Wide and Deep Learning: Better Together with TensorFlow - <AUTHOR> https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/wide-deep-learning-better-together-with.html <comment> john-whelan I'm curious, is it possible to train a model and send that model to a raspberry pi or something to make something like this realistic to use? Then take the results from the raspberry pi, send them elsewhere to be trained into the model? and repeat?

<comment><USER2> Yes, this is very frequently done. Training is far more computationally expensive than evaluation in most cases.

I don't know of any specific cases of this being down with a raspberry pi, but many phone apps, for example, have this sort of architecture. Train a model on a powerful server/cluster, send model to phones for use, phones collect more training data that is sent to server/cluster, repeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if I missed it, but I would have liked to have seen a performance/accuracy comparison between wide+deep learning and a simple ensemble between wide and deep models. The advantage to having 2 separate models is that you could use just one or the other if something went wrong, or if you needed to make a faster prediction (i.e. when the escalator breaks, you get stairs).

<comment><USER4> In many cases the simple ensemble is more fragile because you have to keep track of multiple things at once. The winning solution for the Netflix Kaggle competition was an intractable ensemble which never got used in production. Also when you update your models you'll have to tune them individually, then manually tune the ensemble weights.

Another advantage of joint learning (which the authors mentioned) is that the individual models need not be as big when trained independently since they complement each other. Though the joint model will surely be bigger than each of the individual models.

<comment><USER5> They (reasonably) claim the joint model doesn't have to be as big, but, for example, it would be interesting the see an ensemble of 2 models: a wide model of the same size as the wide half of the joint model, and a hierarchical model of the same size as the hierarchical half of the joint model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am about to catch a flight, so I am unable to do anything better than skimming the post and paper. But isn't this just the good old feature embeddings coupled with learnt features that have been around for several years by now?

<comment><USER7> I think the change here is they're learning the embeddings alongside the feature weights (eg they're part of the same loss function).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone give more examples of specific problems this could solve?

<comment><USER9> The corresponding paper linked in the blog post explains the recommendation system behind Google App Store. The recommendations generated from this model led to a significant increase in app downloads.

<comment><USER10> Nice.

It strikes me that the example in the blog post is just a general search problem, eg google search could use this: if you type "Brexit" and you want a general overview of a lot of different things, vs you type a specific query and are looking for a specific page.</comment></comment></comment>


MariFlow – Self-Driving Mario Kart With Recurrent Neural Network [YouTube] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipi40cb_RsI <comment><USER2> Is it possible the NN is just memorizing each course? I don't think he mentioned in the video what the train/test split was.

<comment><USER3> its in the middle of the video, there is no split, It can only drive tracks it was trained on, and only after manually intervening and teaching it special cases (recovering from getting stuck)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is from the same guy who made the MarI/O video ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44) \- using Neuroevolution). In the video he also compares MariFlow vs MarI/O.</comment>


Productivity tip: pause your GMail Inbox and hide new emails - <AUTHOR> http://www.theodo.fr/blog/2013/08/pause-your-gmail-inbox-and-hide-new-emails/

<comment><USER2> Nice! It's simple indeed.</comment>


Ask HN: How does the two weeks notice work? - <AUTHOR>

After saving up for years, I'm thinking of quitting my big corporate job in a month or so to pursue working on independent projects on my own. I've never had to leave a job before, so I have no idea what I'm doing.
I hear that you're supposed to give your 2 weeks notice, but then I also read that sometimes you're treated as if you officially quit right away rather than in 2 weeks. Is this really up to the company to decide? Is this generally defined in the policy? I'd love to find out, as I'll need to know when exactly I'll be "officially out" for insurance purposes.
Any suggestions/experiences would be greatly appreciated! <comment><USER2> For health insurance, there is this thing called COBRA that you get mailed to you and can sign up for. Basically it means that you can pay out-of-pocket for the same coverage your company gave you without a change in price.

For my last employer, health coverage ended on the last day of employment. However if something happens between your quitting and you filling out the form, COBRA still covers you because the law states that as long as you sign up, it's "retroactive back to the event", the event being you quitting. I don't know if this applies for non-citizens. I would check your employee agreement or handbook for the specific conditions.

These details are from my lawyer, however IANAL myself. For more details on this I would defiantly ask an expert; insurance law is very tricky and my explanation may not be complete.

In terms of what '2 weeks notice' actually means, it varies heavily by company. Some shops walk you out the door immediately or within 24 hours (finance). Others almost always wait the full 2 weeks to get everything in order. Many times it depends on other factors, such as whether or not you're leaving for a competitor (or in your case, starting a competitor).

</comment><comment><USER3> My recollection is that insurance tends to be on a monthly basis. Give notice at the beginning of the month, and you might be covered until the end of the month in any case. Double-check that, though.

I think that if you give two weeks' notice, you're doing the company the courtesy of offering to stick around for two weeks to help with the transition. They might not accept that offer, because they consider you to be a security risk or something, but even if they decline it they're still obliged to pay you for that time, AFAIK; they just won't let you come into the office.

While there might be things for which they could terminate you without owing you severance pay, I don't see how giving notice could be one of them.

But I'm no expert. If it matters that much, consult an attorney.</comment>


Ask HN: Those of you who are parents – how do you balance work/life? - <AUTHOR> I am wondering how you balance your work/life. I myself do not have children yet, but my girlfriend and I are planning on having a family, for which I am completely willing to push back on my career and focus on family.<p>But what about you? Did it lower your career prospects? Did you decide otherwise and lost the family instead? Do you have any regrets? Any advice? <comment><USER2> Definitely altered my perspective on what kind of career I want. Nowadays I plan my life around my kids and intersperse my free time into doing the things I want to do. It looks like sacrifice, but I'm happy doing it this way, and so does my wife.

The balance, at least for me, tilted toward family. But I think this is different for every one. Some may prefer to outsource a certain amount of childcare, for instance.

Look at what you value, and I think you'll plan accordingly.</comment>


The Open Source Report Card - <AUTHOR> http://osrc.dfm.io/ <comment><USER2> The only thing I didn't really like is the : "note that {user} is less of a {language} aficionado", because it compared my github to someone else's profile who wrote very little code and only filed issues, yet somehow was far more superior in {language} due to being involved in repos that were in that language. Aside from that, I like it :)</comment>


Docker Containers Go GA on Heroku - <AUTHOR> https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/1255 <comment><USER2> Don't folks use syntax highlighting on filenames that have the suffix Dockerfile?</comment>


Ask HN: Summer Activities for Bored Kids? - <AUTHOR> I spend time programming Scratch 3 with my daughter as an activity.  But this is not something she wants to do everyday.
Covid has put limits certain kid's activities like parks and arcades.
What activities have you come up with for kids age 6-10 this Summer? <comment><USER2> Yes, I just came here to get similar suggestions for my kids also. Having them some time to spend on khan academy subjects will occupy few hours in a day, but I am looking something in javascript game tutorials for my elder one as he is more interested in it. He is good with basic javascript skills. Any suggestions or pointers?</comment>


ShowHN: PinkHearted - Share to S3 with Skitch 1 without an Evernote account - <AUTHOR> http://www.pinkhearted.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice solution!</comment>


Checking my predictions about clinton's health - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dilbert.com/post/150284922631/checking-my-predictions-about-clintons-health <comment><USER2> Looks like he nailed it.

Im curious about his "running unapposed" theory. If Hillary has to drop one of the debates or has another "episode" it may be the case.

Exciting times.</comment>


First Image Ever Obtained from Mercury Orbit - <AUTHOR> http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/image.php?gallery_id=2&image_id=432

<comment><USER2> I have looked forward to this as much as I still look forward to the New Horizons probe to the outermost edge of the solar system, to Pluto.

Mercury has some exhilarating mysteries, and I look forward to seeing the probe unlock them.

<comment><USER3> Some things will become clear but it'll be like cutting heads off the Hydra. But that's the fun part of science - every question answered seems to raise many more.

