal with other kinds parenthesis, when all I want is to close ` _(foo_ is a nuisance. That's just the down-side of whatever notational benefit those other kinds of parentheses bring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't use the "I owe a thing" method. I put the closing bracket/quote in when put the opening one in, and then hop left a space and fill in the content. I find it too confusing otherwise. For exactly the reason the author describes.

<comment><USER3> It must be that neither of you use an editor which knows how to match parentheses. Then the choice of habit is largely moot. Also, that little leftward jump can be automated by the editor, which is useful if you want it more often than not.

<comment><USER7> Author here. I've used plenty of editors that 'know' how to manage parenthesis. And editors that did even more than that, like auto-completing snippets and moving around the cursor.

It's all great, and I too think paredit is great! But these are all techniques for improving the "writing new code" experience, which is the minority of work that anyone does. Nobody writes perfect code the first time. And these conveniences for writing new code don't help much with the majority of my time, which is spent editing, deleting, and refactoring code - <USER2> understanding at first glance the structure of a program from its punctuation.

So, sure - editors can do more and I'm hopeful about them. But I don't think that 'automatic bracket insertion' actually fixes this problem. I think it makes the task of writing code seem easier but doesn't help at all with the hard parts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The idea that we need to get the code correct in one-go is questionable. Any coder only has limited slots for short-term memory. Spending some of those slots keeping track of syntax balancing is a questionable advice.

Instead of getting students comfortable with the syntax, I try to get students comfortable with syntax errors. Syntax errors are often trivial to fix after accumulating some experience; and as one gets experienced, they (syntax errors) tend to diminish anyway. However, the fear of syntax error -- just like the fear of water when learning to swim -- is very difficult to overcome and can be detrimental.

There is no logical reason to fear syntax errors, and there is no logical reason to worry about syntax when we are working with semantics.

Of course, we shouldn't accumulate syntax debt after hundreds of lines. We should organize our code into isolatable and testable units that fit into quick try/test and feedback cycles -- but that is common sense.

</comment><comment><USER9> Funny, but slighly off topic; I just had a long conversation about the opportunity cost of teaching penmanship in public schools.

If my friend and I had worked harder at penmanship, and less hard at optional studies in AP/STEM stuff, we'd be less employable but would have scored better on the hand-written part of our placement tests. We both got a lot of grief in school from the traitionalists for our crappy hand writing. She still can't write cursive!

<comment><USER10> I mean I don't think being able to write in a way that can be read is some obscure, useless skill. I had to go through a lot of extra instruction in penmanship when I was a kid but it was totally worth it because a life where nobody could read anything I wrote would have been needlessly difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I think it's time to give syntax and writing the time and respect it > deserves.

Before I became a programmer, I did Latin at school - the whold fiddliness of endings/cases was a great preparation. We frequently used terms for "syntax", "parse" and "[parse] tree" in class. This approach probably doesn't scale, but it worked really well for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> Related: Computation and State Machines by Leslie Lamport ([https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/computa...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/computation-state-machines/)).

</comment><comment><USER13> > Programming is _relatively_ unforgiving

Not sure if it was intentional, but I got a good giggle out of this line.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't know you learn these things with practice. You practice when it's fun. But that part of programming is boring. Maybe some focus could be given but it sounds like it could suck the motivation out of would be programmers.</comment>


CSS Pivot - From idea to 20k hits in 7 days - <AUTHOR> http://blog.csspivot.com/post/4287812137/summary-of-launching-the-prototype

<comment><USER2> I like these posts a few times a year, but do we really need a post like this every couple days? We get it, articles that make the front page of HN get some page views. How is this any different than the other twenty virtually identical posts that have been on the front page in the last month?

<comment><USER3> I couldn't agree more. You got 20k visitors in 7 days? Nothing to get excited about. Especially since most of your visitors must come from HN and that you might struggle to get that many visitors in the coming weeks. If you get the same amounts, ore more. Then write about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a way to specify the "license" for the pivot code? This might be handy--sites could take free improvements if they want--if a devoted user wanted to improve a site they dearly loved.

