The Mystery of Missing Inflation Weighs on Fed Rate Move - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mystery-of-missing-inflation-weighs-on-fed-rate-move-1450056838 <comment><USER2> As a complete layperson I might be out of my depth, but is that 5% unemployment realistic? If I remember correctly they don't count people who have been unemployed long-term. There's a lot of people who don't work; whether they collect disability/welfare, live off relatives, or make money through the grey/black markets I don't think the job market has really recovered nearly as much as a lot of people think. And a lot of those jobs are part-time or low wage. Perhaps that's anecdotal from the impression I get, but it doesn't seem like their model takes any of that into account.

Even without inflation it doesn't seem like the people I'm around (mostly middle to lower class) have all that much extra spending money laying around these days. If everyone was making more money I'm sure inflation would rebound, but as it is most the new money the Fed has been pumping into the economy seems to be going largely to the upper class.

<comment><USER3> No, 5.3% unemployment number is cooked. Even the BLS stats say 10.3% & that's probably gamed too.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/04/-the-real-unemployment- rate.h...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/04/-the-real-unemployment-rate.html) …

<comment><USER4> Understand the definitions of "unemployed" here (U1-U6): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bureau_of_Labor_statistics)

Look up the time-series here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#/media/File:US_Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#/media/File:US_Unemployment_measures.svg)

It's a little silly to say that one of these measures is "cooked" while using as evidence an alternative metric that was measured and published by the same agency with the explicit understanding that the two metrics measured different things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Fed's model is broken.

Employment might be up, but wages (except for executives) have been stagnant for well over a decade. Retailers have been squeezing suppliers in order to maintain low prices (hello Costco, Walmart!). Discretionary spending is low due to under-employment in many sectors.

BTW: the "unemployment" figures fail to take into account people who are no longer looking for work and even worse, the masses of underemployed, people who can barely make ends meet.

<comment><USER4> The BLS publishes six unemployment indexes [1] that each include and exclude different groups for which employment status is debatable. However, each index has a largely consistent definition over time. They all follow essentially the same trend [2]. Could you be more specific as to the type of definition manipulation you believe is afoot?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bureau_of_Labor_statistics)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#/media/File:US_Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#/media/File:US_Unemployment_measures.svg)

<comment><USER6> The total labor force participation rate is total number of people who worked last month over total number of civilians over 16 years old. It is at historic lows but somehow "unemployment" is 5%

[http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000](http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000)

<comment><USER7> Not really surprising, Boomers keep retiring, and retirees not interested in work are part of the denominator for labor force participation rate, but not in any reasonable sense of the word "unemployed".

Ever-expanding lifespans and a demographic bulge hitting retirement age naturally combine to make labor force participation historically low.

<comment><USER8> Except that is the opposite of what is happening, Boomers and others who should be retiring are not and those who should be working are not. The only reason the LFP is not lower than it is is because more people can't afford to retire

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the search for new models I've always been partial to the inclusion of credit (marked to market) as a factor in predicting inflation, instead of just money supply. This at least correctly predicted low-to-no inflation post- financial-crisis despite massive increases in the money supply.

[http://www.economicsjunkie.com/inflation-deflation- revisited...](http://www.economicsjunkie.com/inflation-deflation-revisited/) has some good explanations of why.

There's also what you measure: consumer prices do not reflect increases in asset prices, and the latter have grown very quickly in the past few years (as credit has recovered).

</comment><comment><USER10> Related, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently open sourced one of its models (coded in Julia)

[https://github.com/FRBNY- DSGE/DSGE.jl/blob/master/doc/Data.m...](https://github.com/FRBNY- DSGE/DSGE.jl/blob/master/doc/Data.md)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10670138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10670138)

</comment><comment><USER11> Software is leading to much more leverage in capital efficiency. This is driving a reduction in CapEx spending in the US despite low interest rates. It's driving a reduced cost in exploration and extraction, which is in turn increasing supply for commodities and energy. We do more today with almost every conceivable good than we ever have before. More with less is the theme and it's getting much more powerful with software. IBM: $100bn, VMWare: $10bn, Docker/Containers: $1bn. All the same stuff. Our efficiency is increasing rapidly, and it's very difficult to predict with historical figures where this goes.

<comment><USER12> Oh I get it, the Dockers lead to the multi-year global commodity glut, well that's a stunner..

Truthfully: it does amaze how the lens we use to view the world, shapes the picture we see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Missing? There is definitely some inflation in college tuition, housing, healthcare costs and food.

<comment><USER14> 3 out of the 4 you mention have all seen the Federal government silently take over, the US Mortgage Industry, and Student Loans are now majority run by the Feds and healthcare is on the same road, waiting for those savings any day now

<comment><USER15> I really don't think any of those were _silent_ takeovers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They basically have one valve they can turn. The model is too simple.

<comment><USER17> The model is nonsense - not even wrong.

But then the data has been massaged into irrelevance anyway, so it's pretty much a twofer.

How these people have the gall to pretend they're doing anything that resembles mathematical analysis is astonishing.</comment></comment>


The Myth of the Underachieving Genius - <AUTHOR> http://www.skorks.com/2010/02/high-academic-results-make-better-programmers/ <comment><USER3> It seems to me that the author is arguing against a straw man. As far as I can tell, very few people are arguing that people with lower grades are _better_ than those with good grades.

I think the prevailing sentiment is that it's a poor filter to simply disregard those that didn't do well in school -- the idea is not to abandon high-GPA students for lower-GPA students, but to consider _both_.

<comment><USER4> I would agree that on their own grades are poor filter.

You could have less than stellar grades, but may have something else to show your ability (side projects or what not).

On the other hand, a high GPA might only demonstrate your mastery of bulimic studying; Memorize and regurgitate.

<comment><USER5> Or that you learned to game the system.

<comment> alan-crowe I find that throw-away comment is a revelation to me.

The American education system teaches its bright students to game the system. Then they go to work for Enron or Goldman-Sachs, and game the system.

I've lived my life viewing the world through a peculiarly British narrative. Upper class twits preside over a broken system with perverse incentives. Why doesn't it fail? Partly because of the plucky grammar school boy who grows up to occupy a key technocrat role and who heroically resists the lure of perverse incentives and does the right thing. Partly because of the inherent decency and solidarity of the working class, who will not shaft each other even if the system pays them to.

So the American experience, in which mainstream people are always looking for an angle and a way to game the system, seems quite alien to me. Duh! It is the way they have been brought up.

<comment><USER6> > Partly because of the inherent decency and solidarity of the working class, > who will not shaft each other even if the system pays them to.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Why are you romanticising the working class? Personally speaking, the breadth of my family oddly encompasses the upper and lower classes, and after being close to all of them over the years I can tell you there is nothing inherently wrong or right about a specific class. Some of the most admirable people I have met you would label as "upper class twits," and likewise there are others from more humble backgrounds that you would point to as evidence of an exclusive core of decency within the lower classes.

In summary, good and bad people exist in the same proportions in every arbitrary class we would wish to create.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's sort of silly to suggest that people assess someone based on grades when first meeting them (or ever). No one has ever asked me about my grades in any level of education-they're average to below average compared to my peers (2.5-3.0). Most people assume that I did very well in school because I spend a great deal of time reading about a wide variety of subjects so I tend to know a lot about whatever topic comes up at lunch or whatever.

I've met some people who got good grades but can't do anything useful so they go nowhere. I've met some people who make my grades look excellent and they're much more capable than I am in terms of programming skills (in my estimation at least). In my experience the ability to influence people in an organization and read people's feelings is far more important to success than grades. Even the smartest people I know whose social skills are bad tend to have problems getting where they want to go in life.

I assume that people who write these kinds of articles did well in school (Joel Spolsky's made this point before so I'm mostly thinking of him). I think that people who did poorly in school are less likely to write this sort of article and thus if they did I'd pay closer attention to what they're saying. These sort of statements strike me as self serving and defensive.

If you did well in school you played by the rules and you got your reward already. Your parents were happy with you, your teachers didn't ever give you the lecture that went like this "If you only tried a little bit you'd be getting an A in this class", your friends admired your achievement, etc. I'm not sure I feel any need to give you anything more than you already have received. I don't resent your success at all but it's hard for me to feel sorry for you if people notice the underachievers who made it before they notice you.

<comment><USER8> I agree, Ppl with good grades have hard time accepting someone without them to be as good or even better than they are. For them grades become like a company whose share they hold. And any one making an arument against their fallibility even in special situation makes them extremely self conscious!

<comment><USER9> They may be some people who are like this. But I know enough people with good grades, who are much more tolerant; and some even see their chase of high grades as a waste of time.

<comment><USER10> Honestly, I've seen more the former, not what you've described.

<comment><USER9> I guess we both have our sampling biases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would be wise to approach this topic with some detachment, as if debating whether red or black ants have longer lifespans.

There is a risk of feeling one's self-image threatened by this thesis (and its opposite). That perception of threat often ends rational thought.

I think we all suspect that any correlation, positive or negative, between GPA and programmer "value" is merely aggregating several trends which may oppose each other.

Thus, there may be a current of brilliant, rebellious tinkerers who never get good grades but write good code; there may be a current of lazy underachievers who get bad grades and write bad code.

And people change with time. Someone who gets bad grades at 19 but writes great code at 29 may have changed into a "good grades" type.