<comment><USER2> Hear hear. Here's to the questions. The foundation, root, body and crown of science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like you don't want to be there when it 'rains'. But it's amazing how far the impact of the big crater reaches. I wonder if these are cracks in the surface or sprays of dust.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why aren't there that many craters in Earth?

</comment><comment><USER6> Any other boomers think back to the days of John Glenn?

(edited because I forgot the first two flights didn't orbit)

</comment><comment><USER7> It looks like the moon. Maybe it is a moon?</comment>


Amazon Echo Loop - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JPK4XJ6 <comment><USER3> Is this an early April Fool's joke? The video showing people interacting with the ring does not remotely look appealing or cool. I'm surprised this went through all the way to actual production.

<comment><USER4> _Is this an early April Fool 's joke?_

It's yet another SV bubble "innovation" that's only useful on the west coast.

It's not going to work in half the world for half of the year. Winter. Pockets. Gloves.

See also: Apple EarPods, with the cords that get brittle in cold weather and become useless tangles that fly up in your face.

See also: Every iPhone I've ever owned which has gone into emergency thermal shutdown just because I dared to use it in Arizona or Nevada.

<comment><USER5> I've lived in places that were cold for a decent period each year and I wasn't wearing gloves all the time. Even 2-3% of my time would be a stretch.

Even in cold countries we spend ~90% of our time inside and much of the ~10% outside in decent weather. The average American spends 7% of their day outside with some obvious outliers push that upwards. The world average is 87% inside. [1]

Plenty of products are only used a few times a day. I don't think the downtime spent walking around outside shopping or commuting is the killer.

The question is are there enough of those uses to justify wearing it all the time. Not if it works in 100% of situations.

1\. [https://www.creditdonkey.com/time-spent-outdoors- statistics....](https://www.creditdonkey.com/time-spent-outdoors- statistics.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am amazed that this got green lighted.

you know - who is out there saying - what i am missing in my life is a really ugly ring, that i have to charge daily.

<comment><USER4> _I am amazed that this got green lighted._

It's what happens when a company has so much money it can make things without doing any actual market research.

"More dollars than sense" is the appropriate expression.

<comment><USER7> I think it's more that Amazon has so much money that their version of market research looks much different than what you typically think of as market research.

Producing a new device, throwing it up on their website to sell, and seeing how well it does _is_ Amazon's version of market research. It's "move fast and break things" brought into the hardware space. They actually even say as much in their description of the "Day 1 Editions" program, of which the Echo Loop is part of.

<comment><USER8> Expect they're not breaking anything at all.

<comment><USER7> The "move fast and break things" motto doesn't mean actually "breaking" things. It means not being afraid of mistakes, because things that are "broken" or "wrong" can be fixed down the line.

In this case, Amazon is exhibiting not being afraid of releasing a possibly unsuccessful product, because they know they can iterate on it (or pivot, or exit entirely) later on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is clear to me that Amazon has doubled down on the only foothold they have, after missing mobile.

I think that Voice Assistants will always be a feature, though, and not a product. And as a feature, first-party ones will always have an inherent advantage.

Especially with this event, it seems that Amazon is going with a feature and trying to back into products, which to me seems like the opposite way to approach a market.

<comment><USER10> Amazon is under the (mistaken?) assumption that the Echo was popular for any reason besides the fact that it makes playing music super easy.

<comment><USER11> I've owned Echo for 4 years (switched to google home now), and used it to play music only once. It's purely assistant to me.

<comment><USER12> You are in the minority. Most of the queries by far are for music use case.

<comment><USER13> Do you have a source for that claim? Because I also rather rarely play music through mine. Most people I know who have one use it mainly for smart home control.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I would love to have some data on that too. We have a few HomePods around the house, and even though that is more of a music player than a smart speaker, we use the voice assistant for everything BUT music.

Music is usually controlled with our phones or computers, casted to the HomePods.

<comment><USER15> For some additional anecdotal data points:

\- I use mine exclusively for music.

\- My mom uses hers for a mix of home automation and music, but seems to be heavier toward the latter. Sometimes she'll play Jeopardy with it.

\- My grandparents use theirs exclusively for home automation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My main thing with this is it kind of works well for digital minimalism - <USER2> need for notifications or tracking of my body but get the benefit of adding to-dos or looking up quick things without looking at a screen.

I hate smart watches cause I wear a normal watch, you know, something i never have to charge and is always on, amazing concept and I don't want to constantly be pulling out my phone, I prefer to keep it in a bag. This kind of gets that middle ground of answering quick one off questions (which I use my Google Home for now, but not out and about) as well as add to-dos and other things. Connecting this with Ifttt can probably do other cool stuff to.

Though, this is not a mass market need, it just happens to fill my specific need.

</comment><comment><USER17> The linked video is priceless. One of the first examples is a guy asking the ring-Alexa "What's on my grocery list?" to which ring-Alexa replies idiotically, "You have five items on your grocery list." This is almost Google Glass levels of tastelessness and bad design. Did none of Amazon's product managers see someone talking into their cupped palm, pausing, and then moving their hand to the side of their face and think, "this looks stupid and weird"? Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh damn! They should have made it in the shape of tiny angels and demons micro drones which hover over your shoulder. You ask a question and you get an assortment of positive and negative responses from them as they flutter and follow you around your shoulders.

<comment><USER4> I guess all the down-voters never watched a Looney Tunes cartoon. Sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know how to feel about this. On one side are the privacy implications.

On the other hand, 16 year old me would have loved this. This is the pervasive computing of sci-fi made real. All information is just a tap away. Control lights or run a compute job using a custom Alexa Skill.

<comment><USER20> Sci-fi also showed us the risks of such things, if not implemented properly. STtNG had several episodes where the U.S.S. Enterprise was commandeered via voice hacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What is the advantage of this over a smart watch?

<comment><USER22> I would sooner wear a ring than watch. Anecdotally, I have plenty of friends who agree with me

(Granted I wouldn't wear this for privacy reasons, but I really dislike wearing watches)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Echo Loop might be a dud or it might be a winner we don't expect but I am glad they are trying it. We have no idea what form factor of wearable will end up winning and being in the set of things people use and like.

Good for Amazon for trying something new and having the resources to experiment with a new form factor. I have no idea of a ring with a voice interface will stand the test of time but I would like to know if it has any merit.

</comment><comment><USER24> Currently I use a ring that allows me to pay like a credit card: I love it (I live by the beach so I prefer not to have a wallet with me).

Being able to query google from a ring is attractive to me.

I am surprised by the fact the speaker is in the ring, but it means you can potentially receive "private" information from the ring without other hearing.

I imagine people whispering to their rings in the bus. I think the hand motion you have to do from speaking to listening might make you look like a fool (google glass)

<comment><USER25> Hey, which product are you using? I googled and the McLear came up top. Do you like it? The contactless payment thing sounds fucking amazing.

<comment><USER26> That looks pretty cool. I have not joined the contactless payment game yet, but I'd consider wearing this.

Too bad it looks to be UK only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can see the appeal of everything else Amazon announced (even the glasses, which have value in that they're basically headphones you don't have to take off when having a conversation). But cannot figure out the target market of this. I'm even someone who is interested in the idea of a smart ring, but the feature it needs is sleep tracking (since I haven't ever been able to sleep with a watch or band).

<comment><USER28> Sleep tracking is the _only_ thing I can think of that would be usefull.

<comment><USER27> I could see some use in fitness tracking when playing a sport where you'd be asked to take off a watch (pickup basketball, for example). But that's why I think there could be a market for it - its value prop is simply that it's both extremely low profile and connected. The Oura ring is simply too expensive for me, but I _think_ I'd pay $130 for a wearable sleep tracker that integrates with Apple Health that provided me high quality data about my sleep quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I give credit for an interesting product idea, but requiring a nearby cellphone makes it much less compelling than an Apple Watch with a data plan. Something like Amazon's ring but with its own cell data plan and a lot of work put into voice only UIs might be a great product. Still, for now, a watch that can be a replacement for carrying a phone hits the sweet spot for me.

</comment><comment> mitasu-hachi trying not to imagine what'll happen if the battery starts swelling

</comment><comment><USER30> Only one question - Why?

