DFS, poker, basketball, Starcraft and strong opinions, weakly held - <AUTHOR> https://www.davidtran.me/strong-opinions-weakly-held/ <comment><USER2> The principle the author is describing is very similar to the Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty (OFU) principle in online learning, which was proposed by Auer et Al in the context of the multi-armed bandit problem. The basic idea is that when you are sequentially making decisions in the presence of uncertainty, you should make decisions which interpret the data you have in the most optimistic light. The intuition here is that if your optimism turns out to be correct, you can capture most of the upside, but if your optimism is misguided, you can quickly gather information and reassess.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Thanks for making this connection! I hadn't heard of OFU before, but it sounds interesting. I'm actually working on another post about "optimizing around the optimal" and use multi-armed bandit as an example =). As Jeff Atwood mentions in his post on SOWH, writing about this has been a great way for me to think about the topic. If it turns out that smarter/more experienced people have already thought about/written about this subject at length, I'm not at all disappointed that I'm retracing their steps. In fact, it means that I independently found the right path!

I see this Coursera course on OFU: [https://www.coursera.org/lecture/practical-rl/optimism-in- fa...](https://www.coursera.org/lecture/practical-rl/optimism-in-face-of- uncertainty-4Ggk0) and what looks like Auer's original UCRL paper [http://papers.nips.cc/paper/3052-logarithmic-online- regret-b...](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/3052-logarithmic-online-regret- bounds-for-undiscounted-reinforcement-learning.pdf) Do you have a preferred source for learning about this? Thanks and Merry Christmas!

<comment><USER3> Another one you might like is the Amazonism 'disagree and commit': [https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t](https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t)

I ( [https://www.gwern.net/Timing#try-try-again-but-less- less](https://www.gwern.net/Timing#try-try-again-but-less-less) ) see it as a kind of bandit as well, but specifically, Thompson sampling, because you can interpret groups of people with strong but inconsistent beliefs individually as collectively implementing a Bayesian distribution, and then individuals going off and following what seems to then like the most profitable opportunity is equivalent to Thompson sampling: [https://people.csail.mit.edu/pkrafft/papers/krafft-thesis- fi...](https://people.csail.mit.edu/pkrafft/papers/krafft-thesis-final.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As somebody who was top ~2% in Starcraft I got heavily triggered until this part

>The key insight from Starcraft is that you need to be constantly testing and adjusting your hypothesis by scouting your opponent, all while continually executing whatever the best strategy you know of at any given point in time.

This is one of actually a good description of what is to be (in part) learned from Starcraft. However the level to which you can opt to commit to your idea without accurate information is larger than most people can suspect, and a lot of work goes into making the unwanted adjustments seem a non-issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> I started this post with the Starcraft campaign example, and then as I kept writing, was thinking that I might have to backtrack and get rid of SC completely.

To be fair, the campaign is very contrived, but in most 1v1s, I feel like strong opinions were the way to go, with the "unwanted adjustments" you talked about, like waiting a few seconds longer to take your natural after your opponent's scout leaves. It's also why after many thousands of games, I sort of lost interest in Starcraft. Based on maps and matchups, besides cheese, most games played out with both players just executing their predetermined builds until one player made a mistake (the game breaks down to balancing economy, army size, tech and army positioning, so a miscalculation along any of those axes). I did enjoy some of the ICCup seasons with new maps before people figured out optimal builds where it wasn't as repetitive. But mostly I stopped playing cuz of all the long drawn out PvTs :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi David, thanks for the article. Maybe poker, basketball, and Starcraft are highly correlated hobbies among software engineers in the Bay area, but I find it incredible that we share such similar interests. Starcraft not as much for me anymore, despite my HN username (though I still play maybe once a month or so).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading! Whoa, do you still play BW once a month, or is that SC2? I never started playing SC2, so I actually had to look up Artosis pylon. I def remember Manner pylon though :)

And hmm, I actually didn't think I'd find ANY readers at the intersection of startups, CS, SC, poker and basketball. Assuming most people on HN are interested in startups and computer science, I'd imagine that the limiting area of intersection would probably be SC ∩ bball (at least more so than SC ∩ poker or poker ∩ bball), so it's pretty awesome that we share all of those!</comment></comment>


Netflix socks detect when you've dozed off and pause your TV show - <AUTHOR> http://makeit.netflix.com/netflix-socks <comment><USER2> I RTFA, I know this an arduino-based DIY hobby project. But if something like this ever comes out for real, the ability to doze off and pause your TV show will be a trojan horse...

You've seen those charts where people use their smart watch to record their heart rate during the game of thrones finale? (No? Here you go: [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/13/what-game-of- thrones-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/13/what-game-of-thrones-does- to-your-heart-rate/) )

Sure, downloading the Netflix pause-your-stream-when-you-fall-asleep app is comfortable, but it also provides a treasure trove of audience response data. Forget focus groups, now you have the real-time emotional response of many thousands of people A/B testing your original content in real environments.

And this ain't old-media Nielson, this is biggest-user-of-AWS technology-first Netflix.

<comment><USER3> Oh its a lot more sinister than that, and its already here. An app I tried to run on my Android phone would run a video ad before it started, it used the front facing camera to determine if someone was looking at the phone. I looked away and started typing on my laptop and the ad paused, I looked back and it restarted, I looked away and the ad paused. I looked back and deleted the App.

<comment><USER4> This is why I don't use Android. On iOS, you install the app and at some point you see a prompt "This app would like access to your camera. Allow?" and you can click "Don't Allow" and keep using everything else. Versus Android, which at install time asks "This app wants access to these 37 different things. Allow everything and install, or would you prefer to kindly fuck off?"

<comment><USER5> Android is implementing this in 6.0. No reason to make this a fanboy war.

In any case, the app would probably say "Oh, I can't have camera? Well you can't have app."

And it's not like you weren't warned on the page with "37 permissions".

<comment><USER6> Fandoy war? This basic privacy/security feature has been in iOS since forever. It is as common sense as you can get. Not having it is actually outright hostile towards users. I've used both Android and iOS for some time and I can tell you without a shadow of doubt that iOS is far superior.

In the meantime... talk to me when Android gets this basic feature in 6.0.

<comment><USER7> >has been in iOS since forever

Granular permissions have only been in iOS since version 6.0, which came out 3 years ago. The first version of iOS was 8 years ago. For a feature that's "as common sense as it gets" we sure got along fine without it for half a decade.

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't say we were getting along fine without it. There were some pretty big privacy breaches[1], which helped move Apple forward. I think Google and Android are great, but on this topic they have held out for as long as possible, it seems[2].

[1] [http://www.cnet.com/news/path-shares-photos-oh-and- uploads-y...](http://www.cnet.com/news/path-shares-photos-oh-and-uploads-your- contacts-too/)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/20/android- ap...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/20/android-apps- permission-app-ops)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm mostly sad that Netflix detects nothing and pauses my show anyway after a couple episodes. : (

<comment><USER10> That really only became possible when they decided to auto-play new episodes, which is a bad feature in general. There are quite a few shows with really nice music videos in their ending credits. Shrinking the video to the size of a postage stamp and kicking me into a new episode is a rather annoying.

They also have a terrible habit of skipping the opening credits. The credits are often funny or beautiful. Every time I watch Futurama, I need to start the show and then rewind back to the beginning to see the opening joke. It's like VHS all over again.

Opps. I'm ranting. You know, I never noticed how much the interface annoyed me until I stopped to think about it.

<comment><USER11> Different strokes for different folks - I like watching the opening credits for the 1st episode, but not the 3rd.

<comment><USER12> I totally will re-listen to Mad Men's jazzy intro music every time...

<comment><USER13> It's "A Beautiful Mine" by RJD2, incidentally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> But let's be serious here... WHO WEARS SOCKS TO BED?!

<comment><USER15> People who live in climates where it gets cold in the winter, turn down their thermostats at night, and get up in the middle of the night to pee?

<comment><USER16> slippers man, or a quick trip to the bathroom.

<comment><USER17> Doesn't solve warmth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My cheap/effective solution is doing a

      $ sleep x && pkill Chrome

if I think I might fall asleep after x seconds.

<comment><USER19> See, this has been a solved problem for literally decades and this is the only comment in the whole thread that has gotten anywhere near it. The idea that I need socks that can talk to my TV for _any_ reason is just nuts.

<comment><USER20> > the idea that I need socks that can talk to my TV

when you put it that way I really don't see the appeal anymore

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In Thomas Pynchon's novel _V_ , there is a fellow who has a switch on his skin that detects whether or not he is awake (by the resistance? I forget), and so controls the TV. Judging by the Wikipedia article, this is Fergus Mizolydian; I don't have a copy lying around the office.

</comment><comment><USER22> By IR? So this is for 'smart TV's' or bluray players etc. with Netflix on them - and those with IR.

Hmm. I was too hopeful for a Sock API.

</comment><comment><USER23> Instead of flashing an LED, the socks could warm up. That way, if the socks start getting warm and you're still awake, you can react to that, but if you're asleep, your feetsies will be nice and warm.

