Google sends Cr-48 to "Will it Blend?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.gstatic.com/chromeos/demolab/video/blend.mov <comment><USER2> This is particularly awesome because my Cr-48 came with a piece of paper that said something like:

"Do not crush, incinerate, blend (guess we'll never find out if it'll blend...), ...(several other things)..."

<comment><USER3> The full first paragraph of the Safety Notice:

This product contains sensitive components. Do not drop, disassemble, open, crush, bend, bake, deform, puncture, blend (guess we'll never know if it'll bend), shred, incinerate, paint, bring to the moon, or insert foreign objects into the device. Do not spill liquids, rocks of any size, or food on the device. Do not expose the device to water, moisture or rap music.

It keeps going... :)

<comment><USER4> The entire thing (from Reddit):

<http://i.imgur.com/hA2Fd.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google did another advertisement where they destroy at least 5 laptops: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm- Vnx58UYo&feature](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-Vnx58UYo&feature)

I used to think that "Will it blend" was funny. Maybe the novelty of it has warn off. Instead of laughing, watching this video made me wince.

<comment><USER6> I had the same weird feeling watching that video. There is something fundamentally wrong there. I'm especially worried about the last part when the little girl destroying the last CR-48: she was so calm to do that without a blink. I was shocked. This is not the way we teach our children.

[edit]: there's a tagline said by the demo guy in the video: "good thing I get a new one every time". This kinda thinking bothers me.

<comment><USER7> Almost the entire advertising industry is pure waste, whether they are physically destroying laptops or not.

<comment><USER8> WTF?

I know it's cute to be all anti-advertising here, but really?

Shows a distinct lack of a clue about what service advertising offers people, why it's crucial, and why it makes a ton of money for all involved.

Advertisers don't waste money. They carefully use money by investing it in advertising which (when done properly) nets them a positive ROI.

<comment><USER7> Secretly murdering people and then robbing their house has a positive ROI for the murderer too; what a bogus form of argument. You don't look at one party's ROI, you look at the costs and benefits for everyone.

<comment><USER8> advertising rarely causes anyone harm.

<comment><USER7> Two companies (let's say Coke and Pepsi) are engaged in an advertising war.

Coke hires a graphic designer to draw a cool logo.

Pepsi has to fire back and do the same.

In the end both of their brand statures remain them same, and two artists who would rather have spent their time working on something else had their time wasted, due to a particular incentive structure.

Everyone acted in their own interest, and individually had a positive ROI. Yet collectively, the ROI was negative. Coke's action had a negative externality on Pepsi; Pepsi fired back with an action that had a negative externality on Coke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it somewhat ironic that this video will not play on my CR-48.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's meant to be played from <http://www.google.com/chromeos/demolab/> which is in flash and should (from what I've read) be excruciatingly slow anyway.

<comment><USER10> If you swear at that chat bot enough times with enough profanity it forwards you to a google search for 'cleaning supplies'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now blend the cloud!!!!

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't that just be blending things from a datacenter?

Lest we let it slip our mind, the cloud is a still a group of real places, its just data/processing not near your location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What a waste! especially since I have little to no chance of getting picked to try one out :( Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER14> Only question with the blending, have they ever tried blending another blender (same model etc)?

<comment><USER15> OOOhhh blender recursion!!

<comment><USER16> It's blenders all the way down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does this video series actually sell any blenders?

<comment><USER18> No one would've ever heard of Blendtec without them. I'm sure they've sold more than enough to recover the couple thousand dollars they've spent on the videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I couldn't apply for one of these (though I really wanted one) because I'm not on the US, good to see them put to good use.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm still waiting for the iFixit teardown. Maybe Google will send them one?

</comment><comment><USER21> Do NOT breathe that in.

</comment><comment><USER22> That's no Chromebook! That's a black MacBook running Chrome!

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, that was a stupid waste. At least I can take solace in the knowledge that this man is inhaling a significant quantity of toxins.

</comment><comment><USER24> While funny etc. We have so much waste in the world as it is - the last thing we need is the toxic waste of a perfectly good machine being blended and thrown out.

I have never had respect for the 'will it blend' concept, regardless of how funny one may find it. It is simply wasteful.

