Mortality in People with ADHD [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.nice.org.uk/Media/Default/newsletter/Eyes-on-Evidence-September-2015.pdf <comment><USER2>
        All-cause mortality was 5.85 per 10,000 person–years among people
        with ADHD, compared with 2.21 per 10,000 person–years in people without ADHD. The risk of death
        among people with ADHD was more than double that in the general population (adjusted mortality rate
        ratio [MRR]=2.07, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.70 to 2.50, p<0.0001).

They then give the mortality rates for those diagnosed with ADHD another disorder or substance misuse issues:

        Age at diagnosis of ADHD was associated with mortality, with the risk of death highest among people
        diagnosed in adulthood (adjusted MRR=4.25, 95% CI 3.03 to 5.78). Mortality among people with ADHD
        was also affected by comorbid oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder (adjusted MRR=2.17,
        95% CI 1.33 to 3.31) and by coexisting substance misuse (adjusted MMR=5.63, 95% CI 3.69 to 8.16).
        Among people without these comorbid conditions, mortality was higher in girls and women with ADHD
        (adjusted MRR=2.85, 95% CI 1.56 to 4.71) than in boys and men (MRR=1.27, 95% CI 0.89 to 1.76).

The part I found interesting here, that they don't seem to mention elsewhere in this article, is that the mortality rate for males with ADHD but without the other disorders is actually lower than their general population numbers (2.07 general population vs 1.27 for males without one of those issues). They actually seem to completely ignore it:

        "Even if these complications did not develop, ADHD was still a risk factor for mortality. This could well be
        because the core problem of impulsiveness is a cause of accidents, and accidents were the major cause
        of death.

I'm going by the adjusted mortality rate ratio number. If I'm reading this wrong, please let me know.

<comment><USER3> > (2.07 general population vs 1.27 for males without one of those issues)

Since substance misuse and the other disorders influence mortality rates of the ADHD population, it is not surprising that they affect mortality in the general population.

For the inference you seem to be making, I think you would need the mortality rate of males with no ADHD AND no substance misuse/etc. Based on the data given, I see no reason to think that is above 1.27.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After losing my passport three weeks ago for the third time (together with a brand new MacBook I bought a few days earlier) and dooming myself to months of documents recovery in two countries I live in, yes, I sometimes just want to f __* die.

Life with ADHD is hard.

<comment><USER5> Also everyone I know with ADHD, myself included, goes really really fucking hard at parties and substances. To the point where we put our bodies at massive risk. I'm working at trying to train out the stupidity but it's hard.

<comment><USER6> I don't have that issue and never have. But my impulse control is often poor - it's pretty freaking awful. Luckily for me it just means I tend to say too much, although this can have devastating consequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, impulsive, creative, wild, dangerous, bored people doing riskier things have 2x mortality. There's a lot of things that'll increase it a lot more -- like different geolocations.

<comment><USER8> I agree that this shouldn't be a surprise. What I'm more interested in is whether the medication used to treat ADD/ADHD could have an adverse health effect that would reduce lifespan, i.e. if they ignore accidental deaths completely, will those on ADD/ADHD meds live just as long as those that do not take those meds?

<comment><USER9> For stimulants: increased blood pressure. I've had to switch several times because I wasn't able to get to an effective dose without sitting firmly in prehypertension bp levels.

<comment><USER10> True, although--if this isn't obvious--this won't necessarily matter if you're not prone to high blood pressure. I've got several risk factors as well as ADHD, but even with daily stimulants my blood pressure is comfortably within the healthy range.

<comment><USER9> Right, and even then.... I now don't have the impulse to go get soda and snack food at the convenience store nearby to kill time. I also find it easier to plan meals and follow through. So, net positive as far as lifespan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the vocabulary we use is starting to rub up against its limitations in problematic ways. Medicine is ver geared towards a pathology-diagnosis- treatment paradigm.

When it comes to something like blood pressure that's decent enough. Blood pressure above a certain threshold significantly increases the risks of XYZ and therefore… There are edge cases and grey areas that come from drawing a circle around anything that doesn't naturally conform to categorization, but the paradigm works.

For other things, the paradigm is clunkier. For one thing, doctors have an ethical (and legal, institutional..) objection to intervention unless some "pathology" criteria has been met. Since people want to use treatment and/or sell it, the definition of the pathology is constantly being messed with to conform.

Consider viagra. According to some, it is a pathology in young men but natural in older men. In any case, viagra is allowed to be prescribed. But then, impotence is on a scale. You are not allowed to use the drug unless you fall within some diagnostic parameters. There is no framework for "elective" use. You 22 year olds cannot have it. But, it's probably less harm to a robust 22 year old then a 55 year old.

Anyway, ADHD is something that tends to be diagnosed in children when they exhibit some problematic behavior, usually problematic to schools and sometimes at home. It sticks as a diagnosis when the treatment works.

So, your sample here is largely kids that had behavioral problems for which some sort of intervention (ritalin, meditation, diet..) was sought.

It's almost like saying teenagers expelled for drinking at school are more likely to default on rent in their 40s. It might mean that drinking during formative years affects your financial responsibility, but it probably means that teenager who get into trouble often grow into adults who get into trouble.

<comment><USER12> I was with you until the last line:

> but it probably means that teenager who get into trouble often grow into > adults who get into trouble.

I don't need to be the one to disprove it because the loose terminology is just so ludicrous. You're clumping ADHD in with sooo many other outside factors that influence what is 'trouble' and it's causes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My mother always warned me to maintain focus or I will walk in front of a bus. Yet she denies to this day I have ADHD (would make her look bad???). After a lifetime thus far of poor coordination, constantly losing things, awkward social interaction and rarely finishing projects, I've come to terms with it. ADHD is associated with risky driving, dangerous misuse of power tools, other 'short cut' behaviors that undermine safety of adhd people and those around them. It IS a public health issue for that reason yet awareness is low.

</comment><comment><USER6> My anxiety levels are off the charts and I sometimes have suicidal thoughts. I wonder how many ADHD people commit suicide?

</comment><comment><USER14> If nothing else, I hope that studies like this help people to realize that ADHD is a real thing.</comment>


Gpg4win – Secure email and file encryption with GnuPG for Windows - <AUTHOR> https://gpg4win.org/ <comment><USER2> Looks like it's finally compatible with modern versions of outlook.</comment>


Kubernetes installation on Ubuntu 20.04 – 18.04 – 16.04 (("hashicorp/bionic64")) - <AUTHOR> https://jhooq.com/14-steps-to-install-kubernetes-on-ubuntu-18-04-and-16-04/ <comment><AUTHOR> In this article on "14 Steps to Install kubernetes on Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04" we are going to create Kubernetes cluster along with kubeadm on Ubuntu 18.04 (The same steps can be used for the Ubuntu 16.04 as well)</comment>


Deep Painterly Harmonization - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/luanfujun/deep-painterly-harmonization#user-content-examples <comment><USER2> Congrats. This is very cool.

This is probably less a critique of your project and maybe more a celebration of cubism: The clock in the Picasso portrait is not "harmonized" in terms of cubist motifs at play in the composition. The contours appear merely dilapidated. Maybe this passes for someone with little concern for painting or art history but it was like a sort thumb for me. Maybe this is a good study reference on the gap between pattern recognition and human perception. Maybe not. I'd be interested in other thoughts.

<comment><USER3> Plenty of them fail to stylistically harmonize even if they visually harmonize. Of course, in some cases, it's debateable whether stylistic harmonization is even possible at the human semantic level. The bicyclist on the bridge in the scream painting was quite bad, and the Eiffel Tower in the cityscape was noticeably degraded by the fact the painting didn't have the colors that the artist would probably have actually used, so it's rather bluish.