I'm not sure we'd even agree on what a good programmer is. The truly bad is obvious, but one man's elegant virtuosity is another's unfixable nightmare.

<comment><USER12> I agree with you on everything except the last bit. I believe the literature on what a good programmer is has been fairly clear - Fred Brooks first wrote about it in the Mythical Man-Month, and since then there has been a large body of empirical evidence supporting his claims on the variance between good and bad programmers.

Good programmers are simply more productive. They ship more code, given the same amount of time. That's a simple way of looking at things, for sure (you may argue about readability and maintainability and so on so forth), but when the difference is 20 times the average programmer, people begin to sit up and take notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> And apparently this "genius" thinks implication is the same as equivalence.

I don't think anyone claims everyone who has mediocre grades is a genius - <USER2> is not a sufficient condition, or even necessary. So now he hoists up a straw man, and then attempts to reverse it once again to not only claim that because mediocre grades do not mean someone is a genius, mediocre grades must mean they are NOT a genius, but also that good grades are a sufficient condition for genius.

In conclusion, don't bother reading this author's rubbish. I can't say if he grades are good, but I know for a fact he isn't a genius.

</comment><comment><USER14> Original Blog Title: High Academic Results Make Better Programmers

Personal anecdote about laziness and grades: My freshman year of college, I had a semester where I decided that video games were more important than school. I got a terrible gpa, lost all my scholarships, etc. I spent the next several years making it up. Now I didn't quite just rebound to high 3's and 4.0's, it took a few semesters to overcome my bad habits first (3.2,3.5,etc). Eventually I ended up with a cumulative 3.5.

While I do regret getting that poor of grades, it does provide some talking material for an interview (provided your lower grades don't pre-filter you). It shows that you realized your mistakes, worked to improve yourself, and with your high junior/senior level grades, that you actually are smart enough to do the work (well, as much as college can prepare you for that).

So, I guess my point is that even if you have had bad grades, you still have time to prove yourself, and may even end up with interview talking points.

<comment><USER15> FWIW: I always thought that this case would make a great visual resume for a quant. A "stock" chart of your GPA improving over time using the visual analogy of a successful company turnaround.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The thing about "grades" is that the mindset that revolves around getting them can change instantly. They aren't necessarily a sign of intelligence, more of work ethic.

If a person is shown progress or potential in an area of motivation, they can express the same "care" that got the person a 4.0 great grades.

Of course, the person who got the 4.0 shows more historical evidence of continued motivation towards excellence, but I think there's something to be said for such a broad number that's more an implication of ability to solve thousands of fragmented problems than a person who is capable of solving one problem extremely fucking well.

Also, how many startups are really back-checking grades when recruiting? I can see big companies with HR departments and stuff doing so, but I imagine many just-ins don't have the resources/time/care to do so.

So, lie, programmers. Lie.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think grades/school should be used for employment at all.* Grades may coincide with good skills but they are _COMPLETELY_ orthogonal.

1\. Most programmers in the US go through 16 years of school. The final 8 have an effect on where you end up. Of the first four(high school) only about 1/3 of your time is spent on math/science* * . Of the final 4(at the two colleges I attended) only about 2.5 years are spent on math science. Of that 2.5 years only about 1.5 are computer-science specific.

This means you're determining somebody's programming competence based on information (What college and grades) that is less than half(48%) based on math/science proficiency and less than quarter(19%) based on computer science.

2\. They're subjective. Especially liberal arts(i.e. MOST of school).* * *

3.It's incredibly expensive. Computer science and math cost next to nothing, but for some reason I'm supposed to give some school 60k over 4 years to spend about a quarter of my time studying what I'm interested in.

4.If you test out of a class it doesn't count for grades. If I work very hard and do 16 weeks of calculus in 3 and take a test, I get credit. If do nothing and just ace the class I get an A to pad my transcript. This creates a DIRECT incentive to do less.* * * *

* I am absolutely all for hearing about research/coding/contests I don't think schools opinions should matter at all.

* * I mention high school grades because high school grades determine which school you go to.

* * * Yes, math and science in high school/college can be and frequently are subjective as well. Teachers give credit for effort/showing work on problems/homework/etc. etc.. My high school algebra grade was a C despite getting 90+% right on exams because I didn't do the homework and the teacher wasn't satisfied with my explanations.

<comment><USER18> "Grades may coincide with good skills but they are _COMPLETELY_ orthogonal."

No, they are not orthogonal. A moron cannot get good grades, at least not when competing in the same classes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The tragedy of a team of perfect people is that they will all be so desperate to maintain their sense of perfection, their 4.0 in life, that when faced with the pressure of an important project their selfish drives will tear the team apart"

I've seen this happen in real life ... very relevant ...

</comment><comment><USER19> What the author says is sometimes true, but for a very small proportion of the underachievers. A very large proportion of the underachievers, however, will think that they are part of that small proportion.

It is the same with IQ: IQ and cleverness are not always very well correlated, but those with a high IQ will think that there is more correlation than there is while those with a low or average IQ will think that there is less.

Meh. Show me one person who isn't in denial about their abilities in one thing or another, and I'll show you someone who's better at hiding it than you are at detecting it.

</comment><comment><USER20> One thing I'm pretty sure; good academic results don't mean you can code, but poor results mean you can't code.

That's what happens here in Malaysia.

<comment><USER10> In Malaysia, good academic results don't mean anything because the education system is built on rout memorization, not creative thinking.

<comment><USER20> Well said

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Do you advise suicide or normalisation for average grade students ?

</comment><comment><USER22> Straw-man.

</comment><comment><USER23> Tachikomas!

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I want to know why they're there too.</comment></comment>


Show HN: IMAP API – Self-hosted access to IMAP over REST - <AUTHOR> https://imapapi.com/ <comment><USER2> Any IMAP over REST API should just implement JMAP (RFC 8620 and 8621).

<comment><AUTHOR> There is only a handful of IMAP server implementations and there are going to be even fever JMAP servers. It is super bloated, the RFCs 8620 and 8621 are already 200 pages in total. Not an easy thing to integrate with.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, RFC3501 is 108 pages, and the bis (draft-ietf-extra-imap4rev2-12) is 157 pages. It's a complex problem space.

I'm looking forward to getting JMAP Calendars and JMAP Contacts done, at which point is becomes a much more compelling replacement for multiple protocols.

<comment><USER4> Anything we can do to help in getting those other extensions done?

<comment><USER3> The next IETF meeting is in Vancouver in late March - we'll be discussing them there. Other than that, get involved on the mailing list, and help review the documents!

[https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/jmap/meetings/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/jmap/meetings/)

[https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/jmap](https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/jmap)

[https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jmap- calendars/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jmap-calendars/)

[https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jmap- jscontact/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jmap-jscontact/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone tell me if the license as given

> Licensed for evaluation use only

Is clear enough in legal terms for what can or cannot be done ? I assume it means it's free to use to test it and see how it works, but not for anything else ? Does that cover the code too ?

<comment><AUTHOR> It mostly means I haven't yet figured out which kind of license/terms to use for this project. TBD.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your work in this area. A couple questions.

How is this different to the wilduck webmail api?

Would it be hard to abstract away the wildduck storage code to use a datastore other than mongodb?

<comment><AUTHOR> WildDuck API exposes database structures from MongoDB, IMAP API is more like a proxy in front of any IMAP server.

WildDuck is pretty much coupled with MongoDB. IMAP is not very easily abstractable and keeping the result scalable at the same time. Largest WildDuck cluster in production manages 20TB (~20k accounts) of email by now with no special config or modifications - making it scalable was the main goal from the start and supporting arbitrary storage would not have helped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've heard imap is insecure. I've disabled it by default but this is intriguing. Anybody have any more information on imap security?

<comment><USER8> Any references for where you've heard this? Then we can check the claims and perhaps reassure you or suggest workarounds. What are you using instead?

IMAP is on its own insecure because it is a plain protocol, but it can be used in conjunction with TLS to add secure transport. _Exactly_ the same can be said for many other mail protocols such as POP3.

<comment><USER9> Google spreads a lot of FUD (right or wrong) about anything that doesn't use their oAuth.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-were-banning-these- inse...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-were-banning-these-insecure- apps-from-connecting-to-g-suite-accounts/)</comment></comment></comment>


Jason Bradbury: Coding lessons in schools are a waste of time - <AUTHOR> http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/jason-bradbury-coding-lessons-in-schools-are-a-waste-of-time <comment><USER2> >My kids won't need to code because soon computers will just code for them.

This sentence is grammatically correct, but I am having difficulty extracting any semantic meaning. Coding is the act of writing down one's thoughts in a way that a computer can understand. To take the human aspect out of it renders the entire concept senseless.

<comment><USER3> I assume he means something like "computers will reach a point where they can take non-code descriptions written by a human and implement code based off of them." However, I agree that this is not a plausible thought

1\. I doubt that this is coming that soon

2\. If it does arrive, it may well be with AI so sophisticated that the human has no role even for the "creative" parts of the process. A system that can handle non-formal requirements and implement code sounds close to general purpose AI--the kind that just replaces humanity.

This article seems pretty pointless.

<comment><USER4> > _AI so sophisticated that the human has no role even for the "creative" > parts_

That is a crucial point that is often missed by people outside of the industry. There is nothing magical about activities that don't require the assistance of a computer today. The very principle of computability applies equally to any activity, not just mathematics.

In a way, art is the product of a very complex Turing machine that relies on physics and biology to compute it.