<comment><USER25> It's advertising. Admittedly, I don't have the numbers to back it up, but I would imagine that the economic impact of this advertising is worth more than the cost for Google to send a CR-48 to be blended.

<comment><USER24> >...economic impact of this advertising is worth more than the cost for Google to send a CR-48 to be blended.

I know what it is called - but it is still clearly waste.

I was not referring to the economic impact but rather the environmental.

Sure, we can all say "who cares" -- I do, which is why I ask.

Have you seen the garbage problems we have? The toxic waste dumps that are china and other places.

I am not trying to be some tree hugging hippy here - I just dont see the need/value of such advertising.

If they want to advertise - why not go give the things to even more people who want/need it?

How about give one to every student in a school of their choice?

This is utter stupidity on the part of the advertising industry and proves how little value they provide society other than more and more thought pollution on top of the actual pollution they produce.

<comment><USER26> You do not have nearly enough information to make this determination. If tablets like this reduce the demand for bigger laptops and desktops, making them more popular through various forms of marketing may in fact _reduce_ overall environmental impact.

<comment><USER27> "Various forms of marketing" - of the nearly infinite range of marketing approaches, "wasteful destruction" is only one, and oddly enough, most successful marketing campaigns never stooped to that level.

And even when damaging the product is the approach taken, it's not usually a pointless stunt. When Timex abused their watches in commercials, the point was to show that the watches would keep working.

The blending thing is just stupid web-meme fan service, that is unlikely to make a notable contribution to selling Cr48s. Or blenders, for that matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> a youtube link

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5IHNeyHjtM>

</comment><comment><USER29> I actually wanted to test my application on a Cr-48, but I didn't get one.

Oh well. I keep forgetting that it's Microsoft that says "developers, developers, developers, developers".

<comment><USER30> You're joking, right? The fact that you weren't one of the thousands to receive a free laptop makes Google developer-unfriendly?

<comment><USER29> Yes, my post was intended to be tongue-in-cheek. The article is about putting the laptop in a blender; comments should be read with that in mind.

<comment><USER31> Well, at least you're not alone in having no luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What was that Google mantra again?

Evil has many shades of grey but wasting a computer that could literally educate an entire schoolhouse in Africa and keeping this old, stupid joke going must be somewhere south of good.

<comment><USER33> Who's to say this old, stupid joke of a publicity stunt won't sell them enough cr-48's to give TWO cr-48's to schoolhouses in Africa instead of the one they started with? That's what business _is_ , the classic best answer to "you have one egg. How do you make two?"

<comment><USER32> My point is that there are more positive ways to make two than by destroying one. If Google is just interested in getting publicity for the cr-48 they might as well join Cheerios on Days of Our Lives.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Geoground, get a map image based on user's IP - <AUTHOR> http://jarqu.es/Geoground/

<comment><AUTHOR> I recently started working on a small app that I wanted to look slightly personalized per user by showing a faded image of their city as a background.

I couldn't find a service that did this for me, so I made a stupidly simple one. Simply use <http://g.jarqu.es/IP> and it'll return an image of the city based on the IP address.

</comment><comment><USER2> It shows me a blue field. Since it's not possible to zoom out, I cannot see which lake or sea it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Blue image means either IP didn't translate to city, or city didn't translate to a static mappable image.</comment></comment>


Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka in Public Preview - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/11/introducing-amazon-managed-streaming-for-kafka-in-public-preview/ <comment><USER2> This is awesome. Kafka were super fragile to me. Every version will come with all kind of issues and I have to restart here and there :(.

Right now I'm trying to debug this issue: [https://community.hortonworks.com/questions/208764/kafka- err...](https://community.hortonworks.com/questions/208764/kafka-error- attempting-to-send-response-via-channe.html)

I'm not a fan of Kafka though but you sometimes have to managed stuf fyou don't like anyway.

So this is great news. AWS truly listen to their customers I think.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome stuff. Kafka has been out of reach for our small org because we simply don't have the resources to manage a prod Kafka+zookeeper cluster. Kinesis has never anywhere near feature parity with Kafka. Ktables on AWS here we come!

