Lenovo Yoga computers have parts that explode - <AUTHOR> https://adammunich.com/lenovo-yoga-computers-have-parts-that-literally-explode/ <comment><USER2> I have a Yoga 530 (ARR/Ryzen). It's absolutely great for the price. Obviously it's not the same model as the author has, but to be frank that title is pure, utter sensationalist trash.

<comment><USER3> Do you have problems with your wifi?

<comment><USER4> AFAIK the wifi problem (in the case of the device I looked at, that manifested as constant wifi drops unless the laptop was plugged in (frequent enough to make it essentially unusable)) is just sort of a ...thing that one particular model of defective Wi-Fi card will do. IIRC it's a Realtek card.

It seems like a software or driver problem, but no software fix seemed to work. Only replacement with [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079QH5KW1/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079QH5KW1/) solved the issue.

<comment><USER5> Huh, that's interesting. I once worked for a laptop manufacturer, and the inverse problem (wifi only working when on battery) happened there -- it was an issue of high frequency electronic shielding off the power supplies. Something about how the modern auto-layout PCB software the ODM wanted to use had no way to take shielding issues into account and would want to lay traces in routes that an electrical engineer would never even consider.

I can't think how the inverse problem would happen, though. Maybe it's software indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The site is suffering from Hacker News' hug-of-death. But it looks like it was a genuine rant about a piss poor customer experience. I have had issues with the Yoga too before where the display hinge malfunctioned but I had a much better experience with Lenovo support. They replaced it for free even though it was outside the warranty window (albeit by only a month). To each his/her own. Recommending people to never buy a Yoga is probably a tad bit too extreme.

</comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the self-destructing speakers on the old Samsung Chromebook. Set wrong mixer settings and they silently burn up. In my case they melted through the case before I realized what was wrong.

[https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2012/12/10/how-to-fry- spea...](https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2012/12/10/how-to-fry-speakers-in- your-chromebook/)

</comment><comment><USER8> There are a lot of people who praise ThinkPads online, and that seems to gesture into good will in general for Lenovo. Unfortunately a lot of their cheaper computers are just trash. Even in the ThinkPad line they have now introduced the A, L and E series that are more "affordable", but in reality they cut a lot of corners that make the X, T and P series good.

<comment><USER9> to be honest the budget thinkpads have always been crap (as have most of lenovos non thinkpad laptops) its only the T/X/P/W models that were worth looking at, its entirely possible the newer AMD ones are better than in the past but i think AMD sill have a gen or two to go before theyre competitive in the laptop market

still theres nothing out there id consider replacing my X1C with, its a fantastic machine as was the first gen one it replaced, im not loyal to many companies for things, if i think i can get better elsewhere i will but ive yet to find a laptop that fits me better

good thinkpads are expensive (at least new, theyre very affordable refurbished) but to me theyre worth it as they simply last longer, my laptop lives a very hard life and im something of a cruel owner, lesser systems have caved in from such a life in the space of 12 months. my X1C took 5 solid years of abuse being hauled all over the world in an overstuffed backpack (including glasses of orange juice, beer, JD and coke, Umeshu and coffee spilled in it) the only issue it ever had was that a couple of letters on the keyboard stopped working following the umeshu spillage, i could probably have cleaned it up with isopropyl but i picked up a replacement for 15 quid instead

so yeah basically avoid the E/L/A series and maybe even the Tx95 (AMD) range and youre likely to get a very good system (with unquestionably the best keyboard on any modern laptop)

<comment><USER10> > _to be honest the budget thinkpads have always been crap (as have most of > lenovos non thinkpad laptops)_

Depends how far back your memory goes. I don't recall such issues when IBM owned the brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Lenovo seems to have gone down in quality. Their supply chain also doesn't seem to be doing too well. Orders for a lot of their models are delayed by 6 weeks at least. Those who got deliveries are complaining about poor build quality, DOA and other issues. A glimpse through their forums will give you a good idea of how broken things currently are.

<comment><USER9> i think it depends on where you are, last year when buying mine id heard of terrible delays that would no doubt be made worse by my ordering on black friday, but 7 short days later it arrived with no QC issues at all, i can only put this down to the fact that im in the UK and maybe the units sent here come out of a different production plant

i had 2 systems from them last year and both were free of QC issues and arrived within 10 days of ordering. we do pay for this privilege though as thinkpads are drastically more expensive here than in the US (my X1C6 was almost double the US price for the same model)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro laptop, sold between mid-2015 to February-2017 have similar issues:

[https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/aviation/457337-fa...](https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/aviation/457337-faa- bans-some-apple-laptops-from-flights-over-fire-risk)

<comment><USER13> How is that similar? In the Lenovo case, it's a transistor that's failing, and it doesn't sound like there's any immediate danger from it, whereas the Apple laptop batteries are literally catching fire.

Yes, both are design defects, but that's the only thing these issues have in common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As the owner of a Yoga 720-15, I can tell you that this laptop has had and is still having so many hardware problems... In general, Lenovo isn't exactly known for their QA process.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have Yoga 920 that's close to the end of its two year warranty period. May as well extend it just in case.

</comment><comment><USER16> TL;DR : The audio speakers blows up just after warranty expires. Click-bait title, not a safety hazard.

<comment><USER13> The speakers don't blow up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> nasty, i suffered a similar issue but on a much bigger scale on a bitcoin mining asic, the explosion did some pretty brutal damage to the board

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I fixed the website, why is the post flagged?</comment>


Microsoft confirms Windows 10 is downloaded to PCs whether or not users opt in - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2425381/microsoft-is-downloading-windows-10-to-your-machine-just-in-case <comment><USER2> > Microsoft told us: "For individuals who have chosen to receive automatic > updates through Windows Update, we help upgradable devices get ready for > Windows 10 by downloading the files they'll need if they decide to upgrade.

Did they actually? Here's an article[0] with a longer version of that quote from August 6th. So did Microsoft actually tell The Inquirer anything, or are they recycling other rag's stories and subtly altering the quotation? Did The Inquirer even contact Microsoft for comment?

[0] [http://www.techrepublic.com/article/admins-rail-against- unwa...](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/admins-rail-against-unwanted-and- unexpected-windows-10-downloads/)</comment>


Flat Design: Why to question Nielsen Norman's research on the design style - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@seandexter1/flat-design-why-you-should-question-nielsen-normans-research-on-the-trendy-design-style-39a991517e02 <comment><USER2> > The difference in visual contrast between the buttons acts as a confounding > variable.

If you have read the original research, then you should read this post. The original research title is misleading.</comment>


Is rugby too dangerous for children to play? - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/is-rugby-too-dangerous-for-children-to-play-9778518.html <comment><USER2> For balance, a recent study conducted by the University of Bath and published in the BMJ showed that a series of simple exercises can drastically reduce (by 72%) injury in schoolboy rugby players.

[http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/51/15/1140](http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/51/15/1140)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are a couple of fixes that have been suggested.

1) Ban tackles. This has the advantage of being safe for all children who don't tackle, but possibly increases risk as soon as they start tackling because they have no idea how to tackle safely.

2) Stop grouping child rugby players by age, and start grouping them by both size and skill. This is especially important since schools have increased professionalism of the game - they're all more serious about it, which risks more injury.

<comment><USER2> Alternatively, ban rugby in schools, where winning and school pride are placed above individual development and often taught by people that are not qualified to do so.</comment></comment>


Beyond English, the language of the future - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/06/whats_the_language_of_the_future/singleton/

<comment><USER2> The most salient point I got from the article: an increasing number of people learning English are using it only to speak to others who do not speak it natively. A couple of illustrations:

\- I have witnessed one student from Hong Kong and one student from Beijing use English to bridge the gap between Cantonese and Mandarin (as well as pen & paper).

\- My French is very poor, so the only people that I can converse with in French are those with a really bad English accent. I can well imagine that English is worse, what with its crazy spelling and idioms.

<comment><USER3> I post and correct on a language exchange site. One day, one of my Japanese friends there received a correction from someone with the worst English I have ever seen on that site, including that of people learning English. She immediately stated that she only wanted corrections from people who were fluent in English, and asked that he not correct her entries any more.

He blew up. He claimed he WAS fluent.

After a huge row, it turned out that everyone in his village in China speaks English like that and they are convinced they are fluent. I can only assume that's because they use it with each other, and don't try to communicate with people who are natively fluent.

<comment><USER4> And that's why there's so many variant of English, including the broken ones. Manglish (Malaysian English), Singlish (Singaporean English) and much more.

Though not biology, I think this is how language evolves. For example in China, you have so many dialects (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese etc). And if you drill down to a dialect itself there are slight differences. You can roughly identify which part of province that person is from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If only it had a consistent pronounciation, speech recognition would be so much more widely used.

<comment><USER6> The scripts from India has very consistent reading or pronunciation system.</comment></comment>


The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto (1988) - <AUTHOR> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-crypto-manifesto.html <comment><USER3> I don't understand the barbed wire metaphor. Couldn't crypto have the effect of putting content that would otherwise be freely available in the current internet behind monetary barriers? Couldn't cryptocurrencies enable further control by monopolizing media industries? The technology is powerful, whether or not it will be liberating is to be determined.

Edit: didn't realize this was from 1993! Amazing to read that perspective!