Additionally, you could let people sell pivots right on the site. I'm sure you're thinking of these things, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting idea -- we will definitely think about it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man, well done. Very well done.

Just a quick suggestion: I think having "Discover Pivots" on a separate Reddit- or HN-style ranking page might be better than having a bunch of popup windows.

<comment><USER6> +1 on that! Another suggestion: Is it possible to make private posts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea -- will add that today or tomorrow!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm liking the potential of these ideas:

"extending the use-szenarious (eg inviting friends to share pivots for your own website), showing a tree of pivots with their forks and ancestors"

It would be really useful to see a history of versions and easily toggle between them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will be added in a few days! So large of an idea backlog...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> what did you do to in terms of marketing to get to 20k users? I think the site is good.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only marketing so far was to post it to HN and Forrst, and at a usually bad time too (Saturday evening). But people upvoted it a lot and it was #1 almost all Sunday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2373785>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very very well done. I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Best of luck to you!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is an interesting project, but how do you intend to monetize this traffic? I do not see any ads, do you intend to have payed accounts?

</comment><comment><USER10> you should make browser extensions, so user can save their customized css then used as user style sheet on their browser and can share with friends.</comment>


Pint-Size Satellites Promise Spy-Quality Images–Cheap - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-09/pint-size-satellites-promise-spy-quality-images-cheap <comment><AUTHOR> I have been waiting 35 years for this technology. In my previous career I worked with infrared sensing of farm crops from the early eighties.

The main problem in a state like Michigan is that it is super cloudy. Taking pictures with planes is expensive, but you can go below the clouds. Commercial satellite imagery didn't provide this cloud piercing technology. Farmers didn't want to pay for images when there was a cloud obscuring half their field. It was fairly common to go an entire summer and not get a completely clear view of a field.</comment>


Steven Strogatz on chaos theory, game theory, and why math isn't boring - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/steven-strogatz-interview-on-math-education-2016-6 <comment><USER2> Shameless promotion: I'm writing a book in which I introduce mathematics for programmers specifically. If you found yourself here you may be interested. [https://jeremykun.com/2016/04/25/book-mailing- list](https://jeremykun.com/2016/04/25/book-mailing-list)

<comment><USER3> I'd be willing to spend a good 40 bucks on something like this (that may not seem like a lot but 40$ to a college student _is_ a lot). Something that has a twinkle of a promise in teaching a programmer math is something I need in my life.

I just don't "get" what is being told to me when it's in the context of math- notation. As a result I do horrible in math classes in college. The only thing that was taught with a CS-Style notation was approximating using Newton's method. After I saw that it made sense, it was just a recursive method that zeroed in on that location.

Very little aside from that in my calc 1 class made sense. Probably limits, but that's it really. It didn't click as well.

I'd like to get to the point where I understand math concepts as well as I do most of the CS but I just think that's impossible at this point. It seems to be very "this is our garden, you stay in yours".

<comment><USER2> In anticipating a book like this, would you ideally want to learn the math context and notation (provided one goal of the book is to teach that), or skip that entirely in favor of the underlying ideas (as in your example with Newton's Method).

Also, would you be interested in being paid to read a chapter or two and provide feedback?

<comment><USER4> Not the GP, but I'd want to learn _both_ the ideas _and_ the notation. That way, more math would become accessible to me.

Just don't let the notation get in the way of reaching clarity on the ideas.

<comment><USER3> Yes exactly. It seems that no matter what you know math majors don't care. You need to walk the walk and talk the talk.

If you read through my comment history you will find me arguing with many mathematicians who think that math is just inherently harder and I must not understand it because I'm not smart enough. I think that the concepts and basic building blocks seem simple when explained outside the context of the current notation used.

You can see a perfectly prime example of this here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991581)

Read through my comments to see how I feel.

I'd also like to be clear. I'm not saying math is easy, I'm just saying that it can't be impossible for my peasant brain to not be smart enough to understand the concepts of what's going on. I mean it's not Greek.... well... it currently is but it doesn't need to be!

<comment><USER5> The concepts are not individually hard, but they build on each-other (sometimes unnecessarily, but sometimes very helpfully). If you care about understanding the tools you should take the few years of study it takes to learn the notation to a level of fluency, or you won't be able to read the vast literature written in that notation.