We are already seeing impressive pieces of art coming out of silicon computers, DeepArt being an example: [https://www.facebook.com/deepart.io/](https://www.facebook.com/deepart.io/).

It is, to me, extremely likely that within 20 years, we will have generated novels compete on the market with best-sellers.

The creative process will increasingly rely on mastering and combining more and more exotic techniques, and that may require a deep understanding of the new tools at hand.

<comment><USER5> > It is, to me, extremely likely that within 20 years, we will have generated > novels compete on the market with best-sellers.

I'd say it's going to be a lot sooner, given that they're already doing well in writing contests[0].

[0] [http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/japanese-ai-writes- no...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/japanese-ai-writes-novel-passes- first-round-nationanl-literary-prize/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since when does being good at math or programming preclude social skills? That comment in the article gave me a terribly anti-intellectual vibe.

Basically everything will be drag-and-drop interfaces in the future, no mention of who is going to maintain those interfaces or extend them, apparently that will be drag and drop too. I think the rice of fancy visual interfaces have so far made programming more important, and I don't see that trend decreasing in the next generation.

</comment><comment><USER7> BBC (author works there) recently made documentary/reality show "Girls can code". Its about young girls, building an app and trying to pitch investors. Its was the most sexist TV piece I had ever seen. Coding was turned into 'creative' thing such as fashion, dress selection, make-up, marketing...

Out of 2 hours about 5 minutes were spend on actual coding (boot camp). One girl liked it and showed some potential. But that was passed as something "proper lady" should not do.

</comment><comment><USER8> Summary: Jason Bradbury feels generally threatened by something he's unfamiliar with.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I always had my suspicions that this guy didn't have a clue what he was talking about...

<comment><USER9> He doesn't; The Gadget Show is tripe at best, hosted by four idiots and a borderline idiot (Jon Bentley). I wish I could point at a better alternative but Click is nearly as bad.

Definitely a gap in this market on British TV

<comment><USER10> Hey, what's the problem with Click? It's for a general audience, and is gently (and healthily) irreverent towards tech. The presenters are all well qualified for their roles, and they get to report on some really cool and cutting-edge stuff.

<comment><USER9> I think Click is ok really, although as you say, it's aimed at a general audience. I do find it annoying when _massive_ things go on in the world of technology and are unreported, but they have a five minute segment on helper robot prototypes or Second Life.

I guess I'd just like a more 'serious' tech programme on TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow! This guy has no idea what the fuck he's talking about

</comment><comment><USER12> I was going to make some sensible argument about the value of the lessons being exposure to code, and removing the black box of mystery that most gadgets are to kids. But then I read the article... what on earth is this guy going on about?

</comment><comment><USER13> He's right about valuing arts though.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wholeheartedly agree with adding the (A)rts into STE(A)M. He's hit the nail on the head there -- I believe we all should encourage creative thinking to go along hand-in-hand with critical thinking. That said, he's way off base with the coding courses being a "waste of time" \-- we're not close enough to having that good of an AI yet, nor do I think we will be in his children's lifetime. Maybe his grandchildren's lifetime, but even that could be a bit of a stretch.

</comment><comment><USER15> The future as the iPad generation: a machine made for consuming that conceals from you everything about how things work and how to hack them. Even while using 'high-level bricks', understanding how things work internally give you much more freedom to innovate and be independent from some manufacturers.

</comment><comment><USER16> Holy shit, where do they find these people.

Clueless but with influence, no wonder we are all in such poor shape.

</comment><comment><USER17> > My kids won't need to code because soon computers will just code for them

Good luck. This sounds like people predicting flying cars and robot servants in the 50s without having any idea what they are talking about.

</comment><comment><USER18> Its too bad a valid point regarding creativity and art and its value to software products is hidden under a layer of crap about machines coding for you....

</comment><comment><USER19> Shitposting the HN way!

</comment><comment><USER20> coding lessons have only one reason to exist: turn programmers into blue collar workers of the 21 st century. there is no other reason to learn code at school. Period.</comment>


VR Coaster: The Discoveries we made - <AUTHOR> http://www.vr-coaster.com/discoveries.php

<comment><USER2> Here are some videos of the system in use: [http://youtu.be/vBmRb3EFYcQ?list=PLuHude3IzWSmoSgThHSbMYGjxP...](http://youtu.be/vBmRb3EFYcQ?list=PLuHude3IzWSmoSgThHSbMYGjxPdQMi7_j)

</comment><comment><USER3> I bet park owners are drooling over this technology. All the old rides are new again and you can run multiple experiences simultaneously on the same ride? Sounds like profit to me!

<comment><USER4> The coaster doesn't even need to be that good, really, especially if you add in that gamepad they mentioned last. Then it would be all about the length of time on the coaster over sheer thrill/vertigo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really liked the idea that if you can subtly rotate the player you can use breaking forces to simulate acceleration.

I imagine an entire roller coaster hooked to the same simulation so that you can all participate in firing cannons with your head to defeat a monster and earn a top score.

</comment><comment><USER6> > The gateway did not receive a timely response from the upstream server or > application.

:(

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Awww.vr- coaster.com%2Fdiscoveries.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is insanely cool... which means that the amusement park owners will want to shut this thing down =-(

Being a life-long rollercoaster enthusiast, I would love to try this thing!

<comment><USER8> On the contrary, they will be clamoring over this. It's a really cheap way to create entirely new rides out of old ones.

<comment><USER7> Let's hope so!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hopefully these guys will soon be picked up by a ride development company or integrated into Disney so we can see this on a real ride very soon! This is great work!</comment>


Andy Grove urges Intel to build car batteries  - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10121940-54.html

<comment><USER2> I think this is brilliant. We need more competition on the battery front. We are in 2008 using technology that is basically the same as 1808. Intel is all about serious research.</comment>


AWS Tutorial: How to Change an AWS EC2 Instance Type - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@softwareworx/how-to-change-an-aws-ec2-instance-type-309ddcc05adc <comment><USER2> The tutorial is incomplete. A more complete tutorial is linked to … on a site whose company was co-founded by the author. This seems like a thinly-veiled ad.</comment>


Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/25/ubuntu_13_04_review/

<comment><USER2> Just wondering how many people have actually installed Bing Desktop, Google Desktop or any other desktop search on Windows. Why does Ubuntu think their more discriminating user base need these SMART search features when the common John and Jane shunned it?

It's all about privacy and companies trying to get you to buy more things are the worst offenders of viruses and invasion of privacy on the web.

<comment><USER3> I suspect Ubuntu's user base isn't more discriminating. Ubuntu targets people who want to switch from Windows, and most of those people want to switch because "it's free."

If Ubuntu's target market was more sophisticated they wouldn't be reviving the old "sponsored computer" model of fifteen years ago.

<comment><USER4> That's what people say, and probably what Ubuntu says as well, but I'd wonder if their actual user base is really composed of a significant percentage of ex-Windows non-power-users.

I put Ubuntu on just about everything, so do several other devs I know, but we don't use Unity, we have our own preferred environments... so while there is that angle to Ubuntu, I'm not sure how well that actually represents the reality of their installation base.

<comment><USER5> I agree, I think the claimed Ubuntu target audience / core base of users is a complete fantasy. In reality the bulk of their users seem to be standard Linux users who don't care a ton about the particulars of their distro so they just pick the one perceived as the default choice because they don't have any reason to put more thought into it (damn near everything is the same between distros these days, the only big choice for most people is how often you want releases, or if you want rolling releases). If the claimed sort of Ubuntu user actually exists, they are rare enough that I have never encountered them.

<comment><USER3> I think that the bulk of the people currently using Ubuntu are moderately sophisticated technically.

However, I also believe that Canonical is pivoting Ubuntu toward non-technical users because a) it differentiates Ubuntu; b) it offers room for growth; c)it allows them to pursue more diverse revenue streams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well this review helped me determine there is really nothing worth an upgrade to me. Some of the features sound great but are at least another release from becoming really useful. All things being equal I prefer to be on the current LTS release as that is all I'm going to run on my servers and its nice knowing all the native libraries are the same version between my desktop and server.

<comment><USER7> "Perhaps the best part of Unity in 13.04 is not new features, but the noticeable speed improvement. Like GNOME Shell, Unity has taken its fair share of (deserved) abuse for its high-end hardware requirements and sluggish performance. You're still not going to make Unity scream on an old machine, but provided you've got newer hardware, 13.04 is definitely snappier than its predecessors."

Not even this ? If it's true, it would be worth upgrading just for a snappier interface in my opinion.

<comment><USER6> I guess I'd have to see it. Unity has never struck me as slow. I run it on a pretty modern desktop; maybe in a laptop it would be more of a benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> half of this review is about photo-lens search and the online accounts settings page, both of which existed in the previous release.

for what it's worth, my feelings about the photo lens are similar to the reviewer's: it's a really cool idea that makes a lot of sense, and validates the "web search" concept of the unity dash. unfortunately, in 12.10 at least it has a number of issues. the biggest for me stems from the fact that when you add an online account you get all of the services or none. in other words, if you want the dash to search your facebook photos, empathy (the im client) will do facebook chat. there's no way (that i've figured out) to have one on without the other.

on the other hand, i'm not super-bothered by the amazon thing because i just uninstalled unity-lens-shopping. would be nice for them to have some UI for disabling individual lenses though.