<comment><USER4> As the saying goes: information wants to be free. In a world where everyone can interact with each other completely anonymously that becomes even more true, since governments cannot effectively penalize people for distributing said information.

For example, imagine a version of The Pirate Bay hosted as a Tor hidden service, combined with a completely anonymous torrent-like P2P file sharing system.

<comment><USER5> Ugh, I hate that "information wants to be free" nonsense. Information doesn't want anything, it isn't a thing that can want. People want information and very rarely do people actually want it to be free.

<comment><USER6> People generslly want information they don't currently have but want to be free for then to acquire. People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire.

<comment><USER4> > People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to > other people to acquire.

I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, pirated copies of media are typically created when someone legally purchases a copy of the work and then publishes it for others to use entirely for free. I find it very hard to believe that the people posting these pirated works want those works to be expensive for others to acquire.

<comment><USER6> > > People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive > to other people to acquire.

> I don't think that's necessarily true.

You seem to have mistaken "often" for "always".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Relevant: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hbis7/us_congress...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hbis7/us_congress_going_full_1984_on_bitcoin_and_assets/)

TLDR; There's currently a bill to make cryptocurrencies illegal. (and other stuff that the government can't control)

<comment><USER8> Honestly, this seems like a reasonably sane bill. IANAL but it does not seem to make cryptocurrencies illegal, more the opposite: it recognizes them as cash and places the same requirements that other financial instruments have on them...with a review period of 18 months. That seems _good_ for crypto more than anything else.

If anyone knows more about this and wants to explain why I'm misunderstanding this I'd be thankful :-)

<comment><USER9> Don't know what the _HN_ abbreviation, IANAL, means but in my ignorance it just looks quite distasteful. :\

<comment><USER10> It isn't really specific to HN, It's been in use since the days of Usenet, as I recall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, > citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and > tax evaders...

Bitcoin

Silkroad

The crypto wars

The crypto wars 2: The empire strikes back

and that's just one poignant sentence in the fairly small but very accurate manifesto.

<comment><USER12> It's quite funny to see people promoting such conspiracy theories, considering they've already been proven wrong by reality.

Apart from some banana republics, governments around the world have been incredibly relaxed with regards to Bitcoin. The rules that have been established are as favourable as anyone could imagine (i. e. trading being exempt from VAT etc.).

Yes, they have insisted on existing rules, mostly of the know-your-customer variety. It's funny you're citing "national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders", as if those were just talking points to hide the real reasons. Because for the life of me I can't think of any other, legal, activity governments are trying to suppress by regulating bitcoin. What exactly is that killer app of bitcoin that so frightens the establishment?

<comment><USER13> "What exactly is that killer app of bitcoin that so frightens the establishment?"

Right now in order to spend ones bitcoins (with a few exceptions) one has to change them into fiat currency and that's where the establishment can monitor and control the money flow.

What will happen when a critical mass of service providers and product sellers will gladly accept crypto coins? That's when one can hide his cash reserves from the prying eyes of the state. And they'll be able to pay smaller and smaller taxes.

And I doubt that the establishment will be happy to have smaller and smaller budgets at their disposal.

<comment><USER12> Yes, probably. It's just slightly insane to think you can opt-out of paying taxes via technology, or that taxes are somehow for the benefit of some nebulous "establishment".

That's empirically true, for only a tiny sliver of very strange people still fantasise about some Randian utopia of every-man-for-himself. And it's logically inescapable, since there's no way to sustain today's societies without the cooperation established by taxes.

<comment><USER14> > _since there 's no way to sustain today's societies without the cooperation > established by taxes._

To the degree one can differentiate societies sustained by taxes from sustained by lines of credit extended to societies in promise of future taxes of which are now under question…

New "establishments"[0] will form that better serve those who reap the benefits of engaging in crypto-economic behaviors, Old ones will die/become obsoleted/increasingly ineffective at enforcing their diktats, some overlap of functionalities may exist/remain between such. Same as it ever was.

10k software engineers effectively dodging/avoiding taxes on 100k/y of income, who can organize/allocate resources to some other ends seems like a plausible block of people to put up some effective asymmetrical resistance against taxes to governments of various sizes over the world. Yet still a drop in the bucket in terms of population size.

Do a few engineers who are unable to imagine such, really pose a threat agaisnt people are/trying to create something new?

[0] I use this very loosely, could be traditional meat spaces ones, or decentralized digital networks with active and passive mechanisms for ensuring survival.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And the follow-up: The Cyphernomicon (1994) [http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.t...](http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt)

Ah memories...

<comment><USER16> Reminds me of the title my favorite book: cryotonomicon. Highly recommend it.

<comment><USER17> Typo.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you haven't read it, there are some great bits in Cryptonimicon that kind of captures the spirit of some of that crowd. Great book in any event.

<comment><USER19> What gets me is that I read that book before I discovered bitcoin. So when bitcoin was brand new and worth only cents I looked at it like sci-fi and doubted it would ever take off.

I'm still kicking myself over that.

<comment><USER18> Maybe there's something to learning about the tech itself, but actual bitcoins seem like tulip bulbs to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I couldn't tell when this was written. It appears to be from 1993:

[http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/manifestos/cryptoanarc...](http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/manifestos/cryptoanarchist.html)

Edit: See comments below. Turns out it's from 1988.

<comment><USER21> Yep. I remember when it was published. I was on the Cypherpunks list back then, and it was a fascinating group for a while.

Tim May was a vocal, eloquent proponent of anarcho-capitalism[1], and believed that crypto and the net were crucial tools that would tip the balance of power between the individual and the state, cause an erosion of tax-collection powers, and eventually tip the world into a mode of 'voluntary' interaction that others, myself included, argued is indistinguishable from feudalism.

[1] For those of you who are aware of the various minute distinctions made around these schools of thought, May proposed a very "hard" form, arguing that 'voluntary' agreement to slavery and whatnot were perfectly acceptable.

<comment><USER22> > a mode of 'voluntary' interaction that others, myself included, argued is > indistinguishable from feudalism

Good thing you've got The State extorting and enslaving you then, to protect you from that "feudalism".

<comment><USER23> I'd rather a democratically elected state than a cabal of wealthy warlords.

<comment><USER24> Interesting that you see a difference. Who do you think the democratically elected are? "Wealthy ..."

<comment><USER23> Its telling that you don't see a difference.

And An-Caps never seem to understand why nobody takes them seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's an ongoing battle, even if eventual victory is inevitable. Plenty of work remains to put convenient, strong encryption; not to mention anonymity; in the hands of everyone all the time.

[https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis](https://github.com/andreas- gone-wild/snackis)

</comment><comment><USER26> I clicked thinking "I bet that's Tim May." I was not disappointed.

Some of his posts in the '90s were tough to read, but they were interesting without fail. Anyone know if/where he posts nowadays?

</comment><comment><USER27> An entertaining exploration of this was recently written in "A Lodging of Wayfaring Men" by Paul Rosenberg.

Those who fear the loss of the freedom that the Internet once represented (in relation to recent battles of net neutrality, tor monitoring/capturing, fear of brutal regimes' scrutiny and persecution, etc.) have yet another avenue of hope.

I have a basic inspiration and hope in humans growing and learning, increasing our ethics to begin to catch up to our technology.

</comment><comment><USER28> And still, the rich get richer, the powerful even more so... cutting barbed wire hasn't changed anything. Casts some serious shade on the power of crypto- anarchy to change anything. Anarchy, like libertarianism, are lovely notions with no direct roots in reality. Here's hoping blockchain democratizes and makes more transparent at least part of the puzzle.

<comment><USER29> It's not that there's anything wrong with the technology. It's just that people can be exploited. And they get exploited. So the hierarchical power structures remain in place.

Seriously, what better dream to plant in the slaves' minds but the idea that "a simple little computer program" can set you free? And what better way to control them and stifle their rising-up than by the constant deception that they have more power than they do? Fools. They're all god-damned fools.

People talk about VR being 10 years away. We've already been living in it for ages. The Matrix. Democratic Theatre. We've all been living in a dream world. I think we like it here. Because, IMHO, most people would rather blame a higher power for their sh*t than take responsibility to control their own lives.

And whether that higher power's the state or some religion, doesn't matter. It still sets up the same power dynamic that makes most people, IMHO, slaves.

<comment><USER30> > what better dream to plant in the slaves' minds but the idea that "a simple > little computer program" can set you free?

Yet when people overthrow tyrannical governments to then establish democracy the planning is done secretly.

And when tyrannical governments come to power the first thing they do is monitor and restrict communication.

This has been true many times in history in the last hundreds years.

<comment><USER29> I don't believe in encryption as a tool that can give any real asymmetry to an individual or conspiracy against the State. I get that you do believe it can.

Another point is -- all governments monitor communications and we don't call them tyrannical. Take the Germans. They're notorious. But people consider the Germany government quite liberal.

Restricting communications does not have to be a tool of "cruel, unreasonable, oppressive or arbitrary use of power or control." It can be deliberate, reasoned and helpful. China restricts their communications and they enjoy a lot of civil harmony, and a huge amount of national pride.

The media in the US practice a form of "information restriction and control" by tightly directing the narratives, and editorial perspective ( and sometimes even the facts ) that people are consuming. That's been the case for a long time. No one's calling it a tyranny, even tho plenty of Americans distrust authority.