</comment><comment><USER4> > Broker instances start at $0.21/hr and broker storage is $0.10 per GB-month

Kafka requires Zookeeper, do you pay for zookeeper instances too? Anyway, this pricing seems prohibitively costly unless you really need hands-off approach to your infra. Kafka is pretty low-maintenance and stable in my experience.

<comment><USER5> Just to note, the $.21/hr broker is on an m5.large (2 cpu, 8 GB mem), which goes for $.096/hr.

We run three nodes right now on m5.xlarge instances. At $.42/hr for the managed kafka, compared to $.192/hr self hosted kafka, I think we'll keep it self hosted for now...

<comment><USER6> What about the cost of the ZK nodes and associated EBS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome for what I heard about kafka operations.

</comment><comment><USER8> Huh interesting. I've actually had really good luck with Kinesis, this must be their Postgres vs MySQL thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> What would be the advantage of using this over Kinesis?

</comment><comment><USER10> Amazon taking more open source and selling it with no value created for the developers. Maybe Kafka should switch to the SSPL [0].

[0] - [https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public- license](https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license)

<comment><USER11> I would argue that making Kafka more approachable and easy to deploy and use out of box _is_ creating value for the developers, because it helps increase potential user adoption (and therefore increases the potential open source contributor base)

<comment><USER12> I agree. We started using Redis with AWS' managed offering (Elasticache), then migrated to running it on our own once we were comfortable with it. I can imagine the same path for Kafka use.</comment></comment></comment>


Unums 2.0: an interview with John L. Gustafson - <AUTHOR> http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=3001758 <comment><USER2> > To reciprocate a unum, you ignore the first bit and negate what remains!

> Notice that exact numbers have bit strings ending in zero and open intervals > between exact numbers have bit strings ending in one.

So reciprocating an inexact interval gives an exact number, and vice versa?

> If you ask for 2 + 2 at this very low precision, there is no exact > representation for four, so you have to use the open interval (2, 5), for > example.

So what is 2 + 2 - 2?

I feel like this guy keeps contradicting himself, e.g. switching between impractically high and low precision depending on the question.</comment>


Time lapse video of global air traffic over 24 hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XBwjQsOEeg

<comment><USER2> That is amazing. I like how there is a visible correlation between the time of day and the flow of traffic.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's especially obvious in the Europe <-> US traffic. It's mostly one way, depending on the time of day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know what is the value, but it certainly looks nice.

[http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/FPWeb_Final_3...](http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/FPWeb_Final_3.mov)

</comment><comment><USER5> You can see this live at FlightAware.com. You can watch specific airports, flights, aircraft, etc...

<http://flightaware.com/live/>

</comment><comment><USER6> The video I really wanted to see was "this" on 9/11. I wonder if it looked similar to what happens if you 'interrupt' a stream of ants and the 'panic' sets in.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bad title. Time lapse implies a series of photographs, whereas this is a visualization of flight path data. Still very cool.

</comment><comment><USER8> Really cool. You can see waves of red-eye flights arriving just as the sun comes up.

</comment><comment><USER9> Those interested should get hold of a copy of episode 1 of BBC's 'Britain from Above', it's a whole show visualizing everything from airtraffic to mobile phone usage.

<comment><USER9> Show info at <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d23yx>, preview clips at [http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/visualisations...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/visualisations/channel.shtml) and a bittorrent copy is apparently available from MVGroup for those who don't have access to BBC iPlayer

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That is super cool! Esp seeing the day move!

</comment><comment><USER11> Edward Tufte would love it

<comment><USER12>
      for(hour=0;hour<24;hour++){
         for(minute=0;minute<60;minute++){
            for(second=0;second<60;second++){
               ISay.innerHTML = "Edward Tufte loves it";
            }
         }
      }

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> reminds me of an ant farm....

</comment><comment><USER14> Interestingly, the pattern of busy areas correlate with the world cities from which my website get the most traffic. It's a website about science and programming.

The rest of the world (mostly Africa and some parts of central Asia and north- western South America) doesn't seem to use internet much, neither abundant flights, neither perhaps population that can access those (or population at all).</comment>


Location-independent Addressing with Messaging Middleware - <AUTHOR> http://www.250bpm.com/blog:13

<comment><USER2> Two things:

1) If you need a central name directory to point to the locations of various services, we already have DNS and DNS-SD.

