Show HN: DevJoist, database versioning done right - <AUTHOR> http://devjoist.com/

<comment><USER3> I don't understand how this is an improvement over Rails' migrations or Python's South. Or, maybe, what are cases in which I would consider DJ over built-in migration and schema-management systems?

EDIT: ah, perhaps this is just for systems that don't have such native schema migration support (e.g. raw PHP apps)? Though I'm still not sure how comfortable I would be separating schema version from deployed code version.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the biggest value will be for platforms that don't already have built in migrations, but hope that eventually some of the tools will be a reason to use the tool instead of traditional migrations.

The grand vision is that you won't ever have to write migrations again. You'll just modify your database and DevJoist keeps track of everything. You switch branches and DevJoist knows to update your database environment accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So I'm kind of ignorant here, but why wouldn't you simply have your schemas stored in vcs and deploy out the upgrade scripts at upgrade time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the question and I don't think it's that your ignorant. It gets kind of confusing unless you've run into some of these problems in the real world. I'll do my best to try and explain the problems that I ran into, which pushed me to start working on this tool.

I think storing a version of your schema in VCS is a great idea and it solves part of the problem. If I need to set up a new dev environment I can just run the full schema and I'm good to go.

Ok so now I've got my new database set up and one of my teammates, Sally, makes a change. She writes a change script and maybe updates the base schema as well. This means that she has to keep track of the changes she's made all along the way (DevJoist does this for you).

But what if another teammate, Joe, also makes a change. Now I've got two change scripts to run, I'm not necessarily sure in what order, and my base schema has a potential conflict. DevJoist won't let you commit a change to the schema unless you've merged in the most recent revision of the schema - <USER2> gives you a really slick GUI for doing the merging. The merge tool lets you pick and choose which tables, columns, indexes, column properties etc. you want from each version, and then combines them together.

Kind of long winded - sorry, but does that answer your question at all?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it does. I'm not convinced that DevJoist's approach is really what I'd want to use, but it explains the problem statement well enough to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have any suggestions for how to solve this problem in a different way I'd love to hear them. I'm struggling with it myself, so if there's an easier way of doing it I'm very interested.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, from your problem statement, I would presume that the solution is to use a single branch in your VCS for your deployment, with strict controls on branching and merging, ensuring that a consistent upgrade path is presented to the DBMS at all times. I would _probably_ strive for a tool that would detect conflict and print a report, with the developers themselves managing the merging in the SCM.

Although I'm not a DB specialist, I have a profound distrust of GUI tools for this sort of thing; they've died and the DB schema work I was doing was entirely borked. This has happened multiple times across multiple tools. I kind of develop an allergy to certain styles of work in consequence. :-)

I know someone who does all his schema work _in_ the DB itself; there's no SCM versioning of the DDL. I don't understand how that's responsible software engineering. No one else can examine the versions, diffs aren't available, there's no record of what it really is, as opposed to the live-coding. (I do a lot of work in Lisp - I learned real quick that you really want files & source control instead of letting things all hang out in the REPL waiting for you to crash it. The database isn't too different in spirit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, how would I correlate a specific commit in Git to a version on DevJoist?

Until then I'll just use <https://github.com/thuss/standalone-migrations> with my non-Rails projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great question. Right now you could include the git version in the comment of your DevJoist commit. In the future we plan to have much better integration with git/GitHub and other commonly used developer services like Heroku. A part of that will be opening up an API so that you can integrate DevJoist into your workflow however you like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you have an API I could wire into?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at the moment, but it's high up on the to-do list along with:

Automatic synching of changes with your databases so that when you save a new version, your database environment is automatically updated.

Git-style branching.

Versioning of your data (if you're storing any metadata in your db).</comment></comment>


Skype Screen Sharing Is A Huge (And Free) Productivity Tool - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/15/skype-screen-sharing/ <comment><USER2> A more recent skype feature worth an upgrade is group video calling: <http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/05/group_video_calling.html>

<comment><USER3> I am looking forward to the time when Skype has cross-platform group video and screen sharing. I don't use gotomeeting nearly as much for one-on-one screen sharing, but need to bring it out for mutli-party screen share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use this daily with my dev team. It's great because skype is cross-platform, easily traverses firewalls/NAT, and combines the screen sharing with voice chat.

Any competing tool (or set of tools) would have to accomplish those same goals.

Also, I tend to use skype (or email) whenever I have to paste a large block of text (like a stack trace), since Yahoo and AIM both avoid sending messages if they're too long.

<comment><USER5> I use Gists for pasting (<http://gist.github.com>). It's really nice. You can have private gists, which are reasonably secure. You can have multiple files. You get syntax highlighting. And if you paste some code and then want to build upon it, you can edit it either through the web interface or by cloning the repository, working with your favorite text editor, and then pushing your changes.

<comment><USER6> I've been all over using tmux (<http://tmux.sf.net>) for remote pairing basically all day long. It's like a reincarnation of GNU Screen that shows internal cohesion and makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If your internet connection is too slow and skype/ichat screen sharing is laggy, I recommend ssh+screen+vim/emacs

</comment><comment><USER8> Not sure if it is available for Linux yet. One can try yuuguu, but it's only free for up to 100 minutes/month: <http://www.yuuguu.com/features/skype- integration>

<comment><USER9> It's available and works perfectly well.

<comment><USER10> I used to have issues getting it to run in Ubuntu, but as of 10.04 it works right out of the box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Skype and a cell phone (with Skype App) are all you need. In many ways, Skype is the killer app of the 21-st century.

<comment><USER4> That actually brings up a good point. When I was using my iPhone for skype calls, I'd have to first figure out if it was going to be a screen sharing call, in which case I'd use my computer instead. It'd certainly be nice (though probably lots of technicalities to figure out) to link a computer into an existing mobile skype call for screen sharing.

<comment><USER5> That's a really good idea, and it doesn't seem like it should be _that_ difficult.

The way it should work is that when you log into Skype on your computer and you have an active call it says something like "you have a call going on another device, would you like to join it on this computer?" and then you could screenshare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been giving demo's of my company's beta over skype for a few weeks... it's so simple. Everyone has it and I can tailor each demo to each person and they can actually see it working live, ask questions, etc. It's wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would prefer such a thing as an XMPP extension.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is it remote desktop too? Can you take control of the users computer as well?

<comment><USER3> No remote control (yet). Remote control + group would almost eliminate the need for GotoMeeting or WebEx for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anybody know how this compares to AIM screen sharing with audio?

<comment><USER4> Skype screen sharing is view-only (not sure if AIM lets you take control).

Skype uses a form of UDP hole punching to get through NAT/firewall issues and connect two users directly. Unless AIM has this as well (again, not sure), you'll probably have much better luck getting Skype screen sharing to connect.</comment></comment>


History of Guided Missiles [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://nptel.ac.in/courses/101108054/module1/lecture2.pdf <comment><USER2> Why are you doing this?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000879) : Guided Missiles [pdf] (drdo.gov.in)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000874) : Inertial Navigation for Guided Missile System [pdf] (jhuapl.edu)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000860) : Inertial Navigation System (wikipedia.org)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000857) : Missile Guidance (wikipedia.org)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000885) : History of Guided Missiles [pdf] (nptel.ac.in)

Is there some point you're trying to make? Why flood the front page, a scarce resource, with five things all on the same topic?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not trying to make any point.

This week I have taken up studying missile guidance and these were some websites from which I would be taking my notes from. Thought this might pique someone's interest from the HN brethren as well.

Am I breaking any of the HN guidelines here?

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) :

 _Please don 't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions._

Maybe five out of thirty isn't dominating, but it stood out to me. I would much rather have seen a neat blog post that shared your findings and had the references.

But my comment has been downvoted, I guess I'm in a minority, and it shows yet again how much I'm out-of-step with the HN "community".

I'll go away again.</comment></comment></comment>


PegaSwitch: Exploit Toolkit for Nintendo Switch - <AUTHOR> https://pegaswitch.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm really interested in some technical tidbits :)

Quickly looking over the code I think you use a slightly different way to achieve the r/w than qwerty - you don't misalign a pointer, correct? Can you give a short description how you do it?

I wondered how to not crash the switch when done, and you seem to simply set everything to 0 `this.bufs[i] = 0;` and that solves that issue. Could you say a few words on why that is the case?

Any information yet you want to share about the execution environment? Is there some kind of sandbox? Anything interesting you can already access, or surprisingly not access?

Edit: One more question. Did you guys get to play any BotW yet? :D

I really love the overengineering of this toolkit <3

<comment><USER3> There are around 30 or so people contributing ideas and what have you to the project, or wherever we can. Those listed on the actual site are just people who committed code to the repo. A lot of us play BotW though :p.

<comment><USER4> Slightly random question, how did the group form? Have you been working together on previous consoles?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, this one grew totally organically. I used to do console hacking many years ago, and decided I wanted to get back into it with the Switch. People just started joining up, and bringing in trusted folks with them. A comment I made on HN a month ago or so really accelerated this.

<comment><USER5> Are you guys related to /r/switchhacks on Reddit? I see it's private but I still check every day or two hoping there'll be a big announcement :)

<comment><AUTHOR> IIRC, there are several folks from /r/switchhacks around our server. I imagine the subreddit will get big once someone drops an end-user exploit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Several of the developers of PegaSwitch are watching this thread. If you have any questions, shoot!

