The Programmer Hierarchy - <AUTHOR> http://mgccl.com/2006/12/28/phper-think-themselves-superior-than-java-programmers Especially look at the most superior of all...! <comment><AUTHOR> Java is surely a jack of all trades... might not be a master, but does its job pretty well..

Another interesting blog on languages : <http://www.sysprog.net/quotjava.html> My favorite : "our development cycle is much faster because Java is interpreted. The compile-link-load-test-crash-debug cycle is obsolete. (James Gosling)"

<comment><USER2> That's hilarious.

I hope he was intentionally trying to mislead someone... you'd think he'd know better! :)

<comment><USER3> Heh. Java gives you a stack trace. There are a few cases where the jvm is out of memory and can't, but even then you get a lot more information than "bus error" or "segmentation fault".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He needs an arrow from Lisp Programmers to an Erlang Programmers box. Then the Erlang Programmers box needs an arrow to another box with a call to spawn/1 in it that has arrows to everything from Ruby on down...

</comment><comment><USER5> My company actually bought the rights to Series 1 assembly from IBM and that's what I use all day. I don't feel superior as this list suggests I should... mainly just tired and pitiable.

<comment><USER6> Where do you think the sense of superiority comes from? We get to be the "Einsteins" of the programming world: "Do not worry about your problems in programming. I can assure you mine are still greater."

<comment><USER7> I prefer to believe that the arrogance and the hackerness are orthogonal traits.

<comment><USER8> That's what I always hope to be true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do people hate java so much? For its job, it's pretty well designed.

<comment><USER10> Nobody hates Java, it's too generic and plain to generate such strong feelings. People don't care for language, but they do dislike _Java Programmers_ because a big percentage of them, but not all of course, got into CS only due to their neighbor once saying _"I hear programmers have no problem finding jobs"_.

The dumbest, least-motivated, non-reading bunch of individuals with engineering titles I've ever known were all Java or VB programmers. The kind who never heard of slashdot let alone reddit or joelonsoftare and use "wizards" to generate SQL queries. Heck, these dudes even call DELL or HP customer support (!) when their home computers stop booting.

Moreover, even smarter Java programmers have their issues. Nobody believes in design patters as much as Java people do. They never call new() on anything, they MUST have a factory that creates objects. They produce myriads of code that DOES NOTHING, but encapsulates some other junk that in return also does very little. These dudes can get quite aggressive if you try to point out to them that they never actually do anything but most of their time is spent _DESIGNING_ (oh! they LOVE this word, in fact they don't like to be called programmers, they like to be called architects).

I absorbed Java like most of us in college, but I will never go to work in Java shop because the danger of being surrounded by these morons is a lot greater there than anywhere else.

<comment><USER11> Ok, I work in Java all day. I use a smattering of other languages, have developed a number of sites using PHP, and my pet project is in Python.

I don't think you know many java programmers, and it's clear you haven't done any real world java development. Sure, the language has problems, and there are astronaut architects that do silly things, but neither I nor my coworkers rely on "wizards," or are obsessed with factories. Most of us use macs or linux. You might have read a rant that described all java developers that way, but it's unfair. There are VB and C# developers that fall into the same traps you describe.

In any case, if java is such an obviously terrible choice, why does a company like Google use it extensively internally? Either you assume the dangers of being surrounded by morons at Google is high, or perhaps you add nuance to your assertions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think pretty much programmers of every language think they are superior to every other one. The 'dummy' languages think it because of ignorance... or because they earn more money than someone at the same skill/intelligence level on a 'smart' language.

<comment><USER12> Oh yea... and as a perl programmer I consider myself superior to both C (which I've had the misfortune of coding in), Lisp (don't know) and Rudy (sounds nice??).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I the only one who thinks this diagram is too silly to be funny?

<comment><USER14> Oh, it's so silly it might be funny again. It's a parody of a parody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great, funny diagram. I think a bidirectional arrow between C# and PHP is sorely needed, though.

</comment><comment><USER16> What's this nonsense about Ruby being a "web language?"

That chart needs a thorough s/Ruby/Rails/g</comment>


Facts About the Minimum Wage – Pew Research Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/04/5-facts-about-the-minimum-wage/ <comment><USER2> (January 2017, using August 2016 data)</comment>


Show HN: Anonymous salary reports - <AUTHOR> http://dollartranscript.xyz <comment><AUTHOR> I believe in the open web. Trying to get away from walled gardens. Decided I want to switch from iOS Development. And try make a simple web app -> dollartranscript! Fetches/Sends/Decodes Json pretty much what every web app does Responsive via Flexbox. No need for a grid based on my noob knowledge. Frequency chart made with SVG no external libraries Backend: Swift 3 | 4. PostgreSQL as datastore also providing statistical capabilities. Inline CSS FTW Any critique welcome.

</comment><comment><USER2> broken link for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> here's the url: [http://dollartranscript.xyz/](http://dollartranscript.xyz/)

<comment><USER3> It's just a default nginx page.</comment></comment></comment>


Steering the growth of natural plants with distributed robots - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/news/228855-are-your-plants-misbehaving-call-a-robotanist/fulltext <comment><USER2> Or just do it without robots, but with bits of twine occasionally.

I wonder if it can build a bridge: [https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/root- bridges-cherrapunge...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/root-bridges- cherrapungee)

</comment><comment><USER3> A way to spend 100k on a tree.

<comment><USER4> Could you please not post shallow dismissals to HN?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


A Well-Funded Startup Emerges From the Unemployment Lines - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2012/08/learnup

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4383001>

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it just me, or do all the green usernames commenting on this with such unbridled enthusiasm smell of "Voting Ring" and/or astro-turfing?

</comment><comment><USER4> It's always great to see how America responds when times are tough. I have no doubt that the great minds of this country will put things back on track. This is the perfect example.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unemployment + employers who can't find the right people to fill open jobs -> opportunity. Cool to see this approach to the skill gap!

</comment><comment><USER6> Great startup that seeks to tackle this very real problem for the job market. So excited to see more from them!

</comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome. It's refreshing to see a company addressing a real problem. So pumped for this!

</comment><comment><USER8> love startups that set off to tackle a truly compelling, large-scale problem.

</comment><comment><USER9> LearnUp is a wonderful starup. Glad to see they're making waves!

</comment><comment><USER10> excited to see the start of a great company solving a critical problem in the job economy. we need more crazy ideas like this!

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a great solution for anyone who wants to learn.</comment>


PostgreSQL, pg_shard, and what we learned from our failures - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/19-ozgun/265-postgresql-pgshard-and-what-we-learned-our-failures <comment><USER2> I find the proposed solution for 'SELECT COUNT(customer_id) FROM orders' confusing. They suggest placing the 3 billion order rows into three sets of 1 billion, to be distributed among three machines. But summing the number of distinct customer IDs in each bucket doesn't give you the number of distinct customer IDs in the orders table because an ID could be in more than one bucket. What am I missing?

<comment><USER3> This isn't clear in the blog post; I'll try to clarify.

The buckets correspond to hash token ranges. For example, the database takes one row from orders_2013, hashes the customer_id value, and gets a hashed value of 1.5B. It then puts it into the second bucket orders_2013_[1B-2B[.

After the distributed shuffle, you end up with orders_cust_id[1B-2B[ on machine 2. So all orders that belong to a particular / disjoint set of customers live on one machine. You can then push down the count(distinct customer_id) to each node, and then add up the results.

We use hash token ranges in pg_shard. I'll include this clarification to the blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think PG is a great database, but I don't see what makes it a good fit for a distributed system. You're going to either give up too much performance or a lot of the guarantees that make standard SQL databases interesting in the first place.

<comment><USER3> (Ozgun from Citus Data)

It's Postgres' Extension APIs. They enable you to extend, cooperate with, or override any database submodule's behavior without forking the database: [https://goo.gl/rr2EIm](https://goo.gl/rr2EIm)

As an example, let's say you leveraged planner hooks to parallelize PostgreSQL queries. When a new feature such as JSONB gets checked into Postgres, it becomes immediately available for parallel querying.

To my knowledge, no other database provides the means to extend the database to such an extent. These APIs became official in PG 9.0, and two example links from the PostgreSQL documentation are:

[http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/extend.html](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/extend.html) [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/spi.html](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/spi.html)

<comment><USER4> This doesn't really answer my question. I'm not asking "how can you turn PG into a distributed database", I'm asking "what do I get with that that I don't get with, eg, Cassandra"?

<comment><USER5> Structured Query Language ... that's the biggest thing you get. Also database resolved relational data.

It also allows you to present said information from other stores through a well defined interface, such as via stored proceedures that can be locked down via login/identity/application and other features typically in SQL, while being able to act as a gateway for more optimized data stores for specific types of data. Not to mention that JSON data in pgsql has gotten pretty good... I think with plv8 it gets event better. Where I think pg falls is in terms of replica sets, hot failover and automated recovery options which many nosql servers give you in the box. With PG you pretty much have to pay for a decent HA solution.

