Clojure: On the importance of recognizing and using maps - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.nl/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/e0823e1caaff3eed

<comment><USER2> This discussion sheds a lot of light on benefits and disadvantages of object oriented programming. Having everything be "just a map" means that there are a lot of functions in the library that can work on all your data. A downside is that the compiler won't warn you if you break some constraint that invalidates the model of whatever the map is meant to represent. For example, if you remove a value from the map necessary for a certain computation (Clojure maps are immutable, but dissoc'ing away a critical piece of data leads to the same problem).

Clojure's philosophy with respect to OOP is to provide most of the pieces of OOP, but in an orthogonal way so that the programmer can pick and choose the parts he wants. So polymorphism is provided by multi-methods, but with a dispatch mechanism that does not require any type hierarchy. It will be interesting to see if Clojure code starts to look more like "traditional" OOP code, or if Clojure coders find they are fine without traditional OOP.

<comment><USER3> "A downside is that the compiler won't warn you if you break some constraint that invalidates the model of whatever the map is meant to represent. For example, if you remove a value from the map necessary for a certain computation (Clojure maps are immutable, but dissoc'ing away a critical piece of data leads to the same problem)."

One feature of clojure that's worth pointing out is the idea of a validator on a reference type. The reference types are boxes that can only be changed in thread-safe ways. For example, a ref is a container that can only be modified inside of a transaction. You could write:

        (def obj (ref {:foo 3 :bar :5} :validator validate-my-model)

That creates a ref that hold a map with two keys, foo and bar. It also will call the function "validate-my-model" whenever you try to modify the map. validate-my-model is a function that takes the new-state as an argument, and throws an exception or returns false if the new state is not acceptable. Let's say the definition of validate-my-model looks like:

        (defn validate-my-model [new-state]
            (assert (map? new-state))
            (assert (int? (new-state :bar)))
            (assert (int? (new-state :foo)))
            (assert (not (= 0 (new-state :bar))
            (assert (> (new-state :bar) (new-state :foo))
            true)

     Now if you want to modify/update that object (for example, to remove the key :foo from the object), you would do
        (dosync
            (alter obj #(dissoc % :foo)))

Before that change is committed, the validator function is run. In this case, your change would throw an exception because the of line (int? (new-state :foo))

(new-state :foo) returns nil, and (assert (int? nil) will throw an exception.

Vars, refs and agents now support this (and maybe atoms but I'm not sure). I've found the technique extremely powerful. I use it all over my code. What's also nice is that it serves as a form of testing. I _know_ that all of my models have the correct types and relationships, because it's not possible to change the objects without calling the validator.

<comment><USER4> That's very cool; thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was attracted to this viewpoint, especially as it makes serialization/deserialization easy. But there are good reasons behind using objects (and their dual, abstract data types). Because many times, you don't want some parts of your program to know about the internal fields your datatype has, as the implentation can keep changing all the time.

ML which uses ADTs solves this problem nicely. You can just write a module containing the map which implements two different signatures, one signature with the restricted set of fns, and another signature which will expose the map. Regular modules will import the restricted signature, while serialization or database interaction modules can import the map signature.

I like PLT scheme's unit system which comes from ML. It is better in two ways, units & signatures are first class values. And, you can use the powerful macro system to get rid of any repeated syntax pattern involved in exposing a map in two different ways.

<comment><USER6> "Because many times, you don't want some parts of your program to know about the internal fields your datatype has, as the implentation can keep changing all the time."

There's no reason why you can't hide a data structure behind a set of functions in Clojure.

<comment><USER5> You are right, i didn't mean to say otherwise. The original post had a critique of ADTs which i was responding to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The idea of unifying the interface of apis is pretty good IMHO, but I have to say something about this bit "(about objects and abstract data types) No existing user code can do anything useful with your instances." I don't think that's actually true in the case of haskell Abstract Data Types. I mean, sure, the existing code base can't do anything magic with the types, but at least declaring "deriving Typeable, Data" allows you to make some magic.

</comment><comment><USER8> 4 gebruikers?! It has to be worth reading!</comment>


React Cookie banner which can be dismissed with a scroll. F*ck the Cookie Law - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/buildo/react-cookie-banner

<comment><USER2> No need for swearing, just don't include a cookie banner. Seriously, what's going to happen? Absolutely nothing. The ICO actually admitted as much in the UK.

The cookie law is the result of tech-illiterates trying to inform other tech- illiterates of something that they shouldn't need to care about... 2nd party and 3rd party tracking should be, and is, managed by the browser (or User Agent, the clue's in the name) not every single website the user visits.

Meanwhile, Greece is being sold down the river by an anti-democratic EU, the USA seems as troubled by racism as ever, and we're now walking jovially down the road to irreversible climate change... but not.. ZOMG COOKIES! OHNOES! WE MUST MAKE COMPNIES WARN EVRYBODIE!

Imbeciles!

Okay, rant over. Normal service will resume shortly.</comment>


Conway's game of life computed in WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://glslsandbox.com/e#207.3 <comment><USER2> The concept is very simple. Conway's game of life translates to WebGL in a fairly obvious manner. The execution, however, is brilliant. The author added a few flourishes and made something absolutely beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had a similar idea on a flight last week and decided to implement it using Love2d's shader support. It works with Love 0.10.0. Had some fun with it, if you hit "h" while it's running, it spawns a grid of gliders across the entire window, which you can then disturb by clicking on a cell. It's fun to watch the disturbance propagate.

code - [https://github.com/mattegan/Love- GameOfLife](https://github.com/mattegan/Love-GameOfLife)

</comment><comment><USER4> Extremely cool and I love the simplicity of the implementation.

... but wtf, another example in the gallery: [http://glslsandbox.com/e#29946.0](http://glslsandbox.com/e#29946.0) saying »//hitler did nothing wrong //Swastika flag.«

<comment><USER5> Looks like 4chan has leaked out...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have a look at SmoothLife, a continuous generalisation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great. I am seeing a lot of gliders and some brief spaceships 'evolving' out of scribbling with this shader.

For raw power, the hashlife algorithm, discovered by Brian 'Glider' Gosper, uses hash trees to memoise repetitions enabling staggeringly huge runs. [q.v. life in life video]

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice! I too made a GLSL game of life. It also uses your webcam as a secondary input during the lifecycle: [https://akjetma.github.io/#/face-of- life](https://akjetma.github.io/#/face-of-life)

<comment><USER9> Great discussion why User-Agent sniffing is bad is on the front page right now...

<comment><USER8> what browser are you using? well aware of the mess that is browser detection. the function i am using is horrible voodoo cargo-culted magic: [https://github.com/akjetma/akjetma.github.io/blob/master/src...](https://github.com/akjetma/akjetma.github.io/blob/master/src- cljs/home/support.cljs)

<comment><USER9> I was trying it in Opera. A chromium based browser that always had WebGL as far as I know. Even the previous version had optional WebGL (so user agent blocking would not made sense either). So unless this code was written 5 years ago, it's useless. And even if it was, it's obviously badly written and useless as well.

> well aware of the mess that is browser detection

It's a mess because people use it for other things than statistics. "Use IE5+" era apparently taught developers absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER8> Oh you're an opera user. That explains the anger. Anyways, it's fixed now!

edit: also want to clarify that I don't blindly use the user-agent string for browser detection and this was a bug in my app code. Nothing to do with my browser detection function which was working properly.

<comment><USER9> I'd call it frustration :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the title should be changed to "in GLSL", rather than "in WebGL"

<comment><USER11> I think WebGL is suitable to mention. Whilst it is strictly speaking GLSL, with a little WebGL wrapper to execture and pass parameters, it's the WebGL part which sets the users expectation that it is a live demo and functional in-browser. I don't think you'd have that same inference from GLSL alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have seen a lot of version of Conway's GOL but this is by far my favorite. I love the addition of tracking the mouse movement to create more organisms.

</comment><comment><USER13> make me wonder if anyone has ever made an actual game out of game-of-life?

good work. the gradually fading trails are a nice touch. clever 'abuse' of the rgb channels being independent. :)

<comment><USER14> Not sure about Conway's Game of Life, but there is a tower defense game where the enemy is modeled like cellular automata, which is kinda like that.

[https://knucklecracker.com/creeperworld/playcwts.php](https://knucklecracker.com/creeperworld/playcwts.php)

<comment><USER6> There is also Survivium: [http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/Survivium/review.asp?c...](http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/Survivium/review.asp?c=26359)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Also [http://xpl.github.io/expression/](http://xpl.github.io/expression/)</comment>


The press gets it wrong: Apple in Vancouver - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/apple-gains-foothold-in-vancouver-with-purchase-of-buddybuild/article37489322/ <comment><AUTHOR> I know the acquisition itself is not new to hn, but the article is interesting because it shows a complete lack of knowledge or research on the part of the journalist. Apple has had a presence in Vancouver since at least March, 2005, when they acquired Schemasoft. If the journalist had done a google search using the tools tab to set a date range, he would have found several hits to that news. Instead, his spin is "Apple Inc. has staked its first presence in Vancouver ...." which is just wrong. Further down in the article he says "The arrival of Apple in Vancouver with the establishment of a small engineering hub, follows the northward expansion of the biggest internet players in the United States...." Just not accurate. One can only sigh. PS: I did email the journalist in question.</comment>


Israeli team cures cancer? - <AUTHOR> https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israeli-scientists-say-they-think-they-found-one-578939 <comment><USER3> ""We believe we will offer in a year's time a complete cure for cancer," ... It sounds fantastical"

Especially if there isn't a registered clinical trial for it. For example, I found nothing for the company name, at [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=&term=Accelerate...](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=&term=Accelerated+Evolution+Biotechnologies&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=)

Nor for "MuTaTo" nor "SoAP technology".