What's more impressive is that several of them work quite well, and barring anachronism, at the sizes given in the samples you might not know what was added if they didn't point it out. The park bench I found particularly impressive, for instance. I suspect if we increased the resolution it would break down, but at this size it works pretty well.

<comment><USER2> Yeah good point about the resolution. So I wonder what effect lowering the resolution would have?

In general, it's definitely impressive how well they work.

<comment><USER3> I've measured the "realism" of graphics in terms of resolution for many years now, because nowadays we generally have realistic graphics, as long as the resolution is small enough. (Compare with, say, an NES game, where no matter what you do to that image nobody will ever find it realistic.) There's a lot of techniques/artists/etc. I've seen that are perfectly realistic looking at 320x200 (say), but couldn't sustain the illusion of realism at 1920x1080. This way I get a reasonable metric of whether or not graphics are "photorealistic", or in this case, match the style of the painting.

It would be interesting to see them do a higher resolution version, or if they have them. It's possible it would indeed fit right in even so; now that I think about it the microscale of these paintings are probably very stereotypical and the algorithm might be able to reproduce them well. It would be especially interesting to see if it would correctly reproduce brush strokes, which have a lot of context to them. Given that "deep learning" can do things like reproduce the structure of a TV script accurately, it doesn't seem out of the question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Way cool. I would personally mistake many of the results for a real painting if I didn't have the original in front of me.

Getting the colors right is half the problem, and I guess the histogram loss function I saw mentioned at the bottom of the page does that. A couple of the results had strange looking color transformations though - the little girl whose red shirt turns blue, even though the bed has some red in it, and the red rose that turns yellow even though there are orange flowers in the background. So it's not always choosing colors that are the closest to the source while being available in the target's palette. Anyone know why the colors sometimes go so far of course?

Also, this is one of the first style transfer papers I've seen that has a pretty obvious built-in and seemingly plausible business idea. I'm sure poster stores in malls everywhere could sell versions of your favorite painting or poster with your or your own face or something else of your choice added to the composition. It's like the new version of the picture board painting with face cutouts, but way better.

<comment><USER5> Mr Bean as Mona Lisa or Einstein on the $10 bill are perfect examples of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> With these examples it always feels like a very good usecase would be automatic rotoscoping. A movie like "A Scanner Darkly" looks like it could've used these techniques, instead of having all the original footage redrawn manually.

<comment><USER7> That's a better case for typical style transfer than this.

<comment><USER8> Looks like someone did just that!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw0hZ_- tztk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw0hZ_-tztk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would they need/want to add the Disclaimer? ( _" This software is published for academic and non-commercial use only."_) By fear of some patent violation? Or do they plan for commercial use (e.g. licensing to Photoshop) and this way they keep the license non-OSS (a.k.a. the "share source" euphemism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source))? Is it some kind of a well known legalese in academic circles?

<comment><USER10> They use VGG-19 pretrained weights which are derived from ImageNet which consists of mostly copyrighted images. It is currently untested whether this is a legal problem or not.

<comment><USER9> Wow, ok, this is seriously insightful and mindblowing for me! I'd never think of such a danger vector, but with your hint I can now totally understand the reason for caution. However painful it feels. Thanks for the reply! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great examples (after I realised they weren't all going to be McDonald's ads)

<comment><AUTHOR> My favourite: adding a Star Destroyer to A Starry Night. ("What should we add to A Starry Night?" "What else begins with 'A Star'... aha!")

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> These are the same authors from this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13958366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13958366) which was posted a year ago. Really interesting work they are doing.

</comment><comment><USER13> If a prize for best examples exists, this would win the first place!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03189](https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03189)

<comment><USER14> Knowing that mankind's scientific record now contains a Gioconda with the face of Benedict Cumberbatch has very much brightened my day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How long until it becomes cannibalized into a frivolous Snapchat selfie filter?

<comment><USER16> As opposed to these totally not frivolous examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Consider for example a picture of a street and a rendered car overlaying it. It would be interesting to see how well the technology bakes in the car so that it matches the environment. This would go in direction of realistic rendering.

</comment><comment><USER18> Anybody have any idea why gen_all.py is python and filt_cnn_artifact.m is written in Matlab? The latter seems easy enough to write in python as well.

Is there something about what this file does that is easier accomplished in Matlab or is it just two different people preferring different languages?

</comment><comment><USER19> Does this contain pretrained data? Is there a possibility to train it yourself (e.g. to allow a broader set of styles)?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is really amazing. Very impressive. Would love to see this published on the web somewhere to try it out quickly without requiring folks to have the necessary components to build it.

</comment><comment><USER19> It would be nice to have some more controls.

For example, often the color of the inserted object changes radically, which might not be what was intended.

</comment><comment><USER21> The first example that's really abstract is awesome.

I'd love to see more things like this with Rothko, Pollock, etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> Guess it could be used to create whole movies or video games in that painter's style.

<comment><USER19> I guess that would be more difficult, because there has to be coherence between subsequent frames (i.e., it has to avoid wildly changing random effects between frames).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So I assume no CUDA (wrong grpahic card) = no possibility to play with this tool? :/

<comment><USER24> You could use a server, I guess?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is amazing! Wow, well done.

</comment><comment><USER26> So has anyone implemented a web-interface for it yet?

</comment><comment><USER23> wow</comment>


"The Dirty Dozen" Marketing Processes that every Internet start-up must master - <AUTHOR> http://blog.publisha.com/articles/42202--the-dirty-dozen-marketing-processes-that-every-internet-start-up-must-master?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d45b5097ca47c6f%2C0 <comment><USER2> There were a few comments when this was submitted a week ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131105></comment>


Ask HN: Please review my website, job4dev.com - <AUTHOR>

Job4dev was a simple free job board website that I started with a friend of mine in 2007. We were looking for a way to learn Django development and there was no equivalent to a simple board (like 37signals') in Brazil. After that, we haven't changed much about the site.
That changed a few months ago, during the "Stackoverflow Careers" debacle (http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/12/joel-inc-stackoverflow-careers-and.html), when I started thinking about how one could fix the hiring process. We have some ideas about it, and we started working on them.
Motivated by that, and also by the "who's hiring?" threads here on HN, we are putting together an international version of the website and started working on new features.
We are trying to make it as easy as possible to foster communication between professionals that are already employed, recruiters and job seekers. Also, we are putting together a resume editor/publisher, and it's optional to make it public or not.
We are releasing it as early as possible, and we sure know that we are going to be terribly embarrassed by it, but this still is just a side-project for us.
Any feedback will be much appreciated. I think that the best thing you guys could do is to try to revive the "Who's Hiring?" thread and put those companies and listings on the site. <comment><USER2> Consider the most important thing for visitors who come to this site.. finding jobs that are in the place they want and related to the technologies they know. You can currently go down by tags (though it took me 10 seconds to notice this) but I don't see a location search.

I think you need some sort of search or widget smack bang in the middle under the header that lets people do searches or filter by location and/or tags.

<comment><USER3> Hey, thanks for the feedback.

The home page doesn't currently mention it, but you can browse by tags, location and by type of job (contract, telecommute, part-time, internship) on the "Jobs" section, <http://job4dev.com/jobs/> . From there, you can get set any kind of filter you want, and get a custom RSS feed.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, you have the features - you just need to make them a lot more obvious and easy to interpret :-)

<comment><USER3> I agree that the home page needs more information about the filtering options. It's already on my list.

Do you have any suggestion for the "Jobs" page, though? How can we make it easier to interpret it?