<comment><USER6> That was amazingly quick. The Switch hasn't been out that long. Kudos!

I understand that console hackers are notoriously secretive, but what are your plan(s) in the short and long term? Fostering the eventual homebrew community? Improving upon the OS? etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's insane how much progress we made in a short time. I got the core of the exploit working within 36 hours of release, and then everyone's been working super hard to make it useful and awesome. I couldn't be more proud of this team!

In terms of our plans, it's pretty simple: learn more about the system, escalate privileges where we can, and eventually be able to run our own code.

Personally, I really want Linux running. With the things we know now, we'll almost certainly have Linux as soon as the kernel is under our control.

<comment> crooked-v It would be an amazing hardware platform to get some classic PC games running on (with aid of DOSBox, etc). Commander Keen and the original Doom both come to mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree! The hardware is so close to Tegra dev boards that if/when we break the Switch kernel, we'll likely have full-blown Linux (or Android) in no time at all. I can't wait to be able to play SNES, PC, and more on this.

<comment><USER7> While a custom OS and home-brew will be great and increase overall hardware sales, I really hope the Switch doesn't develop a reputation for vulnerability to piracy and turn away third-party game developers so soon..

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, very much. What I'm hoping for (and currently have no reason to think otherwise) is that they're using TrustZone to handle all the DRM, which will make piracy a huge, huge amount of work. It may also prevent us from totally owning the console, but we'll see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've seen "it's the 3DS OS, but maybe rewritten" several times now.

I'm interested to learn more about this. Not for any practical use (well, maybe hacked Pokémon), but just to understand the choice. I naively figured this would be locked-down Android, but it's neat to see that it's FreeBSD + something.

<comment><USER9> Let me assure you, hacked Pokémon is an extremely practical use.

<comment><USER10> This may be a joke, but it actually can be very useful. Save backups, sharing cartridges/games among family members, etc.

My 6-year-old son accidentally threw away his event Munchlax in Pokemon Sun, which led me down the path of installing a full custom firmware on my 3DS and using PokeHex to restore the event card and get Munchlax back. He went from depressed to ecstatic. Now we can both have saves on our Pokemon games and he loves to show me how to get past gyms and other stuff. Great bonding experience.

A little bit further down this path, it's been amazing to be able to play classics like Super Mario Sunshine with real GameCube controllers and updated 4K textures via Dolphin. It looks like a brand new game, and again, my son loves hearing about how I played through it 15 years ago on the original GameCube. We just went on a short trip and we were able to play Super Smash Brothers Brawl on my laptop during the flight.

These experiences really underscore the power and importance of hacking communities. I'd love to see modifications to the legal structures to keep emulation, hacking, and modding communities out of the legal grey area and allow them to more fully flesh out their products. Their work is a _vastly_ understated boon to our cultural heritage, and it allows it to be enjoyed and improved for generations. These people are heroes. The way we treat them is a shame.

<comment><USER11> The emulation and homebrew scene is at a crossroads now. cemu [1] is on track to earn 250k through Patreon (h/t byuu), which is a good way to get stomped on by Nintendo legal.

Open source is critical for the success of projects like Dolphin, but what do you think the emulator developers of the future are going to do when they see the cash they can earn by being secretive?

[1]: cemu.info

<comment><USER10> I just started playing with CEMU, very exciting piece of software.

I'm looking forward to a world where systems have workable emulators within several months of release, not several years. That will only bring the legal issues into more stark relief. So few of us realize that our intellectual property regime is holding back a lot of major accessibility and practicality improvements.

We need to fix it. Amazing projects like CEMU should not have to live in fear that someone is going to squash them and cause a lot of real harm just to protect someone else's bottom line.

<comment><USER4> I think emulators are great, but I'm certainly not excited by for-profit(?) proprietary emulators like CEMU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really? Already? Is this for the purposes of alerting Nintendo to vulnerabilities or is it just part of a quest to run "homebrew and definitely not pirated ohh no not at all" games on the Switch?

<comment><AUTHOR> The vulnerability used is a very well-known one in WebKit from last year. Additionally, news articles about this vulnerability being present were already out there, so we saw no harm in releasing this.

I can't speak for others, but I have no intention of enabling piracy in any way; I just want Linux on it. Others will most likely abuse this for piracy at some point, which I personally find sad, but I don't control others.

<comment><USER13> The mildly unfortunate part is that you disclose the details of the exploit which only serves to allow Nintendo to patch it faster, without them having to invest the time to reverse engineer it themselves. Odds are this method of rooting won't survive the Switch's first patch release, and someone else will have to find a new loophole. If you had kept the exploit private, we may have gotten away with 2-3 patches' worth of time.

Whether the details are published by the developers of the exploit themselves or by a 3rd party, it's frustrating to see the hubris of proving one's ability to explain the exploit winning out over actually helping the users hold onto the ability to root for as long as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you may be misunderstanding this -- greatly. The details of the exploit (that is, the part that Nintendo cares about -- the vulnerability) have been public since May of last year. The fact that the Switch is vulnerable to it (and it's being actively exploited by people) has been known by the public for at least two days. We decided to release this once the vulnerability was already going to be dead, not to accelerate its demise.

Additionally, this isn't a root, nor is it even close. This is the first stepping stone to be used by researchers to get deeper into the Switch and find new bugs. In no way will this impede the homebrew community; it will only serve to empower it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is the worlds hardest language? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108609

<comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009137>

I think this is another case that my suggested duplication detector would have found:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215></comment>


Inbenta, blamed for Ticketmaster breach, admits it was hacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/inbenta-blamed-for-ticketmaster-breach-says-other-sites-not-affected/ <comment><AUTHOR> Basically it looks as though the Ticketmaster site was accessing dependencies for the Inbenta componenet (customer service chatbox) on a third-party site (Inbenta) which was then hacked. Presumably then the hacked Inbenta component was slurping the payment details from elsewhere on the page.

There are so many links in this chain of wrongness its hard to know where to begin.

Don't run code from a third-party site where you're processing sensitive information.

Even better, don't use silly chatbots.</comment>


Wikileaks Expenses: 2011 and 2012 (pdf) - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/2012/10/WikiLeaks-Expenses-2012-2011.pdf

<comment><USER2> Maybe a stupid question, but how do they spend hugely more than they take in both years? Where's the extra money come from?

<comment><USER3> I think the income listed is only for donations made to Wikileaks via the Wau Holland Foundation in Germany, while Wikileaks itself may also receive money from other sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So we now have a Wikileaks for Wikileaks? Inception!

<comment><USER5> Cryptome has been around forever. Some of their stuff is a bit "rantish" but overall I find them quite a reliable source.

<comment><USER4> Well, yea I have seen and read Cryptome earlier but it made me think about Wikileaks for Wikileaks. I'm sure a few governments would be interested to support the idea behind doors. :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Distance to Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/10/24/distance-to-mars/ <comment><USER2> If you go a bit further, you can build surprisingly interesting curves from this math. Try calculating Mars' apparent motion, as observed on earth (i.e., projecting the difference of their positions onto a unit sphere). Its path is a loopy [0] curve, and looks like this:

[https://imgur.com/a/I43kG](https://imgur.com/a/I43kG)

Note that you don't need to implement elliptical orbits to see this effect -- circular inclined orbits can exhibit it.

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

<comment><USER3> Brian Cox did a simple demonstration of why this was using some stones (link below). It makes a nice bit of sense but it must have messed with early astronomers heads when it was first observed

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbynKfNfHk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbynKfNfHk4)

<comment><USER4> It certainly did mess with early astronomers. They were also hindered by their supposition that orbits are circles:

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AddingEpicycles](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AddingEpicycles)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool! This could be taken a step further, adding in the oscillation of the moons rotation for slingshot and accounting for the travel time between earth- moon-mars to come up with a good list of launch dates. I'm sure there are other factors, I'm not a rocket scientist.

</comment><comment><USER6> From Wiki[1] the aphelion and perihelion for Mars are 1.381 and 1.666 so I think assuming that Mars orbit is circular is just wrong. The eccentricity is 9%. The inclination of Mar's orbit is also 1.8 degrees which makes a difference as well.

Wiki also lists a closest approach to Earth of 0.372 AU and a furthest distance of 2.675. The graphs on that link do not come close to those figures. They are off by 25%.

Basically I do not understand why someone would take an orbital problem, simplify all the interesting bits out of it and then put it up on a blog. Maybe he was more interested in the maths than the physics.

(1) - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_Mars#Table_of_orbital...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_Mars#Table_of_orbital_parameters)

<comment><USER7> The results in the blog post wouldn't do to launch a probe, but they do give you a good idea of how the distance varies over time. It's a little surprising that such a simple calculation works as well as it does. More accurate calculations would be interesting, much more complicated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This computes the exact distances of Earth to any planet in the solar system

apt-get install aa [https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/astronomical- almanac](https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/astronomical-almanac)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! The current distance is 2.24AU and it's decreasing (2.192 AU in one week).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whoa! I didn't know of the Python syntax for complex numbers (1j). I was confusing the number 1 with lower case l and wondering where the "lj" symbol is coming from. Apparently you also need to use exp() from scipy, Python's standard math.exp() can't handle complex numbers (at least in python2).

The model in the blog post was obviously a simplified model. It assumes circular and coplanar trajectories, both of which are good approximations for back-of-a-napkin calculations such as this one but not super accurate for real life analysis.