2) I've been investigating mDNS+DNS-SD (a.k.a. Bonjour, a.k.a. Avahi) as a potential solution. One can advertise ØMQ sockets at the host and link-local level, potentially with forwarding between subnets if you're inclined to configure it that way.

However, be warned that you shouldn't expose ØMQ sockets over non-trusted networks. It's still possible to induce bad errors (including aborts and segfaults) by sending malformed data to an open ØMQ socket.

<comment><USER3> We've implemented a DNS-based transport for ZeroMQ, but I am not quite sure it can be made work especially in WAN environment. DNS propagation delay can take several days which is not always an option for application names (as opposed to hostnames).

As for the aborts, I've put all of them there myself, no need to remind me :)

<comment><USER2> You don't need DNS to propagate across the WAN. Just set up your own root server. You'll have low-enough load to set near-zero TTLs (or just have a single root server which everything uses). Although I admit I don't know enough about your use-case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, this seems like a rediscovery of the need for DNS?

e: f,b.

<comment><USER3> DNS is basically for resolving the hostnames. You may recall that it originally evolved from a file containing all the hostnames on the Internet that people downloaded periodically.

Resolution of service names is a different matter. The authors of the Internet have solved it in a cheap-and-ugly way by introducing well-known ports. Unfortunately, the problem wasn't solved in a systematic manner since.

<comment><USER5> DNS has grown the SRV RR to address services. <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2782>

<comment><USER3> Yup. The fact, however, is that it is not used widely. My guess here is that we are facing a problem where requirements differ depending on the scale. We may want local services to register with DNS automatically as they start and be reachable within seconds (DNS-SD use case). With the services facing the outside world, standard pre-defined records with 72hr propagation time are preferable (RFC2782 use case).

Moreover, I would say there's a need for location-dependent resolving of service names to limit the availablity of local services, to return a topologically close instance of the service etc.

All in all, the problem is far from being solved yet.

<comment><USER3> To put in simply: At the moment nobody is going to create a DNS record just to create a TCP connection. Once the following works out of the box on LAN, the problem can be considered solved:

        s = socket (AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
        bind (s, "myApplication1");
        ...
        s = socket (AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
        connect (s, "myApplication1");

Propagation of the name outside of the LAN may require additional administrative work. I guess nobody will complain about that.

<comment><USER5> Semi-widely used I'd say. XMPP and SIP come to mind...

What I like about DNS SRV is that it's standardized and relatively simple to handle, in contrast to some of the other naming schemes out there (eg. CORBA).

I agree though that tools / libraries need to get better here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Search as a Local Shopping Portal - <AUTHOR> http://jenndox.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/search-engines-are-local-shopping-portals/

<comment><USER2> " _This is an Irish company with little reach beyond Ireland and Great Brittan, so I expected to see reviews from either of the countries they supply. Instead I get American naval-gazers who haven't ever seen or tried the stuff pontificating on web forums about how they would never touch a thing they don't understand._ "

Is this because there were no discussions in Ireland about your search subject; or is it because Google indexed only US discussions?

By the way the first result in Google is from Ireland: [http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie...](http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Tritamyl+flour)

<comment><AUTHOR> I got different results from Ireland when I was there a month ago, so it has to do with what indexed pages are shown to whom.</comment></comment>


The Passive-Aggressive Programmer or Why Nothing Gets Done - <AUTHOR> http://www.itmaybeahack.com/homepage/iblog/architecture/C551260341/E20071129060000/index.html <comment><USER2> Oh. My. God. I have one of these working for me, remotely.</comment>


Misunderstanding Micropayments (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottmccloud.com/3-home/essays/2003-09-micros/micros.html <comment><USER2> @pg recently tweeted: "Prediction: Micropayments will happen, but the main beneficiaries will be new publications created to take advantage of them."

I'd love to hear from him and any others who think the time has come (or not), and what has changed or still needs to change. Such a huge percentage of CPC advertisements seem to me to be predatory, and yet that is what pays for Google, among others...