<comment><USER9> That concern is addressed in 13.04. Now you can separately enable or disable applications' integration with an online account (e.g. disable facebook integration for Empathy only).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel the title is inaccurate and misleading. This is not a full review of the new release, but rather of the search options of the dash and the music player.

<comment> k-mcgrady I agree. The actual title is: "Ubuntu 13.04: No privacy controls as promised, but hey - photo search!" It doesn't seem like the website is even claiming it to be a review of the OS.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, but I can't seem to change it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I realize a lot has changed so that it wouldn't be possible, but Ubuntu 13.04 would be a lot better for me if it was just Ubuntu 5.04 with the version updates for all the packages. I guess that's kind of what Mint is going for.

<comment><USER12>
      | I realize a lot has changed

There are a lot of non-UI changes that have happened since Ubuntu 5.04. E.g. pulseaudio, evdev, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know it's not really a solution for the masses, but

      sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

Should remove the results from Amazon, while keeping all the other online lens.

<comment><USER14> You can also turn online search reults off in the privacy settings

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Download the ubuntu server image instead, and after install just run `sudo apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-terminal` to get a fast and clean desktop experience.</comment>


PyPy: Transactional Memory (II) - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2012/01/transactional-memory-ii.html <comment><USER2> It's kind of funny how specific people's technology experience is becoming. He considers separate processes unworkable, but it wouldn't bother me in the slightest. Most code I've ever written was web server code with the only serious runtime changing state in the DB anyway, so the the processes wouldn't ever talk to each other anyway, just to the DB. Then he claims this is a whole new set of problems and technology, but it sounds very similar to whenever I work on a SOA setup. There your technology sometimes supports transaction context across web service calls or it doesn't. So when it does, your web service calls during your transaction can be rolled back when you rollback, and when it doesn't you need specific calls out for roll back purposes or you need to buffer until the end or break things up into reversible parts. Doesn't sound that different from his concerns about calling out of the process into the system and having to buffer if the system doesn't have a transaction context.

<comment><USER3> Separate processes is completely unworkable for the kind of work armin has in mind. Web servers are very specific - there is very little data shared between processes, because web is mostly stateless and the entire state can be encoded in SQL database (typically). However anything that requires some complex interprocess communication is essentially unworkable. You need to serialize and deserialize your data into wire-level protocols, which is often prohibitively expensive, even when you can get it to work.

<comment><USER4> Honest question: what kind of work is that?

The more I think of it, the more I think that "high concurrency with local state on one machine" is a use case that is not going to get more popular in the future.

I believe a big part of the uptick in interest in concurrency is an uptick in the use of distributed systems. With distributed systems, all your authoritative state is stored outside the process anyway (at least if you want it to be fault tolerant, which you do if you need it to be of any significant size).

And of course once you have more than one machine you must deal with serialization. Also, I'm not sure what the kind of work there is where "serialization is prohibitively expensive" but Python is still a natural choice.

<comment><USER3> well. it's not entirely true, if distributed systems were the future, we would never see multi-core systems at all, there are still tasks that are _much_ easier to do if you have them done on a single shared-memory system then distributed. I don't think they're necesarilly less complex, they just don't deal with any sort of "big data". pypy's translation toolchain is one of those problems, but I can see a lot of situations where a large mostly-read-only set is necessary to be accessible all the time.

regarding "Python is still a natural choice" - don't confuse python as a language and python (CPython) as interpreter. You would not use CPython for any performance-critical tasks probably, at least not without spending significant time rewriting pieces to C, but PyPy is quite usable in some scenarios and the list is only to grow.

<comment><USER4> > there are still tasks that are much easier to do if you have them done on a > single shared-memory system then distributed.

Such as...? A lot of the big users of cray-type systems were for scientific uses. AFAIK a lot of them are seriously looking at cloud or commodity-type clusters as the problems get bigger.

Anyway I am curious if PyPy is aiming at some specific problem that I don't know about. For "web stuff", I think what is proposed is perhaps overly complicated.

If you want a large read-only set of data to fit on one machine and need high performance, Java, Python and the like aren't great choices because they don't give you much control over the memory layout. Python is probably better because you could write a C extension. But PyPy itself is not optimized for memory size (in fact I think it uses more memory to get speed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What surprised me most was discovering that Intel's upcoming Haswell microarchitecture may include Hardware Transactional Memory. That's pretty exciting!

<comment><USER6> I hadn't heard that, thanks. That's kind of a full-circle moment then, given that transactional memory started out as a hardware proposal!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As I understand, they seem to say TM failed because it was considered as an alternative to threads and events, so they propose to do events+TM.

That is, one big problem with TM is I/O, like doing network read and write. But if you are already writing event-driven programs, you return to event loop whenever you do network read and write, and at that point TM implementation can do smart things. If TM is sold as "write threads without locks" this can't work, but if TM is "write events but with more parallelism" this seems possible.

Actually I am quite surprised that this model was not heavily investigated already.

<comment><USER8> TM does work well in Haskell, though, where constraining IO effects during a transaction is simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've done similar in a personal project before: a multiplayer text game (a MUD). In general, in these games, the actions you and creatures perform only interact with things that are locationally close to them. Each location belongs to an "area" - so each "area" had a thread to execute actions. There were also world "actions" that had to execute in isolation, but those were much rarer.

That said, a lot of people seem to dislike threads. The problem isn't with threads, but rather having to shoehorn every attempt to parallelize your program into a threaded model. I would feel similar ire if I had to shoehorn every attempt to parallelize my program into an event model.

Threads are a way you can reason about and simplify your program. I've written programs where threads make the program easier to reason about rather than harder. Because of this, telling me your method is better than threads makes no sense to me - for what class of problems?

<comment><USER7> > I've written programs where threads make the program easier to reason about > rather than harder.

I want to hear about this.

<comment><USER9> The one that comes to mind in particular was something that sent email. We wanted to limit emails being sent per email server to each ISP.

We went with: queue per ISP for emails to send out, then each server that could send email to that ISP had its own thread. Each thread would take X emails out of the queue every 10 seconds, send them, then sleep for any leftover time - or not if there isn't any.

Most of the time is spent sleeping or on I/O - the point of threads wasn't for CPU usage, it was because it made everything so simple to implement. The only synchronization issues were taking emails out of the queue and putting them back somewhere if they failed to send.

All of the logic for each thread in its main loop read like a normal, sequential program. I guess you could call this an embarrassingly easy problem, but part of why it's so easy is it maps so easily to threads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I actually kind of like the GIL. It allows me to write threaded code in a "lazy" way sometimes, when I don't want to take the effort to do it properly. (e.g. implementing a message queue using a simple list, using a global bool or int as a state flag.) Even though it's not using the correct structures for these things, it sometimes allows to prototype a simple threaded approach quickly, and at least be sure it won't cause weird clashes in the interpreter. When I want to later port it to a proper solution, I'll switch to the multiprocess model which forces you to use queues and other IPC mechanisms instead of shared data structures-- this is more effort, but usually worth it, if not for efficiency then for robustness. But for one-off scripts and little proofs of concept it can be nice to just carefully share some variables and know with some assurance that you're not going to break anything in the run- time. That's not to say that transactional memory wouldn't be welcome, but sometimes the GIL allows a certain pragmatism in a prototyping scenario.

In Python, threads are "enough" to implement event-based concurrency, as well as asynchronous I/O and calling out to long-running C functions for number crunching.

Beyond that, the main reason to remove the GIL and allow true multicore parallelism is purely for efficiency reasons. The catch is, if I'm serious about efficiency, I probably won't be using Python. Or at least porting only my CPU-intensive functions to C.

Of course, if PyPy eventually provides Java-like speeds, maybe it makes sense to go this route, as Python could start to be depended on for efficiency, so the gains of true parallelism would be visible. But removing the GIL from CPython seems kind of pointless, since the interpreter has so much overhead regardless.

<comment><USER11> you're getting lucky. as I understand it, the GIL just protects certain pieces of interpreter state. you still need to lock to get correct behavior from your code. the presence of the GIL doesn't remove the need to lock your data structures and each thread created with the threading stdlib is actually a native thread on your platform.

<comment><USER12> Yep. The GIL means that individual Python bytecode operations are atomic, and so by extension single Python statements that translate to individual bytecode instructions can be treated as atomic (if you don't care about portability to alternate Python implementations that lack a GIL). But complicated Python statements that translate into multiple bytecode instructions (like dict.setdefault) can't. And, of course, neither can sequences of multiple statements. So you still need locks for most cases where you mutate objects that are shared across threads.

<comment><USER10> Ah yes, that's a good point. I wouldn't go as far as to say I'm just getting lucky though, as I do tend to reserve my lazy bad practices to very simple cases. But I would never use such code in production anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The link to the previous entry is broken. Here it is: [http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/06/global-interpreter- lock...](http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/06/global-interpreter-lock-or-how- to-kill.html)</comment>


Bootcamp vs. CS Degree: Which path is best? (by SwitchUp) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.appacademy.io/bootcamp-vs-cs-degree-which-path-is-best/ <comment><USER2> From what I'm seeing with TalentMatch.ai there are a ton of opportunities for developers and regions outside the Bay Area are growing quickly as well.</comment>


Chess Hustlers (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2001/05/chess_hustlers.html <comment><USER2> A fabulous example of a chess hustler in action (against a Grandmaster): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5vnpOp0U_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5vnpOp0U_g)

This shows a hustler "strategy" not mentioned in the article around 2:25, as well as the recommended move of switching the clock position when you're playing as Black.