I think your model of tyranny and your belief in crypto are unrealistic.

The reason I don't believe in crypto is because I consider everything as "security theatre." IMHO, every single cryptosystem that exists has already been broken. The pretense that it hasn't is just a charade.

Note: I believe in the _strong_ version of the above statement. That RSA / EC / AES / DES and so on are broken. But the weak version, that protocols, physical monitoring, side channel attacks, and other vectors make every practical cryptosystem broken is kind of born out by the events of the last few years.

Whether you believe in the strong or the weak version of that statement the net result is the same, no? I think so, anyway.

<comment><USER31> Few loose marbles for your jigsaw, use as you please.

Lucky unhappy creature, you nailed it (at least if you ask me). Twice.

Circles of dreamers, merrily dancing around technodgod of their choice. Hail Crypto!

"Optimism is cowardice", Spengler.

I am afraid that most people only care about just one thing, and dreaming does not stand in a way of it, maybe even helps.

Feels terrible, to be shaken out of the dream, eh? OTOH, a real porridge, poor smell but what an honor!

Universe goes towards maximum entropy, so reason is, in fact, against the odds. Squared, if it happens on top of life.

It might be good nobody takes words too seriously. Blaming the messenger is not nice on the receiving end. The species is going to harvest all that it saws, both short and long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Another prescient text about how the internet and cryptography will change the logic behind the existence of nation states as we know them today is: The Sovereign Individual (James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg) - <USER2> recommend it, I felt like I was pulling back the curtain on the true workings of the world.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone starting a discussion about libertarianism and anarchism or Bitcoin in general in this thread is probably trolling and not interested in a serious discussion, so don't waste your time.

(Maybe HN should have 1 Mega-Thread for all this stuff, like many subreddits have?)

</comment><comment><USER34> The comments here mention crypto currencies. However, currency is anathema to anarchist societies and isn't mentioned in the manifesto. Anarchists recognize that currencies and markets are products of the state and using this tool in a stateless society makes no sense. A currency and markets primary purpose is to provision the state. What would a crypto currency without a state provision? Who does it serve? Bitcoin makes it clear it is the FPGA and ASIC operators consuming vasts amount of energy.

<comment><USER35> > A currency and markets primary purpose is to provision the state.

Not at all. "State" is a political constructions while currencies are a value transport mechanism and markets are a network of those, both of which, as "pure" concepts, arises pretty quickly when one starts to ponder how to model "actors in need to exchange and use scarce resources which have alternative uses".

In that sense, saying that "currencies and markets" have any particular purpose (political at that) is like saying that someone invented the concept/idea of "hash functions" for the purpose of serving P2P piracy, which isn't the case: "hash functions" just are a thing that arises in the universe. Same with currencies and markets, they're just pretty arbitrary, easy to come up with, concepts.

<comment><USER34> You are wrong, they are inventions used for a political purpose. Try making your own currency and markets if you want proof. Bitcoin is a perfect example. Required millions of dollars to get off the ground, provisioned early adopters like a ponzi scheme. Likely has state backing though I have no proof it's a honey pot. Just gut feeling.

<comment><USER36> > they are inventions used for a political purpose

I think you are conflating "fiat currencies" with "currencies". US Dollars are a currency. Gold is a "currency". Bitcoin is a currency. Calling card credits are a currency. Cigarettes in prison are a currency. Any store of value is a currency -- whether created / authorized by a state or not.

If anarchists go back to a barter system, there will always be asymmetric transactions that will require some sort of value store (basically an IOU for a transaction that already happened) or cause inefficiencies in the market (the buyer or seller would have to take a hit in order to complete a transaction). Currency always has been to fill this purpose.

> Required millions of dollars to get off the ground

I would argue that if you chose to try and replace the old Gold System with your Widgets System, you would also need lots of resources to convince others to buy into your new currency. It's not about state power as much as other people having faith in your currency keeping value, which is the only purpose of a currency.

<comment><USER6> > Any store of value is a currency

No, any medium of exchange is a currency. (That and the unit of account function of money are deeply tied; while store of value is often cited as a function of money, it's not deeply tied to the other two, and lots of things that aren't money/currency fill it; the essential feature of currency is being a medium of exchange.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The author was a senior scientist at Intel.

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

</comment><comment><USER38> It's lovely to think that our abilities allow us to have this comfort that no matter what the dumb slow paced governments will do, we will run circles around them, and as an anarchist that's never really found my self at peace with the authorities that be, it's comforting to read some vague prose that harps on about the things we can do because we're comfortably many steps ahead, but I think there is a) I don't think we're beyond social responsibility. We can't leave people behind, even if they are dumb and ignorant, if we are escaping this horror that is a moronic attempt to dictate our actions, we should at least try to drag our friends out of the path of their ridiculous flamethrower. b) Complacency. I've always figured as long as I can SSH, set up an OpenVPN, get to a server...I can do anything I like. This isn't always certain, nothing is certain. Just going onto a guest network at some shit company you are interviewing for and not getting shit past anything that doesn't pass DPI is like whoa dude, given enough time we could crack it but it isn't quite so easy. c) Inclusion...we make code, we do cool shit, there are lots of people who have so many important things to do without the technological upbringing we have that are so much easier for governments to extinguish.

</comment><comment><USER39> "To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial."

\- Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819

<comment><USER40> I wonder which truths he's referring to there, considering how every truth that was already known in that time seems even more trivial today. In other words: Which truths were just passing the threshold from paradoxical to trivial?

(Or maybe he's just referring to political truths which are coming to light at about the same pace at all times.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Information isn't sapient. People want information, which gives information value.

<comment><USER42> People want information. But the people who want the information want it to be free, so that they can get it for free. The people who create that information usually want it to be expensive, and also to be controlled (so that they can get paid). But all it takes is one person who paid for the information to decide to redistribute it for free, and the game is over for that bit of information.

Thus "freeing" is a one-way function for information. It's easy for information to go from non-free to free, but it's almost impossible for information to go from free to non-free. In that sense, information, by its nature, "wants" (if we can anthropomorphize a bit) to be free, in the same sense that matter "wants" to move to a lower energy state.

<comment><USER41> > But the people who want the information want it to be free, so that they can > get it for free.

Yes, and I also want every economic transaction in which I am demand side to be priced at zero. That doesn't mean that because I deign to buy something that I am unwilling to pay for it. Quite the opposite! I will pay for it up to what I value it.

> But all it takes is one person who paid for the information to decide to > redistribute it for free, and the game is over for that bit of information.

Yes, and that is a problem with non-exhaustive consumption of a resource. This duplicatible nature of data is why data firms have contracts when they sell information. The information existing in their databases has no anthropomorphic yearning for liberty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is this the new Neal Stephenson?

<comment><USER44> At the time this manifesto was written, Stephenson was just publishing his first serious novel, _Zodiac_. He wasn't yet a well-known writer.

<comment><USER43> oh shit you're right 0_0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> While I do agree with this article's identification of the primary utility of crytpocurrencies, we should consider the optimizations that it can provide through a more effective use of resources. I'll go ahead and TL;DR here before the succeeding wall of text:

Crypto currency will result in a net gain of useful resources by using pulses of electrical current. Silver and gold are more useful for their elemental properties rather than their primitive use as trading mediums.

The Physical and Socioeconomic Properties of Elements and Compounds

Gold, silver, platinum, and diamond. For the past ~6000 years, these three elements and one carbon structure have been sought after mostly as mediums of trade. "Various forms of livestock, in particular cattle, and grains were the earliest forms used to settle trades and payment for good goods and services. Cattle are hard to carry in your pocket and grains spoil so an alternative currency was needed". The value of these elements during the early economic development is attributed to their scarcity, resistance to corrosion/oxidization, tensile strength (except Au/Ag, which are very malleable), structural integrity under extreme conditions (a diamond is forever, just like the love between two people). These can thus be relied upon to transfer value between two parties.

Advancements of the past 100 years have suggested new uses for these materials. Certainly diamond will continue to be sought after for its utility in drilling and abrasives, but the electrification of civilization has suggested new uses for these materials. Silver has the highest electrical conductivity of any element, but tarnishes easily when exposed to oxygen. It replaced copper as a conductor during early 20th century war-time resource rationing. Platinum has an extraordinary resistance to corrosion, and can be used to coat electrodes to split water for hydrogen and oxygen extraction (though extracting hydrogen from methane is more economical, but carbon monoxide is a byproduct).

These materials are too expensive to replace copper, but why are they expensive? Thousands of years of economics.

Silver dining utensils aren't valued for their superior electrical conductivity. A host/hostess sets out the "good silverware" for special occasions when it would be advantageous to advertise wealth to others, or because it comforting to hold value while eating a meal.

"Solid state electronic devices use very low voltages and currents which are easily interrupted by corrosion or tarnish at the contact points." The gold stored in sovereign vaults guarded by pensioned government employees 24/7 is not secured under these conditions because of its capacity to increase the durability of electrical contacts. It is valuable because of it, but expensive only because we are delaying the retirement of traditional mediums of resource exchange.