In the hopes that there are some programmers interested in astrodynamics or celestial mechanics, I'll shamelessly take this opportunity to promote a related programming project of mine: [https://github.com/rikusalminen/twobody](https://github.com/rikusalminen/twobody)

It's a simple C library that solves some fundamental problems in celestial mechanics, including state of the art solvers for time of flight (ie. solving Kepler's equation using the Laguerre-Conway method) and can work in 3D and with elliptic (and hyperbolic and parabolic) trajectories. It may seem a bit cryptic (I wish I had the time to write docs), but if you're familiar with the field, you should be able to understand most of it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Note: 1AU = 149597870700m. It takes _light_ around 8m20s to travel that distance.

<comment><AUTHOR> 500 seconds is a sightly easier way to remember the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So earth and mars are circling the sun in the same direction, anticlockwise.

Earth has a shorter orbit and is also going nearly 25% faster.

If earth's at 12 o'clock, where is mars and what direction (N,S,E,W etc) do we aim a rocket for the shortest journey?

<comment><USER9> The most efficient way to get to Mars is nicely explained in Chapter 21 of "From Stargazers to Starships": [http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Smars1.htm](http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Smars1.htm)

You are asking for the "shortest journey" however. Well, the shortest journey would be to accelerate to the speed of light when they are pretty much closest to each other and arrive a couple of minutes later. Not very feasible as of 2015.

<comment><USER12> very helpful link thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> so does NASA time it's launches to when it get's to 0.5 AU? you'd think we'd have expeditions to mars every 2 years by now.

<comment><USER14> Its never a direct ballistic route - its a dance of orbital slingshots. You launch from here, so when you get over there, that's where Mars is. And sometimes you do a carom off Venus or whatever, to add some energy that you couldn't afford to get by rocket fuel.

So no, the fact that Mars is sometimes very close to the Earth is not really helpful. What'd be helpful is, if the max distance were not so great. But we're stuck with what nature gave us.

It can help to try Kerbal Space Program, to get a feel for orbital mechanics. In fact, it may be the best way to get that feel.

<comment><USER15> Slingshots have never been used for Earth-Mars launches where Mars is the final destination. I am having trouble finding a reference as to whether a Venus flyby could even reduce the energy budget for a Mars mission, but in practice no one has ever decided to do that.

<comment><USER14> Earth-Venus-Jupiter has been proposed; I assumed that Earth-Venus-Mars would have some benefit. I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd love a section of my i3 statusbar showing the current distance in light seconds, at all times.

I'm surprised this isn't a thing yet.

<comment><USER9> Use "aa" from the astronomical-almanac package to calculate the value, then feed it into i3status.

Here's the current distance to Mars in AU:

      date  +"%Y%n%m%n%d%n%H%n%M%n%S%n1%n1%n4" |\
      aa|\
      sed -n '/distance/s/.*\([0-9]\.[0-9]* au\).*/\1/p'

And here it is in light minutes (useful for Skype!)

      date  +"%Y%n%m%n%d%n%H%n%M%n%S%n1%n1%n4" |\
      aa |\
      sed -n '/light time/s/,.*//p'

<comment><USER16> Much appreciated. Didn't know about aa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nasa has an open source tool for this that handles light time. [http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html](http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html)

Sadly, language options are c, FORTRAN, or poorly maintained MATLAB.

<comment><USER18> > Sadly, language options are c, FORTRAN, or poorly maintained MATLAB.

It's sad that that makes you sad.</comment></comment>


Why young entrepreneurs should skip university - <AUTHOR> http://postdesk.com/blog/young-entrepreneurs-university-youth-investment-fund

<comment><USER2> I get what you're trying to say, and in addition to the CEO's you have mentioned, there are actually numerous other examples. (e.g. Jerry Yang, Michael Dell, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben and Jerry's)

However, there is a huge "BUT" in the statement of suggesting entrepreneurs shouldn't go to college - and that is entrepreneurs SHOULD go to college. Let me explain:

While I wholeheartedly believe ambitious, talented, and opportunistic entrepreneurs don't necessarily need to finish college and get a degree to be successful, I do believe they need to be smart enough to get into a good university to begin with so they can meet the right people and find co- founders.

Even though I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb, almost none of my high school classmates ended up being entrepreneurs or tech entrepreneurs. Had I ventured out on my own without the college experience, I would most likely still be trying to create my first successful venture at the age of 40.

For many of the entrepreneurs you listed, they found their opportunity and market while in college. If the schools had not asked the right questions or if they had not had the opportunity to be in an environment where they observed a need, many would have never founded their dorm room start ups.

tl;dr: get into a great college, even if you don't plan on graduating.</comment>


Ask HN: How low is too low for a Glassdoor review? - <AUTHOR> When accepting or considering an offer, what is the lowest Glassdoor review that you think is acceptable.
I've gotten an offer from a healthcare company who has a rating of 2.0 and that is scaring me.
Every previous company I worked for was in tech and had a rating of 4.0 or better <comment><USER2> I would look at the substance, not the rating, and see how it meshes with their own perception of them. Bear in mind a lot of companies are going to see Glassdoor reviews posted by angry ex employees most of all. How many people stop to post positive reviews of former employers there? And I suspect a lot of tech companies game the system a bit, have a lot of current employees placing reviews, etc.

But ideally if you've met some people there and have a feel for the company, you're going to have some impression or gut feeling if those reviews are right or not. Trust that feeling.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good question and I'm curious to see the HN community's responses.

I would first check to confirm that the rating is statistically significant and sound. Do both companies you are comparing collect ratings from active team members? Are the ratings for the healthcare company from disgruntled employees that left?

I would also pose that question to the healtcare company and the team that you spoke to during the interview process. I would ask the questions like these:

\- Is the team aware of the issues?

\- What steps are being taken?

\- What can I as a new employee do to make things better?</comment>


NUID – An entropy friendly and highly performant unique identifier generator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nats-io/nuid <comment><USER2> There is no such thing as "entropy draining".

If it's higher-performance than other UUID generators, fine, that's a win. But it's not doing anything useful for the system as a whole by sparing the "entropy pool".

<comment><USER3> I disagree, either the entropy is drained and the randomness of what the pool returns (based on OS) is compromised or you get stalled waiting for more of it and decrease performance of the generator.

[https://www.google.com/webhp?q=draining+entropy+pool](https://www.google.com/webhp?q=draining+entropy+pool)

<comment><USER4> In the immortal words of Timecube: "You have been educated stupid".

Fortunately, salvation is readily at hand: [http://www.2uo.de/myths-about- urandom/](http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/)

<comment><USER3> I think entropy, in however you measure it, does influence something like a UUID generator differently than the cryptographic algorithms. What you are trying to achieve, or more importantly the condition you are trying to avoid, is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote Yet Another UUID [1] for my own purposes recently as well. Mine's based on Firebase's style UIDs [2] -- they sort roughly chronologically, because operationally, I find that irritates me less. Arbitrary choice? Entirely. Regrets? None. Do I recommend it for use? Also not at all. Unless you feel like it. It's fine. I guess.

I've kind of given up on there being any purpose to a One True Spec for UUIDs. Count how many bits of entropy you want. Shove some CSPRNG into it. Call it a day.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

(This a fine implementation, fwiw. I only mean to share my honest question as to whether there's any real utility to UUIDs-as-a-library.)

[1] [https://github.com/polydawn/repeatr/blob/dd41ca72421a173b5aa...](https://github.com/polydawn/repeatr/blob/dd41ca72421a173b5aa14580f5d7df48df1548d0/lib/guid/guid.go) [2] [https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-02-11-firebase-unique- ide...](https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-02-11-firebase-unique- identifiers.html)

<comment><USER3> I agree, was simply sharing because it was a need we had, which might be a need someone else had as well. Anyone can feel free to use it or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > NUID needs to be very fast to generate and be truly unique, all while being > entropy pool friendly. NUID uses 12 bytes of crypto generated data (entropy > draining), and 10 bytes of pseudo-random sequential data that increments > with a pseudo-random increment.

> Total length of a NUID string is 22 bytes of base 36 ascii text, so 36^22 or > 17324272922341479351919144385642496 possibilities.

Isn't 22 bytes = 176 bits?

UUID = 128 bit

Storage performance is more than per-ns on a CPU core, imo.

<comment><USER7> UUIDs are 120 Bit or less. Depending on the Version you use. But you lose 8 bit on any version because 1 byte is used to decode the UUID version.

<comment><USER6> Yes. 128bit is the worst case for UUIDs, I was trying to avoid the claim I was being overly generous by using the smallest size I could get away with. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why on earth would you care about entropy for a UUID?

You can use the most basic PRNG to generate your 128 bits. There's your UUID.

Call me when you find a collision.

<comment><USER9> A basic PRNG might not be enough if you care about malicious collisions. There's plenty of cases of UUIDs being used in a context where a CSPRNG is preferable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the use case here over a UUID?

<comment><AUTHOR> Performance mainly, I think. Benchmarking against UUID v4 shows a ~175% speedup.

