Linux 4.13 support for TLS record layer in kernel space - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/networking/tls.txt <comment><USER2> Active discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164568)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of my pet peeves is linking to 'master' in git repos.

This link has a higher chance than usual to link-rot because it's intentional that the repo can change its structure over time. Even if it doesn't change its structure, it's likely the file will change over time, so discussion here referencing line numbers or paragraphs or whatever will become wrong.

Repos shouldn't have to worry about people linking to them either (as e.g. a reason to not move files around willy-nilly)

Since by (rather strong) convention tags are immutable, you can link to a tag instead.

In this case: [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v4.13/Documentation/n...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v4.13/Documentation/networking/tls.txt)

That link is also better because it explicitly shows the version of the repo that is being referenced as well.

Even if there isn't a suitable tag, I'd much prefer a link to the commit hash than any branch, which is expected to move.

</comment><comment><USER4> A link to the discussion would be good?

edit: [https://lwn.net/Articles/725721/](https://lwn.net/Articles/725721/) has links, the paper has some discussion - one motivation is hardware offload.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't this help implement sendfile for TLS connection as well?

<comment><USER6> It might, it's also in the paper linked in the commit message: [https://netdevconf.org/1.2/papers/ktls.pdf](https://netdevconf.org/1.2/papers/ktls.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What could possibly go wrong?

<comment><USER4> A lot, but note that this is only the record layer, after the most error-prone parts kuike the negotiation, certificate parsing, etc are done.

(Sadly there is a X.509 parser, used for other purpouses, in the kernel.. [http://cateee.net/lkddb/web- lkddb/X509_CERTIFICATE_PARSER.ht...](http://cateee.net/lkddb/web- lkddb/X509_CERTIFICATE_PARSER.html))</comment></comment>


Girls Around Me: One Woman's Defense of the 'Stalking' App - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/253089/girls_around_me_one_womans_defense_of_the_stalking_app.html

<comment><USER2> she has missed the main reason the app is creepy, which is that it panders to and encourages the woman-as-prey mentality.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I agree it's a good wake-up call to people inadvertently sharing more than they'd like with the public, I don't think it matters so much that the data was already public, so much as the way the app puts that data to use.

Most other location-based services have some sort of unique value proposition or special utility using the location data, or are targeted to a specific genre or use-case.

Girls Around Me, although you could claim it has its own "use case," does nothing more than show you _everyone_ who's checked in near you, with no qualifier other than the fact that they're female.

This, to me, is an inherently creepy service and an aggregation aimed strictly at hormonal males, with the dangerous side-effect of exposing females who may or may not be smart enough to defend themselves.</comment>


How to Count Citations If You Must [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~motty/documents/citations-04-27-2016.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> RePEc already implements this index

[https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.euclid.html](https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.euclid.html)</comment>


Most popular programming languages on Stack Overflow since Sept 2008 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d2qrx6/this_video_shows_the_most_popular_programming/ <comment><USER2> Questions on StackOverflow might occur in bursts, after a release or a major project goes public. So statistics on the number of questions doesn't quite relate to 'interest' or 'industry usage', but more like 'churn'?

</comment><comment><USER3> Also SQL lost traction, but a dedicated SE took off in the meantime ([https://dba.stackexchange.com](https://dba.stackexchange.com)).

Stats should be aggregated at the whole SE level not only SO.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't consider SQL a general purpose programming language

<comment><USER5> Hold my beer....

Back in the early 2000's I worked with a SQL specialist who managed to cram the functionality of a whole web app into a SQL database...UI rendering, business logic, the whole shebang. It sat behind a rudimentary Classic ASP app that just made calls to stored procedures.

<comment><USER6> PL-SQL, Transact-SQL, or ANSI SQL?

<comment><USER5> T-SQL on MS SQL Server 2000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd really prefer stuff like this be in more of a slideshow format so I can easily go between time points and compare without having to scrub around the video and press pause/play, memorize what i'm looking at, then scrub around for another time point, etc., but I guess a video is sexier.

<comment><USER8> It's even terrible for what it is.

If you look at the scale bars background, the scale shifts to preserve the length of the largest bar. This makes sense if you're just looking at one image but when going time to time it means the motion of each bar is distorted.

A bar could shrink while gaining in percentage if the maximal bar is growing at a faster rate... What? Why?!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting but important to keep in mind that as languages mature fewer questions need to be asked.

<comment><USER10> Very true. There comes a point where most of the problems/algorithms have already been asked and figured out (or deemed not possible).

<comment><USER11> That is assuming this only is a measurement of new questions posted for a language. I have no idea, is it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> JavaScript is trending up because it is more confusing than ever. Even angular before version 2 is so different from version after that

<comment><USER13> Please stop, rehasing tired memes belongs on Reddit.

<comment><USER14> Serious question as the previous comment seems serious. How is one supposed to know what's being constantly written about something if you don't read HN on a daily basis? Seems like we should assume that the commentator is making an effort to leave a "novel" comment but this time it wasn't, but it might not be the commentators fault.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My own takeaways from this:

1\. Old techs is been replaced by the newer and finer ones

2\. Profitability effects the tend of languages

3\. Easy (to use) is important

4\. One single simple idea (Nodejs for example) can change the landscape so much

<comment><USER6> 1) Aren't python and java "old" now? 20-25 years? C is... what, 40 years old?

2) Python ??? profit? Maybe if Ruby on Rails was up there...

3) Define easy to use...

4) Nodejs and the rapidly changing quicksand of JS, IMO is not easy to use, thus my confusion on point #3.

<comment><USER15> Let my explain:

> Aren't python and java "old" now? 20-25 years? C is... what, 40 years old?

"Modern" (Even though it's 25 years old) languages usually forced on productivity more: The language is easier to understand and use, the programmer can focus on the logic of their program instead of battling the system etc.

And, since we already in a well-developed industry, productivity can translate to profitability, and usually it does.

Simplify my opinion here: Productivity (or profitability maybe) drives tech tend.

Python is hot today because it can be used in many fields which is hot today. Back-end dev, script, and maybe some machine learning + data research etc. And Python makes doing those things easy (in terms of easy to use) because both of the language itself (not a bad language) and it's ecosystem (Many of things you wanted are just one pip away).

Also, even I do not think JavaScript is a good language, but I must say it's a easy language to get started: 1) You don't need to learn a lot to write "Hello World" (`alert("Hello World")`) and later other simple functions. 2) Web browser is the playground which you already have. 3) The ecosystem is huge (Many things are just one npm away). 4) Let's don't forget that you can make money from it.

Now imagine if one day you have to understand compiler, linker and manual memory management to write webpage scripts. Much harder, right? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this include questions that were quickly downvoted? You get a lot of people asking things they could have found with a search, and those get downvoted quite fast.</comment>


Web giants to cooperate on removal of extremist content - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-internet-extremism-database-idUSKBN13U2W8 <comment><USER2> This can be used to censor any content, needless to say.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bigass world-spanning censorship engine. I can't think of anything to say that isn't totally obvious.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems the method will rely on sharing file hashes. Should work in most cases but hashes would not be that difficult for a bad actor to change with some basic knowledge (I.e. terrorist uploader)

</comment><comment><USER5> Not yet clear whether Marxist thought will be blocked as extremist.

<comment><USER6> If you're referring to detox week, which explicitly supports flagging political submissions, you probably shouldn't be surprised if it does when you specifically call it out as Marxist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't feel comfortable flagging it because I disagree with the reasoning behind the policy, but isn't this political?[1]

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404)

<comment><USER8> If you think it is political, you must flag it, regardless of your comfort. Obey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A big win for virtue signalers, champagne socialists, and pseudointellectuals everywhere.</comment>


Ink propelled boat, using the Marangoni effect - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1190995855173672960 <comment><USER2> what if you could do this electrically? [https://www.researchgate.net/post/Surface_tension_and_electr...](https://www.researchgate.net/post/Surface_tension_and_electrical_field)</comment>


U.S. wage growth is getting wiped out by inflation - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wages-inflation-20180810-story.html?outputType=amp <comment><USER2> This is why the World Bank can claim to have lifted the poorest who earn $1 a day above this limit, wage inflation gives these people $2 a day, but the cost of living has increased to $3 a day, so they are now worse off despite the headline claim to having being lifted out of the $1 a day poverty. For thousands of years clever people have been manipulating stupid people.</comment>


Microsoft Support for Secure Shell (SSH) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/06/03/looking-forward-microsoft-support-for-secure-shell-ssh.aspx

<comment><USER2> I'm really excited for this. I'm hopeful that this will include extending the core Linux utilities to windows also.</comment>


Show HN: ReactScrollShadow – CSS shadow to indicate scrollable area - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zzarcon/react-scroll-shadow <comment><USER2> "Pure CSS" is a term that implies there is no JavaScript involved. I suggest rewording the readme so it doesn't confuse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does everything as simple as this need to be a React project these days? It would be so much better if it was pure vanilla CSS or a Pen.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it doesn't have to be a React component, you are right. But just by doing so you get a lot of things for free and makes it easier for people to start using it, like, you just install it, require it, and you are good to go... that was the motivation beyond using React for it

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't work all the time, you should use IntersectionObserver or ResizeObserver etc.

Edit: I'll rephrase my question, why does the Hacker News Frontpage include stories with zero comments and 1 point?

<comment><USER5> I think we should aim to be more constructive on showHNs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why not use some box-shadow so it looks like a shadow rather than a line?