It's like if you're interested in 19th century piano music, but all your experience with reading music is in the form of guitar tablature, then you're going to have a tough time with your study. You could conceivably find top- down videos of someone playing some of the music you care about, or convince someone to translate some parts of it into guitar tablature. But it would be a better use of your time to just learn to read standard music notation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Proffesor Strogatz wrote a book called Ninlinear Dynamics and Chaos which is the best intro book on non linear diff eq I have ever come across. I highly recomenend it: [https://www.amazon.com/Nonlinear-Dynamics-Chaos- Applications...](https://www.amazon.com/Nonlinear-Dynamics-Chaos-Applications- Nonlinearity/dp/0738204536)

<comment><USER7> And I'd like to recommend Prof. Strogatz's book "The Joy of X" as a wonderful sampling of a number of basic math topics. It's very easily digestible. [https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Guided-Tour-Math- Infinity/dp/0544...](https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Guided-Tour-Math- Infinity/dp/0544105850)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The reason I posted this article was that this is the second mathematician I've come across in two days to talk about the elegance and beauty of mathematics.

I wish I had seen some of this beauty from a younger age.

It goes to show how much the right teacher, especially early on, can have a profound impact on your life.

<comment><USER8> I agree. Most of mathematics is taught as calculations without motivation. If it was taught as the study of systems, and a toolbelt to understand the universe, more people would be passionate about it. All we can do is show the light to others.

<comment><USER9> Actually if you dig in the calculation techniques taught in primary school(Like multidigit addition/multiplication/ division), you would find some of them are actually quite clever ideas (O(log n) algorithms), but what almost all school do is to ask the student execute the algorithm like a computer, not how to come up with ideas like those...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So here's the dilemma. People who see the beauty and elegance of mathematics are _always_ going to go into something that exercises that, and will _never_ go into teaching.

Why would anyone who is seriously good at lots of math go into teaching? Especially in the USA, UK, or other countries where teaching has such a low status. In many cases teachers are genuinely despised.

Why would anyone good at math _ever_ go into teaching? No money, no status, no respect, no flexibility, no control, crushing hours, crushing workload ... why would _anyone_ do that?!?

No wonder students are never exposed to the real beauty and elegance of mathematics.

<comment><USER11> Steven Strogratz _is_ a teacher. He's also a popular math writer (he had a NYT column for a while).

<comment><USER12> Agreed. He also mentors many PhD students, which is where a lot of the magic happens in terms of training.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mathematics is the study of objective truth in a universe that has certain rules. How could knowing the universe in all its glory be boring? Wish they taught this rather than calculation at school. It's very uninspiring to not realize this and do math.

In fact, natural numbers are the basis for almost all of mathematics. And natural numbers are a manifestation of counting. Information theoretically, to count, one needs two dimensions (or degrees of freedom.) Space for storage of the number. And time to increment the storage medium, again and again, at different points. You could use two dimensions of space instead, and you'd just draw two orthogonal lines..and say the area inside the rectangle is the product.

So if counting is fundamentally related to the relationship between two dimensions, then so is addition since addition is repeated/recursive counting. And multiplication is repeated/recursive addition.

Once you realize this, physics seems less fundamental than mathematics, when it comes to understanding the universe.

Multiplication and addition are related in the way that f(x) and repeat(f(x), y) are related. They distribute over eachother and have certain properties.

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(mathematics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_\(mathematics\))

So..the primes, the chaotic relationship between the modularity of addition over multiplication and the modularity of multiplication over addition, is due to the relationship between our universe's dimensions.

Want to study the universe at the most raw level? Mathematics. Want to study it a little higher? Physics. Want to study it at a higher level..maybe closer to the phaneron? Biology/neurochemistry.

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

Want to study it at the thinking level? Zen buddhism.

Choose your pick. The causal chain of human to universe doesn't discriminate. The whole chain could be the "real" reality. Pick your choice. It's all beautiful. It's all mystifying and enigmatic. Just do it.