Now, that's not the only place to register trials, but I doubt that Israel will allow treatments with at best minimal drug trials so, where's the evidence of demonstrated effectiveness in vitro or in model organisms?

<comment><USER4> The article says it was successful in mice, so still some ways to go but sounds promising?

<comment><USER3> The article says _the company says_ it was successful in mice.

Is there a publication? I didn't find one in PubMed, though I didn't look all that hard.

We know that people - including those at biotech research companies - <USER2> out misleading, underpowered, and even faulty experiments.</comment></comment></comment>


Where do I end up if I dig straight down? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ubasics.com/dighole/

<comment><USER2> Nice. It's interesting to see that pretty much the entire U.S. is opposite ocean. For the 50 states, the only exceptions seem to be the northernmost tip of Alaska, which is opposite part of Antarctica, a little bit of northern Montana, north of Great Falls, which is opposite the catchily named "French Southern & Antarctic Lands" island, and the islands of Hawaii, which are mostly opposite Botswana, with just a little bit being opposite Namibia.

BTW, a pedantic point: If you dig straight _down_ , you end up at the center of the Earth. If you keep going from there, then you're digging _up_.

EDIT: The area just southeast of Lamar, Colorado is opposite a tiny island called "Ile Amsterdam". And southwest of Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, you are opposite an even tinier island called "Ile Saint-Paul".

</comment><comment><USER3> The name for the point directly opposite the globe from another point is called antipodal. Thus, ggchappell's observation means that Cheyenne Well, Colorado is antipodal to Ile Saint-Paul.</comment>


How I Accidentally Wound Up Running an Outlaw Biker Gang - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/powertrip/how-i-accidentally-wound-up-running-a-outlaw-biker-gang-in-ohio-47a44ac3b95a <comment><USER2> Quite the interesting read. Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Many jobs may vanish forever as layoffs mount - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/business/economy/coronavirus-unemployment-claims.html <comment><USER2> > "Firms intend to hire these people back," he said, referring to a recent > survey of businesses by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. "But we know > from the past that these aspirations often don't turn out to be true."

What past scenarios can we base these conclusions on? Nothing like this has ever happened in the modern economy. In the past when we've had this kind of job loss, there was significant capital destruction, e.g. bankruptcies of farms and loss of production from the dust bowl, or fundamental devaluation of assets, e.g. property being worth less than previously thought. Here, at least for the moment, GDP is down simply because people have stopped working. It's not clear the productive capacity of the economy has decreased.

Honestly, I have no idea what will happen. But I think it's probably not correct to try and compare this to previous recessions.</comment>


Trust the Anecdote - <AUTHOR> http://www.codypowell.com/taods/2015/06/trust-the-anecdote.html

<comment><USER2> This is a very important point though personally I formulate it the other way around:

      you only (proactively) fix what you measure, and you only measure what you think is important.

This is of course sensible (you know weaknesses/risks/scale points in your design and so you monitor them).

But end users do unexpected things and it's worth looking, since at the end of the day it's all about the end users, else you don't have revenue! Sometimes, as the article notes, there's nothing you can do. But trust end users to find your blind spots for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> > email Jeff Bezos with a streaming video problem. He'd add a single '?' in > the body

"A good driver should know what's wrong."

P.S. not accurately quoted. Better: [http://mtchndrn.blogspot.pt/2007/12/when- i-first-started-usi...](http://mtchndrn.blogspot.pt/2007/12/when-i-first- started-using-unix-when-i.html)</comment>


Why We're Letting Accelerators Give PBworks Away - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pbworks.com/2013/06/19/why-were-letting-accelerators-give-pbworks-away/

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to spell out why giving away $2,000/year licenses actually helps us make money.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my windows/mac/nix application - <AUTHOR>

This app sits in the tray/dock and records everything you copy (text, images, files) to a local, encrypted sqlite database. It has a built in web server which only listens to local connections, so the interface is actually through the browser.It has starring, Local RSS Feed, Is themeable, Full Search, Can Sync contents to controlc.com and more. Screenshots:
Main view: http://ioj.com/v/qzbp3
Alternate Theme, Settings open: http://ioj.com/v/0xret
Individual item view: http://ioj.com/v/yui6v
If you want to try out the windows beta client, You can grab it here: http://harknesslabs.com/setupcontrolc.exe <comment><AUTHOR> Screenshots:

Main view: <http://ioj.com/v/qzbp3>

Alternate Theme, Settings open: <http://ioj.com/v/0xret>

Individual item view: <http://ioj.com/v/yui6v>

If you want to try out the windows beta client, You can grab it here: <http://harknesslabs.com/setupcontrolc.exe>

<comment><USER2> don't put windows/mac/nix if you only have a windows executable

<comment><USER3> right, I would not have clicked the link if I knew it was windows only...

<comment><USER4> .exe?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't install in Sandboxie. Some file not found VB.NET error.

Nice app though, But I don't know if 21MB memory usage is worthy for a collector like that.

Can not collect HTML texts in IE or Chrome

Can not collect richtext in Word or anything else

If copied some Excel data with CJK characters, VB.NET yields a System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException error.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesnt do any formatting at all. Toyed around with it, but it caused more issues than solved problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did I miss the link to check this out?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its in the comments. I updated the first post with more info.</comment></comment>


I want to apply to YC funding competition, but I'm not a techie. Any advice? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All, I just reviewed the YC funding application for Summer 2011. I can answer all the questions thoroughly, except the obvious ones relating to my previous experience with programming/startups/IT projects. I have no experience, I just have ideas and an insane work ethic to make things happen.
I know ideas alone are worthless. Everyone has ideas. But, right now all my close peers/family are advising me to get involved in Startups, because I've been generating great ideas regularly only to do a Google search and find them already funded and being implemented. This has happened at least 7 times in the past year, with unique ideas that have received $1M+ in initial funding.
Now I have an amazing new idea that I know will be a big hit. If I don't do it, someone else will very soon.
I'm 27, I've been doing medical sales since I graduated college, but I left the corporate world last year primarily to venture out on my own. I have a house, housemates that cover my expenses, and I have savings. I mention this, because I'm not just a daydreamer. I'm a daydreamer with great ideas and successful track record of accomplishments since I was a kid.
Every time I read about a Startup's success, I can see myself in that same position. I just need to better understand how I can get involved in the network.
Given that I do not know how to program, I am considering outsourcing all of the work to get this website running. It's not my preferred method, but it's better than nothing.
If I can get the work outsourced, get the site running, establish a GREAT revenue-producing model, prove the substantial NEED in the WORLD for this service (it's currently being serviced indirectly), then what is the quickest way for me to tap into a network of Angel Investors / VCs that can take this business to the next level?
If you were in my position, what would you recommend for a guy like me to get a Startup running and funded?
I'll do anything (legally, ethically, morally) to make this work. The world is waiting for this service. I've even seen websites that ALMOST (about 40%) similar to my idea and they've had tremendous success.
Please help a newbie out with any advice on taking action and getting in front of the right crowd that will hear out this idea.
Thanks for reading. <comment><USER2> Candidly speaking, "my family thinks I come up with good ideas" does not appear high on the list of things I see on resumes of people who build successful businesses. Most of them have a history of having built stuff. Even if they cannot themselves build stuff, then they can Jedi mind-trick a builder into building their stuff and that guy will thank them for the opportunity.

You're good at selling stuff, right? Sell _one person_ the notion that this is the project that is going to change their life for the better. Have that guy build it.

You're not nearly done at that point, but one guy who has actually built things plus one guy who has the magic snake charmer reality distortion field thing down is a powerful combination. Besides, after you have a prototype, its Achievement Unlocked: Not A Bozo, and then you can sell, sell, sell to customers/investors to your heart's content.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree 100% that "my family thinks I come up with good ideas" is a very weak statement. It's by no means the basis for my pursuits but, I don't have friends in the IT-field so I discuss my ideas to my friends/family instead. And they are a TOUGH sale. In fact, as a rule of thumb, I go to them only b/c I know they'll give me EVERY reason why my ideas won't work. And I give my rebuttals on why it will work and I win. :)

Right now I'm working on an online microbiz that will promise to deliver traffic to small businesses locally (with scalable potential). The entire web development is being outsourced and should be ready by April 1st. It's my first "online venture", but it's not innovative. I'm just replicating a successful business model and using it to do a few things: 1) Generate income independently 2) Learn more about outsourcing projects 3) Get my 'foot in the door' in the online business world 4) Use this to gain some recognition amongst like-minded peers so I can expand my network.

