Show HN: Flask-Ask – Amazon Echo Development in Python - <AUTHOR> https://johnwheeler.org/flask-ask <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Everybody!

For the last month I've been working on a Flask extension called Flask-Ask I want to plug. The "Ask" part stands for the "Alexa Skills Kit", which is the service behind the Amazon Echo family of devices.

[https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask- ask](https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask)

I've used a lot of web frameworks, and I love Flask! The Alexa Skills Kit is based on its own Request/Response model built in JSON on top of REST, so it made sense to incorporate mitsuhiko's architectural patterns like decorator- based routing, context locals, and templates, and adapt them for Flask-Ask.

I put up a 5-min tutorial for Flask-Ask here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC2zi4WIFX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC2zi4WIFX0)

You can develop without an Echo Device using Amazon's Echosim service: [https://echosim.io/](https://echosim.io/)

Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Thank you so much for this :) I've been experimenting with using Echo for home automation (mainly TV/Logitech Harmony related stuff) and this is really, really cool for that. A tangent: Siri on the AppleTV 4th gen was pretty cool until I got Echo - now having to have that remote and press a button seems archaic. Apple and Google will definitely release something similar soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I experienced the same feelings. It's interesting how eliminating the extra button press makes the technology not 20% more useful, but maybe 10x more useful (IMO).

There are constraints. For example, the Alexa service can't do dictation, so building certain types of applications doesn't make sense.

But, after experiencing the Echo, it's hard to imagine a future without this type of computing - where you speak a sentence and it maps to a function carried out on a server. It's a very natural and fun way to get things done.

<comment><USER3> I really find it creepy. Sounds like a possibility of total surveillance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow great work. Makes me want to grab an Echo and start using this. I love Flask :)

Do you know if Android or iOS can expose custom voice commands API like this, without building an entire native app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Steve.

I don't know much about Siri or Google Now voice activation APIs ("Hey Siri" and "OK Google"). Also (as you're probably aware), Google just came out with an Echo competitor called Google Home, which presumably operates on APIs like Echo's.

I think the model itself is probably a generic one. For Echo, speech maps to actions executed on a server, so you can say:

"Alexa, ask calculator what's two plus three"

and from there, Alexa does the non-trivial work of determining that:

1\. "calculator" is a skill (i.e. program)

2\. "what's two plus three" maps to a function of the program

3\. "two" and "three" are arguments of the function.

The Alexa Skills Kit's job is to parse the speech, break it down into those elements, and pass it securely to your program using JSON over HTTPS.

Flask-Ask provides natural mappings to corresponding Python constructs (programs, functions, parameters) through a decorator-based API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome - looks like a really easy and quick way to get started. I'll be trying this out this weekend. And good job on the video - you got right to the point :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I appreciate the feedback. I'll make sure and keep getting to the point.

I invested in a Blue Snowball mic, and I'm making more videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FjlV1PeK2w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FjlV1PeK2w)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62WIaU_eVGE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62WIaU_eVGE)

I'll be making more to cover all aspects of the API: 8 or 9 3-min videos. I think that's all it will take for anyone to become proficient with Flask-Ask and the Alexa Skills Kit. They're easy.

If you try it out this weekend, the Ask constructor has changed from the one in the video

Ask(app)

to

Ask(app, "/")

Also, you don't need to add /_ask to the end of the ngrok URL anymore.

Thank you for your interest!</comment></comment>


Order of the Occult Hand - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Occult_Hand

<comment><USER2> _" It was as if an occult hand had taken Chuck Klosterman's radio, tuned away from the Top 40 ear candy of Duran Duran and the Stray Cats, and tuned into the satanic debauchery of Motley Crue."_

You had me at Motley Crue.

It's as if an occult hand reached down from the heavens and typed those words on my keyboard. Weird...</comment>


How do valves work? (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.vintage-radio.com/repair-restore-information/valve_how-valves-work.html <comment><USER3> Not a bad description, but I do think the title should be modified to indicate that the article refers to thermionic valves, which are more commonly referred to as "vacuum tubes."

I saw the title and thought "hmm, gate valves? globe valves? pilot-operated relief valves? heart valves perhaps?"

<comment><USER4> "Valve" is the common British usage (and the site is based in the U.K. - <USER2> its home page).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Typo: "Lee de Frost" should be Lee de Forest.</comment>


Studio Ghibli Releases Free Zoom Backgrounds for Video Conferencing - <AUTHOR> https://mymodernmet.com/studio-ghibli-virtual-backgrounds <comment><USER2> This is blog spam. The original article is

[http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2020/04/17/studio-ghibli- video-c...](http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2020/04/17/studio-ghibli-video- conference-backgrounds/)

Which points to the actual images located on

[http://www.ghibli.jp/info/013251/](http://www.ghibli.jp/info/013251/)

<comment><USER3> Google Translated (license, film names) [https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...](https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&pto=aue&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=ja&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=http://www.ghibli.jp/info/013251/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Zoom is convinced that my slightly old CPU is too weak to do its background removal, so I can't even try and use them. It's pretty annoying- I don't know what CPU feature they'd even be relying on that isn't in the perfectly good i3 processor I have in there.

</comment><comment><USER5> I feel like they are random pictures rather than Zoom backgrounds.

</comment><comment><USER6> awesome! love me some spirited away, totoro and ponyo, but the howl's background seems the most work-like one.</comment>


Blanking Out - <AUTHOR> https://sarahwerner.substack.com/p/blanking-out <comment><USER2> There is a similar problem with digitized photos, for instance from glass plates. Often they had notes in margins or on the backside, but many scanning efforts didn't take these into account. So a lot is lost forever, either because the originals are destroyed, or forgotten in some archive.

<comment><USER3> In the precomputing era you could (legitimately!) get a PhD for building a table of constants (e.g. log tables early on, later CRC data like steam tables and curves). In the humanities you could get one for writing a concordance of all the words in Shakespear or some other corpus, or all metaphors, and the like. It's obvious how computation killed them.

But in a few years some enterprising grad student or post doc will earn accolades by re-scanning some old sources, taking into account some important metadata which right now is irrelevant. Perhaps labeling or annotating the result in some novel way.

<comment><USER4> There's an interesting article somewhere that I really wish I could find right now - the gist is that someone working at I think a dictionary publisher was confused to find a filing cabinet that contained an index of every word _reversed_ in alphabetical order. It took some thinking to realize that this was a useful index to find all of the words that ended in a given suffix - e.g. go to "gni" to find the gerunds.

It's interesting to think though that maintaining a dictionary once meant having a large set of filing cabinets containing sheets of words sliced and diced in every way you might need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A 2009 paper shows that you can tell blank pages apart from one another by examining them closely under a scanner: [https://citp.princeton.edu/our- work/paper/](https://citp.princeton.edu/our-work/paper/)

So not only is there so much texture there, but even a single manufacturer's individual blank pages differ dramatically because of physical wood fibers within the page.</comment>


Being lazy has its benefits - <AUTHOR> http://shorten.ly/r9lytg

<comment><USER2> Futures make for an interesting 'batch' RPC API - queue up a bunch of RPC calls by returning Futures instead of values, and when one is forced send them all across the wire.

This is a great way to add batch functionality to an API that didn't have it originally. Need to frob a set of zibs? store the futures of the zib frobbings in a new set, and then force them. (wow, bad faux verbs and nouns)</comment>


How Can an Existing Centralized Finance System Defeat a Crypto-Currency? - <AUTHOR> https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99972/how-can-an-existing-centralized-finance-system-defeat-a-crypto-currency <comment><USER2> Don't kid yourself look at bit coin wealth distribution.

[https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/1-bitcoin-community- controls...](https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/1-bitcoin-community- controls-99-bitcoin-wealth/)

it's way worse than any current wealth distribution.

<comment><USER2> which means there's anywhere from 100-1000 people that could decimate the value of bitcoin by selling there stake.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple code sharing platform - <AUTHOR> https://webfol.io <comment><USER2> 1\. The 'demo' button does not seem to provide noticeably changed content. I was expecting something similar to what the 'view example' text link provides.

2\. Before providing a _valid_ email address, I'd like to know more about how it Webfolio works and what it offers. For the purpose of soliciting feedback captcha and email validation and profile information are friction for the user.

My advice is to turn all that stuff on when there is an actual problem with spam that outweighs the value of making it very easy for people to try the service out. Or to put it another way, spam and validation are Webfolio's problem not mine.

My first experience with the site is working to solve Webfolio's problem rather than Webfolio working to solve mine. And my past experience is that providing a valid email to a website often results in managing spam for several years. So the sign up process not only involves work that doesn't solve my problem it also involves possibly creating additional unrelated work...all before I've even been able to touch the product.

I mean I see a phone and maybe it's mostly an iOS app. How would I know?

3\. Webfolio is not unusual. Lots of sites encourage people with legitimate interest to leave before touching the product and few treat all visitors as possible diamonds.

4\. I think that portfolios probably play a role in the future of programmer hiring as software moves from strict engineering toward a cluster of related creative concepts. So it is good that Webfolio is exploring that space.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

The demo button is supposed to play an example video but I agree it must be improved.