</comment><comment><USER7> I've got a plugin[1] I use for something similar when it's a horizontal scrollable area. Scroll the boxes in the demo[2] to see the shadows appear/disappear when there is overflowed text on the left or right edge!

1: [https://github.com/tomhodgins/jsincss- overflow](https://github.com/tomhodgins/jsincss-overflow)

2: [https://tomhodgins.github.io/jsincss- overflow/test/](https://tomhodgins.github.io/jsincss-overflow/test/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty neat! thanks for sharing

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Both the "react-scroll-shadow" link on the left of the demo and the github cat link to [https://github.com/zzarcon/react- circle](https://github.com/zzarcon/react-circle)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh sorry about, I copied that from a previous project I did, just published a fix for that. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get it. Can someone explain?</comment>


Cutting cost and power consumption for big data - <AUTHOR> http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/cutting-cost-power-big-data-0710

<comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/12/mit-flash-only- supercompu...](http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/12/mit-flash-only- supercomputers/), which points to this.</comment>


Is MonoTouch now dead in the water? - <AUTHOR> http://redth.info/2010/04/09/is-monotouch-now-dead-in-the-water-what-does-apples-new-iphone-developer-agreement-mean/

<comment><USER2> I don't agree with the conclusion here. If you're using MonoTouch you should panic. You should be looking at backup plans and asking yourself whether you can use web apps.

Because even if Apple decides not to drop the bomb today they might tomorrow or the next day. You're living on borrowed time if you use MonoTouch. It's not fair but it's true.

<comment><USER3> Apple could drop the bomb on any language at any time (including Objective-C). You're presuming that Apple wants to kill MonoTouch, which I don't think is a foregone conclusion. I personally think that this is all about Flash and MonoTouch has very little to do with it from Apple's standpoint.

<comment><USER4> That might be true, but is it worth the risk?

<comment><USER3> If you've already got a MonoTouch app as SamAtt claims, then the risk is already taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't believe we even have to have this conversation. It's absurd. There really isn't any other way to put it.

I feel wrong about having an iPhone now. I feel dirty.

</comment><comment><USER6> " MonoTouch apps have very little evidence that they were created with MonoTouch"

Maybe that's fine for a small independent developer to take that risk. Some big organization with lawyers will not do this, and a startup probably will not either.

"Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++"

I don't think Apple can get more clear than this. This is referring to your application.

"Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited"

Yes this bans MonoTouch.

<comment><USER7> I'm a big MonoTouch fan. And even I can admit that MonoTouch apps have a lot more startup time than native apps. The MT team has done a lot to relieve this, but it's still there and still obvious. I think that alone makes Apple not like MT :-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And all this time everyone thought Microsoft was the big threat to Mono.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mono does not have a place/platform they can comfortably call home. Marginalized by the Microsoft/Windows community, marginalized by the Linux & Mac communities, and now banished from the IPhone/IPad platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really good point mentioned by the author, "Apparently every game produced by EA on the App Store would be in violation of the terms due to the fact they use Lua for scripting."

Does Apple really expect EA to select a new scripting language for their games or block scripting/add-ons on the iPhone/Pad versions?

<comment><USER10> EA being the size they are will presumably have some negotiating power to be allowed to use Lua. More to the point, EA probably can check with Apple in advance if they'd allow a particular game, just as it's done on other game consoles. You don't have to worry about EA, you have to worry about the thousands of little developers who _don't_ have the direct wire to Jobs's desk. Developing for the iPhone is becoming a liability, not an investment.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is my company's next move? - <AUTHOR>

For the past year I've been running a site that can best be described as "IMDB for concerts". I've achieved a good market fit--bands want what I've built--traffic has been increasing, I've got a lot of good things already in place for the next few months. And I've reached the limit of what I (and my one employee) can do on our own. I'm ready to expand.
I've listed some of the strengths; in my mind there is one challenge when it comes to seeking external money: I don't have a clear, short-term path to revenue (aside from traffic-based ads) and I'm worried that this is a problem for potential investors. [note: I believe this is actually a strength for the site because I can focus on growth and the user experience.]
So what is my next move? Apply to something like YC? Seek angel investors? Wait until I'm further along?
Feedback appreciated. <comment><USER2> "I believe this is actually a strength for the site because I can focus on growth and the user experience."

To investors, they want a clear path to ROI (how long will it take and what is your estimate on how much they will be able to make). Before approaching any investor, you need this. Otherwise, you probably won't be able to get any money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Paul, I should clarify that the site will surpass the 100,000+ unique visitors per month range shortly. There is income. But the type of business it is means that larger income sources won't come online until 2-3 years down the road.

<comment><USER2> So are you actually making that income? from the 100,000+ unqiues?

<comment><AUTHOR> We expect to reach that number by this summer. But yes, we are well on the way (above 50k).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My first HTML Demo - <AUTHOR> https://glennthealien.github.io/HtmlDemo/ <comment><USER2> Great but you might want to consider redacting your email and phone number considering there are bots that can crawl and pick them up, leading to unwanted spam. Also sometimes people on the internet can be not so nice, and it's usually a good idea to minimize your exposure, especially in a very public platform like HN or Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER3> This website is way better than my first attempt back in the day. Keep it on !

Nevertheless, maybe the public dislosure of your phone numbers is not necessary.

<comment><USER4> _This website is way better than my first attempt back in the day._

Me too, but I wrote my first site when HTML 2.0 was standard so I have an excuse.

<comment><USER5> My first website was built with FrontPage[0].

I will recommend you to try it out after I figured out how to time travel :)

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

<comment><USER4> I used Frontpage, and Frontpage Extensions on the server side. I used HoTMetaL, Dreamweaver, and a few other WYSIWYG editors too. They were good, but nothing quite beat Notepad (or BBEdit if you were on a Mac). I remember Adobe Pagemill was really handy for doing the same changes across hundreds of files too.

As fun as it was then I don't want to go back.

<comment><USER6> I used Frontpage for a good while (I made a nice chunk of change off of that app), but switched to Dreamweaver as I started doing more and more PHP.

But either way, I always loved those programs (and was really irritated by the elitists who said you couldn't make decent sites unless you used only notepad; those training wheels helped me become good at something that all of my "notepad-only" friends have all given up on).

But I agree, as fun as it was, I really have no desire to go back to that world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really, really great. Especially that you coded all this without DIY tools. I remember, the first time I tried building a website it was with Microsoft Frontpage, and then I upgraded to Macromedia Dreamweaver (now Adobe) and finally I gave up on both and started coding on notepad because these tools got in my way. Atleast you're lucky enough not to worry about IE anymore ;)

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks amazing. Way better than the typical React/Vue bloat that's advertised here on HN regularly. I dig the background, it fits well with the text, although the font looks a bit weird. I think Comic Sans or <marquee> tags would make it stand out a bit more.

<comment><USER9> Don't forget those <blink> tags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is a good idea to remove your sensitive info (e.g. phone number, last name, mail address) or replace it with bunk.

<comment><USER11> Definetly! You should use junk data (ex: 123-4567 as phone number) for everything you don't want to reveal. You can leave the email if you want to be contacted, although I recommend you to make a unique one for this purpose.

You can also host a private version which would contain the real information for employers

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice website. The "about" section is probably the most interesting for visitors and could be expanded. Readers might not know what TAS is. Is there anything you want to add or change about the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> hover over it (I used the abbr property for it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From a technical standpoint, it's a website created using bootstrap and some inline CSS. The carousel works, and that's not trivial to achieve as a neophyte. There is a footer with an easter egg (small text).

Home pages were very common back in the 90s and these days are out of fashion mostly due to blogs and social networks.

That's why making a home page these days is even more important, in order to contribute to a more decentralized Internet. So good job keeping the flame alive.

</comment><comment><USER14> While cool and all, I am sure it looks about on par with what everyone here did when starting out or am I crazy?

Thanks for not putting your age in the HN title though..

</comment><comment><USER15> This is really great for first time website.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice website.

Interesting, in Taiwan international schools are forbidden to enrol Taiwanese students. I wonder what the rationale is behind that. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipei_American_School](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipei_American_School)

<comment><AUTHOR> if u read carefully, they say only students without foreign passport, which I do (Canadian)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Next stop CSS. Try to make a web site using only HTML and CSS, without Bootstrap or JQuery. The trick is to use as much HTML semantics as possible, make the site readable using just HTML, then do all the styling in the CSS stylesheet. And add classes to the HTML elements if needed.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is what I did when I was 13. :)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20050503103013/http://eren13.8k....](https://web.archive.org/web/20050503103013/http://eren13.8k.com:80/)

<comment><USER19> Good times! I find out that my first one is still up: [http://lacquemant.free.fr/](http://lacquemant.free.fr/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Uhh.. congrats on making a website? I mean, if you are a real poster and are the age of the people on your site, kudos on making a public site. But I'm sorry, I don't feel this deserves posting on HN. I'm feeling trolled right now.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great start! Keep it up, stay curious & continue learning. Try to learn a bit of javascript with a fun game tutorial like this: [https://codecombat.com](https://codecombat.com)

</comment><comment><USER22> Really super stuff. Especially if this is your first time with HTML.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool stuff, Glenn! Keep doing and you'll go places!

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks great!

Here is something to remember about doing this kind of work: It's never done! There is always something else to do. So, I hope you enjoy doing the work.