That said, I honestly really like document stores, and RethinkDB as an example offers some of the relational features of a typical SQL database while being mainly available as a document store.

<comment><USER6> You can get SQL over Cassandra or almost everything other database (even MongoDB) via Spark. And CQLSH is SQL-like at least.

And personally I have always thought putting business logic in stored procedures is a truly dumb idea. You forever lock yourself to that database and there is always a point that you can exceed its capabilities and need to implement functionality in the application layer anyway.

<comment><USER3> I think it's the extent of SQL coverage. As an example, PostgreSQL covers all join types (inner, outer, anti, lateral) that I can think of.

Postgres has been building its SQL coverage for over a decade, and compares favorably to others databases: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018129)

<comment><USER4> Well, of course it does, but "join" in a distributed database is notoriously different (and often not present at all) from "join" in a non-distributed scenario, so this doesn't make it a strong argument for Postgres.

<comment><USER7> The problem with joins and reason why most distributed databases don't support them is primarily that the local machinery is complicated to implement.

Given local join machinery, a join between 2 distributed tables can be achieved by joining the partitions of the tables locally after ensuring that tables are co-partitioned and partitions are co-located. That is, if performing A JOIN B ON (A.X = B.Y), ensure that A is partitioned by X and B is partitioned by Y with the same partitioning scheme such that every partition in A has a corresponding partition in B with which it can be joined. A distributed join can then be performed (in parallel) by joining each pair of partitions and concatenating the results.

Ideally, tables are co-partitioned and partitions are co-located in advance. The article describes scenarios in which the tables need to be repartitioned during the query, which can cause a lot of network traffic. However, the amount of traffic is limited in practice since filters and projections can be applied before shuffling any data.

The great thing about implementing a distributed database on top of PostgreSQL is that the local machinery already exists, and it is very good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Should Citus reevaluate cstore_fdw in light of this extensions API? I wonder if a foreign data wrapper is similarly ill-fitted for this application.

<comment><USER7> For basic reads and writes the FDW APIs are quite suitable and they work well for cstore_fdw. However, to get the most out of columnar storage you also need vectorized execution that can calculate aggregates on blocks of values. The FDW APIs are not well-suited for this purpose, since they pull one row of data at a time. We've done some experiments in which we used the executor hooks to implement a vectorized executor for cstore_fdw [1] and it can give dramatic performance gains. However, the SQL support of this solution is limited as the APIs force you to build a new executor from scratch.

With sharding, the distributed executor can work on the SQL level and translate one SQL query to many SQL queries. In that case your distributed executor can focus on issues such as partitioning and merging data, while the low-level work is still being done by the regular PostgreSQL executor, so you don't have to implement it from scratch.

[1] [https://github.com/citusdata/postgres_vectorization_test](https://github.com/citusdata/postgres_vectorization_test)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The problem was that we were trying to retrofit [the Foreign Data Wrapper] > API for something that it was fundamentally not designed to do.

> The PostgreSQL Extension APIs ... enable you to extend, cooperate with, or > override any database submodule's behavior. We could therefore change our > design to use the planner and executor hook APIs, and we found that things > followed nicely from there.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately this comment is really a good summary of the article. I guess it makes marketing sense to cut up big blog posts into two, but as it is the article really is vapid, while it could easily have been the article that makes me consider CitusDB over MongoDB for a particular application.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, the details of _why_ statement one is true are still interesting though.</comment></comment></comment>


Chatroulette may be about to make a very big mistake - <AUTHOR> http://howwl.com/post/?p=260

<comment><USER2> I feel like hotornot solved this problem a lot time ago.

Just let users rate other users, and let them set their thresholds.

You could even have the software automatically calculate a score based on how quickly/often a user is skipped. Vulgar users are usually skipped often, and within a few seconds of a connection. Stop connecting those users with newbies, and start connecting them with each other.

<comment><USER3> hotornot solved the problem by moderating all photos before they were pushed to the general public. this approach obviously wouldn't work for CR.

your suggestions are pretty good- i'd be somewhat surprised if these sorts of things weren't in place already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Setting aside the business model issues for a moment: I'm really intrigued by the idea of penis-recognition software. Now, that's a branch of AI I never even considered before, and already my mind is racing through the algorithmic approaches...

<comment><USER5> If they get the penis-recognition AI working, they can split the site in two, chattroulette and penisroulette, and automatically route videos to the correct site. I'm honestly not sure which site would become the more popular though.

<comment><USER6> I think the penis showing men would just disguise their penises. So we would see penises with little wigs and glasses on. I would like to see the penis AI cope with that!

<comment><USER7> Would you really?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not like Chatroulette was going to be a long-term thing. It's million- dollar-homepage 2.0.

<http://www.quantcast.com/chatroulette.com>

<comment><USER9> <insert your supreme being here> help us if you're wrong. _shudder_

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chatroulette is not going to be a viable long term business.

It does, however, tell us two things:

1) A lot of men seem to like to show there penis to people (especially girls) 2) Girls dont like to see random men's penises

Square that circle (e.g. make the men pay and pay the girls to watch) and you will be on a million dollar idea.

<comment><USER10> I think it's interesting how almost everyone assumes the naked guys on chatroulette are straight.

<comment><USER6> No I dont think that at all... I just think gay guys will do it for free, so there is (maybe) as much money to be made!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr: converting the darker parts of the web into a viable business model is hard.

Mind you, I'd say chatroulette's problem is not obscene content, but the fact that it's a fad for bored teenagers.

<comment><USER12> I disagree. It's at least theoretically possible to find advertisers that want to reach bored teenagers. Very few people would risk having their logo appear on chatroulette.

<comment><USER11> The problem is that chatrouletter was a novelty. The bored teenagers are already moving on to the next thing. I don't even want to imagine what you'd try and sell to an audience of a few dozen exhibitionists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> '"If he doesn't make a dramatic move soon to clean up the service, the brand will be permanently tarnished," says another interested investor.'

Is Chatroulette not already synonymous with anonymous penises? I'd say the brand's already tarnished in that regard. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing -- anonymous penises may be exactly what some users are looking for.

</comment><comment><USER14> He should just sell out to Youporn or whatever. Pretty sure CR isn't the next the Facebook, worth turning down billion dollar offers for.

</comment><comment><USER15> It depends what you call success, really. If you want anarchy, ChatRoulette's got it. If you want genuine mass appeal, then you need to meet the mainstream halfway. Look at the career trajectory of most bands.

If you insist, you can call that a sell-out, because it is. But what it really is is optimizing for a different pay-off.

</comment><comment><USER16> It looks like they are also about to launch chat roulette by city. Just go to sanfrancisco.chatroulette.com and you can see that it's already set up, they just haven't announced it yet.

<comment><USER7> I believe any chatrouletter subdomain creates a "channel" for that specific subdomain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> With P2P the image recognition would have to be done on the client anyways. So those who don't enjoy watching phalli would be able to change their preferences covertly.

He could even provide a simple form like

      [ ] block nudity
      [x] censor nudity

Those baring themselves to the peer wouldn't even know whether it was worth it or not. That's what I'd do anyways.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just make the filter optional and default, like Google's image SafeSearch. Next?

</comment><comment><USER19> They should name the filter "Cockblock".</comment>


Google Denied Trademark on Nexus One  - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_denied_trademark_on_android_nexus_one.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> doh... but then does it matter? The name fits the phone so well... do Androids dream of electric sheep? I dunno, ill check the market place.

<comment><USER3> Someone needs to make an Electric Sheep screensaver for the Nexus One. <http://community.electricsheep.org/>

<comment><USER2> or a live wallpaper (not sure why I got down voted for my last comment... oh well)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to pay your users? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the brainstorming part of trying to start a new app.  Similar to Amazon's affiliate program or the way 99 designs holds design contests, I'd like to be able to compensate the site's users for their input.
For those getting compensation, I'm thinking the average amount would be less than $100.
What are some hurdles to paying your users?  What legal obstacles should I be aware of?  Is this a solved problem (i.e. should I go with PayPal?  Stripe?) <comment><USER2> The main hurdles seem to be taxes. The solution seems to be (IANAL) to have some checkboxes that say "I will take care of taxes myself".

See how Adsense and Amazon affiliates do it. You can probably get away with doing less than them.

Good luck, interested in finding out the answer myself :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's the same thing I was thinking. It seems like you could do payments through PayPal, but I'd rather not get stuck keeping track of all compensation paid and providing the requisite tax forms at the end of the year -- it's just too much overhead for a bootstrapped side-project.</comment></comment>


What Hackers Need - <AUTHOR> http://recoding.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-hackers-need.html

<comment><USER2> What you wrote might not be true for hackers everywhere, because different places are moving at different pace. I say this because I am from India. For 1 teenage hacker here, I am sure you have 10 teenage hackers there (in US or Europe I suppose), and we are like, more populous. But I suppose this kind of stuff also has to do with a lot less people here having the "luxury" of having computers, but that is for a different talk/chat/thread :-)

Out of the three things that you wrote, I can only relate to one.