I just had a new housemate move in and as luck would have it, he's a Java Developer with a masters in comp sci. He's only been here for a month, but I know he's a great guy and I plan to discuss this idea with him for possible teamwork in implementing it.

You're right that I should develop the prototype then be concerned about the sales pitch/growth after wards. I realize it, but it helps to hear it from others.

Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Team up with that new housemate of yours. Make him your CTO, get a prototype up and running.

Pick up a book or do some online tutorials in whatever the prototype is built in... Learn HTML & CSS - very easy to learn.

You're going to have a million more ideas in your lifetime you will regard as amazing and life changing, trust me. Use this one to get your feet wet. Start doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If your idea involves any significant amount of programming at all, start learning to program now, even if it's not realistic that the code you produce make it into the final product.

By all means apply to YCombinator. The chances for you are much lower (since you don't program and afaict you are a single founder), but you can always apply again in future rounds.

I'm applying this round myself and have basically taught myself to program over the last 6 months. I have about ~6500 lines of code written so far and the technical co-founder that joined me says that it's on par with code he has seen from people working 4-5 years in the market.

If you are smart, clever, capable and determined, there is no reason that you can't achieve the same by the time the next class comes around. If you are serious about learning to program, look around on HN and if you need any specific advice, feel free to ping me.

What you don't want to do is end up asking this same question again in 6 months time.

Even if you were to really impress the YCombinator partners and get an interview and pass the interview, you will still need to recruit technical talent. Being able to program even as an amateur can only help.

</comment><comment><USER5> Learn to code. Even if you aren't able to code well enough to build your own thing, if you have not built an application and launched it, you will never be able to manage a team to do it. Much less be able to do with with an outsource provider.

Why not apply to development companies as a programming intern. Explain you're a business guy, teaching yourself coding, you know you'll never be great, but you need to learn.

At my consulting company, we've got a guy who is quitting his job at a VC and working as an intern with us for three months. We do pair programming, so he'll rotate through projects and be on the development team. We won't bill him out to clients obviously. Our developers get to learn about his business experience, and he learns how to code, and probably run a development team.

I tell clients who have an idea and have never built a website to go get a job at a startup. If you're a not a developer, don't do a startup without having worked in one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Become a techie. You don't have to be a programmer to be a techie, just stay up to date with tech news. YCombinator wants the companies in their incubators to employ a wide range of techies so I don't think you should be looking to YCombinator for funding.

Also just having a "good idea" isn't enough anymore. Venture Forums see hundreds if not thousands of business plans a year and spend about 30 seconds looking over 95% of them.

It is also difficult to find an god outsourced coder, not to say that they aren't out there, it is just really difficult to weed out the bad one's.

Do you have an executive summary? I would start by sending out the executive summary to local Venture Forums in your area and gauge their reactions. Angelsoft.net is a good place to submit your business proposal to. You can only submit to 3 companies at a time though so chose wisely.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is your idea medical related? I was in that world on the sales/strategy end for a few years. I'm applying today at YC for a non-medical related startup, that I programmed.

If you want to bounce around some thoughts, shoot me an email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mine is also non-medical. I'll email you as well, but I'll post a question here b/c maybe others may be interested: How did you go from sales/strategy to programming?

<comment><USER7> Well you can't start a biotech in your garage. I was more passionate about creating SOMETHING than I was tied to any particular field.

With that, I cracked open a few books and started coding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Feel free to ping me if you want someone to look over your idea (don't if it's in any of these spaces which I'm involved in: recruitment, marketing analytics, advertising)</comment>


Show HN: Tokk – web app for tracking to-dos and time - <AUTHOR> https://tokkapp.com <comment><USER2> I like the interface; it is simple and straightforward. I would have liked to see an example of a pre-built report. I would also like to have a section for notes so that I can add things that I learned, highlights and lowlights, in case I would need to talk about them with a manager or give advice to a colleague.</comment>


Using GCC's Stack Smashing Protector on Microcontrollers - <AUTHOR> http://antoinealb.net/programming/2016/06/01/stack-smashing-protector-on-microcontrollers.html <comment><USER2> There are other features you can use if you're willing to accept a bit of overhead in the name of robustness, namely the code instrumentation feature ('-finstrument-functions')

Using that option, you can provide relatively strong stack protection and even a permissions system to restrict parts of your code from accessing others.

For even more robustness, you can do random stack offsetting, return value checking, return opcode checking, per-task stack bounds checking, heap metadata protection, heap bounds-check, etc.

All this does come at a price tho, every function is instrumented on entry and exit so its not the most performant. It does provide pretty good protection against buffer and stack smashing exploits.

Also, since this is an embedded system with a well-defined memory map, you can perform very strong pointer-checks (not simply NULL checks) against exactly the allowed ranges (a simple NULL check has a 1 in 4.2 billion chance of catching an issue).

<comment><USER3> Do you have a writeup somewhere? And/or a rough estimate of the overhead of your scheme?

<comment><USER2> I have docs... but not in a publishable format currently. I have been considering doing a series of posts about the techniques tho as they are widely applicable and do significantly increase robustness.

Currently you do pay a performance (and hence power-usage) overhead of ~5% depending on how many 'domains' you wish to protect but that can be optimised and tuned to your particular application.

Certainly for some applications the robustness and protection from malicious message payloads is well worth the performance hit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's really nice to have these things written out, the interfaces used by gcc options that insert extra code/calls are typically undocumented (except for their source code).

kasan, asan, and ubsan are similarly lacking in docs (but are also composed in much the same way). I imagine some of the profiling hooks are done similarly, but I have not yet looked into how to use them.

It'd be really nice if gcc considered these semi-public interfaces that they should document.

> I plan to add other other debugging features in the following weeks. I have > an idea on how to use the MPU to prevent thread stack overflows (different > from the buffer stack overflow we explored today).

On that note, one can actually abuse the debug hardware on cortex-m3 chips without an MPU to add stack overflow protection. Simply need some hooks into the scheduler around where it switches tasks (some already poison the top of their stacks & check for the poison on switching, the keep-out can typically be applied very close to these locations).

The debug hardware takes a base+mask, so one can theoretically block access to wider spans of memory that a single u32, but at that point calculating the best way to cover that memory range becomes a bit difficult.

<comment><USER2> Curious to know about the debug-abuse trick, I've implemented an MPU-based stack protection scheme that involves poisoning the return address to trap returns and implement a 'sliding' stack window.

It does work, but due to the limitations of Cortex MPU windows I've moved over to code instrumentation for our protection which involves a very much beefed- up version of the GCC stack protector.

<comment><USER4> I basically was using the Debug Watchpoint and Trace (DWT) block of the armv7m architecture (the ARMv7-M architecture reference manual specifies it).

DWT includes "comparators" typically used as hardware watch points. My methodology was to use one of the DWT comparators to watch for something reading/writing the last u32 of the current task's stack. Note that this might not be perfect as it could be possible for the stack to somehow skip over the last u32.

Then, install a handler for the Debug Monitor exception (which triggers when a watch point is hit) to disable the DWT comparator, print/store the appropriate info, and finally reset the chip.

Essentially, we're behaving like a simple "debug monitor" which only is capable of setting a single hardware watch point automatically.

Note that DWT is technically an optional component in armv7m, so it may not be functional on every chip. That said, most folks like having debug capabilities (this is the same hardware that jtag debuggers use to set watchpoints), so most seem to include them. On that note: doing this can (to some extent) interfere with external debuggers. To mitigate some of that, I did try to use the last DWT comparator instead of the first, but this will really depend on how your debugger works.

<comment><USER5> I implemented something similar on a coldfire cpu. I was able to protect against the skip over problem you describe by combining the hardware debug point with -fstack-check to create a "canary" zone at the bottom of every stack. This prevents a huge buffer that goes past the bottom of the stack (which would not normally hit your single watchpoint) from overwriting code far outside of the stack space.

<comment><USER2> yes, that would work for that.

In my case, with my domain protection system I had well defined domain- crossing points across which I could guarantee that no data was being passed- by-reference, At these points I was trying to fit the Cortex MPU windows as closely as possible over the 'used' stack area so I could prevent access to it by any potentially malicious code. I would poison the return address to cause a known fault when the code returned and move the MPU windows accordingly.

Although it worked, due to the limitations of the v7-M arch MPU windows the protection was never complete and proved to be time consuming to implement due to the size of the application. Maybe in future it will become more practical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One obvious gotcha with this technique is that a typical attacker will have full access to the assembly code of the target under attack. Therefore, checks against a constant will not be very useful. Fortunately, some microcontrollers are equipped with a hardware random number generator. You can initialize the value of __stack_chk_guard with a function that has __attribute__((constructor)) and does not itself use memory in a way that would cause GCC to issue the stack protector. That way the canary value will be initialized during the startup code before entering main().

<comment><USER2> the check is also quite weak in that its only really protecting a single point. Its quite easy to stride "over" the protected area rather than going "through" it.