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks good. One bit of advice - replace the background image with a solid color. A busy background image can make the text difficult to read.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ahh, I have been trolled. HN needs a specific _report_ button, even for young accounts, because duh, this post.

<comment><USER26> If you see something horrible wrong posted to HN you can email the mods: firstname.lastname@example.com (it's a manual process, so write to them only in special cases)

This is a strange submission and probably will not reach the front page, but IMHO it's necessary to report it manually to the mods.

Anyway, if you continue to post similar angry comments in allcaps the mods may notice and ban your account, so better try to fly under the radar for a few days.

From: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

> _The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. > Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial._

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you were thinking you got away with the easter egg, you didnt ;) Good job kiddo !

</comment><comment><USER28> good job you should consider adding links to your profile like github

</comment><comment><USER29> I wish I had this opportunity at 14. Awesome start. Keep going!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> the phone number is not real

<comment><USER26> In the movies, they use 555 to show a fictional phone number in USA, I don't know if there is something similar in Taiwan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_\(telephone_number\))

Since this is not your phone, are you sure that it is not somebody else phone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> well done!</comment>


What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_startups_can_learn_from_haruki_murakami.php <comment><USER2> Goes to show that anything you enjoy, if you think about it hard enough, can be applied to startups. It's all human experience. Feynman said it as "The whole universe is in a glass of wine."

<http://hackvan.com/brain/msg00058.html>

Personally, I don't like this example. I love Murakami's novels because they contain mystery and loose ends, and they don't pretend that human lives neatly wrap up into stories. Murakami doesn't tell me what to think, he shows me enough complexity and paradox to make me think. The blog post, on the other hand, is name-dropping him to repackage the same motivational bullet points.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. I was expecting a lot more from the title than it delivered -- perhaps some kind of in-depth discussion of how the largely somewhat bizarre plots of Murakami's books can be related to startups. Maybe the end of the world in Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World tells us something about how to cope with time pressure, or sitting at the bottom of the well in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is something to do with getting your best work done in isolation. Or, er, something.

But nope, just a list of random platitudinous advice which could be related to just about any successful person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I never thought one day I will see people relate him with startups when I was 22 reading his novels 18 years ago.

One of my favorite quote from his "Norwegian Wood" is : ""The true enemy of this bunch was not State Power but Lack of Imagination". "This bunch" was socialist university students.

</comment><comment><USER5> 29 is not a "late bloomer" for a novelist. That's considered somewhat precocious, actually.

<comment><USER6> What an intriguing factoid. Could you elaborate on this? Where and why?

<comment><USER5> Novelists (and short story writers) who publish a first book in their twenties are perceived as wunderkinder. It is considered much more usual to begin publishing books in your thirties. I'm basing this on my experience as a keen reader of "literary" fiction and as a fiction writer (with a handful of pubs, but no book, dammit). And no, if I published one today, I wouldn't be considered a wunderkinder ;-)

Now, I'm pretty confident in my assertion that this is the general perception, but I haven't compiled the facts to see whether perception coincides with reality. Certainly, I can think of many young first novelists from over the years: Michael Chabon, Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace. Yes, Neal Stephenson, you hackers, you. But if you check out the press and reviews on their first books, you'll find that almost the most salient fact about them is their age.

Assuming most first fiction books are published in the writer's early thirties, why would that be? Writing fiction requires a lot of disparate skills. It takes a long time to develop them, and they tend to develop asynchronously. The typical case, is a young writer with the technical skills, but not enough life experience to really get inside anyone's head, which is necessary in fiction, of course. (Certainly, it sometimes works the other way around.) Some young writers are so good at the technical aspects that the reader is willing to look past shallowness of characters, a tired theme, etc. And their books are published despite flaws. I'd say this is the case with Zadie Smith's _White Teeth_ for instance.

And of course (he says cynically) sometimes books are published for reasons other than their quality.

Murakami, BTW, has all but disavowed his first two novels.

<comment><USER4> His first two was the reason I started to read his stuff. It just like those punk band. Even it is green, but you feel there will be something if they keep on working, and after years you know everyone listen to their stuffs. Even though when they look bad later to see how embarrassed it was. But the spirit is the essence.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Interviews with 100x More Productive Programmers - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/lisphackers <comment><USER2> The whole book is available to read online without a download.

[https://leanpub.com/lisphackers/read](https://leanpub.com/lisphackers/read)

<comment> trevor-e This page is very irritating to read because the colors are inverted from how they should be. The current colors emphasize the question title instead of the answer.

edit: Perhaps not inverted since the titles should still be skimmable, just anything other than the gray paragraphs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow... not just 10X programmers, but 100X, and the only evidence seems to be a firm assertion at the start of the book.

<comment><USER4> I was coming to the comments in search of what 100x meant -- how it was measured and compared. If someone is 100x more productive, they ought to be able to build systems in days or weeks instead of years, right? Kind of joking, but mostly poking fun at what seem like silly numbers.

<comment><USER5> I guess the 100x means that they are using LISP? Or maybe the other way around? Not sure.

Meanwhile we are told that HN has excellent protection against upvoting rings. How the heck does this reach the front page in an organic way?

<comment><USER6> From the data it looks to me like established community members were interested in the topic. Perhaps they didn't look at the article, perhaps they noticed something about it that you didn't, and/or perhaps they're familiar with gnocchi's fine submission history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a link to a free book... Thought it was a sales page at first.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This link didn't generate the interest I thought it would get. A lot of interesting people are interviewed in this ebook like Peter Seibel.

<comment><USER8> An accurate title would help. These interviews seem to be more about Lisp evangelism than why/how/if these people actually are more productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Luke Gorrie (Australia - Sweeden - Switzerland)

Maybe first learn how to spell the names of the countries.

<comment><USER9> Really? It's mostly likely a typo but somehow is the most salient point for you...</comment></comment>


The time that Tony Fadell sold me a container of hummus - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@arlogilbert/the-time-that-tony-fadell-sold-me-a-container-of-hummus-cb0941c762c1#.1tuydakjg <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11423411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11423411).

<comment><USER3> Dang it...dang. Just minutes before I hit "Submit". I'll post over there, delete the one I just posted if you like.

<comment><USER2> Sure. Sorry about that; it's hard not to miss a few.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, should have put a smiley in there. It was no big deal to Cmd-C, Cmd-V. My faux anger was just an opportunity for word play on your user name. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HELP HN: My Google Apps Account & Gmail Account were hacked. What should I do?  - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN Community,<p>I have a huge problem. Both my Google Apps account & Gmail account were hacked. Judging by the "Last Account Activity" feature in gmail, the account was accessed repeatedly by an EC2 IP. An email was sent to all of my contacts including a link to a malware site (I did not open the link yet.) The intruders already tried completing transactions in my bank account. What should I do? Any help is much appreciated. Thank you in advance! M <comment><USER2> Well; You most likely had a stupid password (sorry for the bluntness but it's true!), so you need to change that immediately. Then I would email all my contact saying DON'T OPEN THE LAST EMAIL :)

</comment><comment><USER3> change the passwords of any other site which uses the same password as your google acct.

In the future use an algorithm-based password, so that each site you visit has a unique pw.

and switch to 2-step verification <http://goo.gl/NZrTJ></comment>


Leap Motion Is Dead - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/30/once-poised-to-kill-the-mouse-and-keyboard-leap-motion-plays-its-final-hand/ <comment><USER2> The tech sucked in real-world conditions

<comment><USER3> I agree. For a period a several years ago I was tasked to oversee this in a museum alongside an occulus rift early dev kit and some other tech curiosities. The leap motion almost never worked, and people would usually end up disappointed. The kinect seemed to achieve everything it was trying to do but better and for the whole body.

The occulus rift dev kit comparatively despite being a prototype, stood up amazingly well to the general public, even if I didn't feel it was that impressive, it was awesome to give the first view of VR to so many members of the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any word on whether the purchasing company will continue to support existing Leap hardware/software at all, for those of us who own one?

Leap Motion is great fun in maker circles.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://blog.leapmotion.com/leap-motion-and-ultrahaptics- join...](http://blog.leapmotion.com/leap-motion-and-ultrahaptics-join-forces/)

This is the best Information I could find.</comment></comment>


DeepMind AI learns to act aggressive when it doesn't get its way - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3004396/google-deepmind-learns-to-act-aggressive-when-it-doesnt-get-its-way <comment><USER2> The AI acted aggressively by blasting its opponents....because the game was designed with that being the optimal way to score points. If the optimal way to win was to just pause the game, it would have done that. 0/5 stars, would not read again.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh wowzers! DeepMind "AI" finds the most effective strategies for a couple of simplistic games. This "research" could have been done by an undergrad twenty years ago (with simple self-written algorithms), in a couple of months... max! Only positive point is the article is mercifully short.</comment>


Ask HN: How are submissions ranked? - <AUTHOR> What determines ranking of submissions on HN? I've seen a lot of odd rankings, but normally a story that is higher is either newer or has a greater number of points. Right now, the submission on the FCC request for comment on net neutrality is #70 (164 points, 70 comments) and a random paywalled story about a company I've never heard of getting more money than I dream of is #69 (7 points, 0 comments).<p>What would cause this ranking? <comment><USER2> There's a decay algorithm which scores posts based on their points _and_ how long ago they were posted.

There are some good articles about the algorithm floating around if you Google for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That doesn't explain why an article with more points that is a newer is below an article with fewer points that is older.