But this would be hard as a DIY project.

<comment><USER24> Sounds like the hardest part would be making sure it isn't a fire hazard. That being said I don't like my feet being warm while I sleep, so this project misses for me by being a sock. So close.

<comment><USER25> I'm sure the same benefit could be gained through a leg band. For me, I tend to move around in my sleep, so I wonder if it would work.

<comment><USER26> Pretty much no one moves around during deep enough sleep, it is just when your sleep cycle lightens up that you move around in your sleep. The same tech still works, it just might not be able to detect all the stages of your sleep as effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Most of the people I know who watch Netflix at night want it to keep playing after they fall asleep.

<comment><USER28> I'm one of those people. Falling asleep on the couch under a big blanket, and waking up every hour or so to catch a few seconds of some Star Trek TNG is a pretty profound sort of comfort for me.

It reminds me of watching old James Bond marathons with my dad when I was a little kid, and falling asleep during them.

<comment><USER29> I think you may have sleep apnea.

<comment><USER28> Huh, my dad has sleep apnea. What about waking up to Star Trek makes you think that, though?

What I mean by waking up is like: do you ever wake up in the middle of the night to the dog wanting to go out, or a noise outside or something? You come awake _just enough_ to process what is going on, and then go back to sleep right away.

For instance: sometimes I'll wake up to the really faint sound of somebody jingling keys outside the kitchen door, but I can figure out that it's just our roomate, and to go back to sleep. Like a very low thread priority or something.

<comment><USER30> The way you described it sounded like you just randomly wake up in the middle of the night, which _can_ be related to sleep apnea. If you're waking up that easily it _could_ also mean that you're not going into deep and REM sleep because your brain needs to keep you at a certain level to wake you in case you can't breathe.

Edit: or you're just a light sleeper, but generally waking up several times a night is not common.

<comment><USER31> > or you're just a light sleeper, but generally waking up several times a > night is not common.

Especially if the TV is on

<comment><USER31> ^ I didn't actually intend to word this sarcastically, my apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The website, [http://makeit.netflix.com/](http://makeit.netflix.com/) asks for us to submit our own ideas. Most of the things I think would be cool to do with Netflix involve having some form of API access to its catalog or apps. IR socks are not Netflix socks.

</comment><comment><USER33> I thought NFLX was up today due to the Fed raise. Glad to know it was the socks.

<comment><USER34> #ThereIsNoGreatStagnation

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I suspect something more accessible to the general public could be done with the heart rate sensors and accelerometers already in Android watches, Apple watches, and Fitbits.

</comment><comment><USER36> Was sad to read that there's nothing Netflix specific here. The hidden requirement is your box running Netflix has to support receiving IR signals.

For example, I use an Xbox One, which to my knowledge doesn't have an IR receiver.

<comment><USER37> It does. I use my Harmony remote with it and that only does IR, not Bluetooth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> What about socks for truck drivers to detect if they are dozing? Have them set off a phone alarm, etc. Better yet, can FitBit, etc. detect dozing and use the vibrating alarm to alert?

<comment><USER39> While I think an alertness sensor is probably a good idea for drivers, I don't think an accelerometer is a useful way of going about it. These don't really notice that a user is asleep until they have entered a fairly deep sleep, which is fine for pausing a TV show but far too late for alerting someone who is operating a motor vehicle.

With Netflix if the accelerometer doesn't notice you've fallen for 5 minutes before pausing, that's totally fine. If the user is operating a motor vehicle and has been asleep for 5 minutes it'll be a miracle if they're still alive.

<comment><USER40> Not to mention that being in a moving truck will probably muck up the accelerometer readings...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Ok ... so how do you wash them without blowing the electronics?

<comment><USER42> You don't, you just knit new ones, download the pattern, do a little programming, solder some electronics and configure your remote and VOILA! New SOCKS!

<comment><USER41> Engineered obsolescence at work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's cute, but is it a joke or something more serious ?

I don't see any use for it, except perhaps saving bandwidth.

Surely it must takes some time for the device to find out that you're actually sleeping, then you anyway have to rewind back to the point you stopped watching, so I don't think it makes a big difference to go 10 minutes or 1 hour back.

<comment><USER44> This is part of Netflix's "makeit" projects[0]. People can submit ideas for DIY projects that incorporate Netflix in someway, and they pick ones they like. So I believe this would fall under community engagement.

[0] [http://makeit.netflix.com](http://makeit.netflix.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Aren't there systems for that already? Vizio's connected TV watches you, with a camera. Kinect watches you, with cameras and LIDAR.

Orwell saw this coming. Winston Smith watches his exercise program: "6079 Smith W! Bend lower! You're not trying."

<comment><USER46> Nobody's forcing you to watch Netflix (or use Kinect, Facebook, etc) at gunpoint.

If anything the trend of tracking/surveillance with consent is Huxleyish rather than Orwellian.

<comment><USER47> It's probably hopeless generally, but thought you might like to know that Huxley himself rejected BNW later in life and offered a new take on things in Island. So it's not really fair to the author to use Huxleyish as a synonym for BNWish. Sorry I don't have a cite, read this in a biography of Huxley that had a cite. The wiki page for Island hints in this direction though: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_\(Huxley_novel\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I thought title meant some socket library or socks proxy? Came here to mention how, out of context, people would be confused wondering what Netflix foot underwear has to do with networking.

Only to realize I was the fool. ;)

<comment><USER49> For a moment I stopped to wonder what kind of mind reading capabilities their clients have, if even their sockets could tell when the viewer isn't receiving :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is pretty damn awesome!

<comment><USER51> You missed the pun opportunity...

This is pretty darn awesome! (Darning socks?)

:)

<comment><USER52> You're knit picking. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> lazy-ass first world problems Good lord, what hackers have become...

</comment><comment><USER54> They refer to the method used as "actigraphy", which apparently is commonly done with wrist-watch packages. Sounds like an idea for a Pebble watchapp!

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actigraphy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actigraphy)

</comment><comment><USER55> Maybe netflix could consider partnering with SparkFun for some of this stuff... the colours even match already.

</comment><comment><USER56> Who says Silicon Valley isn't solving the really important problems any more.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm more afraid if it knows I'm doing something else.

<comment><USER58> Why? It's almost as if you have something to hide...

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is clearly overengineering. All you need to do is hack your kinect to look for eyeballs; no eyeballs for a minute? Pause the show.

Might not work if you have cats.

</comment><comment><USER60> Are these instructions thorough enough for somebody with no hardware experience? How long might this project take for such a person?

</comment><comment><USER61> I found this part rather ominous:

 _However, there are ways to increase your socks' accuracy. More on this later._

<comment><USER62> I think they were referring to the "extra credit" portion at the end

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Quick Question: Who is responsible if the battery blows up and you have burns on your foot ?

</comment><comment><USER64> Great invention for narcoleptics.

</comment><comment><USER65> For a moment sounded like a April fool joke

</comment><comment><USER66> webcam + motion detection would be a way to do this without additional hardware.

</comment><comment><USER67> Wait, this isn't a joke?

</comment><comment><USER68> Your move Slack.

</comment><comment><USER53> first world problems....

</comment><comment><USER69> Featuring auto pause and nail fungus.

</comment><comment><USER70> Or Netflix could just prompt the viewer to continue to the next episode.

...but then they wouldn't be able to sell you special socks.

<comment><USER71> It's a DIY project. They're not for sale.

<comment><USER72> yep, I was overjoyed when I saw that; great way to get someone interested in building stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Please don't use Netflix and other paid streaming services. By doing this you support Digital Restrictions Management development and finance copyright lobby.

[https://stallman.org/netflix.html](https://stallman.org/netflix.html)

If you want to watch their shows too much, download them illegally via file sharing services. They can arrest a very limited number of people, and by engaging in such activity you lower other people's chances to be persecuted.

<comment><USER74> I hate DRM, but I'd personally rather legally pay for something with DRM than illegally torrent.

<comment><USER75> My position is that I don't really care that much about DRM on something that I'm not buying in the first place. With Netflix, I'm not purchasing TV shows or movies, I'm just paying a flat monthly fee to have access to view their entire catalog whenever I want. So to me it doesn't really matter if there's DRM, because it works, and when I want to watch it again, I can do so for no additional cost. I just have to pay the monthly subscription fee.

For something I _buy_ , it's another matter altogether. I don't want something that I own to be limited in how I use it, like only playing on certain devices, or a certain number of times. So as a result, I'm not real wild about spending any money on Blu-Ray discs, which had strong DRM and can only be played on certain players or with certain software. (AFAIK, you still can't watch Blu-Ray movies on Linux, which to me is pretty much a deal-breaker since I use my laptop for things like that constantly, including watching Netflix.) Worse, because of DRM, these limitations could change in the future, which is entirely unacceptable.