</comment><comment><USER3> Shirky seems to have been entirely right. Microtransactions haven't really succeeded except inside games - and there they're successful but unpopular.

<comment><USER4> And, arguably, they've "succeeded" (for certain meanings of success) because the mental transaction costs are offset by the perception of sunk costs.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting to ask "what are people buying, if it's not exactly the game itself?"

Extensive research has been done on this and there seem to be various things that come up as popular ways of extracting money. Paying to overcome a slowly raising artificial barrier. Social status in competitive games. Gambling, usually disguised as "crates". "Whales". And kids who don't understand what they're doing but have been left alone to press the button that spends money.

<comment><USER5> You forgot "entertainment"

<comment><USER6> Gambling is entertainment.

<comment><USER5> And many people that play games with micropayments are doing so for entertainment. So why not mention the main and positive reason that people play games?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of course the bitpass website is dead, as are micropayments. Now we have all you can eat subscriptions.

I think the fundamental issue is there's too much stuff, if item A costs money, items B-Z are also available for free.

Bandwidth costs appear to be 0 now, you can pay to listen to music without also downloading a video, or download the video to listen to it for free.

<comment><USER8> Bandwidth costs are highly dependent on where you live and what you can pay for. In most of the developing world, people access internet through their phones primarily, on prepaid plans costing about $5 per gigabyte, which can be a significant part of a monthly income.

<comment><USER9> Where? In Cambodia 1.4gb costs $1.50. That's the cheapest I encountered but other developing countries in South East Asia isn't that much more expensive. Even Myanmar which has been on lockdown for decades and only recently got public sim cards is affordable for data.

[http://www.cellcard.com.kh/en/prepaid- plans/xg/](http://www.cellcard.com.kh/en/prepaid-plans/xg/)

<comment><USER8> Kenya, for example, has 500Ksh for a GB, which comes to about $4.92, USD; this is comparable to rates I encountered elsewhere in SSA.

Meanwhile, the less money you have, the more you pay! Smaller bundles cost more per GB, and many of the Kenyans I knew would regularly buy 150MB top-ups due to lack of upfront funds.

On AirTel in India, it looks like they charge about $3.88 for a 1GB bundle good for 28 days (there's a cheaper 1GB bundle good for 1 day, however, and some other deals available). There are also a few articles floating around on the _increasing_ cost of data in India, suggesting that companies started with cheaper data while establishing themselves in the marketplace, and over time have been more obliged to turn a profit instead of burning investor money on subsidized plans. Cambodia does look pretty cheap, though, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A simple way to look at micropayments for content such as on websites:

If micropayments are used in _addition_ to ads-- perhaps for premium content or premium sidebar sister content -- then micropayments are acretive to publishers and the only problem is convenience of payment.

If microtrans are to replace ads (or be offered as a choice to users instead of watching ads), then In order to embrace micropayments, publishers would need to see themselves making nearly as much from micropayments as from ads.

Say a typical publisher gets a $10 eCPM aggregate across all the ads they show on a page. That is 1c per pageview. So, would some users pay 1c per article? Say users read 100 articles a day across many sites: would they be fine paying $1/day to access all this content?

The actual range might be anywhere from a fraction of a penny to several cents per article/page, but we're in the ballpark.

To me, this sort of system could work. As a user, I'd go for it. But payment needs to be automatic and frictionless (after I authorize a site to charge me for views).

Those best positioned to enable such a microtransaction payments are browser makers. Next up are as blockers. Maybe Facebook as they aggregate so much content now, though this conflicts with their model. Google AdWords+Double- click could also introduce a user-facing option to disable ads in favor of micropayments which users could purchase in-bulk and then spend through over time by viewing pages, but this too would conflict with Google Ads' model and network effects in many ways. A third-party new entrant could also do this. Perhaps you'd subscribe or fill a wallet with a service which content publishers integrate and get authorized to deduct fractional-pennies per view from.

This sort of model would be a welcome change, from my POV. And the economics seem workable from a publisher's POV as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would really love to see micropayments succeed. It seems to me it is the only alternative to ads, which can include malware, and websites making money through tracking.

Unfortunately, the fact the idea has been around so long but never caught on beyond a few areas makes me worry is simply is unworkable.