<comment><USER3> Various weights or penalties could automatically be applied, according to the posted domain, or the karma of the poster, or any number of factors. If more users comment than vote, that can cause the rank to drop, as it implies low comment quality. Replying too quickly triggers the flamewar detector, which drops the rank. Of course, user flags and downvotes affect the ranking, as does occational manual moderator intervention.

Because the staff doesn't want people to successfully game the system, much of what goes into the ranking process here is opaque, with only a few details about it leaking out from time to time. I have no special insight into it, I just know what I sometimes read.

Basically, just accept that Hacker News is not a direct democracy, but more akin the American electoral system, where your votes are more or less a suggestion passed on moderators, who make the final decision about whether or how much they count.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you seen this? [https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn- faq](https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq)</comment>


Swagger is now the OpenAPI Specification - <AUTHOR> https://buildazure.com/2017/10/20/swagger-is-now-the-openapi-specification/ <comment><USER2> Don't be fooled kids, this may sound great but it is in fact the gate to hell. Back when I was young the same thing was called SOAP and it also promised standardized APIs in a vendor neutral description format and code generation. It was pure misery. I still have nightmares about it. They may say they only bring the good parts of SOAP, but there are no good parts in SOAP.

<comment><USER3> The Swagger/OpenAPI spec format is its own special little hell. Just enough "user friendly" features to make it difficult to parse, yet still complicated enough that it's a pain to write.

<comment><USER4> I thought I was the only one! As far as I can tell the sentiment regarding Swagger/OpenAPI is generally positive, but I am starting to think that's just because it's an improvement over the status quo of "nothing" for most people.

I personally prefer API Blueprint, but even there is room for improvement.

<comment><USER5> I prefer RAML tbh - using Markdown as the basis of an API specification language is a pretty terrible idea. RAML's syntax is much more structured and pleasant, and the type syntax is far nicer to write than JSON Schema. Alas it seems to have lost the battle of network effects...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm very confused, the article bills this as news, but this has been true for at least a year, is the news that v3 is now 'current' rather than in development?

[https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification](https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI- Specification)

<comment><USER7> I believe you're correct. It hasn't been official yet despite being mostly ready to go

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always found Swagger to not be very readable or usable. APIs keep changing, and are meant to be malleable, not rigid. IMO, Swagger always ends up being too much planning, too little implementation.

I remember having a bunch of discussions about these issues when I worked on the Postman Collection Format ([https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman- collection/blob/devel...](https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman- collection/blob/develop/examples/collection-v2.json)) which can be very flexible.

</comment><comment><USER9> The one Swagger docs site my team used, we all thought it was completely broken for the first several weeks of trying to access it.

Turns out there was a small red ("error" colored...) header bar near the top, collapsed by default. You need to click that to expand out all the API docs. Fun design.

</comment><comment><USER10> Which editor do you use to edit Swagger? Writing Swagger specification by hand is a nightmare because of the poor online editor. The error messages are hard to understand.

Also Swagger.io people decided to replace the old editor with the new editor and it doesn't have many useful features the old has. Thankfully they kept the old one live.

Swagger is not all that hard to understand. This is a fantastic tutorial which helped a lot to get started: [https://apihandyman.io/writing-openapi-swagger- specification...](https://apihandyman.io/writing-openapi-swagger- specification-tutorial-part-1-introduction/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there a good writeup on "WSDL: Lessons learned", with some depth?

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there any standard as to how to do some of these thing - API versioning? actions like login/logout? doing a GET on multiple IDs? spinal casing? common response object format? application specific error codes?

<comment><USER13> The spec allows you to describe how you decide to implement these things; it doesn't proscribe any particular API patterns.

You can declare types separately from APIs to make your last two items easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another API specification that I really like is [CoreAPI]([http://www.coreapi.org/](http://www.coreapi.org/)) .

It works nicely with the django-rest-framework (both created by the same person) and has clients for python, javascript, and a command line tool to interact with the API. I have written a small python script that takes our CoreAPI specification and then generates markdown documentation around it.

The catch is that it is not as well documented as Swagger so working with it would require digging into its source code.

</comment><comment><USER15> API Builder [[https://www.apibuilder.io](https://www.apibuilder.io)] integrates many of the end to end tools teams need to manage APIs at scale. JSON remains first class and support for swagger is native (also supports avro idl… protobufs to come).

API Builder was started in 2014 as a free and open source project to build a community around best practices we learned scaling gilt.com and building flow.io.

Managing great APIs end to end at scale and over time take a huge investment in culture and tooling. API Builder solves a number of those problems.

A few reasons why teams adopt API Builder.

\- Very, very high quality generated clients: Teams that use API Builder end up relying 100% on the generated clients - ie. the developers STOP writing and managing their own client SDKs, freeing up time to focus on product improvements.

\- History: Every change in spec is documented - accurate and automatic - e.g. [https://app.apibuilder.io/history?org=apicollective&app=apib...](https://app.apibuilder.io/history?org=apicollective&app=apibuilder- spec)

\- Resource centric: API Builder is resource first - instead of defining an operation explicitly, you define resources and then expose operations on that resource.

\- Simple service specification: API Builder at its core separates the notion of the input format (e.g. api.json, swagger, avro) from the service description (service.json). This is a huge advantage: regardless of input format, the service specification can be fully expanded and complete.

\- Simple input format: The default api.json format is simple for humans to write. It is JSON, but more than that it is approachable by a novice and designed to be both simple and easy.

\- Easy to add code generators: Code generators in API Builder are themselves REST services which accept a service description (in JSON) and essentially return a string. Teams often write their own code generators - even small disposable ones - to systematically solve problems in an automated fashion.

\- Testability of clients: With generated mock clients built from the same interface definition, teams can rely on mocks when building automated tests - and further use the provided mock clients to override only the specific features needed for a given test.

\- Workflow that works with micro or mono repos and allows for concurrent, branched development of spec, service and client

More at [https://www.apibuilder.io/](https://www.apibuilder.io/) and [https://app.apibuilder.io/doc/why](https://app.apibuilder.io/doc/why)

[edit: formatting]

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't see how Swagger helps me build, document or test my API. Anyone have a good experience to share?

<comment><USER17> So far as documentation goes, OpenAPI does include fields for human consumption - such as "example". I've been using Swaggerhub to validate my OpenAPI documents and it clearly demonstrates what the automatically-generated documentation might look like.

It won't help you at all with unit testing (you shouldn't be using HTTP for that). You can theoretically use it to generate a client library in your language of choice for integration tests (true for Swagger, not yet for OpenAPI). Finally, there are tools built around it that let you play around with APIs that have these specs - Microsoft PowerBI comes to mind.

There are ways you could use it to build an API, but I wouldn't consider them a good idea. Edit: You could completely automate the process of ensuring that your semantic versions are compliant (i.e. you aren't breaking compatibility when you are claiming that you are not).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do Swagger/OpenAPI and its more popular implementations support JWT/bearer tokens yet?

<comment><USER13> The spec seems to: [https://swagger.io/docs/specification/authentication/bearer-...](https://swagger.io/docs/specification/authentication/bearer- authentication/)

I'd be curious about implementation support as well. I was able to get it to work with earlier versions, but IIRC it involved using the apiKey in header auth type and manually adding "Bearer" to the auth header.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Still the best option is the unix philosophy: "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." \- Peter H. Salus in A Quarter-Century of Unix (1994)

<comment><USER20> It really isn't the universal interface. At some point, most of us need to transfer more than just "text", even if we end up representing the data as text. For example, if I need to describe the name, breed, and sex of a set of dogs, I can transfer that as JSON:

      [
        {
          "name": "Spot",
          "breed": "Dalmatian",
          "sex": "male",
        },
        ...
      ]

as CSV:

      name,breed,sex
      Spot,Dalmatian,male

etc. The list goes on. The concept of "text" fails to capture both the higher- lever format (JSON, CSV) and the lower-level details (what the keys are in JSON, what values might be valid for enumerations such as "sex", etc.; what units for numeric types, how do we represent null (esp in CSV), etc.).

For JSON HTTP APIs, Swagger makes a not-that-bad (IMO) attempt at describing the format of the structure.

The Unix philosophy, while it works well in _specific_ cases, does not lend itself well to the creation of robot solutions. Parsing text streams with tools like sed/grep which are not the right tool for the job, in that they cannot understand the corner-cases of JSON/CSV/etc., leads to brittle solutions. (e.g., a use of sed/awk on the above CSV might work, until we get a more complicated format in a later iteration with a field containing an embedded newline, and our awk script falls down b/c we're not using a real CSV parser.)</comment></comment>


Germany's welfare experiment: Sanction-free 'basic security' - <AUTHOR> https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-welfare-experiment-sanction-free-basic-security/a-46629933 <comment> time-domain0 In the US, there's a major problem where the cliff of sanctions and penalities for making forward progress from destitution to livable wages rationalize, in many people's mind that somehow absolutely no safety net is desirable (!?!), rather than a gradual safety net that doesn't treat poor/disabled/bad circumstances people like criminals or burden them with a constant flood of paperwork and bureaucratic BS.</comment>


Open-Source Recycling - <AUTHOR> http://preciousplastic.com/ <comment><USER2> While i nether have the room nor the time to do this, i love the idea. I also love the "Why" section of the website, so simply yet so mighty.

<comment><USER3> I'm hoping to find some workshop that would share the tools and space (for a fee), but I have no idea where to look.

Making stuff out of garbage would make me feel like Tony Stark.