<comment><USER3> UUID V4 is ~900ns/op, NUID is ~60ns/op, so 15X speedup, or 1500%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Entropy draining" :(</comment>


Winn-Dixie ordered to update website for the blind - <AUTHOR> http://legalnewsline.com/stories/511127037-first-of-its-kind-trial-goes-plaintiff-s-way-winn-dixie-ordered-to-update-website-for-the-blind <comment><USER3> >"Therefore, Winn-Dixie has violated the ADA because the inaccessibility of its website has denied Gil the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages or accommodations that Winn-Dixie offers to its sighted customers."

Can't you argue this for literally any company of any kind?

This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers.

So now if I build a shitty website selling homemade candles I can get sued because I didn't use the right accessibility tags?

Also $37k to add features for the blind is ridiculously low.

<comment><USER4> _This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers._

Isn't this entirely the point, though?

We can make a reasonable assumption that if it were generally profitable to make services and venues accessible, then it would already be done. It's precisely _because_ it's not cost-efficient that regulation has to exist.

That assumes, of course, that you accept the central conceit that it's a good idea to ensure that people with a variety of disabilities can access services and aren't generally shut out of mainstream society.

Quite aside from anything, WCAG is hardly onerous to comply with.

<comment><USER5> >WCAG is hardly onerous to comply with

This is pretty much the argument by which all legislation is passed. It will ultimately be the weight of all legislation in the end that will leave the internet in the hands of only large corporations and leave the people without a free internet.

You will also never get what was originally intended. Laws will be passed for regulation which will be turned over to a regulatory agency which will be lobbied by the most powerful corporation which will in turn implement rules for exclusively their benefit outside of the original intent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Chris Keroack, an employee of software testing company Equal Entry, estimated it would cost less than $37,000 for the company to update its site._

Great, now instead of a manger that has no clue on estimates, we get to deal with and outside testing firm.

<comment><USER7> I'm sure Keroack is jumping at the opportunity to sign a $37k firm-fixed contract which assumes all legal liability. /s

<comment><USER6> I'm sure that given the name of Keroack's firm, it's all about the expert testimony and not testing services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oddly enough the website for my very small side-business is probably compliant, if compatibility with screen reader software is the criterion.

I've told this story before: When I first learned about HTML in a magazine article, one of the promised benefits was that you could create specialized browsers that could use the tags to interpret a site in various ways. One of the possibilities mentioned in the article was a browser for the blind.

What I think has happened subsequently is that the Web quickly went from rather plain HTML, to being a general purpose programming language for rendering arbitrary content on a specific collection of browsers.

I'd be happy to switch my site back to plain HTML, like what I wrote in an evening when I first launched my business.

<comment><USER9> WCAG 2.0 AA would be difficult to comply with accidentally.

A fair amount is just common sense, but some parts require deliberate changes.

[https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for that. It's a big read, but I'll try to work my way through it. I actually care about this stuff -- supporting the blind is something that I should be trying to take care of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like the equivalent pre internet situation would be sueing a grocery store that has a Sunday newspaper circular for them not providing it also in braille.

<comment><USER11> sure, if the newspaper had ways for you to purchase stuff directly from the newspaper and maybe deals available only if you can read the newspaper.

<comment><USER12> Plenty of newspapers offer various coupons and discounts to readers. Many grocery stores also have flyers near the entrance offering small discounts to people who happen to grab one when they walk in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > ...Winn-Dixie's website is heavily integrated with the company's physical > store locations, making it subject to the ADA.

Heavily integrated?? GTFO.

10+ years of shopping at Winn-Dixie...until today, number of instances I've visited their website: precisely _zero_

<comment><USER13> I've never used their bathroom. And I've never used their handicap bathroom either. So do away with both, right? Just because _you_ haven't used it, is not proof of how little or how much the bathrooms or website are integrated with the physical store.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps _you_ should actually visit their website and observe that it's nothing like your typical ecommerce front.

The applicability of bathrooms, handicap stalls, parking ramps, etc. are predicated by the existence of B&M store fronts, which is their primary mode of consumer-facing business and drives the requirement of ADA compliance.

To the point of integration, I challenge you to point out _any_ mechanism that would prohibit me from completing an in-store transaction to the non-compliant disadvantage of the disabled without requiring a visit to their website.

Since proof is the exclusive domain of mathematics, I can merely _demonstrate with high certainty_ that 10+ years of shopping at Winn-Dixie--slightly biased as a tech-oriented customer with a professional engineering background--has yet to compel me otherwise.

<comment><USER13> > I challenge you to point out any mechanism that would prohibit me from > completing an in-store transaction to the non-compliant disadvantage of the > disabled without requiring a visit to their website.

You can get coupons on their website. As a blind person, I would need to take extra steps in order to get those coupons.

You can refill prescriptions online and save time, rather than waiting in the store.

There you go. Time to stop moaning and get busy and start making the website ADA compliant.

> has yet to compel me otherwise.

Again, I've never used their handicap bathroom. Or any of their bathrooms. You having not used it is a very weak argument. Apparently it wouldn't even stand up in a court of law.

<comment><USER7> You've completely missed the mark by failing to point out any mechanism that addresses _a material disadvantage that would otherwise compel a customer to visit their website_ , visually impaired or not.

Restated, point out a material disadvantage that I would directly suffer if I didn't visit their website...you'd have to establish that I _must_ visit this website before you can make a valid argument. Failing to clearly establish this criterion begs to question what it means to be _heavily integrated_.

> You can get coupons on their website. As a blind person, I would need to > take extra steps in order to get those coupons.

You mean the same coupons that are provided 1.) at the entrance of each store; 2.) posted on applicable product in every isle; 3.) stuffed in your snail mailbox; and 4.) spammed to your e-mail inbox. Your argument is asymptotic to a B&M store which _doesn 't_ have a website being legally required to create and maintain one in compliance with the ADA because electronic coupons are somehow universally equitable to the visually impaired...and yet here we are discussing litigation precisely because they're not.

> You can refill prescriptions online and save time, rather than waiting in > the store.

So what you're saying is the time it takes for someone who is visually impaired to independently navigate and fill out a _compliant_ web form is, in some qualitative sense of average, _less_ than the time it would take for a pharmacy specialist without an equivalent disability to perform the same task. Oh how easily this digital generation has forgotten that a vanilla phone call is a valid method of achieving certain end goals.

> Again, I've never used their handicap bathroom. Or any of their bathrooms. > You having not used it is a very weak argument.

Again, your counter-argument is a red herring and _irrelevant_ : the existence of handicap bathroom provisions is a requirement of ADA compliance, which is _predicated on and applicable to the existence of a B &M store front_...it has nothing to do a website! It doesn't matter that you've never used the physical resource; there's clear and established requirements traceability to existing statute.

To wit, what wasn't clearly delineated was _website != public accommodation_ , which the court disagreed with based on the premise that the website in question was, by their definition, _heavily integrated with the company 's physical store locations_.

Accessibility of the website is _not_ what's being questioned...I'm calling bullshit on the legal finding that this website was _heavily integrated_.

The onus is on you to understand the logic.

<comment><USER13> > You mean the same coupons that are provided 1.) at the entrance of each > store; 2.) posted on applicable product in every isle; 3.) stuffed in your > snail mailbox; and 4.) spammed to your e-mail inbox.

Yes. Those same coupons. It takes less time to get them on the website _when it works_. The extra time it takes to for those other methods you listed is a "material inconvenience" for a blind person. All of the methods you listed require the assistance of another person. Getting them from the website does not require the assistance of another person.

> So what you're saying is the time it takes for someone who is visually > impaired to independently navigate and fill out a compliant web form is, in > some qualitative sense of average, less than the time it would take for a > pharmacy specialist without an equivalent disability to perform the same > task.

Yes. If there is a long line.

And a blind person doesn't have to wait at the pharmacy for 20 minutes _after_ having the pharmacist do what could have completed at home at their own convenience. That again is a "material disadvantage" that people who are not blind do not have to suffer: 1) wait in line for the pharmacist. 2) wait again for the script to be filled.

There is also the question of privacy. A blind person has no way of telling who is listening in on the conversation while at the pharmacy counter. A non- blind person is able to use the website to enjoy this added privacy.

You should read the court ruling (only 13 pages) so you can learn all of the above and more details about why the court ruled the way it did.

> It doesn't matter that you've never used the physical resource; there's > clear and established requirements traceability to existing statute.

It's good to see you're finally starting to understand that whether or not _you have personally used the website_ (or bathroom) has nothing to do with the law. Agreed this lawsuit covers new territory. But your usage (or lack usage) of the website proves nothing about how integrated the website is with the physical location.

> The onus is on you to understand the logic.

If there's any onus, it's on Winn Dixie to fix their website. Per the court ruling. And perhaps the onus is on you to stop making assumptions about the life of a blind person, and to read the court ruling in full so you don't make ignorant sounding statements about what is and isn't convenient for a blind person compared to a non-blind person.

<comment><USER7> > The extra time it takes to for those other methods you listed is a "material > inconvenience" for a blind person. All of the methods you listed require the > assistance of another person.

How convenient that you've completely ignored the intentfully positioned point (4) and purposely withheld point (5) mobile app, then proceed to conflate subjective _inconvenience_ with objective _disadvantage_ , then fail to address the asymptotic counter-point given. There exists more than one method to acquire the same coupons: none of which are exclusive to a particular distribution medium, all of which are subjectively inconvenient to some degree, and at least one of which is accessible to the visually impaired.

> And a blind person doesn't have to wait...