Really helpful advice, thanks again.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Webchat with API in just ~60 lines of NodeJS - <AUTHOR> http://fayechat.kaerast.info/

<comment><USER2> Remember twitch.me (node.js realtime chat)? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840914>

Chat.io, new HTML5 / Node.JS-powered social group, launches <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2343840>

Show HN: Node.js console chat <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391389>

The node.js chat server that was posted earlier <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980838>

Show HN: Meet the new Ajax IM (with Node.js) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1127654>

NodeChat <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866401>

Ragechat: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889883>

Using node.js, <blah blah>, to make a real time chat app <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2306423>

Chat system with WebSocket and node.js <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1020577>

Hey man, doing anything constructive with your free time is a rare and admirable trait. But really, another Node.js chat application? Really?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure there's plenty of node.js chat systems out there, but this is quite a nice demo of Faye and how easy it is to build with it.

The Node.JS examples shared previously have been more complete systems from what I can tell, this is a very minimal app designed as basis for you to build something bigger and better. Rather than complaining about needing extra features, fork the code and build something fun and worthwhile.

<comment><USER3> Can you talk about faye vs other chat options?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main reason for using Faye is probably the fact that it can run on Node.JS or Rack. This example is running Node.JS, but where Faye really excels is in a Rack environment - adding asynchronous functionality to Rails/Sinatra without needing an extra server running Node.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me, or is Webchat in node.js the new "Hello World"?

</comment><comment><USER5> xss anyone

<comment><USER6> lol, yeah, he updated the code to filter out <script> tags and his RegEx is wrong and now won't allow any messages to come through.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, I rather stupidly didn't think to add any XSS protection initially because this was a simple tech demo. And yes, I managed to balls up the regex for a while.

It's working nicely again now.</comment></comment></comment>


"in my late 20s, and I wasted time. Is it too late?" A 47 year old replies - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/1w3z4d/someone_posts_i_am_in_my_late_20s_and_feel_i_have/

<comment><USER2> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." \--George Bernard Shaw</comment>


How I Snuck Through Wikipedia's Notability Test - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/how-i-snuck-through-wikipedia-s-notability-test-abfbd15127bc <comment><USER2> The article could be titled "How I harnessed the cronyism that has paralyzed Wikipedia and scored a free bio out of it, and Why you'll never succeed if you try the same"

</comment><comment><USER3> The key part of his article is a little more than halfway down: "I also realized that my well-sourced biography can be attributed, in part, to the fact that every word I've published is available online, and thus easily cited as a reference. In the eyes of Wikipedia editors, my being a digital native appears to be a distinct advantage: it's much easier to link to existing online sources than to visit libraries and dig through decades-old physical media, such as books and newspapers."

I am a Wikipedian. He has that right. Wikipedia has a HUGE bias toward online sources, as a practical matter, rather than toward print sources. That's not official policy on Wikipedia. Wikipedia policy makes clear that it is perfectly okay to cite a book that is a reliable source on other grounds, even if the book is very hard for any other Wikipedian to find in a library or as a used book. But the practical thing that happens on Wikipedia is that most articles are based on sources that Google can find, and many articles that are otherwise well sourced will be doubted if editors can't find any confirmation of their content on Google.

Basically Google's ability to serve up what humankind has put onto the public- visible World Web Wide limits the development of Wikipedia. I learned to do research the old-fashioned way, at a university with a huge library, and began using online databases there as a student job back in the 1970s. Today I can look things up with practiced facility online, but I still find that looking around in a library full of dead-tree books can turn up all kinds of information that has never been online. It takes both kinds of research to build a good encyclopedia.

Just for fun, take a look at how Wikipedia describes what Wikipedians should be here to do as encyclopedia editors,

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_enc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_encyclopedia)

as well as its description of what Wikipedia is not.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not)

</comment><comment><USER4> > the minutiae of the universe (toilet paper orientation: 5,147 words;

I submitted that article to HN. It got a few of upvotes but was then flag- killed. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6047531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6047531)

I submitted it because it's a pretty thorough article. It's not a stub of nonsense; they talk about some of the research behind the intense arguments that can result from hanging a roll "the wrong way".

I learnt to always leave a comment about why I submitted an article if I think it's going to be flagged.

<comment><USER5> I see the TP debate as an example of a more general phenomena where people consider themselves to be an expert on any subject they have even a single direct experience with. ('Expert' is probably too harsh though; it's more like "I want to share my knowledge, even if it's not actually useful.")

Edit: It may even be a biological instinct.

PS: This comment is probably a perfect example, now that I think of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sure you all know the phrase "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". The same could be applied to Wikipedia and helps explain how the author slipped through: People only contribute to things that are in their sight. The author says this himself by noting that Wikipedia is human driven. His article wasn't notability-checked after the initial creation because no editor probably saw it. You see the opposite in the GoT article, where every detail is bought under scrutiny.

He also probably got a pass because the article was created by an established editor rather than a brand new user. Given enough time though, I'm sure some editor might've seen it and would have put the notability template that exists on the page now.

Dig into the depths of Wikipedia and I can guarantee you'll find tons of non- notable articles that no one bothered to bring up for deletion, but is headlined with cleanup templates. Heck, just the other day I saw an article that tried to pass for notability by indiscriminately littering the page with citations that just barely mentioned the subjects' name. All it takes is one well-meaning editor to double-check any dubious claims by looking at their citations and making sure they are reliable.

It's a bit silly to make it sound like he gamed the system. He didn't pass the notability test; it just wasn't administered yet. The editors that worked on his behalf were well-versed in the rules and they worked within them, acknowledging that the article might not last. You either get a speedy deletion of something obvious in the new queue or you get discussions for deletion for things that aren't apparently notable to someone else.

<comment><USER7> Heck, just check out the "list of collaborative software" and "list of project management software" articles; they're there more as a quarantine zone/chew toy than anything. Every time someone makes a crappy productivity webapp they apparently feel justified in creating its wikipedia article. These often continue to exist for a year or two before an editor finally takes the time to throw it into the delete queue. At least these are indexed in one place, whereas biographies of obscure people have no such convenient referral page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the main problems with Wikipedia is that it is actually multiple products in one: an encyclopedia, a biography site, an news archive, medical reference and so on. If the site was an encyclopedia, McMillen would just have a short page or even nothing. He probably wouldn't be notable enough. If it was a biography site, say one specific to journalists, he would have a longer page, and if it was an archive of news, he would have the kind of page seen here. The lack of defined format leads to this kind of confusion here, for both the reader and the writer. The problem for many of the site's writers is that the "encyclopedic" stuff is done. There's only so much to say about dinosaurs. When any news comes up they flock to fill in the page with minutae, with the result that pages on pop culture topics are becoming so long they are almost unreadable. See my blog post: [http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly- sins/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/)

<comment><USER9> From your linked article:

> There are very few Web 2.0 features. Social features are primitive: readers > cannot make an easy list of their favorites, nor can they share to Facebook > or Twitter with a single click. It's as if the past ten years of progress > had never happened.

Thank god.

<comment><USER10> Wikipedia is like Web 1.0, but _better_. It has a sophisticated templating system, readable and consistent styling/formatting, more hyperlinking than the old web ever had, citations and fact-checking, it's freely editable by anyone, it's freely licensed, has full revision history, links never die...

<comment><USER8> Web 1.2?

<comment><USER11> Web 0.999...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An example of 'business as usual'...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Neville_Nevill](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Neville_Nevill)

I wrote the first draft of this page in 2004 as a result of an interest in Victorian lunar observers (long story). This minor Victorian astronomer produced an important moon map and contributed serious work on celestial mechanics that was rendered obsolete by Ernest Brown's major improvement in lunar ephemeris computation.

The subsequent history shows a purposeful improvement in the page and adds a couple of references. I think the current version of the page is better than the one I contributed.

I'm wondering if the wikipedia process sort of mostly works but gets derailed around notability/contentious issues?

</comment><comment><USER13> He says, about a certain editor:

>> (He has since asked that I leave his Wikipedia username out of this story.)

But later:

>> That editor... had expanded my page significantly...

Linking directly to the page, with the editor's name on it, at that time just after said editor had made those significant changes.

So yes, I guess he did keep the name out of the _article_ , but it was only one click to find it out. Is this good? Unless the guy's reason for not wanting his name in the article was just so this article didn't show up in search results for his user name, and doesn't actually care that people connect his edits to the page with personal interaction with the subject of the page, then this seems kind of unethical to me.

</comment><comment><USER14> For what it's worth, I'm working on an entry for a media executive who I was surprised to find _didn 't_ have an entry (while you might not recognize the person by name, I'm all but certain you'd know the organization). Rejected as "non-notable".

This despite NY Times, citations, multiple prior incumbents listed, and at least one existing "red link" reference to th individual.

I've tossed in a few more buckets of links and noted various other bits as mentioned above. We'll see how it works out....

<comment><USER15> I had several rejections for the page of the former Finance Minister in my country, because they thought I was him and was self-promoting.

After writing on the editor's page and showing him enough news headlines, I convinced him it was legitimate.

<comment><USER14> Mine finally got through. Jarl Mohn, the recently selected CEO of NPR.