</comment><comment><USER31> Oh FFS this is ridiculous. If Amazon can build it into a ring, they can install it subdermally and power it with the Krebs cycle. We're all just aching for a way to have a more intimate, always-on relationship with Amazon. _Amazon what are you waiting for???_

</sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER32> This feels like one of those bad Kickstarter projects that get made fun of on YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER33> The only things I ask Alexa to do are

\- Turn on/off the lights

\- What time is it?

\- What's the weather (today, this week)?

Literally that's all I've done since the thing came out. I find other interaction patterns to be inferior to just waiting to use by phone.

I hate using Alexa as a speaker since my Sonos system is far better than even the top tier Alexa hardware, and I want to use non-Amazon music services anyway. Alexa really wants to play music though as it frequently misunderstands me and tries its best to get me to like it. I wish I could disable music outright, but the product people at Amazon will never allow it.

Alexa is such a toy. It'll never be much else despite Amazon trying their damnedest. It gets things wrong frequently and isn't really life changing. They missed the smartphone boat and this will be their second fiddle.

</comment><comment><USER34> this takes "talk to the hand" to a whole new level. i pray this madness stops

</comment><comment><USER35> I do wonder what else does it pick up. This seems to be a voice version of facebook scanning faces of all random people on pictures taken in public and posted to facebook.

</comment><comment><USER36> That...could be quite handy for the elderly. Spend some time as a caregiver and you see that a lot of these oddball form factors are quite handy for some folks.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm usually enthusiastic about Echo products but today's announcements should have included Henry Winkler, a motorcycle and a shark tank.

</comment><comment><USER38> I was in a group of ~a dozen people recently and somehow it came up that over half of our wedding bands were from Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER39> I actually like this a lot tbh. I only wish it looked better but worth a try.

Been looking to try some new IoT stuff.

</comment><comment><USER40> A curved LiPo battery being shipped in a real device! cool! This has been a long time coming

</comment><comment><USER41> It's basically what the Apple Watch already does.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is one of the saddest things I have ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER42> maybe work on making the Alexa phone app more user friendly instead...

</comment><comment><USER43> One ring to bring them all…

</comment><comment><USER44> Java Ring 2.0

</comment><comment><USER45> I'll pass for now, but keep me in the loop.

</comment><comment><USER46> One ring to rule them all?

All that is missing is an Amazon Echo Loop Nose Edition. Bear with me...

It's mounted right above your mouth, so you never have to raise your hand to your face - pfft, how exhausting right? You tap it with your tongue to activate (if you're flexible enough). And, it just vibrates, making your nose itch, when you have a notification.

To charge it, along with your ring, eyeglasses, ear pods, watch, phone, laptop, and smart socks, you will need another usb port. But luckily, you can charge this one in your sleep. Just mount the magnetic charger right to your face. So convenient! Battery lasts all day! (6 hours)</comment>


Inversion of Control with shareable react components - <AUTHOR> https://www.lorenzweiss.de/inversion_of_control_with_react_components/ <comment><USER2> I disagree with the premise. In the Article, we construct a button, and make it increasingly more complex by adding props. Eventually, the author states we should stop and leverage children:

"We now have at least 10 optional props and conditions to cover all use cases of all buttons in our application... In react every component gets automatically a prop called children, this prop will be filled with anything you wrap with your component."

The problem with not having a defined interface (for prefixed and/or suffixed icons), is that anytime a developer consumes our button in our application, we can have N variants of it.

If your designers ever want to change, say, the size of the icons inside buttons, now you'll have to adjust that in every instance you use the button, which is the point of having the props abstraction. It gives you an easy way to control all buttons look the same, in one precise location. For this reason, this isn't a helpful application of inversion of control concept.</comment>


Water quality data for national-scale aquatic research: The Water Quality Portal - <AUTHOR> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016WR019993/full <comment><AUTHOR> Link to the actual data portal. Submission contains the abstract: [https://www.waterqualitydata.us](https://www.waterqualitydata.us)</comment>


Uncovering Hidden SSIDs Using Wireshark - <AUTHOR> https://cybersecuritylabs.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/uncovering-hidden-ssids/

<comment><USER2> If there are no associated clients, you can brute-force the SSID with MDK3 [http://www.backtrack- linux.org/forums/showthread.php?t=12360](http://www.backtrack- linux.org/forums/showthread.php?t=12360)

And mahouse is correct: airodump-ng automatically detects when the SSID is broadcasted and displays it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't airodump-ng do this by default?

<comment> TD-Linux Yes it does, even with a neat curses based interface IIRC. No need for wireshark at all.

<comment><USER4> I just wish airodump-ng's curses interface paid attention to the height of my terminal or provided a way to scroll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat, but you can do the equivalent with tcpdump and grep, right?</comment>


Show HN: alify.me – extension to put relevant AliExpress products on Amazon site - <AUTHOR> Hey,
I just finished building a first version of a browser extension: alify.me. It puts the relevant (hopefully) AliExpress products on the Amazon website, while you are surfing it.
The idea is to get the often way better prices on AliExpress for the same or similar products that are on Amazon. Obviously, doesn't work for all products, but some - as for some categories it doesn't really make sense to buy in China.
Now, I'd hope for some feedback. I wanted to put out a first version asap and see how people liked it, before I keep developing it. So, please let me know. :)
For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alifyme/jmkpahegcf...
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/alify-me/ <comment><USER2> Is the "a" icon added to my Firefox toolbar supposed to do anything? Clicking on it does nothing.</comment>


Linus Torvalds Talks Linux Security at LinuxCon - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/linus-torvalds-talks-linux-security-at-linuxcon.html <comment><USER2> Why do I keep seeing Heartbleed and Shellshock mentioned in articles specifically about Linux security? Those two vulnerabilities had nothing to do with Linux.

Software using OpenSSL or bash on _any_ platform were vulnerable. That includes Macs and Windows.

Linux is extremely popular for servers and embedded systems where OpenSSL and bash are common but bringing them up every time "security + Linux" are discussed is a bit like talking about tires that blow out whenever the topic of logistics comes up.

<comment><USER3> So by that logic, it is unfair to criticise flash and or Java as Windows security issues?

It seems like Linux people want to shift the definition of "Linux" between only the kernel and the entire OS when it is convenient. In this case we're shifting down the definition to "kernel only" so we can avoid talking about Linux (the OS's) potential security issues.

Heartbleed and Shellshock are Linux (OS) issues. Just because that same software may ship on BSD and OS X is entirely irrelevant. Linux was still by far the largest target (just like Windows is the largest target of cross- platform Java vulnerabilities).

Linux as a kernel is pretty freaking secure. Linux as an OS has a lot of issues, and many (most?) popular distributions are a large part of why (e.g. SELinux is often disabled by default and a lot of packages are incompatible, a lot of services run as root by default, a lot of packages are installed by default (not the minimum), etc).

<comment><USER4> > So by that logic, it is unfair to criticise flash and or Java as Windows > security issues?

Uh, yes. They are not Windows security issues.

> Heartbleed and Shellshock are Linux (OS) issues.

No they were not. Run OpenSSL on Windows and you were just as vulnerable to Heartbleed, same as if you ran bash as a CGI service on Windows, or OSX or BSD or VMS or ...

> shift the definition of "Linux" between only the kernel and the entire OS > when it is convenient.

No they don't, Linux the OS makes sense in some circumstances, not in others, this is one of those times where it doesn't since we're talking specifically about Linus' work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Most of the security issues we've had in the kernel have been just completely stupid bugs...

Wouldn't that be an argument to be more stringent in reviewing and auditing the kernel code? I don't know to which extend they already do audits, but if you find a bug of a certain type, maybe consider combing the tree for other instances of that type of bug. I believe that's the approach OpenBSD has taken.

<comment><USER6> My very first mentor responded to me calling something "just a stupid bug" by saying "Almost all bugs are stupid." His point was that even the most talented programmers will make stupid mistakes and stupid bugs are capable of passing through large levels of code review.