I started programming after getting into college, and still I am sure, lots of teenage hackers there (wherever you are) can very easily better me. Secondly, I have not had the chance to have a mentor. (But I think hostilefork and other guys in the Rebol room are changing it)

The third thing is, that I have worked at two different jobs for a period of one-and-a-half years. And I understand what you mean by exposure to reality. It means 2 things to me:

\- dealing with politics.

\- delivering despite the previous point.

And no matter how much I despise my two software jobs, I will say that the people skills I learnt there were more important than the programming experience. I no more work at a software job now, and I am not even sure if I would really do one in the near and far future.

This is a fact that the way we are teaching hackers is not the right way, but we are improving. Some places faster, some slower. Some places are moving backwards, but it is tangential to your discussion. What I loved about your post was that instead of enumerating 20,000 points on how the present hacker education system, you said what you thought should be done. This is positive thought, instead of passive thought.

:-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I too, only had one thing from the list (the job, coding for a company that didn't understand programming). While I had access to computers from a young age, I didn't have free access. I also didn't start seriously programming until college either. I wish I could slap my younger self and tell him where his priorities should lie.

This post was not intended to be a "Look at all these great things I've got" but rather a discussion of how good hackers come to be. I feel incredibly inadequate when I read about people like Drew Huston, who started coding at 5. All I can do is keep moving forward.

Glad you liked it!

<comment><USER2> So, you have made me realize something.

First of all, I should mention right now that I fully take your "theory" of 3 things to be true.

I think it is very, very difficult to have all 3 things. Most people would be lucky to have 1, really lucky to have any 2 and really, really lucky to have all 3.

But.... here comes the internet. IMO the net is a very good open resource for learning and programming. Just take our very own Rebolbot as an example. And like I mentioned earlier, you can easily find guidance from better people here.

Btw, I love your writing. Not read the whole of your blog, but I love it. Keep writing, keep enjoying it

:-)</comment></comment></comment>


Two billionaires on the university - <AUTHOR> http://www.bogost.com/blog/two_billionaires_on_the_univer.shtml

<comment><USER2> The blog post unfairly juxtaposes two different aspects of the university (research and getting undergrads degrees):

Bloomberg is focusing on research: he understands the academy, the intellectual body of people collaborating, discussing and rubbing elbows. Research that happens in a "physics building, a school of public health, a children's hospital, a stem-cell research institute, a malaria institute, and a library wing" cannot happen at all the same "online". New buildings, especially institutes and hospitals, can make a HUGE difference.

Cuban seems to be addressing and entirely different point, which is that for many big universities their income comes from being a degree-mill for undergraduates (which often, unfortunately, just the absorption and regurgitation of information.), and as such are focusing not on quality education and research, but on looks and prestige. A fair enough criticism, but not contrary to Bloomberg's donation.

<comment><USER3> Bloomberg went to Hopkins as an undergraduate student, and that experience is largely why he donates so much money to Hopkins. A big chunk of his current and past donations went to non-research aspects of undergraduate life (scholarships, improvements to the undergraduate campus, improvements to buildings that serve undergraduates, etc). Also, his donations have gone to things that traditionally are associated with looks and prestige, like the new buildings and moving parking to underground garages.

I think part of what Bloomberg is doing is allowing the Hopkins undergraduate school to be what any top-rate university would want to be without making the kinds of sacrifices that Cuban is critical of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's possible they are both right. The school Bloomberg donated the money to, Johns Hopkins is among the more prestigious name recognition wise. It's hard to see how, with billionaires willing to give you so much money, you could possibly go bankrupt. On the other hand Cuban's point of view probably has more merit for second and third tier schools with less name recognition. Look at newspapers; the New York Times seems like it will survive many small town paper's futures look much more uncertain.

<comment><USER5> Thiel, another billionaire who's down on college, got a Law degree from Stanford. Stanford is probably even more highly regarded outside of tech circles, if you can imagine that even being possible.

The answer may be in the degrees themselves: Bloomberg received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering whereas Cuban received a BA in Business Administration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't understand why someone would get a CS degree these days, but I could totally see why someone would get a medical degree.

(A good exception for getting a CS degree though is if you'd like to get a US work visa like a TN or an H1B, which requires one).

<comment><USER7> Or the plethora of ancillary benefits to getting a university education. The actual education in many areas is negligible, instead you get up to four years to defer having to do any real work, spending a sizable chunk of your time around intelligent, like minded peers. And for a lot of people, it provides a relatively safe way of experiencing life on their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Me (non-billionaire and dubious source) on the university system:

[http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/04/14/the-difference- betw...](http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/04/14/the-difference-between-a- degree-and-an-education/)

:)

</comment><comment><USER9> It is hard to see how a billionaire's opinion of the University is relevant. They are extreme outliers and haven't devoted much of their lives to studying universities.

Bloomberg at least seems to be involved with JHU and had a sense of what they produce.

<comment><USER10> > It is hard to see how a billionaire's opinion of the University is relevant.

Oh, I don't know. Maybe because they have billions of dollars worth of influence?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Bloomberg's donations have made possible a physics building, a school of public health, a children's hospital, a stem-cell research institute, a malaria institute, and a library wing._

Unless they left some money for operating them over the decades, they just burdened themselves with more future spending.

But there's a major difference: Bloomberg is donating his money for what he sees fit, Cuban is commenting on that. Let Cuban donate a billion to pay for tuition</comment>


The Physics of Bread - <AUTHOR> http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2017/oct/05/the-physics-of-bread <comment><USER2> Reminds me of an AvE video about DIY carbon foam.

\- Making carbon foam [https://youtu.be/Wex_yKfrTo4](https://youtu.be/Wex_yKfrTo4)

\- Bread bowl foundry [https://youtu.be/L-qOIO6IQWk](https://youtu.be/L-qOIO6IQWk)

</comment><comment><USER3> Comments on the link suggest that this is a known patent troll outfit.

<comment><USER4> Yes, Intellectual Ventures is an IP outfit founded by Nathan Myrvold and Edward Jung, both from Microsoft.

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

I think that's quite off-topic for the submission at hand, however. The article has little (nothing?) to do with intellectual property (other than perhaps copyright and authorship of Myrvold's upcoming book) or patents.

If you want to consider this as a reason to discount the submission, please feel free. Perhaps even flag the submission if you feel it's inappropriate for HN. But please don't derail what could otherwise be an interesting conversation about bread, physics, and the history of cooking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nathan Myhrvold has a new cookbook about bread: [https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Bread-Nathan- Myhrvold/dp/09...](https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Bread-Nathan- Myhrvold/dp/0982761058/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509035344&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=myravold). This complements his prize winning modernist cookbook [https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science- Cooking...](https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science- Cooking/dp/0982761007/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1509035524&sr=8-3&keywords=myhrvold).

<comment><USER6> Is it really $500+ for 5 volumes? I don't know why I was hoping it was going to be affordable.

<comment><USER5> That is $562.50 reduced from $625.00 at Amazon for the 5 volume set, only $112.50/volume or $0.21/page on pre-order. The shipping weight is 53 pounds. While I have not seen this book, the photos are over-the-top gorgeous. There is a wide range of ancillary materials--posters and the like--as well. If you want to learn about bread in detail, this is may be your book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone who is in to food physics (food technologists / mechanical engineers / analytical chemists / biologists / applied machine learners) and is looking for a creative and interesting job, please get in touch.</comment>


Minksy: "My career was based on cowardice" - <AUTHOR> http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/19 <comment><AUTHOR> "That is, here was this new field called cognitive psychology, and I was really good at it, getting new ideas, and except for a few other people like Sigmund Freud and William James, who maybe had better ideas than I did, there wasn't much competition. Licklider and Miller were… accepted me as an equal, and so you could say that my career was based on cowardice, or… or something. If there was a field where there were five or 10 people who were better at it, why bother? Because in these fields, you know, if you were a very good physicist and you ran across a Richard Feynman, what's the use?"</comment>


Multi version control hosting - <AUTHOR> http://startup-ideas.posterous.com/multi-version-control-hosting

<comment><USER2> I've recently started using <http://hg-git.github.com/> (found it via a comment on HN, IIRC) which allows you to use the Mercurial command line tools to interact with Git repositories on GitHub.

It was created by people at GitHub.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. I will check it out.</comment></comment>


Show HN: AutoMicroFarm Is Ready for Shipping - <AUTHOR> http://blog.automicrofarm.com/post/147044782291/the-automicrofarm-is-ready-for-shipping <comment><USER3> As someone who gardens, and has a little 3 acre homestead, this is not something I would go for in its current state... but there are improvements that could get me there:

1) I understand buying off the shelf parts for your prototype. But spending hundreds of dollars to be shipped parts I could have bought myself is just adding more middle-men into the supply chain. At this point, just sell the parts list and plans for $20. And when you have built parts with ease of assembly in mind, so this is 5x easier than DIY with parts from home depot... THEN sell the kit.

2) You need to share data of how much water is needed on an ongoing basis, in different climates. People in Arizona with limited water supplies might not have the same resources to put in, for example.