I know it's a bit of a gray line, but I just don't see subscription services the same way, because I don't actually own anything there, I'm just buying access to a store of online content.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Gluten-free Restaurant Locator for Android - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.celiacfeed.android

<comment><USER2> -1 for requiring registration before I know whether this App gives me value. Good idea but I don't love starting our relationship this way</comment>


Push to Weaken U.S. Endangered Species Act Runs into Roadblocks - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/push-to-weaken-us-endangered-species-act-runs-into-roadblocks/ <comment> another-one-off I'm going to live a little dangerously here, partly because I have a job in mining, partly because of who I am.

I don't have the foggiest idea why it is important to protect endangered species in and of itself, and I don't think there is a good reasons to.

Famously, pretty much every species that has ever existed has gone extinct. Every organisation, formation, species or what have you will, statistically, some day no longer be. The nature of time is to bring change. We can't preserve everything anyway, and there is nothing to be proud of in keeping a dying species in the world.

I can understand requiring extractive companies to restore land after they use it to something that isn't hostile to life, but I don't understand why the fact that the near-extinct colour-crested-hopping-possum is endangered should impede human progress. We need to face up to the fact that human endeavor is more important than animals and that being rare does not make a species somehow important. It certainly shouldn't be a cover for NIMBY types to shut down mining activity.

<comment><USER3> I can think of two reasons to protect species: one practical, one moral.

The practical one is that humans rely on ecosystems being the way they are, and that unbalancing them disturbs our interests, particularly in agriculture. We also rely on a diverse plant ecosystem to discover and develop new medicines.

The second argument is more values-based: that ecosystems and animals have value in and of themselves, axiomatically. If you don't appreciate this argument perhaps you never will: it's not something that draws on more fundamental principles, it just is a principle itself. Similar are arguments about speciesism and the active right of sentient animals to survival: it's probably one of those things that can't be deconstructed into more basic, falsifiable arguments. I'd suggest the same applies to the claim that human progress is necessary and valuable - it doesn't seem provable, just an instinctual belief.

There might be a third argument: that protecting the environment helps economies optimise for longer term gains. One of the things holding back sustainability has been the relative cheapness of dirty alternatives - <USER2> restricting mining might encourage more creative means of manufacturing. And frankly, if all you're doing is mining cadmium for smartphone batteries, you may not be doing the human race much good to begin with.

<comment> another-one-off > that unbalancing them disturbs our interests

I've talked to farmers on trains, I've lived in cities, I've worked in mines. This doesn't reflect my experiences, we have shredded the natural environment to our benefit in all those places. Farms are a long way from a natural environment, the modern farming process is awash with chemicals and such. Lab grown meat is an exciting possibility. Our success as a species have come through striving to transcend the limits of nature.

Nearly all humans are urbanised. Urban environments are as far from natural ones as we can reasonably make it. There is almost no fauna larger than a dog, flora is controlled. When given the choice, as a mass, we choose to be as far from nature as possible and visit it for short and very controlled periods of time.

The moral aspect I suppose we shall agree to disagree.

Are you sure the cadmium isn't going to be used for solar power? Or that the 'creative means' that you would like to see won't benefit from it when the science comes in?

<comment><USER4> "Farms are a long way from a natural environment, the modern farming process is awash with chemicals and such."

It seems you are viewing industrial, monoculture farming techniques as a justification for what humans should be able to get away with as far as land or resource use. It is not at all self-evident that such an approach works best. There is an opposite viewpoint that traditional, diverse crop farming could produce higher quality, higher nutrition output without using too much inorganic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.

My point is that you seem to conveniently accept the "obvious superiority" of a modern approach and ignore other viewpoints or approaches wherein biodiversity fits in naturally.

<comment><USER5> With robotic advances to deal the higher labor intensity of diverse crop farming, I think it could be cost competitive in the near future. The question I think is: Who will be behind funding and developing? I think it would take a "Tesla" type commitment to complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Endangered Species Act is not a good way to protect endangered species. It bars consideration of cost at any level, and basically destroys the property rights system thereby providing incentives to preemptively destroy habitat.

Anyone who wishes to understand effective ways of protecting species needs to think a little about cows and elephants.

See also the classic [http://www.masonlec.org/site/rte_uploads/files/Manne/2014.12...](http://www.masonlec.org/site/rte_uploads/files/Manne/2014.12.06/LueckMicheal_Class%208.pdf)

<comment><USER7> > It bars consideration of cost at any level

What would an Endangered Species Act that considers cost look like to you? It seems unlikely "a few thousand owls" versus "a giant iron mine" is ever going to be sustained _on cost_.

<comment><USER8> Why aren't endangered species protections treated more like eminent domain? In cases where cooperation is more efficient than completely taking the land, the restrictions can be added to the property deed and the owner compensated.

Putting arbitrary and unpredictable costs on landowners seems like a bad system.

EDIT: by "bad system", I mean "less effective and less fair".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember reading a few years back that the extinction of a species is worse than we think because it likely also leads to the extinction of exclusive parasite species. For example, if the California condor goes extinct then (maybe) that would also lead to the extinction of some louse species that exclusively parasitizes condors. The author seemed to think it obvious that this would be a bad thing, that the extinction of any species must be a bad thing, but I can't imagine why anyone would think that way. I want to save the condors, but I think the world is better off without the condor mites.

<comment><USER10> unless they have an as-yet undiscovered property that, for example, cures cancer... i'm sure before we realised bacteria can be super cool when they work for us, people would have been fine removing them all for medical reasons

it's what we don't know that we need to preserve, because there's no going back</comment></comment>


Mesosphere Google Cloud Platform, Integrates Google's Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/18/mesosphere-comes-to-the-google-cloud-platform-integrates-googles-kubernetes-project/

<comment><AUTHOR> The main idea behind Mesosphere has always been to allow developers to treat a data center like a single computer — with Mesos and other software packages abstracting much of the basic devops work away. Some companies that currently use Mesos are Twitter and Airbnb.</comment>


The most underrated feature in Python 3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/08/03/the-most-underrated-feature-in-python-3/

<comment><USER2> I may be just a bit tired right now but I had to keep nipping to the top of the article to remind myself which was foo and which was bar.

There are good times to use foo and bar, rather than more self-documenting style placeholder names, but this was not one of them for me.

<comment><USER3> I had the same problem. My first thought was, why can't we just name them something like 'dependency' and 'app' or whatever. So much clearer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sad to see this PEP dates back to 2005, and 10 years later the majority of Python developers are still on 2.x and don't benefit from it :-/

<comment><USER5> I think the majority are using 3.x for new projects? Of course there's still a lot of 2.x around.

<comment><USER6> A lot of us who came to Python late have only ever used 3. I can't imagine the horror of dealing with multiple charsets and bytes in 2.x

<comment><USER7> You don't really have to deal with bytes in py2. That's part of the problem.

<comment><USER8> You have to. And even some http libs only use Bytes in py3. Dealing with Sockets also only works without unicode. Thats just horrible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Java had this feature since the last millenium (java 1.3, i think). I really miss it programming in python 2.7.

<comment><USER10> by reading this I just learned about the concept of chained exceptions, although I can't see why is so useful, the built-in traceback and sys module has always been good enough:

        import sys,traceback
        try:
            ...
        except Exception as ex:
            exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback = sys.exc_info()
            logger.error("%s:%s" % (str(ex),  str(traceback.format_exception(exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback))))
            raise MyException(" :( ")

<comment><USER11> that's not nearly good enough, it's barely acceptable. i've been programming python for a decade and the fact you have to do this with exceptions was plainly dumb. as a programmer you should never have to worry about preserving tracebacks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great post. I'm a python dev and had never noticed that.</comment>


Interview with Mark, a programmer building bespoke business applications - <AUTHOR> https://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-mark-a-programmer-building-bespoke-business-applications/ <comment><USER2> Wayback Machine Link [https://web.archive.org/web/20181008184720/https://remotehab...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181008184720/https://remotehabits.com/interview/interview- with-mark-a-programmer-building-bespoke-business-applications/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the downtime HN, should be fixed now!

With RemoteHabits I'm aiming to build a resource for people to learn how to work remotely. I've struggled with this a bit as I went from full-time -> consulting -> my own projects.

Please let me know if you have any feedback or anything that can be improved!

</comment><comment><USER3> > Resource Limit Is Reached

Time to upgrade your web server?

</comment><comment><USER4> HN hug of death?

<comment><USER5> And self-inflicted too</comment></comment>


Ask/Show HN: TSAKilt.com - <AUTHOR> http://tsakilt.com Good idea or bad idea? Funny or not funny?
Wearing a kilt through the security screening process is a true social/political hack and I think really funny. If enough people did it, it would send a message. Plus, I think TSA employees would complain that they don't get paid enough to frisk a bunch of dudes in kilts.
Do I actually think people will do it? Not sure. But for $10 to buy the domain and a few hours hacking together a Shopify theme, we'll see I guess.
Also, on a legal front, can I use my modified Department of Homeland Security logo under the guise of parody? <comment><AUTHOR> Good idea or bad idea? Funny or not funny?