How convenient that you've completely ignored the prepostured phone call alternative remark, then substantiate your realigned definition of _disadvantage_ with conditionally objective points and still fail to acknowledge that the mentioned alternative affords the same privilege which is _not_ inaccessible to the visually impaired. There exists more than one way to expedite a prescription refill: none of which are exclusive to a particular process, all of which are subjectively inconvenient to some degree, and at least one of which is accessible to the visually impaired.

> There is also the question of privacy. A blind person has no way of telling > who is listening...

A blind person doesn't have to vocalize a single word to conceal privacy- sensitive information and still effectively communicate at an open pharmacy counter: fold a prepared (written, typed, whatever means favorable to the blind) piece of paper containing sensitive information, pass said private message to pharmacist when applicable. Paper not accessible? Try text on mobile. Keypad not accessible? Try any speech-to-text mobile app. Mobile not accessible? Try a phone call from your favorite secluded location. Common sense for anyone who isn't mentally impaired and doesn't have a thinly veiled legal agenda. There exists more than one way to achieve derivative privacy: none of which are exclusive to a particular channel, all of which are subjectively inconvenient to some degree, and at least one of which is accessible to the visually impaired.

But I'm protecting my privacy under HIPPA, says Gil. If this claim were even _remotely_ legitimate, pharmacy counters wouldn't have any semblance to physically adjacent open check-out lines, and HIPPA would mandate it so, not the ADA. Even if on some Twin Earth privacy in a deliberately open public accommodation were a legitimate concern, it would impact _all in-store customers without discrimination_...and since both normal and visually impaired customers have alternative means of achieving the same benefit of derivative privacy, no inherent disadvantage exists.

> And perhaps the onus is on you to stop making assumptions about the life of > a blind person, and to read the court ruling in full...

The plaintiff describes his "inconveniences" in sufficient detail for me to opine at will...no unfounded assumptions required. I _really don 't care_ what is and isn't inconvenient to the visually impaired because the contention I was initially remarking on was the court's decision of classifying Winn- Dixie's website as _heavily integrated_...to which you've provided no relevant argument against, and in which it appears you've lost complete sight of. This discussion has clearly digressed to the point where nothing constructive may come of it. Therefore, I submit privilege of the last word to you.

<comment><USER13> Sure, I'll take the last word. I'm confident I made a strong argument that the website is heavily integrated to the physical locations. If the website were purely informational, I agree you would have a strong argument. But the website is transactional, and the website transactions entirely replace a set of actions that would normally take place at the physical location. Would you really characterize a transaction which I initiate on the web and then complete in the physical store as _not_ integrated?

If you still can't see that, that's ok. Winn Dixie will fix their website regardless of your curious position.

More importantly I'll add that you've been increasing patronizing and condescending with _some_ of your remarks, and for your own sake, I hope you don't talk to people like this when you are face to face. Your last two replies come off as a cringe-worthy attempt to demonstrate intellectual superiority ("look ma, how smart I am"), or perhaps a style of speaking learned from debating club. Everything you said could have been said using simpler words, fewer words, and it would have been clearer and easier to read. If you do talk like this when you are no longer behind a computer screen, you might see an significant increase in the quality of your relationships if you tried hard to at least pretend that other people are your equals and deserve respect when you speak to them.

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." -- Maya Angelou

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm really sad to see so many people on HN arguing against the need for enforceable (and not onerous if you look into it) accessibility standards on the web.

A huge social benefit of the Internet is to connect everyone and make information accessible to all.. It has changed our world for the better.

People with disabilities should not be excluded from this.

<comment> FLUX-YOU >I'm really sad to see so many people on HN arguing against the need for enforceable (and not onerous if you look into it) accessibility standards on the web.

Someone decided that developers must comply with disability technologies, and not have disability technologies built around the existing technologies. And most developers had no argument in that battle. Now we have aria attributes sitting inside of our HTML.

And most likely because businesses are going to push this down on their existing developers, meaning they will need to devote time and energy learning what ADA and the WCAG standards are and figure out accessibility testing while maintaining all of their previous responsibilities.

But really, we shouldn't need to do any of that.

We should have tools that allow us to comply to these standards with little effort. We should have tools for the disabled that are as brilliant as Google search. We should have testing frameworks that test our websites for this.

Why the hell are we spending money on suing companies instead of spending it on research for curing disabilities? Where's my damn artificial eyes and ears I was promised decades ago? All I got was this stupid lawsuit.

Is any of that being built for the next generations of developers who probably get no accessibility training in college or dev bootcamps or internet tutorials? Do businesses even send their devs to accessibility coding conferences or workshops?

So I think many devs are justified at arguing against having to learn yet- another-spec because someone else simply told them to. We already have enough to learn with companies cramming laundry lists of technologies and ideologies into their job postings. Accessibility will become another bullet point on that list and we'll have Full Stack Javascript Accessibility Ninjas.

<comment><USER14> Sounds like you've got it all figured out! Let me know when your unicorn comes out of stealth mode.. /s

FYI we do have lots of tools and frameworks that make developing for accessibility relatively straightforward.. But you have to want to do it, and you have to know how to do it. This takes education and learning, but most worthwhile things do.

Sayings things like "businesses are going to push it down on their existing developers" is looking at this all wrong.

Developers should be building accessible websites in the first place.

<comment> FLUX-YOU >Developers should be building accessible websites in the first place.

Sorry, we've got like ten other people telling us we need to "build websites with <this> in first place". Accessibility is just another line item at the same point as security, scalability, and resilience.

And for what it's worth, I would prioritize security over accessibility any day of the week.

It's very easy of you to ask all developers to design websites with accessibility in mind. To push all of these requirements onto someone else.

But keep piling on responsibility onto your devs and watch how they build everything in mediocrity because you don't give them time to become good at anything.

The field is utter chaos.

<comment><USER15> Very often, if not almost always, there is no competition between security and accessibility. I'm not sure how you get this impression. The two can also go hand in hand, building features that render server-side with security in mind in addition to the existing client-side functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is what happens when an industry purposely ignores making websites accessible and more importantly ignoring principles of progressive enhancement. This is the first of many lawsuits to come, I fear.

I hope the web development industry will self-correct itself and get serious about a11y principles in websites before laws get made that convolute what web developers do best.

</comment><comment><USER16> 60 mins did a segment about this a while back. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xjq9xWnwT0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xjq9xWnwT0)

ABC15 Arizona also did a story [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D60we_4VZGY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D60we_4VZGY)

Another interesting thing is building inspectors that work for the city, don't care about ADA only city codes from my understanding. I never dealt with them, but after watching this segment I can see violations all over when I go places. Like ADA is 20 years old and my city doesn't even have curb cuts for wheelchairs. Plus some small towns websites have bad low contrast or horrible fonts. I also think some flat UI designs are really horrible to tell things apart.

Sad thing, some of these lawyers doing this only cares about making money, and not actually helping accessibility.

There's a bill in Congress H.R.620 \- [https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th- congress/house-bill/620](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house- bill/620) that is meant to reform this. Basically you'd write a written complaint to the business, Then the business gets 60 days to reply outlining how they will improve it. Then 120 days to actually fix it. You can't just go out right suing, they get a chance to correct it. If they aren't correct it, then you get to sue. Seems fair to both the business owners, and accessibility.

There was one case I remember when watching related videos before, that someone had to pay a lawyer 5K and all the work they had to do is move the soap dispenser. Something the business owner himself was able to do with a screwdriver and 15 mins. Then someone else had to pay 5K over missing a $50 sign, another quick fix. I guess if H.R.620 was the law, with those really small changes they could just fix it right away and reply saying they already fixed it outlining how.

On the side note, making captions helps SEO find your video, and powers the transcripts. Sometimes watching a long presentation like a hour long, later I'll be working on somthing and remember hearing about the problem before... So I'll look up the video, go to transcripts and ctrl-f. I was listening to a podcast on a walk one day, and wanting to write down some notes when I got home of some points that interested me... But no transcript, so I'd have to go back and listen to find it again...

However, somethings I think might be impossible to make accessible like complex applications for 3D Virtual worlds, 3D Modeling, Camara filters, Photo editing.

Also wonder how this would apply to user generated content. Should Facebook or YouTube or the uploader be sued for some random vlogger not captioning a video, or some individual live streaming from their phone? I'd surely hope there'd be exemptions for those websites, probably Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would cover that case. However if a business uploaded a video to YouTube, then that business should caption it for sure. However, I hope lawyers don't start going after individual YouTubers... Didn't caption that video of your family at the theme park? $5,000 demand letter! That would get ridiculous if lawyers ever attempted to do that.

<comment><USER17> Maybe the business owner could have bothered to read the law and come into compliance without needing the lawsuit. This law is not a surprise.

<comment><USER16> Who knows, maybe they bought a existing building and didn't build it in the first place. If it's a new building, I'd hope the architect they hired was aware of this stuff.

But these lawyers create 1000s of lawsuits. They are the offline equivalent of patent and copyright trolls. Send out a bunch of letters, scare a business owner and make a quick buck. Most of the time they never even go to court. The lawyers just care about making quick bucks, they could care less about accessibility.

A judge threw out 1,000+ lawsuits of a lawyer doing this before. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dJ06AHwOI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dJ06AHwOI)

I rather see correction than punishment. Things like this is just a turn off to starting businesses, and letting megacorps who can hire a army of lawyers take over the planet. I think if business owners are doing their best with their resources, if they mess up, give them time to correct it. Instead of paying lawyers thousands and thousands, they can spend that money instead on fixing the issue - and sometimes the fixes are basically free like moving a soap dispenser.