<comment><USER2> I could see hacker spaces doing this, there is almost always room and a budget for new machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if this project is based off the earlier Recyclebot? That was something I'd wanted to build for a long time.

[http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12948](http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12948)

[http://reprap.org/wiki/Recyclebot](http://reprap.org/wiki/Recyclebot)

[http://www.appropedia.org/Recyclebot](http://www.appropedia.org/Recyclebot)

Precious Plastic certainly looks further along though - and their instructions look to be higher quality, too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Always wanted to do this, but I was afraid reprocessing plastics would release toxic fumes or hard to detect dangers for the average guy. I can't stand throwing things anymore.

<comment><USER6> I'm obsessed with not throwing away things and really appreciate a cool project like this. But nonetheless, I would like to emphasize that recycling is no substitute for not producing and not consuming plastic, which is by far the best way to fight what is depicted in the Why? section!

<comment><USER5> You're into the San Francisco glass jars + tissue bag trend ?

<comment><USER6> No

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A positive thing for sure. But the hardest part is not the processing, it`s the sorting of different types of plastic and the washing phase if required.

<comment><USER8> How advanced are the sorting facilities? I assume they must use some image recognition and robotics already. Do they use deep learning yet?

<comment><USER9>
       Do they use deep learning yet?

"yet" ? Deep learning is no panacea - it's not clear why this would even be on a top 5 list of approaches to try on a putative ML part of the process. There seems to be a lot of confusion on this, generally.

Most likely they just use cheap labor for sorting

<comment><USER10> I'd think once you have built sensors that can digitize the whatever properties of the plastic that are relevant to sorting them, actually recognizing the different types of plastics would be rather simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Someone who knows more should prove me wrong, but...

Intuitively shouldn't a dedicated plant's machinery have much higher efficiency? Coupling that with the biggest problems of recycling being the combined energy costs of transportation and processing, this seems to not solve anything?

It kind of solves only one leg of the transportation, but the final recycled plastic will still need to be transported. That's again assuming costs of transportation are linear with respect to number of sources (but I don't think that's true...). And assuming same thing about processing energy efficiency, this does worse with the processing energy part.

<comment><USER12> I think we'll find something more interesting if:

\- The outputs of this recycling tech can be fed into personal fabrication tech (3D printers, etc.)

\- Power generation is decentralized (solar, etc.)

It's part of a set of tech that would allow for the localization of manufacturing, closing the whole lifecycle locally. This in turn brings things back to the community. It's not always about total energy efficiency.

<comment><USER4> > The outputs of this recycling tech can be fed into personal fabrication tech > (3D printers, etc.)

I can:

[http://preciousplastic.com/videos/build/extrusion/](http://preciousplastic.com/videos/build/extrusion/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My wife was wondering whether this can be considered 100% healthy: don't you need plastic to reach a very high temperature to model it that way? Doesn't it start releasing whatever thing that might be carcinogenic or such?

<comment><USER14> Thermoplastics will melt before they start to chemically decompose. Whatever residue is in the plastic might be liberated by the heat (those residues will also migrate out at room temperature, so we tend to be somewhat careful about what residue ends up in products).

Thermoset plastics will not melt and will release all sorts of magnificent things when heated.

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

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

</comment></comment><comment> fake-name From [http://preciousplastic.com/machines/](http://preciousplastic.com/machines/)

> You can make the molds completely yourself using CNC to mill the lathe or > simply welding them.

.... What? "mill the lathe"? I think they accidentally a word in there.

>These lines can be used to make new raw material (3d printing filament), granulate, spinned around a mold or up to you to find new creative ways.

> Well suited to make large and more solid objects, the oven itself is also a > great machine for prototyping and making plastic test.

> Since it works with molds you can easily replicate and set up a production.

This website desperately needs copy-editing.

\----

Also, I'm completely tired of people coming into an existing engineering discipline and deciding to come up with a whole bunch of terms for existing processes. It's not "a injection", it's *an injection molding machine. All the new terminology does is make things extra confusing.

<comment><USER15> The people behind the project are Dutch, German, Mexican [0] and none of them -from what I could see- would normally speak English as their first language.

Why don't you send an email to point out the mistakes in their text? [1]

They might even appreciate it :)

[0] - [http://preciousplastic.com/thanks/](http://preciousplastic.com/thanks/)

[1] - [http://preciousplastic.com/contact/](http://preciousplastic.com/contact/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not everyone has the skills, nor the tools to do this. I love the idea, and wish someone would make the machines (or the entire kits to assemble at home). I would buy them!

<comment><USER17> As said in the intro video, ask the local handyman.

This is not out of reach, they managed to build those in Africa with whatever was available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been looking for something like this for a while. Was already thinking on developing mynown machines but this just saved me lots of resources. Great project!</comment>


Reddit Places a 'Quarantine' on R/The_Donald - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/politics/reddit-donald-trump-quarantined.html <comment><USER2> Seems reasonable. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier, honestly.

I don't expect this is going to be pretty, but it will be entertaining to watch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good.</comment>


Can you really read 50 Books in a Year? - <AUTHOR> http://www.careermetis.com/can-you-really-read-50-books-in-a-year/ <comment><USER2> If you want to track what you read, goodreads is a pretty decent site. It even has a Reading Challenge where you commit to reading X books for the year and it will tell you if you are on track to hit that target (with a simplistic % of books finished vs % of year gone by, but it's a start).

I'm surprised this guy didn't try audio books with a 2 hour drive commute - I've never found audio books to work for me but I know a lot of other people who think they're awesome.

>I personally do not read fiction. My thought process on fiction is that if the book is good enough – they will eventually make a Hollywood movie. And when the movie released I will just watch that.

This, though, is a completely foreign worldview to me. Totally baffling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I have tried audiobooks using Audible. The advantage of that is that you can go back to your favourite chapters; listen to it while working out and doing chores. Another cool thing with audible is that you can control the playback speed.

I wanted to focus on reading books / ebooks because I personally found it more rewarding and enjoyable.</comment></comment>


Slack skyrockets 21% after making IBM its biggest account yet - <AUTHOR> https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/slack-stock-price-ibm-biggest-account-global-employees-messaging-platform-2020-2-1028890304 <comment><USER2> I wonder how they organize it on big companies like this. Is it running one instance per team? Do they have a big one with the whole company also?</comment>


Innovation in Violinmaking (1998) - <AUTHOR> https://josephcurtinstudios.com/innovation-in-violinmaking/ <comment><USER2> A more recent article (2006) by the same author discuss his progress in developing an "ultralight" violin: [https://josephcurtinstudios.com/subject- to-change-innovation...](https://josephcurtinstudios.com/subject-to-change- innovation-among-violinmakers/)

Curiously this new design remains under development today, with completion listed as "fall 2018".

As an amateur luthier, I'm thrilled to see a push for innovation in the viol family of instruments. It's an uphill battle -- any deviation from Cremona design is seen as heresy and is immediately rejected. Even benign cosmetic elements are dismissed out-of-hand. Thankfully this orthodoxy does not exist in the folk instrument world, where innovation flourishes.

The author's comment about being a civil war re-enactment actor perfectly captures what it feels like to be trapped by orthodoxy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, I was interested, but just couldn't get through the whole article without a single figure or diagram to illustrate his points about what he would change.

Perhaps I'll give it a try reading this much prose again when I have the time.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it assumes a good deal of prior knowledge about violins.

<comment><USER3> Oh, I play the violin. And even I was finding it hard to want to continue reading a wall of text without a single diagram or figure...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author is mostly be optimizing for volume, and in a fully acoustic context I see why that's a goal. But there's an enormous amount of vioin performance that is either recorded or amplified, in which case volume doesn't matter much. I'd love to see someone optimize for tone quality and responsiveness at the expense of volume.

<comment><USER2> From the article, about 4% of the energy from the bow is ejected as sound but even that seemingly low figure may be near the top of what is possible, mechanically speaking.

Even with amplification, there is always a desire for more potential volume since that gives the musician a wider (potential) dynamic range. And an instrument that is more sensitive is often more capable of the greatest volume.

I think it's fair to say that the tone/volume struggle is a balance. No-one wants a harsh-yet-loud instrument. And a beautifully resonant, lush instrument that can't rise above the 2nd and 3rd chair instruments will be resigned to solo work, only.

there's a saying in the luthier world : "you can give 'em volume or you can give 'em tone, and they'll pick volume every time."

<comment><USER5> _> And a beautifully resonant, lush instrument that can't rise above the 2nd and 3rd chair instruments will be resigned to solo work, only._

There are a lot of recording and amplified gigs, though, where relative volume doesn't matter much. For example, I play for dances with fiddlers, and the fiddle is always amplified. A more responsive fiddle, one that let you keep excellent tone while playing faster, or one with just better tone all around would would easily be worth accepting lower unamplified volume from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most obvious innovation would be replacing the friction peg tuners with guitar-style machine heads. This wouldn't perceptibly change the sound, but it would make the violin easier to keep in tune. But violinists care more about tradition, so this obvious improvement isn't done.

<comment><USER7> The German carbon violin maker mezzo-forte - by the way, that's one hell of an innovation - uses Wittner fine tuning pegs:

> _The Wittner Fine Tune pegs retain the traditional hardwood appearance > demanded by professional musicians while offering a unique internal gearing > system that makes them a revelation to use._

I'm thinking about buying some of those pegs myself. I saw them for 80 Euros for a violin. They come in two sizes, 7.8 mm and 8.6 mm.