Wearing a kilt could be a true social/political hack. If enough people did it, it would send a message. I think TSA employees would complain that they don't get paid enough to hand search a bunch of dudes in kilts.

That said, do I think anyone would actually do it? Not sure.

Also on a legal front, can I use my modified Department of Homeland Security logo under the guise of parody?

<comment><USER2> You should be able to use the DHS logo any damn way you want other than for the purposes of fraud or impersonation or fake recommendation. The FBI tried Copyright with their logo and got nowhere: <http://www.eff.org/press/mentions/2010/8/3> Parody is surely covered.</comment></comment>


Xobni, Y Combinator startup seeking great hackers. We'll be wearing black shirts at startup school. - <AUTHOR> http://www.xobni.com/jobs.php <comment><AUTHOR> Check out Paul Buchheit's article titled "Looking for a co-founder." <http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/looking-for-co-founder-try- attending.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> These are great guys. If you're not going to start your own thing, go hack for them because this is going to be a big deal.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, how did the recruiting go?

<comment><USER4> It went really well. The people who attend are the best part of startup school, for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, really goes to show the type of turn the tech industry is taking. In order to continue to improve existing functions (email, searches, etc) more and more cutting edge analysis techniques must be developed.

</comment><comment><USER6> C#? Ouch.

<comment><USER7> They need to talk to Outlook, so it's probably the best they can do. The better .NET languages like F# don't seem to be mature enough yet for production use.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did you discovered HN? - <AUTHOR> I remember watching one of my repos (abandoned now) get a lot of stars out of nowhere and being super confused. Then one of the regular contributors told me "you are on the front page of HN" and I had no clue what HN was. After all that I couldn't stop coming back to this site. If it wasn't for that I don't know if I would have ever discovered it.<p>So I was wondering, how did you find out about HN? <comment><USER3> I was getting fed up with how every comment section on Reddit devolves into nonsense - either trolling, arguing, or stupid memes. Don't get me wrong. Memes are fine in the right place - like Twitter. It has twit in the name for a reason... The problem is, no matter what the subject is or how the conversation is going, it eventually devolves into rubbish. Call me an old crank, but I find it extremely tiresome. It's like being an adult, but choosing to hang around with children with limited attention spans. If I wanted that, I'd just take up a babysitting job and turn everything into a Card Against Humanity game.

So one night, I just said my farewells, passed on the reins for a couple channels I administered, deleted all my messages and logged off. I had more than a year of Reddit Gold, but meh... it wasn't worth sticking around, even though parts of the Lounge are alright for general chatter.

Prior to this, I had seen a few mentions to articles here, and I checked it out. I actually read more of the comment sections than the articles - <USER2> what I was looking for. People actually discussing stuff.

HN's subjects are on par with what I look for, and people actually being able to converse civilly without turning everything into a meme or a flame fest is a huge bonus.

So, here I am. Feel free to send me HN Gold if it gets invented.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this is one of the reasons I like HN. Memes are fun, but sometimes I just want to discuss stuff seriously. I'll still upvote a clever pun or subtle meme reference on HN, but no reason it should be at the top.

<comment><USER3> I love puns, but if a comment is _only_ made for the sake of making the pun, it probably isn't adding anything to the discussion. A pun or meme-ish comment with additional _actual_ content however, is much more conducive to conversation, and doesn't risk derailing or dead-ending an otherwise perfectly good thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently came across my (admittedly cringey) blog post from 2005 (that's 15 years ago!): [https://kirubakaran.com/archive/2005-12-thoughts-of-paul- gra...](https://kirubakaran.com/archive/2005-12-thoughts-of-paul-graham/)

So turns out I discovered Paul Graham in 2005 via his "Great Hackers" talk, started following his essays, then discovered Reddit from that, and then Hacker News from that.

My HN profile says I created the account in Aug 10, 2007. But I remember lurking for a while, so I must have started using it a few months prior to that.

Seems like a lifetime ago.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was reading coding horror back in the 2000s when it was mentioned on that (Jeff Atwood's blog of Stack Overflow and Discourse fame, though he originally was known for his blog).

I think that triggered a large influx of new users right then so the community response was to post a ton of erlang articles to try and discourage new members and stave off an eternal september.

Seems like dang even got involved in that!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537347](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537347)

</comment><comment><USER7> IIRC, I discovered about YC back in 2011 from the book [https://www.amazon.com/Startups-Open-Sourced-Jared-Tame- eboo...](https://www.amazon.com/Startups-Open-Sourced-Jared-Tame- ebook/dp/B004ZULMR6)

Came to take a look, found HN.

</comment><comment><USER8> Shopping oriented research for a new workstation class computer rekindled my interest in _current_ tech after about a decade. Eventually, I wound up regularly looking at Techmeme. One day, there was a link to an HN discussion thread. In a few months, HN pretty much replaced Techmeme's river.

</comment><comment><USER4> I applied to YC, saw that they asked for HN handle and look positively on people who have said smart things on HN. So I suppose I should cut down on the trolling, lol.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been reading it for a long time. I only recently opened an account to comment/post. I think I heard about it from someone in one of my college classes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I probably found it via Paul Graham's web site. I don't remember exactly how I found his website, probably via his Lisp essays or "A Plan for Spam".

</comment><comment><USER11> I've learned about HN at my first job/apprenticeship from older coders 10 years ago. Same for twitter, basically :)

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been here so long on so many banned accounts that I can't even remember how or why I got here

</comment><comment><USER13> I heard Mike or Rob mention it on the Startups For The Rest Of Us Podcast back in 2011.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think I found Paul Graham's articles when googling for startup ideas and found HN as well.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been interested in Ycombinator for a long time... saw a reference to hackernews</comment>


Top 5 Fascinating Books on Languages and Linguistics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/candl-blog/top-5-fascinating-books-on-languages-and-linguistics-9140ce2b5e79 <comment><USER2> If you want to take your interest further, you can venture into the world of constructed languages, which is basically applied linguistics. Arika Okrent's _In the Land of Invented Languages_ is a great book about conlangs in general, and David Peterson's _The Art of Invented Languages_ focuses on conlangs in movies and TV.</comment>


AT&T Discussed Idea of Takeover in Time Warner Meetings - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-20/at-t-said-to-discuss-idea-of-takeover-in-time-warner-meetings <comment><USER2> TWC is already merging with Charter (interestingly, it's the _smaller_ company (Charter) who's "buying" TWC)

So .. how would this work?</comment>


The Irken Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.nightmare.com/rushing/irken/irken/lang.html

<comment><USER2> Is this named after the alien race in Jhonen Vasquez's Invader Zim?

<comment><USER3> Not a single reference to "invader" or "Zim" is found on the linked document :( What a tease, indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After I read the intro, I thought to myself "okay, it's statically-typed where Scheme is not. So why is that an advantage?" I don't want to read about how to use a new language without knowing what advantages that language has over other languages, so I can know if it's right for my needs. Therefore, I think the Features/Motivation section should be at the top, right under Syntax, not way at the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER5> >(define length

> () -> 0

> (_ . tl) -> (+ 1 (length tl)))

^ Syntax in my scheme (other than sexps)? Heresy.

<comment><USER6> what about '=>'

e.g.

       (define (test ls)
          (cond
            ((car ls) => (lambda (a) a))
            (else '())))
       >(test '(1 2 3))
       >1

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks like a very interesting language. I like the idea of exploring the statically typed Scheme space. I especially like the support for algebraic datatypes and the array notation. But a couple of things puzzle the hell out of me. Why Python (at all) and why not LLVM already. Using Python for the front end surely makes it much harder to set up an efficient API accessible from C. The use of C for the back end is perfectly defensible, but (and I'll have to read it more carefully to check) does this mean there is no (fast) interpreter and it is only a compiled language? If so, I'm disappointed, as the language itself looks absolutely great. With the LLVM Jit on the back end and a front end written in C, say, this would surely be a killer language.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks really cool. I've always thought that PreScheme was an interesting idea, it's been on my list of "maybe in the future" projects for a while now. This looks like a pretty nice update to it. I'd imagine that the combination of type inference and macros could lead to some really incomprehensible error messages, though.</comment>


Ask HN: What kind of computer chair do you use at home? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Three suggestions:

1\. Go to the store, sit in the chair, and buy the one that feels comfy but won' break your budget. Other than that don't worry about it.

2\. From my past experience in the web 1.0 era I've found that startups that focus on furniture over their own product don't do well in the long run.

3\. The real thing you want is a HUGE whiteboard.

<comment><USER3> Great suggestion on #1, and I recommend looking for a store that specializes in office furniture - not Staples or Office Depot.

When I started working from home, I did exactly this and sat in two dozen different chairs. I settled on this one [http://www.bestofficefurnituredeal.com/Eurotech-Mid-Back- Erg...](http://www.bestofficefurnituredeal.com/Eurotech-Mid-Back-Ergonomic- Task-Chair-Aviator-FM5505-Green-Mesh-Fabric_10049.htm) and never had a sore back from it in the 2 1/2 years I sat in it.