Florida lawmakers are trying to stop drive by lawsuits. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYn36DSDJng](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYn36DSDJng)

But I really hope H.R.620 passes so it's applied to all 50 states federally. I think it's fair to both the disabled and the business owners. In the end, the only thing should matter is that things are fixed and made accessibly - <USER2> lining lawyers pockets.

Wow [https://youtu.be/hEQPUJjIdAc](https://youtu.be/hEQPUJjIdAc) this one lawyer just wanted money and didn't even want proof it got fixed. Thankfully the restaurant owner found another lawyer willing to fight the other lawyer pro bono and won! Also this video at the end explains H.R.620</comment></comment></comment>


China and Russia are cross-indexing hacked data to target U.S. spies - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-cyber-spy-20150831-story.html

<comment><USER2> Poor U.S. If only it wasn't perfectly okay with insecure systems as long as they also benefited from spying on them.</comment>


Plusconf - Online conference for entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.plusconf.com

<comment><USER2> Apparently you have to give them your personal information before you can find out what it costs.

Tried typing a question into the KissMetrics box and it just disappears after I hit submit. So it looks like IM but its just another version of a form?

If they want the conference to succeed they need to drop KissMetrics and go with Olark for real time answers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Landing page would benefit from some additional information... specifically, where the conference is taking place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Online, just sign up and you'll get link for video streaming.

<comment><USER3> ahh. Guess I missed that in the link title. It would still be nice to see on the landing page, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really enjoyed the last PlusConf, and I'm impressed you put together another one so quickly. Great job Ben!

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there any attendee participation? What makes it a "conference" vs. a series of online webinars?

</comment><comment><USER6> Can't wait for this one, last PlusConf was EPIC! :)</comment>


US Republicans' belief in evolution plummets, poll reveals - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/republicans-belief-in-evolution-plummets-poll-reveals/

<comment><USER2> More surprising to me is that a stable third of Democrats and independents don't believe in evolution, either.</comment>


Reproducible builds *without* patching tool chains - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloudseal.io/blog/2019-05-15-introduction-to-reproducible-builds <comment><USER2> Ok. Let's stop the efforts into patching toolchains. We only need cloudseal to make sure software is reproducible.

Here is the catch: How do we bootstrap cloudseal in a reproducible fashion. We don't have cloudseal to do so. So we either can't reproduce cloudseal, because we have neglected to patch the toolchains it quite possibly it depends on, or we can reproduce cloudseal! But this is most likely because of the reproducible builds effort.

I would like to evaluate the solution it tries to solve. But the technical details but the lack of any code backing this effort and the spare details makes it somewhat hard. No information if the product is Open-Source as well.

>in our initial experiments we've achieved 100% reproducibility for over ten thousand unmodified Debian packages

Yes. Debian is currently doing this on _all_ their packages where 96% is reproducible. How was this test done? What packages did they pick? Unreproducible ones, reproducible ones?

A lot of questions in general.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for these points and questions!

First, we'd love it if you would try our early container prototype on your build. Contact us and we'll add you to our closed alpha test. Also, we can send you the full paper (preprint) on the Debian case study, with the gory details.

I would never argue _against_ patching tool chains to make them deterministic. If I were the maintainer I would always accept these patches! (And the GHC community we're part of has made some efforts on that front.)

You raise an interesting question regarding bootstrapping which I believe is similar to the good old Ken Thompson "Trusting Trust" attack: [https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...](https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf)

Well, there's always _some_ trusted code base (even with Coq), but I would argue that it would be harder for us to execute the trusting-trust attack in a container than in a compiler like Ken Thompson's original. The compiler can inject malware when it recognizes that its compiling itself, but we run arbitrary build systems, compiler tool chains, JITs. On top of that, one can build the container itself without ever _using_ the container, so we wouldn't have an opportunity to inject.

Any containers or VMs that we use in binary form need to be trusted for the same reasons. And Debian Reproducible Builds still has the original trusting- trust approach to contend with as well: i.e. they could bootstrap with a previously-corrupted gcc binary. The DRB website lists a Ph.D. dissertation on improving this situation, but I haven't read it, and I don't think it's been implemented in DRB: [https://dwheeler.com/trusting- trust/](https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/)

<comment><USER2> >First, we'd love it if you would try our early container prototype on your build. Contact us and we'll add you to our closed alpha test.

If the code is available; sure. If it's not then sadly this isn't interesting.

>Also, we can send you the full paper (preprint) on the Debian case study, with the gory details.

This would be more interesting as I'm doing a master thesis regarding reproducible builds and rebuilders for debian at this moment, along with contributing to the effort in general. Feel free to send a copy to email@example.com

>The compiler can inject malware when it recognizes that its compiling itself, but we run arbitrary build systems, compiler tool chains, JITs.

The compiler can inject anny backdoor into any code as long as its invoked. We are not strictly limited to it compiling itself. I'm unsure how appealing to the diversity of the things you compile is an argument. A lot of things utilize `ld`, `gcc` or `tar` somewhere in their build chain regardless of what they build. It's not going to be harder to backdoor something if you have enough diversity.

This is a neat example of the possibilities you have with the rust compiler as an example: [https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/12/02/reflections- on...](https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/12/02/reflections-on-rusting- trust/)

>The DRB website lists a Ph.D. dissertation on improving this situation, but I haven't read it, and I don't think it's been implemented in DRB

Davids PhD hasn't really been implemented to any large extent in the real- world, beside smaller toy examples, as it would need a second trusted compiler to verify. This is hard work and I don't see anyone actually want to implement a second compiler to C++18 (as an example) to help verify the gcc output they are getting.</comment></comment></comment>


Slack Removes Hate Groups - <AUTHOR> https://slackhq.com/slack-statement-hate-groups <comment><AUTHOR> I'd appreciate a bit more information on this...specifically whether they are doing content monitoring on various Slack groups for hate speech, etc.</comment>


Visualizing the Hidden 'Logic' of Cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/07/see-your-citys-street-structure-with-these-tools/566138/ <comment><USER2> This is maybe the main thing I noticed as a European visiting the US. It also made me realise why I thought the early versions of SimCity were somehow not entirely satisfying.

You'll come across this in movies now and again, someone will use "blocks" as a measure of distance within the city, but if you've grown up in Europe it makes no sense at all. The space between streets here varies a lot, it's not just a grid where you can say "up three, turn left, along four".

<comment> ur-whale Conversely, navigating a European city is a very confusing experience (even for a European), whereas driving around from point A to point B in e.g. L.A. is a no-brainer.

<comment><USER3> >whereas driving around from point A to point B in e.g. L.A. is a no-brainer.

... in theory.

Now getting around Manhattan is truly a no brainer!

<comment><USER4> Try Salt Lake City, Utah. [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/plat-of- zion/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/plat-of-zion/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting, but it should not be called the "Logic" of cities. Maybe "Orientation" of cities.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, I was hoping of a visualization of travel flow, infrastructure (logistics, grid, plumbing, ...), evolution of districts or something in that vain.

Logic is the wrong term here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really loved the minimal Mapbox implementation of the concept! (by Vladimir Agafonkin)

[https://jsfiddle.net/Mourner/zbdu3fkg/](https://jsfiddle.net/Mourner/zbdu3fkg/)

</comment><comment><USER8> While this is a great visualization, I think that it is missing the traffic volume, which would paint a much more accurate picture of how cities actually work. I say this looking at San Diego where if you want to know how the city is designed and how traffic actually flows, there should be 3 big lines running from south south east to north north west (or similar) because those are the 3 major freeways. Instead you have a big north south signal which is not actually reflective of how any traffic flows.</comment>


A $34 Smartphone Gadget That Can Detect HIV in 15 Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/02/hiv-diagnostic-tool/

<comment><USER2> Its awesome, but it would probably add some awkwardness to making new acquaintances at party. Hi, my name is ..., and I really like You. Do you mind giving me a blood sample?

<comment><USER3> From: [http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/cheap- smartpho...](http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/cheap-smartphone- dongle-diagnoses-hiv-and-syphilis-15-minutes) HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011783) (102 points. 4 days ago, 32 comments)

> _They found that the test rivaled gold standard lab tests and was able to > correctly detect infections 92 to 100% of the time. Although it missed one > case of syphilis and falsely diagnosed syphilis infections 14% of the time, > the device is still extremely useful because false positives would be picked > up later on after the patient is sent for further tests and treatment._

If you use it in a normal party (were I assume that less than the 1% have syphilis) then more than the 90% of the detections will be false positive. Good for amusement of everyone but the subject case :(.

It is only useful as a first screening test, take it only as a suggestion to take a serious test.</comment></comment>


Troll hunter: Twitter cracks down on abuse with new trust and safety group - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/troll-hunter-twitter-cracks-down-on-abuse-with-new-trust-and-safety-group/ <comment><USER2> Until people like Briana Wu are banned for their abusive behavior, I just can't believe this is anything but a power move to silence opposing viewpoints.</comment>


Ask HN: What is normal procedure for start of contract? - <AUTHOR> I'm receiving my first contract programming job, but I have a question/concern based on things I've read here and elsewhere. I'm wondering what is the typical and fair process for the first payment to the contractor (me). If I invoice monthly, and they are allowed a month to pay the invoice, that means I can work for 2 months before seeing any income. And I've read sometimes companies (not good ones) can take advantage of this and get two months of free work without actually ever paying the first invoice, or if they do, they pay it very late.<p>I suppose I just hope for the best, or is there a common arrangemet that is often made in contracting, like paying half of first month up front, etc. ? <comment><USER2> You can (and should) ask for whatever you think is fair. For new relationships, deposits are common, as are twice-monthly billing and net 10 terms.