3) You need to talk specifically about what plants work well, what the yields are,in different climates and growing zones, and recommend planting strategies for different locations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

1\. In talking to other aquaponics businesses, I've heard that people are not very excited about paying for a manual/plans. If you're serious about this, let me know and I can email you a payment link :)

2\. Aquaponics in general only uses ~10% of the water a normal garden, with the only water losses being evaporation and plant transpiration (and what water is incorporated into the plants themselves).

3\. This is a good point. The plants that normally grow well in your garden will grow well in aquaponics, with a few extreme exceptions. For example, you would not want to grow blueberries, since they prefer a low pH.

<comment><USER4> I love the idea, but as an Arizonian, evaporation is a serious concern - <USER2> the summertime, water evaporates out of pools at a rate several times faster than more moderate climates (pool covers are big business out here for that reason). When we water lawns/gardens, it's generally in the very early morning or late evening, when we won't lose a large chunk of the water to evaporation.

I'd also be concerned about water temperatures of a shallow pool during the summer. Water's a great heatsink, but that can be a problem when the ambient air temperature is 118F, and the intense UV out here will likely break down the pools quickly. Most anything made out of plastics is completely trashed after a year of exposure out here. PEX in particular isn't rated for continuous UV exposure, and would likely disintegrate rather aggressively out here.

I love the idea, though. Turnkey aquaponics is a really exciting prospect, especially out here where we don't have particularly rich soil. I'd love to be able to run something like this in my backyard, if I could work out the location-relevant logistics.

<comment><AUTHOR> If evaporation is a serious issue, you could cover up most of the fish tank (but be sure to add an air bubbler so there's enough oxygen for the fish). Also, if you dig a hole for the fish tank (like I didn't) that should help with the water temperature. In your case, tilapia would be a great fish to grow, they are really happy with water above 85F.

Also, it would be a good idea to cover up the plastic, perhaps even more than my enclosure does, to ensure it doesn't degrade as quickly.

I'll help customers make these and other design considerations as part of AutoMicroFarm support.

<comment><USER5> > but be sure to add an air bubbler so there's enough oxygen for the fish

Not a serious aquarist here, but I did a lot of research before getting my little 10 gallon tank at home set up and everything I've read says the oxygen introduced by air bubbles in the water doesn't really dilute in the water well (most of it just comes up the bubble and out into the open air). In theory, as long as there is a big enough hole for a modest amount of air to be exchanged with the surrounding environment you shouldn't need any extra equipment, as the surface of the water should continue to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide just fine as long as there is enough oxygen present.

<comment><USER6> What really matters is the surface agitation. Bubblers will do that, but so will any pump as long as the outflow is directed toward the surface.

A better idea, I feel, is to just keep a layer of air between the water surface and the cover. The key issue is that oxygen has trouble crossing the air/water boundary, so you want that to be as big as possible. Meanwhile, if you keep the air holes in the cover small enough, most of the humid air will be trapped inside, and you will minimize losses from evaporation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Another factor to consider is the air pressure. If you cover up the fish tank, and add the air bubbler, the pressure will increase, which will increase the dissolution of oxygen into the water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> * Sand is not a good substrate for plants. Too fine - aeration problems; surface to volume ratio not good. Anaerobic zones will form. Denitrification with odor will stress plants and fishes.

* No dedicated biofilter. Nitrification bacteria will form and live on the sand. Tight coupling between fsh tank and grow beds. No way to decouple when one or the other has to be maintained.

* Fine mesh preventing the sand to get into the fish tank will clogg with detritus.

* Grow beds will clogg with detritus after approximately one season.

* No sump tank. Water level in the fish tank will vary a lot. Fish don't like that. Stocking density will have to be low to aleviate this.

* Too much sun on the fish tank. Most fish species don't like this and algae will form rapidly.

Please do not _sell_ aquaponic designs like this one.

I'm doing aquaponics since 2012 and I'm currently working in aquaponic research for a university.

<comment><USER8> _Sand is not a good substrate for plants._

What's a better inexpensive substrate? I've been finding Diatomaceous Earth (sold as kitty litter or oil absorbent) to be great for starting seedlings, but it's more expensive than desirable for filling a large volume.

Detailed thread here: [http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=22329](http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=22329)

<comment><USER9> [http://www.grodan.nl/oplossingen/groenteteelt+producten/grot...](http://www.grodan.nl/oplossingen/groenteteelt+producten/grotop+master)

Used in Dutch greenhouses for the last 20 years or so.

<comment><USER7> Most of the grodan producs are made from rock wool. From a plant perspective it is a very good substrate, good capilarity, inert, stable.

But it is not compostable and recyclable.

For a classical ebb and flow grow bed, the rock wool fibers are too fine grained.

<comment><USER9> You're wrong, it is 100% recyclable[1]. Otherwise we would have an enormous heap of those things.

It's not composted, but luckily these things can be recycled into other, more useful products. You basically can't sell compost over here as there is too much compost already. We're already exporting compost to the UK for very low prices.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5yw_RIU59o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5yw_RIU59o)

<comment><USER7> Ah cool, good to know. Thank you for the pointer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, Andrew here. I'm the AutoMicroFarm founder. Really happy to finally have this prototype finished, and available. Let me know if you have any questions!

<comment><USER10> How many of these would you need to produce enough food for one adult? What kind of fish should you grow, and how long do they take to be adults and edible?

Your project is very cool, I think you're doing an amazing job. Keep it up!

<comment><AUTHOR> If you eat mostly plants, two of these systems will provide 90%+ of your food (assuming you have a greenhouse to put it in, or live in a place that stays warm year-round).

The fastest-growing fish used for aquaponics is tilapia, which can reach maturity in six months. But, they require for the water temperature to stay above 60F (15C), and really prefer water above 85F (30C). Other fish take 9 or more months to mature.

Thanks!

<comment><USER11> >If you eat mostly plants, two of these systems will provide 90%+ of your food

What numbers are you basing this on? That is, do you have an estimated yield in lbs. for what one system can produce?

<comment><AUTHOR> My initial proof-of-concept produced 10 lbs/square foot annually, not counting the fish. This system should be more productive, but only time will tell.

If this system has similar levels of productivity, it would produce 360 lbs annually, so two systems get you 2 lbs of food daily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very cool concept. I would like a bit more information on the following:

1) What kind of fish are recommended/suitable?

2) Where do you get the fish? I assume most pet stores don't sell fish to raise for food.

3) What are the fish food options? Again, I assume pet stores don't carry the required feed.

Edit: A few more fish related questions: Do you have to stick to one type of fish at a time? How many fish can your kit support at one time? I'm sure that's species dependent, so perhaps some examples?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Tilapia, perch, and catfish are popular. I have catfish in mine. You just have to match the temperature requirements to your climate/area.

2\. You would get the fish at a fish hatchery, there should be one near you. This is something I find out for my customers. You can also buy fish online, but the overnight shipping makes it a bit expensive.

3\. You can buy fish food online, or at a hatchery, or e.g. Tractor Supply.

4\. The thing about different fish species (or even same species but substantially different sizes) is that if a fish fits inside a bigger fish's mouth, that bigger fish will try to eat it, unless the smaller fish has somewhere to hide, like aquatic vegetation. This is something I will be experimenting with more.

<comment><USER13> Re 4. Might be better off with two fish tanks. One for the wee ones?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the 'aqua' part is well developed in the aquaculture field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Realizing this touches several comments made already...

\- What about pests? Will the fish control mosquito-larvae in the pool? ... and any other bugs that fall in? (Think southeastern US or other places where mosquitos can be a problem.)

\- What about scavengers? Do the fish bed to be protected from raccoons out suburban/feral cats?

\- Can you sell sub-kits? For example, I could use your source of kiddie pools and fish, but don't need to buy pex from you when there's a hardware store two miles away...

\- What about erosion during times of hard precipitation? (Again, most places in the US do get some serious weather multiple times during the growing season.) Seeing my mature plants wash away would be rather frustrating.

I dig the idea, from one garden hacker to another, I just have a lot of questions ... and as I said: I'm not interested in a full kit, but a sub-kit with research would be really useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just talked to someone who also says raccoons will be a problem. I guess the best solution would be to have a lid/cover for your fish tank.

<comment><USER6> If there are raccoons in your area, you really want netting over the pond.

The standard advice for preventing fish loss to raccoons without using netting is: the water must be at least three feet deep (any less than that, and the raccoons will hang from the edge by their hind legs and grab sleeping fish off the bottom) and you MUST NOT train your fish to surface near the edge of the pond (fish have trouble distinguishing the sound of human footsteps from the sound of raccoon footsteps). Any food should be thrown into the pond at least three feet away from the pond edge.

Naturally, that advice isn't very helpful for a pond six feet or less in diameter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. Seems like an appropriate-sized net would cost around $10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What a cool idea! I was pretty surprised how much the wooden enclosure really improved its appearance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, me too! My wife also really liked it, saying how the enclosure finally made her not ashamed to tell her friends about it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well hell, there is definitely room for profit on this system!