TBH, it will only ever protect against accidental errors, not malicious intent.

<comment><USER5> True, but you can use -fstack-check with a well-defined canary space and correct probe interval to prevent the jump over attack you are describing.</comment></comment></comment>


UK Met Office gives Government (sometimes accurate) confidential weather advice - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/07/met_office_forecast_not_forecast/ <comment><USER2> Do you know of any open-source projects or algorithms for modeling weather?

It would be interesting if people had access to the same data meteorological agencies had and worked with their own algorithms for weather forecasting.

<comment><USER3> Take a look at this slide-deck [http://www.slideshare.net/ianfoster/e-science- foster-decembe...](http://www.slideshare.net/ianfoster/e-science-foster- december-2010) particularly page 10 onwards.

Lately this has been a hotly contested issue, with arguments both for and against open sourcing code. Though it is desired that code and weather models be open sourced. The incentive mechanisms that researchers in this field work under act against this goal. It is not uncommon to guard model, data and code, at least temporarily till enough publications have been wring out of them. Moreover the community is not very tolerant of mistakes, which makes people shy away from open sourcing their code lest embarrassing mistakes are discovered. All in all not a very healthy atmosphere.

Nonetheless many are working towards the goal of open sourcing understandable models (in python) [http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2008/08/climate-models- is...](http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2008/08/climate-models-is-there- better-way.html) But I do not know what has come out of it.

Other places of interest are <http://mitgcm.org/> and <http://wrf- model.org/users/release.php> were you can actually checkout code.

Disclaimer: I have not played with any of these code. Its something that interests me, yet something that I have to put aside at the moment.</comment></comment>


Hacker News Comments RSS? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a feed for comments? <comment><USER2> There are more feeds coming soon, after startup school and YC interviews.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wrote a tool you may find useful: <http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow></comment>


A Founder's Guide To Replacing Yourself: A Few Weeks Ago I Fired Myself - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/13/a-founders-guide-to-firing-yourself/ <comment><USER2> I can't stress enough the importance of making yourself replaceable and interchangeable. Two very important reasons: (1) it enables you to move on to more interesting things, (2) you can develop a greater sense of having a life and take more fun and daring risks.</comment>


Inferno on Android - <AUTHOR> http://9fans.net/archive/2011/09/308 <comment><USER2> "Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs, but is now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_%28operating_system%29>

<comment><USER3> For more documentation and papers see: <http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like this. I'd like to see more of Plan 9 in general use. Since I started reading about it I've thought it would be cool if a big company did for it roughly what Apple did for Unix with OS X, preferably in a more open-source manner.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is great. I've been wanting my phone to be a node on my grid for a long time. I'm glad some people got motivated and actually hacked it all together. The dream of ubiquitous 9p/styx lives!

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's a short video I threw together demonstrating the phone. It's pretty spur of the moment, and the video quality is low, but you may be able to get an idea of how it works: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF_-jQc53jw>

Also check out <https://bitbucket.org/floren/inferno/wiki/Home> for screenshots.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for posting the video! Do you have any knowledge of the technical details? I only know a bit about inferno and am specifically wondering:

\- is there support for mounting a filesystem accessed via ad-hoc wireless with another Android/Inferno device?

\- does the windowing system support multiplexing? (e.g. OS-level screen- sharing with another device)

I should post this to the listserv but am too lazy at the moment.

<comment><USER6> Sorry I'm late getting back on this. Since I did a lot of the low-level work getting Inferno running, I suppose I have as much knowledge about it as anyone ;)

For your first question, that depends entirely on whether or not the Android command-line tools allow you to set up an ad-hoc wireless network. If so, then yes. If not, then no.

As to the second question... I have never tried it, but you should at least be able to import /dev/draw from another device and do stuff with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why on earth didn't anyone seriously think about Inferno for mobile devices? How much polish could've gone into Inferno given all the work on things like Maemo, Meego and Android...

<comment><USER9> Many people did, there are even some other early efforts, I am aware of some efforts that never went public.

Thing is, even though many people thought about this, very few actually worked on it. With open source talk/work ratio is around 50 (just made that number up).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow! Can it run acme? I'm wondering because "treats the touchscreen like a one-button mouse" If so, how is the right and middle click used? Anyway utterly cool stuff!

<comment><USER6> Hi, I worked on this project, so let me jump in on this. It can run acme, but at this time we don't have a way to do right and middle clicks. I didn't make it a priority, because the accuracy you can get in selecting text on these capacitive screens is just not very good--I don't think Acme would be a very pleasant experience. It worked fine on my old iPaq, but that had a resistive screen and a stylus.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. I was just thinking I could try it on the device my neighbor has: A very cheap android 2.2 tablet with a resistive screen and pen, no multitouch. Never mind, it can hardly run android apps.

The [Octopus project](<http://lsub.org/ls/octopus.html>) has an interesting take on gestures. When right-clicking, it pops up a circular menu where the direction one goes in determines the action. See <http://lockerz.com/s/139588614> That might be something for touch tablets.

I daily use AcmeSAC on Mac & Win7 with a trackpad (and MagicPrefs for three finger middle click) and with a Wacom tablet and pen. Very nice for editing without RSI problems.

<comment><USER6> Well, if you can get accurate-enough touch events, you could always go into emu/Android/screen.c and hack around with the pointer event handling code, make it check the state of some of the physical buttons--thus, if you're holding (say) the Home button when you click, it does a left click. Since you have a pen, you should be able to hit the regular window control widgets to minimize/close, rather than relying on our physical button shortcuts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is fantastic. Inferno needs more public exposure.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone has screenshots or photos? I want to see how it looks on a mobile phone...

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to be a huge Inferno fan, but with Go around (Rob and Ken both worked on Inferno, Rob was even responsible for the name), I wonder how relevant it is this days.

Go has a much more vibrant community and development is blindly fast. Given Go's dramatic memory efficiency advantages over Java I would hope Google will push it on Andriod soon.

Go code can already run on Android, but building Android apps in Go is another matter, but with Brad Fitzpatrick moving from the Android to the Go team recently, I'm optimistic.

</comment><comment><USER13> I LOVE so much that #b2g and inferno are using the nice Linux Android base to quickly bootstrap new mobile platforms. Get the benefit of a large existing install base, choice of devices, etc.

I'll be interested to see if the other Plan9 inspired projects find a home in a similar circumstance. There's a surprising number of tools being fostered by Google and Googlers (in their 20% time) that harken back to P9.

<comment><USER14> What are Google people working on besides Go that is Plan 9-ish?</comment></comment>


Scientists use camera with human-like vision to capture 5,400 FPS video - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2019/07/09/scientists-use-camera-with-human-like-vision-to-capture-5400-fps-video/ <comment><USER2> Haha, I worked with a relative of this camera during my bachelors :-) the DVS, e-DVD and DAVIS are some of the more useful results of neuromorphic engineering research, and really shine if you combine them with NNs or other noise-tolerant signal processing methods

<comment><USER3> Have they been combined with NNs? If so, how?

<comment><USER2> AFAIK, mainly with SNNs or recurrent networks, since they can learn how to do detection etc. on the stream of events and don't need "frames". I'd have to google for publications as well since this was a while ago

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's basically a copy/paste of [https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/09/event- camera-slow-motion...](https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/09/event-camera-slow- motion-hdr/) but without the github link [https://github.com/uzh- rpg/rpg_e2vid](https://github.com/uzh-rpg/rpg_e2vid)

</comment><comment> lota-putty 1\. Why didn't they compare it with contemporary 5000+ FPS camera[s]?

2\. What's the size difference as opposed to contemporary 5000+ FPS camera[s]?

With good Dynamic Ranging and affordability, it's good for independent film- makers?

<comment><USER5> Yeah. That comparison video is annoying. At one point they have three videos side-by-side with their video in the middle. In the next comparisons, theirs is on right. Aaaaaggh. Little things like that drive me nuts.

I have no expertise in this realm but some of their bullet videos seemed a little "artificial" or CGI. Maybe it is that some parts of a frame had much more detail/precision than other parts of the same frame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some "normal" cameras for comparison:

[https://www.slomocamco.com/cameras/](https://www.slomocamco.com/cameras/)

3600fps at 720p, raw 10 bit dng, £5000.

Some Phantom cameras have faster frame rates ([https://www.phantomhighspeed.com/products/cameras/ultrahighs...](https://www.phantomhighspeed.com/products/cameras/ultrahighspeed/v1212)), but you'll pay over $100k

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.wired.com/2015/04/apple-watch- design/](https://www.wired.com/2015/04/apple-watch-design/)

>Yet what Dye seems most fascinated by is one of the Apple Watch's faces, called Motion, which you can set to show a flower blooming. Each time you raise your wrist, you'll see a different color, a different flower. This is not CGI. It's photography.

"We shot all this stuff," Dye says, "the butterflies and the jellyfish and the flowers for the motion face, it's all in-camera. And so the flowers were shot blooming over time. I think the longest one took us 285 hours, and over 24,000 shots."