<comment><USER13> Yea, mathematics is more fundamental than physics, in the sense that it would be possible for different universes to exist with different physics, but it's not clear at all that universes could exist with different mathematics. What would that even mean? You may like Max Tegmark's idea that the universe _is_ math: [https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646](https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646)

But it's nonsense that the natural numbers require two dimensions. Time appears nowhere in the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo–Fraenkel_set_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo–Fraenkel_set_theory)

<comment><USER14> Do you know what the uni~ i universe means? It means only (one-ly). How could there be multiple? That's just non-sense.

The parent implied counting, not the natural numbers, need two dimensions. But even in Set Theory you need at least one level deep _nested_ sets to build the natural numbers. Qunatification is the (a?) difference between zero and higher order logic, I suppose.

<comment><USER15> > _Do you know what the uni~ i universe means? It means only (one-ly). How > could there be multiple? That 's just non-sense._

Do you know what "atom" in "atom" means? "Indivisible". But somehow we've been dividing them for power for quite some time.

Arguments from etymology are invalid, because words are not obliged to be backwards compatible.

<comment><USER14> > Arguments from etymology are invalid, because words are not obliged to be > backwards compatible.

That's how you end up with loads of confusing homonyms, which the parent almost admited to. I mean, sure an etymologic argument can be insufficient or even wrong.

<comment><USER15> My point is, words are only labels - pointers to concepts. You can't prove facts about objects from just their labels, nor do the labels have causal power over reality. Universe being derived from "uni" doesn't force the concept of universe to be a singleton.

Proliferation of homonyms is another topic altogether; it is an issue, but it's about creating barriers to communication.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the most absurd A/B test result you've seen? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't know if I have a good answer for this specifically, but as a consumer, I have a little rant. You know, Amazon must A/B test the shit out of their homepage... but if I buy a shower curtain, my Amazon home page is nothing but shower curtains for weeks. How many shower curtains do they think I need? This works with other once-in-a-blue-moon items, too: plungers, watches, windshield wipers, phone cases.

What they should do is say "Hey, this guy bought a shower curtain, which means A) he has a bathroom, and B) either moved in or is redecorating... and that means he probably wants a bath mat, a toothbrush holder, a plunger, a towel rack..."

But nope... shower curtains for days. And you know that somehow this works out great for Amazon, or else they'd change it.

<comment><USER3> "Turns out the last shower curtain you bought from us isn't working out so great, is it? Well, check out all these top-ranked shower curtains that your search didn't return!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article covers it well: [https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of- internet-chum-de0b...](https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet- chum-de0b7a070a2d)

It's about the ads you usually find at the side and bottom of dodgy sites. An exact quote from the site:

"Like everything else on the internet, traffic flowing through chumboxes must be tracked in order for everyone to be paid. Each box in the grid's performance can be tracked both individually and in context of its neighbors. This allows them to be highly optimized; some chum is clearly better than others. As a byproduct of this optimization, an aesthetic has arisen. An effective chumbox clearly plays on reflex and the subconscious. The chumbox aesthetic broadcasts our most basic, libidinal, electrical desires back at us. And gets us to click."

So you get all kinds of disgusting, disturbing and yet fascinating things that entice you to click. Clicking the most disturbing thing encourages more content like that.

</comment><comment><USER5> I knew a background check website that tested two funnels. One gave the free info instantly and then upsold to the paid plan, the other gave that same info after an 11 minute B.S. process. The version that took an artificial 11 minutes led to literally 10x conversions to the paid info.

<comment><USER6> I think this makes sense. If they can get it instantly without pain there is no incentive to upgrade. Having to wait is extremely annoying.

A dating website I used to use does something similar. It makes guys wait 10 minutes between each message while girls can send all they want. I can imagine this works really well because even I considered purchasing it, and I never purchase such stuff.

<comment><USER7> You find a nice lady?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mostly when significantly different pages make little to no difference on conversion. This has made me a little jaded about sweating over the colour of a button, or wording a statement type thing. Yes, a site needs good architecture and design. But overall its other things than design look/language that become the real needle movers for digital performance, but people often focus here as its the fun stuff.</comment>


Why I dislike Modern UI - <AUTHOR> http://nirm.al/post/why-i-dislike-modern-ui.html <comment><USER2> I dont know how this type of blog posts get into HN.