The abrupt arrival of the digital age has produced technologies that continue to eliminate the middlemen and inefficiencies that are parasitic to the process of transferring value. Web payment services do much to reduce physical transportation of metal and paper currencies, which saves energy and time and therefore creates more value because it directly contests systems that were already in place (though the modern currency thief is going to exploit network vulnerabilities, in the same way train robbers would exploit vast, unsecured distances between towns during the westward expansion of early America). The blockchain is an even newer technology that is continuing to be refined, and is expected to be immune to counterfeit and centralized control. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most widely used cryptocurrencies that use the blockchain, and their value remains constant across all currencies. These concepts (especially Ethereum) are the digital manifestations of the theory of democracy - unhindered by loopholes, corruption, indecision, and private- interests.

A re-evaluation of value transfer mediums is necessary because of things like supercapacitor technology. Energy storage is the primary bottleneck in the implementation of energy harvesting mechanisms, as the sun only gives usable energy to a region for ~8 hours a day, and the rate at which the wind blows is inconsistent, albeit predictable. Silver is a useful material, not because of its electrical conductivity (which is on par with copper), but because its unmatched ionic conductivity. The Lithium-ion battery functions because of the exchange of ions between two conductive materials, and the energy density of a cell relies on the composition of the anode, cathode, and electrolyte. The primary determinant of this composition is the balance of value versus performance. Prohibitive value only exists when there is competition for the uses of a resource. Reduce this competition, and gain new utility.

<comment><USER46> This problem is also solved by fiat currency.

<comment><USER45> Certainly, but crypto has the advantage of being counterfeit-proof.

<comment><USER47> I have never in my life been concerned about counterfeit dollars. While I may have unknowingly handled one at some point it's never come up or negatively impacted me making that benefit marginal at best.

<comment><USER48> It's not individual law abiding citizens that are worried about counterfeits. It's a state level concern. Which seems odd to me that crypto's uncounterfitability would be a selling point for said LACs.

<comment><USER12> _Yawn_ Nobody cares about counterfeit cash. The technological gap b/w counterfeiters and national mints has continuously expanded. Today, even most countries have given up trying to update their technology, and have started buying their bills from a small number of printers (i.e. Giesecke & Devrient).

More importantly, only a tiny fraction of money in circulation is actually held in cash. Today, most countries could declare all cash worthless overnight and it wouldn't have a major effect on the economy. All the infrastructure to move to electronic payments is already in place, and trade could continue unharmed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IsLisp: The ISO Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.islisp.org/ <comment><USER2> ISLisp is in many ways a simplified and slightly changed/extended Common Lisp.

See for example the object system, which works mostly like CLOS.

ISLisp is clearly in the tradition of Lisp 1, Lisp 1.5, Maclisp and Common Lisp.

The spec is quite a bit shorter (134 pages) than the CL spec, but it contains also much less detail about the various constructs. It is also object- oriented, where the CL spec does also provide structures (a kind of records) and then for, say conditions, does not say if they are implemented as structures or classes. In most real Common Lisp implementations the choice has been made to implement much of the data structures as classes - like what ISLisp specifies. That means in practice in both CL implementations and in ISLisp, conditions will be classes.

As such ISLisp is a nice and relatively clean old-school Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe the most commonly used implementation is OpenLisp:

[http://christian.jullien.free.fr/](http://christian.jullien.free.fr/)

There's also EuLisp:

[http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~jeff/lisp/eulisp.html](http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~jeff/lisp/eulisp.html)

I'd love to hear from someone who has tried either and can compare to Scheme, CL or Clojure.

<comment><USER4> I wanted to, several years ago (between 2002-2004, in a commercial project, embedded setting). It was quite good on paper, with a simplified specification (compared to Common Lisp, which is huge) and several nice additions. I liked the simple object system.

The problem was with the implementations — too few, too buggy, too few people using it.

These days I would not bother with it, given that we have Clojure and its approach to concurrency. In really small embedded environments I'd go with something smaller than ISLisp, with an implementation that is easier to understand and possibly fix if there is a problem.

<comment><USER5> > These days I would not bother with it, given that we have Clojure

And Racket. And a variety of Scheme implementations.

The spirit/sentiment of ISLisp seems similar to traditional, pre RSR6 Scheme. But I guess ISLisp would appeal if it's similar to some other, older Lisp systems?

<comment><USER4> Yes, for small things I'd consider a Scheme — though I have to admit that every time I tried to use Scheme, it turned out that doing relatively simple real-world things (such as dealing with files or network) was unnecessarily complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't look like the ISO standard is used much. Is there something useful in ISLisp which is not present in CL ? If there is no standard FFI interface, threading model..., then why bother ?</comment>


Show HN: AutoGripe for Fail2Ban - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/r000t/AutoGripe

<comment><AUTHOR> I _did not_ create this. The author of this project is Blair Strater ([https://r000t.com](https://r000t.com)). However, immediately reporting when someone tries to brute force your SSH helps companies know when one of their customers' servers has been hacked and hijacked for malicious ends.

</comment><comment><USER2> Fair warning: a lot of hosts hate automated abusemail, and it's automatically trashbinned by quite a few of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love AutoGripe. I use it on all my servers. The only downside is a bit of "Inbox full" errors, mostly from China. I guess their ISPs are asleep at the wheel.</comment>


Contemporary economics is finally breaking free from its market fetishism - <AUTHOR> http://bostonreview.net/forum/suresh-naidu-dani-rodrik-gabriel-zucman-economics-after-neoliberalism <comment><USER2> There is literally a 150 year history of people (sometimes economists) attacking economist for their supposed market fetishism. Its the same story going around and around in circles.

Economics constantly adjust and some of the critics have been taken into account, others have been rejected.

No matter how many times this happens there is always another newspaper or blog leading the 'these are all fundamentalist' charge, mostly without having a clue about the actual intellectual history of economics or any actually new ideas that have not already been studied for 50-100 years.</comment>


Steve Jobs tells annoying college student, "Please leave us alone." - <AUTHOR> http://www.edibleapple.com/steve-jobs-tells-annoying-college-student-please-leave-us-alone/

<comment><USER2> Suddenly I have sympathy for the college student, where otherwise I would not. The customer is almost always right.

<comment><USER3> That's funny. I suddenly had greater admiration for Steve Jobs, which is pretty rare for me, as I generally dislike Apple's products and branding. I appreciate that he stuck to his guns while still responding civilly.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Netflix still using AWS when Amazon is their biggest competitor? - horizontech-dev I have been wondering about this question for some time. To give context, I get it, the engineers and management at Netflix continuously evaluating (and it's not an easy task), but what's something holding them moving off of AWS like Dropbox?<p>Aren't they literally giving money to their competitor? <comment><AUTHOR> A lot of Netflix's technical "secret sauce" is their own infrastructure via the Open Connect initiative.

You cannot get a silky smooth experience across that many congested networks with just bare AWS.

Why would Netflix want to take on the enormous risks of self-hosting? They don't have the experience and they don't have the skills. They can hire the appropriate people but it's extremely expensive. AWS provides a lot of very valuable tooling and expertise baked into the service price.

</comment><comment><USER2> No one will know, and those that do will never reveal it. But I can surmise that it's a mutually net beneficial arrangement in the short-run, with Netflix expecting a better solution to present itself either internally or externally at some point. Otherwise, you're right, Netflix wouldn't use AWS and AWS would not supply to Netflix.

In a way, they're allocating money and resources to Amazon rather than developing internally simply because the long-term ROI doesn't warrant it.

And let's not discount the most obvious reason why it's probably not even a concern for Netflix: Amazon Prime Video sucks. Sure, Blockbuster probably said the same thing about Netflix at one point, but it's hindsight. I think most people, at the time, would have never guessed Netflix would be the one to pivot to online streaming either.

It's a very though provoking question and there's no way to distill it into one answer, so I'm just providing my POV.

<comment> horizontech-dev > rather than developing internally simply because the long-term ROI doesn't > warrant it

To clarify, I am not expecting them to build their own cloud, but why they using it when other providers have caught up pretty much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You're really looking at this from the wrong direction. Your competitor doesn't need to fail in order for your own business to succeed. It isn't a zero-sum game.

It wouldn't surprise me if Netflix had that meeting at some point. What would it cost them to run their own infrastructure? Would that be less than the cost of staying with AWS? Is Amazon exploiting their position as Netflix's hosting provider to unfairly compete with them? Do they fear that they might in the future?

At the end of the day, the answer was very likely a solid "no". Many industries are full of examples of competitors working together to the benefit of both companies. Just look at the aerospace industry.

<comment> horizontech-dev Thanks for the response. But totally disagree.

> Would that be less than the cost of staying with AWS? I think the answer is > Yes. The main advantage of Cloud computing I think is the speed to market, > not the cost. Excerpt from [https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/21/three-years- > after-moving-o...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/21/three-years-after- > moving-off-aws-dropbox-infrastructure-continues-to-evolve/) "Dropbox still > believes it made the right decision and has found innovative ways to keep > costs down"

> Is Amazon exploiting their position as Netflix's hosting provider to > unfairly compete with them? I completely disagree. Here is one example > (Certainly, a simple G search should give enough examples) > [https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from- > its...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own- > sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015)

<comment><USER4> The answer to your question is "Because it makes business sense to do so". Whether you can understand their reasons or not, the best indicator that Netflix has good reasons to use AWS is that it continues to do so. And that will be true until the (possible) day that it doesn't anymore.

> I think the answer is Yes.