He flips a few pages further into the making-of book, onto the first of several full-page spreads with gorgeous photos of jellyfish. There's no obvious reason to have a jellyfish watch face. Dye just loves the way they look. "We thought that there was something beautiful about jellyfish, in this sort of space-y, alien, abstract sort of way," he says. But they didn't just visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium with an underwater camera. They built a tank in their studio, and shot a variety of species at 300 frames-per-second on incredibly high-end slow-motion Phantom cameras. Then they shrunk the resulting 4096 x 2304 images to fit the Watch's screen, which is less than a tenth the size. Now, "when you look at the Motion face of the jellyfish, no reasonable person can see that level of detail," Dye says. "And yet to us it's really important to get those details right."

<comment><USER6> Yeah the Phantoms get a lot of use in sports and nature documentaries. The level of detail is really a sight to behold . These guys work magic with them in food advertising:

[https://foodfilm.fr/](https://foodfilm.fr/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Several years ago I had an idea for a camera made from harmonically oscillating pixels that shift frequency based on intensity. It would have many of the advantages of event cameras, but with extremely accurate absolute brightness measurent as well.

Does anyone know if this exists?

<comment><USER8> Sounds like MKIDs - microwave kinetic inductance detectors. They're arrays of little LC oscillators where the inductance changes when a photon hits. They can actually resolve frequency and time of arrival of a photon, which is super useful, especially for photon-limited astrometry. [0] [1]

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

[1] - [https://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~bmazin/mkids.html](https://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~bmazin/mkids.html)

<comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_inductance_detector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_inductance_detector)

FTFY

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://inivation.com/buy/](https://inivation.com/buy/) ($3000-$6600 usd)

Unfortunately not quite at "buy to play around with" prices, but for the right application within the realm of affordable.

I work on underwater computer vision and would love one of these. Limited lighting = long exposure times. Motion blur can be mitegated by moving slowly, but then you have all sorts of lighting phenomena which makes not over/under saturating the image a real problem.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is revolutionary, even if only from a dynamic range standpoint. It's somewhat disappointing to see the first comment under their article is "Looks like VHS" ... really?

</comment><comment><USER12> So the actual framerate depends on the number of events that take place in a time interval?

It seems to me that an "explosion" would generate a lot of events.

Also, in what way is this different from a codec, i.e. isn't this just a much simpler form of mpeg?

And will this produce artifacts, or drop events?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> full paper: [http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/arXiv19_Rebecq.pdf](http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/arXiv19_Rebecq.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> awesome, now just waiting some manufacturer to embed this in a cellophane</comment>


On video games and storytelling - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/gears-of-war-writer-tom-bissell-on-video-games-and-storytelling.html

<comment><USER2> I have Andrew Glassner's _Interactive Storytelling_ which I found very interesting on the topic of storytelling in video games. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that the process of story telling and creating good games are in tension, since games are about giving the player power while good story telling requires authorial power.

[That conflict actually gave me an idea for a game in itself : one where the player is the god who is creating a legend by exercising their power over the life of computer controlled individuals. That makes the player into the author and shifts that exact authorial/player tension into the purpose of the game. Your score is in two parts: 1. the fame of the chosen hero, 2. the happiness of the chosen hero. The end game is that in order to get the highest score in fame, the hero must become aware of your influence in their lives (much of which will have been negative) and gain enough power to destroy you. That's the fun of games, you can often switch around conflicts and make them interesting mechanics.]

There are a number of games I find interesting from a story telling or literary view

* Sleep Is Death <http://sleepisdeath.net/>

* Passage <http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/>

* Dear Esther <http://dear-esther.com/> (which sounds a lot like one of the games described in the article).

* Every day the same dream [http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/everydayt...](http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/everydaythesamedream.html)

These are mainly 'art games', and some, like _Dear Esther_ aren't really games at all, but it's interesting to see more mainstream games getting better storylines and taking emotional engagement more seriously too.

It's been interesting how some recent games like Bastion and Sword and Sworcery have really played with the concept of the narrator.

Eve Online <http://www.eveonline.com/> is particuarly exciting from the politics side of story telling, because I've always been hopeful for the possibilities of developers creating a rich enough, persistent universe that players create their own meaningful, epic storylines, and Eve seems to the be the only MMO that has actually managed to pull that off (despite the fact that I find the actual gameplay unbearably dull, as is so often the case with MMOs).

For emotional engagement, simply searching for 'games that made me cry' turns up quite a few stories of strong emotional reactions. _The Walking Dead_ , talked about in the article gets quite a few mentions.</comment>


Yet another (command-line) bug tracker - <AUTHOR> http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/later_bug_tracker.html <comment><USER2> I don't think we need another bug tracker - bugzilla and trac do a great job already.

What I'd love to have is a command line _interface_ to existing bug trackers.

<comment><USER3> Some years ago I wrote one (cleverly named Tracuala) for trac. It was good enough most of the time for my needs. Trouble was, Trac didn't have a real Web API at the time, so I was hacking around cookies and authentication and what not. And when I upgraded a Trac instance, stuff broke.

Nowadays I use Pivotal Tracker, which has a very nice Web API. That allowed me to write yet another CLI tool (cleverly named Pivotal Slacker) which works quite nicely for fetching lists of stories, adding new stories, doing bulk updates or additions from yaml files, and the like.

The upshot is that all Web-based tools should try to offer a decent RESTful API as well so that folks who want additional tools can add them without having to worry about coding to the quirks of Web page scrapping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, something that's not immediatelly apparent upon reading this. How do I use it? Do I init it in an existing GIT repository and will the added bugs be synced along with my other changes? That would be awesome to replace my current method of light-weight bug tracking: a todo.txt in the git repo.

<comment><USER5> When you init it, it creates a .later directory to store the issues. You could revision this along with code, so yes it seems like a nice replacement to the todo.txt.

<comment><USER5> Playing a bit more, what would be really nice would be to be able to do later -r list to recurse through subdirectories listing issues in those too. At present it only looks upwards.

<comment><USER6> Interesting idea. One could do that in ~/dev and see all issues of all projects inside...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm just wondering: is using a command-line bug editor actually a good idea? Seems like the perfect way to stay out of touch with how normal people experience your software.

<comment><USER6> Stolen from ditz:

\- create a simple website form for bug reports, which emails to the project mailing list, where all discussion should happen anyways

\- let a bot scan the mailing list for bug reports and commit them, wherever suited

<comment><USER8> Why should all discussion happen on the mailing list?

<comment><USER9> Why shouldn't it?

<comment><USER10> As long as its easy to hack up a script to parse the output of the discussion, what difference does it really make where the discussion happens?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A CLI bug tracker client is attractive if the data model is super simple and/or pure text. Once you need or want to start attaching files, especially screenshots or other media, to each issue, then the CLI doesn't fit as well. Very appealing idea, however.</comment>


If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Silicon-Valley <comment><USER2> Amazing anecdote from a 2016 New Yorker article on the show:

> During one visit to Google's headquarters, in Mountain View, about six > writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who > wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. "Most of our research > meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable," Kemper told me....

> "He claimed he hadn't seen the show, and then he referred many times to > specific things that had happened on the show," Kemper said. "His message > was, 'We don't do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going > to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.' " > (Teller could not be reached for comment.)

> Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a > dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He > wobbled to the door in silence. "Then there was this awkward moment of him > fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open," Kemper said. > "It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while > it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use > this?" In the end, the joke was deemed "too hacky to use on the show."

[https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how- silicon-v...](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon- valley-nails-silicon-valley)

<comment><USER3> Any shows of the same style on Hollywood?

Do the show producers feel something similar to some in their own industry or their surreality is just reality for them? Are they brave enough to mock powerful people they may wish to work with later?

Would be fun to watch one on Hollywood and they should have very intimate details to bare.

<comment><USER4> > Would be fun to watch one on Hollywood and they should have very intimate > details to bare.

Try Californication or Entourage

<comment><USER5> Heck yeah, Entourage was good. Way good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few months ago I wrote a certain story here and to my surprise I received a call from Dan Lyons, one of the writers of the show. We had long discussions about silicon valley and his new book coming out (I'm featured in it). A few weeks ago he was in LA and we had another long discussion about the show.

Silicon Valley is the show most startup founders will refuse to watch. My startup was featured on TechCrunch Disrupt, we were on stage talking about how we will change the world with our product. Then things didn't particularly go as planed.

I discovered the show and started watching it shortly after. It was painful to see that they portrayed our exact journey as it happened. Only the show poked fun of the mistakes we were making. I watched it not only as a comedy, but also as a documentary that would predict our fate. It was eye-opening!

My favorite part (and most humiliating) was when we pitched our startup to a non-silicon valley investor and she simply replied: "OK, cut the crap. Which website are you scraping?"

All my co-founders were offended by the show. I must admit, its painful to watch someone else make fun of the things you put your heart to. But from time to time, someone has to make fun of you or you start to take yourself too seriously.

If you are trying to make it in silicon valley, please watch the show. At best, it will help you make your startup more grounded.

<comment><USER7> Man, you need to get better co-founders! I agree that Silicon Valley often hits _painfully_ close to home, but that's precisely what makes it so fantastic.