Things like inverting the logic in one case of a complex conditional, or copy paste bugs like:

        z1 = x1 + y1;
        z2 = x2 + y2;
        z3 = x3 + y1;

Are very hard to see. We have lint tools to catch a lot of them (e.g. a single '=' in a conditional), but at some point the tool lacks sufficient semantic understanding to catch everything.

<comment><USER7> That's a very common error and is called the last line effect: [http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0260/#ID0E5HAE](http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0260/#ID0E5HAE)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> (by the way the article is dated August 2015)

I love the tone here. Not promising the moon.

Everybody knows there will be bugs. In general it's just that dance that you have to do around that, that you can't admit it.

Same about planning ten years to the future. Maybe you could give scenarios.

I guess he's expecting quite a lot from the audience.

</comment><comment><USER9> I propose a corollary to the "bugs are shallow" quote: "Given enough code output, all programmers are stupid"

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's the video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xKXHavHJ7U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xKXHavHJ7U)

</comment><comment><USER11> Related to the recent interview notes by Brad Spender: [https://grsecurity.net/~spender/interview_notes.txt](https://grsecurity.net/~spender/interview_notes.txt)

IMO it's scary to hear Linus say that "security is just stupid bugs" and that he doesn't think about containers much (container/namespace security and functionality is a big and quickly emerging part of the kernel security landscape). Call it a lack of vision or whatever, but I think he should be doing more to architect for security and to recruit, place and reward talented people into security lead positions in the kernel community.

<comment><USER12> Which implementation of containers are a "quickly emerging part of the kernel security landscape"? Im seriously asking because cgroups and jails have been around for a very long time and, unlike LXC so far (for all intents and purposes, given that Docker is the most popular implementation), actually provide real security instead of dependency and devops management poorly disguised as security.

Maybe times have changed in the last year since I've used LXC containers, but when I explored them they were about as secure in practice as a paper bag is waterproof.

<comment><USER13> Windows is doing a lot of work using their hypervisor to secure parts of the kernel -- This talk from Blackhat 2015 has some really cool details: [http://www.alex-ionescu.com/blackhat2015.pdf](http://www.alex- ionescu.com/blackhat2015.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


I don't do meetings. I do tweetings. - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.org/2008/09/06/i-dont-do-meetings-i-do-tweetings/ "Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate" - Dave Barry <comment><USER2> Makes a lot of sense. Something the big corporates should be taking heed of - it seems the higher up the structure you go the larger percentage of your day is consumed by the one hour meeting! A lot of the concepts remind me of the strategies Ricardo Semler talks about in his book Maverick - a good read if anyone's interested.

</comment><comment><USER3> Article makes reasonable (although not exactly new) arguments for running faster, leaner, less formal with fewer meetings and more emails.

What annoys me is the twitter part - who in their right mind would have any sort important technical discussions over twitter? Can you imagine discussing MySQL tweaks 140 characters at a time? Dynamic programming algorithms? I guess some people just like to hit every nail with a social media hammer.</comment>


How you know you're an entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/2010/05/25/how-you-know-youre-an-entrepreneur/

<comment><USER2> Not sure I agree, although the article was written tongue in cheek. Entrepreneurship is about taking control of your own life and making stuff happen. Not trying to profit from everything you lay your eyes on.

Of course it helps to see opportunities everywhere but it's not only about money.

</comment><comment><USER3> This example makes no sense. A cadaver is a dead corpse. The organs listed (except corneas) need to be harvested from a brain-dead person on life- support, which is only 1-2% of all deaths.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're an entrepreneur you'd also figure that there is a very good reason for such discrepancy in price.

Then you'd identify and account for reasons (organs go bad, quality might be this or that way, risk of getting caught, logistics,...). If you did it correctly you could figure if some of reasons for higher price can be removed or minimized. And from this we can derive our arbitrage opportunity.

For this case you'd probably figure out that guys in biz already got it covered (these guys are definitely pro's) and that there is really no opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER5> The easiest arbitrage opportunities are always illegal...

</comment><comment><USER6> It wasn't until I read the part underneath it, talking about what your first thought should be, that I realized that I actually was thinking about the fact that the individual organs sell for more than the complete body.

<comment><USER7> There are some car part companies that work along this scheme, they buy complete (new) cars, disassemble them and sell the parts at a discount compared to the official channel. It's a bit problematic because not all parts are equally wanted but on the whole it seems to work.

The writer doesn't take in to account that most of those organs have to be harvested within minutes of death and treated very carefully to make sure they are usable for a recipient. The observation is a funny one though, pity that in practice it doesn't work out.

Makes you wonder if you could bequeath the value of your harvest-able parts to your estate, organ donor-ship is for the most part a 'free' affair.

<comment><USER8> That's probably the entrepreneurship opportunity right there: bring in your dying relatives to try and get some cash out of them.

I guess the problem is that old people generally don't leave much usable stuff.

IIRC I think Iran has a functioning market for (some) body parts. There's an argument to be had for the creation of a regulated market, especially in kidneys. Because the black market is going to happen anyway.

<comment><USER7> > bring in your dying relatives to try and get some cash out of them.

I _really_ hope you're joking ;)

Scary reading:

<http://www.editinternational.com/read.php?id=47ddbe51262c7>

<comment><USER8> I'm here to confirm : it was a joke!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Even when I was a kid I saw scarcity or demand as business opportunities. If I had a cool new toy that noone else had I would rent it out to the kids in the yard for a buck per go as soon as play with it. As one of the first kids to have a home computer I would charge kids to play arcade games at my house rather than go to the arcade, etc.

I try to convince myself that this makes me entrepreneurial rather than just a greedy bastard...

<comment><USER10> Sorry, just greedy. And a geek. The other kids had real friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Gross and I think the word he is looking for is "greedy" not entrepreneur.</comment>


Git-R-Done - <AUTHOR> http://codetuple.com/articles/programming/SYrSnGSx7s5/git-r-done-1 <comment><USER2> Neat, but incredibly OO focused. What about us C, Haskell, and Lisp programmers?

...Than again, we should all know OO. It's just that a lot of design patterns work more simply using other paradigms and higher level languages. Strategy is barely worth mentioning, for instance.</comment>


Google to End Health Records Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/technology/25health.html?_r=1&hpw

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I never heard of it. If the only people who know about a Google service are Google fans, it will fail.</comment>


Show HN: Kousibei.net is up again with a solution - <AUTHOR> Previous version of K'Net give out html page with altered links all back to itself. The data volume is too excessive that even Openshift cannot hold the fire. And later I found it had been experimented before as CGI proxy.
The possible solution is to take html documents only, css links at most, leave other links directly to the original server.
The result, less perfect view, but acceptable. <comment><AUTHOR> Early of my claim "no tracking, zero logging" was true but a teething mistake.

At the beginning the logging files was huge and my disk quota on Openshift free server quickly run into exceeding disk quota error. I was counting on the statistic data on Google Ads to be aware of the number of users.

Tracking is everywhere, logging is necessary for security concerns. Privacy comes from the fact that people are using dynamic IP addresses to access the web and most importantly, the server neither logs base on login user, nor couples login user with the IP address.</comment>


Iran announces 'halal Internet', new cyberdefense study programs - <AUTHOR> http://internetofelsewhere.com/blog/2011/04/17/iran-announces-halal-internet-and-new-cyberdefense-study-programs/

<comment><USER2> "Halal internet?"

Sounds tasty. I'd like to order mine in a pita with rice on the side, to go please.</comment>


How SOPA Affects Students, Educators, and Libraries - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/how-sopa-affects-students-and-educators <comment><USER2> "When faced with these sorts of situations, administrators will likely enact policies to shield their universities from liability, even if those policies don't take advantage of the fair use exceptions to copyright provided to educators. In spite of the law's current explicit protection for "multiple copies for classroom use," many universities currently pay blanket licensing fees to the non-profit company Copyright Clearance Center in an attempt to stave off potential liability. And it's understandable why the universities pay: the Center is now partially financing a 2008 lawsuit filed by an academic publisher against Georgia State University, which did not pay for such a license."