Now that I'm back in an office, I sit in a Steelcase Leap and have enjoyed this chair, too.

Just don't randomly pick one based on reviews, try them out. Even check to see if your local office furniture will let you take one home for a test drive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am either sitting on the couch with my laptop on my knees or at a standing desk.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some leather desk chair (don't even know the brand).

<comment><USER6> Same ... not sure mine even _has_ a brand, it's just a desk chair heh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Herman Miller Embody.

</comment><comment><USER8> I stand!

juststand.org</comment>


User Experience for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://uxmag.com/design/user-experience-for-developers

<comment><USER2> First time I've heard the "T Shaped Professional."

That is exactly what I've been aiming toward becoming. You're a 'deviner' (developer/designer), maybe I'm a bizdeveloper.

<comment><USER3> It's a relatively old term actually. I believe the guys from IDEO first introduced it. Very valid concept though.

Tim Brown from IDEO: [http://www.chiefexecutive.net/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=...](http://www.chiefexecutive.net/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications::Article&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=F42A23CB49174C5E9426C43CB0A0BC46) (sorry for the long link.)

<comment><USER4> Which is really just another form of the quote "know everything about something and something about everything."

<comment><USER3> Brevity.

<comment><USER5> Its also mentioned in Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Go to the homepage of this UX site and tell me what you think.

Yes you will probably zoom because the text is so crowded and small. Once you zoom you'll notice that some of the touts wrap wrong and break the layout slightly.

There must be an argument stating how this homepage has been optimized for some kind of reading pattern, but I just don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it my imagination or is every single person mentioned in the article a guy?

<comment><AUTHOR> It didn't even occur to me there was a gender bias when I wrote this article but you are right.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the response! It's a very good article but the gender ratio was the first thing that popped out at me ...

And talk about classic HN moments: the author of the original article thought my comment added information -- and I _still_ got downvoted. [http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2091&cpage=1#comment-...](http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2091&cpage=1#comment-116520)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple to Produce Face Masks - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-09/apple-design-teams-develop-special-face-masks-for-employees <comment><USER2> [https://www.macrumors.com/2020/09/09/apple-designs-masks- for...](https://www.macrumors.com/2020/09/09/apple-designs-masks-for- employees/)

Just for their employees, not for sale.

</comment><comment><USER3> 99.99$ PRO 199.99 $

<comment><USER4> Lol. Not mention the design will feature a bespoke 'over the head' connector, rather than string over the ears..</comment></comment>


The greatest economic boom ever? - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/07/23/100134937/index.htm?postversion=2007071209 <comment> patrickg-zill I think a large part of it is related to Internet-enabled service delivery, so that for instance, HP can hire people in Manila to provide services to companies in USA and Europe.

Another part of it is the economic modernizing going on - 2 years ago when I was in Manila, Philippines, you needed to have cash when shopping or eating out, and houses/condos were sold for cash (you had 48 monthly payments at 0% interest at the end of which you owned the place).

When I was there a few months ago, you could get mortgages up to 20 years long and the bug bundle of cash I brought was irrelevant - every store except street vendors took credit cards.

Danger is that the increases in real estate worldwide could give us the mother of all asset bubbles, everywhere, simultaneously.

</comment><comment><USER2> To a certain extent, we should have expected this for some time. An introduction to economics will teach you about productivity. Clearly, sending a tractor back 1000 years would do wonders for local productivity. The boost from the marginal US tractor would be orders of magnitude smaller.

This is pretty obvious.

What isn't obvious is why the developing world grows so slowly in spite of the multitude of available improvements from the first world. The article mentions looking for 20% growth in some countries. Is that really a high number considering people in the US is 40X richer than Eritrea? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita)

Increasing freedom is important here, clearly. Increased ease of communication must be playing a roll.

One thing I've never understood is why it seems people don't try to make much money off of the poorest 5B people. If you tap that market, the growth potential is ginormous. This reminds me of an excellent article about design for the world's poor. [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/science/29cheap.html?ex=11...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/science/29cheap.html?ex=1184904000&en=3c586de4efc78ca5&ei=5087)

<comment><USER3> Did you expect it to be obvious? It's a very complex problem and we are badly informed at best. Two _excellent_ presentations on these lines:

<http://www.okananter.com/wordpress/?p=21>

<http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/140>

As for marketing to the poor, I don't follow your reasoning. It strikes me as obvious that it's easier and a better ROI to make money from those who have some to spare than from those who don't. As currently underdeveloped countries get richer, more people will try and sell to them.

Are you talking about _positioning_ now so you'll reap the rewards when these countries get richer? That's not making money on the poor; it's investing money on advertising to them so you can hopefully get it back when they get rich enough to be potential customers. I wonder how many of the people in the position to make such a decision will look that far into the future. They should be looking to maximize shareholder value, and who invests looking for a ROI event 50 years from now?

[Edit: Of course I see why serving this market would be motivating, and I'm not saying it can't be profitable.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first greatest economic boom came with the mass replacement of animal power with steam power.

The second greatest economic boom started around 1910 with the coming widespread deployment of automobiles, airplanes, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, radio and telephones.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first was probably the use of language or tools. (Hard to say which came first, since other animals use tools too after a fashion.) After that the control of fire, the domestication of animals, agriculture, the city...

Fortunately they seem to occur at increasingly small intervals.

<comment><USER5> If they occur at increasingly small intervals, they are probably also decreasingly important and far-reaching. Probably we see those that are closer to us more important as they are.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that's the case. Due to exponential population growth, the majority of humans that have ever lived are still alive, so it would seem to be a natural hypothesis that most of the progress that has ever been made has been made in the past century.

<comment><USER5> According to most estimates the nr. of people who have ever lived is around 100 billion. People alive today are between 6 and 7 billion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Klotho – There May Be a Drug to Turbocharge Your Brain. Who Should Get It? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/health/klotho-brain-enhancement-dementia-alzheimers.html <comment><USER2> The article refers to Klotho as a "hormone." It appears to be an enzyme instead, and a membrane-bound enzyme to boot:

> Klotho is a transmembrane protein that, in addition to other effects, > provides some control over the sensitivity of the organism to insulin and > appears to be involved in ageing. ...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klotho_(biology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klotho_\(biology\))

That means that you're probably not going to make a drug my injecting Klotho or with Klotho tablets. Instead, your best bet is to make small molecules that inhibit or promote the activity of Klotho.

Then the article compounds the problem with:

> Now Dr. Dubal and other researchers are trying to build treatments based on > these results. Either by injecting Klotho into the body or by stimulating > the brain to make more of the hormone, they hope to treat diseases like > Alzheimer's.

Later:

> When Dr. Dubal injects Klotho into mice, for example, the hormone doesn't > actually get into the brain. It must trigger some series of reactions in the > body — but no one can say what they are.

This is why an injectable of the enzyme itself seem so unlikely:

1\. Brain penetration is difficult to engineer into molecules, and especially so with proteins. Small tends to be a requirement, and peptides rarely fit the requirement.

2\. An enzyme requiring to be bound in a membrane makes a terrible drug target because no only must it escape the body's housekeeping machinery, but must somehow survive with its membrane intact or miraculously become bound into the membrane of a passing cell. I'm unaware of any examples of that.

<comment><USER3> Can't say for sure since I'm not in this field, but some reddit research led to this:

>Whether acute klotho elevation represents a strategy that can rapidly enhance cognition, motor functions, and/or induce brain resilience is a gap in our knowledge of its therapeutic potential. Here we show that αKL-F, a fragment of the α-klotho protein similar to its secreted form, can acutely improve cognitive and motor functions following peripheral administration. It does so despite apparent impermeability to the blood-brain barrier in young, aging, and hSYN transgenic mice. Further investigation of αKL-F-mediated molecular mechanisms revealed activation of glutamatergic signaling and enhancement of synaptic plasticity.

[https://www.cell.com/cell- reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(17)309...](https://www.cell.com/cell- reports/fulltext/S2211-1247\(17\)30990-7)

So the research around klotho may produce something which doesn't actually need to cross the BBB as a retail drug, but on a simultaneous front, we have gene manipulation via CRISPR that would also increase klotho production.

<comment><USER4> You want to CRISPR yourself to gain a few IQ points?

Anyways that's at the least two decades away if even that, for what can at best be defined as recreational gene therapy.

<comment><USER3> >You want to CRISPR yourself to gain a few IQ points?

Depends on the side effects, depends if you can safely and reliably reverse the decision.

Would I personally be patient zero? No, not likely. Will someone be patient zero? Yeah, of course, there's always people willing to be on a new frontier.

<comment><USER5> > depends if you can safely and reliably reverse the decision

Can you safely and reliably reverse a find/replace on a program's source? Generally, unless you have a backup, the answer is no. There's also a lack of any kind of guarantee that the resulting program will compile, or if it does, that it will run without any more bugs than it had before.

CRISPR is just about the same way. We need to do research in ethical and humane ways, ways that balance the possible gains with the possible losses. We've already had an incident where human DNA was edited, and not particularly ethically or responsibly. I'd really wish that people not bring sci-fi futurist fantasy thinking to this particular table.