My own startup has been mostly outside of America, but we get enough brushes with Silicon Valley culture -- or, worse, wannabe Silicon Valley culture -- to make the show really resonate.

Even closer to home, for me personally, is the Australian comedy "Utopia" (or "Dreamland", depending on the market). It's about a municipal urban development corporation, which is basically my startup's customer group. One episode features a sendup of what my own startup does (online collaborative infrastructure planning and stakeholder engagement) -- or, more to the point, what some of our would-be customers want it to do. You can tell that the writers know what they're talking about. Damn near killed me to watch it. Highly, highly recommended!

<comment><USER8> Utopia is a documentary, not a comedy. I know people that can't watch it because it is like being in their office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My favorite Silicon Valley anecdote:

"During the review process once the footage [of Techcrunch Disrupt] was woven in, another editor criticized the crowd shots for not featuring any women and blamed Berg for the oversight.

'...Those were real shots of the real place, and we didn't frame women out.The world we're depicting is f---ed up.' said Berg"

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/hbos- si...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon- valley-had-diversity-problems-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2016-3)

Sorry for the amp link, the main page was broken.

<comment><USER10> Surprisingly even-handed piece:

 _There 's been debate about whether "Silicon Valley" the show should have more diversity than Silicon Valley the place, but Berg argues that a show made for entertainment not meant to be a "social-action wing" or be a force of change - the show is just satirizing the reality that the tech industry itself needs to take care of._

<comment><USER11> One thing that mildly annoys me about the show is how white the cast is.

At least in my Silicon Valley career, the "cast" around me has been vastly less so.

<comment><USER12> I have no idea where you're working at but if you've ever looked at Google's public diversity report (one of the largest companies in the valley), you'd see that your Silicon Valley career does not reflect what the majority of people in this very large company experience.

[https://diversity.google/annual-report/](https://diversity.google/annual- report/)

<comment><USER11> By this report Google is 56.6% white.

My experience is that white male Americans are roughly 25% of the Silicon Valley workforce, but if you bundle in white immigrants and women you might reach 40-50%.

As I remember the TV show, the main characters are 80% white, and the Indian guy is the whitest one I've seen.

Small sample, I know, and I'm not offended. Just a little bored...

<comment><USER13> > _the Indian guy is the whitest one I 've seen_

What do you mean by that? Can you explain?

<comment><USER14> > What do you mean by that? Can you explain?

Maybe he means culturally

<comment><USER13> So a guy who was born and raised in Pakistan and has a Pakistani accent is culturally white? What exactly does that mean? Does it mean that he's educated and wealthy?

<comment><USER14> I think he means, that guy is more culturally white than the Indians who he finds in the SV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always describe Silicon Valley (the show) as being solidly in the Uncanny Valley ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)). It's humorous and absurd, but at the same time so close to reality it's unsettling.

<comment><USER16> "Silicon Valley" is like Silicon Valley, but it goes to 0x11.

<comment><USER17> Or to 0x0B?

<comment><USER18> 3?

<comment><USER19> 0x11 = 17 That's like 6 above 11! About right in my opinion.

<comment><USER20> Our Hexadecimal codes go to Q - bonus points if any one gets the Traveller SF RPG in joke.

Traveller is where of course Elite ripped off the initial space combat system from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's quite amazing how good a job Silicon Valley does considering how badly wrong it could go (I'm looking at you Big Bang Theory). I'm sure there are quite a few industries that could have similar comedies about them from people who really know what the industry is like. W1A is another great example.

<comment><USER22> Pardon my ignorance but what did big bang theory got wrong?

<comment><USER23> Pardon the terminology, but I consider that show to be Nerd-Blackface. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I find how the show deals with anything technical to be an affront to intelligence in general.

<comment><USER24> I think you set your expectations way to high if you expect a general-appeal TV show to get what theoretical physicists to right. That said, a couple of moments were pretty good - e.g. when the guys were thinking about something with "eye of the tiger" playing on the background. Nice lampshading of the fact that it's impossible to show intellectual work on TV. They had some pretty good moments early on. They should've stopped there.

<comment><USER25> Yes! That scene was hilarious. I also like the scene when they're super excited that they hooked a lamp up to a port on the open internet and someone turned it on. Then someone asks, why spend the time to do this? And they respond, because we can. It reminded me of me and my friends in college, and the response we would get for some of the things we did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a pretty great article on the same subject from the New Yorker in 2016.

[https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how- silicon-v...](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon- valley-nails-silicon-valley)

My favorite part:

>>>

During one visit to Google's headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. "Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable," Kemper told me. GoogleX is the company's "moonshot factory," devoted to projects, such as self-driving cars, that are difficult to build but might have monumental impact. Hooli, a multibillion-dollar company on "Silicon Valley," bears a singular resemblance to Google. (The Google founder Larry Page, in Fortune: "We'd like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things." Hooli's C.E.O., in season two: "I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.") The previous season, Hooli had launched HooliXYZ, its own "moonshot factory," whose experiments were slapstick absurdities: monkeys who use bionic arms to masturbate; powerful cannons for launching potatoes across a room. "He claimed he hadn't seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show," Kemper said. "His message was, 'We don't do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.' " (Teller could not be reached for comment.)

Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. "Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open," Kemper said. "It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?" In the end, the joke was deemed "too hacky to use on the show."

</comment><comment><USER27> Love the show partly for how deeply researched its identity and culturally driven jokes are. Here are a few:

Erlich passing Dinesh off as Latino to get a deal on a graffiti logo design:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSzmVFF58Mo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSzmVFF58Mo)

Dinesh recounting to a puzzled Gilfolye about how he was a "cool" kid back in Pakistan, and why:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKz0M6SmQ8c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKz0M6SmQ8c)

The latter one, in particular, implies that the writers had a deeper than average understanding of the different youth cultures of the US and South Asian cultures at a particular time in history.

<comment><USER28> They ring true. Some moments don't even have to exaggerated to be funny. That is exactly how being "cool" works in parts of India, and just the fact is enough to make a person from the west crack up.

Dinesh is one of the few nerdy Indian stereotypes that I do not mind. All the others seem like caricatures and generalizations of South Asians. Dinesh on the other hand, could be sitting right across my table, coding....

If The Big Short is considered a great "documentary" for the 2008 crisis, then SV does even better for the Valley.

<comment><USER27> > That is exactly how being "cool" works in parts of India, and just the fact > is enough to make a person from the west crack up.

Indeed. In the context of the show, and American culture, it was Dinesh's perspective that stood out as seeming odd or unique.

But I wonder if the post-1950s American/Hollywood understanding of "cool" \- the glorification of rebel/outcaste that Gilfoyle's personality represents - is itself really the anomaly on the global scale.

I'd imagine many/most parts of the world don't develop a romantic cultural trope around the underdog, or the person who doesn't fit in with the mainstream. But I'd be interested to learn otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love the running joke that the main characters work on fake technobabble, but the background companies (particularly the TechCrunch episode) are babbling about stuff that sounds fake but is real tech. "Making the world a better place through Paxos distributed consensus!"

<comment><USER30> I mean, it would be kind of odd if the show's writers came up with something novel and instead of rushing to patent it decided to make a TV show out of it. Meanwhile, it's OK for the other companies to work on things that already exist–it adds to their run-of-the-mill-ness.

<comment><USER31> That hasn't stopped people from trying to make PiedPiper a viable startup though: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/actual-silicon-valley- startup-g...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/actual-silicon-valley-startup-gets- inspiration-from-hbos-silicon-valley-startup-1542391937)

<comment><USER32> My experience in Silicon Valley has me uncomfortably laughing at the show.

This startup is laughing at themselves and the valley. It's so absurd that a VC actually funded this it makes me wonder if they aren't laughing too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I find it hits a bit close to home, so much so as to ruin the comedy sometimes... it'd be funny if it weren't so true, which is depressing.

Still watch it, and love it though. And super impressed that a Hollywood production finally understood Northern California. That never happens (see: The Social Network, Hackers, every Steve Jobs movie, etc.)

<comment><USER34> I would highly suggest checking out Halt and Catch Fire. It's a period piece, but I think it captures the spirit of Northern California. The first 2 seasons are in Texas before they jump ship to San Francisco.

<comment><USER35> ditto. Its starts off with a young ex-IBM executive trying to build the first IBM compatible machine and everything that goes with launching the new product. Later seasons go into things like server farms, early gaming, and social networking.

really underrated show.

<comment><USER36> I really like the historical/tech story lines but the soap-opera interpersonal relationships wrecked it for me. The whole "broken imperfection" thing often goes to far and really detracts from the story.

<comment><USER37> You might like this documentary on the origins of National Semiconductor: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbRZGDV- ws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbRZGDV-ws)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love the show, but there's a lot of things that Silicon Valley is that it does not cover. It's not the fault of the show - it probably would be much worse if it did. But some aspects of SV - like how much it is integrated into the big politics and yet how much they try to downplay it and make it look like their behemoth companies are just young and agile rebels playing this new Internet thing, as if it were the early 90s... Or how monocultural and group- thinky many places are, and how office politics often becomes more important than tech (but don't tell this to anyone, we're not like those old industries!) SV series kinda touches on this, but only lightly, mostly concentrating on things around tech. It probably makes for a much better show.