<comment><USER2> Without going into too much detail, format the filtering better. For example, there's currently a mix of checkboxes, font sizes, text colors.. it needs to be more uniform UI wise and more prominent and friendly presentation wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clicky: <http://job4dev.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> It looks like you're allowing people to post available jobs for free. On job sites, typically this is a source of revenue. Where do you anticipate your revenue coming from?

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's free to post jobs on the website, and it always will be. The only requirement for now is that information about the company has to be provided, or we won't approve it to be listed.

We have a bunch of different ideas for revenue:

1) Offer a service for managing the hiring process. Allow companies to browse through resumes, setup interviews, keep tabs on interviewed candidates, etc.

2) A "matchmaking" service. Given a job seeker's resume and given the listing's requirements, we can set up a freemium system where companies get to see candidates that are a better fit, and vice-versa.

3) A more traditional ad network. Something like Jobthread.

4) Another freemium service: "Career Analytics". Given a professional's resume and qualifications, we can collect aggregate data and see how he or she compares with others, how "employable" one is. Or answer questions like "How does my salary compares to the average?", "Would it be a bad idea to quit my job and go for a PhD?", "Would I make more money if I leave the technical side of the job and went for management?", etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks a lot like a Jobberbase install with custom theme and tags. <http://www.jobberbase.com/></comment>


How Should Secular People Approach Sacred Art? - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/how-should-secular-people-approach-sacred-art/

<comment><USER2> The article is mostly about visual art, but religious music is also very enjoyable IMO.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkAa3Zdx6Ro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkAa3Zdx6Ro)

The "Dies Irae" theme is used a lot in classical music, for example this Totentanz by Liszt:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUMR_D6G_Sw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUMR_D6G_Sw)

Gesualdo's Madrigals are sublime, too.

<comment><USER3> I was about to say the very same. There are so many beautiful pieces of religious music, it would be a crying shame to dismiss them simply because you don't believe in the subject matter.

Afterall, most of the history of the human race has been dominated by religion in some form or another, it's a bit silly to disregard all of that.

<comment><USER4> Let's take a moment to remember Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ui2deAKr8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ui2deAKr8)

If I recall correctly this is a love song that takes a deeper spiritual meaning in the context of qawwali.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The sacredness is hardly in the art. In the presence of sacred art there are no secular people. (Meaning that "the sacred" is precisely that which moves you beyond the mundane.)

<comment><USER6> Your cultural bias is showing. Without the right background nothing inherently separates religious and secular art. And there is nothing universal about what moves people.

Note: There are a few preferences that show up across cultures on average, but there not universal within a culture.

<comment><USER7> > And there is nothing universal about what moves people.

Birth, death, time, nature, space...

<comment><USER8> Strongly agree.

I order most of my books chronologically. In the far top-left are English translations of works from ~5000 years ago. They're so remote that, though bits and pieces of them survive as faint echoes through the centuries scattered across a hundred peoples, these are _dead_ cultures. These pre-date _early_ dates for the composition of the Torah by better than a millennium. Some of the authors were as ancient to Homer as Julius Caesar is to us. Their literature is often quirky and even alien to a modern reader.

The broad strokes, though? The themes, the underlying humanity of the characters and the author? Rarely do they not feel entirely familiar.

Honoring, pleading with, boasting to, daring, _threatening_ the gods. Terrified of death and eager to make a lasting mark on the world. Writing propaganda, hagiographies, libel and honest praise. Teaching and exploring. Full of doubt, hope, love, hate, pride, jealously, and a sense of justice.

Funny, clever, evil little humans.

Just like us.

<comment><USER6> Finding connections is not what I am talking about. The issue is no specific example is universal.

Even pain might seem universal, but some people simply lack that sensation. As in antithetic while getting a cavity filled would be pointless.

This might all seem pedantic, but it's really important to remember that people don't necessarily think the way you do.

<comment><USER9> The specific instantiation might vary but suffering is universal. We all suffer in various ways to various degrees depending on the circumstances around us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't quite understand the problem here. Art comes from a culture, and there are different cultures. Some are secular, others not so much. They all produce art. Good art is good art, regardless of the background. It might open up in a different way for a person who shares the cultural or religious context but that's just one way to look at it and that doesn't mean other views would get any less. I fail to see why would anyone disregard a beautiful fresco just because Christians paid the artist to paint it for them. It's not exactly as if the fresco would try to convert its audience.

<comment><USER11> I don't think many people would, really; but I certainly remember becoming a militant atheist at the age of 6, and resenting every encounter with a hymn or a christmas carol for most of the rest of my school days. I needed to take a long detour through black metal before I could appreciate sacred music (and while I appreciate the importance of Renaissance art to the development of human culture, I find still that there are only so many paintings of Jesus and martyred saints I can look at consecutively before my eyes glaze over).

So I can certainly imagine there being people out there, like my 8-14 year old self, who really don't like religion to the point that they can't appreciate religious art at all. If the subject matter really does set your teeth on edge, you're not going to appreciate the beauty. Art isn't just a thing; it's an interplay between the thing and the viewer/listener etc. If there's no open port on the receiver, the message won't get through.

<comment><USER12> " _I find still that there are only so many paintings of Jesus and martyred saints I can look at consecutively before my eyes glaze over_ "

Heh, that I can believe. Fortunately there's a lot of other sacred visual art to view, for example, look at the many depictions of the archangel Michael over the years in the Wikipedia article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_(archangel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_\(archangel\))

One thing I find very interesting about these works is the application of a society's current aesthetics in depicting a figure from a fixed, much earlier time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "What does it mean to be moved by the beauty of a vision you can't believe to be true?"

It doesn't mean anything, it's just like we like fantasy and science fiction, it's the remote worlds filled with wonder, evil and heroic deeds. My favourite musical is Jesus Christ Super Star. How can you not love the song 'Gethsemane' in which Jesus struggles between taking the rough road and dying for his cause, or escaping now and living in peace with the things he has achieved so far? Let alone that he isn't even sure that his death will be justified?

You don't have to be a theist to appreciate that. (As I am not)

</comment><comment><USER14> I am a man, nothing human is alien to me.

</comment><comment><USER15> An I approach I have found fruitful is working backwards, while contrasting it with secular art.

</comment><comment><USER16> Good article, but why is Rothko mentioned in the same breath as Fra Angelico?

<comment><USER7> I would argue that Rothko is one of the most talented painters ever to live. Whereas everyone else before him was trying to show off how good they were at painting, he was focused on making stuff that actually looked good on people's walls. That sort of empathy for users is the same key ingredient that's behind so many really successful entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER17> I've never understood why people like Rothko's work. I look at his stuff and say "I could do this myself with 2 - 3 colors of paint and 10 minutes with a paint roller." What am I missing here? Is his talent understanding his market or artistic (or both)?

<comment><USER18> There are hundreds if not thousands of artists who can recreate some of the most famous and technically difficult paintings of the past 1000 years and yet they're lucky if they can sell their original work at a garage sale.

Art has very little to do with reproducing what the eye can see, in fact some of the most renowned art does exactly the opposite.

If you're confused by Rothko I hope you never come across Duchamp.

<comment><USER7> > If you're confused by Rothko I hope you never come across Duchamp.

As Seth Godin says, the first guy to install a toilet in a museum was an artist, the second was a plumber.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Myself, as a secular person, the way I approach religious art is the same way I approach non-religious art.

I give it a brief glance and a slight nod (if nod worthy which usually I don't feel is the case), then I proceed to ignore it. Most of what is called art isn't in my opinion anyway so I usually don't even bother with that.