That said, here is an idea. I spend a lot of time on HN clicking on links. I would hate to have to spend time clicking a "send micropayment" icon every time I did that. But what if I had an arrangement with HN that every time I clicked on one of its links, HN would send a payment from me to the page I linked on?

</comment><comment><USER12> YouTube Red seems to be a form of micropayments that works well. I signed up for the service as part of Google's July 4th promotion and its made YouTube so much better as a product. I assume the monthly fee is somehow distributed to content creators as a micropayment, as replacement for viewing an ad.

<comment><USER13> Your total spending is fixed. That's a subscription.

The artists also aren't looking at each playback as a transaction.

<comment><USER12> Youtube pays red share to creators by total minutes watched by YouTube Red users, each minute of playback is a transaction</comment></comment></comment>


MAGI Synthavision Demo Reel (1980) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAYaX6NuI4M&

<comment><USER2> I do love the tech of this era. Here are some contemporary throwbacks:

(video) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7q5DLS1rAU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7q5DLS1rAU)

(audio) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT0gRc2c2wQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT0gRc2c2wQ)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some context, from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Applications_Grou...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Applications_Group):

> Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. (a.k.a. MAGI or MAGI/Synthavision) was > an early computer technology company founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman > and located in Elmsford, New York, where it was evaluating nuclear radiation > exposure. In 1972, the graphics group called MAGI/SynthaVision was formed at > MAGI by Robert Goldstein.

> It was one of four companies hired to create the CGI animation for the film > Tron. MAGI was responsible for the most of the CGI animation in the first > half of Tron, while Triple-I work mainly on the second half of the film. > MAGI modeled and animated the light cycles, recognizers and tanks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A related video is "Where The Wild Things Are - Early DISNEY CG Animation Test": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvIDRoO8KnM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvIDRoO8KnM)

The actual animation is at the end. MAGI Synthavision did the wireframes for the vector test and I think the actual rendering of the backgrounds for the final animation. Traditional Disney character animation was overlayed on top. John Lasseter directed the full test animation.</comment>


Men intelligence can be inferred from their faces - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2014/04/11/if_he_looks_stupid_he_probably_is_108592.html

<comment><USER2> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy) that's an old story...

</comment><comment><USER3> I asked my girlfriend what face matched mine.. She said "The leftmost one!"

:(

</comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't state whether the women measured were allowed wear make-up or not, which could have a significant effect?</comment>


Information Arbitrage: How I Invest - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2009/12/how-i-invest.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InformationArbitrage+%28Information+Arbitrage%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> "2. Tomorrow's ad exchanges will resemble the stock and options markets for equities."

Already largely the case. See adwords.

"3. Social media will simply be called "media," and viewed as a fully- integrated part of the overall media buy."

I'm skeptical. I've purchased a lot of Facebook/Myspace ads and I can tell you first hand, they just don't perform as well as other types of media.

<comment><USER3> >I'm skeptical. I've purchased a lot of Facebook/Myspace ads and I can tell you first hand, they just don't perform as well as other types of media.

Notice that you said "other types of media". So it's already coming true -- it is a type of media in the same way as newspapers, television, etc. Also, social media ads don't have to perform as well as other media to be considered media. They just have to be considered when a company is going to advertise.

<comment><USER2> Social media is a subset of media. It doesn't blend into the superset (in an advertiser's mind anyway).

When I purchase AdWords, that's just media. It shows up on Google, blogs, some professional content sites, etc., and I don't know or care where. If they added Facebook to that, it would drag CPMs way down so they won't,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just finished reading "The Snowball" (Buffett bio) and can recommend it highly. You get a real sense of what it takes to follow Buffett's dictums to (taken from the book):

1\. not lose money

2\. see rule number 1

3\. never go into debt

Buffett only uses a computer to play bridge, "helicopter" and read newspapers. Pretty long way from Ehrenberg's #1 - "Machine-driven trading will continue to proliferate, and represent a sustained source of alpha."

I had to look up alpha <http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp>

I think while it is likely anything new will be computerized, overused, and consequently cause "alpha" it will not be sustained. For anything sustained will be met with a financial instrument to hedge the alpha away (see LTCM). As we saw that hedge went spectacularly wrong.