Filmed as part of The Tim Ferriss Experiment TV show (available on iTunes!)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wayward Queen is also great if you want to get into a fistfight: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danvers_Opening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danvers_Opening)

It's played pretty often on Lichess around the ~1200 level if you don't block it with a knight.</comment>


What Europeans understand about health care and Americans don't get - <AUTHOR> http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-do-those-decadent-europeans-understand/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately we (UK) are somewhere in the middle, and we can't agree on a way forward. The answer is to let the insurance/private people do some things, but not just the profitable things. It's a tricky thing to set up permanently without having to muddle around in the future (which would look bad)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just another socialist idiot claiming that "market failure" is the cause of problems in the industry that has been the most highly regulated and controlled for over a century.</comment>


Spy Chief: We Should've Told You We Track Your Calls - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/17/spy-chief-we-should-ve-told-you-we-track-your-calls.html <comment><USER2> _If the program had been publicly introduced in the wake of the 9 /11 attacks, most Americans would probably have supported it. "I don't think it would be of any greater concern to most Americans than fingerprints.... just like we have to go to airports two hours early and take our shoes off, all the other things we do for the common good, this is one more thing."_

The sad thing is, he's both oblivious to all the TSA protests, and probably right.</comment>


Properly calculating time differences in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://blog.synyx.de/2012/11/properly-calculating-time-differences-in-javascript/ <comment><USER2> This is good info.

I'm a fairly intelligent guy, can follow the plots of Primer, Terminator, and other scifi time travel movies. I have a decent understanding of relativity, spatial reference frames, etc.

But any time I have to deal with slightly more-than-simple time issues in any language, my brain starts more or less falling to pieces. Python and js have good libraries that help, but its still a confounding bugger of an issue.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty simple once you know the rules:

\- Always store times and calculate differences/offsets in UTC.

\- Never attempt to convert a local time to UTC (it is _not_ a one-to-one mapping!).

\- Depending on your application, convert any dates to a given timezone _at the moment they are displayed_.

Now Javascript throws a monkey-wrench into the whole affair, because it assumes Dates should be handled in the user's local timezone, which, if you're dealing with timezone issues, is certainly not what you want. So attempting to convert a Date object from one timezone to the next is surely impossible to do without introducing bugs unless you understand the rules for every timezone you're dealing with.

Luckily, a guy named Olson created a database of timezone rules for us mortals to use in our timezone-aware applications. In another stroke of good fortune, some smart people wrote a Javascript library [1] that parses this database for you and can convert your Javascript Date object between any timezone on the planet. So you do all your calculations using this Date object in UTC mode, then convert to the desired timezone at the time they are displayed.

[1] <https://github.com/mde/timezone-js>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nitpicking, but this:

 _Luckily, there is, and that place is UTC. UTC is a time measuring system that does not have daylight savings time and where midnights always are 24 hours apart._

isn't strictly true, at least in the sense that 24 hours isn't always the same length of time because of leap seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> The ECMA-262 luckily(?) ignores leap seconds:

<http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/5.1/#sec-188.8.131.52>

 _Time is measured in ECMAScript in milliseconds since 01 January, 1970 UTC. In time values leap seconds are ignored. It is assumed that there are exactly 86,400,000 milliseconds per day._

<comment><USER5> Ignoring leap seconds will not make them disappear :-) They belong to UTC not to ECMA-262.

Therefore, whenever we compute the difference between two UTC times, we should really account for any leap second.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the purpose of calculating milliseconds between midnights of different days, you can however assume them to be multiples of 862e5 _in JavaScript Date.UTC_.

You just have to keep in mind that JavaScript UTC != Real UTC

Edit: clarification

<comment><USER5> No, you cannot. If you do it, your UTC time difference might be one or more seconds off. And this is not what you want, if you need to rely upon that quantity.

Only one Coordinated Universal Time exists: it is the UTC standard. ECMA-262 is the specification of a scripting language, with tons of interesting features but with a very poor understanding of what UTC is.

UTC is based on TAI. Whenever we need to compute time differences of UTC times, we need to account for leap seconds implementing TAI. Implementations are available in a number of languages and very easy to port: \- C <http://cr.yp.to/libtai.html> \- Haskell [http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/time/1.4/doc/htm...](http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/time/1.4/doc/html/src/Data- Time-Clock-TAI.html) \- Erlang <https://github.com/secyoure/taider>

Full disclosure: author of the Erlang TAI library here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree - but as you point out, JavaScript doesn't use proper UTC but a simplified version that does not account for leap seconds. Let's call it Date.UTC.

In Date.UTC, there are no leap seconds and therefore the Day == 862e5 assumption holds and we can use it to calculate the difference between two dates measured in days, which is the point of the blog post.

When doing arithmetic with _real_ UTC, you are absolutely correct and we have to take leap seconds into account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you don't mind dependencies, there's Moment.js

<http://momentjs.com/>

<comment><USER3> ...Which unfortunately falls short when you need to do anything more complicated than transforming dates between local time and UTC. If you need to, say, display a Date in Pacific Standard Time to a user agent in Helsinki, you absolutely need something that understands the timezone database.

I've found that timezone-js [1] does the job.

[1] <https://github.com/mde/timezone-js>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I ran into this problem, I ended up switching over to using the "datejs" library, located here "<http://code.google.com/p/datejs/downloads/list>. Date.js seems to handle Daylight Savings Time just fine; I don't know if it deals with Leap Seconds.

</comment><comment><USER8> "As a JavaScript veteran you know that you have to use new Date() instead of Date() because the second one returns a string for some reason"

Uhhhhh...</comment>


Kanary: A Kotlin web framework for building scalable and expressive RESTful APIs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SeunAdelekan/Kanary <comment><USER2> Just tried it, I love the syntax and structure and will try to build something simple with it

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow!!!!</comment>


Why Not All Earnings Are Equal; Microsoft Has the Wal-Mart Disease - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/adamhartung/2011/05/03/why-not-all-earnings-are-equal-and-microsoft-has-the-wal-mart-disease/ <comment><USER2> The problem with this article is that it is based on an incorrect thesis, which is that MS revenue has stalled. It hasn't. See:

<http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/revenues_ttm#zoom=5>

MS revenue has continued to climb to this very day, with only a drop during the recession. Outside of Apple, there aren't many companies that wouldn't take this type of revenue growth at this size.

The article makes a mistake a lot in the tech sector make which is that if MS isn't doing better than Apple then its in serious trouble. Doing worse than Apple is hardly an insult. There are probably no more than a couple of companies in the world that are doing better than Apple. Yet, there are few F500 companies that can match MS's revenue/profit growth -- yet almost all can beat its market cap growth.

<comment><USER3> Not only that, but there are precious few other tech companies that have gotten spanked so hard by regulators litigation about anti-trust issues.

It was only 13 years ago the idea of Microsoft offering a free web browser bundled with their OS was considered dirty pool. In fact, in the EU, Microsoft is still facing issues about bundling a media player for free with it's OS.

Imagine Apple having to install a Zune store and Amazon store along side iTunes with every iPhone or iPad they sold.

<comment><USER4> Yes - seriously. The amount of effort (person-hours etc) that goes in inside Microsoft to satisfy litigation demanded regulatory compliance is staggering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like Microsoft, but as a disclaimer before my analysis - I bought 400 shares of Microsoft stock a little bit ago at $25.79 per share.

Here my thoughts:

-Microsoft's price/earnings ratio is around 10, which I feel is pretty good for a company with a lot of stable revenue base and a chance at upside.

-This article talks about Microsoft's poor performance in tablets, which is true and worrying. I'm not sure Microsoft will make that ground up. They do have an excellent research division, though, and I'm wondering if they can make a strong showing in the next generation of technology after this. I don't know what that'll be, but new input devices should be coming online. The Kinect is _amazing_ , I was really blown away playing with one in Singapore. If Microsoft can build on that to do alternative input and the next generation, they could have a huge renaissance.

-They have a very solid installed base. Government and business are very likely to keep running on Windows and Office. For consumers, even if tablets totally take over - and I'm not sure that'll happen - late adoptors will be buying those pre-installed Windows laptops and PCs just like always.

-$50 billion in cash reserves means they've got a lot of time to figure something out going forwards. Lots of cash + some very stable covering their fixed costs + big research division = seemingly a pretty safe buy with some upside.

I don't think it's a good stock to buy for short term appreciation - it might well go down over the next 2-3 years. But I'm comfortable holding it for 10 years. I think there's a decent shot it pays well in dividends and holds its value and a decent shot for lots of growth and appreciation.

Of course, maybe the house does fall over. Do your own research, etc, etc, etc.

<comment><USER6> It's not about how many people you've got in your R&D labs, it's about _which_ people you have in your R&D labs.

<comment><USER7> Surely it's not about who does your R&D so much as what they produce?

Most of the MS R&D papers I've read have been very good, with excellent ideas. Let's also not forget that GHC is maintained at MS R&D.

The problem lies in converting research into product. One example is the data mountain[1]. The data mountain was way before its time (3d desktop in '98, which is still struggling to make inroads), it's a bad interface for a mouse- driven UI, but a good one for a touch-driven UI (probably not on a phone, but maybe on a tablet and definitely on a 20" or larger screen). But they haven't done anything with it.