A few of the YouTubers I like have built systems like this. One of the better systems was from MrTeslonian [0].

Hope you get people to buy this!

[0] - [https://youtu.be/VaY5hMxTExQ](https://youtu.be/VaY5hMxTExQ)

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks similar to a barrelponics system. That was my first, proof-of- concept prototype. It cost me $700 and 50 hours of work, and had a growing area of ~9 square feet.

I'm sure you could get the system cheaper if you found the parts for sale, or already have them. You could also build it faster if you're really handy, have the experience, and don't make any mistakes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool! I'll be keeping an eye on this.

This year I've been experimenting with these DIY self-watering grow containers:

[http://earthtainer.tomatofest.com/pdfs/EarthTainer- Construct...](http://earthtainer.tomatofest.com/pdfs/EarthTainer-Construction- Guide.pdf)

Very little maintenance after the initial assembly and planting, and I've had pretty great results so far.

I've heard about aquaponics before, but never dug into it. I'd be interested in hearing about its advantages over a (presumably less involved) traditional container setup like mine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Josh, the advantages are similar as compared to a garden, except the containers solve some of the problems (such as optimal watering). Probably the biggest advantage is you get fish as part of your harvest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If this type of thing piques you interest, there is a vibrant aquaponics community with many forums eg. [1] and designs using all sorts of off-the- shelf parts.

IBCs and blue plastic drums are generally the "go to' solution [2] as they're made from HDPE, although some are made from plastics that are not considered food safe as they use mould release agents during the manufacturing process which are toxic (no reference for this at the moment, sorry).

Just be aware that generally you need A LOT more grow bed area than you would think to be able to efficiently use the fish tank volume. You can pack a lot of happy fish into a given volume of water.

Also, the general consensus is to use course gravel (20mm) rather than sand, as sand can quickly become blocked with organic material.

[1] [http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/forum/](http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/forum/)

[2] [http://ibcofaquaponics.com/](http://ibcofaquaponics.com/)

[EDIT] Also, you'll want to keep the sunlight off the fish tank, because once the nitrogen level starts to rise [3], the algae will go nuts in there. I learned this the hard way.

[3] [http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/information/the- nitrogen-c...](http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/information/the-nitrogen- cycle/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I realize the gravel vs. sand debate is a bit contentious, but I haven't had any blockage in the two months I have been running the system, despite claims of that the sand will become clogged within hours or days.

In fact, the sand media was the original aquaponics design.

References:

[http://iavs.info/](http://iavs.info/) [http://aquaponicsnation.com/forums/topic/9039-integrated- aqu...](http://aquaponicsnation.com/forums/topic/9039-integrated- aquavegeculture-system-iavs/)

<comment><USER18> That's good to hear you've been having success with sand.

I'd love to hear how it's going after 12 months, because sand is certainly easier to work with than course gravel, which can be difficult to plant seedlings into, based on my own experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll let you know. But I hope to find/develop a better medium before then ([http://blog.automicrofarm.com/post/142436464771/mushroom- med...](http://blog.automicrofarm.com/post/142436464771/mushroom-media- adventures)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Was the kiddie pool chosen specifically for cost? There are a plethora of fiberglass and UV-stabilized PET plastic holding tanks used in the aquaculture business (and rainwater collection systems) that would have much better strength and lower tendency to go brittle over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the biggest consideration was cost, and the lack of any potentially harmful plastics, such as phthalates and bisphenols (such as BPA).

<comment><USER20> How much more would it cost to use something that's at least a solid color (preferably green/black/brown)? The obvious kiddie pool factor is a big enough turn off for a lot of people that fixing it might be worth raising the price point. Even the wooden enclosure doesn't hide the color and print on the pool.

<comment><AUTHOR> The cost is ~$100 more per container (from what I could find), so the whole system ends up costing $300 more, at least. Is it worth the color change?

<comment><USER21> As soon as you have any sort of volume, you could hit Alibaba and try to find something better, even get your items customised to completely suit your needs.

The colour/look would completely put me off buying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I presume you need to manually top off the system for evaporation?

In rainy weather, is losing nutrients to overflow a problem?

Any thoughts to using a 12VDC pump, powered by a solar panel and small battery? (In some places it is illegal to have an extension cord outdoors for months on end.)

Would it be easier/cheaper to ship a version that didn't include the kiddie pools or sand, with the expectation that someone could source those bulky items themselves?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you would need to top off in times of little rain.

Unless you have a ton of rain, I don't see losing the nutrients as a problem.

That is something I looked into. For $150-$200, you can buy a kit containing the DC pump, a battery, a solar panel, and a timer.

That is something I considered, but I thought it would be simpler to start off with just one offering.

<comment><USER14> Is there some provision for the over-watering (rainy) scenario? I would be interested if this were accounted for...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I drilled a small hole near the top of the fish tank. I'll update my blog to mention this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> david-given See also [https://automicrofarm.com](https://automicrofarm.com).

</comment><comment><USER23> I just saw that this system went on sale recently too: [https://farmbot.io/](https://farmbot.io/)

It would be way cool to collab and create an AutoMicroFarmBot.

What features of the AMF are you planning for the next iteration/2.0?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I'm in touch with Rory of FarmBot.

I would really like to solve the hassle of how heavy and inconvenient sand is, perhaps by replacing it with e.g. mushroom media: [http://blog.automicrofarm.com/post/142436464771/mushroom- med...](http://blog.automicrofarm.com/post/142436464771/mushroom-media- adventures). But, first things first :)

<comment><USER23> Why did you decide on a two tiered system? I've seen aquaponic setups where the farmers are using a floating medium above the fish pool.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hard to find a 12" (30cm) deep medium that would allow for fruiting plants such as tomatoes, be lighter than water, and not just be a support structure such as polyurethane foam (i.e. not having roots grow through it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fantastic, really nice to see this done from start to finish. Will this ship to Europe?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm just focusing on the US market for now. Although I'm sure all the parts (or their equivalents) are available in Europe.

<comment><USER21> If many components are typically available in hardware stores, have you looked at dropshipping in some way from hardware stores local to each buyer? You could ship out instructions and any exotic pieces from a central spot, plus the bulk of things from local stores?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Aquaponics has always interested me, and as an alpha product this looks pretty neat! A few questions:

1) I've heard that you don't really save money on the fish side after you take into account feed and labor. Would you characterize that as true?

2) What are we talking about in terms of maintenance time/costs?

3) How high is the risk of mold or some disease getting in your system, considering your fairly inexperienced target user base?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. This may be true with aquaculture, but in backyard-sized aquaponics, where you're not trying to breed fish, I feel there's really not that much labor involved. And the feed not only feeds the fish, it's later re-used as fertilizer for plants. If you account for both fish and plant production, you can definitely save money.

2\. Maintenance time is minimal: I spent 15 minutes a day on my initial prototype, and that was mostly to feed the fish and gather the harvest, once it got going. Maintenance costs are really minimal: fish feed and seeds come out to maybe $20-30 annually.

3\. I've never had a problem with mold, since the water always drains (after flooding). There is always the chance that you'll get some kind of pest or disease on your fish/plants, I've had those pests but companion planting can minimize that risk (something I'll help my customers with).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have a pair of pet terrapins. Has anyone tried aquaponics with terrapins? They produce a lot more waste than fish. Perhaps that'll allow for more land- mass for growing?

<comment><USER27> I don't know anything about terrapins in particular, but turtles in general carry a ton of potentially dangerous diseases. In many states, turtles are outlawed as pets because their digestive systems are so geared towards incubating bacterial pathogens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's really exciting that YC Fellowship is funding stuff like this (that is, stuff that is truly very early-stage and experimental).

</comment><comment><USER29> Wow, that was quick! After following this project for a few years it's nice to see this finally ready :)

</comment><comment><USER30> "Pays for itself in six months" with what value attached to the labor involved?

<comment><USER31> Do you really attach a dollar value to activities you do in your spare time?

<comment><USER30> It's a system for producing food. How much does that food really cost?

<comment><USER31> However much the store you buy it from sells it for. Stores don't sell at the cost of raw materials, so the argument you can discount the cost of labour (and the cost of processing, transport and storage for that matter) doesn't really make much sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Guide to Find and Connect with Investors in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://hackfundraising.com/ultimate-guide-to-find-and-connect-with-investors-in-silicon-valley/ <comment> 100-xyz Not a bad article. Saw a few spelling mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER2> do you have an invite to lunchclub ?</comment>


Apple acquires Buddybuild - <AUTHOR> https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/buddybuild-is-now-part-of-apple <comment><USER2> I'm happy for the founders, this is probably a good and profitable exit for them. But as a customer I am really sad and disappointed.

Apple has a very bad reputation when it comes to taking over products like this. TestFlight is the prime example. TestFlight basically disappeared for a year until coming back as a more limited and slower Apple branded service. And by slow I mostly mean, it takes 6 months for bugs to be fixed or for exciting things to happen. Agility and innovation of a startup basically ends when Apple assimilates a service.