There is some cool stuff for sure, Burning Man comes to mind, especially before the steampunk infestation. But generally I wonder why people waste their time.

I do however (nearly) fall to my knees in worshipful rapture at a good piece of technical work be it a building, a vaccine or a piece of code. But it has to be functional or I don't care about it beyond a glance. And efficiency and functionality it what makes it beautiful to me.

I'm guessing this view might be considered by some to be a disorder and it probably correlates with my lack of religiosity. As a side effect of said disorder, I simply don't care what these kind of people think.</comment>


How to Quit Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://thetoolsweneed.com/how-to-quit-facebook/ <comment><USER2> How to quit Facebook:

1) Deactivate your account

2) Make sure you let everyone in your social network know that you're quitting Facebook by writing a Medium post, news column, or HN post on how it's going to drastically improve your life by eliminating all of the attention seeking behaviors that social media attracts. Make sure to lecture all of them on how much more meaningful your interactions with your true friends are going to be now that you've ascended to this higher state of purpose and existence

3) Continue living your life exactly the same, but with more time spent on Reddit, Instagram, and Hacker News now that you can't visit Facebook anymore

<comment><USER3> Don't forget step 4, being make sure to jump on the next 'big thing' when it comes along so you can write a similar post about you leaving that sodden platform a few years later. Step 5 is usually presented as 'Rinse, Repeat'.

The best way to solve these problems is not jumping on those platforms in the first place. No matter what everyone and his dog may say it is always best to think for yourself what benefit - if any - that 'great new service' would have in reality and what price it carries for delivering that potential benefit. What things like Facebook potentially gave was a way to find long lost acquaintances with whom to share... well, what, really? Those people ended up being lost acquaintances in the first place because you did not share that much with them other than a temporary sojourn in a college hall or classroom. A few of them probably stuck around to become friends in real life, the rest faded into the background. Facebook dug them up for you so you could tell each other what food you had today or that you walked the dog again. Then one of them started posting photos of himself on some sunny beach, creating envy in all his contacts who hurried to post similar photos of themselves on even sunnier beaches. Rinse... Repeat...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Message your manager, say you need to have a little talk, and then tell them you will be leaving.

Optional preceding step: get new job first.

</comment><comment><USER5> i don't think it's as simple as just doing it. is there a way to delete your personal facebook while operating business profiles/pages?

<comment><USER6> Is it that hard to make a new/empty profile and assign it as admin and then delete the old profile?

<comment><USER5> good ideas! thanks guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just a video and no text article? I'll pass!</comment>


A history of the Amiga, part 8: The demo scene - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-9-the-demo-scene/ <comment><USER2> Ah the memories. I was heavily involved with the Bay Area Developer GRoupE :-) We had BADGE meetings initially at Stanford Linear Accelerator and then later at Stanford. We used to head to the Oasis for the after the meeting meeting. As a lot of the original Amiga developers (pre-Commodore) were based out of Los Gatos (the original home of Amiga when Commodore bought them) many would come to those meetings and share various insights with us.

At one point we decided to host a demo contest (which Tom Rokicki pronounced with a long 'e' sound) it was the hottest ticket in the Bay Area for a while, we even had Commodore and Newtek offering up gear for prizes. Some amazing stuff watching people pull every ounce of performance they could out of the chips.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really shoulda been born 20 years earlier. I've read a lot about the C64, demoscene, the high times of usenet, etc., but it was all before my time... Nowadays the hottest thing in the computer world are iPhones and Facebook, neither of which I'm a fan of.

<comment><USER4> It's never too late to join in, the demoscene is always looking for people to participate and compete! Start small, organize some friends and try and make a small intro. Get a few groups of friends together and host a basement party and compete. Check out the facebook page I linked to elsewhere here and try and attend a local party. They're gobs of fun.

<comment><USER3> See, Facebook again ;-)

I don't think it's possible to get "a few groups" of sceners together in the Netherlands. It's even hard to find people enthusiastic about FOSS, though there are some more of those.

<comment><USER5> How about you attend Outline then, two weeks from now?

<http://outlinedemoparty.nl/>

It's a very welcoming place for the newly interested, I assure you.

<comment><USER6> I should really go to a demoparty again, some time (you do remember me from my scene days, right skrebbel? like you I had a different nickname back then).

Do demoparties also have Javascript compos nowadays? Building a 4k usually took me about 6 months, add some extra to that because I've been out of it for ~10 years ...

I always prefer the "limited" compos because you don't usually need a team (hard to come by, helps if they're local) and because IMO it shows more of the scene spirit: pushing the boundaries. I mean, a PC demo nowadays can pretty much do anything, and even back in the day I felt it was too much freedom.

Are there still parties not all the way down in Eindhoven? :) I'm still located all the way up North :) Although if I'm heading somewhere for 3-4 days, NL is small enough. I do need some peeps to meet up with there and have a good time, cause I doubt I can get my local friends to clear their schedule on short notice like that :P

<comment><USER5> Don't worry, I know who you are :-) Hi!

I believe that there's an oldschool party in Northern Germany every summer, too: <http://nordlicht.demoparty.info/>

That said, I won't be able to make it to Outline myself, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I still remember my first sin scroller, copper bars and the easy water mirror effects with a negative bitplane offset.

I wonder if there is a site that explains copper bars, vertical bars, endless blob, glenz vectors etc.? Would be interesting to read about that again.

<comment><USER8> Ooh! I know this one!

Copper bars: Copper wait-until-screen-vpos-hblank, change $dff180 (bankground screen color)

Vertical bars: create a single horizontal 1D bitmap (pref. hold-and-modify); set BLPxMOD to negative the number of bytes of a single row (so the same row of pixels repeats over and over again) and animate the 1D bitmap - there's a nice demo that does this under the pre-tense of an undocumented instruction (the joke being there's no need for an undocumented instruction)

endless blob: to draw endless BOBs, allocate as many framebuffers as memory will reasonably allow and flip through them, drawing a BOB on each framebuffer with some sine path motion as it is about to be displayed, net effect is the BOBs keep on coming and flowing perpetually like millions.

Glenz vectors: use blitter to draw lines & blit into bitplanes with polygon filling mode, you'd need at least three bitplanes, one for the silhouette of the shape, one for the front-facing faces and one for the back-facing faces, then set up the palette so it's "just right" for the combination of planes to give a semi-transparent effect.

A site that goes into old school amiga demo techniques would be awesome! Would love to read up about even basic stuff like dot record breaking techniques & bitmap rotation and zooming techniques (eg. Brian the Lion intro screen comes to mind, as do the rotating platforms in Turrican 3)

<comment><USER7> I remember those too :-) Great!

Zooming I mostly did with applying Bresenham to drawing bitmaps instead of lines (And then obviously repeating lines with BLPxMOD).

That site would be awesome.

<comment><USER9> Well, it's not exactly what you want, but there's this site about how to do old school effects in software on a modern PC.

<http://insolitdust.sourceforge.net/code.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow I never really knew what these were as a kid but always found the demo intros amazing. I had an Amstrad 6128 at the time and a cracked version of Bloodwynch (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodwych>) had the most amazing demo with an incredible sound track.

I used to just load the demo and listen to that track over and over, it was awesome.

Which I could find it now.

<comment><USER6> Did you check youtube? A lot of old demos are recorded there.

I should put my 4k's up myself, except that the best one (featuring a real- time software synth in ~1100 bytes of the 4096), I've only recently been able to get it to run on someone's ancient win98 laptop :) No luck with the DOS-box emulator, so far...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just a sidenote: as for the name of the community, demosceners themselves refer to it as "demoscene", in one word.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't make it correct, though. We're mostly Europeans who learned English as a second language.