Isn't that extortion? Georgia State didn't cough up their "protection" money. Time to smash the windows...</comment>


A RickRoll Duet for OSX - <AUTHOR> http://trolocsis.com/roll.sh.txt

<comment><USER2> It's only missing a midi background track.</comment>


The Dentist Office Software Story - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2014/07/the-dentist-office-software-story/ <comment><USER3> This story is fictional, I know the real one: the guy described really does exist (and he probably exists in just about every country). He was a dentist that taught himself how to program (domain expertise really counts for something in almost every profession) and built the ultimate dentist software (dogfooding it) in visual basic. He then marketed this software to his colleagues and it spread like wildfire, capturing a very large portion of the market in a surprisingly short time without spending a single cent in marketing, because it was exactly what the dentists needed.

Because our dentist/programmer was a smart fellow (he'd have to be, given that he's active in two different complex fields) he foresaw that selling the software once was a nice proposition, but selling it repeatedly would be even better.

Hence the annual 'maintenance fee', of about 1,000 euros per dentist using his software. Do you know how many dentists there are in nl?

So, instead of going for venture capital this dentist-wannabe-programmer built himself a money printing press that printed more money than he and his extended family will ever be able to spend. At the end of every year the maintenance payments roll in and he's laughing all the way to the bank. This money machine has been printing since the early 90's and does not look like it will stop printing any day soon. And no VC made a single cent on any of that. He's so solidly entrenched that trying to attack his position is a losing proposition.

I like the avc blog, but it would be nice if stories like this were grounded in reality rather than fiction.

<comment><USER4> I've seen (and supported) some dental software, and you're missing a detail: since your tooth-pulling coder is so solidly entrenched, no development beyond OS updates and imaging interfaces ever takes place. Therefore everyone suffers through mid-90s-era GUIs (and not the cutting edge from that time by any means!) until the dentists are all replaced by robots.

<comment><USER5> Here's the thing: for many so-called niche industries, the requirements change about as infrequently. People aren't even considering the 90s-era GUI - <USER2> have a tool that gets out of their way, they're familiar with it, and it gets the job done quickly and well.

I've gone this route replacing a niche software product running on MS Access with a newer, better, faster one. It met all the requirements. It fixed all their pain points. It followed the latest usability guidelines. If this office had adopted it and referred it over to other offices, I would have been as well-off as the dentist described by GP.

It fell flat. They paid me for the product, said it was really great, but ... none of their reps wanted to make the changeover. It was not that the learning curve was too high - it was that _any_ learning curve was too high.

To clarify: anything different from what they were doing every day for the past 10 years meant that they had to think about the software they were using and not the job that they were doing. And that slowed them down - the fact that it would have been a temporary slowdown was irrelevant.

I've seen the same thing played out in my eye dr's office. THey had an old 3270-based system that they used via emulator - and they could _fly_ with that. They knew all the shotcuts, didn't even have to look at the csreen.

Over the period of a year and a half I watched them get a new system in. It had all the same features and a ton more. And it slowed them down to a crawl.

They reverted back to their 3270 based system by the time a year had passed.

So you make an assumption that newer is better - but remember that's _your_ assumption, and it's not one that the targe audience (ultimately the end- users, not just the people you're selling to higher up the chain) will necessarily share.

<comment><USER6> It's a generational thing as well.

My wife is just out of residency running her own medical practice. She went with the latest-and-greatest electronic medical record system that's all either web of iPad based, with all her records stored in the cloud and fully integrated with similarly advanced billing software. It's pretty good, and does most of what we need well. It's definitely head-and-shoulders above any other software out there that's specific to her specialty.

Right now she's considering buying another practice, and during the pre- purchase process the ~65 year old doc was talking about how fantastic their medical record/billing software suite is. Does everything they could ever want it to do, everyone in the office loves it, etc..

So, I ask for a demo, and he loads up a Filemaker database running off the server in the back room. Looks like it was designed in 1996, offers zero web- connectivity, and they're 100% happy with it.

That practice would never consider "upgrading" to the software we use. We'd never consider the software they use. There's a generational gap in medicine and dentistry, just like everything else. The more young docs come out of medical school, the higher their expectations will be for things like GUI, UX/UI and mobile connectivity.

<comment><USER5> Depending on how you mean generational - if the implication is that younger generations won't be susceptable to this, then I disagree. If instead you mean that it's generational in terms of software generations and the systems we first learn to use - with that, I definitely agree.

For your wife, in ten or twenty years that all-touch cloud-based system will be as the Filemaker system is for the 65 year old doc, when the next generation of latest and greatest comes around.

It's not about the abilities of the technology, IMO, but about people's resistance to change for the sake of change. If what they have works well for them, there is very little impetus to accept change, particularly when technology is not their actual business.

<comment><USER7> Except that with a cloud-based product, she won't have a choice. She'll wake up a morning and the product will be different, she'll have to accept it.

Just like all the changes in gmail are not welcome by everyone, but you can't just choose to stick with the 2004 version.

Or, maybe, she'll get an email saying "we're sorry but we'll shut down the service, the company is closing". Or "we're glad to announce we're acquired by our competitor, see how you account will be migrated."

<comment><USER8> YES! I think the generational aspect of it is more that the older practitioners have been burned more by the new-fangled thing, and what's most important to them is a system they can trust.

There is a finite number of times that a small business owner can say the words, "I'm sorry, I can't schedule your appointment right now because our system is down" before never saying that again becomes their number one software-related concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reality-based revision:

Two young entrepreneurs graduate from college, and go to YC. They pitch PG on a low cost version of Dentasoft, which will be built on a modern software stock and include mobile apps for the dentist to remotely manage his office from the golf course. PG likes the idea and they are accepted into YC. Their company, Dent.io, gets their product in market quickly and prices it at $5,000 per year per office. _Dentists might have good reason to like this new entrant, but the Dent.io founders have no relationships in the dental profession and they don 't know how to sell to the more than 100,000 dentists practicing in the United States today. Because of this, and because dentists are reluctant to change the software that is used to manage their operations, which would require staff retraining, Dent.io fails to make much of a dent in the market._

</comment><comment><USER10> Although there are some 'straw man' aspects to any story like this, I think it's pretty clear that in today's startup economy the USV thesis about network effects is pretty valid. That said, I think the more interesting question is when we will evolve a good way of monetizing networks.

Advertising is OK for now, but clearly it doesn't work for all scenarios. For instance, a dental application would be a terrible place for advertising as people don't want ads anywhere near medical records.

I once went to a talk by USV and heard something along the lines of this: the first big layer of the internet was the infrastructure layer. The best companies to invest in were Cisco and those who were ahead in that field. Then the infrastructure enabled the provider layer, and AOL and other providers were the big ticket. Then came the application layer, when people like Google started to build interesting applications over the internet. The newest layer is the network layer, which has some overlap with the app layer but is where players like Facebook and Twitter come in.

The question is: what's next? What layer will leverage the networks to useful economic extent like all of those other layers have in the past? Whoever has an answer for this will be very, very rich and famous.

<comment><USER11> Monetizing a dental network would actually be surprisingly easy...you charge dentists for new patient appointments. With the average lifetime patient value being over $1k, charging $20-$50 per appointment will get a lot of traction among dentists. Additionally, using the data in dental management systems to help automate the operational aspects of a dentist's practice is something that dentists are more than willing to pay for. Companies like Lighthouse 360, Intuit (Demandforce) and SmileReminders all make a ton of money sending email/postcard/text communications to patients on behalf of dental practices. It's not uncommon for services like these to cost $100-$300 per month and be worth every penny.

Where would the network come in? Well, it turns out that the software made by the companies I mentioned is mostly applicable to any industry where patients schedule appointments, so you can cross market between, say, a hair salon and a dental practice to try to get patients of the dental practice to make appointments to get their hair cut and vice versa. A company that integrated with all the major management systems across industries could create a site similar to Yelp! which would help customers find and select local small businesses.

I do wish the original author had written about an area that he actually understood. The dental practice management system market is among the worst to try to disrupt. The entrenched players are terrible and yet there's so much friction, that it's almost impossible to dislodge them. All the innovation is happening from companies that build integrations to pull relevant data out of those management systems to do the interesting stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't shake the feeling that only one of the examples _needs_ VC investment to function and succeed, and all of the others could be bootstrapped or take minimal investment.