From the blog posting it is also not very clear what will happen to existing iOS customers. Can I upgrade my plan? Can I expect service? Will the existing infrastructure be maintained?

I'm excited about what this could mean in terms of Xcode and Xcode Server improvements. Or maybe even a hosted CI service at Apple. But that it all long term 'maybe'.

<comment><USER3> Apple is notoriously bureaucratic. So its not surprising that innovation is stifled. I really hate this duality b/w innovation and stability... perhaps if more startups were focused on longer term survivability, it would be better for society overall?

<comment><USER4> Innovation and stability are tautologically in opposition to each other, alas.

<comment><USER5> I've found that this doesn't have to be the case.

Continuous deployment is a good example where this doesn't hold. You roll out things more quickly... and you experience less issues!

When issues happen, the cause is easier to isolate. After all, you only had one day's worth of changes (and not one year's worth). The previous state is more knowable. Testing is more concentrated.

Apple's new OS releases are the opposite of this. They release 30 different major changes at once, they all collide, and we end up just assuming that .0 releases will be broken.

In an alternate universe, Apple just releases updates to parts of software when it's ready. They don't pin Safari to the OS (because there's not much of a technical reason to). They could pinpoint _when_ "Month 13" started showing up everywhere beyond "when everyone downloaded that 7 gig update".

It takes some effort and tooling, but if you're expecting to make changes, a lot of times making the changes piecemeal will mean that post-release stability will increase in many cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Goodbye Android builds.

edit: yup;

On March 1, 2018 buddybuild will stop servicing apps on the Free Starter Plan. Also on March 1st, the buddybuild service will stop supporting Android apps for all plans. Any historical data related to those apps will be deleted from the service at that time.

<comment><USER7> This gives my current team two months to find a new solution. Buddybuild, aside from the odd issue from time to time, had been a great solution for us. Now we're suddenly wondering where to go next. Not to mention, we now face the question of whether to move our iOS apps off buddybuild as well.

<comment><USER6> I'm sure your team had an incredibly productive December and are ready to get migrating on the double! Oh, wait, you're probably catching up from a month full of time-off and holidays and were planning on hitting it hard on new features in Jan..

Same boat here, we'd JUST started using BuddyBuild a month or two ago.

<comment><USER7> >I'm sure your team had an incredibly productive December and are ready to get migrating on the double! Oh, wait, you're probably catching up from a month full of time-off and holidays and were planning on hitting it hard on new features in Jan..

You nailed it. The last thing we want to be doing right now is have to tinker with finding a new CI system. There's too much real work that we have to do. It always takes time to set these things up properly, and reliably. We've used buddybuild for more than a year, and we've long had it to the point where it just worked, and worked reliably.

<comment><USER8> why not just deploy .... the only thing a CI system does is run a bunch of scripts ... build a bash script and deploy by hand.

Theres an 80/20 rule here, you can get 80% of CI features in 20% of the script you create

Also if you turn down your deployment cycle (once a day, twice a week , etc) you will lessen the problem of lack of a tool , until you find one

CI for me has always been about deployment organization and automation. Its ok to have a bug be fixed by end of day, it doesnt have to be deployed in 15 mins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And just like that, by dropping Android support, Buddybuild goes from viable solution to total non-starter. Does any serious mobile app development these days really go all-in on one platform?

<comment><USER10> If I were to seriously attempt to commercialize the toy apps I build for my kids/family I'd go iOS first easily. People with Apple devices are far likelier to pay, and Android development is, in my view, an inferior experience (although Kotlin makes it marginally less so these days).

<comment><USER11> This may have been historically true, but our internal data shows us that starting early 2017, people in tier 1 countries were equally likely to pay and have comparable LTV on both platforms.

And if you also going to launch in EU/Australia/Canada, you will have a nearly 50-50 split of ios and android users on a platform neutral app.

So the classical logic of implementing on iOS first doesn't really apply anymore. Now its more, implement first on the platform you are comfortable with but don't forget about the other platform because there is a equal amount of money to be made there...

PS: Data excludes low end iOS and android devices. (< SE, old iPads/iPods, old and cheap android devices). These devices have extremely low conversion on both platforms anyway.

<comment><USER12> The logic still applies.

1\. Start with platform you're most comfortable with. 2\. Iterate on product until you have a winning formula 3\. Replicate on 2nd platform to double revenues

Building is a lot easier than identifying what to build, better to speedily experiment on one platform.

<comment><USER13> In my opinion the new logic is build in React Native (unless your app fits in the 10% of use cases that won't work well with RN), then deploy to both at once. We have had excellent results.

<comment><USER14> I'd say RN won't work well in 99% cases.

<comment><USER13> I'd say you are probably using a lot more React Native apps than you realize right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recently posted an "Ask HN" asking for a flexible CI system. Most of the suggestions were proprietary hosted SaaS solutions.

I was sceptical, and things like that keep me sceptical. Sure, setting up a CI system yourself is maybe a bit harder than using a hosted solution. But if the provider decides to change their offering, you are in big trouble. You'll need to spend a lot of time switching to a new sevice, migrating all your data and processes. And once that is done, you can start to retrain all your employees.

And you always have to be ready for that scenario, at two months notice....

<comment><USER16> I've built several Jenkins-based CI systems at work. Once you know how to not shoot yourself in the foot, it's really easy. I have 2 cardinal rules:

1) Don't run any jobs on the master box – master is just a web server + master Jenkins app server 2) All build scripts should be part of the project, not configured CI

#2 is the more important. Jenkins jobs at my work used to have tons of configuration and plugins, because the person setting up the CI would see (for example) an "Xcode plugin," and (naturally) decide to install and use that. That was a nightmare because of transient dependencies (and conflicts), and now configurations like "project file name" were spread across multiple jobs. Now we just have similar build scripts in each project, which has the additional benefit of letting developers run builds and tests locally the same as they run in CI. Jobs are tiny, and all the CI configuration has to do with CI things, like schedule, branch, archiving, notifications, etc.

<comment><USER17> At that point, is there much point in using Jenkins? Aren't there much lighter weight alternatives?

<comment><USER16> If you know a good one, definitely let me know. Generally the only constraints are open source with a permissive license & on-premises installs.

One benefit is it can already integrate with whatever else is out there. When we switched from GitLab to GitHub Enterprise at work, our CI environment just needed to point somewhere else.

<comment><USER18> Why did you switch from GitLab? What should we improve?

<comment><USER16> Nothing! GitLab was great. But we had several GitHub, GitLab, & Stash instances, and there was a push to consolidate onto one platform. Not sure why we consolidated onto GitHub over others, but that was above my pay grade :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If anyone has a good Android (or even iOS) replacement, share here? I know myself and likely many others will be looking to migrate this month.

<comment><USER20> AppCenter.ms has many similar features and supports iOS, Android, Windows, ReactNative, Xamarin, and others.

[Disclaimer: As I'm a PM on the AppCenter team I'll leave evaluation of goodness to others :)]

<comment><USER19> Any plans to add Gitlab support to roadmap? Dealbreaker on our end. Email in profile if you'd rather not answer publicly. :)

<comment><USER21> Yes! GitLab support is on our roadmap.

<comment><USER18> Awesome! Please let us know if you need any help. Best is to email firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What a shame for some, but I'm happy to see a Gastown company succeed. The tech hub around Victory Square is such a great little community.

</comment><comment><USER23> 2 months is not enough time for people to find alternative solutions.

<comment><USER24> I was doing marketing/growth consulting for FoundationDB when they were acquired by Apple. The product was shut down overnight. Compared to that, a two-month notice seems generous.

<comment><USER25> (Former FoundationDB employee).

Where did this dumb meme come from? First of all, FoundationDB was not a service, so there was nothing to "shut down".

It's true we stopped selling the product to new customers, and we no longer offered free downloads under the community license. However those with existing licenses were able to continue running the product (and in fact some of them do to this very day).

What's more, the Community License was explicitly written to be valid in _perpetuity_ , precisely to protect customers in this sort of instance.

Many people were disappointed by the way Apple handled the acquisition, including me incidentally, but your comment is mostly FUD. If you really were doing consulting for us, then I'd expect slightly better treatment of a former customer.

<comment><USER24> > I'd expect slightly better treatment of a former customer.

1) Apple--who I assume made the decision to end the service abruptly--was not my client.

2) I'm making objective statements. I'm not making a judgement of whether it was smart, foolish, fair, unfair, etc. Actually I was very happy for the FDB team and stay in touch with some of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Congratulations to the buddybuild team. I've used buddybuild since 2015 and it has streamlined a lot of problems with building, signing, and distributing dozens of iOS apps I've worked on over that time.

It will be interesting to see how (and when) Apple integrates this into Xcode, iTunes Connect, TestFlight, and the rest of their development portal. I don't really see Apple running a hosted continuous integration system, but maybe they plan on investing more effort in Xcode Server[1] to sell some new Mac Pros, whenever they're ready.