I don't think the right stuff from MS R&D is transported to the product development people, which is sad, but highlights one of the differences between Google and MS. At Google a lot of research papers are driven by actual solutions (cf. BigTable, GFS etc). At MS there's more 'pure' research going on and as a consequence the divide between the research people and the product people is larger.

That's what it looks like to me anyway. I don't think there's any problem with the quality of the research being done at MS, quite the contrary.

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/dcr/work/datam...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/dcr/work/datamountain.htm) (The video sadly seems to have fallen off the web.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The world is addicted to exponential curves, and yet everywhere we look, we see logistic curves in a finite world. Unfortunately, it is quite profitable to con people into thinking that the latter is really the former. Our whole financial system is built on this fraud, from the VCs on down.

Microsoft ran up the logistic curve, stalled out and, sure, made some bad decisions.

Apple made some bad decisions, went way down the logistic curve, and now is climbing back up it.

That isn't to say there aren't lessons to be learned by looking at the two companies. It is to say that one of the premises of the article, that there is some exponential growth curve that all companies need to stay on, is flawed. I would expect no less from one of the chief financial ponzi rah-rah mags, though.

</comment><comment><USER9> Customers don't need to be excited about your products to make a boatload of money.

I don't think anyone is excited to buy gas at $4 a gallon, but that doesn't make it an unprofitable business to be in. MS has been running with out it's founder for years and has been moderately successful.

If one is to believe the reality distortion field that Jobs is central to Apple's success then his health problems pose a major problem to the long term value of the stock.

Apple has some very serious competitive risks (Android) and some very serious internal risks (Jobs' health). Apple's stock price is based on the idea of maintaining 30% growth for the next few years, that's a much more difficult goal than to lose 2% per year. Also, Moore's law is still relevant in the mobile market meaning that people replace their phones fairly frequently to get better hardware support. A mobile phone from 5 years ago is clearly inferior to most people whereas a computer from 5 years ago is mostly adequate for most users. What this means is that there is still time in mobile for a major competitor to emerge. The desktop PC market is locked up and belongs to Microsoft. The desktop PC running Windows is also a core part of the business to a lot of companies in the same way that Mainframes are to the financial industry. Yes, Microsoft's Desktop PC business will continue to decline for years, but it's a steady essentially risk free revenue stream. The mobile revenue stream is still largely up for grabs.

Microsoft also has big inroads into enterprise sales which could solidify WinPhone 7 in the enterprise which would bring in some pretty big bucks.

<comment><USER10> _Customers don't need to be excited about your products to make a boatload of money._

Then why does Microsoft keep wasting money trying to get people excited about its products? I see what you're saying, which is that there are still strategies Microsoft can use to keep their business going. The problem is that they aren't using those strategies. They keep trying and failing at putting together exciting new products for end users because they just aren't as good at it as Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So while the article notes several times that "Microsoft is not making items that customers want", it seems that this is addressing the consumer customer. But isn't Microsoft addressing what the enterprise customer wants? And isn't this a serious chunk of where their income is coming from.

While I am not seeing flaws in the argument here, I am slightly skeptical, as for multiple decades I have witnessed many people underestimating Bill Gates, and now I wonder if that continues.

(I remember a time where Intel was skeptical of compilers produced by tiny companies such as Microsoft--they got no respect whatsoever.)

<comment><USER12> "While I am not seeing flaws in the argument here, I am slightly skeptical, as for multiple decades I have witnessed many people underestimating Bill Gates, and now I wonder if that continues."

I would certainly rate Microsoft's chances much higher, _if_ Bill Gates still held an active role in the company.

<comment><USER13> Agreed.

I don't understand how a CEO (Ballmer) can last so long at a company with share price effectively flat between $20 and $30 since 2002 (1). Especially in the tech industry -- unless shareholders think the results would be worse without him. MSFT has dividends which maybe offset the flat share price in the investors mind, but oracle (2) and ibm (3) pay dividends and they have had good share price growth since 2002.

(1) MSFT: <http://goo.gl/He849> (2) ORCL: <http://goo.gl/iNWs1> (3) IBM: <http://goo.gl/0W6Kz>

<comment><USER14> Personally I think expecting stock price to always increase is horrible these days.

<comment><USER13> I agree somewhat with that. I can't place my finger on it, but there's something I don't like about growth needing to be the norm... but that's a whole new topic.

Regardless, the opportunity for profit is why people purchase public shares of a company. Profit can only be made by an increase in share price (assuming no splits) or dividend payout (i think).

EDIT: realized there are many other ways to make money (sell short, derivatives based on price volatility, etc) but i think my point is still valid that the shareholders of a company want growth in share price or they'll invest their money elsewhere.

<comment><USER8> Your discomfiture is well placed:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

The world is mostly logistic curves, but the ponzi needs us to all believe in exponential curves.

<comment><USER15> Just a clarification for those (like me) who didn't get it:

A logistic curve is basically an S-shaped curve, also known as a sigmoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there anyone out there with a background in economics who could explain why it's reasonable to expect a company's revenues to grow indefinitely? I get that there's inflation, so there will always/usually be some upward pressure, but surely there are natural limits?

</comment><comment><USER12> It would seem "Wal-Mart disease" is a good place to look for start up opportunities. Look for companies suffering from Wal-Mart disease, then think up ways to compete against them.

<comment><USER17> I don't really understand where the term "Walmart disease" comes from. Certainly, Walmart is not an exciting company but it's far from poorly managed. The fact that it's stock has been in a holding pattern for a few years does not mean that it's future is bleak.

Walmart as a company has incredible focus at their core competency. It may be true that they've come close to saturating their market but they still do what they do better than anyone else. Microsoft has saturated their core markets, are losing ground in their core business, and have no idea where they're going to go in the future. But hey if they throw enough money at everything they might hit something...

The one thing they do have going for them is that they still have an incredibly smart collection of engineers. If they somehow find a way to get some leadership at the top, they could turn it around much the way Apple was able to turn it around once Jobs retook the reins.

<comment><USER18> >The fact that it's stock has been in a holding pattern for a few years does not mean that it's future is bleak.

Their stock doesn't move because there's way too much of it out there. I've heard talk of considering it AAA.

>It may be true that they've come close to saturating their market but they still do what they do better than anyone else.

The leverage their market position better than most but I've worked there and I found the quality of the management there pretty appalling. In fact, usually when a manager from Walmart went somewhere else they did poorly. As if they only know how to win when they already have a massively dominant position in the market. The only one who knew how to actually _get_ that position was Sam Walton.

<comment><USER17> "There's a difference between the quality of a business and the quality of a management. If it's a strong enough business, it should be able to withstand poor management. If you gave me the number-one pick in the CEO draft, and said he had to run Ford Motor, I wouldn't do it. It would be too tough. A CEO depends on too many things happening that are outside his control, even if he's the best in the world." -Warren Buffett

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _"Microsoft has caught the "Wal-Mart Disease" – constantly trying to do more of what it always did, hoping it can regain old results – even as the market keeps shifting. In stalled companies, executives cut costs in sales, marketing, new product development and outsource like crazy in order to prop up earnings. They can outsource many functions. And they go the resorvoir_ [sic]* of accounting rules to restate depreciation and expenses, delaying expenses while working to accelerate revenue recognition. While Microsoft had higher earnings than last quarter, it wasn't because customers were excited about their products!"*

Not only is Hartug's claim regarding Microsoft suffering from Walmart disease unsupported by a substantial evidence, e.g. examples of Microsoft cutting back on marketing - just look at WP7; or outsourcing new product development (one example would be nice), but it also ignores the fact that although one could argue that Windows 7 was more of the same, the Kinect was not exactly what their customers wanted but that it was delivered at the right price and in high volume.

</comment><comment><USER20> Not surprising. In 2005 they hired wal-mart's COO. [http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/aug05/08-04Tur...](http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/aug05/08-04TurnerPR.mspx)

Edit: (or to be more pedantic, they hired Kevin Turner, a Wal-Mart executive to be their COO)

<comment><USER18> Kevin Turner was the CEO of Sam's Club. CIO before that.

<comment><USER20> Sam's club is a subsidiary of wal-mart <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam%27s_Club> He was also executive vice president of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

<comment><USER18> Yes, sorry that wasn't clear. I meant he was Walmart CIO, then Sam's CEO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> the Microsoft COO is from Walmart, so its hard to see why anyone should be surprised by this turn of events.

</comment><comment><USER22> I did a quick sum of the quarterly losses in that chart, and came to a total just shy of $8 billion</comment>


DEC 64: Decimal Floating Point by Douglas Crockford - <AUTHOR> http://dec64.org/

<comment><USER2> Posted not that long ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812) with substantial commentary and criticism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks wglb, seems like the domain changed (even though the .com still works and does not redirect)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> >By giving programmers a choice of number types, programmers are required to waste their time making choices that don't matter. Even worse, making a bad choice can lead to a loss of accuracy or destructive bugs.