<comment><USER6> > Can you safely and reliably reverse a find/replace on a program's source? > Generally, unless you have a backup, the answer is no.

Bad analogy as source code is one of the things that is super easy to reliably reverse anything as it is always in version control.

<comment><USER7> I think in this context that would count as having a backup

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For a vision of how the ethical / legal landscape will probably unfold, one needs only look to stimulant drugs. They have approved therapeutic use in treating ADHD, but are frequently used as performance enhancers and recreationally by neurotypical people. In small (theraputic) doses, the deleterious effects are minor, but recreational use is often high enough to cause psychosis and addiction, so invites legal restriction.

Perhaps the most relevant question would be: what is the effect of having too much Klotho?

<comment><USER9> To play devil's advocate (of sorts)... Maybe the pathology-treatment paradigm needs challenging. Dangers/costs exist for "neuro-untypical" people too, as well as benefits.

Anyone will concede that costs can outweigh benefits for some diagnosed (neuro-untypical/pathological) patients. Is it impossible that benefits outweigh costs in neurotypcal patients? My experience is that professionals are uncomfortable with that thought.

I was one of the kids prescribed stimulants in the early days, circa 1990. Even as a kid, I smelled wierdness.

One doctor prescribed the medication, and asked for teacher feedback. If the drug did its job, then I had ADD. The test was comparing behaviour on & off the drug. If I didn't have ADD, the drug wouldn't work. Later on, the doctor told my mother: "If you take it, it'll do the same thing. It boosts concentration in everyone." This was a slip, kinda. They prefer if patients (and professionals) pretend that "the drug only works if you have the pathology, and is very dangerous if you don't."

I think the medical system is uncofortable about "enhancement" generally. For something to receive treatment, it needs to be a pathology, untypical... I sympathize with the reasoning, "first, do no harm" and also the potential reality of such drug use becoming more common.

Often times, this gets abstract... "what _is_ normal, man."

Anyway, I don't think ADD drug benefits or costs are, in reality, very closely correlated to your unmedicated baseline. Besides biilogy, a big factor is your job/school/environment, and what it takes to perform in that environment. If you're a football player or a film director, add drugs probably won't do much. If you're a chess player or ceo, they probably will, regardless of your unmedicated norm.

<comment><USER10> Agree with everything you said except for this last bit:

> If you're a football player or a film director, add drugs probably won't do > much.

It's obviously not a useful data point, but my own personal experience is that my physical endurance is greatly increased on the days I've taken my Adderall prescription.

If you read up on amphetamines, it's pretty interesting. They known to provide significant physical enhancement in a number of dimensions. The trick is keeping the user from developing a physical dependence.

<comment><USER9> Interesting. It's been a long time for me, but I don't recall those sorts of effects.

What I meant was that the importance of concentration (or really any drug- enhanced something) varies a lot by activity. You might be add-as-hell, but in your daily life that's fine. OTOH, you might be "neurotypical" but up to something where any enhancement is felt.

<comment><USER11> >What I meant was that the importance of concentration (or really any drug- enhanced something) varies a lot by activity.

I think it's important not to undersell the universal utility of _focus_. Even if you ignore the obvious physical advantages afforded by PED-stimulant drugs, like decreased reaction time or increased endurance.

If you model decision making in a zero-sum adverserial context like football or chess as an OODA loop[1], then a drug that decreases your processing time and decision making time is going to grant you an advantage by shortening that OODA loop.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doctor: Here's a drug that may improve your intelligence but it's relatively untested and since we don't have a good understanding of the nature of human intelligence or how it interacts with other personal characteristics or society as a whole we have no idea what the actual outcome will be for you.

Me: Don't care. Hit me.

Takes pill.

Me: Old me was stupid to make that decision. However I cannot regret his passing despite the acute melancholia that is now the cornerstone of my existence.

<comment><USER13> I would never in a million years wish upon another human being the degree of suffering that having a turbocharged brain has caused me throughout my life. Seeing people chase this is like watching a slow motion train wreck. I can think of no more effective way to reduce happiness, success, and human connection. It's a lonely and distant place to be. Nothing is worth this price. Don't pay it.

<comment><USER14> I've generally found that the most intelligent people have had overall delightful dispositions, and it's the above-average-intelligence folks who, being obsessed with smartness, are far less happy.

<comment><USER15> I think you'll find that only a smallish subset of above average intelligence folk are obsessed with smartness. Those are probably the less happy ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't want to take a drug to improve my performance while having to monitor for side effects, deal with withdrawal and worry about potential and unknown long term damage.

In particular I don't want to feel like I would have to take a drug just to keep up with everyone else who is on gear. That's how it seems to be in professional sports, but that's a niche. Brain drugs would be attractive to a large part of society.

<comment><USER17> This is one of the main reasons I like watching soccer. The smallest dude can dominate the world and it doesn't feel like I'm watching people destroy their health for a chance at making it big.

<comment><USER18> I think any sport that is more like an art is gonna be like that. Soccer is more of an art. There are positions where the performance enhancing drugs definitely will help you. (And I'm sure a lot of players use those drugs if they are at those positions.) But you won't become Pogba, Messi, or Neymar by shooting up. Those guys are artists.

Basketball is like that too. Shoot up with whatever you like, it will have no effect on your 3 point percentage. You want to shoot like Steph Curry? Then you'll need to be just as good an artist. You want to handle the ball as well as Kyrie Irving? You'll have to be just as good an artist.

I know people might disagree with this one, but I think some hockey positions are like that. People should try this experiment, go to your local ice rink, and try weaving through traffic at top speed on skates and putting the puck in that 6 inch window that a keeper _might_ give you to the back of the net. Steroids aren't gonna help with that.

Those are all sports where a little guy can come in and just dominate through sheer asymmetry of skill. It's a beautiful thing to watch.

<comment><USER19> PEDs can help with the things you describe because they allow you to train significantly longer and more frequently because you recover far better/faster.

<comment><USER20> I once worked with a professional cyclist. His attitude about PEDs were largely similar to yours: less about increasing your maximum ability and more that they allowed for better recovery between training/racing sessions. This is anecdotal, of course. No idea if it's true.

<comment><USER21> There absolutely are PEDs that increase your maximum ability when it comes to endurance sports, like EPO. A reporter tried microdosing EPO ([https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-32983932](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk- scotland-32983932)) and experienced a 7% increase in maximum performance in 7 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> proto-n If true that it enhances healthy people, I wonder why we didn't evolve to produce more of it? Why didn't mice?

Maybe side effects? Maybe being too smart is an evolutional disadvantage on an individual level or in small groups? Maybe producing the hormone is too costly?

Seems like too easy of a "hack" to improve such highly optimized systems such as humans or mice.

<comment><USER22> Why haven't we evolved photosynthetic skin? Why haven't we evolved the ability to regrow lost limbs and organs? Why haven't we evolved a better defensive system, delivering us from sickness and cancer?

The answers to all those questions are the same: evolution doesn't "care" about you being comfortable, or optimized. I quoted "care" because evolution is a process; it lacks a conscience and thus it cannot "care". But it has _drives_. Regarding you, evolution's drives are that you pass your genetic material down to your offspring, that you have as many offspring as possible, and that they repeat the cycle after you are gone.

All the benefits that you as an individual get from are either a direct consequence those drives, or a happy random accident, because there's a high degree of randomness involved.

The fact that there's randomness, plus the fact that individual comfort or productivity is not a drive, means that there could be places where us humans can "supplement" evolution - that's one of the roles of modern medicine. I'm not saying this particular compound will work as advertised; just that the room for improvement exists.

<comment><USER23> I agree. Personally, I'm very annoyed with myself at times at the tendencies that drive me that are constantly at odds with productivity or good health etc etc. as like you said it, evolution does not have the capacity to care about the desires of humans. In a macro-scale sense, humans figuring out how to overcome this is a type of evolution via intellect possibly as our intellect results in tools etc. via evolution.

<comment><USER23> It might also be something like limited resources as a driver in environmental pressure such as food being available to older members that did not pull their weight and a tribe had a better survivability if these individuals naturally died off earlier than later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If I understood this correctly, all the results with mice came from genetic modifications that, I guess, produce more Klotho since birth. Would be interesting to know if the same results can be obtained by injecting the hormone later in life.

<comment><USER25> From the article:

> she injected the hormone into the bellies of mice, to have a point of > comparison. Within a few hours of the injection, the mice started doing > better on cognition tests.

A link there points to a study that says it worked on both young and aging mice: [https://www.cell.com/cell- reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(17)309...](https://www.cell.com/cell- reports/fulltext/S2211-1247\(17\)30990-7?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2211124717309907%3Fshowall%3Dtrue)

<comment><USER24> Great, thanks. I wasn't focused enough while reading :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What a ckickbaity title for the times and what a strange way to talk about a new medical discovery.

Is there some kind of secretive cabal that decides who gets drugs? Yeah the price will be high at first very likely and if there is huge demand and an efficient way to produce it that price will likely come way down.