When I read violin forums it's often about name dropping. Who made the instrument? How ancient is it? When I bought my first violin I told them my upper limit and to give me instruments without telling me _anything at all_ about them. I tried about 8 different ones for two hours and ended up spending 1000 Euros (just the pure instrument without anything else, well, strings of course, Thomastik Dominant). I never looked at any of them closely, not even the one I ended up buying. Only when I was back home did I really have a look at what I bought. Until then I only cared about how it felt and how it sounded. I considered a Mezzo-Forte (carbon) but thought I'm not advanced enough to be able to make good decision (yet), besides, it would have cost 2400 Euros, quite a bit more. What I read about that carbon instrument was pretty positive - pretty much all negative comments were almost all along the line "it's not traditional", often without even having ever tried one.

[https://www.mezzo-forte.de/en/](https://www.mezzo-forte.de/en/)

[https://www.simplyforstrings.com.au/blog/wittner-finetune- pe...](https://www.simplyforstrings.com.au/blog/wittner-finetune-pegs-make- their-mark/)

[https://www.thomann.de/gb/wittner_violin_tuning_pegs_4_4_78....](https://www.thomann.de/gb/wittner_violin_tuning_pegs_4_4_78.htm?ref=intl&shp=eyJjb3VudHJ5IjoiZ2IiLCJjdXJyZW5jeSI6IjIiLCJsYW5ndWFnZSI6ImVuIn0%3D) (linking only the 7.8 mm version)

<comment><USER8> I want some of those pegs! The dance between the fine tuners and the pegs is frustrating, and I don't like the look of a tailpiece with four little screws sticking out of it.

I'd love some for my viol even more, as it's got seven strings all made of gut and goes out of tune with the slightest shift in humidity or temperature. Anybody who doubts the progress of violin making just needs to play the viol for a while, as viol design is still mostly just recreations of the old instruments. Or play baroque violin - violin as Stradivarius actually made it - and understand that progress has been made.

I think the adherence to worship of the past is a relatively modern thing, but it's nice to see things moving around. I've seen quite a few very interesting instruments on the English folk scene lately by Tim Phillips.

<comment><USER7> Just to add to my list of links, the actual manufacturer website (1990s style design but _tons_ of information) is

[https://www.wittner-gmbh.de/](https://www.wittner-gmbh.de/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is maybe a stupid question, but why don't violins have markings to indicate the notes. Obviously you wouldn't have physical frets like a guitar because that would alter the sound, but one of the reasons beginners sound so awful is because it takes years before they can reliably play in tune. Is there a reason why?

<comment><USER10> Not a violinist but I used to be a professional double bass player and the issues are somewhat similar (actually worse on violin than double bass because the gauge is shorter and therefore the margin for error is less).

Beginners do sometimes stick stickers on the fretboard, however these are generally not encouraged.

Firstly if you're looking at the fingerboard while playing a violin your neck would be in a really bad position, so it would encourage a bad habit. To learn to play in tune, you train your ear (so you know what in tune is) and your proprioception (so you know where your body needs to be in space to make the instrument be in tune).

Secondly, the difference in area between the note being beautifully in tune and sounding awful is really small, so in order for a sticker or visual cue to help your head and the instrument would have to be in exact alignment at all times and even then you may not be able to see. This is made much worse by parallax. When playing the violin even if you are looking at the strings, you are looking down the fingerboard towards the nut rather than across the fingerboard like in the case of a guitar, remember.

Thirdly, if you're looking at your fingers you're not looking at your music (which you need to when you're a beginner) or your conductor or fellow players (as you need to when you're actually performing).

<comment><USER11> Another ex-double bassist, but started on Violin for about 10 years.

I agree with the above but also add that any permanent markings would be problematic because wood expands and shrinks and therefore markings would not remain in the place.

That being said, on the rare occasion of a double bass solo in orchestra I would usually mark a starting point on my fingerboard with pencil.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: MsgMe.at - an ultra simple reminder service - <AUTHOR> http://msgme.at

<comment><AUTHOR> I realize there are a hundred solutions that do the same thing, but I wanted one that was ultra clean, ultra easy, and just got the damn job done.

I'd love any feedback or suggestions you guys might have on this little two- day project. Thanks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just wanted to let you guys know, in case you see this, that I've added a standard e-mail/password sign up/sign in option to the service -- I hope you'll take a look!

</comment><comment><USER2> facebook login is a non-starter :/

<comment><AUTHOR> For you, or is this a broadly-observed view for customers in general? There are lots of Facebook-only apps out there, and I only selected it because it makes it incredibly easy to get folks into the system.

Speaking honestly, it also offers fantastic demographic data for those that opt-in to receive sponsored offers...

Thanks for your thoughts, regardless!

<comment><USER3> Facebook login is a dead stop for me too. Maybe your demographic is the Facebook generation, but there are lots of non-Facebook generation people who use email, want reminders, have busy lives, and money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate it. I'll look at adding a standard login mechanism this weekend.

Bottom line is I want this thing dead-simple, but this shouldn't add too much overhead, I suppose.

<comment><USER3> Because of the Facebook thing I haven't logged in yet, and this may be answered if I do, but how do you deal with time zones?

<comment><AUTHOR> You pick it from the list and I use it to calculate the difference between the current time in your zone and the time you want the message, then add the difference to GMT time on my server. It was simple once I got the dots connected and figured out PHPs DateTime class. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ICS (iCalendar) file converter - <AUTHOR> https://icsconvert.appspot.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> A comment about the appspot.com domain.

I did look at getting a dedicated TLD (i.e. icsconverter.com) for this but with Stripe (quite rightly) requiring SSL when I did the sums for getting a custom domain on SSL with Google App Engine it was around $50/year. Which is ok for a site that's going to be making some money but a little extravagant for a little side project

Especially when compared to $0/year for SSL on a appspot.com subdomain.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a quick commute time project I did because I had some data in Google Calendar and wanted to get at it but I could only export it as iCalendar (.ics).

I used Stripe for payments and found it gloriously simple compared to previously doing battle with PayPal.

All comments and feedback welcome, thanks.</comment>


Ask HN: Time off after Graduation? - <AUTHOR>

Currently, i'm in my last semester of a 5 year Computer Engineering degree. I've been fortunate enough to land some nice co-op positions with companies locally, and am happy with my work history.
I'd love to take a few months off to develop my own skills(i love the mobile space, but need some more hands on app development experience), along with a bit of travel, and getting into real-estate with my father.
What's holding me back, is wondering how employers will view my gap in work history if i take a few months off? Will they look at my resume and say "Why didn't this guy get hired right out of school"?
I'd hope that if I had something to show for with my time, then I'd be in a better position in their eyes. I'm not in debt, and have majority of my co-op money saved.
I guess i'm looking for some reassurance. Thoughts?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> A few months off won't hurt you. I've got gaps between all of my jobs and it's never been a problem. It does put you in a slight disadvantage in negotiations (companies will often bid your salary up higher if they feel like they have to hire you quickly or else somebody else will), but if you have solid skills and tangible accomplishments to demonstrate, they'll want you regardless and figure they don't want to leave you on the open market for somebody else to grab.

A few _years_ out of the workforce can hurt you. I have a friend that decided to spend a few months traipsing around South-east Asia, that few months became 5 years, and now he worries about being unemployable.

</comment><comment><USER3> How much time are you talking? Professionally, no one's going to mind if you take a few months break. Personally, I _strongly encourage_ you to take a break! Just decompressing after 17 years in school and getting used to real life is going to take a while. Of course this depends on how much "real life" exposure you had during school :) but for me it was about 7 months.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have about 2 years of work experience due to co-op, and a previous relevant job prior to co-op.

I'm thinking about 4 months to decompress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the best course of action is to still do the interviews, but ask the potential employer for a late start date. Personally I took about 4 months off after I finished classes. I arranged the start date of my job to be early September (I finished classes in April; probably went to same school as you, 5 year program with co-op and whatnot).

</comment><comment><USER5> Work gap is fine as long as it is right after school. You have an easy story to account for the gap, and it's a good time to take a break.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think you could interview, accept a job, and put off the start date for 4-6 weeks. Just tell them in the interview process your intentions.</comment>


Ask HN: If all events are random or deterministic is there free will - <AUTHOR> I'm going back and forth with my father in law about whether or not free will exists (beats talking about politics) and I stumbled into an idea and was curious if it made sense.
I'm supposing that all events are the result of a train of consequences (determinism) or are completely random (quantum stuff). Is this correct?
If so wouldn't this rule out the possibility of "free-will" since your choice will either be completely random and without cause or it's the result of the history of the universe that put you here now? <comment><USER3> It's an interesting discussion and one that has bothered philosophers for millennia. I'm afraid you won't have a true answer to your doubts and it's a matter of what makes sense to each of you.

As usual, Wikipedia does a decent job of surveying the landscape so you can deep dive into any of the philosophies as you wish: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will)

</comment><comment><USER4> There is actually a solution to this problem similar to Pascal's Wager [0]. This is the argument.

1\. If there is no free will and you believe you have free will then it doesn't matter.

2\. If there is free will and you believe it doesn't exist then you have wasted your life.

3\. Our knowledge of the existence of free will or not is incomplete.

The end result of these three statements is no matter how unlikely free will is (all evidence suggests it doesn't exist) you must act as though free will exists since there is some finite probability that it does and you will waste your life by believing free will doesn't exist.

Does anyone know who first proposed this solution in the literature?

0\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager)

</comment><comment><USER5> You are going to have to define free-will.