Investing in and promoting startups that can only exist with VC funds sounds like a fair enough strategy for a VC.

I'm not convinced that the interests of founders and VC are always the same.

<comment><USER13> To be fair, he is explaining the USV investing model. He is not saying that this the only type of business to build...he is saying this is the type of business we can comfortably invest in. VC investing isn't right for every business and every business isn't right for VC's. That's just fine.

<comment><USER12> Oh, I totally agree with you; I just walked away with the impression that the VC-funded option was the "most right" startup model.

As an explanation of _why_ they invest the way they do, it's very good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article disappoints me because it seems to boil down to:

      BAD: making money by selling software
      GOOD: making money by selling ads

So how do you make money selling ads? By getting a bunch of users and auctioning off their private information.

I wish more people in the position to fund software development would support a model where your users are your customers and not just eyeballs to be sold to the highest bidder.

<comment><USER15> No, what you write down is just one implementation of the idea outlined in the article. The general case is closer to:

BAD: counting on the intrisic quality of your software to keep competitors at bay

GOOD: using switching costs / network effects as barriers to entry

<comment><USER16> That's not GOOD, that's profitable EVIL.

<comment><USER17> Barriers to entry are what capitalism is all about. (Real world capitalism, not the utopian capitalism from Econ 101.)

Patents, R&D, trade secrets, network effects, natural monopolies... all of these are competitive advantages that capitalistic companies want to have. It's the reason that "nobody else can provide what we do". Otherwise you're just trading commodities and you won't realize economic profits.

Now I'm not ascribing any morality to this. You can call it evil if you like. Just know that this definition makes 90% of businesses "evil".

<comment><USER18> Don't forget regulation. Complex regulation with a large compliance department to dot the i's and cross the t's is a great way to keep new entrants out. Why do you think there are so few new banks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of my previous dentists, who is also a computer enthusiast, told me he switched his office from some proprietary software to [http://www.opendental.com](http://www.opendental.com) and he is completely ecstatic about it. He specifically said he likes the fact that Open Dental is open source, so it gets a lot of the little details done right as it receives contributions from the dentist community. He even demo'd some of the features on his computer for me :)

So I do think that Fred's story is anchored in reality. This open source disruption seems to be taking place.

</comment><comment><USER20> I realize this is pretty naive of me, but I'll ask in the hopes of learning something:

Why does a VC care about sustainability or the company getting disrupted? Wouldn't they just want to grow fast and big enough to get a return and move on?

<comment><USER17> In order to get a return, someone with lots of money (or many people with some money) must believe that there is a future in the company. Yes, technically a VC cares most about the point between initial investment and liquidity event, but in a rational market (HA!) the liquidity event is most valuable when the company has a solid foundation and growth path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Software products may be a commodity (although I'd argue this point to an extent), but the companies that run them are not.

Price is one variable in the purchasing-decision process, but beyond some point, it really falls down the priority list for large businesses. This is why the phrase "Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM" is so telling. Companies like stability and are willing to pay a premium for it.

To that end, if you find that adjusting price alone allows you to steal signficant market share, then you are competing for the least-desirable customers (ie, those that can't afford the product).

Companies that are deciding between Cognos and Microstrategy will compare prices, but there are many other factors that contribute to the final decision as much or more than cost. If I come in and offer a BI tool built on my laptop that I charge $10k a year for, I don't think I'd get the time of day from their customer bases.

</comment><comment><USER22> Incidentally, if you're looking for a niche software opportunity, you could do worse than appointment software for dentists. I spent a fair amount of time speaking to dental practice managers about that specific product idea (I was teaching myself to place cold calls, not really interested in it).

Almost all dental office managers I spoke to 1) used something called Eaglesoft (www.eaglesoft.net) and 2) _hated_ it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have to comment because my wife is a dentist and I have considered entering the dental market a couple of times because the software is pretty terrible. I think there is one founder (SikkaSoft??) who has a similar story.

A couple of interesting things about the Dental market:

1) Customers are resistant to change because they want to spend their time focused on the dentistry not solving IT problems. One of the leading dental software providers, Eaglesoft, has a really bad UI/UX. Each screen looks like it was designed by a separate team of engineers and has never been updated. On the other hand, dental staff get used to the quirks of the UI and it's not clear that Eaglesoft could totally redo their product without a revolt from customers. 2) A pure cloud based solution would be super awesome except that you still need to integrate with a bunch of hardware, e.g: you need to tell the digital x-ray to take a picture. On the other hand, the need to operate on premise servers for dental offices is a giant ass-pain. Also the Dental market is still windows based which really sucks. (have you tried administrating windows servers? yuck) 3) Since this is a fairly mature market there is a bunch of vertical integration. Patterson (which owns eaglesoft) wants you to buy their kit which runs with their software, I think Schein is a distributor for dentrix so they have their own stuff as well. 4) While no dentist likes paying the maintenance fee for their software, it's really a non-issue when you come to the P&L statement.

I think one possible way to disrupt this market is to do a mashup of Athena health and dentrix/Eaglesoft. My understanding of Athena Health is they run your back office so you don't need staff to do billing and deal with insurance companies. I don't think there is someone who does this well in the Dental space (but I could be wrong). At a certain office size you need a full time staff member to run Billing. As long as the cut that you take is less than the cost of employing a billing department, it's a win.

</comment><comment><USER24> I work in a pharmacy, the quality of the software we use is so low that it's depressing. From the GUI to the non-existent automation, everything is pathetic. You have to manually issue THE SAME data over and over again.

Not to mention that every-single software company keeps it's data in obscure formats in order to avoid third parties accessing the data. It's like if the 2000-2010 changes that took place in the field didn't touch the Greek pharmacy/medical software and most of them keep operating in the 90s closed source principle.

There are some new SaaS about medical offices around. But they are so ugly that it's scary... Small market I suppose.

<comment><USER7> In these niche markets, to succeed you need to understanding the business well. Having something that is technically good is secondary.

Sure, if you can nail both that's better, but the "domain expert with some vague computing knowledge" beats the "technical expert with some vague domain knowledge" any day.

Add to that the fact that tech people often want to work on sexy projects like social/mobile/bigdata/api/whatever, it doesn't help bringing quality products to these users.

<comment><USER24> Every word of @eloisant's comment is (unfortunately?) true...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So your software can get disrupted if you don't continually re-invent to it keep up with the times.

Your social network or social app is actually way more fickle and less defensible than he thinks. Think about precursors to Facebook like Friendster and MySpace. Suddenly they became uncool and _poof_ they were gone.

If you look at teen's perceptions, Facebook.com is next up on this sad list of has beens. That's why they're paying through the nose to diversify out of that product. AVC has found no magic bullet with their strategy.

</comment><comment><USER26> > So we asked ourselves, "what will provide defensibility" and the answer we > came to was networks of users, transactions, or data inside the software.

I've always found investment philosophies like this to be too overgeneralized. When I ask myself the question of what will provide defensibility, I can't think of a good answer other than "it depends".

The question really is "how much does it depend?". I think it depends enough such that it's best to just look at each company on a case-by-case basis.

<comment><USER27> I concur. It seems like it's missing loads of history. Remember when MySpace was the juggernaut with a huge network of people? Then practically overnight they became a joke. Same with Alta Vista, and a million other companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This doesn't strike me as the best example. I don't really see the network benefits of the final offering. And practice management software is notoriously sticky.

</comment><comment><USER29> This article actually highlighted that my development of a web app has gotten sidetracked by the lure of VC investment and general tech startup mentality which has thrown me way off course. I know my industry and should be "dogfooding" it rather than trying to build something that's impressive in the tech/startup space.

</comment><comment><USER26> Telling a story before getting into theory is often better than explaining the theory and following up with a story. This is a great example of that.

</comment><comment><USER30> I enjoyed listening to the author of Open Molar on Floss Weekly:

[https://www.openmolar.com/](https://www.openmolar.com/)</comment>


A Haskell kernel for IPython - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell

<comment><USER2> Author here - didn't expect this to end up on Hacker News, given the niche interest :) Happy to answer any questions you guys have.