But then, weren't they all (8 in 8 years).

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

Adding another 8 references seemed to help. They actually trimmed that down by a couple in the publishing process:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jarl_Mohn&diff=ne...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jarl_Mohn&diff=next&oldid=650172490)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's amusing to see that McMillen's entry is now tagged with "may not meet notability guidelines." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillen)

I suspect that this belated effort to quiet everything down will just make for an even noisier and messier debate.

<comment><USER10> Not really. Looking at its _Articles for Deletion_ page, it seems like most of the citations were actually junk. This is just like how hoax articles have stuck around: people are suspicious of citation-free pages, but pages with poor citations are rarely checked.

By the sounds of things, this article didn't actually pass Wikipedia's notability test - it's just that nobody put it to that test by nominating it for deletion (i.e. nobody thought it was suspicious).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Andrew_McMillen)

<comment><USER16> We're both right, TazeTSchnitzel. I agree with you 100% about junky citations and the article's inability to meet true notability standards. But now that it's become a publicized article, various pranksters and Wikipedia critics aren't likely to let it disappear quietly.

<comment><USER10> Ah, I see your point. Yeah, some people might want to _keep_ it, I hadn't considered that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If the information is verifiable, why can't wikipedia just let the page exist?

<comment><USER4> Wikipedia is not about "correct" or "true", it's about "verifiable".

This leads to some distortions and a lot of frustration. It might be why WP has a problem keeping technical editors around.

<comment><USER18> Well, it's also that it's not consistently applied across the board.

In the actual _definition_ of notability, it is made clear that the policy is purely about verifiability: something is notable when we can say more than a couple verifiable things about it. However, because the policy is named _notability_ , the AFD (articles for deletion) threads very often contain systematic mention of how noteworthy an effect is "within the [whatever] community".

I never really followed up on it, but I wanted to see whether I could game the system in the reverse way. Coming from a physics background, in college I wrote up some drafts about a fake physics concept, including some thought into using @cornell.edu emails to create a fake arxiv.org LaTeX article or two. The idea was to combine this with links to 404'ed pages, some fake blog articles across the Internet authored by me, and some

The actual concept was going to be something like "Tenacity (science)" which was going to explain that NASA researchers had discovered some unexplained and hard-to-causally-model (but extremely predictable) force which makes orbital rocketry more energy-expensive than "the calculations" would give you. Models would be proposed requiring, say, Kerr metric general relativity solutions to Earth's gravity (hence trying to determine whether the core of the Earth was actually a spinning black hole) or strange drag forces going like v^1.5 or v^3 or something. The joke was that the _actual_ genesis of the phrase was a 2005 Homestar Runner cartoon where a character named Strong Bad is sitting in a foil-lines cardboard box pretending that he is involved in a space program. "Got to... escape... Earth's... tenacity..." he says as if straining under a heavy weight.

<comment><USER19> >In the actual definition of notability, it is made clear that the policy is purely about verifiability: something is notable when we can say more than a couple verifiable things about it.

Someone is doing things very wrong then, because I've seen a lot of over- specialized but completely verifiable information get removed from Wikipedia. The reasoning was entirely based on noteworthiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> there was a good post about this, a year or two ago, where somebody couldn't get Wikipedia to publish the truth on a topic because the inaccurate information was very widely cited. editors basically responded "we know this is false, but the true version isn't notable enough to mention."

(tried, but failed, to find the link just now.)

<comment><USER21> You may be referring to the Philip Roth incident. (There are a number of such incidents, but this is perhaps the most famous).

Essentially, the article on Roth's book The Human Stain (an excellent book by the way) cited a New York Times critic as saying that the main character may have been inspired by a particular person. Roth's agent attempted to remove this (Roth says that he was not inspired by this person). However, there was no published source that indicated that Roth felt this way, just Roth's agent's communication with Wikipedia volunteers. So Roth published an article in The New Yorker as a means of establishing a published source that could be used to refute the claim.

I think the ultimate resolution was to say something like "New York Times critic says Roth was inspired by... but Roth says..."

This is a case where both sides were partially right. It's perfectly encyclopedic to note that a major critic believes that an author was inspired by a particular person. However, there should have been a better mechanism for the author to establish his own version of the story.

But it gets into complicated areas. Should Wikipedia just take anything that an agent sends at face value? Isn't it possible that a person isn't the best source on biography (plenty of people have self-serving and inaccurate views on themselves). Wikipedia's general philosophy is to look at what reliable sources say and summarize them rather than trying to make judgements about who is right and wrong and I think the resolution of citing both sources and letting readers decide was reasonable.

<comment><USER22> The one I'm thinking of was more straight forward than that. A person's incorrect age was taken from wikipedia and published elsewhere. Those pages were then cited as reference confirming their age, completing an unbreakable circle (by wp's rules anyway).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> His wikipedia page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillen)

</comment><comment><USER24> There is a fellow writer and music journalist from Queensland by the name of Andrew McMillan. His entry is a mere 398 words. I got a bit nervous when I found it because he died in 2012: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillan_(writer)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillan_\(writer\))

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Andrew_McMillen#Of_note](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Andrew_McMillen#Of_note)

Not for long, I would bet.

<comment><USER25> Well, this whole situation just might be what makes him "notable" enough to have this wikipedia page.

He is, after all, the only australian freelance journalist whose essay on how his own wikipedia page bypassed the wikipedia notability filters spurred on a debate on his own notability. The delicious (and unique) recursive meta here is, IMO, more than enough to keep the page.

<comment><USER26> Seems like it would be bad to encourage people to do this by allowing the article to stay up.

<comment><USER27> Spite should be a valid reason for deleting articles.

<comment><USER28> > Spite should be a valid reason for deleting articles.

Should _not_ , right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A friend of mine once played an elaborate prank where I got a Wikipedia page. He made me a Faroese cricketer. It was pretty great, but eventually things spiraled out of control when I spontaneously combusted.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Timothy_Dees)

<comment><USER30> Any way to view what the article looked like before it was deleted?

<comment><USER29> Sadly I think it's disappeared into the ether. I also tried to find the Faroe Islands News Service blog that my friend put together, but it seems to be dead as well.

<comment> glass- Here's an image of the last revision before it was deleted: [https://i.imgur.com/mlip1D9.png](https://i.imgur.com/mlip1D9.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm not sure I understand why he needed to make an article to watch something get deleted for notability "in real time". These decisions are made _constantly_ and you can always watch the process by going to AfD.

I hate articles about Wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am regarded as Not Notable Enough For Wikipedia for the specific reason that I feel that no one should have to pay to read my essays and articles. Were someone to pay me to publish in dead tree form rather than on my own website, I would merit an article.

I've written mountains of highly regarded essays and articles, generally on the topics of mental illness - I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder - as well as software engineering.

My essay Living with Schizoaffective Disorder is on a reading list that the California State Department of Mental Health distributes to its county clinics.

<comment><USER33> "Will someone pay you to publish your work" is a much stronger filter than "do you put your work on your website".

(I write this as someone who has written a lot on my website for free and not published anything in a paid forum.)

<comment><USER19> But the issue here is that "will someone pay to publish" is true but unprovable. "has someone paid to publish" is a sloppy approximation at best.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Running for stuck to chair programmers - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I don't like sports but I'm overweight and my doctor leaves me no choice but to start running a little bit.I read a lot of methods for those who, like me, can't even run for more than a minute so I made this little android app to motivate me. It's only a chronometer that alternates walking and running phases and uses text to speech (so I don't have to look at my phone while running). Hope this helps  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.deliriom.runbabyrun <comment><USER2> Running is a skill to learn just like everything else. People with sedentary lifestyle start running, run out of steam after a minute, decide this is not for them and give up entirely.

So I tried an introductory level of running schedule to overcome this. Every other day you need to invest ~30 minutes. In fact, the very first day you shouldn't be running more than 8*1 minute with 2-minute pauses. It was terribly exhausting. After a few weeks, I was able to run for 15 minutes straight.

Metric apps like MeyerD's are good tools, but there's no substitute for well thought out training plans.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi! I'm not a programmer, but a nerd who trolls around HN... What I am? I am a strength and conditioning coach who happens to also travel the country teaching amateur and professional endurance athletes how to run better. I'd love to help you out if you're interested. Want to see what one of my programs look like? Go to <http://crossfitendurance.com> and check out the daily workouts, that's my stuff. My email is in my profile if you'd like to chat!

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a dumb trick that's helped me run: I set up a custom playlist on my .mp3 player which goes for exactly as long as I intend to run that day. Then I run until the music stops.

It's trivial, but it's made a real difference.</comment>


The Three Axes Of Political Arguments - <AUTHOR> http://freedom-or-safety.com/blog/the-three-axes-of-political-arguments/

<comment><USER2> Great--another graph that simplifies political discourse into a few vague terms that are, themselves, highly politicized.

Even if something like this were somehow representative of the range of political discourse, I struggle to see what real value it would bring. I agree that we should not allow others to set the rules of a political discussion as a choice between X and not X, but how is limiting ourselves to thinking in terms of just three criteria, instead of just one, much better?