You'll find many specific half-English terms in the demoscene, in fact. One of my favourites is the role of "Graphician", which would be called "Graphics artist" in any other place. The term is inspired by "Musician", I suppose, though I like to think it's actually a play on "Magician".

<comment><USER12> I also remember it being called "Demoscene," (one word) as far back as the mid 1990's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps the following question should have its own Ask HN topic, but: Why isn't there a Linux demoscene?

<comment><USER4> In my opinion there have been two great non-commercial (counter-commercial) software movements: The Cracker/Demoscene and the Open Source/Free Software Movement. Both movements came out of solving the same problem, commercial software is expensive and not as available (in several different senses of the word) as each movement would like. How both movements attempted to solve that problem is where that difference lies:

The Open Source/Free Software Movement:

1) Prevent software from being closed in the first place with various licensing schemes

2) Recreate closed commercial software with open alternatives

3) Share the guts of what you've done with others

The Cracker/Demoscene (for those that don't know, the demoscene is a spinout of the software cracking scene):

1) For software you want to use, crack the copy protection on it so licensing is irrelevant

2) Do it in as creative a way as possible

3) Compete with other groups of people trying to do the above, that means trade secrets

Over time, these core philosophies dictated how the movements operated.

They're both social movements in a sense, but very different kinds of movements:

I also remember attending a few Linux User Group (LUG) meetings. A bunch of folks crowded quietly into a rented room, there were a few lectures, a bit of Q&A, discussions over various Linux distros, shared tips, lots of config discussions. A few people might show off how their desktops were configured or provide a demonstration of a properly configured piece of software and give a tour of the code. At some point some code might be copied and distributed on floppies (and later CD-Rs). Very collaborative, even if it didn't really excite the senses. Leaving a LUG so you could go home and try a tweak in some X.conf file wasn't exactly mind-blowing. It felt kinda like school. It was all very _Yin_.

Contrast with going to small demo parties in my teens and the sense of friendly competition was simply awesome. It was brash and bold, artistic flourishes were rewarded, and groups that could come up with something novel kept those secrets close to their chest as it was their competitive edge. The typical party was loud, intense, and touched the senses, you worked on your discipline (coding, music, graphics) till you dropped or the competition started, at the competition a bunch of people piled into a room and tried to blow each other's minds. Clever hacks were rewarded with praise and tales of glory. It was like a street racing community or playing hooky so you could watch two kids have a fight. It's the friendliest kind of war. The demoscene is very _yang_.

Getting together with your demo group or attending a demo party was _exciting_ and fun, you weren't really trying to change the world, just carve out a meaningful piece of it for you and your friends. The goals of the scene were completely orthogonal to the goals of the open source movement. And there has historically been very little overlap between the two groups of people. In practice this has meant that demosceners find themselves fed into the commercial software world, which is where they're most comfortable anyway, while open source folks have gravitated towards service and system integration companies. A few times, in organizations with hundreds or thousands of software folks, I've asked the question of who there participates in the demoscene and not gotten a single affirmative answer (though a few are aware of it), while most of my old demoscene friends work in closed-source commercial software and games.

It's kind of a shame, lots of the problems the open source movement has about front end design and interfaces and well...the human facing part of software...might be better met by demosceners on the job.

I think it's undisputed that the open source/free software movement has been the most impactful, I'm not using a demoscene derived OS and demoscene tooling has usually been very hacky. But I like to think it's been very influential. I've often used demoscene productions as ways of pushing development teams to change their perceptions about what a computer is capable of. I remember one case where we were hitting a performance problem in a piece of code, the developers (all with backgrounds in free software) were insisting that a single system just couldn't manage more objects. I showed them Blunderbuss [1] which fortunately is a beautiful demo _and_ has a nice behind the scenes writeup [2][3] with this gem:

 _Particle count. I want more. I want to be able to render sand or smoke or dust with particles. That means millions. 1 million would be a good start._

It was meant to embarrass a little bit but also to inspire. It's a totally difference kind of software, with totally different goals than what we were doing, but the point was there. Get creative, get clever, get a little "right brained". Find bottlenecks, find efficiencies. Small speedups are for late stage optimization, huge speedups are what I was looking for. They eventually pulled it off and found ways to dramatically speed their code up, but I had to keep a blunderbuss to their head the entire time.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezltebzdgjI>

[2] [http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-m...](http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly- modern-particle-system/)

[3] <http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/blunderbuss/>

<comment><USER5> Nice writeup!

Also, I never knew that "yin" meant boring and "yang" meant super awesome!

<comment><USER4> I guess it depends on from what angle you look at it. Yin has been far better for my paychecks over the years, and that's pretty awesome IMHO!

<comment><USER5> Hah, you win :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there any kind of a demoscene community alive today in the SF area? Everything I can find seems Europe-centric.

<comment><USER15> This party is not in SF, but I'm sure you could click around and discover some west coast folks who attend: <http://atparty-demoscene.net/>

Also, see Pouet.net for all things demoscene.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> DHH had this to say about the demo scene, in an interview with Randal Schwartz:

Q: Really? What made you not want to be a programmer? This is curious.

A: "I had a bunch of friends who I loved dearly, but in many ways were exhibiting all the traditional programmer stereotype themes of being just overly focused on things I didn't think mattered and at that time programming perhaps also was a little bit different. Growing up, programming was assembler and C. I had a lot of friends in what was called the 'demo scene', which is mostly an European thing where you had all these guys on the Commodore 64 and on the Amiga writing these really awesome visual displays of various kinds, and all that stuff was usually in assembler. I had absolutely zero interest in learning or doing anything with assembler, it just didn't make any sense to me at all.

I only really got interested in programming when I stumbled across languages that made sense to me on the level that makes sense to me, which is at the very least high level languages like Java, PHP, or whatever have you, anything that's above the 'I have to dick around with pointers' or I actually have to move memory spaces around; that stuff has absolutely zero interest to me at all.

I didn't start programming until I was in my late twenties, and even then I didn't start programming because I wanted to be a programmer. I started programming because I wanted a few programs. And that was apparently the easiest way to get there because the other way of getting programs is that you actually have to talk to programmers, which is surprisingly painful at times. I found that the easiest way was just to pick it up and learn it myself."

<comment><USER17> just replace assembly/C in his complaint with math. That's what he is talking about, he doesn't know math / doesn't want to learn it and use it, which is what most of demo coding is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good memories. Later day Amiga demos like Arte from Sanity were very memorable and enjoyable. Very far away from simple intros with a couple of effects, they became closer and close to full blown video clips, albeit all rendered in real time.

<comment><USER9> What do you mean by "later day"? Amiga demos are still being produced to this day.

<comment><USER18> WHat I mean by "later day" refers to the end of the Amiga life as a commercial machine, i.e. mid 90s. I know very well Amiga demos are still being made to this day, but there is much less demo scene involvement in the Amiga now than then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those interested <https://www.facebook.com/groups/NAScene/>

It's pretty heavy on East Coast demosceners right now, but North American Party announcements pretty regularly go up.

</comment><comment><USER19> My gosh , i still have the hardwired amiga demo on disks ! it was amazing back then !

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CGOh-jb4QM>

EDIT : is some demo code source available somewhere ? i knew a site back then , but it went offline.</comment>


Accessing Nested Objects in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/accessing-nested-objects-in-javascript-f02f1bd6387f <comment><USER2> JS should have syntactic sugar for this: foo.?bar.?baz or something.</comment>


Samsung's new Sero TV can rotate vertically for your TikTok and Instagram videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/5/21050604/samsung-sero-tv-rotate-vertical-video-tiktok-ces-2020#comments <comment><USER2> This would also be excellent for many arcade games (and many faithful arcade ports) that were originally designed for arcade cabinets using a portrait orientation.