<comment><USER38> > ...how office politics often becomes more important than tech...

Basically all the Hooli scenes are about that. Also just about the entire careers of Big Head, Jack Barker, and Denpok the "spiritual advisor".

<comment><USER24> In Hooli there's one big player - Benson - who is erratic and egomaniacal, and everybody else does what he says. He is a personification of a jerk (I mean, look at his signature!) and serves as a kind of super-villain that is the source of all evil. But usually there's no super-villain, there's just "culture" and everybody is playing by the set of rules that nobody in particular invented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's pretty crazy how the real SV has been obligingly giving the real show new material since it first debuted, with ever-increasing excess, quixotic ventures in search of markets, worsening scandals, and externalities everywhere!

<comment><USER40> There were also several moments the real show gave the real SV new material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Somebody gets an idea almost right, but not quite, and their business fails; > then someone else does it just a little bit better and they are viewed as a > genius for the rest of their life.

I'm still thinking about this comment about Fieldbook shutting down [1], and the "What Happened at Fieldbook" [2] article:

> In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more > traction.

Was really sad to read that.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18461395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18461395)

[2] [https://medium.com/the-fieldbook-blog/what-happened-at- field...](https://medium.com/the-fieldbook-blog/what-happened-at- fieldbook-d70bf25b3968)

<comment><USER42> I was thinking about the same thing. Probably because of recent news about Airtable.

<comment><USER43> Read the same article yesterday, which got me thinking.

I'm not familiar with Fieldbook, but I do wonder if they weren't as savvy as Airtable when it came to sales & finance strategy.

Products alone rarely make a business. It's a perfectly viable strategy to keep forging ahead at a loss while you slowly gain market share. You obviously need to show revenue growth (sales savvy) to keep the funding coming through (finance savvy).

I'm definitely guilty of getting all caught up in product and neglecting the business side of things.

<comment><USER42> I feel like technically Fieldbook had pretty much everything that they needed to compete with Airtable.

Airtable probably does a better job of attracting customers with their extensive collection of premade content though.

But I cannot get over the 'candy' look in airtable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > It's more fun to root for the underdog.

Outside of dumb luck, I don't see a plot arc that favors Richard's team at all.

Especially when one of the overarching themes is that over the seasons the "underdog" throws friends under the bus, hacks competitors, rents a botnet, lies, commit fraud, and all kinds of other abuses.

What's the difference between Richard dumping a gf because she uses spaces and Gavin screwing over Jack because Jack wanted to get dropped off first from the private plane? The only difference I see is that Richard's narcissism doesn't come with the weight of a $100 billion company behind it.

Richard's bad behavior comes off as less jarring because almost all of the time he has considerably less power than Gavin. Richard doesn't have a wall of lawyers who he can casually probe about assassinating a foe. Gavin does.

Edit: clarification

<comment><USER45> You know, the show continuing well past where the story makes sense is very much in the vein of Silicon Valley. Plot planning be damned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> King of the Hill has also resurfaced on Hulu recently after not being available to stream anywhere. Mike Judge has a real talent for nailing essence of a culture.

<comment><USER47> Woah, I had no idea Mike Judge was involved with King of the Hill.

Growing up in Texas, I never appreciated how on-point the show was, until I left the state and realized that the subtle culture cues of Texas didn't exist elsewhere, which means that King of the Hill _nailed_ it. I mean, _every detail_ is perfect.

<comment><USER48> Hank Hill was basically the "stop hwackin' off in muh toolshed" guy from Beavis and Butthead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I always like to compare Silicon Valley to The Big Bang Theory. TBBT seems like a parody of the stereotype of the people they are parodying while SV is a true parody. I'm always thinking "haha, that's so true" when watching SV, but never while watching TBBT.

<comment><USER50> TBBT is not a "parody". It is your standard-issue broadcast network sitcom about 3 males, 3 females and their friendships as they date and break up with each other, marry each other and have kids. This is a successful premise that has stood for decades in American TV. Friends and How I Met Your Mother followed the same principles almost to a tee. That's how you get a show that runs for 10 seasons in this day and age.

Pointing out that TBBT's parody is poor is like saying Will & Grace did not portray a representative picture of gay urbanites.

<comment><USER51> It's funny that you compare TBBT to Will & Grace, since they have very different receptions among their subjects.

I know lots of gay urbanites who feel well-represented by Will & Grace. I know lots of people in the "trad nerd" set, but none of them see The Big Bang Theory and say "yep, that's me".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I believe that some of the genius of the show has to go to Dan Lyons as well. He worked at HubSpot for a stint and wrote a book about it called "Disrupted" ([https://www.amazon.com/Disrupted-My-Misadventure-Start-Up- Bu...](https://www.amazon.com/Disrupted-My-Misadventure-Start-Up- Bubble/dp/0316306096)). Really funny, in a sad way.

<comment><USER53> I read through this book in a few hours and really couldn't put it down

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I asked my friend if he watched it (I don't) and he said it hit too close to home. I nodded, then he added "... because I'm a consultant for the show, and every year they meet with us and we give them ideas from our jobs and things to put in scenes"

</comment><comment><USER55> Dan Lyons, author of "Disrupted," is also on the writing staff for the show. Not quite Silicon Valley but if you read the book, some of the stuff from his time at Hubspot makes it into the show.

Judge surrounded himself with a lot of different perspectives on all of this.

</comment><comment><USER56> Bill posted this on /r/SiliconValleyHBO: [https://old.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/9yh7dp/wh...](https://old.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/9yh7dp/who_wore_it_better/)

I like to think he photoshopped it in his spare time lol.

</comment><comment><USER57> Pied Piper has the Conjoined Triangles of Success. Asana has... [https://wavelength.asana.com/pyramid-clarity-strategic- align...](https://wavelength.asana.com/pyramid-clarity-strategic-alignment/)

</comment><comment><USER58> Dan Lyons, one of the writers of the show recently wrote a new book titled "Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us ..."

<comment><USER59> Also worth reading his book "Disrupted" \- the book is every bit as funny and relevant as Silicon Valley

<comment><USER60> I loved Dan Lyons fake Steve Job columns, but Disrupted didn't work for me at all. He presented himself as the lone adult in a sea of misfit children, but came across as a clueless and bitter crank. The same (admittedly keen) observations about the corporate culture would have gone down so much better (for me) if he hadn't tried to crammed every page with so much smug superiority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I mean, he's not really from Silicon Valley, so I guess we should take his viewpoint with a grain of salt ;)

> I have friends in Silicon Valley who refuse to watch the show because they > think it's just making fun of them.

But yeah, it's good to take a look at satire of yourself once in a while. Often they can tell you stuff that you may have overlooked, and generally they're not too hurtful when doing so.

</comment><comment><USER61> You might also like "Nathan Barley (2005)" \- a savage British TV parody of the mid-2000s startup scene in Shoreditch, London.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg&list=PLTM- Dbun10...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg&list=PLTM- Dbun10Dp86u1TzEKkRkPNqvb0Qt2k)

<comment><USER62> I'd second this recommendation - it's incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Maybe it's longing for byegone days on my part but it feels like the atmosphere of the Valley and tech in general has changed so much so quickly that my head is spinning.

It feels, well, not fun anymore a lot of the time. Development by copy-and- paste and gluing other peoples code together to arrive at a half-baked solution instead of exploring the code to try to understand it as a system so the solution you arrive at is the most effective that time and skill permit.

Being more infatuated with nerd culture than building something great. (I see this a LOT!) Chasing dollars instead of knowledge. And, don't get me wrong; it's ok to want to make money. Even a lot of it. But that should be the icing on the cake of solving real problems.

I feel like we used to do this stuff because it was what we loved to do. But now it feels like too many people do it because they want to look cool and/or they want a lot of money. The romance is dying.

</comment><comment><USER64> Dan, "Fake Steve Jobs" Lyons also worked as a consultant for Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER65> Silicon Valley is more than just Web 2.0 companies. If you went to an average ASIC company I doubt it would this crazy.

<comment><USER19> Maybe not today. But we've had our moments.

[https://youtu.be/-P28LKWTzrI](https://youtu.be/-P28LKWTzrI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I found that the first few seasons (maybe first 2 or 3) did a great job at parodying the Valley. They were truly uncanny to watch for me sometimes, and I don't even live in SF.

The past few years, the quality degraded significantly IMO. It mostly turned into "The Office but with developers and geeks!!" \- which doesn't make it a bad show, but not as witty and thought provoking. I wonder if it's past the point where it needs to reach a wider audience, just like any other show.

<comment><USER67> The Office deliberately has a mockumentary style with the characters breaking the "4th wall" in a very believable way. SV doesn't have that and you don't really know the "real" motivation and feelings of a character till the plot unravels. They couldn't be further apart in structure.

<comment><USER66> I'm talking about the general plots/storylines, not the structure of the show.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> HBO's Silicon Valley isn't a comdedy, it's a documentary. I've met archetype on that show, and have been a couple of them myself.