<comment><USER3> I agree. The key takeaway here is that there are many different dimensions to politics, even on a single topic. That was hopefully clear already to most reasoning people, and something that they try to keep in mind as they discuss and reason about laws and events...

However, it's certainly not a sparse 3 dimensions. It's an N-dimensional space for some high value of N, if not infinite. There are as many ways to frame a political topic as there are ways that we live and interact in society and the economy.</comment></comment>


Getting Funded, Step 4: Due Diligence - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/getting-funded/getting-funded-step-4-due-diligence-3d2ab36fa187

<comment><USER2> Just the technical bullet points: _" block diagram of the product's components, inputs/outputs to processes in the diagram, internal and external interfaces to the product, languages, frameworks, libraries used, extensibility, portability, openness, standards compliance, scalability, development infrastructure, IDE, Version control, Build tools, Defect tracking systems, Development methodology"_

Is this really a normal amount of information investors request from companies? What's the point of knowing all of this? Asking it implies that #1 the company has all this data in place, otherwise it's wasting time getting it together, #2 the investors know better than the founders about architecture, technology and toolsets and #3 a significant amount of times a term sheet is revoked because of trouble with build tools, standard compliance or a "development methodology". I'm feeling the author just listed everything he could think of rather than everything that actually matters.

<comment><USER3> The quantity of diligence is usually proportional to the size of the deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Be careful of DD done prior to a term sheet, as it allows the VCs to retain optionality on your company in a way that is pretty cheap for them and very expensive for you. Arranged calls with bizdev and customer prospects from a VC's rolodex looks like progress but doesn't necessarily mean anything.

I'd love to know how people who are good at this qualify VC prospects and decide what kinds of up-front due diligence to acquiesce to.</comment>


Index Investing Makes Markets and Economies More Efficient (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2016/05/passive/ <comment><USER2> I always thought that the role of the stock market is the collective intelligence of a large pool of investors, that allocates resources to the most effective or highest performing businesses. Index investing is a blunt instrument that does not allow investors to resource-allocate on the fine- grained individual business level. In the best case, it's more like the Soviet central planning, where a handful of people selecting which stocks comprise an index do most of the financial planning. In the worst case, it causes bubbles- the only decision power there is buy/sell , the detailed microeconomic information about individual businesses is almost irrelevant to the investors.

<comment><USER3> I've been thinking the same. Are there any consumer-oriented products that lets you pick your own index?

As in: you select the stocks and their proportion and supply the money/demand money out, and stocks are then bought/sold automatically?

Say I want to follow index X, but I don't want stocks in oil or coal companies because I believe they're going to die before I need the money out. There doesn't seem to me to be an easy way to build that customized index.

I guess you need a low-fee stock broker and an algorithm that's aware of the fees for this to not end up drowning in fees.

<comment><USER4> Robinhood let's you trade for free, and quantopian.com provides a python based platform for automated trading with support for robinhood.

Have fun,

<comment><USER5> How are they sustaining that free trading? If it's on VC money, then I worry what exactly happens to shares if the firm shuts down. Who is actually holding the shares becomes a critical question in that circumstance.

Edit: I see a $110M Series C in April '17 reported for Robinhood.

<comment><USER6> You can pay like $10 a month for their "Gold" offering. Gets you margin (which also nets them some money) & after-hours trading.

<comment><USER7> Except for margin trading, robinhood is a great deal. Many of these regular discount brokers are committing high way robbery in terms of the fees. TC Ameritrade is the worst in this regard. I hope robbinhood puts them out of business or at least takes away a large chunk of their market share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This could not be more wrong and it's discouraging to see it on the front page of HN -- index investing exerts a normalizing pressure on the prices of assets, which is rarely supported by the underlying values of the companies.

This is unlikely to be a popular opinion amongst passive investors, but day traders and market makers are responsible for making economies for efficient and providing price discovery (if they make profits) by reducing the spread and reducing volatility. Traders who lose money have the opposite effect -- they make assets more volatile by pushing up tops and pushing down bottoms.

Active long term value investors also contribute to positive price discovery and reduce volatility (if they make money) for the same reasons, but on a different time scale.

<comment><USER9> Passive investors were not going to make the market more efficient anyway since they are not informative. They carry only one piece of information which is that they have some money to invest into the economy and would be okay to take some risk, and they express that well enough through a passive financial product reproducing what the financial industry itself calls the "market returns." They of course do care to make some money; nobody is in it to lose money, so how are they making the market less efficient? It's not that different from saving the money in a bank for the bank to allocate.

Now, if the passive investment flow comes to dominate volume on any given day, then the "marginal" trade becomes a passive, uninformative one; then we have a problem.

<comment><USER8> They aren't making the market less efficient, because index funds create value for many people for the reasons you described. The market inefficiency is easily corrected by day traders and market makers.

I'm just saying that index funds do not make markets and economies more efficient, as the article claims, so if we had a 99% ownership tied up in index funds scenario, markets would indeed be far less liquid and more volatile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This guy is making all kinds of assumptions to get his results that can't possibly be true. On a first read it looks like he's assuming:

Stocks in the passive investment category stay that way forever- they are _never_ sold at any price.

Money never enters or leaves the stock market

Companies never issue or buy back stock.

I mean with bat __ __crazy assumptions like these, you can come up with any conclusions you want!

<comment><USER10> For one thing: as soon as the price of an asset drops far enough in the _active_ market, all those people in the passive market holding the stock are going transition from "passive" to "active" in a _hurry_. So that breaks the assumption set right there: passive stocks are never truly passive.

<comment><USER11> What do you mean? An ETF tracking the S&P 500, for example, is not going to sell a stock no matter how much does it drop (until it gets excluded from the index, of course).

<comment><USER10> People can sell their shares of the ETF, and as you say, stocks can get excluded from an index.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The OP defines an "efficient" market as one in which active investors cannot consistently outperform the average by selectively picking individual securities. In this regard, the OP is absolutely right that index investing is making markets "efficient," because active and passive managers, when considered as two distinct aggregate groups, must necessarily earn the same average return before fees, expenses, and frictional costs.

HOWEVER, that doesn't necessarily mean the growth of index investing makes markets more _accurate_ at pricing securities.

There's NO evidence of that.

Maybe the growth of index investing is doing the opposite: making markets LESS ACCURATE at pricing securities.

Indeed, by many measures, US stock prices are looking positively FROTHY these days.[1][2][3]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/business/stock-market- mas...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/business/stock-market-mass- psychology.html)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/business/stock-market- val...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/business/stock-market-value- trump.html?mcubz=1)

[3] [http://time.com/money/4943479/wall-street-prediction- stock-m...](http://time.com/money/4943479/wall-street-prediction-stock-market- downturn/)

<comment><USER13> What is the "accurate" price of a security, particularly if it does not pay a dividend? And what good is achieved by that price being found?

<comment><USER12> Pricing is more accurate when it's closer to the net present value of the profits that could be taken out of the business by a person "who buys it for keeps," to paraphrase J. M. Keynes.

The more accurate a market is at pricing securities, the less severe the magnitude of bubbles and subsequent crashes. Bubbles are extreme examples of overoptimistic pricing.

To be clear, I do NOT know if index funds are causing pricing to be less, or more, accurate. I don't think anyone else knows either.

That said, it seems to me that (1) the ongoing mass-scale removal of intelligence from the investment process is unlikely to make pricing more accurate, and (2) these days, stock prices are looking frothy by many measures (e.g., Shiller CAPE).

<comment><USER13> I'm still missing something here. A stock is an instrument of potential income and control, but I've never seen a price that was anywhere close to correlated with that. In fact, if anything there seems to be a discount given to high- dividend stocks (for which I, as an income investor, am grateful to all you baseball card traders that I don't understand).

To put it another way: the actual _value_ of a no-dividend no-vote stock is precisely zero. The _price_ is whatever the buyer and seller agree on, right? So how can one price be more "accurate" than another?

<comment><USER14> In the event of liquidation, shareholders are on the list of those owed a portion of the proceeds. In fact they are last on the list, after creditors (those who have loaned the company money directly), bondholders (bonds are a form of debt), and holders of preferred stock.

That right is the ultimate determinant of the value of a no-dividend no-vote stock: fractional ownership of the right to proceeds in the event of liquidation, after those above have had theirs.

As a higher-risk asset, it produces greater returns, since otherwise there is an arbitrage: buy bonds issued by the same company instead. This arbitrage lasts until the bond becomes "expensive", and therefore produces worse returns (since its payout is independent of its price).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Economists are always right within their own narrowly-defined models! Yes, if you pre-define a set of securities that you will forever be limited to exclusively trading, and divide two groups into passive (never makes another trade again) and active (makes trades), the two groups will perform equally (excluding fees).

Now, in the real world, there are several significant reasons why that model model offers nothing but a fun little thought experiment.

<comment><USER16> This does look too contrived to be meaningful, but the author claims that it is an example of a general rule identified by Fama and Sharpe:

"The aggregate performance of the active segment of a market will always equal the aggregate performance of the passive segment." (before frictions like trading costs and taxes are taken out.)