I think that the same person put into the same situation makes the same choices. So it is the result of history. There is the chance that neurons fire semi-randomly, potentially meaning someone might connect a different thought given the same scenario.

Either way, does it matter? Are those things free will? I believe people can chose thier actions. They can choose to be better or worse or any of a million other things. This ability to choose is free will, and is independent of determinism. Even if it is an illusion (and you are just successive, deterministic events), it is important that people chose to be who they are. That is how society can exist.

</comment><comment><USER6> Determinism is compatible with a free will. Determinism simply mean that the future can be accurately predicted from the present. Its only implication on the subject of free will is that the same person in the same situation always will make the same choice, i.e. theres nothing inherently random about our decision making processes.

<comment><USER7> That kind of depends on your definition of "free will". If the same person in the same situation will always make the same choice, then they cannot choose differently. Then they aren't free to choose differently, for at least some definitions of "free".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> All of these comments are good points. I have thought of free will too. My idea was mainly nondeterministic free will, but also a kind of two kind of free will: "classical" free will which is less free but has more effect, and "quantum" free will which is more free but less effective. I also thought of a kind of deterministic free will where free will is somehow encoded in the initial state; possibly transcendental numbers might be required in order for this to work. And yet there are still more questions. I have read Wikipedia and other stuff too.

</comment><comment><USER9> One of the pointers Advaita offers is to start observing your "choices" — what and when are you "authoring"?

I've been doing this for a while and am yet to observe any choice which is not determined by circumstances, conditioning, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, desires, bodily needs, or genetic make up. None of these are under my control, so where's this "free" will?

I recommend I am That, a book collecting talks with Nisargadatta Maharaj. If you're lucky, it'll blow your mind.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a deep rabbit hole, for further confusion I proffer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice)

</comment><comment><USER11> There is no contradiction between being causal and non-deterministic. QM is both, for example.

So your argument fails at that point. Not that that helps much in determining whether or not we have free will, just that this isn't a good argument against it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why do you care about free will? If you are a healthy human being, you are capable of making decisions based on the knowledge you have and your ability to think. Why does free will matter in this case? Or am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a fun topic of conversation that opens up other cans of worms involving religion, justice, heroism, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What do you mean by free will?

</comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR: Check your presuppositions.

> I'm supposing that all events are the result of a train of consequences > (determinism) or are completely random (quantum stuff). Is this correct?

In "He Is There And He Is Not Silent", Francis Schaeffer points out that, if everything had an impersonal beginning, then free will is impossible. A bunch of other stuff is impossible, too: love, morals, meaning, real beauty. Everything we think of as making us human is dead. All we are is deterministic machines made out of atoms, with quantum uncertainty injecting some noise at the lower layers. We're peers to robots. This is the consequence of your supposition in your second paragraph.

But, Schaeffer points out, there is another possible starting point - <USER2> everything we see had a _personal_ beginning, that is, God. In that case, our aspiriations to being real persons rather than just machines are in line with what has always been - true personality. And if that is so, then your second paragraph is an incorrect supposition.

Most everyone has a materialistic starting point as such a deeply-buried presupposition that they never question it. But the logical consequences destroy our humanity.

It's kind of like this: Have you ever put a T-shirt on backward? It looks like it should work, and it covers everything that it should cover, but it just doesn't fit. And you try to wiggle it around so that it fits better, but no matter how you wiggle, it never fits right. In the same way, the materialist presupposition looks like it explains everything. But who it says we humans are doesn't fit us. It's untrue to our experience of living as human beings.

I assert that this isn't just a cruel joke played on us by an unfeeling universe. I assert that this is evidence that the materialist presupposition is in fact incorrect. It doesn't explain who we are as human beings. It doesn't explain how we can have real personality.</comment>


Show HN: Subtitles for theatre - <AUTHOR> http://subtitlesfortheatre.com/v2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, "surtitles" are subtitles shown in theatre shows and opera. Its key goal is to increase accessibility of performances, mainly for foreign speakers and visitors with reduced hearing. This app not only resolves the pain of creating and translating surtitles, but also allows screen subtitles (also) into mobile devices. Screening to projection can be adjusted in multiple different ways (colors, fonts, positions, ...).

Main competitive solution now is PowerPoint.

I'd be glad for your suggestions and recommendations. Thanks! ;]</comment>


GitHub Is Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.githubstatus.com/ <comment><USER2> PSA: I just received a github phishing request that was not detected by Gmail. I almost fell for it.

Phishing email looks like a "review your suspicious activity" alert, but the alert is the suspicious activity.

[https://imgur.com/a/zdtWmuN](https://imgur.com/a/zdtWmuN)

<comment><USER3> Did the odd capitalization, "April 01th", and unrelated sending address not tip you off?

<comment><USER4> Yeah I gotta agree with you. How is this any different from the other 10s of thousands of variations of phishing attempts?

If it's not signed and it's not from github.com or a registered subdomain, or if the URL of the action isn't _explicitly_ github.com... it's not legit. It doesn't matter if it slipped through GMail's filter or not...

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to shame people for falling for phishing. I fell for a convincing Steam phish once when I was a young teenager after a friend's account was compromised and messaged me with a link to a perfect clone of the login page and a similar domain.

But as far as phishes go, this one just seems not too convincing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apparently the earlier thread about Microsoft's cloud stability was a bit prescient.

<comment><USER6> Has GitHub moved their infrastructure to Azure? Last I recall they ran mostly on their own servers.

<comment><USER7> I'd imagine the higher volume due to remote work (e.g. people collaborating more on issues and such who may have communicated in person previously) is also a contributing factor.

From the sound of their earlier 'not postmortem but we'll do one soon', it sounded like they currently have a database tier that's creaking at its foundations, and I'd guess any time there's extra strain or someone pushes a fix to the GitHub codebase that adds a tiny bit of unoptimized code, it strains it past the limit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even our static assets from raw.githubusercontent.com are throwing 500s. Whatever it is, it sounds like a pretty widespread failure...

<comment><USER9> Yeah, can confirm. I'm working on some visualizations for covid-19 where I pull data from raw.githubusercontent.com and I'm getting 500s.

<comment><USER10> There are some CDNs in front of rawgit like jsDelivr that may work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If only there was some kind of distributed version control system. /s

<comment><USER12> Of course, there is. You just need to host it. Self-hosted GitLab mirrors work great when GitHub is down.

[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/repositor...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/repository_mirroring.html#pulling- from-a-remote-repository-starter)

<comment><USER13> You can just sync with someone else's repo by specifying it on the command line. Nothing to install, no script, nothing. It's built into git and is right there in the single line summary of the man pages for git-fetch, git-pull etc: they all take a repository argument.

<comment><USER14> Managing keys for all the contributors quickly gets to be a chore.

Identity management is what Github really is all about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't see the point for major open-source projects or even company projects to depend on a third-party provider for git services in the cloud that is not on-premise. It's fine if the source code is self-hosted or on premise and the mirror is hosted on some cloud VCS like Github, but not the other-way round, which for the latter you risk getting problems like this.

The case for self-hosting a VCS server for serious projects is made once again.

<comment><USER16> Unless you have the (ops) capacity to host it yourself reliably, chances are GitHub will be up more than your self-hosted solution.

As I'm typing this, I'm waiting for GitHub to recover so I can deploy an update to a rather important project for a big client. However, I'm happy it's _their_ engineers to be scrambling to fix their git hosting, instead of _me_ context switching from my work and rushing to duct-tape piece of plumbing I really don't care to think about.

<comment><USER17> > Unless you have the (ops) capacity to host it yourself reliably, chances are > GitHub will be up more than your self-hosted solution.

For an individual it's absolutely trivial to self-host git over ssh more reliably than github.

It just costs a bit of money.

<comment><USER18> > self-host git over ssh more reliably than github.

Host where? That host may be down. If it's local, then you run into other problems trying to access it remotely.

Still, I find github to be down quite a lot lately which is concerning. It doesn't stop me from working, I just can't review PRs and get changes.. but I would be more worried if I were using github actions stopping me from releasing a hotfix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We use a self-hosted GitLab ourselves and I can honestly say we have more up time than GitHub.

But 9/10 every project we use is on GitHub and our work is stalled. Centralization will be our downfall :(

<comment><USER12> You may be able to mirror those to your GitLab and then do all your work from the mirror.

[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/repositor...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/repository_mirroring.html#pulling- from-a-remote-repository-starter)

Congrats on the self-hosted uptime :)

<comment><USER19> The nature of our product is to follow 100s of projects. And most of the interesting stuff is actually not in the code but in the issue tracker, release notes etc (for us).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> UTC for status updates?? Not PST/PDT??

Amazing!

</comment><comment><USER21> Yep. git push/pull are throwing permission denied errors. I thought I'd check ssh itself.

ssh -T firstname.lastname@example.com throws the same permission denied error.

</comment><comment><USER22> That's great. 2 minutes before it went down a pipeline workflow ran in Heroku deploying a bug to my app. Now I can't deploy the hotfix since it depends on Github and I'm not able to revert to the last successful build on the Heroku interface.

Any ideas?

<comment><USER23> How about git push heroku master from local branch?

<comment><USER22> Ho! I just forgot about it. Thanks a lot. It's running ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I didn't realize until today that [https://www.npmjs.com/package/geckodriver](https://www.npmjs.com/package/geckodriver) downloads from Github.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yep, hitting Nginx 504s when accessing my (and others') repositories.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was building a github app and was scratching my head about where I messed up. The website and front end were loading but github isn't sending webhooks.