(And if anyone has an interest in contributing, _please_ get in touch!)

<comment><USER3> IPython creator here, just to say I'm _thrilled_ to see this! We've wanted more languages to follow this route, and while we have only had time to work directly with the Julia team, it's fabulous to see others following up with the idea.

Please don't hesitate to ask us on the dev mailing list if you run into any problems. For one thing, we're planning on making some updates to the protocol spec soon, based mostly on the experience of the IJulia work. It would be great to have your input there as well, in case you spot something that wouldn't fit well the patterns you saw while doing the Haskell port.

And besides, this means I now have one less excuse to get off my butt and learn Haskell! :)

<comment><USER4> This is really interesting. Is there any hope for a hybrid language? Like python with haskells time system, or writing lambda functions like lisp and using python to execute? Basically, taking the 'best' parts of languages and combining them.

What about multiple definitions for functions depending on what kind of input is given. Like python has no tail recursion, but lisp does. Write a python function that gets transparently translated to lisp to utilize the features of the language.

<comment><USER5> This isn't related to a hybrid language per se. IPython runs a language core and then provides a notebook frontend atop it.

You could perhaps have multiple language cores each communicating problems to one another via the common language of the notebook... but that's nothing more than any other text serialization route with all of the challenges therein.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great to see. The IPython project has grown to be much more than just a collection of nice interactive interfaces to Python. It is a well-designed JSON-based protocol between interactive interfaces and execution kernels – which can execute any language, not just Python. The fact that you can do things like IHaskell and IJulia is a testament to how well the IPython team has designed the protocol.

The best part about this project is that it stands to reduce much of the duplicated / wasted effort that goes into recreating the same interface functionality for every single programming language. This is already allowing Julia (and now Haskell) to reap the benefits of the amazing browser UI work that's gone into the IPython Notebook – all for the very low cost of implementing a rather simple ZMQ message server.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the encouraging comments! I started working on this by looking at IJulia (huge fan of Julia!) and reading the source code and using that to figure out exactly what I should implement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to see something like this but as a magic method for iPython Notebooks.

Using those you can integrate bash, R, Ruby, SQL, etc. into the same notebook and pass data between them all.

EDIT: Here's a link to most known magic extensions: [https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/Extensions- Index](https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/Extensions-Index)

<comment><USER8> Can't find a link, but I believe I've seen at least one demo passing data back and forth between Julia and Python in a notebook that looks similar to what you're referring to.

Edit: here's an example [0]

[0] [http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/JuliaLang/IJ...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl/master/python/doc/JuliaMagic.ipynb)

<comment><USER6> Excellent work with IHaskell; I don't want to hijack this thread, but since it came up organically:

The PyCall.jl [1] package allows transparent calling of Python from Julia. It's quite stable and exceptionally well done (it was written by Steven G. Johnson of FFTW [2] fame – his software is uniformly impressive). The IJulia package [3], which primarily provides a pure Julia IPython kernel so that you can interact with Julia via the various IPython front-ends, also includes [4] a Python package for calling Julia from Python plus IPython "magics" for calling Julia from a normal IPython process. This is rather more experimental than IJulia, but should be usable.

[1] [https://github.com/stevengj/PyCall.jl](https://github.com/stevengj/PyCall.jl)

[2] [http://fftw.org](http://fftw.org)

[3] [https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl](https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl)

[4] [https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl/tree/master/python](https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl/tree/master/python)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's like org-mode, but without all the emacs! :)

I actually was _just_ discussing with coworkers how I wish tools around org- mode could actually create an "editable" final state that didn't require emacs. I've been introducing iPython as a way around this, but I've been disappointed with forcing everyone into using python for our analysis work.

Only one of my coworkers really uses emacs, and so sharing perf data and analysis quickly has mostly become iPython.

This gives me hope!

<comment><USER10> It would be awesome to have a org mode -> ipython export that also supports all the languages that org mode supports (or rather, the main subset, I guess), though I think that that's a long way of. Julia lang also supports an iPython notebook implementation, but if I remember correctly, they replaced python with julia in there. It would probably be a lot of work to support all different languages within ipython. Actually, just porting Babel over might be easier.

<comment><USER11> There is a ipython emacs frontend, but I'm not familiar enough with emacs to say if it would help at all.

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure that it only exports the structure, but it doesn't allow editing and running of the code in ipython since that would require having support for the plethora of languages.

Example: There's a c extension to babel/org-mode that allows you to write a document like this in normal text, and then type:

+begin_src c int test = 42; printf("%i", test); +end_src

and then run and execute this code block in the document, and have the results appear underneath it. That is already pretty cool.

But even cooler is that you can have a python block, and a R block and a ruby block, and then define a variable in python, and have ruby do something with that variable (i.e hand it over) and then create a new variable based on the ruby transformations, and hand it over to R to do some statistics processing with the data. Finally, You take the R output, display it as a table, and generate a plot for it.

All in one text file. Truly awesome.

<comment><USER9> Exactly.

If we can find a way to use the "ipython kernel" with other languages to generate a generic notebook that can access multiple language runtimes, it'll be unstoppable (just as unstoppable as org-mode is)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this is exciting and has a valid use case. The other day we were explaining Python list comprehensions which was heavily inspired by Haskell's list comprehensions. But it was no where as concise or expressive as Haskell.

In many cases Haskell is very concise and it helps to have an option on the interactive interpreter to enter a Haskell one-liner to prototype a solution.

</comment><comment><USER13> IPython really needs a new name.

It's too successful/cross language to just be associated with Python. The guide to learning Julia actually encourages using IPython Julia.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool. Agree about the rebranding of IPython, but I'm sure that'll come as the community matures.

IHaskell specific: As a beginning Haskell learner, is there a simple graphing framework that can make graphs shown inline in IPython (of course bindings to D3 etc to make web native graphs would be awesome, but even just images are fine) ... I'm currently learning maths/stats by implementing basic functions and experimenting with them in R, Julia, possibly Haskell etc. Being able to easily do simple graphs is crucial.

<comment><USER2> IHaskell in its current state is the very first step towards that experience. I'm hoping that graphing and numeric support will come in the next few weeks to months. I'm also not sure that the Haskell community really has something as powerful and standard and nice interface-wise as NumPy, and if not, I'd be interested in creating it. (Currently playing around with building a nicer interface on top of hmatrix. REPA is pretty good, but doesn't use LAPACK/ATLAS/etc in the backend.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is rad and I had no idea IPython was flexible enough that you could do this. Installing immediately!

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow such great Haskell stuff comin to this site these days.

Haskell on IPython? HELL YES. I am definitely taking my Haskell education more seriously this week.

</comment><comment><USER17> I use ipython for all my (mostly scientific) python interpreter needs and have been looking for a functional programming language to learn. Between all the recent posts on haskell and now this, I think I know which one it will be.</comment>


New study: Exercising frequently may reduce suicide attempts in bullied teens - <AUTHOR> Http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/exercising-reduce-suicide-attempts-bullied-teens-article-1.2385525 <comment><USER2> Although it probably won't.

This article doesn't link to the (paywalled) study, which is here: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890856715...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890856715004359)

It's really frustrating that people casually toss out exercise as a treatment for depression thing, especially when they do so as a way to prevent suicide.

Exercise is important, and we need to help more people exercise, but it's probably only weakly preventative of suicide and it's probably only weakly a treatment for depression.

Here we have people being bullied so hard that they want to die by suicide, and one solution is "go for a jog 4 times a week". That's barely acceptable if it works, but since we know it probably doesn't it's grotesque to focus on what the victim isn't doing rather than focus on how society is failing to protect the victims from harm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is grotesque. A case of "Wow, we are doing it so wrong."