My first thought is playing some classic Ikaruga, but there's heaps more games (not just shootem ups) out there that are better in their original portrait mode.

Edit: in case anyone is curious why this would be better than a normal screen on a stand that can rotate. It's because the majority of screens are not designed with significant vertical viewing angles, so when rotated they become visually less appealing for people to gather round and enjoy like the classic crt screens of old arcade machines.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Intrigued. Was just mirroring my phone on the TV to play some games and wished there was landscape options. Asian social media is also experimenting with short vertical shows designed for Gen Z. Also build in stand seems useful. That's 1 less piece of furniture to move.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your steps to protect your privacy? - <AUTHOR> Everyday there is a new malware, attack, data breached. I don't feel sharing my personal information, not shopping online at all. Bit sometimes things are not in our control and we are required to submit our personal, banking information.
I don't want to do anything online. I just want to live life like before 1900.
How could you live a life without computers? <comment> 2-4-Flinching Well can't really. Actually my job.

Not sharing your information is a good step and when you do compartmentalize it. Different emails and phone numbers for different things. I have a few google numbers I give out besides my actual number. Lots of my information on online fourms is completely made up but documented. I use keepass to keep strong passwords and notes on accounts. If it doesn't need my real name, it doesn't get it. Limiting information on the web about you is good over all.

Shopping in store doesn't give you security unless you use cash. The Target Breach was all in store and they actually said that "There are no indications at this time that the breach affected customers who shopped at Target's online stores." Home Depot was malicious software installed on the self-checkout lanes.

As for living life like its 1900, you can as long as your job is not in computers or using one. Grabbing cash from the bank, paying for cash in store. No online bill pay or banking, no hacker news. I have known a lot of guys that do it daily. Even have dumb phones that were super cheap.</comment>


Demand growing for open access science texts and tools - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/12/building-sustainable-open-access-science-texts-and-tools.ars <comment><USER2> With regard to OpenCourseWare, MIT are not selling secret knowledge, but a certificate stating the bearer is smart enough to go through their courses and has done all the work necessary to complete them. This should be the m.o. of all learning institutions.</comment>


Free web research and analysis tools - <AUTHOR> http://openstrate.gy/

<comment><USER2> This is very awesome

</comment><comment><USER3> Yahoo is back!</comment>


Ask HN: Any recommendations on good conferences / meetups in the UK? - <AUTHOR> I've been wanting to meet new people for a while. I've had a search and there's a few conferences in the UK that seem interesting.<p>I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations in particular? Especially in the NW or Manchester. <comment><USER2> I've attended ACCU a few times and really enjoyed it. I've also heard good things about Steelcon, but I haven't made it there yet.</comment>


A Detailed Analysis of 35+ Best Freelance Websites for Hiring - <AUTHOR> https://www.konsus.com/blog/best-freelance-websites/ <comment><AUTHOR> Categorized by niche - Writers, Designers, Virtual Assistants etc.</comment>


The difficulty of private contact discovery - <AUTHOR> https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to work out if Signal can leak my contact information. And came across this piece. That doesn't really answer my question. In fact the more I read it, the less assurance I have.

Was this problem solved partially or wholly?</comment>


Does Facebook Make Businesses Any Money? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2011/04/facebook-is-great-but-does-it-make-businesses-any-money.php <comment><USER2> "Of the 24 companies interviewed, only 7% cited social networking as one of their most effective sources of customers."

That's 1.68 companies. Oops.

<comment><USER3> Looking at the diagram it says 7% out of _102_ online retailers. Which, slightly rounded of, is 7 online retailers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is obvious that Facebook makes _some_ businesses lots of money (see: Zynga). It would be more interesting to know _who_ is making money, and what their business models look like.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ex-intern on the Facebook ads team here.

Facebook's role in the marketing funnel is not to get from interested customers to buy from the company. Its role is at the level of TV advertisements and display ads: Build awareness.

RWW is going about it the wrong way. I don't think Facebook is trying to be the #1 in terms of direct sales driver (for the 7%, they're probably like Zynga or on-Facebook apps). Facebook is unlikely to become more effective than search in that regard, but that's because the latter is intentions-driven.

How can they tell whether the awareness being built contributed to sales? Surely they can run randomized (controlled) tests and see if it makes a difference (I think Neilson does research in this field). But it appears from the article that RWW (nor the companies it interviewed) did not do that level of research.

If you want to use Facebook to get from unaware visitor to paid customer, it's going to be harder than using AdWords.

</comment><comment><USER6> _The report leaves hope for certain types of businesses, who it says may be in a better position to make money from their Facebook presence. Among them are what they call "small pure plays", small businesses for whom "Facebook is the 2011 version of Yahoo Merchant Solutions or eBay ProStores."_

Can Facebook process payments for third-parties?

<comment><USER7> It sure can, with Facebook Credits. Today, the margin is a little high for physical goods, but it works well for virtual goods.

<comment><USER6> That is processing payments for Facebook, not third-parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 'Do the Yellow Pages Make Businesses Any Money?'

'Do TV commercials Make Businesses Any Money?'

'Do Postcard Mailings Make Businesses Any Money?'

<comment><USER8> If you can afford TV you can afford to be rich. TV is the top of they pyramid for advertisers

<comment><USER6> $20?

<http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is interesting is that a social media presence influences your page rank, so all those sites citing SEM might be looking at a partial side effect of something that they don't consider important (not Facebook, but twitter, GetSatisfaction, etc).

</comment><comment><USER10> I know affiliates who have made up to six figures a day on Facebook in some months but they are not going to write about it because they don't want competition.

<comment><USER6> Is this still true? How long ago was this?

I have heard Facebook turned their backs on affiliate marketers once the big corporate branding campaigns became ubiquitous.

I have had several ads rejected for attempting to sell Clickbank products (I know, I know - just testing the platform). I had an ad approved, made a sale, and the next day, the ad was disapproved.

It seems they only care about big corporate dollars or local mom-and-pop stuff. No place for affiliate marketers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> social media = branding search = customer acquisition

</comment><comment><USER12> Our company cannot get their ads to work - the quality is horrendous vs. AdWords/MSN.</comment>


BLT – New Blockchain Standard for Digital Identity - <AUTHOR> https://guardtime.com/blt-technology <comment><USER2> RSA has been the dominant digital signature scheme since the 1970s, but it's outdated and cannot scale for the explosion of data or devices.</comment>


Why SQL server was never ported to Unix - <AUTHOR> http://hal2020.com/2011/07/27/porting-microsoft-sql-server-to-linux/ <comment><USER2> Great article.

The decision to support anything new in the enterprise infrastructure space, given that you'll often be asked to support it for (literally) decades, is non-trivial even when you only have one platform to worry about. But especially when the second (or nth) platform in question has very different end-user expectations for usage conventions, documentation, scriptability, etc...it takes a _very_ special partner opportunity (or end-customer so huge that it might as well be a partner opportunity) to make it worth pulling the trigger.

Databases in particular strike me as poor candidates, because the space is so hotly contested by organizations capable of research-class CS and deep optimization. So of all the things you might port to a new platform, MS SQL Server (a platform in itself) represents an enormous risk.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great argument ... for open source.

Red Hat (the company I work for) sells quite narrow products. For example, we'll sell you and support PostgreSQL but only on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or KVM but only on x86-64. Upstream, PostgreSQL runs on BSD, Windows and a zillion other platforms. KVM supports i386, S/390, PPC and a few others.