So what you're saying is that (1) Netflix is already secretly planning to move away from AWS, in which case your question is moot, or (2) everyone involved in platform decisions at Netflix is an idiot that can't do math.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would expect Netflix to have reasonably detailed strategic analysis and projections of all of the available options - moving to Google, moving to Azure, moving to Oracle, moving to multi-cloud, colocation, not to mention things we can't even imagine because ... well, we have no real idea.

At different points any one of these may make strategic sense, but as others have highlighted here such moves would consume resources that could be allocated to other areas.

My take would be that increasingly the Netflix business model is really content and production. Disney is the real competitor here. Technology is necessary, but not sufficient.

<comment> horizontech-dev > I would expect Netflix to have reasonably detailed strategic analysis and > projections of all of the available options - moving to Google, moving to > Azure, moving to Oracle, moving to multi-cloud, colocation, not to mention > things we can't even imagine because ... well, we have no real idea.

I think the same too. Curious to confirm the thought process and curious to hear if there any anecdotes

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also ... Dropbox is a good example of a product that has lost it's way. It went from a very simple and clear product with strong value to something we all now work around. Its more reliable to email or slack files than deal with whatever confusing thing Dropbox is doing.

<comment> horizontech-dev And you think that's because they moved off of AWS?

<comment><USER5> I am observing that there is no correlation between location of hosting and quality or user experience. OP used DropBox as a reference for a company that moved off AWS. My observation is that DropBox sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Prime, while part of the same company, are vastly different services.

While it's fair to call them competitors, it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

<comment><USER7> AWS and Amazon e-commerce are vastly different services, yet Walmart refuses to use AWS because Amazon is also their largest competitor. In fact, Walmart built themselves an entire private cloud to avoid using AWS.

So OP actually raises a very good question: why does Netflix use AWS when Walmart does not?

<comment><USER8> The decision to build a private cloud sets back other priorities, like competing with Amazon on Grocery. It may, or may not, pay off for Walmart. If Walmart did store their data in Amazon's cloud, it is possible Amazon could use that information (sales, prices, etc) to more efficiently compete.

Conversely, if Netflix built out their own cloud, it could have come at the expense of delivering more content, which could risk unseat their position as the leader of streaming space.

<comment> horizontech-dev Great points. I understand that it comes with an expense, but "I think" in the long run it would benefit them.

> Conversely, if Netflix built out their own cloud Well, they don't have to > build their own cloud. They can use other cloud providers still.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Magic of RPython - <AUTHOR> http://kirbyfan64.github.io/posts/the-magic-of-rpython.html

<comment><USER2> I used RPython on my own interpreter project a few years ago (stopped working on it around 2013). It's a very interesting approach to writing interpreters/JIT compilers, and produces very fast code, but developing RPython code was very painful for a few reasons (back then, maybe they got fixed in the mean time):

1) Huge compilation times, and compilation is non-incremental. Making even a small change to the source code causes it to be fully re-compiled, which on our project took 15-20 minutes (I can only imagine how painful this is on PyPy, which took me around 2 hours to build the time I tried it). I think the root cause of this is the static analysis and type inference, which needs to run again on the entire source code, and proved to be really slow on a huge code base. This was painful for development, so much time wasted on waiting on the compiler.

2) My experience with error messages was not as positive as the OP's. Sometimes, I'd make a type error in the code and get a cryptic error message, and have to guess by myself what caused it. Perhaps things have improved since then (I see some new details in the errors in the article that weren't there when I used RPython).

<comment><USER3> The best way to work with it is to write tests which can run in interpreted mode.

<comment><USER2> If you mean run RPython code as regular Python code, that doesn't always catch typing problems. For example, returning a None where an int is expected works fine in Python, not so in RPython.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> RPython and PyPy are (IMO) the coolest Python projects out there. I made a little Brainfuck intepreter with it and it was super simple, but making small changes seemed to slow it down a lot. There is very little visibility as to how the code is compiled - i.e should I use a list or a tuple for some things? Can PyPy work out that a list is fixed sized? How should I classes to make them as efficient as possible (like are classes with two or so fields passed as structs)?

</comment><comment><USER5> The coolest example of RPython in action, after PyPy of course (but goes without saying): Pixie, the lang and VM that is a native, high-speed Lisp.

[https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie](https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie)

</comment><comment><USER6> Note that, as far as I know (the rpython/pypy team will confirm or infirm) RPython is _not_ intended to be a general-purpose python-like language. For that you want cython or nim. RPython is a toolkit for building language VMs. I'm guessing that's why relatively little work has gone into error reporting.

<comment><USER7> I hadn't heard the word infirm before so I looked it up. It seems to me that it does not mean what you think it means. Thought you might want to know that. [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infirm](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/infirm)

<comment><USER8> It's a mistake French (Latin?) speakers (myself included) often make: [https://translate.google.com/m/translate#fr/en/infirmer](https://translate.google.com/m/translate#fr/en/infirmer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I must say that RPython is not a very good name. I assumed it was a system for R and python integration. Like say the RPython package [http://rpython.r-forge.r-project.org](http://rpython.r-forge.r-project.org)

<comment><USER10> Me too. Why not call it PythonC?

<comment><USER11> That could cause confusion with CPython (the main python implementation) and possibly also Cython (C extensions for Python).</comment></comment></comment>


Boilerstrap: A beautiful mashup of HTML5 Boilerplate & Twitter Bootstrap 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/emorikawa/boilerstrap

<comment><USER2> It's usually helpful to include a demo with these things :)

<comment><USER3> I also turned away when I couldn't find a demo. Github provides free pages hosting, no reason to not have a demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Uhmm, I just looked briefly at HTML5 Boilerplate in the past, and I was wondering what is it providing that Bootstrap is missing ? How come Bootstrap wasn't enough on its own ?

<comment><USER5> HTML5 Boilerplate is more of a best practices HTML/CSS template. Bootstrap is a css design framework for creating a nice user interface with little effort.

They actually have some of the same stuff like css resets and normalization, but they are used for different things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A great combination. How does it compare with the mashup of Bootstrap + H5BP that can be downloaded at <http://www.initializr.com/> ?

<comment><USER7> Thank you. I didn't know about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> html5boilerplate used to be my goto html / css structure for starting a project. I recently build one using bootstrap 2.0... and it was significantly less hassle, but still looks good and works on desktop and mobile

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, I played around a bit with this and it's alright, but I didn't find anything different from the others (twitter bootstrap or foundation, etc), I mean besides combining boilerplate and bootsrap. Unless I'm missing something? because there's no demo or documentation! hehe :) <http://dropafile.com/boilerstrap/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone explain to me why this has a dependency on node? All the things it's using node to do can be done with Ruby (which it also depends on)? It always bugs me when a project has excessive dependencies without any good reason, and this is worse than an extra lib or two, this requires a second, entirely separate, ecosystem (Node vs. Ruby).</comment>


Skype Founders Sue eBay, Investors  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125313063626017009.html

<comment><USER2> A quote from the NYT article regarding the lawsuit:

( [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/technology/companies/05noc...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/technology/companies/05nocera.html) )

"But it also acknowledges that an "adverse result" could mean that the continued operation of Skype's business as currently conducted would likely not be possible."

That's quite a statement.

And if the amounts are what they are claiming then it might make continued operation of ebay impossible, after all, ebay is selling skype in order to recover some of the money they sunk in the project.

Skype has been putting a serious damper ebays balance sheet the last couple of years, 1.9 B$ in their cash drawer is roughly 18 months profits.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a different lawsuit if you have access to paid WSJ (they had full article for free for few minutes since they broke the news, then pulled it off into premium. bummer).

<comment><USER2> Wow, there is more than one of them ?

I read it as being the same. The key seems to be this bit:

"It turns out that in selling Skype to eBay, Mr. Friis and Mr. Zennstrom retained control of a key part of the Skype technology, which they licensed to eBay. Although the details are under seal in a London court, the Skype founders' essential complaint is that eBay tampered with their software, and in doing so, violated the terms of the licensing agreement. They were demanding that Skype be forced to stop using the technology, which, for all intents and purposes, would mean shutting down Skype itself. The case is set for trial in 2010."

Sorry for muddying the waters.

Btw, if you follow the link to the article from google news you can read it.

<comment><USER3> That's a new angle on this: That eBay are messing around with the Skype code. My best guess is, tampering with superpeers to get short-term speed ups, versus long-term messing up Skype fundamentally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice soap opera.</comment>


9 Women Can't Make a Baby in a Month - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/9-women-cant-make-a-baby-in-a-month/

<comment><USER2> A quote from an Agile / Scrum talk I saw last week: "Agile delivers things sooner, not necessarily faster."

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, 9 women can't make a baby at all without a man.

So, instead of 9 people with similar abilities, it's better to have 2 people whose abilities complement each other.

</comment><comment><USER4> True if you need just one baby. If you need one baby per month on the other hand... Not quite sure how that translates to software development though...

<comment><USER5> Even then you would not get the first baby for at least 9 months. After that you would get one baby every month circa, but just as with most software development situations you can't speed up the first baby growth by throwing more people at it.

<comment><USER6> _you can't speed up the first baby growth by throwing more people at it_

No, but you can make the process more interesting. You could... _monetize_ the situation.

<comment><USER7> I thought there were laws against that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've actually always disliked this analogy as it relates to project delivery (whether it be software development or a consulting project).