Here's a piece of advice a friend and mentor gave me when I went from full- time to contracting long ago. We were talking about terms and I said well, I figure we'll just do net 30 or something. He got really serious and said "No, listen to me. You're a contractor now. You want your money, and you want it now."</comment>


Top 10 Web Dev Blunders of 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://nettuts.com/articles/web-roundups/top-10-biggest-web-dev-blunders-of-2008/

<comment><USER2> _1\. Site Meter Crashes For IE Users_

Blunder? That's genius!

<comment><USER3> Exactly what I came here to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I definitely though Tumblr admin vulnerability would have made the list.

</comment><comment><USER5> How about timeless mistakes:

1\. No search (this site) or crappy search (reddit)

2\. Unreadably small text

3\. Ecommerce sites that don't make prices clear ("call a sales representative and give us all your contact information we can then spam you with")

...

More: <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> he should check with alexa first because for Plurk things seems to go very good:

<http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/plurk.com></comment>


Ask HN: How a self-learned programmer learn algorithms/scalable system? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Algorithms: [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-fall-2011/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Coursera has both Sedgwick's lower division sequence in Java and Roughgarden's two class upper division sequence using whatever language the student chooses.

[https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI](https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI)

[https://www.coursera.org/course/algo?from_restricted_preview...](https://www.coursera.org/course/algo?from_restricted_preview=1&course_id=971469&r=https%3A%2F%2Fclass.coursera.org%2Falgo-005)

There are also upper division courses by Sedgewick as well.</comment>


Tutoring company pilfers logo from Linux distro - <AUTHOR> http://www.archlinux.org/static/newsletters/newsletter-2009-june.html#stolenlogo

<comment><USER2> The whole discussion was pointless, since the foundation members obviously didn't have any intention of pursuing necessary actions or the fortitude to take a firm stance. As such, all they did was waste the time of everybody involved. Sorry, but don't bother writing a warning if you have no intention of holding the line or negotiating a compromise.

<comment><USER3> Furthermore, the tutoring business is very tough. I bet the problem solves itself within 24 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They interpreted the last letter this way: "It had become obvious that we were dealing with a person unwilling to comply with our request."

I'm not so sure, however. I interpreted it as being a step away from an offer to change the logo while still saving face.

Edit: I've sent this opinion to them; maybe it will have an effect?

<comment><USER5> I agree, they were at most 2 more e-mails (and a law firms letterhead away) from getting it removed.

<comment><USER6> I think the best punishment would be letting them keep that awful logo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who's been lifted from many, many times I feel I should be outraged by this... but I'm not. Given that the linux people aren't using the logo any more, why not just charge the tutoring people X amount for the logo and drop it?

I imagine that 'Dr. Elias' is not entirely stupid, and would realise that paying for the logo is certainly likely to cost less than having to reprint office stationery, get new decals for the car, etc.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that the Linux folks haven't indicated that they'd be willing to discuss a payment option. Sure, C&Ds are often just a beginning negotiating tactic - but _only_ when the other side expects it. Otherwise, it's just scary. The fact that the guy wrote back looks to be like "hey, I'm a good guy, but I can't possibly afford to change my logo, and I'll use the irritant language to look tough so that you pretty please don't call me on not being able to afford to change the logo on everything".

Now, the Linux folks aren't in the business of licensing their logo, so it's probably suboptimal to try to figure out how to do a licensing agreement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am amused by the tutor's use of the construction "would have went with" in his response. Someone who charges money for his English instruction should probably proofread his email (or learn grammar).

<comment><USER10> And yet, you understood what he meant.

As I become a little less young, I begin to realize that perfect grammar matters less than I used to believe. And if someone would judge me for beginning this sentence with "And", then I probably wouldn't want to associate myself with them anyway.

<comment><USER11> I agree with your point completely: just because you're fastidious about grammar doesn't mean you can accomplish anything worthwhile. And anyway, most of the 'grammatical rules' that are widely propounded are just a form of mythology: maxims received uncritically and held up as a sign of (supposed) education.

On the other hand, written expression is like the programming interface for the world most of us live in: from the money we make to the business relationships we form to the thoughts we develop, written expression is almost always an essential means to reaching the goal. Those who can't be bothered to adhere to arbitrary grammatical conventions often find the grander and more abstract challenges of life inscrutable.

The Romans had an expression: "Qualis oratio, talis vir", as is the speech, so is the man. (Seneca, _Epistulae Morales_ 19.114.1, attributes the expressions to the Greeks: "Hoc quod audire vulgo soles, quod apud Graecos in proverbium cessit: talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita.") <http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/seneca.ep19.shtml>

Despite the Latin slogan, I'm reluctant to reach a conclusion about the tutoring proprietor based on his use of language. Maybe he had a rhetorical reason for lapsing into grammatically half-baked jargon: he's suggesting he's too stupid or careless to be guilty of a premeditated logo theft. I don't know.

But...

Can you really write "If someONE would judge..., I wouldn't want to associate with THEM..." without cringing? I've been guilty of worse, I readily admit, but is it too fastidious and pointless to balk at such a construction?

<comment><USER10> _"as is the speech, so is the man"_

I like that. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i think i'm more annoyed that the guy's obviously lying through his teeth while trying to assess how much shit he could possibly be in for.

plus, that logo is horrid. looks like something an intern/temp would have worn on the starship enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER13> As they don't use it anymore, they could ask the guy to contribute a minimum amount of money to some cause.

</comment><comment><USER14> will the tutoring company satisfy GPL requirement if it includes a dozen pages of GPL license on each of its tutoring materials (vehicles, documents, advertising, website and any other media)?

assuming such logo is GPL

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd recommend leaving them alone.

I mean, you're no longer using it, why not let them too? Copyrights suck, after all.

<comment><USER16> Trademarks aren't necessarily the same issue as copyright, but in this case, it does seem like leaving them alone would be best, since they (Arch) assert that they haven't used it since 2007. What with asking the community to intervene, however, it's likely too late for that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does Swift change anything about the dismal app business? - <AUTHOR>

I've been excited about Swift lately, but upon closely thinking about it... it's still the same old thing, just cleaner.  The app store is still crowded neck-to-neck, flooded with hundreds of apps every day.  It's arguable that starting a new iOS app today would not be an optimal decision... would starting a Swift app be any different?  As a small developer, I'm thinking it may be a better idea to abandon the crowded iOS apps space altogether for other greener pastures.  Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Swift is going to help iOS apps improve in quality and quantity - though some very bad quality Objective-C apps that would have been rejected into the store would be bad quality apps that are accepted into the store.

Your problem may be to do with using the App Store as the sales and advertising platform. If people find out about the app through the other means and purchase it in the app store, you don't have such a problem with your lack of visibility in the store.

I think there is a future for using apps as a mobile optimized interface for an online service, where there are other sales channels apart from the App Store.

When it comes to product discovery, people find out about products on the web at all sorts of times when they are not particularly browsing for an app. It helps if there is a decent web presence for them to see what the app does, and possibly use it in a web browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> The more pastures the better I say. Write once....

Swift is for the people that have no plans on eating anything but apples.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. It will only lower the barrier. While not being innovative in any way Swift is a modern language and does simplify development.

2\. Based on your concerns, using Swift is a really bad idea, since you will be tied to single platform. I would opt for C# + Xamarin instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> All that swift does is changes the tool you're using - the pastures remain the same colour.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why would a language change a business model and ecosystem?

</comment><comment><USER7> I see a rising demand for Swift Android port

<comment><USER8> You can already write Android apps in a number of JVM languages. You're not stuck with the Java language. ;-)</comment></comment>


Apple's CarPlay in new Mercedes C-Class (Gallery) - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2014/03/03/mercedes-benz-gives-us-a-look-at-apples-carplay-in-new-c-class-gallery/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+%289+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence%29 <comment><USER2> That big slab of tablet looks so out of place. I've been looking for a new car and this is a feature in so many models. It's really sad, it's so ugly, like they had a great design, then someone said, hey, throw a tablet right on top of the dash.</comment>


ACLU: 92% of Gitmo detainees were not Qaeda fighters. 86% turned in for a bounty - <AUTHOR> http://www.aclu.org/national-security/guantanamo-numbers

<comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this, and I think it's a terrific and important graphic, but maybe it demonstrates why infographics are not sufficient in presenting this information on the net, in that there appears no way for google or bing or duckduckgo to find it, or the information on it.

It doesn't show up in google searches for ACLU Guantanamo or ACLU Gitmo or ACLU Al Qaeda. (Maybe it will after some time.)

Some of the information within is put in the source as meta data, but not all of it.

<comment><USER2> The information itself is interesting, but as an infographic it's actually pretty terrible. Nearly all of it is just text that happens to be laid out in an image. The only graphical element is the comparison of prisoners released by the Bush and Obama administrations, which isn't all that useful since Obama has only been in office for three years; a bar graph arranged by year would've been better.