But, discussing it with one of my sons, he suggested that excercise probably reduces the suicidal tendencies by reducing how much the kid gets bullied. If you are fast enough to run away and not get caught or strong enough to punch them out, bullying incidences probably start subsiding. My sister was a geek in high school during a really rough tinme/at a rough school. She tutored a football player and soon realized she wasn't being hassled at school because she had a shadow who was ready and able to throw people down the stairs if they bothered her. Threat of physical force has long been a good deterrent to bullying.</comment></comment>


Ads are just answers - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/ads-are-just-answers.html <comment><USER2> >We're developing ads that provide richer information to you because we believe that search ads should be both beautiful and informative, and as useful to you as an answer.

Google has started silently substituting words or dropping words from queries. See, for example, my stack exchange question: <http://webapps.stackexchange.com/q/19465/13791>

I'm not sure I want ads that do the same.</comment>


The Dark Side of Incentives - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_47/b4156084807874.htm

<comment><USER2> The first paragraph or two of this reminded me of Goodhart's Law: as soon as a metric becomes a goal, it tends to lose value as a metric. My pet analogy is taking an overheating car, and trying to fix the thermometer instead of the engine. Incentivization always has this problem, and it's a hard one to fix: how to you ensure the behavior you're rewarding from other people is the behavior that benefits you? Especially with something as large, convoluted, and ultimately nebulous as corporate governance, I don't see an easy solution.</comment>


The mod_python project is now officially dead. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2010/06/modpython-project-is-now-officially.html <comment><USER2> They don't make a big deal out of it, but Phusion's Passenger (as is mega popular in the Ruby world) supports WSGI backends: <http://www.modrails.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> been unofficially dead for a while. mod_wsgi replaces it: <http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/>

<comment><USER4> the author is the maintainer of mod_wsgi</comment></comment>


FriendFeed's "hidden" features due to Self-Reference - <AUTHOR> http://plpatterns.com/post/51385513/hacking-friendfeed-with-metafeeds

<comment><USER2> I fed my feed back to my friend feed account. Each post showed up twice but that was it. No infinite loop, no endless recursion.

<comment><AUTHOR> It takes a while to update.

To speed the process, go to your page (i.e. friendfeed.com/yourusername), click Add/edit services, click the self-referential feed in the My Services list, then click Refresh Blog.

BTW I'm not encouraging anyone to actually do this. It was fun just to try out.</comment></comment>


John Carmack on the Government - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1895320834035758&id=100006735798590 <comment><USER2> A tech god start talking about topic he does not understand well enough, and the article is full of descriptions without much data to back.

No one is immune from human nature after all.

<comment><USER3> This is absolutely crazy, he did say, that he gained much of data point from Armadillo Aerospace project. Again, Peter Thiel reiterates the similar thing about "bytes and atoms".

What if the state of CA regulated Quality Controls and Error rates on Software produced? What if there is a regulation to prove that a Video game does not impair congnitive skills of 1% of people who play it etc.

The tech world is so lefty because, its "byte world" is nearly unregulated but the Aerospace, manufacturing etc. "atoms world" is regulated to death. That is the problem. If there is a person without depth, its is likely to be you than John Carmack.

Edit: As usual flagged, but if this was a testament to the group think article from the atlantic or new york times, this would have a couple hundred upvotes and a massive policy discussion. My respect for John Carmack has increased even further, he like many practitioners is an empiricist.

<comment><USER4> He calls out regulation but can't provide a single example? How can that be called "empiricism"? And while he lists "regulation", this rant is almost exclusively a complaint about taxes.

The old chestnut about "how can it be fair to extract money with the threat of jail" is also a huge warning sign. The government only has two methods of enforcement, one being fines and the other being prison. If you buy into that idea, you are left without any means to collect any taxes and therefore the concept of "government" no longer makes any sense. That leads you into Ayn- Rand-la-la-land which is a nice idea for a 14-year old to entertain but not a serious option to organise a society.

I'm also sceptical of his claims of government inefficiency, considering Armadillo Aerospace doesn't exactly strike me as a paragon for the magic efficiency of private enterprises.

<comment><USER5> Is John Carmack 14 years old? What makes you think your ideas are more "serious" than his?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Carmack is a highly focused, driven, successful individual that believes in meritocracy. Combine that with being a tech focused white male, and of course he is a libertarian. How could he possibly see the world in any other way?

What gets me the most about libertarian rants though, is how the person writing is always so completely convinced that they have come up with some novel solution to the world's problems. As if the only thing standing between us and a techno-utopia is the EPA and the FCC. They do not acknowledge that the structures in place are a direct result of the failure of free markets to handle basic human needs on a wide scale.

<comment><USER7> > They do not acknowledge that the structures in place are a direct result of > the failure of free markets to handle basic human needs on a wide scale.

That's not really correct: those structures are the _direct_ result of politicians creating them, in response to a _perception_ that markets (unfree markets …) failed to do one thing or another.

<comment><USER6> >in response to a perception that markets (unfree markets …) failed to do one thing or another.

Was it a mistaken _perception_ that rivers were catching on fire in the 60's, leading to the EPA? I guess we should have left that to the free market too.

Government and business can work together, but we must acknowledge that the goal of business is to drive profit, not human welfare. The goal of the government is to drive human welfare, not profit. The two should be seen as litigants in a court of law; combative yet civil, with an agreed upon set of values. The opposition of these two forces creates a dynamic far preferable to one extreme or the other.

<comment><USER7> > the goal of business is to drive profit, not human welfare

I agree, and that is indeed a problem.

> The goal of the government is to drive human welfare, not profit.

I disagree strongly: the goal of government is _power_. No-one runs for office to make the world a better place: he runs for power or, if we're very, very lucky because he wants to be _the one_ to make the world a better place.

To your dialectic of government & business, I'd like to add a third party: the people. We're not pure either, of course (as a group, we like to oppress, ignore & line our own pockets!), but we're the ones that create government; we're the ones it ought to serve; we're the ones who ought to hold it accountable.

Some of us fall into the trap that whatever a corporation wants is okay, others into thinking that the State is always right, others still into thinking that the People are always right. The truth is that all of them are sometimes wrong. There's no real solution.

But let's try to minimise the amount of violence in our society, and try to maximise the utility we get for that violence. Am I okay sending men with guns to wrest your property away in order to fund the national defense? Sure. Am I okay sending them to prevent people starving in the streets? Okay. Am I okay send them over in order to finance a cowboy poetry festival? Hell no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > What things do you care strongly enough about to feel morally justified in > pointing a gun at me to get me to pay for them? A few layers of distance by > proxy let most people avoid thinking about it, but that is really what it > boils down to. Feeding starving children? The justice system? Chemotherapy > for the elderly? Viagra for the indigent? Corn subsidies?

nailed it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Considering recent changes in the US government's leadership, this really needs a (2010) in the title.

<comment><USER10> He reposted it last month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Helping people directly can be a noble thing. Forcing other people to do it with great inefficiency? Not so much."

Just because scaling a process results in inefficiencies doesn't mean there's no need to scale it. If you feel like you personally can help every person directly, please do, disrupt taxes! But until you, we're not tearing down the system that works (however inefficiently).

</comment><comment><USER12> Nothing more to see here than the regular libertarian, economically illiterate drivel:

Need less government, government is bad, regulation is bad, taxes are theft.

There, I just saved you 10 minutes. I apologize for the snark, but for an outsider (someone who's not part of the tech bubble, and not a libertarian), these rants from libertarian tech people are _comically_ identical to each other, yet none of them ever amount to anything, because all fail to take human nature into account.

</comment><comment><USER13> > My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for > the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off > with a government that was less ambitious.

Well, since we are stating theses, _mine_ would be that while the government delivers poor value for services it consumes in some areas, the private sector _sometimes_ provides _very_ poor value for the services it consumes because it is incentivized to do the opposite.

Believing one is better than the other without actually looking at the economics involved leads to things like privatized prisons (where the incentive is to keep people in and returning to prison, not to rehabilitate them), and large public lending systems (Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac) which are susceptible to being brittle under economic stress.

Any time you think you believe something strongly enough that it falls under a 90/10 rule, it's probably worth really looking into that 10% and understanding it. You might find your 90/10 rule is more accurately a 70/30 or 60/40 rule, and that's really a different thing.</comment>