[1] - [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/ID...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/IDEs/Conceptual/xcode_guide- continuous_integration/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40013292-CH1-SW1)

</comment><comment><USER27> I thought it was something to do with Buddy, the hosted Continuous Deployment platform - [https://buddy.works](https://buddy.works)

But it's Buddy Build, the hosted Continuous Deployment platform - [https://www.buddybuild.com](https://www.buddybuild.com)

They have similar background gradients.

<comment><USER28> Well, if names are any indicator, one of them builds, but the other one actually works. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Curious how those of you who knew about buddybuild heard about it? Seems I hear about companies for the first time when they are either acquired or shutdown.

<comment><USER11> It was one of the few CI providers that supported MacOS.

Since iOS apps can only be legally built on apple hardware, if you were an iOS developer and didn't want to maintain your own mac minis, you knew about them and the few other providers.

<comment><USER30> You can use Bitrise.io ( CEO here ) as well to build your macOS app. Give it a try and let us know how you like it! We're glad to help with setup too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Holy shit. Was looking at the pricing.

> $1,037/mo

> Billed monthly

> 10 Concurrent builds

That's A LOT for 10 concurrent builds... I am sure the product is great, but that pricing is just a jaw drop. Probably a sign of "we are confident this price is worth it." Anyway, congrat.

<comment><USER2> Totally worth it.

<comment><USER32> I will second that. My iOS team was 1 person strong so we could get by on the startup plan at $80 a month (1 build at a time). The gain in productivity was huge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been a Buddybuild user for the past couple months after watching the founder, Dennis, give a talk at a meetup. Great product with a super easy setup. Really bummed that I'll likely have to find a new solution after only two months (though I understand the founder's decision). Can anyone recommend a product with a similar ease of setup?

Buddybuild was my first foray into mobile CI. Have not seen the need since our iOS dev team is one-person strong (me!) but once I've realized the benefits, there's no going back.

<comment><USER33> We at nevercode.io wrote an overview of our platform for BuddyBuild users for easy migration. Have a look :) [https://nevercode.io/welcome-home-android- developer/](https://nevercode.io/welcome-home-android-developer/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> There's always Jenkins with Fastlane as an alternative, then again Apple offered the guy that created Fastlane an internship. Maybe Google will put something together for the Android crowd?

<comment><USER35> Fastlane has pretty good Android support (equivalent to iOS).

And the guy that created it, @krausefx, now actually runs it as a Open Source community project - from within Google where the Fabric team landed after some time at Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Seems pretty clear to me that Apple is doing this to make Xcode for iPad viable. For vaguely complex apps, the iPad still wouldn't be fast enough to do compilation in a reasonable time frame. By moving compilation (or at least some of it) and release processes (archiving, signing, etc) to the cloud, Xcode for iPad becomes much more streamlined and capable of building larger, more complicated apps.

</comment><comment><USER37> When can we expect a "it's been an incredible journey" blog post?

<comment><USER38> It's already up: [https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/169262039243/bu...](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/169262039243/buddybuild)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> That is an aggressive timeline to drop android support!

</comment><comment><USER40> Wow, looks like a great opportunity to create a competing service that supports iOS / Android.

<comment><USER41> There are quite many competing services that focus exclusively on iOS and Android (nevercode.io, bitrise.io and others). Buddybuild wouldn't have sold to Apple if they saw that there's still more untapped opportunity in this space. It's a crowded market.. (disclaimer: I'm the former CEO of Greenhouse CI)

</comment></comment><comment> trevor-e Apple needs to drastically simplify how Xcode builds work instead of acquiring more companies. For example, provisioning profiles solve a problem that doesn't exist while creating a dozen more. Xcode is still limited to macOS.

On the deployment side iTunes Connect is possibly the worst website that I've used. It's incredibly slow (both the front and backend) and has limited options for phased releases.

<comment><USER42> "Xcode is still limited to macOS."

Yes, their IDE was made for their platform. I'm not seeing why this is a problem.

<comment> trevor-e Yes, it's totally within their rights to do so, but the walled garden approach is getting old. Microsoft is at least starting to learn to this. If they don't want to port over all of Xcode, at least port xcodebuild and allow us to connect to physical devices. macOS does not make a good build server. If they did things right then companies like Buddybuild and fastlane wouldn't need to exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Personally, I think this is the fairly useless move by Apple. Being able to build apps easier will not change this dead ecosystem. Easier ways to market apps, get them into the hands of users, and remind ppl to use the apps they downloaded is what's needed. Facebook, Google and Apple consume all free of users.</comment>


Hoping to avoid injuries, computer gamers get physical training - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/drop-the-pizza-pick-up-the-weights-videogamers-get-in-shape-1539276694 <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/GAapY](http://archive.is/GAapY)

</comment><comment><USER3> This goes for basically any living creature. Exercise is massively beneficial. Just doing daily pushups will alleviate the majority of back pains people have from sitting at the computer all day.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I get in touch with technologically savvy blind people? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for making digital devices more accessible for blind and poorly sighted people, at a fraction of the cost of current devices. However, not being either, and not knowing anyone that fits the criteria, I'd love to chat with a technically minded person (or a few) on the viability of the idea.  Any suggestions or contacts, HN? <comment><USER2> I've started working as a developer for my country's government (Argentina) very recently.

I discovered that each and every website I build must be fully supported by screen readers and it must be entirely accesible.

There's this blind fellow that sits right next to me, with the task of checking out every single thing I do, in order to verify it works correctly for him.

He's very smart and a gadget freak. He walks around with his iPhone everywhere and loves to dabble in discussions with us about current technologies.

I'd be glad to hook you up. I'm not familiar with his English skills, but I'm willing to bet he'd do alright in a conversation. If not, I can surely act as an intermediary if that's ok for you.

Let me know!!

</comment><comment><USER3> I worked for a company that built products for the blind. I did a quick search on the optacon, a product I did some work with, and came up with this site of a user: [http://www.blindcanadians.ca/publications/cbm/6/support- opta...](http://www.blindcanadians.ca/publications/cbm/6/support-optacons- revival) The company I worked for became "freedon Scientific". THis company makes a variety of enabling technology.

I work with a couple of pioneers in the industry, I would be glad to either check out your idea, or pass it on to my friends.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately FS have created an expensive ($1k+) piece of software that is difficult to learn. I commend the OP for having the vision to innovate in this space.

<comment><USER3> I am not real familiar with "Jaws" which is what I think you are referring too. I had worked for the company that had been called Blazie Research. Blazie made "laptops for the blind", their products used a Z80 processor and a hardware based text to speech. The premium model had a braille output that had either 20 or 40 braille cells that were driven with piezo transducers. When I started we were tasked with building the next generation model based on the StrongArm chip. It was a very cool project that was lost in a venture capital based merger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At my university there are ~3-5 CS/ACT majors who are legally blind and very tech saavy, so maybe check there too as I'm sure they'll have some interesting suggestions

</comment><comment><USER6> There was a story here on HN about a dev who spent a week 'blind' to test his website accessibility. A few blind developers showed up in the thread, maybe try to contact them. (I tried to find the thread but couldn't, will update this if I do)

Edit: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5020421>

</comment><comment><USER7> Hap Holly, KC9RP. Blind since birth, long time ham radio operator. His website is <http://www.therainreport.com/abouthap.shtml>.

Ham Radio has a long tradition of connection with blind or otherwise "handicapped" folks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Accessibility Internet Rally in Austin used to have someone from the University of Texas as a judge. I think he worked at the disabilities studies lab. <http://www.knowbility.org/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comments everyone!

I will be following up on them, but just need to do a bit of research (based on some comments below) to make sure I don't ask silly questions :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Old friend of mine, Chelsea, would meet the criteria. Contact info at <http://mashable.com/people/chelsea_stark/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Hit up @Jennison and @kevinrj on twitter — I've seen them both do talks at conferences and they really know what they are talking about.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reddit has a subreddit just for that.

<http://reddit.com/r/blind>

</comment><comment><USER12> What's your contact info? I have a friend who meets your criteria.

</comment><comment><USER13> email in profile</comment>


Clarifying some things about Guile-Emacs - <AUTHOR> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-09/msg00559.html <comment><USER2> This is a good clarification. I was worried about Scheme becoming the "official" Emacs extension language, which I think is a bad idea. Getting a better/faster Elisp engine is a good goal.

I can't help but think that Emacs is a local maximum: it works well enough that people don't take on the task of implementing huge changes. People who demand a lot from Emacs learn how to do things in Elisp and just get on.

As for the future, I would love to see an Emacs implemented in Clojure (no, not ClojureScript, Clojure on the JVM). I think approaching this task with any Lisp-like language other than Clojure is misguided, because it doesn't take concurrency into account. Clojure is the only Lisp-family language which gets concurrency right. Also, I'd love to have easy access to Java libraries. But, that's just me dreaming.

<comment><USER3> Being based on Clojure for good and bad also means being dependant on the JVM. Not taking RMS's stance on Free software with a capitol F into account (and make no mistake that Emacs _is_ RMS's baby, it wont happen), the JVM is a troublesome dependency in itself.