So why not use BigDecimal? It's too slow? So performance _is_ a reasonable selection criterion? But not performance of million ints vs a million DEC64s? o_0

</comment><comment><USER4> IEEE 754-2008 already has standardised decimal formats: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754-2008_encoding)

<comment><USER5> Crockford addresses that in passing at the end of the DEC64 page, claiming that IEEE 754's decimal floating point types were too inefficient to garner support.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Douglas Crockford talks about why he wants DEC 64 in this talk: [http://vimeo.com/97419177](http://vimeo.com/97419177) (jump to 41m:20s)

<comment><USER6> This has been brought up before and lots of issues were raised. Including multiple 0s and lack of normalization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> At least with IEEE 754 you can cast as an INT and collate. Putting the exponent in the lowest bits prevents that for DEC64. What were they thinking?</comment>


Please Calculate This Circle's Circumference - <AUTHOR> http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/please-calculate-this-circles-circumference/

<comment><USER2> To be honest, I'm not sure why this is such an issue. Any sane student would recall the relation that

        PI = 2 * Math.atan2(1,0);

The exercise listed in this link is one of futility, and also one of gross oversight. Using the above will give you the appropriate type (float or double, whichever you define PI to be) and will give you the best precision available on any given machine (though really, the machine precision issue is something that is somewhat agnostic towards language).

</comment><comment><USER3> "\- Can I use #define? - No!"

I think teacher has some ideas here :) .</comment>


Performance without the event loop - <AUTHOR> http://dave.cheney.net/2015/08/08/performance-without-the-event-loop

<comment><USER2> May as well be talking about Erlang. Except that Erlang has the concept developed 10 steps further.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do we not observe 2D objects in our 3D world? - <AUTHOR> If we are in fact living in a higher than 3 dimensional world as 3D creatures, why is it we do not observe lower dimensional objects? Would make sense that lower dimensional creatures can not comprehend higher dimensional space, but as 3D creatures shouldn't we be able to observe and comprehend lower dimensional space? And the stuff that's in it? <comment><USER2> Aren't drawings 2D objects? If you make a perfect slice of something, can't the cross-section be comprehended?</comment>


Complaining About Work - <AUTHOR> http://ryanmartinsen.com/article/complaining-about-work/ <comment><USER2> Really recommend people think deeply about this topic. The author makes a great point which I totally resonate with (having had many of the same issues). It took too long for me to figure out that putting out alternative ideas for consideration was 'good' but actively campaigning against 'bad' ideas was a problem. (both for me and for the team).

The key for me was recognizing that when it wasn't my decision to make, there was no value in me being overly invested in the outcome. Instead I could positively surface the challenges as I saw them, and let go of the decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comments!

I've had so many issues while being invested in the outcome of something I didn't have power over. Letting go of those decisions has made me so much happier.</comment></comment>


GlowForge Schedule Update - <AUTHOR> http://community.glowforge.com/t/schedule-update/3657 <comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if scope creep has been a major factor.

Many features seem to have been added instead of focusing on a minimal core 1.0 release.</comment>


JavaScript Module Pattern: In-Depth - <AUTHOR> http://www.adequatelygood.com/2010/3/JavaScript-Module-Pattern-In-Depth

<comment><AUTHOR> I know this article is relatively old but I was looking on information on how to organize a large javascript code base and this article is very clear and well written. If anyone could point out some other good site on javascript code organization and techniques I'd appreciate it.</comment>


JVisualVM and Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://www.fatvat.co.uk/2009/05/jvisualvm-and-clojure.html <comment><USER2> What is it with Clojure and fractals? :) I wrote a blog post on how I used VisualVM to optimise my Mandelbrot renderer but it goes into more depth and shows what you can learn by tracing the call stack: [http://developmentjungle.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/optimising...](http://developmentjungle.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/optimising- mandelbrot/)

<comment><USER3> Thats pretty cool! Thanks for sharing.</comment></comment>


Elf Electric Pedal Car: When 1 Horsepower Is Enough - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323368704578593651252009998.html#project%3DSLIDESHOW08%26s%3DSB10001424127887324879504578597992560021074%26articleTabs%3Darticle <comment><USER2> As a rule of thumb, if you need to move a horse-like weight at horse-like speeds, one horsepower will do.

<comment><USER3> Why are most law mowers 5 hp?

<comment><USER4> Probably because the horses are used for moving the blade more than the mower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the price they're offering it - I feel like it might end up going down the same road as a Segway. For 5000$ - why not buy a used car if you really cant get around those distances on foot? I just feel like the speed vs price vs safety vs existence of other much cheaper options - will make this thing a lot less attractive.

</comment><comment><USER6> I guess the main benefit of a motor on a bike would be to get up hills quickly so you don't have to pedal as much, flat pedaling would be fine.

I wonder where you would park it though? Would you need to have a parking spot for it? That's expensive in a city like San Francisco and finding a parking spot sucks going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER7> An expanded one of these with room for a couple of children would probably be useful. I know one person who cycles the school run with a 5 year old in a seat at the back of the bike and two younger children in a bike trailer.

<comment><USER8> The first thing that crossed my mind when I read this is that it would be a huge and tragic disaster if that person would get hit by a car. It just doesn't seem safe enough.

<comment><USER9> You're right. Those things are death traps, accidents just waiting to happen. And by "those things" I mean "cars".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A latter day Sinclair C5. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5)

</comment><comment><USER11> A top speed of 20 mph seems dangerously slow for public roads.

<comment><USER12> More of an enclosed recumbent bike than it is a 'car' so you could say "dangerously fast for a 3 wheel bike" :-) (tricycles are notoriously prone to flipping over because of the way they convert angular momentum.)

I suspect it is a bit more fun than a golf cart though.

<comment><USER13> My understanding is that it's single-wheel-in-front trikes that are dangerous when cornering at speed. This vehicle has the single wheel in the back.</comment></comment></comment>


Does Alexa really harvest passwords and spider password-protected areas of sites? - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/16/25FE-stupid-users-part-3-admins_5.html <comment><USER2> It sounds more like a badly designed web app than Alexa doing something it shouldn't. If it really did do harvest passwords and log in with them, we'd hear a lot more about it.

As gojomo said it was probably passing the username and password in the URL (query string). I've been burned by the exact same thing before because of Alexa. I had the little Alexa rank FF extension which told Alexa about a page I really wish it hadn't...

</comment><comment><USER3> I suspect that if this happened as described, it was a combination of rare factors and/or happened long ago.

The Alexa robot obeys robots.txt, for one. AFAIK, it doesn't POST form data or visit HTTPS URLs. It might GET any plain HTTP URL it discovers or appears popular from toolbar reports.

Some web sites can be disrupted by otherwise well-behaved crawlers. They might have a buggy robots.txt. They might use logins that put credentials on a GET query-string -- and that URL could thus be reported elsewhere by toolbars, or back-linked by referred-to sites. They might perform destructive operations via GET. So elements of the story are plausible, with enough other assumptions about the fragility of the admin pages in question.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I find a SaaS project to build? - <AUTHOR>
 I'm a software developer and I want to make a SaaS product. I've reached out on reddit asking for someone to partner with who has:
* A SaaS idea that is solving a proven pain point for SMBs/SMEs
* At least one customer who is ready to pay for it
* The capability of selling the software and is in a position to get customers for it
I've posted a couple times and haven't been able to find anything. Am I asking for too much?
It seems very difficult to find software to build that is actually solving a problem for people. There's a million me-too-social-media-platforms, projects that are re-inventing existing software that is serving its domain just fine, or ideas that simply have no real plan for gaining users (other than spending hundreds of thousands on advertising to take users from other platforms) or have no real way to demonstrate or gauge the potential demand.
The issue seems to be, at least partially, that the niche problems I'm looking for require expertise in some industry that barely anyone in the general public has given any thought to - for example, I've read about someone who had success in building software for doggy daycares. I'd have no idea this is a problem needing solving unless I operated or owned a doggy daycare.
How can I find a project to work on that has reasonable evidence to show its need/demand? <comment><USER2> _Am I asking for too much?_

Probably, yeah. And the way you're asking is probably wrong as well. Assuming your other posts are like the ones you've made here, you seem to be making a couple of critical assumptions about the people you're soliciting, among them:

1\. They know who you are, or have any reason to care what you're looking for.

2\. They don't already have somebody building their thing for them.

3\. And if they don't, that they have any reason to think you're a qualified partner to work with

I mean, if I'm Joe Business Guy and you show up on a forum and make the statements you've made above, my first reaction is probably going to be "Who the fuck is this guy, and where does he get off making demands here when he has no credibility or reputation?"

I'd suggest a strategy of engaging with the communities you're soliciting among, get to know people, demonstrate value, probe gently to see what people are interested in working on, and then suggest working together when there are clear signs of a good match. Think of it kinda like dating. Imagine if you posted on a forum saying

"Hey, I'm Joe Random Anonymous Suitor and I'm looking for a wife with a demonstrated track record of good cooking, and a sizable dowry. Must be from a good family, and ready to marry and have kids." Do you think that would net a lot of responses? Yeah, it's just a metaphor, but think about it...

<comment><AUTHOR> I do include more information on those posts about my experience (nearly 20 years worth) and I provide and talk through my resume with the calls I have.

I agree that it seems I need to engage in communities more, and probably ones that are in-person

<comment><USER2> Ah, OK. That is good to hear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My guess would be that the people you are trying to reach are not reading reddit nor Hacker News.

In my experience, typical business folks are too busy running their business to look beyond their everyday problems. I have lost count the number of times I have come across people using a spreadsheet program as a form of database, e.g. for keeping track of customers and email as a hierarchical filing systems, etc.

Perhaps you should read: "eMyth". The basic message is that most people are working "in" their business and not "on" their business. Which in turn means that only a tiny percentage of business owners would be even thinking about looking for some form of improvement.