I hope those economists have a more sound basis for this claim than the author gives here - assuming, of course, that the author of this article is not misrepresenting or misinterpreting them. To take an extreme case, if all the passive investment is in a single asset, I don't see how this could be, and an issue with passive index investing is that it is in a limited set of assets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ownership seems to get mixed up with efficient capital allocation in a lot of discussions about this (referring to likely comments, not the article). For index investing to work you only need a market that's "efficient enough in aggregate". What you're actually purchasing is ownership of future economic growth.

</comment><comment><USER18> For those interested in indexation, FRMO's Murray Stahl has published some thought-provoking articles about indexation here:

[http://www.frmocorp.com/indexation.html](http://www.frmocorp.com/indexation.html)

 _In principle, the theory behind indexation is very much like the theory of perfect competition. In perfect competition, the idea is that no participant is sufficiently powerful or sufficiently large to influence the price of the product. The product is assumed to be homogeneous, and shares are designed to be homogeneous. In the theory of market efficiency, no one has an information advantage over anyone else, and there is always enough liquidity. It seems reasonable to make those assumptions. Yet, it is worth making some observations about them._

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the main reason someone chooses to invest money into index funds is either they just want stable returns without too much hassle, or they believe in efficient market theory that basically states that you can't beat the market, so no point in even trying(and that's true for most of the mutual funds). But looking at value investors, it seems you can consistently beat the market.

Also, what bothers me about indexing, is that a lot of money is going into same companies(S&P500). Look at any S&P500 companies Top Institutional Holders and without a doubt Vanguard is on top(wild guess). Not sure what happens with the price, when company is excluded from S&P500.

In conclusion, indexing is fun in the bull market, it's just you can't retire in the recession years.

</comment><comment><USER20> This assumption that passive investors have no cash inflows / outflows totally breaks his model. As soon as passive investors start buying or selling the index -- a real world necessity -- they are playing a zero sum game against a counterparty. Specifically, active investors could sell overpriced stocks to indexers and buy underpriced stocks from indexers, which in turn drives the price discovery. This churn allows for active investors, as a group, to gain alpha at the expense of indexers.

Piggybacking off the article's example: Suppose news breaks that Facebook has made a catastrophic legal error which will result in them losing 50% of their revenue over the next year. This is obvious to the active investors who collectively decide to sell their Facebook shares, resulting in a fall in the total value of the index equal to the drop in value for Facebook. In the time it takes the old pre-news price to drop to the new post-news price, active investors have, on net, sold Facebook and gone to cash and will have shared in a relatively small portion of the crash, and passive investors will have bought Facebook due to churn, or held Facebook as part of the index, resulting in them absorbing a larger portion of the crash than active investors.

So how does this all fit into the "active managers don't earn their keep" narrative? I think what we've seen is a long term drop in the alpha available to the active share due to things like narrowing spreads, faster response to new news, etc. So effectively active management is in a secular decline, which allows for (1) bad results for active managers on net, and (2) failure of poor performers and their removal from the market, and (3) continued real value generation by the better and remaining active managers. So this idea of conservation of alpha is also silliness because the market will always be slightly oversaturated (net negative value for money managers) or undersaturated (net positive value for money managers).

If you doubt this, read Ben Graham's the "Intelligent Investor" \-- In 1949 he thought it was quite easy (EASY!) for an average Joe to earn outsized returns with a little stock research (and I think history proved him right until at least the late '70s).

</comment><comment><USER7> _It's important to remember, here, that secondary market trading and investing is a zero-sum game for the participants. For a given market participant to outperform, some other market participant has to underperform. Obviously, for a market participant with a given level of skill, the ease at which that participant will outperform will be a function of the quantity of unskilled participants that are there for the skilled participant to exploit. To the extent that the prevalence of indexing preferentially reduces that quantity, it makes outperformance more difficult._

That is a myth that refuses to die.

Market makers and liquidity providers enter into neutral trades so it doesn't matter which way the market goes..they make money from the spread and churn. Just because you made $40k from being long Google doesn't mean some schmuck lost $40k.

 _Eventually, indexing comes around to disrupt the industry. Of the 500,000 individuals that were previously managing funds, 499,500 go out of business, with their customers choosing the passive option instead. The remaining 500–which are the absolute cream of the crop–continue to compete with each other for profit, setting prices for the overall market._

Indexing has been around for a long time now, but active mgmt has had a terrible time and is actually getting worse in recent years, against the author's thesis that passive investing is supposed to create a small pool of 'superstars'.

<comment><USER21> [http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp)

Some schmuck sort of did. The market makers and liquidity providers are not the source of the sold stock, simply intermediaries.

"is actually getting worse in recent years, against the author's thesis that passive investing is supposed to create a small pool of 'superstars'."

This is a huge point of contention. Capital takes a long time to flow out of mutual and hedge funds which have been underperforming. It could be many years yet before any "superstars" emerge.

<comment><USER7> I mean as in a P&L statement. If I sold a bitcoin at $1 in 2010 did I lose $4000? no but I may regret it. If someone short sold it, then it would be a $4000 loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Quick Question: Why is efficiency a desired outcome in markets? Or is it just a natural outcome of competing players?

<comment><USER23> The core social benefit of financial markets is to get capital to where it can be used most productively. This is why Google could get funding in 1998 and why Venezuela can't today.

<comment><USER13> What did Google's initial funding have to do with the securities market?

<comment><USER24> The angels / VCs that funded it did so with the knowledge that they'd be able to go public later and get their money back out. If there's no market for selling equity in mature companies, there's less incentive for starting or investing in small / growing companies.

<comment><USER13> So, investors simply don't believe in the existence of income?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is dumb, the point of the stock market is the return the stocks give you in dividends etc. Here, he treats those returns as not being a factor, and as stocks having no intrinsic value.

If they have no intrinsic value of course passive management makes sense!

</comment><comment><USER26> Prices are set at the margin.

This article is concerned with the average skill of investors, an entirely meaningless metric that determines nothing. The marginal investor determines prices not the mean one.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is efficiency a desired quality of a market?

</comment><comment><USER27> Investing in index is like subscribing for slavery. It only benefits people with tons of money. Sure, it's less risky. But along with preventing massive downside, it prevents massive upside too. I've just got 1 life, limited time and I want to risk everything for a massive upside, not efficient market.

<comment><USER28> I'd think investing all your money in playing the lottery opens up a much bigger upside. Sure, it's more risky, but you've just got 1 life!

<comment><USER29> Wait... are you trying to tell me that scratch tickets aren't essentially the same thing as stock certificates?

<comment><USER28> I'm just saying, don't subscribe for slavery!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


With A New API, Aviary Wants To Become The Twilio Of Photo Effects - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/aviary-api-photo/

<comment><USER2> Direct link: <http://developers.aviary.com/effects-api>

Does anyone know the pricing levels beyond the free 1,000 photos a month?</comment>


Why I am moving away from Vue.JS - <AUTHOR> https://hashnode.com/post/why-i-am-moving-away-from-vuejs-cjq6l0ib3006izws1ntmczinv <comment><USER2> The article was more of a timeline of how the author delved into programming using different stacks and frameworks, then (finding) realizing that there is little market for VueJS. Hence, the choice to move to React.

I think there was not even a hint of a compelling reason why moving away from VueJS was made.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really hate to say this. But I didn't like this article because it somehow puts the blame on VueJS. Where frankly there is none.

It seems this guy is more of a "plumber" type developer than a "roll up your sleeves and get on with it" type developer.

This developer smacks of someone swinging through the trees in the jungle of frameworks and latching on to whichever framework gives him the most bang for buck or IOW does the job for him. I get the feeling that when you look at the package file for his projects, they have 2000000000000 dependencies.

When I moved from jQuery over to Vue, I found that many libs didn't have similar components. Instead of looking at React I simply built my own. Also moving from jQuery over to ES6 is trivial. Sure it's a pain in the beginning but now 7 months later, I don't even think about it.

I've looked at projects of Vue 1.x and can easily read them, there isn't much difference between 1.x and 2.x. It's trivial to upgrade. Can you imagine this developer crowing at 3.x and saying his code isn't running?

> And the market as a whole doesn't care.

Really, this says it all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Use the (1) best tools to solve the problem that (2) you know best (3) if your goal is to create a working solution as fast as possible.

For web apps, I moved from .NET MVC + jQuery over to .NET Core (or sometimes nodejs) for the backend and VueJS for the front end (axios for ajax calls). I've went through 4 projects like this over the past 2 years and my personal productivity is through the roof using Vue. I output only JSON from the backend, and Vue snaps that up on the client and I'm off an running with total control over the user interface and overall experience. It's reinvigorated my entire outlook on web development as a whole, and I've been doing this for 18 years.

The author seems to slam the VueJS community for not being as native-mobile developer friendly as React. Well, yea - React Native is a mature option for mobile development. Maybe Vue will get there, but mobile has not been the focus of the VueJS community.</comment>


Apple fires engineer after his daughter's iPhone X video goes viral - <AUTHOR> https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/10/30/apple-fires-engineer-after-daughter-iphone-x-video.html?ana=yahoo&yptr=yahoo <comment><USER3> Discussion on the Verge article submission from 1 day ago (73 comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15576895](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15576895)

</comment><comment><USER4> From the article, "I had no idea this was a violation"

Welp, if you weren't getting fired for showing off the iPhone X before it ships without permission you should be fired for being at Apple for _four years_ and not realizing this _might_ be a problem.