<comment><USER27> I was deploying code to production as it died!

<comment><USER28> Well that is just the worst luck. Condolences as you revert locally?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow, it's totally dead, not even a read-only view.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well, I guess I'm done working for the day.

</comment><comment><USER31> Today I have a deadline. It heats up the emotions.

Paulo Coelho: "And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

Murphy: [GitHub is down]

[https://twitter.com/QuantumGameIO/status/1245818849246748674](https://twitter.com/QuantumGameIO/status/1245818849246748674)

</comment><comment> awinter-py have never seen the github 500 screen before! the 404 screen is delightful, this one is as well

silver linings

<comment><USER25> I'm not even getting the pretty errors :) Just the generic nginx 504 timeout.

<comment><USER32> I was trying to authorize a third-party client and got an angry pink unicorn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Lol. Couldn't work on github, I thought it was just a slow connection so checked HN instead to see whether the page loads - and now I guess it wasn't just an issue on my end :D

</comment><comment><USER34> Okay... so, when is Amazon launching their GitHub alternative?

<comment><USER35> There's the AWS CodeCommit service but it's for private repositories only

[https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/](https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wrote some open source code to automatically mirror all my commits to Keybase. </shameless plug>

I think read replica mirrors are good practice for fault-tolerant systems

<comment><USER37> link?

<comment><USER38> it's probably on github

<comment><USER39> Hopefully does not depend on github webhooks for replication!

<comment><USER36> It does, but it would've mirrored your latest commit before it went down.

Anyway, here's how you connect Keybase to GitHub:

[https://blog.codefor.cash/2019/08/30/free-automatic- github-b...](https://blog.codefor.cash/2019/08/30/free-automatic-github- backups-with-keybase/)

[https://github.com/codeforcash/github-to-keybase- mirror](https://github.com/codeforcash/github-to-keybase-mirror)

Note: this was a v1, and I'm sure there are more resilient ways to do this. Critical feedback strongly encouraged (ideally along with suggestions).

<comment><USER39> Hooks ([https://git-scm.com/docs/githooks](https://git-scm.com/docs/githooks)) together with templates ([https://coderwall.com/p/jp7d5q/create-a-global-git- commit-ho...](https://coderwall.com/p/jp7d5q/create-a-global-git-commit-hook)) sound like a good alternative.

Edit: I can see where your solution has an advantage. When one accepts contributions, all of that can be automated with web hooks via github. Still, having to run lambda/similar for this is a bit heavy weight.

Edit 2: Considering that for a release, I would opt in for release from a tag or explicit commit, that would be a non issue. Pull when needed, for redundancy, use another, self hosted bare repo. Push there in case of github down.

<comment><USER36> I'm also thinking that it would be easier to use git-hooks to push to AWS CodeCommit (in a random region that GitHub is unlikely to use) paired with CloudWatch events to invoke service backup to Keybase

<comment><USER36> Of course, ideally it would be a Terraform (or similar open source stack) script so it's not dependent on AWS as a vendor... I have experienced the real pains of vendor lock-in, even with cross-region there is opportunity to improve robustness

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Didn't check the status page but I figured once I had my before bedtime peak at the trending repos.

</comment><comment><USER41> Their status page is quite pretty, does anyone know of an open-source option that looks similar?

</comment><comment><USER42> The BSOD for a new generation...

</comment><comment><USER43> Just managed to push something, but the web interface is still down.

EDIT: (21:00 UTC ) Just got in :D

</comment><comment><USER44> It's OK to rely on Github clones for dependencies, they said.

Mind your own codes, they said.

</comment><comment><USER13> I first thought I was having network saturation problems due to my gf's kids playing games instead of doing their school online. I then checked some other sites and found they were fine but my first assumption was _not_ that GitHub itself was having problems.

</comment><comment> ur-whale GitHub or how to re-centralize what was properly decentralized. Sad.

</comment><comment><USER45> Seems to be back up now.

<comment><USER46> Still down for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> ...its back now for me.

</comment><comment><USER37> Yeah navigation is slow or timing out on my repos.

</comment><comment><USER48> I too went straight to HN upon realizing this

</comment><comment><USER49> Working now

</comment><comment><USER50> It's working again.

</comment><comment><USER51> ahh, angry pink unicorns.

Reminds me of the old Twitter failwhale

</comment><comment><USER24> Hehe, somebody modified the XKCD "Compiling" comic.

[https://twitter.com/PonteIneptique/status/783190337602846720](https://twitter.com/PonteIneptique/status/783190337602846720)</comment>


Tim Bray on the iPad: Memory Matters - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/04/05/Memory-Matters

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know why apple only included 256MB memory?

The lack of ram means that in-memory cache for the browser is limited (to zero?), which limits performance.

The cost of ram seems so small (a few dollars per GB in bulk) to a software developer - is the cost energy consumption or ???

<comment><USER3> It's not RAM in the form of SIMMs or DIMMs, though, it's RAM embedded into the chip (like everything else; the A4 is a System-on-a-Chip), meaning that it's basically an L3 cache: it suffers from heat dissipation and placement issues just like the L1 and L2 caches do.

The real question is whether Apple has designed the A4 with an external memory bus that's currently not being put to use, and which would allow for future expansion in the "iPad 4G·S" or somesuch equivalent. It would actually be a very clever game-theoretic strategy to constrain the memory at first.

If Apple had instead released this first iPad _without_ multitasking but _with_ 2GB of RAM (or even more; it could certainly all fit in the case, and RAM doesn't really impact battery life) developers would be sloppy and use as much of it as they wanted, disallowing their apps from ever being multitasked in the future.

However, constraining memory to 256MB at first forces developers to write apps that only use that much. Later, Apple can release the 2GB model, and it would suddenly be possible to multitask 8 or more of the 256MB-model apps at once. (Of course, also making provisions for new "fat" 2GB apps.)

<comment><USER4> "A4 with an external memory bus"

I'm really completely out of my depth here, but if that were the case, I wonder if you could mostly eliminate the Flash memory, except for the OS. Would there be cost or performance advantages in doing so? I mean, it would suck to lose 64GB worth of stuff if the battery ever died, but the battery's locked in there, and you could put in some kind of backup button-battery... maybe that added complexity would negate any cost or performance advantages.

<comment><USER5> Besides being cheaper, flash memory is significantly more compact.

<comment><USER4> Oh... yeah, I guess that's right. I'm still thinking in terms of the old Palm devices that used RAM rather than flash. But that was a different time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Bitcoin alt. witho POW and open to every gov's unilateral action posible? - <AUTHOR> I have difficult or impossible technical requirements and I would like a genius and practical mathematician and programmer to suggest an approach.  You must understand my requirements and then come up with the closest workable alternative.
I have the following problems with bitcoin:
1) The proof of work paradigm wastes resources.  The proof of work is literally proof, that you have burned resources in some direct way.
2) It is lawless, not subject to seizure by any authority through any direct, programmed interface.
I would like to address these issues. Requirements:
1. I would like proposed version not to rely on proof of work, to stop wastage.
2, I would like every country to be allowed to change any account to which its users give their citizenship. I would like users to be able to specify their citizenships when starting.
e.g. U.S. citizen specifies he or she is subject to U.S. seizure and oversight; dual citizen of the U.S> and Canada would be able to specify these two countries, so that either the United States or Canada would be able to directly modify their account.
3.  (optional) I believe it would be better for account balances not to be public; it should be visible to the countries of citizenship.
4. The owner of one account should be allowed at their option to add identity information to the account which is visible only to their countries.
5. I believe that some countries are incompetent: after they fuck up and accidentally leak their private key, it must be possible to roll back all actions taken from the time of their fuckup.
Please propose an outline for a scheme that meets some of these mathematical requirements.  How can it be run?
I'd like to hear ingenuous mathematical proposals that meet the above requirements.  If you have no solution or are not ingenious enough, please do not respond with low-quality comments.  Thank you. <comment><USER2> I believe there's already a system like this, that uses Turing-complete rules described in natural language to regulate the behavior of a network of independent agents (both human and computer).

They're called "banks", regulated with "laws" and "lawyers".

But seriously, some of these requirements appear to make an implementation exceptionally challenging - in particular, if value is allowed to leave the system by transforming into other currencies or tangible items then #5 essentially _requires_ lawyers. #2 and #3 together also seem to imply that a state-level actor could create arbitrary balances in secret.

        I would like a genius and practical mathematician and programmer to suggest an approach.

Wouldn't we all. And for free on HN, too!

<comment><AUTHOR> I found your introduction exciting, until I realized you were only just joking about the real-world.

Well, regarding a state-level actor being able to create arbitrary balances in secret: I specify only forfeiture, not creation.

In essence each state to which someone checks their allegience should be allowed to remove (as punishment or following whatever rule of law process is in place there) whatever they want from any of their citizens' accounts.

This would at least allow some recourse against illegal activities. Yes, the involvement of the respective governments' legal systems is obviously a given.

The difference between this and banking is that banks don't operate a distributed monetary network anyone can join and transfer coins among without any fee: on the contrary, banking infrastructure is cumbersome.

The required scheme has the goal of allowing governments to intervene directly. Otherwise it would be like bitcion. Also the onerous proof of work blockchain work requirement is lifted.

However the mathematics and trade-offs to make this work are not obvious. Hence my Ask HN. Thanks for your response.</comment></comment>