One guy ranting saying "I dont like this, period" without any elaborated answer fits into the same clickbaiting crap that we get elsewhere...

<comment><USER3> From TFA: "When I see these modern interfaces and all these animations/transitions, I get sudden emotions which seems good, but that fades away quickly and after that it turns out all too noisy. There is no serenity in it."

He's getting sudden emotions? What does this even mean? And do I really need "serenity" in a GUI?

For me, the real problem with GUIs is that it's not easy to repeat or automate a task.

<comment><USER4> The sudden emotion is "hey, that was neato" but that feeling doesn't last and often doesn't serve the content at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Computers are meant to be automating certain things in this world, so that you could concentrate on the important things in your life. It is not meant to be a life force of one 's life._

I also dislike animated, time wasting UIs, but _because_ computers _are_ one of the most important things in my life and I want to spend more time on the cooler things they can do :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Indeed.

For going on 20 years, I've been waiting for the adults to be in charge of UI/UX.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this make tons of sense. It seems like some designers or people that make interfaces try to ~show off~ to users with cool UIs, crazy animations, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> This resonates with me (though is terse on proposed solutions). As an example of a very effective UI, I use vim with multiple buffers, ctrl-p and ctags in a largish c/c++ project. It lets me fly around the code effortlessly. My colleagues are pointing and clicking through tabs in sublime text. Sure sublime is probably faster to learn, but it certainly has a lower upper bound on performance.

I would love to see the keyboard used more in modern interfaces, the discrete nature of keys can make for a crisp experience compared with the finely quantized continuous space that is the domain of the mouse. Think of problems like hunting for the right place to grab and divide a window border, key combinations could get you the same result without the hunt.

</comment><comment><USER9> "give me cli or give me death"

</comment><comment><USER10> I think his blog is very much "modern UI."

The styling is well-considered, deliberate and does the job nicely. UNLIKE the naked HTML/no-css that some people here PRETEND to admire.

Webpages should be pleasing to the eyes. Pulling this off requires a sense of taste and significant work (although not necessary by the content author).

</comment><comment><USER11> I kinda agree, but I'm not sure the problem are animations or effects, but where is the focus and the priority of the design, and the management and reduction of information and visual noise.

Reminds me this old post of mine from 5 years ago: [http://www.feiss.be/blog/post/157](http://www.feiss.be/blog/post/157)

</comment><comment><USER12> I can understand why a super productive i3wm is good for developers. It just keeps the focus on the task.

My mom still uses Lubuntu on my 2006 laptop with 1 GB RAM, when Gnome and KDE require at least 2+ GB.

</comment><comment><USER13> What are examples of "Modern UI"?? I think of Mac OS X, my Garmin watch or the Leica M10 UI. They are modern but I do think their UI would still be good in 40 years

<comment><AUTHOR> I used macOS and I'm not sure of others. I'm not totally against animations on Modern UI. But I think it is used heavily in certain places like twitter for example. The profile parallax transition and other animations is kinda laggy when I'm on the low-end processing machines. Also Airbnb's new design and Apple's product pages are heavy if I'm on a slow network. Animation/transition are mostly used to cover the slow network latency. Also most people think that it is fancy to use animations rather than solving a problem. I think design should be consistent across devices and networks, showing a different design for users on a slow internet connection is kinda ugly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Complaining is easy. If you don't like how modern UI's work, do something about it instead of making more noise.

</comment><comment><USER15> a huge part of this "modern UI" wants to be invisible, and not fancy at all. Transitions, transparency, animations are techniques and methods to make a digital thing become more humanized.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like this post because it validates my opinions!

IMO this is the pinnacle of web design: [https://stallman.org/](https://stallman.org/)

<comment><USER17> With 5 lines of CSS added it would be. Currently it's not.

When I read something from Stallman I always take the time to either download the html and convert to pdf or manually add some CSS for font size, line length and centering justifying.

<comment><USER16> I use my own default CSS, so it's pretty nice to read for me. It's sad that most browsers have crappy default CSS.