I can't even take this as genuine. I seriously wonder if they were already half out the door for other reasons.

<comment><USER5> The quote is from the daughter.

I don't think it's particularly genuine either, but it's not a quote from the employee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> She came from SoCal to visit him, planning to make this video, and possibly knowing she'd see the iPhone X. I wouldn't be surprised if virality was her target, and this was her way to get into Hollywood. And the father, this must have been his way to help his daughter, maybe he was already planning to retire.

He must have known he'd be fired. No one of his seniority is that naive. And no way they shot all this footage in the Cafè and had this much face-to-face interaction with workers there without someone reminding them about "No Photography." No reasonable response he could've given except that they had permission.

Edit: Come think of it, forget about the iPhone X, this is probably one of the very few (only?) videos ever of Cafe Macs.

<comment><USER7> I assume this is all sarcasm?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like they're making an example of him more than anything else. In this case, a lot of media reporters already have made detailed videos of the phone so the damage is minimal -- but if another engineer leaks the next iPhone at an alpha stage, it would be very different.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps it wasn't in the linked article, but other ones I've read indicate that the video showed things on the phone beyond what Apple's media department let reporters see. Things like internal QR codes and project names. This appears to be more than a simple case of making an example of a bad apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Samsung should hire him, and also the daughter to do a walkthru of whatever their next phone is.

<comment><USER11> That would be brilliant marketing actually!

<comment><USER12> That would be. They should develop a whole ad campaign around that. Apple as the heartless corporate behemoth vs the loving samsung. In reality they are both corporate behemoths, but image is everything.

The engineer did violate his NDA, but he was trying to help out his daughter. Should your job really come before family especially since he didn't reveal anything truly secret.

<comment><USER13> > Should your job really come before family

I'm always nervous when I see phrasing like this because it all depends on what you mean by "come before". For example, I would love to spend 40+ more hours per week with my family, but I don't. That doesn't mean I put work before my family, it means I love my family enough to provide for them.

Conversely, if I had a job that required 40 hours per week (objectives and culture wise) and I worked 80 hours for the fun of it, then this would be a clear case of putting work before my family. In that case, no, I shouldn't be doing it.

The question here is which category (if either) does this fall into? It seems as though the issue here is the employee had a non-disclosure condition of employment, which he violated. The "help" he provided his daughter may have helped her financially, though I suspect ego was the primary driver for both the employee and the daughter. As unpopular as it may be to side with the big- bad-company, I think Apple acted appropriately here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "I had no idea this was a violation"

Somehow hard to believe.

<comment><USER15> I know several kids who can get out of pretty much any trouble by feigning ignorance. Their parents drive me nuts.

<comment><USER13> Man I wish I could upvote this twice! Since I can't, I'll register my hearty agreement with text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sad but makes sense, Im thinking he violated his NDAs, Apple could have likely sued him for that

</comment><comment><USER17> Feels like someone has an agenda, this is the 10th time I've heard this story and it has exactly the same information.

Father told/showed daughter prototype phone in breach of an NDA that I _know_ he signed if he had access to that hardware. Daughter felt really proud of superstar daddy and took to the internet to show off.

Apple has three recourses,

1) Sue the employee to the fullest extent covered under the NDA. My employer can hold me personally liable for any loss of revenue and it wouldn't be hard to claim damage on this.

2) Ignore the incident, set a precedent that leaks are ok. Or internally lambast the employee which is akin to bullying in some eyes.

3) Terminate the employee, allow a clean break and for the employee to persue other jobs with newly accrued information (IE; that when your NDA says "NOBODY (inc. Family) are to be told [...] that it generally means it.

This is a non-story. Yes, it's sad. But it's wholly self-inflicted and I think Apple took the least destructive path on this.

<comment><USER18> Can someone explain why you're down voting this person? His/her comments seem very reasonable, am I missing something?

I hate that HN lets you downvote without an explanation.

 _edit_ : And now I'm being down voted for asking a question!? Wtf is going on.. I'm trying to get information here..

<comment><USER19> From the official HN guidelines[0]:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, > and it makes boring reading.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER18> Hmm, shame - I was hoping to promote actual discussion about the real reason at hand, but I guess that's not allowed.

I do find it _very_ strange that we're not supposed to foster discussion, but rather quietly accept silencing of dissenting views. Seems very against the meaningful discussions that I come up HN for. Strange for me.

Thank you, despite it breaking the rules I guess. I'm let down by HN this day. :/

<comment><USER20> First rule of HN: do not talk about downvoting.

Second rule of HN: you get the idea....

<comment><USER18> Well more explicitly, I don't give a shit about downvoting - but _why_ someone downvotes is very important.

Eg, if someone writes a long well thought out post, full of information, and is down voted heavily - should we not question it? It seems the HN mantra is "well the masses have spoken, best not to question them".

I don't give a damn about someones magic internet points, but what I'm being told is I cannot try and prompt actual discussion? I just have to remain dumb about something I'm missing, because that's what a HNer is supposed to do?

This seems so wrong :/

Honestly, this seems like an above _(not by you exactly)_ of the root idea. By all means, don't talk about down votes, but I wasn't - I was talking about the content, that others apparently did not find worthy. _Why_ was it not worthy?

Why is it a good rule to not understand why things aren't worthy? Again, I'm not talking about magic internet numbers, I'm talking about content - <USER2> we're not allowed to do that either. Wtf?

<comment><USER20> I totally agree with you. But every time I raise this as an idea I get downvoted :)

I can only assume everyone else is perfectly fine with it - except yours is not the first post I've seen like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Relevant [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RvNS7JfcMM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RvNS7JfcMM)

</comment><comment><USER22> I would think this kind of unintentional mini-leak happens several times per day at Apple: there must be hundreds of employees running around with prototype hardware, using them as their primary phones.

If that is true, then it would seem pretty arbitrary to fire the employee, especially since the articles makes it seem like his daughter took the video down immediately on request.

Regardless, there is no shortage of demand for RF engineers. An engineer with 17 years of experience, getting fired over something uniquely a concern for Apple, that he was not even primarily responsible for, and getting featured on TechCrunch... This could be one of the best things to ever happen to his career.

</comment><comment><USER23> This scenario is pretty much applicable for any private corp. across the nation or globe. Every company has their own rules and regulations around the secrecy of new products before the launch in order to stay competitive. The reason this news story is picking up extra traction is because a) it involves Apple and b) some people are trying to justify the idiocy of this teenager using innocence. This guy should be grateful that Apple is not coming after him with a lawsuit that he cant even dream of defending.

</comment><comment><USER24> This seems to be the video in question:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBeD8E2xxck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBeD8E2xxck)

</comment><comment><USER25> Showing the phone itself and its features does not seem like a fireable offense, but it sounds like some internal naming, documentation and links were visible, which is surely a major violation of company policy, if allowing your family to have access to your internal account were not (which it also certainly is).

</comment><comment><USER26> How a tech company can dictate a lifestyle, and make you lose your job for it, is beyond me. I guess you deserve the consequences if you subscribe to that lifestyle contract.

<comment><USER27> Look, he violated his employer's NDA and it wasn't a mistake. What do you expect?

Much worse violations have happened in the past at Apple, and were unintentional. Like the firmware leak that leaked everything about this year's iPhones. As far as I know, nobody was fired for that, because it was a mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sad, Apple has indeed lost it's way. Old Apple would have capitalized on any press. Tim Cook is the Steve Balmer of Apple; right now they're still making money off of legacy. Jobs demanded quality and usefulness, not silly touchbars, half-witted protocol implementations, and removing of essential ports (ethernet, headphone jacks, etc). The market is ripe for another commercially supported Unix-based hardware/software outfit to take over and give people what they really want.

<comment><USER28> You think Jobs would've been cool with this? What are you smoking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If Apple does not want their devices to be used as intended until an embargo date has passed they should keep them on premises. Once the device is out of the gates the secret is out as well.

NDA's are very effective when you are talking about documents and adults. As soon as you're talking about devices and/or kids NDA's are ineffective because _anybody_ that spots the device can post a picture without any recourse by the company and kids will do whatever they want to in today's connected world.

Whether it was smart or not is another matter but I feel that firing someone over something like this is way too harsh, besides all the good publicity it gave Apple. But I guess when you're a tech-fashion company it's perfectly ok to ignore the realities of producing physical goods and the fact that you're going to have to let your product out of your control at some point.

<comment><USER30> > In the video, which has since been deleted, Peterson shops at Santana Row > before meeting her father, Ken Bauer, for pizza at an Apple cafeteria in > Cupertino. Bauer pays for their meals with an unreleased iPhone X, telling > the cashier that he worked on the phone's wireless payments feature.

This all happened on Apple's campus, mentioned in the second paragraph. Maybe read the article before commenting?

<comment><USER29> Ah, I missed that. Ok, so even then: don't let your super secret phone out of the developer area. Many non-Apple employees visit Apple and eat at the cafetaria, any one of those could have spotted the phone.