It suggests that there is nothing anyone can do to decrease the amount of time that a baby gestates; but that's quite different from project delivery.

While adding bodies does not necessarily divide the length of time required, there are absolutely concrete things which can be done to reduce the timeframe.

You can reduce scope (or features) for starters. A woman doesn't have the option of delivering a "minimum viable product" of a baby (with only core features) in less than 9 months, but a consulting engagement could certainly cut out features to be completed sooner.

Childbirth is a subset of project delivery whose completion dates are not particularly fungible. There are numerous other types that are.

<comment><USER9> Part of my career has been doing software project management, and it's been very rare that an end client that I was working for was willing to extend a deadline or limit the functionality of a project. If a company is run and backed by software professionals this may happen, but for most other projects you just aren't allowed to change the rules — which is why the baby analogy holds so true.

<comment><USER8> Right, but here's my problem with that:

I understand that the reason the analogy has become popular is because at some point, an idiot manager looked at a project plan, saw that the project was supposed to take (let's say) 6 months, and said "Hey, if we increase the number of developers from 2 to 6, that means it will only take 2 months."

So I get why it's easy to respond with "9 women can't make a baby in 1 month."

But let's say that instead the project plan said that it was going to take 6 months, and there was 1 developer on the project. It's absolutely likely that adding an additional number of developers can shave some time off that project (not inversely proportional to the number of developers you add, and not in every single circumstance, but I'd argue for the overwhelming majority of projects).

The analogy suggests that no part of project development can be parallelized, which to me just seems like shitty management of the project.

<comment><USER9> The problem with the 6 months 1 programmer vs 1 month 6 programmers is that the minute you have more than one programmer they have to have an architecture that works together plus take time to communicate with each other — and then add to that the concept of a "critical path" i.e. that one programmer may not be able to start something until another programmer is done.

Although in my professional experience the idea of adding more programmers is always suggested by the client about a week before the project is due!!!

PS If you had to live through about ten of these clients you'd have the same religious feelings that I do for the Mythical Man Month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reproduction is an interesting analogy for software development, but like all metaphors it eventually fails.

For instance there is the change of feature set as pointed out by m0nastic. Large projects tend to be very flexible in features over their development life, which is odd because usually its not the end user requirements that are changing.

Another thing is varying programmer qualities. Some programmers can bang out a baby in 9 days. Some require 90 months to make the baby (hint: don't whinge about your hiring praxctices, man up and get rid of these ones). Some are completely infertile (fire these ones with extreme prejudice). Some project a field of radiation that will not only prevent themselves from making the baby, but will kill all babies in a 5 mile radius (do the world a favour: take these ones out back and shoot them, and then burn the body - _do not promote them to management!_ ).

Continuing the reproduction metaphor, Yak Shaving can be considered similar to Onanism. While some people might not be able to make babies, they might be master craftsmen when it comes to building cribs. Some people might be bad programmers but really good at changing nappies... without these people you will be buried in a mountain of... 'cruft'. :D

</comment><comment><USER11> More correct (if less vivid): see Amdahl's Law. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law>)

Most activities can only be made partly parallel. The rest must be serial; that is, will depend on steps done before, and cannot be made faster by breaking it up for more workers. If a task is 90% parallelizable, and you multiply the number of workers by 9, you only get a speedup of 5. If you multiply the number of workers by 100... you still only get about 9 times faster. :-)

</comment><comment><USER12> Probably some credit for the title and article goes here? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364648>

<comment><USER13> No, it's actually been around much longer than that:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookss_law>

Not even sure if that's the origin of the phrase.

<comment><USER14> Corrected link for the lazy: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_law>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a non-programmer The Mythical Man Month was perhaps one of the best books I've ever read to understand how to manage programmers, and how to explain to non-programmers how things work.

If your goal is feature poor and bug filled software then you can ignore this advice — but if you want to manage a large scale project with multiple programmers this advice still works today.

</comment><comment><USER15> Amdahl's law [1] in layman terms: "9 women cannot make a baby in one month."

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law>

source: <http://twitter.com/#!/nivertech/status/51643148253933568>

</comment><comment><USER16> This is completely brilliant. Mark Suster is rapidly becoming my favorite VC blogger.

</comment><comment><USER17> the analogy doesn't really work... because 9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months.

<comment><USER18> This is not the same thing. What if you have a pressing need for the result in one month, and you don't care about getting more later?

Edit: for example, if you're trying to make a phone call, what good is having a high transmission rate if it means that you also have high latency?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> ... no but it'd be fun to watch them try.</comment>


How Blender started, twenty years ago - <AUTHOR> http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/12/how-blender-started-twenty-years-ago/

<comment><USER2> Blender is a really fantastic software, from a professional, a educational, and a tinkering perspective.

I started using Blender in 1998 or 1999 back when it was still closed source (around version 1.6, I think). Back then I also used to use 3D Studio Max and it was a far superior software. Then, NaN went bankrupt and managed to raise enough awareness to collect the required money so that the investors could be paid out and Blender could be released into the public as open source. In the following years, Blender has continously grown in feature-size oftentimes coming quite close to what professional packages offer.

From a professional perspective, one can get a very solid 3D Rendering and Modelling solution for free that offers enough features to get a deep understanding of the whole subject. This makes it easy to learn enough to be competitive when it comes down to searching for a job.

From a educational perspective, Blender is a great teaching tool. The animations that Blender can generate (with particles and hair and bones) look good enough to amaze young kids. Based on this amazement, one can explain the math behind it, or the code behind it, to make computer science and math look more practical.

From a tinkering perspective, Blender is fantastic. The core is written in C/C++ but a huge part of the application is scripted in Python. This makes it very easy to have a look into the source, extend the app, and gain a better understanding of the ideas behind 3D Rendering and modelling. Case in Point: When working on an iPad game recently, a friend and I decided that we did not want to build our own level editor. Since one requirement of each level was the ability to edit nurbs curves, we decided to simply script a lightweight Blender Plugin so that we could use Blender 3D as the level editor. After some initial problems it went fluidly, and we quickly had a great working level editor with an extensible interface, all scripted in Python. If I were to work on another game and if there weren't already a good level editor for the kind of levels I'd need, I'd go with Blender again as it is really easy to extend and already has functionality for lots and lots of use cases.

All in all, Blender is - in my eyes - one of the big success stories of open source software. Especially because there's no big corporation behind it. Open Office has/had Sun, Linux has IBM, RedHat, and many many others, but Blender is really being build by a community of seperate entities and few corporations.

<comment><USER3> Blender represents both the triumph and tragedy of open source software. I've been vaguely following its development since the late 90s, periodically making attempts to learn it, and failing until I finally made a more serious push earlier this month. Once one has gotten over the very steep learning curve, it's an amazing piece of kit. On a feature-by-feature basis, it handily outcompetes many commercial packages, and once one has learned the keyboard shortcuts, I can see how the interface would actually become a pleasure for daily users.

However for beginners and casual users, the UI is a disaster: stupidly opaque and pointlessly obtuse. It is obtuse in ways which _aren 't_ necessary to support the power-user workflow, but seem to exist for no other reason than to maximise the "WTF?!?" factor for new users.

For example: object-selection is done via a right-click, requiring the user to break their muscle-memory from literally every other GUI program they've ever used. WTF? And where are the contextual menus? And why are the all-important keyboard-shortcut tooltips scattered so haphazardly through the UI?

Making things worse, the defaults and documentation assume a three-button mouse and a full keyboard with a numeric keypad etc., and the most basic navigation functions -- panning, zooming, dollying, orbiting -- all rely on inputs from these devices. Working on my 13" Macbook Pro, it took me about 15 hours of banging my head against the software until I found a combination of settings which allowed me to pan and zoom etc. using only my trackpad. (I had asked the Blender forums for help, and the advice I received was to buy another computer). Now it's working quite well for me, but only because I was willing to endure a few days of pain to get there.

3D software doesn't need to be this difficult. In my day, I've been highly proficient at 3D Studio, Lightwave, Cinema4D, Form•Z, and various other platforms, and none of them embody UX anti-conventions the way that Blender does. Heck, even basic things like its click-drag mechanics are just wrong (click-drag to initiate a drag, at which point the object or control point becomes "sticky" to the cursor, even after it's released; a second click is required to end the drag), requiring the user to _comprehensively_ retrain their muscle memory in order to use the software. WTF?!?

The Blender community, unfortunately, seems to largely be a self-selected cabal of people who have survived this pointless hazing ritual and are determined to make sure that everyone who follows in their footsteps does the same. Although a small minority of the community "gets it" and is making earnest and well-thought-through proposals about how to fix the situation (see: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ScPMbHv8WRCU2znB7IU2l-W9...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ScPMbHv8WRCU2znB7IU2l-W9hH- NLs5weQKLkjqmgpA)), they don't seem to have much traction, and are continually derided / ignored by the rest of the community. Thus even the very simplest lowest-hanging fruit -- such as enabling "select with left mouse button" by default (it's already an existing setting, buried deep in the preferences where no noob will ever find it) -- aren't implemented.

It's a sad situation, because with a bit more polish on the UI/UX, Blender could be a genuine player in the 3D industry, rather than an intriguingly powerful assemblage of missed opportunities.