You can either be a customer, _or_ you can port yourself / find another partner to make the code work on other platforms. This only works because it's open source software.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't doubt the author is reliably recalling what happened but I do doubt that Microsoft would have ever released an enterprise product for *nix. This would have eventually had to be decided at the Gates level and I don't think he would have ever undermined Windows with a tacit admission that it could not meet every customer need.

</comment><comment><USER5> >> The first order engineering of making that happen, assuming you disable some Windows-specific functionality, was rather small (on the order of a few manweeks).

I have a hard time believing that. I used to write to the Windows internals API a lot (the kind of stuff you see on sysinternals), and I can't imagine the sql server team not doing the same. That stuff was _not_ easily ported to Linux, at least in the late 90's / early 00's.

<comment><USER6> The guts of SQL Server were (and as far as I know still are) a RDBMS named Sybase that MS bought sometime in the mid '90s. Sybase ran perfectly fine on Unix, just without all the GUI crap.

<comment><USER7> See [http://hal2020.com/2011/07/27/porting-microsoft-sql- server-t...](http://hal2020.com/2011/07/27/porting-microsoft-sql-server-to- linux/#comment-664) for a history of the SQL Server guts. It is now a complete rewrite of the Sybase code.

<comment><USER6> Oh, that's fascinating. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Slightly tangential - I didn't realize that this was Hal Berenson's blog. This is an individual who carried serious clout within MSFT. All his other posts are great reading too for an insider perspective on lots of things Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER9> Could someone pleae correct the title to read "Why _Microsoft_ SQL Server was never ported to Unix" rather than the more general term SQL server (which Microsoft would no doubt be delighted to assume as its own...)

<comment><USER10> SQL Server already means "Microsoft SQL Server." They took ownership of the term a long time ago.

<comment><USER11> I think he meant to point out that "SQL server" doesn't mean "SQL Server", which is technically a valid point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The most interesting part of this article to me was the description of the problem with sales. I think it provides a great insight into the thinking of large companies like Microsoft and why they're decisions are sometimes baffling to those of us not working at huge corporations. He mentions that a sales person going after $100k contracts would not make their quota and lose money for MS. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised but it seems pretty crazy.

It also kinda confirms what we already know - that every department of MS is geared towards pushing their whole software stack and to change would be like trying to redirect an iceberg.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't the answer to that question trivial? Microsoft needed Windows monoculture to succeed and the way to do that is to completely and totally strangle any Windows customers so they could not move to something else without basically starting over.

<comment><USER14> Aw c'mon, at least _read_ the article and don't trot out a knee-jerk argument. It makes many valid points about how well Microsoft could really succeed in selling a Unix-hosted product when their heart was in Windows. Just by flipping the question around I think it buries the issue pretty well: If your Unix enterprise app needed a SQL server, why would you look to Microsoft?

<comment><USER15> Why wouldn't you? Microsoft is a major software vendor. If they make a solid DB for Unix, why not consider it alongside Oracle and other major software vendor's offerings? You would consider it on the merits of the product.

None of the reasons in the article make much sense to me except for the one left for last, that it just doesn't make overall strategic sense for Microsoft: Microsoft's model is pushing Windows, and selling SQL Server for an alternative OS is a bad idea (it's a good idea for SQL Server revenue, but bad for overall Microsoft revenue).

As others said, Gates would have veto'd SQL Server for Unix, that's the bottom line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting exploration of the business issues, and, for Microsoft, I can understand this.

It does contrast rather strongly, though, with the experience of Oracle and Informix trialing their first Linux ports. "We just typed 'make'" was the quote out of Oracle at the time. While I'm reasonably confident that there has been a bit of platform-specific tuning since then, the point is that writing code for a standards-based platform (UNIX and POSIX) made porting to a new target pretty straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is just sugar coating for the crap they're covering.

I'd reduce it all down to: we didn't want people to use SQL Server on *NIX because we wanted to sell them expensive OS licenses & licenses for other products.

>environment no one really knows nor cares what the underlying OS is. SQL Azure thus becomes Microsoft's answer for those who don't want to run an in- house Windows Server just so they can run SQL Server.

Nope, not really, I do care about the database and about the underlying OS. I don't like to use Windows for web hosting mainly due to its unpredictable HDD space usage (Windows folder growth vs number of installed updates over time).

Also, in Microsoft land, it's pretty difficult to be "up to date" with everything. You install hundreds of updates for the OS, the database and other components and there are some extra hotfixes you normally get when you have a support contract with them.

There's also the issue of the performance. You need more hardware for Windows than for other OSes. I had an "enterprise" CRM we will not name which had low performance on a Windows 2008 R1 Standard. I tried to upgrade it to R2 and the CRM stopped working completely. Of course, this wasn't done on the production box.

<comment><USER18> """This is just sugar coating for the crap they're covering."""

Yes, please, do reduce an elaborate article discussing technical and business trade-offs into a silly anti-MS rant that wouldn't be out of place in Slashdot circa 1999 for us.

<comment><USER17> >I had full executive support in investigating a port, but had I brought forth a proposal to proceed I would have faced arguments from many that I was undermining Microsoft's entire business plan.

See? Read that part "I was undermining Microsoft's entire business plan", please. That also includes the monoculture and the perfect vendor lock in.

The main issue is that you can't easily move to another platform when your entire app / system runs on MS software. If you use Oracle's DB or something else for an app with a DB, you could move away from Windows if you decided to, provided you are ready to and can make the required changes to your app's code.

As for "my rant", it looks like the porting to *NIX was just an idea, not something they were seriously considering. I never expected them to do it because some people would choose not to buy Windows licenses and just buy SQL Server licenses, not both.

That's hardly a rant. It's just the long story of MS vs. the "viral" open source / free software.

<comment><USER18> """That's hardly a rant. It's just the long story of MS vs. the "viral" open source / free software."""

That's hardly a story.

Company wants you to use their products instead of OSS/whatever alternatives. News at 11.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I could have sworn that way way way back when MS-SQLServer just started out it was a "fork" of Sybase Unix code??? I kinda remember that happening in like the 90's and then like usual Microsloth screwed it's partner (Then Sybase that did a lot of the work on the initial windows port)

Of course I maybe having some sort of strange drug induced flashback but kinda remember this?

RB

<comment><USER16> TFA states as much: _When someone says Microsoft SQL Server you could think of two things. One is the relational server(sqlservr.exe) that has its origins at Sybase and was re-written by Microsoft to produce Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and later versions._

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wasn't that the database that used to regularly get it's indexes all mangled up?

I weep cold salty tears into my stale cheerios at the thought that any large Enterprise was ever seriously considering it as a viable solution.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Please stop calling MS SQL Server just "sql server". It's just as ridiculous as calling MS Internet Explorer just "internet".

<comment><USER21> No, it would be like calling Microsoft Internet Explorer just "Internet Explorer". That's what most people call it.

<comment><USER22> If IE were called "Web Browser", I think we'd feel the need to prefix it with MS.

<comment><USER23> At least in my community, when you talk about "sql server" it's obvious that you're talking about MS SQL Server. In the same way, postgreSQL is "postgres" and Oracle Database is just "oracle".

<comment><USER22> That community being people who already know about the brand. I say it every day at work, too, but the OP still has a valid point for public discussion.

<comment><USER18> No, he has not. "sql server" is just the product's name, it's not a generic category of servers.

We call the generic category "SQL Server" belongs to: database servers, or relational database servers.

No one uses "sql server" for something besides naming that specific MS product.

<comment><USER22> Fair enough. I still think it's hard to say how confusing it is to those not familiar with the brand.