I visited a couple of hardware manufacturers in the past (Swatch, Logitech) and have seen pre-production hardware of which only single working prototypes existed. There is no way that you'd be able to take a photograph of any of those and those are not companies that are as paranoid as Apple about this stuff.

My guess is that they are making an example out of this guy to cover up their utter failure in process that allowed this to happen in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's pretty strange that someone lost their livelihood solely because they didn't bow to authority.

(As opposed to a practical reason, like "what he did mattered.")

<comment><USER32> Well at least this was for a reason.

Remember that one guy they fired for a bad decorated apartment? You got life a representative lifestyle- so designer cloths, designer furniture- else apple does not want to associated with you. IKEA is very very close to crossing a line there.

<comment><USER5> > _Remember that one guy they fired for a bad decorated apartment?_

No. What are you talking about?

<comment><USER33> Sarcasm folks... GP complained about it being a 'lifestyle' thing.

<comment><USER5> This doesn't read like sarcasm to me and the "lifestyle" comment is not in this comment's parent tree.

Maybe it is sarcasm, but it's bizarre if so. (Bizarre either way, actually.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Journey from My Tent in Afghanistan to Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@thenickfrost/a-journey-from-my-tent-in-afghanistan-to-silicon-valley-94e17b214ac2

<comment><USER2> Thank you for your service!

All the best at Mattermark.</comment>


The decline in computer science students (part 2) - <AUTHOR> http://brucefwebster.com/2008/06/24/the-decline-in-computer-science-students-part-2/

<comment><USER2> The thing that always confuses me about these articles is how IT and computer science get equated. Its like saying doing research in applied mathematics is great training for being an accountant. Theres certainly a relationship, but theres certainly a huge difference between the two.

I guess the question is then: how does computer science pull a physics? Does there need to be some analogue of Feynman + Hawking etc, where theres both epic insight and just generally an outgoing ridiculous persona and also some reasonably good popular expositions of deep ideas?

<comment><USER3> _Does there need to be some analogue of Feynman + Hawking etc, where theres both epic insight and just generally an outgoing ridiculous persona and also some reasonably good popular expositions of deep ideas?_

What ideas in CS are as interesting to the layman as the most interesting parts of physics? Tell a layman about black holes, galactic collisions, big bangs, quantum weirdness, nuclear fusion, or any of those other things in physics which are unimaginably (to us) big, small, hot, cold, fast, slow, or weird, and for the most part (with the exception of particularly dull laymen) they'll be fascinated. How much can you tell a layman about CS that will get the same reaction?

<comment><USER4> Once, I had been dating a girl for a bit, and in one of the dates I was telling her about the distances between stars, and how there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in the earth. And at some point I was trying to explain her 2001 A Space Odyssey, and the meaning behind the monoliths. --which is pretty fascinating to any person that has some geekiness inside.

She was totally bored.

Then I switched into how Rome is awesome, and Instabul was a romantic place, cools things to do in Europe blah blah.... a little bit more interesting to her as she had never travelled in europe.

I quit dating her after that night. I was "sick" for a while, then in "Boston" for a long time....

I just couldn't date a person with that low level of curiosity.

Anyways, you would be suprised on how layman might be totally un-interested to even these cosmical events. Something it is just beyond some people, it is like foreing stuff, that they don't need to understand, and trying to understand will only give them headaches.

Moral of the story: When dating, never trade intelligence for beauty. You will regret it as soon as the eye candy wears off.

<comment><USER5> I think Rachel Hartman's character Lalo said it best in "Blondweg Blossoming": the secret to being _interesting_ is being _interested_.

My wife and kids and I have a rule - I'll watch whatever 10 minute video they want to show me on YouTube if I get to show them a 10 minute clip from Cosmos. Let's just say they that their about at their limit of "Star Stuff" :-) But I don't think any less of their intelligence or curiosity just because Carl Sagan isn't their thing. My wife knows much more about philosophy then I and my kids interest in biology and psychology is greater than mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish I had declined my CS education. I, a recent CS graduate (Bachelor of Science in Computer Science), have come to the conclusion that a)my education equals squat to potential employers (and that a hand full of $300 certifications would have served as more valuable) and b)everything I learned in 4 years of CS studies, I could have learned in half the time outside of class - much of which I did, and then had to sit through it again in class.

I have been out of school for approximately 3 months now, have submitted well over 100 resumes, and cannot net even a remedial hold-over job screwing in PCI cards and fixing users' desktops. This afternoon I am throwing on a pair of khakis and heading out to see if I can net a job waiting tables - woot!

P.S. That last sentence is literal, in about an hour I am going for a restaurant interview... man, I am really happy I listened to my parents and elders and made sure to go to college, so that now I have 35k in debt and no job with which to pay it back with.

<comment><USER7> Been there done that, it gets better.

I got out of school with my BS in CS right at bottom of the .com bust. 2+ months of resume sending and nothing, eventually I got "network engineer" (glorified PC repairman) job. It was fun for about a month, then it got repetitive. 6+ month later I finally got a break and started (for slightly less $) as junior software engineer.

So yeah right now it feels like your CS is worth less then a bunch of certificates, but don't worry things change and in the long term you are better of.

In fact waiting tables might be better then what I did. It could pay more if you get lots of tips and you can keep your skills sharp outside of work, and the temptation to specialize in your new job and forget CS isn't there.

In summary: Suck it up kid!

<comment><USER6> Ha! Thanks. Yea, I know what you are saying, and I am sure that something will come along. I am taking my A+ next week because every 'network engineer' position that I have applied for requires it - they do not, however, require a CS degree. Go figure. All I can do is use this time that I have and hone my hacking skills - something to be thankful for. Oh, and at the interview they said the waiter positions was filled, but they will call me about the busboy position! Yay!

<comment><USER8> Try applying for QA positions as well, instead of tech guy ones. Frankly, you might be running into a problem that you're overqualified for the grunt work positions. Further, unless you're WAY younger than your wife, you may be running into an age discrimination issue.

I've come to the conclusion that the best thing anyone can do for themselves to get into the corporate world is an internship during one's college years. Most places hire their new talent from their intern pool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perfect. It should decline even more, because lets face it: big percentage of CS grads aren't really "into it". The article points at year 2000 as the peak of CS enrollments, same year when I met an ex-taxi driver and the history teacher both turned Java programmers.

<comment><USER10> Where they good programmers? Some of the best programmers I have ever met started off doing other things in life (or never even went on a CS course). You cannot begrudge people for starting on different life paths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would like to see how CS minors figure into the context, as well as CIS/MIS degrees. As someone with a CS minor (considering going back for a BS/master's), I've found that all I needed was that first job. Certainly, I've had my fair share of jobs that I just couldn't get into, but it's enough for blub.

I might advise someone to get a major in Biology and a minor in CS these days. In the corporate world, as far as I can tell, you are only as good as your domain.

</comment><comment><USER11> Bruce F. Webster - creater of 'Sundog, the Frozen Legacy' for the Atari ST. And a good writer for BYTE back in the day. Thanks for the link.

</comment><comment><USER12> Too many bosses like lumberg (from the movie Office Space) out there.

Can't get any referrals.

Besides Microsoft and the rest are scouring the streets of third world cities like bombay and Calcutta picking up throwaway kids and teaching them how to program.

Only one out of 50 makes it but when they kick in they only cost $15 an hour.

Who the heck needs those expensive kids with Computer Science degrees.</comment>


Shutterstock Creates First Silicon Alley Billionaire - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-28/shutterstock-creates-first-silicon-alley-billionaire.html

<comment><USER2> There were many Silicon Alley billionaires back in '99/'00\. I had four (I think) in my portfolio alone. But none of them were billionaires after the dot-com crash. As my boss back then used to say: "Money's not money til it's cash." Wise man, he was.</comment>


Geologists Find Clues In Crater Left By Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/06/476871766/geologists-find-clues-in-crater-left-by-dinosaur-killing-asteroid <comment><USER2> > "I think it was a bad few months, really," Morgan says.

Actually, there's quite a bit of evidence that the dinos were wiped out in a matter of days, if not hours. The ejecta from the impact was launched out into space on sub-orbital trajectories. When it fell back, it heated the atmosphere and turned the whole planet into a giant convection oven.

[http://www3.nd.edu/~cneal/CRN_Papers/Schulte10_Sci_Chicxulub...](http://www3.nd.edu/~cneal/CRN_Papers/Schulte10_Sci_Chicxulub.pdf)

<comment><USER3> How did birds and mammals survive?

<comment><USER4> Birds are dinosaurs

<comment><USER5> Non-extinct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This animation shows the land basically behaving like a liquid in response to the impact: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicxulub- animation....](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicxulub- animation.gif)

</comment><comment><USER7> The scale of this event really does boggle the mind.

<comment><USER8> The novel Seveneves brings a similar (actually, far worse) event in a modern environment. Both a fun and nightmarish thought exercise.

<comment><USER9> I immediately thought of Seveneves as well. You know some time thousands of years in the future, the Earth's humaniods are going to ask how their ancestors survived the asteroid in our future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pardon my ignorance but I don't exactly get how dinosaurs were wiped out of the earth by _one_ asteroid.