<comment><USER4> I realize you have strong feelings here, but what you are saying isn't really a tragedy. Blender is hard to learn, so are 3D graphics in general. You can accomplish a lot but it's difficult to do so. That's it. not a tragedy. the community is pretty helpful too. Every artist community is pretty critical when presenting your work, blender is no exception but Iv'e gotten help at various times over the year in forums and IRC with sure the occasional snark (that's everywhere).

I bet more people ask for feature requests of big complex commercial software and don't gain traction either. People get used to the UI and come out of the woodwork when noobs want to change it.

Another comparison, without having owned it but just through seeing and hearing demos, Maya is barely usable for projects without 3rd party plugins (my understanding anyway). How is that a good setup for a new user?

<comment><USER3> I know that 3D graphics aren't trivial to learn, but the tragedy with Blender is that it is _arbitrarily_ difficult. The difficulties aren't intrinsic to learning 3D. A lot of people -- both beginners and professionals from other platforms -- are turned off Blender when they can't even figure out how to do basic functions like select an object or pan across a view without watching tutorial videos. That's really unreasonable, and I'm sure that Blender loses a substantial portion of its potential users due to completely unnecessary UI anti-conventions like this. It wouldn't be difficult to fix: simply enabling "Select With: Left", "Orbit Style: Table", "Zoom to Mouse Position", and a handful of other existing defaults would make Blender _vastly_ more approachable out-of-the-box. I'm sure that something as simple as this would produce a measurable increase in its rate of adoption, perhaps on the order of 15% or 20%, without compromising the advanced functionality in the slightest. Other measures such as consistent tooltips across the UI and contextual right- click menus would give another significant boost in adoption.

The tragedy of Blender is that the community is highly responsive to feature requests from established users, and has developed some superlative advanced capabilities as a result -- but is blind to the needs of beginning users. If Blender were a commercial product (maintained by people who think not only in terms of _features_ , but in terms of _market penetration_ ) then these kind of simple issues would have been addressed a decade ago, and the good efforts of the Blender developers would now be reaching a much much wider audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My biggest regret was that they haven't invested more resources into BGE (Blender Game Engine). They had it within their graps, and could have easily stolen Unity3D's thunder, as well as probably gotten funding somewhere.

They just didn't listen to market, imho.

Admittedly, some licenses should've been changed for that to be true.

<comment><USER6> BGE wasn't ignored because anyone on the dev team wanted to sideline it. In fact, many many people really loved it and hoped it would go somewhere. But it is an open source project. The stuff that gets resources is the communities that show up and work on it.

If you want BGE to get better, join the team and make it better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love blender, but as a person with a startup in the 3d printing field (shameless plug: bld3r.com) my one regret is that the learning curve for modeling is so steep. Is there a forked version that is a standalone for 3d modeling? If there isn't, there should be.

Blender is the only program i know of that is open enough and powerful enough to spend a long time learning, but for noobs in 3d printing, it's absurdly disheartening. I'd hope we could develop a version easy as solidworks, even if it were uglier. If i'm totally out of the loop on open cad software, do please tell me what i'm missing.

<comment><USER8> Why would you need a standalone version for modeling? That would be like having a car sans everything except the engine. The 3d viewport works closely with almost all the other views, if you don't need a feature, just hide it. Once you grasp the basics of how to manipulate/transform vertices the curve is flattened immensely. The only tip I could give is to learn the keyboard shortcuts. If you still insist, you could build your own version of Blender and omit many of the other things it comes with now by default, the game engine, cycles etc.

<comment><USER7> In a word, clarity.

I realize it would be redundant, that's not the point. I'm hoping for 3d modeling software that is free, and easy to start with. Maybe blender isn't the solution to that problem, but i've spent well over two years using blender, and i honestly have no idea what half of it does.

There are some helpful "blender for beginners" video tutorials, but not many, and i've looked.

In trying to advance open 3d printing, this is a huge barrier. Modeling software is the future, and if we want any independence from stratasys we'll need a powerful, easy to learn, modeling program. Otherwise we'll be overwelmed by proprietary software that only works with proprietary printers, e.g. makerware slicing program.

<comment><USER8> 2 years and no progress? I think you are doing something wrong. I have been using Blender for a long while now and there are parts of it that I see every day and don't use or even know what it does. It's a generalist's package, it can be overwhelming but just focus on what you want and don't try to grasp every bit of it. A beginner's series I would recommend is [http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses/blender-basics- intro...](http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses/blender-basics-introduction- for-beginners/) and some useful resources can be found here [http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/a/43/12](http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/a/43/12). I have a friend on fb that makes amazing 3d prints using Blender and a couple years ago he was fairly new to it, here's his blog, [http://generativemodelingproject.blogspot.com/](http://generativemodelingproject.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER7> I'm familiar with this course, the amount of time dedicated to modeling is not very large, but the overview of the controls is pretty decent.

The reason i'm not good at using blender is that when i hit a wall... it's a pretty insurmountable wall. It's much easier to just switch programs. If i need precision, openSCAD, if not, sketchup, both of which are obviously inferior.

The stack exchange post seems very useful, i'll look into that, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> OT: If anyone is interested in trying Blender or need a place to get solutions to problems, [http://blender.stackexchange.com/](http://blender.stackexchange.com/) is a great resource.

</comment><comment><USER9> I remember way back when, how 3ds max was something like 600 megs and blender could fit onto a floppy disk. Some really amazing stuff. Now blender seems to be 60 megs, but I imagine comparative things like maya are probably far in the gigabytes now

<comment><USER8> The size of a default Blender installation _now_ is ~214MB. Zipped, it's abt 40.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Definitely a steep learning curve, but like vim/emacs, it quickly becomes second nature.

I shouldn't have left all my Blender books on the bottom shelf of the bookcase where my old cat could pee on them. I need to pick it back up again. Good thing there are so many more resources these days.

</comment><comment><USER11> Kudos to Blender! I would not have completed my 3D animation degree graduation project without it, years ago, and I picked it back up just a couple months back for video composition work. Looking forward to doing even more in it once my new computer arrives.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's an entertaining Blender podcast.

[http://www.blenderguru.com/introducing-the-new-blender- guru-...](http://www.blenderguru.com/introducing-the-new-blender-guru- podcast/)

In early episodes he tried to rally people to fix the UI and make it more intuitive. He got so much crap (why should we change!?) that I think he's given up on that for the moment.

<comment><USER8> Actually no, what he was proposing was to reskin the interface to make certain things more obvious and consistent. However, it's not as easy to peel a UI off an existing program as non-technical people might imagine. It was an excellent initiative and the effort is ongoing. [http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/10/redefining- blender...](http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/10/redefining-blender/) and [https://developer.blender.org/project/view/12/](https://developer.blender.org/project/view/12/)

<comment><USER12> Well, I didn't think what he was proposing would be trivial. He was simply trying to make the app more accessible to a larger audience.

Listening to his podcasts made be think the about the way Apple does it with constant UI refinement, and why many open source projects are really lacking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> OT: The URL is [http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/12/how-blender- starte...](http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/12/how-blender-started- twenty-years-ago/)

I've never seen "index.php" in the middle of a URL like that. Very quirky.

<comment><USER14> The web server is configured to use something like mod_rewrite to pass everything after index.php as a query string parameter to index.php. Many sites use this (though most don't do it so nakedly) to make pretty URLs that search engines and users prefer.

Essentially, the request is equivalent to index.php?Article=2013%2F12%2Fhow- blender-started or perhaps index.php?Year=2013&Month=12&Article=how-blender- started.

<comment><USER15> Actually, you don't need to edit your server -at least with Lighttpd-.

PHP automagically (or is this expected behaviour?) gets the string appended to /index.php for you! Check out the example at [http://private.woutervdb.com/examples/url- query/index.php/We...](http://private.woutervdb.com/examples/url- query/index.php/Welcome,%20Hacker%20News)!

I've made no changes to my webserver configuration. Works on Lighttpd on my laptop and webserver, not sure if Apache and IIS do this as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really hope that something like Blender Composite Nodes and Blender Python Nodes can replace Quartz Composer (which apparently has been ignored by Apple anyway).

It is a pity that you can't tap into design tools unless you have a Mac.

<comment><USER2> Offtopic, but I think a huge reason for that is how fantastic the Apple Frameworks are for any Pixel/Vector/GPU/UI stuff. Quartz Composer offers an API to include it into apps, there's CoreImage, CoreVideo, Quartz2D, SceneKit, CoreAudio, and much more.

SceneKit [1] alone, makes it unbelievable easy to create animated 2D/3D interfaces that combine various media types.

Due to this, it is probably easier to create a sophisticated design application for the Mac platform than for any other platform [2] [1] [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/3DDraw...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/3DDrawing/Conceptual/SceneKit_PG/Introduction/Introduction.html) [2] Based on some reading it seems that Qt is starting to offer similar functionality, especially with regards to Filters/Pixels/Vectors, but I'm not really sure about that.

<comment><USER16> You may be right, and I'm no expert in this, but that is not a large part of the reason.

I think it was a well designed piece of software by itself - and the node based programming model lended itself well to interface design.