Lest I sound too negative. My advice is to get up from the computer and go and talk to small business people, e.g. networking events, chambers of commerce, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree this is likely a large contributing factor. I've done the whole networking thing a lot before and it's tremendously time consuming with very little to show for it. But I guess that's probably largely my fault in addition to probably going to the wrong sorts of networking opportunities

<comment><USER3> I agree networking events generally consume a great deal of time.

Perhaps you could try to be a more strategic. That is, at least get an idea of what your idea client / collaborator would be like. For example, if you are interested in health and fitness, then make contact with SMEs who have gyms, sports stores, provide boot camps, etc. Still on that same track, google to find some forums and directories and find out who might be interested in your area.

Ok, sport and fitness might not be your ideal, but the same principles apply to any general area. I firmly believe that you need to build up an interest in a specific domain/industry in order to find opportunities. The recommendation to scratch your own itch leads us to build stuff for other hackers/programmers and thus end up in a small and over-crowded market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your post is literally a problem that you have, and could potentially solve with a SaaS. Turn your question around and ask yourself: what problems do I have that could be solved with a SaaS?</comment>


Deprecating the GitHub Developer Program - <AUTHOR> https://developer.github.com/changes/2019-12-05-gdp-deprecation/ <comment><USER2> Hi all, this is Shanku Niyogi. I run the Product team at GitHub. I sincerely apologize for this post. We screwed up. This post was made in error, and we are retracting it. We are always looking to improve our programs for developers, and are working on improvements. But this is not the way to make changes. And it is NOT a goal to end our program. Sorry for the confusion.

<comment><USER3> If possible, it might be helpful to share a little detail on how it happened. You can imagine that it did happens signals at the very least that someone with power/influence got this post out there in the first place.

<comment><USER4> They've agreed to deprecate the program but once the post was out and got terrible feedback, they realized that deprecating a developer program is not the best idea for something like GitHub, let alone announcing it as such. So instead of admitting they've made a mistake in deprecating the program, they're blaming the messenger and pretending it never happened. They went as far as getting the archive.org pages blacklisted/hidden apparently, which shows somewhat clearly the mindset involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> GitHub appears to be slowly but surely ensuring anyone who extends their ecosystem is either acquired by GitHub or extinguished -- something I am pretty sure everyone who works in the space has known for a long time.

It is no coincidence that many of the companies that have used this developer program: Pull Panda, Dependabot and others like Semmle, Spectrum, etc. have been acquired by them. It starts looking a lot like going in the trajectory of an Apple App Store-esque developer platform in terms of lockdown to me.

I know GitLab isn't perfect, but I truly appreciate their openness[1] and willingness to partner with others in this space that are trying to improve developer tooling. If we want better developer tools, we need open platforms for those tools to exist.

[1] [https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/](https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/)

Disclaimer: I work in the space (@ Sourcegraph) but the words/thoughts here are my own, I'm not a corporate shill (I hope) :)

<comment><USER6> How is [https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/](https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/) materially different from [https://developer.github.com/marketplace/](https://developer.github.com/marketplace/) ?

Not trolling, just curious why you think one is open and one is not when they both provide ways to get a stamp of approval when you write apps to a public API.

<comment><USER5> If you want to test your integration with GitLab Enterprise, they will give you a development license for free because they understand you are contributing positively to their ecosystem: [https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/#requesting- ee-d...](https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/#requesting-ee-dev- license-for-rd)

It used to be the same case with GitHub Enterprise, they would give you a development license to test your integration. After this, you will need to purchase a GHE license which is $2,500/yr (you must first go through their sales team).

Basically, this shuts out people from developing integrations that can be sold to other enterprises from what I understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems rather abrupt, and poorly written as far as output from Github goes. Anyone have inside gossip on whats going on? Smacks of some sort of internal dispute or a security/liability issue?

<comment><USER8> This is exactly why I prefer GitLab's "radical transparency" approach, for all its warts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The post was deleted, here is a mirror:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191205225751/https://developer...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191205225751/https://developer.github.com/changes/2019-12-05-gdp- deprecation/)

<comment><USER10> "Hrm.

The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL."

<comment><USER11> The calendar view on archive.org shows the page was archived 6 times while active, but all of those copies seem to have been manually deleted from archive.org (or perhaps hidden/blacked out?), or something else weird is going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given the ongoing GitHub / ICE controversy which is ever prevalent on Twitter.. I have to wonder. Is there a viable alternative for open source projects with enough of a network?

I see people who are very outspoken on the subject that are maintainers of projects on GitHub.

Seems rather hypocritical, but maybe there isn't a better option.

<comment><USER13> Sourcehut: [https://sr.ht](https://sr.ht)

Savannah: [https://savannah.nongnu.org/](https://savannah.nongnu.org/)

GitLab: [https://www.gitlab.com](https://www.gitlab.com)

BitBucket: [https://www.bitbucket.org](https://www.bitbucket.org)

SourceForge: [https://www.sourceforge.net](https://www.sourceforge.net)

If you don't want to be on GitHub, you don't have to be. If you want to avoid a transitive dependency on GitHub, that might be difficult.

If you're looking for self-hosting options:

Gogs: [https://gogs.io/](https://gogs.io/)

Gitea: [https://gitea.io/](https://gitea.io/)

Also, Sourcehut, Savannah, and GitLab from the service offerings can be self- hosted.

These are literally off the top of my head, and based primarily on osmosis from browsing HN. I am sure there are many more.

<comment><USER14> Bitbucket can be self-hosted too. It's not open source, but the licence fees for self-hosted installs are very reasonable.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for letting me know. As I said, most of my knowledge of these is just osmosis from comments here.

I've used TFS, Visual Studio Online / Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab, and SourceHut. My knowledge of the others is purely from people like you. I appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They even say that it has served many people very well, why shut it down then?

The only reason I can think of is that microsoft wants to provide these features themselves, maybe as a payed option?

<comment><USER16> It could either be competing products or a wish to re-work the policy terms to allow them to carve out some enterprise-contract type flexibility. My experience with Microsoft is that they are consummate enterprise account managers. They hold the hands of enterprise buyers and their sales teams seems to love to have special enterprise features/integrations.

My prediction is we will see a newly defined developer program with consumer tiers which will be the tip of an iceberg of enterprise-ready configuration below the surface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those worrying, this doesn't mean they're shutting down their API or locking it down. This was their partnership program for companies building on their API: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190928071306/https://developer...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190928071306/https://developer.github.com/program/)

</comment><comment><USER18> So developers will no longer be able to create integrations?

</comment><comment><USER19> > GitHub Developer Program will no longer be accepting new applicants in > preparation for new programs at GitHub.

Sounds like there will be different tiers. Maybe to generate revenue through those tiers? Or am I crazy and reading too much into it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I use the Developer Program to create Personal Access Token pretty frequently, what will happen to that?</comment>


Worrisome nonstick chemicals are common in U.S. drinking water: Federal study - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/worrisome-nonstick-chemicals-are-common-us-drinking-water-federal-study-suggests <comment><USER2> I guess I should get my water tested?

Do common filters that attach to your faucet or are inserted into your fridge filter these particles?</comment>


Anonymous Takes Down FBI.gov - <AUTHOR> http://protestsopa.com/post/16144789949/fbi

<comment><USER3> Obligatory:

<http://xkcd.com/932/>

<comment><USER4> It's even worse than that, unfortunately, as it's already being reported (by people that should know better) as a "hack":

[http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/19/anonymous-hacks-doj- univer...](http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/19/anonymous-hacks-doj-universal- megaupload/)

<comment><USER5> NYTimes syndicates Venture Beat so it makes sense for that audience at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please, post something more substantial! If I didn't know better, it would make it look like the actions of Anonymous are directly related to the anti- SOPA protests yesterday and it will only harm us in the end. Yes, there are issues with the megaupload.com take down - but let's not give MSM or the pro- SOPA senators a reason to forget about what was accomplished - and to me a posting on a domain like proteststopa.com with just those screenshots is detrimental to the cause.

(Also - don't take this as me being for or against any of these actions - <USER2> just can't help feel yesterday becoming a waste of everyone's efforts.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point! Edit: "Anonymous takes down FBI.gov. This movement by Anonymous is interesting, however it may overshadow the point of the January 18th blackout against SOPA. Some Congressmen may see their actions as positive renforcement for censorship on the web."

<comment><USER6> Thank you! I would hate to see someone use this as a reason to convert peoples opinions on SOPA.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem! Thanks for your input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Taking down www.FBI.gov is not that big of a deal. It is almost certainly an externally hosted CMS that is completely independent of any day to day FBI operations.

This is analagous to claiming victory by DDOSing a blog.

<comment><USER8> That's the point. Notice their message about the stunt. They're not interested in attacking the FBI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder: when did Anonymous prepare this attack?

They are very efficient at pointing LOIC and all other weapons to the targets they want in a couple of hours. Were they waiting for the next event to happen?

<comment><USER10> Keep in mind that newer versions of LOIC can be run idly in the background, connected to a control channel on IRC for remote activation by someone else. The amount of "coordination" necessary for a massive LOIC attack is limited to getting someone to download the software and enter the relevant channel information.

<comment><USER11> If memory serves, it's even easier than that: the version currently being distributed comes pointed at the CnC channel by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _yawn_</comment>