Why does everything have to be some kind of unfairness conspiracy?

<comment><USER27> Eyeballs! We want your eyebaaaals!

Not a drug. Not a hormone. Ginned up controversy written by someone with only a rudimentary understanding of biology and a deadline.

Headlines today: "Shapely Blonde With Piercing Blue Eyes May Have Discovered Cure For Cancer Or Something".

It's the idiocracy. Give up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It almost feels like the beginning of a real-world Flowers for Algernon. One wonders if we just haven't found the downside yet.

<comment><USER29> I can't decide whether it's journalistic malpractice not to mention Flowers for Algernon, or an incredible act of journalistic restraint and/or editing.

<comment><USER30> Is this even required reading anymore? I think we read it in 7th grade or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The irony of this potential drug is that we currently aren't smart enough to know any better. This potential drug plays mind games with you before you take it.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am somewhat sceptical of any easy chemical 'enhancement' treatments. If there was a simple chemical treatment that could enhance human performance with no down sides, given millions of years of evolution you'd think out bodies would have figured it out by now. Especially if it's an enzyme our bodies already produce. If it were a simple as produce more enzyme in the right place = better performance, why aren't our bodies already doing it?

Of course performance enhancing drugs of various kinds do exist, but there's always a risk or down side to go with it. The benefits are usually fairly marginal too. Maybe enough to bump the third best athlete in the world to being the best athlete in the world, but that doesn't actually take much in objective terms. Furthermore the greater the potential benefits from a drug like this, in order for our bodies not to have already exploited it presumably the down sides must be commensurately bad otherwise the tradeoff would be worthwhile.

So ok, such a treatment might work and might be useful in certain circumstances but I think a very healthy dose of caution and scepticism about easy medical fixes is in order.

<comment><USER33> Evolution doesn't optimize for intelligence or lifespan, it optimizes for reproduction

<comment><USER32> And therefore for those attributes which make one more likely to survive and reproduce in a given environment.

On it's own, being stronger could be expected to make one more likely to have surviving offspring, but if it's at the cost of other detrimental effects like paranoia, excessive resource usage, shorter life span, etc then it might not be worth it. Similarly higher intelligence would be an advantage to survival and reproduction, but only if it doesn't come with excessive mitigating costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Title reminded me of 'Limitless'

<comment><USER35> Same, and there was a whole tv show based off the movie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can we not first try this on a few apes and other primates preferably at an ape sanctuary run by a sadistic person ? Maybe someone can then make a documentary or movie based on this?

<comment><USER37> Island City (1994 film)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hormone "K".

Reference: [https://archive.org/details/TedChiangUnderstand](https://archive.org/details/TedChiangUnderstand)

</comment><comment><USER39> With what side effects, short term and long-term? How about resistance or dependecy?

</comment><comment><USER40> So in order to get really smart must qualify by getting really stupid first.

</comment><comment><USER41> They need to make this drug available before the 2020 presidential election.

<comment><USER42> Evil and dumb can be manageable. Evil and intelligent is frightening

<comment><USER43> > frightening

I really don't know why people use this term. Nothing is frightening in the world of man.

It's like this:

Whatever can be made by man, can be destroyed by man.

Edit: So many frightened people...

<comment><USER44> Nothing is frightening because everything can be destroyed? That's a new world view to me.

<comment><USER43> Here's some examples for your world view.

A man with a knife intent on doing harm, is stopped by one with a gun.

A man who develops a virus for a plague to kill people, is stopped by one who develops the cure.

A man who develops icbms to devastate a nation, is stopped by one intent to develop a missile defence shield.

There are many examples that I could continue with. The key takeaway here is that whatever some one does, in time there is an equal opposite reaction to counter it.

That's my world view. I personally don't fear anything. But then that's could be just how I'm built.

<comment><USER45> "A man who develops a world view to look badass on the internet"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> All i can think of is Ghostbusters - "I am Vince Klo(r)tho keymaster of Gozer!"

</comment><comment><USER47> Doubt this works.

Pretty sure intelligence is related to the general metabolic setup of the brain, which is almost certainly genetic after controlling for healthiness.

<comment><USER48> While metabolic health is almost certainly related to intelligence, what makes you think it's the defining factor? Wouldn't that mean all diabetics were less intelligent than non-diabetics? Also, almost all children have better metabolic health than almost all adults, and even their fluid intelligence is lower up to a certain age.

I do agree that increasing intelligence is probably very difficult. However, there are probably some limiting factors set by evolution (amount of energy consumed, heat produced, etc) which might be overcome through modern methods.

<comment><USER47> I stand my ground. Children have the most neuroplastic brains capable of learning multiple languages simultaneously and having them become instinctive.

Adults are largely screwed on that front.

Most masters of various practices started when they were children and people that got into the practices later on often can never come close to the same level.

Age 18-23 or whatever where people say they are the sharpest is just like the point where you know the most before neuroplasticity starts degrading faster.

[https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/28/5/764](https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/28/5/764)

This somewhat suggests that the episodic physiologic consequences of diabetics are linked with iq differences, which makes sense considering hypoglycemia and acidosis are direct hindrances to metabolic output and integrity.

Why would running make you smarter? It is known it does 100%. Well running improves the efficiency of mitochondria and at a larger scale the blood flow to the brain. But of course that won't endlessly improve your intelligence. It'll hit a cap at your systems maximal efficient output. Similar to genetic muscular strength.

Energy consumption and heat production are directly related to metabolism.

<comment><USER49> Intelligence can mean a great many things.

If we are simply making people better at cognitive tests then whats the point really? Nothing exciting there.

If we are making more Einsteins and Steve Jobs then Im more inclined to say we are increasing our intelligence in a meaningful way.

I think we need to be careful about our scales and definitions when speaking on the true nature of human intelligence and intellect otherwise we're all just blowing hot air. IQ is an antiquated measure of intelligence for example. If we are talking about extra IQ points then who cares.

<comment><USER47> Cognitive testing is actually the most statistically sound stuff we've ever come up with in psychology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think the question they're asking is already observable. Who is privileged to have finances that can pursue a healthy lifestyle compared to the person having to order off the dollar menu. Who can afford supplements, exercising and leisure time without stress. No matter it's unfair and people have no trouble not caring when they're the privileged. Nobody's going to take the fallacious high road with any drug that increases lifespan or lifestyle and give it to the less privileged or unfortunate compared to themselves.

<comment><USER51> Pretty much. The common mythology of the fat rich guy is mostly untrue. Its the wealthy that have time to devote to weightlifting and even hiring a personal trainer, eating expensive protein shakes and supplements, possibly even getting TRT from a doctor.

Wealth supports health for most folk unless they are slimes like Harvey Weinstein who would rather rape and eat grapes and drink bottles of wine like a heathen.

<comment><USER52> Though you don't see the health -> wealth progressions lauded as often, this does not mean they don't exist.</comment></comment></comment>


Middle East Turmoil - WSJ Interactive Info-Graphic - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704504404576183972416733938.html#articleTabs%3Dinteractive

<comment><AUTHOR> I this to be a surprisingly good use of interactive design (one not possible with a static newspaper). Note that you can slice by geo or by time.</comment>


Ask HN: What's an average salary for a web developer? - <AUTHOR>

PHP, JS, jQuery, MySQL, HTML/CSS, 2-3 years experience. <comment><USER2> You can use salary.com to get charts of averages salaries

I just used "Interface Designer - Web" in Los Angeles and got 10th-25th-75th-90th percentiles of $77,029, $81,850, $103,169, $117,756

They describe a "Interface Designer - Web" as:

 _Designs html prototypes, visual interfaces and interaction of web-based applications. Designs and evaluates visual human interfaces utilizing user- centered design principles. Implements the user interface design. Works with the product development team to design online user experiences. Ensures user experience is formulated to achieve the goals of the online entity. May require an associate's degree with 0-2 years of experience in the field or in a related area. Has knowledge of commonly-used concepts, practices, and procedures within a particular field. Relies on instructions and pre- established guidelines to perform the functions of the job. Works under immediate supervision. Primary job functions do not typically require exercising independent judgment. Typically reports to a manager._

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Thanks. Any ideas for Berlin/Europe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How about for an entry-level web developer in the Bay Area?

</comment><comment><USER4> It depends. Where do you live? Who are your clients? How complex are the projects? How big is the company? How many other staff are there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Small company, 8-10 employees, 2/3 of which are developers. Front end interface development. Let's consider US and/or Western Europe.

<comment><USER5> The US and or Western Europe are huge places with a crazy amount of differentiation between cities and states.

Most places it probably starts off with a similar salary to middle class wages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, how about Berlin vs. Boston?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A better site to get answers for salaries is glassdoor.com - you can see what web developers at actual different companies make. And you can see it by city, by years of experience, etc...</comment>


Show HN: Midori – library for animated image backgrounds - <AUTHOR> https://aeroheim.github.io/midori/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

I wanted to share a library that I've been working on for a few months now called midori. This library was built with three.js and uses WebGL. It allows users to use their own images as animated backgrounds for their websites.