Right now, it is more a case of adoption. For example, Facebook is investing a lot of resources in creating stuff like Origami for Quartz Composer. I'd be willing to bet that if Facebook puts even a small part of that resources into supporting something like Blender, then the fundamental differences at the OS level should'nt matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The early source code files from the screen shots are a reminder that big things start small; very small.</comment>


New patent group threatens to derail 4K HEVC video streaming - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-patent-group-threatens-to-derail-4k-hevc-video-streaming/ <comment><USER2> New patent troll group that is.

<comment><USER3> How did you come to that conclusion? The companies involved do not appear to be doing any of the things commonly required by the various definitions of "patent troll".

Most definitions require one or more of the following:

• purchases a patent and enforces it

• does not practice the patent itself

• has no manufacturing or research base

• focuses solely on enforcing patents

This group comprises companies such as Dolby, Philips, Mitsubishi and similar that do have both research and manufacturing, are patenting technology they developed, practice the patents they develop, and have plenty of business other than patent enforcement.</comment></comment>


RC4 in x86 assembly – 77 bytes - <AUTHOR> https://odzhan.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/ciphers-tiny-rc4-implementation/ <comment><USER2> [EDIT:] For those who didn't read the article, this is a cute parlor trick, but RC4 is broken and should not be used. If you really want a small cipher, use TEA or one of its more recent variants.

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

<comment><USER3> Is TEA less broken than RC4? It's also bigger. RC4 is remarkable because it's _so_ small. TEA does somewhere around ~8 times more work.

<comment><USER2> Yes, TEA is less broken than RC4. This is not to say that it is _inherently_ more secure, just that no effective attacks on it are currently widely known the way they are with RC4. But this could just be because no one uses TEA and so it has received comparatively little cryptanalytical attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Brilliant! Great work!

</comment><comment><USER5> Can we stop promoting the use of a _broken_ cipher?</comment>


Show HN: Commits.io – Create a poster from your code to hang in the office - <AUTHOR> https://commits.io

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be more interesting if it showed some sort of information about the source code? For example the edits over time similar to this project: [http://www.bewitched.com/historyflow.html](http://www.bewitched.com/historyflow.html)

<comment><USER3> Maybe, you could do it like gource. It shows a tree of your project structure that you can print off? I think that sounds pretty cool, and might be a bit quicker to generate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't work when I drag n dropped an image (just says "Rendering" indefinitely) :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that :(, should be good to go now.</comment></comment>


Stripe complete schema for database/API design learning and inspiration - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/FGRibreau/stripe-schema <comment><USER2> I don't know who this guy is (maybe I am out of touch), but it doesn't appear he works at stripe or is affiliated from what I see, maybe I just missed it. So is this actually Stripe's schema or just what he thinks it looks like or should look like?

Either way, it is always interesting to see how other people lay out data systems, especially when the data system is for a large dataset.

A couple of key things stood out to me right away though. Using varchar for every id, I get in very high transaction tables int (even bigint) can sometimes be a problem but there are solutions to those and int performance will always be superior, not to mention far less memory/disk space used generally.

Also the use of bigint for fixed range values is a little weird, like the legal_entity_dob_day, month & year, where for each of them it could've been a 2 byte int and been fine (or even tinyint at 1 byte), taking up far less space. This isn't a big deal for a table with 1,000 records, but for millions/billions it adds up quickly. Probably on the accounts table the size difference is reasonably minimal, but the same thing is on transactional tables which will grow significantly so those extra bytes do matter. I have seen people standardize values this way for coding purposes but that generally isn't good DB architecture/design overall IMO.

Obviously stripe is super successful and if this is their actual schema, even if it was at one point, it worked for them. But if so I'd be interested in understanding their choices around like the varchar id's and bigint's for small fixed range values etc.

*edit -- clarified a little

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is deduced from the stripe api, which most likely resembles the actual implementation quite well. The ids could be some unique reference instead, and I'd assume that the metadata info are json fields in each table.

Nice to have it laid out. A relational diagram would be a great addition.</comment>


Ask HN: What Are Your RubyMotion Gotchas? - <AUTHOR>

Its been almost a year since RubyMotion launched. Some of you have gotten a chance to play with it. Others have probably gone full-speed with it. Some are working in teams, others have surely gone solo. My question is... what's the catch so far? <comment><USER2> In RubyMotion, a string __is __a NSString, a floating point number is a Numeric, which is a NSNumber, so it's not a leaky abstraction like Phonegap is. Your Obj-C knowledge will carry forward if you already know it. RubyMotion puts Ruby's sugar on top of it too, but there's almost nothing the from the iOS SDK that's off limits, if you need to use a method from NSDate instead of Ruby's Time, you can. In PhoneGap, if you wanted to use CoreImage heavily you'd likely have to write a custom PhoneGap plugin, in Objective-C, to make it available to your JS. In RubyMotion, you just use CoreImage.

A couple of maybe-unexpected (but documented) differences for iOS devs: you don't use ARC, RubyMotion does its own memory management, and there's a wrapper around Grand Central Dispatch and you can't access it directly (I don't know the full reasoning for that).

For a Rubyist: You sometimes have to deal with pointers which looks strange. There are named parameters, which Ruby 2.0 just introduced but it will look a little strange at first.

Overall, there's conflicting idiomatic styles between Objective-C and the iOS SDK and Ruby's typical implementation (camel-case vs snake-case, short method names vs long method names, implicit returns, etc). You'll have to make a decision for yourself how to resolve that. Debugging is still a little rough around the edges, it's doable but not as nice as regular Ruby or Objective-C, though the RubyMotion REPL helps immensely with that.

Additional benefit, unit testing is easier than Obj-C and built into RM by default with MacBacon (RSpec-like), and Ruby has a strong culture of testing code, so that's a positive influnce in the iOS dev community.

</comment><comment><USER3> Even with RubyMotion, you have to still learn the full iOS API. There is no way around that. You save a little bit of syntax, but Xcode is a pretty good IDE so that isn't the big deal.

The big deal is the community and culture of the open source that comes with Ruby folks. The number of open source RubyMotion applications is already perhaps higher than the objective C ones.

If I were to choose to build ONE iOS product today, I'd prefer to do it in the native objective C. But if I am a shop that plans to build quite a few of them, RubyMotion would be my choice.

<comment><USER4> While I started with iOS development through the traditional route of those Stanford courses, I learned the bulk of my more in-depth knowledge after focusing on RubyMotion.

"You'll still have to learn the iOS API" is true, but I think it's a red herring. Because RubyMotion isn't just swapping ObjC with Ruby, and there are more compelling reasons for trying out RubyMotion than "you get to use Ruby".

RubyMotion is a vast simplification of the development environment (rake + vim), a set of wrappers that vastly simplify Cocoa Touch objects/libs, and a small helpful community that makes it easy to filter out signal from the noise when you hit an obstacle.

And those are the reasons why RubyMotion helped me become a better iOS developer as a newbie.

By wrapping Cocoa Touch in some painful areas, it helped me focus on learning the iOS framework at a higher level instead of wrestling with ceremony.

<comment><USER5> I totally agree with this. I learned _so_ much about iOS and Objective-C from starting development with RubyMotion.

I guess that's my gotcha: you'll end up in Objective-C even if you're trying to avoid it, and that will be... just fine!</comment></comment></comment>


Quora: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings responds to Q's - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Netflix/How-much-does-Netflix-spend-on-postage-each-year

<comment><USER2> This link shows the Qs and Reed's responses: <http://www.quora.com/Reed- Hastings>

I've always been impressed with Netflix's approach, doubly so after seeing their employee culture presentation:

<http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664></comment>


Ask HN: What is the difference between a CTO and a VP/Head of Eng/Tech? - <AUTHOR> In different places online I've seen different takes on the two titles, and it seems that there is no consensus which of those titles pertains mostly to technology, and which is more focused on organisation and human resources for engineering roles (although in most cases there is an agreement that there is a specialisation of this kind, at least in organisations large enough to have both roles individually). What is your experience? <comment><USER2> As you say, there's no particular consensus, and the roles vary at differing organizations.

One distinction I've seen frequently though is that the CTO is a visionary role, while VP Eng is an organizational role. The CTO's job is to set the overall technology vision for the company, including technology choice, investing in new & emerging technologies, setting an engineering culture, etc. They're outward-facing, while the VP-eng is inwards-facing. The VP Eng's job is to make sure the trains run on time, serve as the root of the managerial hierarchy, identify roadblocks to further engineering progress, and coordinate the efforts of the engineering team. Somewhat cynically, the CTO is where you put the technical cofounder when their wanton creativity and manic energy starts getting in the way of the engineering team's progress.

A similar distinction can be found with CEO vs. COO - the CEO is an outwards- facing visionary role, while the COO is an inwards-facing managerial role.

</comment><comment><USER3> Generally, but not always, a title which includes 'Officer' means that the individual can contractually bind the company to contracts. That's what it means to be an officer of a company in a legal sense. The ability to contractually bind the company is usually the distinction between 'Executive VP' and other 'VP' titles as well.

That does not mean that a Head of Engineering isn't an officer of the company, but not being one would be a reason to choose one title over the other. 'Job title as a form of compensation' is another reason.

</comment><comment><USER4> Like you say, there is no consensus. You just have to ask at each company what the titles mean to them.

One way to ask is by percentage time spent coding vs managing. There's a _small_ leaning of VP Eng towards more-managing rather than more-coding, but I've been the VP Eng who was 80% coding / 20% managing.</comment>