It really shines in text-mode browsers, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You lost me at "Computers are meant to be automating certain things in this world".</comment>


Why a top terrorism analyst thinks US government surveillance has gone too far - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2013/06/brian_jenkins_fears_nsa_overreach_a_top_terrorism_expert_thinks_government.html <comment><USER2> He wonders why this is covert when all smart terrorists know it already.

I'll play Devil's advocate and answer that. To the extent that the USA publicizes what it does, people in other countries around the world will get concerned and develop alternatives that are not subject to US jurisdiction. Alternatives developed for legitimate reasons by non-criminals then provide options for terrorists to use that are hard for US authorities to monitor.

Let me give a specific example. Around the world, terrorists are forced to use sites like Facebook to promote their views because that is where they will find the people that they want to convince. They take precautions, but they are still forced to use the tool, and it is still easy for them to slip up and get caught.

If, however, distrust of the USA had pushed the people that they want to convince to social networks based outside of the USA, then the exact same terrorists could use those networks in the exact same ways and it would be much harder for the US to capitalize on those inevitable small mistakes.

<comment><USER3> I note also that there are many, many more stupid terrorists than smart terrorists. Likewise criminals.

<comment><USER2> The existence of stupid terrorists is a nuisance in the grand scheme of things. The inspiration for the level of our efforts is fear of something on the scale of 9/11..or bigger.

There are people with the funding, means, and motivation to do something like deliver a fully weaponized anthrax bomb in NYC or Washington, DC. A large portion of our intelligence efforts are devoted to making sure that they do not succeed.

<comment><USER4> If those people really exist with the motivation and means to do that, why haven't they done so? US Intelligence is clearly not perfect, as we saw in Boston.

<comment><USER2> First, existence proof. Do you think that al qaeda under Osama bin Laden didn't have the money, means, and motivation to have done something like that? If you think that, you should look into the situation at the time, Osama was from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, had a network that extended around the world, etc, etc, etc.

Now why did he opt for planes over mass destruction? I don't have a window into his mind, but I can make some reasonable guesses.

First, he was looking for great visuals, and he got that. Killing 100k people with anthrax would have done more damage, but would not have the visuals of seeing an airplane disappear into a building and explode out the other end.

The second has to be concern for the US response. He took out high priority targets that struck at the heart of American power without undue casualties. He got multiple wars, and a worldwide manhunt for anyone in his network. If he had inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties, do you think that the USA would have held back on all out war? (Potentially including nukes, a draft, etc.)

A third is that the USA has been proactively identifying ways in which he could actually acquire those things, and blocking them. For instance look at the efforts we took to help secure Russian nuclear materials.

<comment><USER5> Alternate theory: al-Qaeda used planes because planes exist here in the real world, and weaponized Anthrax bombs that can kill 100,000 people don't.

<comment><USER2> The effectiveness of biological warfare lead to major world powers accumulating hundreds of tons of such weapons, considering what would happen if they used them, then signing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention) and destroying them. (It is, admittedly, easier to give up one "ultimate weapon" when you retain your supplies of another. And in warfare there is no question that nuclear bombs are more useful than biological weapons because they act immediately.)

The capacity to create them again exists and takes little resources in theory. Doing it effectively and actually having it work the first time you try is another story. There is no question that al qaeda can find people who could try, but the probability of success is a different story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As long as I can tell a cop to go fuck themselves without being arrested, I don't feel oppressed.

<comment><USER7> Good luck doing that in the US.

<comment><USER6> I have done that plenty of times. As long as you do it where there are witnesses and you don't do anything else...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds? - <AUTHOR>

What RSS reader do you use? What features do you like, or want from it? How many feeds are you subscribed to? How do you read them: Skim all posts? Read everything? etc <comment><USER2> Google Reader. I try to keep my feeds clean, skimming over headlines and marking content I do not want to read as read. Then, I actually read the rest of the posts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Feed Sidebar in Firefox, subscribed to about 150 feeds.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4869>

</comment><comment><USER4> I use Google Reader to keep track of approximately 300 feeds. These days I mostly only read everything during the weekends. This way I avoid procrastinating during weekdays.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use google reader, I subscribe to around 200 feeds. I keep trying to cull them -- but I just miss those few blogs.