The primary features supported by the library are:

      - Configurable camera
      - Animated transitions between backgrounds
      - Post-processing effects & particles

Implementation-wise, there's a lot of interesting stuff accomplished via camera manipulation, shaders, and tweening.

I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks for taking a look, it means a lot!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is really cool!</comment>


Can we really get mad at bad programmers? - <AUTHOR> http://recoding.blogspot.com/2013/02/being-programmers.html

<comment><USER2> I agree that a lot of code is "bad" looking back at it but, I think there's still a difference between bad programmers who when they find a screw are quite happy to drive it in with a hammer and good programmers who go looking for something better, even if they end up with a butter knife instead of a screwdriver.</comment>


Ask HN: why most startups use ruby and rails? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I would like to understand why ruby and rails is used heavily in startups? Thanks. <comment><USER2> It's because Rails is essentially a "batteries included" full stack framework which helps a startup focus on building a business and not on building technology infrastructure. Outside of Rails and Django, you're left to make a lot of decisions to get the same level of functionality before you can start building even an MVP.

Here's what you get out of the box with Rails:

1) Database schema management via Rails migrations which work great with mature RBMSs like Postgres and MySQL.

2) A solid ORM (ActiveRecord) which makes CRUD super easy and intuitive.

3) An active community with lots of open source libraries (gem) to do just about anything you want.

4) Highly productive ways to work with frontend (CoffeeScript) and backend (routing, controllers, active_record, etc).

5) Great documentation and ecosystem around it.

Contrast this with Go, Node, and other OSS ecosystems and you're often left to make a lot of the decisions on your own with immature libraries. Often to get to the same place, you'll be inventing a lot of your own infrastructure.

Node is probably the closest to approaching a "batteries included" status with the MEAN stack, but it's not quite there yet.

You can certainly get all of what Rails comes with out of the box on any stack, but unless you know it really well, there's a lot of decisions to be made. With a startup, the kind of analysis paralysis that often comes with technology decisions can really kill an idea in its early stages.

<comment><USER3> What does Rails do that Django doesn't? It seems like Python language is much easier to learn, with very clean syntax.

And Django's architecture is usually simple and easy to understand as well -- e.g. the official tutorials have you do a lot of things "by hand" before showing you parts of the Django standard library that automate them.

<comment><USER4> > It seems like Python language is much easier to learn, with very clean > syntax.

This is the kind of stuff that used to start flamewars on Usenet ha. I respect your personal opinion, but just to put a different opinion (mine) out there: I find Python very opinionated and feels kind of "old" (like, when was the last time an OO language required you to provide a reference to the object as a parameter within the methods?).

Also in my opinion, even now in 2014 it is still not clear what version of Python should people use 2.x or 3?, given that there is still a bunch of code out there that is not compatible with 3 (granted, there are tools to convert that code, but that makes just an additional step to do compared to just using Ruby).

All in all, these are just opinions. Both of the stands are very respectable, but I wanted to put this out to compare with your opinion. I don't use Rails, even though I use ruby a lot, so on those frameworks I cannot comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it's a regional thing? Where I live, Python and Django is much bigger than Ruby and Rails.

<comment><USER6> Unless you're in SF, it's easier to find Pythonistas than Rubyists, hipster jokes notwithstanding.

But the stats show the giant, kitchensink frameworks are pretty even in measurable terms, but Rails had about 5x individual committers.

[https://www.ohloh.net/p/rails](https://www.ohloh.net/p/rails)

[https://www.ohloh.net/p/django](https://www.ohloh.net/p/django)

<comment><AUTHOR> "Unless you're in SF". isn't there where most startups are? so if many of them use ruby and rails in SF why it isn't the main framework outside SF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bias: I'm mostly a Ruby dev, compile OpenSSL and Ruby from source.

For greenfield apps, node has the advantage of being mostly the same language back- (node) and front-end (browser). Hence why Asana and others use it.

Python is more popular than Ruby, but they're roughly equivalent sans religious wars.

The other thing is that Rails is a mature, well-defined architecture with tons and tons of gems.

The bower asset packages can be used straight via

        # Gemfile
        source 'https://rails-assets.org'

It's also not hard to get gulp and phantomjs setup.

General advice though...

Build outside-in. (Frontend first, backend later)

Building inside-out can lead to wasting time building things that just aren't needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Build outside-in. (Frontend first, backend later)

Building inside-out can lead to wasting time building things that just aren't needed."

I will keep it in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Because for startup to survive it needs to take minimal time from paper napkin idea pitch to production deployment. And RoR has all the bells and whistles packaged together. The quicker the time - the quicker VC's gets return on their investment.

Having said that, please note that ruby on rails is one of the slowest performing frameworks:

[http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7&test=query)

</comment><comment><USER8> To understand Ruby, and why anyone including a startup wants to use it, you need to understand more about its founder, Matz. He is a truly amazing individual.

Here's a recent interview with Matz from RubyConf13 (Miami Nov 2013) [http://multifaceted.io/2013/rubyconf-13-a-chat-with- matz/](http://multifaceted.io/2013/rubyconf-13-a-chat-with-matz/) that may be of interest.

It's about making developers happy…

<comment><USER6> Matz's prefecture business folks are awesome and supportive. I think I still have a pile of their postcards somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's quick to get started with (and it's not PHP). It runs on *nix/Mac OS/Windows. Tools like scaffolding let you move on from simple CRUD stuff to business logic.

I'm not a rails dev but these seem like desirable properties, especially if you are working with limited resources to get a prototype or mvp going asap.

<comment><USER10> do you sure it can be run on windows server or windows desktop with all additional gems that can be used for development?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think because it's easier to learn and require less code so startup may focus on product instead of code. This should be true especially if you compare RoR to java technologies, but i'm working on a project where Grails was the requirement and i think Grails has a good future because thank to Groovy it requires a lot less code but has its foundation on java frameworks (hidden to the developer) which are very stable, solid and mature (and obviously complex!)

</comment><comment><USER12> Well its as heavily used as other technologies I think it would be safe to say. RoR, Django, Synphony are some of the frameworks I am constantly hearing about for start ups. Just depends on the programming language preference.

</comment><comment><USER13> Your question has already been answered at Quora:

[http://www.quora.com/Ruby-on-Rails-web-framework/Why-do- so-m...](http://www.quora.com/Ruby-on-Rails-web-framework/Why-do-so-many- startups-use-Ruby-on-Rails)

P.S. You need to sign-in with your Google or Facebook account to view the page.

<comment><USER14> > Rails developers often use Macs. For some people, this means nothing. For > others, this means the difference between getting hired or passed over. > YMMV.

I must say this made me laugh. Is the tech scene getting too stupid?

<comment><USER15> What? I must say, this is the first I've heard of this trend. Personally, I might be a little querulous when interviewing a dev who used Windows by preference (though this would be irrelevant once they'd demonstrated or failed to demonstrate technical skill), but I've never worked with a hiring manager who'd discount a web dev who used a Linux-based operating system.

<comment><USER14> Do you feel the same about Windows?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Because they don't mind using garbage tools, as long as they are hip and trendy.

<comment><USER16> I can't stand answers like this ... why is it a "garbage tool?"

<comment><USER3> My main complaint: The syntax is awful [1].

The runtime is also extremely bloated. To run one fairly simple web application with a handful of users, Rails uses well over 500 MB. I have no idea what it could possibly be doing with that much memory -- is it trying to make a separate object for every pixel? Startup for Ruby apps often takes over a minute.

Ruby is Rails. It's hard to find information about using Ruby for non-Rails projects. So as a beginner, not only do you have Ruby's weirdness to deal with, you're often fighting the number of moving parts in a modern web application.

Also, "magic." I haven't used Rails enough to know about this, but I hear "magic" is common, e.g. (I've heard) Rake uses some horrible hack to monkey patch the lexer or somesuch so it can have its own syntax. This kind of thing leads to code that's even harder to understand because you now have non-local dependencies. To be fair, Python also allows monkey patching, but also has a strong "don't-do-that" cultural norm.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899)

<comment><USER17> Rails is not bloated, it just comes with a lot of features. I'd suggest watching these videos.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ex8EEv- WPs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ex8EEv-WPs)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUNdKVG2W-8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUNdKVG2W-8)

A typical Rails instance will use 100 - 150mb, and does not take a minute to start up. Have you actually used Rails? I have several large projects and none have ever taken that long to startup.

I use Ruby for non Rails projects all the time and had no issue finding how to include Active Record and Action Mailer into a Ruby CLI application.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tips for Starting your own Software Business in 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1483 <comment><USER2> I was expecting a headline for picking the right partner. So let me add, if you're a software developer, I think your co-founder shouldn't be necessarily a developer. Because as you have mentioned yourself that having a software is just one side of the coin, and marketing it is another side, so I one can pick a sales/marketing guy as a co-founder, with some knowledge of development. He may help you get the customers you need.</comment>