Were all the dinosaurs located in the same small area? Or did the remaining dinos die from the subsequent winter?

<comment><USER11> Very simple and quick explanation as far as I remember it - the large dinosaurs that survived the initial impact were wiped out by the ensuing 'winter' and lack of food (they needed a lot to sustain themselves). Plenty of smaller creatures survived including types of dinosaurs that evolved into birds.

Happy to be corrected :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it possible that it wasn't an asteroid at all, but just a Tesla Model S?

</comment><comment><USER13> Title error because of old science. The asteroid killed off lots of things, but dinos were already on the way out. Maybe next year things will swing back, but atm the rock wasn't to blame.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/18/dinosaurs- in...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/18/dinosaurs-in-decline- long-before-asteroid-catastrophe-study-reveals)

"...a huge tsunami that was triggered when the asteroid struck."

I think we need a different word for that scale of wave.

<comment><USER14> "a new study suggests" != "new science"

As good as it is to have new papers on the topic, let's not fall into the pop- science trap of thinking every new research will "cure cancer", "change our entire understanding of physics" and all the other premature comments that people make.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin about to cross $11,000 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/coinhubplatform/status/935836525748674560 <comment><USER2> Thats weird, i thought these "round" numbers are mostly psychological. The previous bitcoin peak was around $1000 and followed by a looooooooooong winter. I thought it would repeat itself, hover around $10000 for a little and then go for another looong dive.

But maybe there's too much market activity to stop it yet.

It's fun making this kind of predictions. I would wager for fun that it will not reach $20000 before it starts the dive.

<comment><USER3> Coinbase is the #1 trending app in the iOS App Store right now. Crossing $10k is getting a lot of press and causing a lot of FOMO. The wall of dumb money about to enter is huge and may be able to keep this rally going for a while.

<comment><USER2> thats why i assumed that the previous peak had to do with a lot of press about bitcoin crossing $1000. but maybe it was just mtgox

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This feels so much like a "Pyramid" scam, or "irrational exuberance" and markets are climbing with it, and for no good reason other than too much money in too few hands.

<comment><USER5> No doubt. There's a few parties with a lot of money to invest; I'm sure every once in a while they chuck a few million into the market, raising the price above a certain threshold. News outlets pick up on it, a lot of people's interest perks up, they buy quickly to ride the upwards wave, annnd the party that bumped the price up initially slowly sell off again. Easy 30% return on investment.

<comment><USER6> In this case it might be a bit more than 30%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There was a story on the BBC News site about it crossing $10,000 just... well, today, actually.

Part of me is disappointed that I missed out on an opportunity to make an awful lot of money quickly when I wondered about buying some a couple of years ago and decided it was too dicey.

But then part of me thinks anything that has gone up in on-paper (on-screen?) value by an order of magnitude this year, and now roughly doubled in just the past month alone, is still surely being carried by pure hype, and some people are going to lose an awful lot of what they thought they had if it turns and they try to sell and find they can't.

</comment><comment><USER8> the true investment apocalypse will happen when BTC falls back to below $1000 and the average Joe invest thinking that it is now so cheap. Then it's the time for bitcoin to be replaced by another coin and to fade away into nothingness.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this the hyper- _deflationary_ collapse of a currency?

Hyperinflation gets all the rhetoric but currencies in fact have two different failure modes. (Well three if you count apocalypse but that's different.)

<comment><USER10> If this is failure, I'd love to see success...

<comment><USER11> A currency is only useful to the extent that it can be traded. Something which is 1 dollar one day and 10000 the next is worthless as a trading medium. It's why we don't buy and sell things in gold any more. We just sort of sit on it uselessly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well maybe some people really can't live without bitcoins

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, it was hovering around $8,000 less than a week ago.

</comment><comment><USER14> Let's turn back the time a few years, I want to make some adjustments to my investment.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's time to buy.

<comment><USER5> That's exactly the sentiment that the large BTC traders want to share, so they can sell off the stocks they bought a week ago at 30% below what it is atm.</comment></comment>


US plane in 1961 'nuclear bomb near-miss' - Suraj-Sun http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24183879

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article: 'One simple dynamo-technology low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.'

And the bombs were 260 times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Jesus H. Christ.

NB the original story appeared in The Guardian.</comment>


"I'm smart but I just don't try" a sixteen year old's thoughts - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@DHU/i-m-smart-but-i-just-don-t-try-c90ae0a3ef6

<comment><USER2> I feel this way still at 35. I many not be as smart as this 16 year old, but I do feel I need to be engaged and have a goal to learn something rather than for the sake of it or because it is forced on me.

This person is obviously smart to be this reflective at such an early age and will probably do very well at finding the thing to make him happy.

<comment><USER3> 32 and in the same place.</comment></comment>


The saddest script I ever wrote - <AUTHOR> http://blog.snailtext.com/posts/the-saddest-script-i-ever-wrote.html <comment><USER2> Off topic: Page starts with "snail text" logo and ends with quirky upside down link "What's snail text?". Sure, I'll bite. I press the link, and get subscription form without any explanation what I would be subscribing to. And then in bottom of page there's a second bait, "What's snail text?". What indeed. It is launching soon. And it has a twitter account. So that is known. Maybe one day we'll find out more.

<comment><USER3> I went to the twitter account then find the blog and checked over the blog post titles. I still don't have a clue about what snail text is. What indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Actually most problems here already described well in Docker docs:

\- [https://docs.docker.com/storage/bind-mounts/#configure- mount...](https://docs.docker.com/storage/bind-mounts/#configure-mount- consistency-for-macos)

Due to it is being VM, contents are synced between host and VM. It takes time and damages IOPS greatly. Eg. Even running ~100MB Jar takes minutes...

Side note that vim uses `swap` files `.$FILE.swp` when you write out, it removes the original file renames the temporary one to original one. So essentially inode or reference is different thats why it triggers sync with VM.

Ed probably writes files in-place.

Docker now uses inotify equalivent (fswatch?) on macOS, which is pretty much reliable than polling. Ofc if your app did not close file with exclusive read- write-lock, docker cannot do anything about it.

</comment><comment><USER5> > One day about a year ago, I started using ed in place of vi

This is a choice that I feel would benefit from some kind of explenation

</comment><comment><USER6> > because I would not be thwarted by crappy software

Oh mate, I don't think that's the issue here! This is like breaking your host OS and then making it pantomime it's own replacement so you can pretend you still have a working OS!

</comment><comment><USER7> We had something kind of similar for a large e-commerce project. Docker was loading the site super slow with a mapped drive so we had the brilliant idea to rsync the files from OSX into the container using a file watcher. This meant the page loads were faster , but it could take even longer for the watcher to diff the changes and sync them back up to the container. Pretty annoying.

At some point, the container got optimized to not need the sync anymore for acceptable load times. Nobody is sure what we changed to help that out.

</comment><comment> kalium-xyz NixOS fixes the issue the author was using docker for. systems with explicit well managed state make development much less of a hell.

<comment><USER8> Note: this depends crucially on your appraisal of the Nix language and ecosystem as "less hell".

<comment> kalium-xyz Its an investment but there are no nasty surprises to it or security issues, just a lotta gotchas. Things get better by the day in terms of editor support and tooling integration so keep watch c:

<comment><USER9> I love Nix and NixOS, but having "a lotta gotchas" doesn't square with "no nasty surprises".

<comment> kalium-xyz Maybe im using the term wrong, I mean there is a steep learning curve but its nothing that will cause you serious issues like randomly deleting data or "how do I un-rm a file?". The complexity is in using the tooling and not in the commands being idiotic and having dangerous side effects, if anything less so than other OSes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sure the author tried some debugging but it's a bit sad not to see any in the post, instead their workaround is simply presented.

I would assume the root of the difference in behavior comes down to calling fsync when editing files on such a mount.

In lieu of having macOS's userland source I grepped through through copies of ed's source from GNU and OpenBSD. I don't see any calls to fsync. Whereas Vim by default does. Note most instances of vi are actually a link to Vim/a minimal version of Vim. Normally I'd test this with with some quick tracing but it appears I've not configured SIP to allow DTrace on my machine and I can't be bothered to reboot right now.

</comment><comment><USER11> Didn't follow that, but invoking _csh_ is indeed very, very sad.

</comment><comment><USER12> Problems like these drive me absolutely mad, but I have the nasty tendency to waste huge amounts of time trying to track down the underlying issue. Sometimes this works and I can fix the problem; other times I figure it out, learn something new, and file a bug report or write a workaround with the new knowledge, but all too often I spend hours with little to show for it, give up far later than I should have, and have the papered-over issue in the back of my mind forevermore.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is... beautiful.

I wonder though, how different are the file edited with ed and the one edited with vi. Maybe ed fails to update the "date modified" under these conditions?

<comment><USER14> ed might do truncate/write, and vim might do create/write/rename. New file, cache miss.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, this is obviously a replace vs in-place modify difference. Could replace the script with a simple copy-to-temp+rename-back.

<comment><USER16> Or not use ed(1).

<comment><USER15> Personally I use magnets to flip bits around, ed(1) seems a bit to bloated for me.

<comment><USER17> Who needs magnets when you have cosmic rays?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>