</comment><comment><USER69> This well-written article has been discussed before, but I figured it was worth posting. It's a bit more in the "black humor" vein than Silicon Valley, but it also just nails the real SV vibe:

[https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny- valle...](https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/)

</comment><comment><USER70> > Even a huge believer in technology like me has to laugh when some character > talks about how they're going to change the world with an app that tells you > whether what you're eating is a hot dog or not.

sorry bill but one could argue in a round about way that andrej karpathy did do just that ;P

the hot dog identifying app is one of my favourite examples of how spot on the show is

here(o) is a question i asked to one of the show's technical consultants whether the choice of 'not hotdog' was a reference to one of karpathy's early demos(i||ii)

timanglade> Ha seems like a fun coincidence.

(o) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14639161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14639161) the yt link is now a dead link.. use either of the below

(i) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6aEYuemt0M&t=465](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6aEYuemt0M&t=465) ; Title: Deep Learning for Computer Vision (Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI) ; Desc: The talks at the Deep Learning School on September 24/25, 2016 were amazing. I clipped out individual talks from the full live streams and provided links to each below in case that's useful for people who want to watch specific talks several times (like I do).

(ii) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyovmAtoUx0&t=5787](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyovmAtoUx0&t=5787) ; timestamped from the full stream; Title: Bay Area Deep Learning School Day 1 at CEMEX auditorium, Stanford ; Desc: Day 1 of Bay Area Deep Learning School featuring speakers Hugo Larochelle, Andrej Karpathy, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Andrew Ng. ;

</comment><comment><USER71> > This kind of back-channel relationship—satirists texting casually with the > satirized—is a departure from much of comedic history.

_Yes, Minister_, which satirizes the British government, supposedly had close access to several people in government, though it was probably careful rather than casual.

The clips on Youtube are all distorted, don't bother with them, but find S01E04 "Big Brother".

</comment><comment><USER72> Mike Judge, one of the show runners, was in the valley during the 80s so it makes sense that there would be some truth.

<comment><USER53> Dick Costolo and Dan Lyons also worked as consultants for the show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Reminds me of this talk by a reporter turned startup employee turned author: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=G7vrCpWbmDw](https://youtube.com/watch?v=G7vrCpWbmDw)

One of the funniest things I've seen, while also being sad, because it's so true.

</comment><comment><USER74> Silicon Valley

The Internship

The Circle

It's possible to get a somewhat accurate view from watching these, but you have to know which parts to completely ignore. I kind of wish there were "this is accurate" edits of those shows and movies.

<comment><USER39> There's also the short-lived Betas, on Amazon Video. It wasn't as good as HBO's show is (the characters are far more grating), yet the younger and scrappier milieu feels like it captures the youth-obsessed, juvenile segment of startup culture better. And it's also based in San Francisco, unlike the South Bay-centered Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> The Lena easter egg in plain sight was amusing during a few episodes

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

<comment><USER56> I don't think that was a easter egg given that they work on compression. It's a standard test for image compression, after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I wonder what Bill Gates thinks of the character Jack Barker.

<comment><USER77> I thought he was more a send-up of Ballmer than Gates, although that might just be the physical resemblance.

<comment><USER78> He is a Steve Ballmer sendup, but Gates and Ballmer worked closely for many years at Microsoft and had many fundamental disagreements about the direction the company should take. Ballmer refocused Microsoft from software to hardware when he became CEO (hence "The Box" joke on the show).

Ballmer himself probably doesn't like the caricature (he's a bit of an internet darling, isn't he? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY)), but would someone who worked with Ballmer find it accurate? Likely.

Not to mention, Gates wrote the article about Silicon Valley linked in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> People who enjoy Silicon Valley should read the book Disrupted. The writer went on join the writers at Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER80> So how does one subscribe to this show without subscribing to HBO? I looked at their website and don't see anything else I would want to watch. I really want to watch Silicon Valley, but that's the only thing HBO offers that I'm interested in. Can I buy just this one show from them?

<comment><USER81> Just subscribe to HBO Now from your choice of providers for one month and binge watch all the seasons. Cancel when done and only paid $15.

<comment><USER80> Thanks, I suppose that would work. It would probably take me a few months to watch all the episodes, but if the show is as good as everyone says, it would be worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Office Space, Idiocracy, and Silicon Valley. It's practically a NatGeo series about the USA.

</comment><comment><USER83> If you like Silicon Valley check out The IT Crowd, also equally hilarious take on the world of IT.

<comment><USER50> Aside from the completely overused line "Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?", the show has almost nothing to do with IT. Apart from a couple of IT-related plotlines, most of the episodes take place outside their office.

<comment><USER38> > ...the show has almost nothing to do with IT.

"The Internet" device. All the tech illiterate coworkers. Jen's imposter syndrome. Moss's on-the-spectrum reactions. Online dating when it was still nerdy. Novelty websites. Viral cultural events.

But it wasn't exclusively geek humor. There were broader episodes involving Jen's and Roy's romantic lives too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> What is the best way to watch it online?

I have bought Netflix subscription - but I am dissapointed now - the library of historic films available for me (in Poland) is very small and the current productions are kind of mechanistic. And no SV in Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER85> Everything you need to know about how Silicon Valley funding works in a little over a minute [https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo](https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo)

</comment><comment><USER86> The final instance of "Silicon Valley" should be set in italics as a title (or quoted, if HN titles don't allow italics.)

(Would presumably be just as true the other way around, but that's not the title of the piece.)

</comment><comment><USER87> Does the show get any better? I stopped around the time they hacked the phones in that conference, I think season 2?

It was a constant the leader fucking up and the gang coming through at the end - over and over and over.

<comment><USER88> It's sad that's all you got out of it. There's a quite a bit of subtext in the show, particularly if you're in SV. I often wonder if people outside the valley pick up on the themes or if it's jusy slapstick to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I don't think BillG quite got the 'Hotdog Not Hotdog' joke..

</comment><comment><USER90> "Conjoined Triangles of Success" and "ruinous empathy."

Pure genius.

<comment><USER78> I have a copy of the Conjoined Triangles of Success tacked to my office wall. I don't think anyone I work with has keyed in on the fact yet that it's a joke from a TV show. It captures serious business jargon and corporate culture so well that it doesn't read as anything but.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> As someone living in the bubble, Silicon Valley felt way too real. Does this apply to tech company culture outside of the valley ?

</comment><comment><USER92> Also, read "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble" that was written by one of the SV script authors.

</comment><comment><USER93> Fun fact: I'm in the background of the basketball court scene in Season 4 (and I am a consultant for the show)

</comment><comment><USER94> The fact that this is true just makes it hurt more that I am obviously Jared.

</comment><comment><USER95> needs 2016 tag.

</comment><comment><USER96> Love the show and do think pretty realistic in an exaggerated way.

</comment><comment><USER97> I've only seen one episode of the show a couple years ago, and I basically found it boring. Keep in mind I've never been to Silicon Valley.

All the comments here make it sound like a depressing place to be

</comment><comment><USER98> In 1999 we were working a very long shift waiting for the batch process on the AS/400 to go through and our FTP "edi" trNsfers to Sun to complete (an ftp script written for us by these four hacks, who founded linuxcare after this episode) (sifry, dibona, etc)

We decided to go grab a beer and play pool while we waited for this new thing to execute based on this new language sun was having us convert everything to, XML...

While at the pool place these girls in lingerie were walking about selling raffle tickets.

We asked what they were for.

"We are putting ourselves through school and we are selling raffle tickets for the lingerie we are wearing, for $5 a ticket."

"I see, where are you ladies going to school"

"Oh, we go to ___silicone_ __valley college... "

\----

I wish this was a scene in Silicon Valley... it was ridiculously funny.

</comment><comment><USER99> I haven't watched the show much, as I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley for 20+ years and I don't see much besides a superficial resemblance. I saw a bit of an episode where a few 'brogrammers' were making fun of the main character like it was a 'mean girls' high school, and I thought it was ridiculous. Then I saw another bit where one of the characters was threatening a kid for his Adderall prescription and, again, thought it was moronic. I haven't watched much else.

I compare the show to Entourage: Amusing to those outside Hollywood, but completely ridiculous to anyone who actually works in the industry.

<comment><USER100> Mike Judge does his homework. Being in the industry myself, he does many other aspects in the show. I recommend you try another episode, such as one that involves the VCs.</comment></comment>


Safari and Web - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=e4u1mtfu <comment><AUTHOR> Bringing FaceID and TouchID to the web is interesting and curious about the enhancements to the WKWebView.</comment>


Facebook Moves to Ban Private Gun Sales on Its Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/technology/facebook-gun-sales-ban.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> I find it very questionable how major tech companies have started to enforce their political, ethical, or religious views on their customers, without any regard for the width of the cultures and views on the planet that they cater to.

Google and Facebook both seem to believe themselves to be the morality police pretty often, particularly on how they handle adult content. As private companies, they have every right to do so, but I find it has a chilling effect on the freedom of the Internet, now that so much of our Internet use is locked into these tech companies' products.</comment>