OpenJDK has terrible performance. Oracle JVM has terrible licensing and platform support.

For the "emerging" platforms such as ARM that means that anything based on JVM is inaccessible, unless you are willing to accept a 30 second+ startup-time for any JVM based application.

If you have any doubts about this, try getting Clojure and the appropriate tooling working on a Raspberry Pi. You will be tearing your hair out before having written a single line of code. While the rest of the Linux userland (based on C) just flows by at a nice regular speed.

The JVM situation (either open, supported and slow, or not supported at all) makes Clojure a no-go on this entire platform.

While I'm not saying we should limit Emacs to what runs well on a RPi, I think it's worth considering ARM as a critical platform to support in the future, and the JVM has no room there. At all.

<comment><USER4> OpenJDK performance seems fine to me, on platforms that have HotSpot support.

I'm not arguing that Emacs should target the JVM but don't see how building it on yet another bytecode VM is going to fix any performance problems.

<comment><USER5> When I write command-line programs, the JVM seems just fine. Even the startup time is not bad. However, when I compare actual editors and IDEs, JVM-based editors feel as painful as pulling teeth. Compare jEdit and Kate, or even Sublime Text. Or compare Eclipse, IntelliJ, Netbeans, etc. with any native app. Sure, these IDEs do a lot, but when I'm editing some UML diagram in Eclipse, for example, just clicking on an element to see its properties takes a few seconds. Seems like Eclipse is using _all_ its libraries to accomplish this. I'm not running these on netbooks. I am comparing speeds across fairly well-endowed laptops and desktops. Maybe the fault lies not with JVM, but with the rest of the Java ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also notice on a different branch of the thread, where rms says, "Guile is the direction we should go, if at all possible." It sounds to me like Guile, at least as Emacs' elisp implementation, is one way Emacs _could_ go, a way it _should_ go, and the way rms _says_ it should go; all that suggests strongly that it is the way it _will_ go.

<comment><USER7> [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2014-09/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2014-09/msg00527.html)

Heh, nice email header.

Guile is an old GNU project ([https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/History....](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/History.html)), it languished for a long time but recent developments have really pushed it forward.

<comment><USER8> > Guile is an old GNU project, it languished for a long time but recent > developments have really pushed it forward.

A bit like Emacs then ;)

(it seems much more active around v24 onwards)

<comment><USER9> Once rms stepped down as a maintainer development around GNU Emacs seemed to have significantly improved. It is amazing to see the progress. Although the 24.4 release keeps waiting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome! I like how he clarifies what this is, isn't and what state it is in. I was definitely wondering where this project was and where it was heading.

I also appreciate how he claims it build cleanly too. Almost feel like building it and trying it myself :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the most important thing would be for the community to understand what ports and what doesn't port from the elisp version that everyone uses- until then I don't think many will be able to make an informed decision regarding the risks of migrating.

<comment><USER11> It looks like it's supposed to be backwards-compatible with pretty much all existing elisp code.

<comment><USER10> Right, it's the "pretty much" part that's a little disturbing. Would be nice to know why this caveat is always thrown around.

<comment><USER12> One example is that some extensions such as Gnus have contain code written in the current Elisp interpreter's bytecode, which is incompatible with the Guile VM.

<comment><USER13> From the submitted email:

>Guile-Emacs loads, compiles and executes the programs included in Emacs by default, plus Gnus, Org-Mode, and more.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Internet Explorer's new official mascot is a robot-fighting anime heroine - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/11/06/internet-explorers-new-official-mascot-inori-aizawa-cute-robot-fighting-anime-heroine/

<comment><USER2> (Disclaimer: I haven't see the video)

This is an old Japanese meme known as "OS-tan"[1], meaning something like "Operating System girl". It has branched out to consoles, mobile OS's and browsers. It's interesting to see Microsoft using the meme to generate some buzz and start some major marketing (Mascots are HUGE in Japan).

On the other hand, that article is just lazy, and lacks research. It just stated that Aizawa exists, what is written in the official page and nothing more. I was expecting something about the meme so people don't think this is some "insane" or "genious" publicity stunt. It's just Microsoft riding a known fad. It's interesting to see an old company like them adopting internet culture. I'm curious to see what follows this.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS- tan)

EDIT: After posting this I started exploring. The character creator's page in much more interesting than the article: [http://www.collateralds.com/news/random/the-story-of- aizawa-...](http://www.collateralds.com/news/random/the-story-of-aizawa- inori/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's the video of the anime: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHTUlF7NA2o](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHTUlF7NA2o)</comment>


Why Statistics Don't Capture the Full Extent of the Systemic Bias in Policing - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-capture-the-full-extent-of-the-systemic-bias-in-policing/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone have a citation for the unfounded stops assertion -- "But we know that police officers are more likely to stop Black and Hispanic people than white ones — and that _more of those stops are unfounded_."</comment>


Show HN: Text mining using web editor - <AUTHOR> https://textmine.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there - email verification is disabled and you can test the service with any email.</comment>


Next Update to MacOS Sierra Removes the Battery "Time Remaining" Indicator - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2016/12/13/macos-sierra-10-12-2-released/ <comment><USER2> I don't think this is a big deal. That indicator was ridiculously inaccurate anyway.

If you want it back, use iStat Menus.</comment>


Show HN: A visualization of YC Startups - <AUTHOR> http://trynudge.com/index.html?view=Editor&play=FHTz0woebkY

<comment><USER2> Nice visualization. Only some minor nitpicks with the funding scale:

* The numbers are a little odd, (10, 82, 163, 245, 326). I prefer something more regular like (0?, 100, 200, 300) or (0?, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300). It's a difficult design decision, because each dataset has different number ranges and I don't know a good "standard" heuristic to peek the better numbers.

* I'd like to have an option for a logarithmic scale. It would help to distinguish the not extremely big companies. I'm not sure if this feature will be very usefully for the general public.

* In other graph, the axis doesn't start at 0. I consider this a feature, but some people would claim that it's misleading. Perhaps add "force 0", "smallest range", "automatic" as an option.

Another suggestion: When the mouse is over an item, add the values of the axis to the tooltip (for example: Dropbox (S07, $260m))

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty difficult to glean much from this in terms of actual funding. It looks like it is on a log scale or something and has nothing on mouseover except the name. I guess most of them are between $10K and $82M but it's hard to see where.</comment>


Rails Gotcha With before_validation - <AUTHOR> http://factore.ca/on-the-floor/77-rails-gotcha-with-before-validation

<comment><USER2> It's not really a gotcha since it's documented:

See the section "Cancelling Callbacks" in the docs for ActiveRecord::Callback: [http://rails.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Callbacks....](http://rails.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Callbacks.html)

"If a before_* callback returns false, all the later callbacks and the associated action are cancelled. If an after_* callback returns false, all the later callbacks are cancelled. Callbacks are generally run in the order they are defined, with the exception of callbacks defined as methods on the model, which are called last."

before_filter in controllers used to work the same way, but somewhere along the way it was changed to check #performed? on the controller. That way before_filters only cancel the action if it redirects or renders a template.

How else would you do that for callbacks though? Force the user to raise something like ActiveRecord::CancelCallback? Use the obscure throw/catch statements?

<comment><USER3> Raising an exception is a good method. A better method would be a condition system [1], which enables more fine grained handling of such things. throw and catch are a kind of bad implementation of this, but there is no reason you couldn't use them, except that very few people do.

In practice, maybe a Ruby linter could/should pick this pattern up and warn about it? It wouldn't be hard to identify functions which return a value based on a block if with no else say.

[1] [http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling- co...](http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-conditions- and-restarts.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is one of the reasons why you should learn Ruby throughly before you could become a Rails master. The value of last expression executed within the function becomes the return value of the function itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think the gotcha is so much with before_validation, as with Ruby's implicit return values.

<comment><USER6> Besides brevity is there any other case for implicit return values? I love little lambdas as much as the next guy but does the cost have to be that every one of my functions returns something unless I write an extra line to the contrary?

I'd rather pay the price of typing

      return self.shipping = false

to make the function return false if I actually wanted it to do so, rather than

      self.shipping = false
      true

which just looks bizarre to me and doesn't make its motive clear (you wind up only including it when your last expression evaluates to false). I have vague, unpleasant memories of also encountering this gotcha with Perl in RT scrips, where you would suffix silly little 1;'s and 0;'s to everything to make the next action run or not run.

I don't know about everybody else, but I don't FP to the extent that I never write subprocedures. Isn't this still typical?</comment></comment>


Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/01/16/alma-mahler-it-had-to-be-her/ <comment><USER2> I never understood why a raving antisemite like Alma married Mahler. This article at least casts some light on that mystery.</comment>


Acer Aspire S7 Review - <AUTHOR> http://ultrabooksreview.com/catalog/acer/acer-aspire-s7-391-9886/overview.html

<comment><USER2> Looks thin and awesome. Although, just to be pedantic, I've had a lot of Tablet PCs with touch screens that also had keyboards (so called convertible form factor instead of slate form factor).</comment>