I'd say about 5% of the feeds I get interest me.

</comment><comment><USER6> www.google.com/reader

I subscribe to anything interesting and then unsubscribe from everything that has too many posts and/or proves to be too boring :)

</comment><comment><USER7> bloglines beta. I quite like the navigation and the feed handling behavior.

However, I wish they would give more customization and the feed aggregator break less often.

However, of late, it is become more and more sucky and I plan to move away from it sometime soon

</comment><comment><USER8> I use Google Reader. I skim the headlines and read what I find interesting in full.

</comment><comment><USER9> call me old fashioned, but I still use my browser to view RSS. I skim the headlines as a live bookmark and go to the actual post if interested.</comment>


Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5B01Z920091201 <comment><USER2> I was really hoping this was about some 419 variant...

We would like to steal ships worth $x, but to do so we need boats and guns and fake papers, which cost $y. We presume in most cases we will be able to ransom for $x/10 of which you will get $y*10. Please send the money to... and so on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Best quote: "we've made piracy a community activity."

<comment><USER4> There are a couple of gems in there. Another is "I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."</comment></comment>


Increase Hacker News Font Size? - <AUTHOR> https://puu.sh/seoXx/f4e1503fe9.png<p>This site appears so tiny on my screen. I can increase the zoom on Chrome, but when I do, any article I click on is also magnified. (Except of course, when I go on a spree of opening new tabs from articles here... which happens very often. Which is why I'm only bringing this up now! <comment><USER2> > I can increase the zoom on Chrome, but when I do, any article I click on is > also magnified.

Is this standard behavior for Chrome? I have my HN zoomed at 125% (2 steps up) and while it remembers it for all of this domain, none of the linked stuff is zoomed regardless of what kind of target window it opens in.

<comment><USER3> Same experience on Firefox here: HN zoomed two steps up, linked pages are not zoomed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a great solution when you simply want larger font size, but I use Stylish on pretty much every page.

I use this: [https://userstyles.org/styles/22794/a-dark-hacker- news](https://userstyles.org/styles/22794/a-dark-hacker-news)

Makes some of the font larger. You could modify that sheet.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use the relatively popular Georgify extension for HN ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfale...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfaleomlfanfehgblppafkijjhmi?utm_source=chrome- app-launcher-info-dialog))

</comment><comment><USER6> I made my own version just for fun, but it has a larger size :D [http://martinsandstrom.github.io/HackerNews/](http://martinsandstrom.github.io/HackerNews/)

<comment><USER7> Nice! Just started a project myself [http://quantumsheep.herokuapp.com/](http://quantumsheep.herokuapp.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use this firefox extention: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/zoom-page/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/zoom-page/)

Breakes on some sites, but for most it zooms to up to 150%. When I make the browser smaller it might just zoom to less, depending on how well the site reflows.

</comment><comment><USER9> In Firefox I just zoomed in. It stays that way. Simple solution and it works well. Probably in other browsers as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> I made this chrome extension to increse visibility and better font size [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernews- theme/n...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernews- theme/ngjchhmppjcijklbnigfhhjdajkpjhil)

</comment><comment><USER11> For those on mobile (e.g. chrome), zooming in does not reflow the text. So it's not an option

</comment><comment><USER12> I use Chromium, and I always zoom HN into 150%, haha, it needs only zoom in once.

</comment><comment><USER13> I zoom in too on Chrome. Not sure why they make it so small.

<comment><USER14> They did not change the css since a loooonnng time I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> On my Android tablet where, sadly, HN is but one of many sites which seem to think I have microscope lenses fitted instead of eyeballs, I use Opera which, while far from perfect, does have one killer feature; namely it reflows text on a page when you pinch to zoom in.

Give it a go, if on mobile. You'll wonder how you lived without it.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.brow...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.browser)

[No affiliation. Just a happy camper]</comment>


Another experiment with speed reading as part of our CourseWork - <AUTHOR> http://speedreadingonspeed.herokuapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> We are working on this application as part of our CourseWork, and we need your valuable feedback. Thank you.</comment>