It seems more like an example of how the current trendiness of infographics can lead to hapless attempts at applying the format when plain old HTML and CSS can do exactly the same job (and be search-indexable to boot).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What really stood out for me is the realization that _children_ are imprisoned at Guantanamo. And we're not talking infants, but 13+ kids.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks Team america for making the world safe again!</comment>


The Sparrow - <AUTHOR> http://hn-books.com/Books/The-Sparrow.htm <comment><USER2> I do not share the majority opinion on _The Sparrow_ , but I'd rather be positive and suggest a few alternatives which I feel deal more inventively with the themes of first contact, the alien, and colonialism: Gene Wolfe's _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_ and Stanislaw Lem's _Eden_ , _Solaris_ , _The Invincible_ , and _Fiasco_.

Wolfe does a fine job of modulating his prose style according to the dictates of his content, and unpacking the workings of the book over repeated readings is a pleasure -- both admirably Joycean qualities in a writer.

Lem I admire for his commitment to imagining the alien as something truly alien, resistant to simple analogies with our existing store of experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll definitely give this one a read soon. I'm currently reading The Mote in God's Eye, which is another book that explores first contact with an alien race. I have a long ways to go, but I'm really enjoying it so far. Give Mote a shot if this sort of subject matter interests you.

<comment><USER4> You might also want to checkout Accellerando by Charlie Stross. It has some really interesting notions of building businesses and future craziness in it as well.

<comment><USER5> I really like all of Charlie's books. The Laundry books are definitely different; closer to fantasy in fact, but still nicely in touch with hacker mentality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for the recommendation.

I've been in the mood for just that type of can't put down read. But after googling for 'book reviews', 'top books' and 'books you can't put down', etc and other similar queries I just got a bunch bestseller lists and spammy adsense sites. Weird

<comment><USER7> Looking for a good read? Follow these directions:

1) Go to amazon <http://www.amazon.com>

2) Pick your genre

3) Sort by reviews

4) Pick the books with the most number of positive reviews

5) Read a few of the negative ones

6) Go out to Google and search for the books you selected

7) Pick up reviews from other non-book-review sites, like hn or reddit

8) Confirm selection by comparing notes from various sources

9) Get the book to read

Or you can just go to <http://hn-books.com> and let somebody else do all of that for you

EDIT: It occurs to me that perhaps you're making a snarky comment which I'm ignoring, but just be aware that the biggest problem in finding great books isn't piss-poor search strings and frustrating google search results: it's fans who love author X and are going to give him/her positive reviews no matter what they write. It makes it difficult to use review systems. I don't think that in a net of a billion people and a trillion web pages you're ever going to find a simple method for locating a good book to read that's going to stay the same over any length of time. There's simply not enough description in "good book to read" to have any meaning. There's a huge amount of implied context that is relevant but not supplied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really did not like this book. There were too many cusp points of stupidity, like "i am going to smash the next person who comes through that door" and kills an unintended victim. And the translation error that leads to the unfortunate hand modification, for someone who was such a genius at learning languages was not credible.

The whole precept of the book was done in a ham-handed way. The idea of a fallen sparrow being noticed, but not saved, and watched to suffer and die seemed to be an indication of a personal ax to grind on the part of the author.

I do read a lot of science fiction, but this book seems more like "everything you who are religious know is wrong" rather than Arthur C Clarke's invention of staggeringly different ideas about first contact. There is more imagination in the original short story "2001" than in both of the volumes in this set.

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought this book was great, but I also found it quite disturbing. Some pretty bad stuff happens in it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I read it several years ago and concur - it's well worth the read.

<comment><USER7> Have you read the sequel? I haven't read any reviews of it. I was wondering if it was as good as the first book.

<comment><USER11> Worth reading, but not as good as the Sparrow.

<comment><USER7> Without giving away any of the plot, the thing I liked about The Sparrow was the huge factor of the unknown. The entire story had this feeling that you just didn't know where it was going -- a sense of uneasiness.

I don't see how you could do that the same way again, at least not in the same universe.

But I've got it on my kindle anyway. Sometimes first books are so good you have to read the second one just to see where the author wants to take the story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I enjoyed this book and couldn't put it down, but was sad to find out the sequel was not about getting vengeance, which would have been awesome.

</comment><comment><USER7> This was the best sci-fi book I've read in many years. Tightly plotted and full of deep ideas and stuff to make you think. Had a blast reading it. Can't recommend it enough.</comment>


Brad, let's get together - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/09/15/bradLetsGetTogether.html

<comment><USER2> I wish I could downvote this. It's amazing how people still give attention to Dave Winer. Haven't we gone through this before?

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of Winer's past griping about the world not adopting his version of RSS (<http://backend.userland.com/davesRss2PoliticalFaq>). If your standard is open and superior, hackers will use it. If they don't, spend your time innovating on The Next Big Problem instead of insisting that everyone else doesn't get it.

<comment><USER4> The only feed consumers that do not support Atom are controlled by (and solely used by) Dave Winer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brad Fitzpatrick needs to prove he cares about the web?

To Dave Winer?

This is ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER6> Never trust a man who thinks every paragraph of his blog is worthy of an individual permalink.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... every paragraph of his blog is worthy of an individual permalink ..."_

No but think of it this way. Each idea can be linked. The fine grained linking is possible because Dave uses an outliner for ideas ~ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner>

Dave's obsessed with them ~ <http://www.outliners.com/></comment></comment>


Linux clusters in cars using Power CPUs - <AUTHOR> http://linuxgizmos.com/automotive-grade-linux-update-clusters-up-and-ibms-openpower-opens-up/ <comment><AUTHOR> It will be interesting to see whether the open sourcing of the Power ISA will impact upon the RISC-V efforts. Having the choice of too many open-source ISAs could end up with a situation where support remains sketchy for all of them.</comment>


Screw-in coffin patent issued - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/02/screw-in_coffin_patent_issues.html

<comment><USER2> This is hilarious, but probably not viable:

a) Coffins are sold to grieving families on the basis of "the one last thing you can do for [deceased]". Hence sales are made based on how luxurious, etc. the coffin is, not how efficiently it bores into the ground.

b) Who is going to want to file past a gigantic drill bit in a church?

c) If you look at the silhouette in fig 6, the coffin is roughly 40% longer than the deceased. Hence to bury a 6 foot tall individual, the coffin will need to be ~ 8.5 feet long, too tall to be screwed in by hand.

d) Part of the point of burials is the ceremony of lowering the coffin into the grave. This won't be viable with the screw coffin - "alright folks, it's time to bury Dad. Now these two hefty blokes are going to take a quarter of an hour to screw him into the ground. You all stand there and listen to him bump around inside the coffin".

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe most countries have a minimum depth that bodies have to be buried at. That is going to be hard to achieve with these kind of coffins.

<comment><USER4> I don't know why there couldn't be 'filler' space at the top put there just to achieve the depth requirements.

<comment><USER2> Well, assuming the minimum depth is even as low as three feet, the deceased is up to six feet tall and there's maybe a foot of additional space (thickness of coffin, the pointy drill bit, satin pillows, etc.) you're now looking at a ten foot long coffin. This seems to be a bit unwieldy at best, particularly when you've got to stand it up to bore into the ground.

<comment><USER5> You can have a funeral in winter before the frost line raises, however it'll destroy this. Frost doesn't stop a backhoe, I'd bet a lot of money it would stop this because the torque required to break and shift frozen soil is immense, especially considering it has to displace its entire volume _around_ the coffin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This will give a whole new meaning to "turning in one's grave".

</comment><comment><USER7> Yow. Would be less expensive to have a drill to make the hole with, then lower the coffin in, then to build the drill into the coffin.

Or to cremate.

</comment><comment><USER8> This actually is a novel idea. And it saves space. Pack more deads per square meter.

<comment><USER2> I imagine making every single coffin into a drill capable of boring a hole into the earth is a lot more expensive than buying a couple of sets of digging equipment per cemetery.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, if you're going to bring in machinery, you need to make sure that there's enough space to stop them from crushing the other coffins - which might negate any space-savings from burying people vertically. Whereas with this, a few people put it in, which needs very little space. Besides, don't the families of deceased generally pay for their coffins?

<comment><USER2> I think finding people who can manhandle an abnormally large, heavy, drill shaped coffin into place will be harder and more expensive than using machinery - there's a reason why we don't dig graves by hand any more.

Families do pay for the coffins, but they also pay for burial costs as well (so they'd also be paying for space and a portion of the machinery).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't find anything online, but I can recall reading that Christian heathens were buried vertically, because this meant that they could not enter heaven. Is there anything like this in other religions (especially other monotheistic ones)?

There'll be plenty of non-religious folks who could opt for this or another form of vertical burial, but I wonder how many people or their families would simply opt for the traditional, religious burial.

</comment><comment><USER11> Pallbearer? No, thank you.

(Though really I think the casket is INSIDE the screw. If it's not, that will by my new invention: "Easy corpse retrieval system" is how I'll bill it, and mostly to those singularity folks. "Be the first one out once we figure out how to cure stuff. No messing digging or accidentally crushing the casket!)

</comment><comment><USER12> At the risk of being downvoted, the phrase "What's up, doc?" was the first thing that came to mind.

The opportunity for ridicule has probably killed many an invention (i.e. Nokia and "side-talking").</comment>