<comment><USER24> I don't know about your culture, but I've never heard anyone use 'sql server' when they meant 'the database server'. You just don't call it that. I also think it's a pretty dumb product name. You might as well call a web server 'html server'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Porting to unix? How about the other way: turning it OFF on windows?

 _sigh_

<comment><USER25> I'm guessing the down moderators are missing the irony here. I'll spell it out: why is sql server an essential system service on Windows? WTHeck?

<comment><USER26> Which version of SQL server is an "essential system service" on Windows?</comment></comment></comment>


Autobiography of a Yogi - <AUTHOR> http://www.ananda.org/free-inspiration/books/autobiography-of-a-yogi/

<comment><AUTHOR> From Wikipedia [0]:

Autobiography of a Yogi has inspired people, such as Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson, a biographer, records that Jobs "first read [it] as a teenager, then re-read [it] in India and had read [it] once a year ever since." Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, told his story of attending Steve Jobs memorial service, where the attendees were handed a small brown box on their way out. "This is going to be good," he thought. "I knew that this was a decision he made, and whatever it was, it was the last thing he wanted us all to think about." The box contained a copy of Paramahansa Yogananda's book, "Autobiography of a Yogi."

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiography_of_a_Yogi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiography_of_a_Yogi)</comment>


Google Brain Toronto - <AUTHOR> https://canada.googleblog.com/2017/03/canadas-ai-moment.html <comment><USER2> 1\. What is the Vector Institute? Is a foundation? Is it a not-for-profit corporation? Something else?

2\. Who controls it? The government (which has put in most of the announced funding)? The University of Toronto? Google? A combination of all of those?

3\. Who will own the work created by the Institute? How will it be licensed, and what rules will govern its publication?

These are questions that would be answered at a very early stage of an ordinary research partnership between a public university and a corporation, but I can find none of these details about Vector.

<comment><USER3> #3 bothers me a lot. It reminds me of the way owners of sports franchises use public tax-payer money to pay for stadiums, meanwhile keeping all the profits from the money made by their teams.

If the various governments in Canada are funding this research and Google is contributing such a minor amount of funding, who is the beneficiary of the research output? Does Google get first dibs on all the information? Does the research ultimately find its most valuable commercial use at Google? Who else stands to benefit from this research? Are any of these beneficiaries going to directly be Canadians? Or are Canadians merely going to be tertiary benefactors with the primary ones being the researchers working in Toronto taking salaries?

<comment><USER4> Google is one of 11 companies (the platinum level sponsors) that committed $5M to Vector. It's not a Google thing.

The researchers are Vector are free to pursue their own interests, and publish their work like any other academic. Their output is not owned by Google or any of the corporate sponsors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am seeing a lot of investments and MASSIVE promised commitments by a lot of people/company. Is all this money going towards paying experts/ buying equipments ? Don't get me wrong, I like seeing all this money being poured in. It's just that i'm curious as to how this money is being used.

Tangentially, do you think any of this will trickle down to people who are trying to learn math/ML in the form of scholarships?

<comment><USER6> I agree. It has all been quite vague. I wonder if any will go towards AI based startups.

<comment><USER5> Well, I know ycombinator is doing it.[0]

[https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-ai/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-ai/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Canada will benefit from the brain wall Trump has erected.

<comment><USER8> Those jobs would have been shipped to India eventually anyway. Global corporations don't care about silly things like stable economies. They care about the bottom line.

Edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Am I wrong in some way?

<comment><USER9> India doesn't have top universities and top research talent.

<comment><USER10> aren't IITs top univ.s?

<comment><USER11> Certainly some of them are for undergraduate education, but I'm not sure they're top research universities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ouch, sorry Waterloo.

<comment><USER13> Right? This is an odd choice. Google just built their massive new campus in Waterloo, and University of Waterloo is one of the best engineer schools and computer science schools in the world, but they build this an hour away in a market that is much more expensive? An odd choice for sure.

<comment><USER14> I wasn't too surprised. If you look at the Vector Institute website ([http://vectorinstitute.ai/#people](http://vectorinstitute.ai/#people)), you'll see many additional well-known researchers involved, in addition to Geoff Hinton:

David Duvenaud, Sanja Fidler, Brendan Frey, Roger Grosse, Geoffrey Hinton, Jordan Jacobs, Tomi Poutanen, Daniel Roy, Raquel Urtasun, Richard Zemel.

there is a lot more momentum at UofT in this specific area of research, more than there is at Waterloo.

<comment><USER12> The University of Toronto is probably a lot better funded than Waterloo, too, has a massive student base, and has connections to other local universities that are also much larger than Waterloo like York and Ryerson.

This selection will certainly put a dent in Waterloo's reputation, though with any luck they'll be able to capitalize on it in some capacity due to their proximity.

<comment><USER15> > This selection will certainly put a dent in Waterloo's reputation, though > with any luck they'll be able to capitalize on it in some capacity due to > their proximity.

Highly doubt it. Waterloo is known for being mediocre/trash for CS research. People go to Waterloo to get into industry and not academics.

<comment><USER16> >Waterloo is known for being mediocre/trash for CS research

Are you out of your mind?

Do you know why Waterloo's School of Computer Science is named after David R. Cheriton?

Yeah, the same DRC who made a major exit to Cisco, seed funded Google and hold an emeritus professorship at Stanford.

A sizeable chunk of the people who published Spark have done their undergrad' or research masters at UW.

Waterloo is definitely top-notch at the undergrad', perhaps less impressive than schools with bigger endowment at the research level, but far from being "trash". Tons of Waterloo profs are on the steering committees of major CS conferences (VLDB most notably).

This comment is so puerile, it has to be written by some jealous and petty undergraduate student. Or so I hope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Posted by Geoffrey Hinton" it may be, but "authored by Geoffrey Hinton" if there's any truth to it at all must surely be true only in the most superficial and technical sense. With all the marketing speak in that piece it's completely alien to Hinton and very much in line with coming out of some corporate spin department.

Looking beyond the presentation though, I find this an interesting and important development for the field. I'm inclined to think there are plenty of valuable researchers who will work for the vector institute in Toronto who would not have gone to work for Google Brain in the SF Bay area.

</comment><comment><USER18> Soo much money being thrown behind a methodology/philosophy that is potentially on its last legs....

So many bets being placed on gift horses hoping for a high return. So little efforts looking and/or thinking beyond a narrow box.

So much disruption potential outside of mainstream currents.

And to think.. All one needs is a computer and an idea.

What unfolds in the times ahead is going to be one for the history books.

<comment><USER19> Literally almost everything that happens, and everything in the past few decades of tech anyways, is "one for the history books"

History books contain a lot of inane details no one besides readers of history books are ever charged with knowing. (Then there's the important big-picture stuff and sub-arcs that we're supposed to remember lest we repeat them, but most people have already stopped caring by that point because of the inane details)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The phrasing "Canada's AI Moment" to me implies that this is temporary.

<comment><USER21> What [in technology] is not temporary?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone else feel insufferable pressure as YCF announcements near? - <AUTHOR>

My god I wish I had a better strategy to deal with this. My current strategy is lurk on HN and post as much useless crap as possible.<p>So not helping. <comment><USER2> From the fake guidelines:

> _Please don 't post useless crap if possible._

Go to YouTube and watch a movie, I like MythBusters or artisanal glass artwork like : [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih60DlrHELU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih60DlrHELU)

<comment><AUTHOR> <passive-aggressive>hahahahaa LOL</passive-aggressive>

Glass blowing -- this is cool, and the sound is cool.

I also like : "Will it blend?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Go exercise somewhere outside.

</comment><comment><USER4> No.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good.</comment></comment>