Instead Buffett tries to find good management running undervalued companies that he thinks he understands to be selling something people need no matter what (and with which his substantial capital can assist). Its amazing how much personal effort Buffett has taken with his various acquisitions even when he was only a shareholder to help them through rocky times and so realize value.

Such a different perspective. Another Buffett rule: "Anything multiplied by zero is zero." Meaning if you constantly accept a small risk of losing it all you eventually will. Buffett prefers a higher margin of safety and look where that got him.

BTW, I bought informationarbitage.net long ago because I thought it was an interesting idea. More intersting still is to just happen across the guy that owns the .com variant posting to my daily feed.

</comment><comment><USER5> When I read how relational databases are inadequate to store, index and process unstructured data in real time, it made me draw an analogy between the old virus/anti-virus game where it was a race between the virus writers and the anti-virus software makers, and sometimes they were accused of being in cahoots.

Could we not say the same thing about the content indexing technologies (NoSql, MapReduce) and the content creating technologies (Twitter, ECommerce, Content Farms)?

</comment><comment><USER6> Geeknet (formerly Sourceforge) is trying to do a lot of what this guy describes. Aside from owning an e-commerce site and several news/community sites, they bought Ohloh.net. They are working toward understanding their user base and selling ads that target them intelligently w/o alienating them (not always successful, but that's why it's a challenge).

</comment><comment><USER5> If machine driven trading continues to proliferate, will the job of the CEO be to keep the algorithms happy as opposed to keeping the investors happy? At least the investors will call you up and tell you what's on their minds, whereas the algorithms are mainly black boxes.

<comment><USER7> Algorithmic trading is already the norm with most any of the large investment organizations.

And from the other side, if you're not already using program trading for your investing or otherwise investing ginormous sums, you're probably not big enough for the CEO to take your call.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That was a good article, not only for investing strategies, but also had a few good tech business ideas - very appropriate for HN.</comment>


Secret London Facebook Group Amasses 180,000, Morphs Into Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/07/secret-london-facebook-group-amasses-180000-%e2%80%94-morphs-into-startup/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> "Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou originally set up the group in response to a competition from ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to win a mere summer internship. However, it seems unlikely that Tiffany will be too bothered. There's now a holding page and Twitter account (@secret_london) as Secret London morphs into a full-blown startup."

One project down, 399 to go.</comment>


Someone Made a Fake Equifax Site. Then Equifax Linked to It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/equifax-fake-website.html <comment><USER2> The creator of the site was on here today posting about it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15295146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15295146)

Weird seeing a repost on the website where a lot of the story unfolded on the same day.

<comment><USER3> > Weird seeing a repost on the website where a lot of the story unfolded on > the same day.

Not only that, this nytimes story got bumped to #3 within a few minutes with no comments/votes.

Does the nytimes pay for preferential treatment of their stories?

<comment><USER4> Much more likely, this post got several upvotes quickly because users recognized the story (and its relation to HN) from earlier today. The algorithm heavily rewards early upvotes.

<comment><USER3> Oh okay. I'm fairly new to how things work here and unaware of how the algorithm works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15295146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15295146).</comment>


Ask HN: Stress Test Application for CPU/RAM/Disk - <AUTHOR> Hi there,
I want to check and then harden my Kubernetes cluster's stress tolerance by deploying some kind of stress generating application that would:
1) Try to hog as much CPU as possible
2) Try to allocate as much memory as possible
3) Try to saturate disk IO with a lot of operations
The question:
Do you know, can you advice any application that does some harmful chaotic activities, tries to misuse resources, e.g. hogs CPU and leaks memory like there's no tomorrow? Does not need to be Kubernetes specific, just need something that works on Linux ;)
I need this to test if resource limits we apply on our Kubernetes cluster work the way we expect them to work, before deploying production applications there.
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> stress-ng fio</comment>


Improving Freecycle with SMS alerts - <AUTHOR> http://paulfurley.com/improving-freecycle-with-sms-alerts/

<comment><USER2> or you could use ifttt..never used xapier, but i'm imagining it could do that too..</comment>


United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-airlines-mileageplus/1693331-shares-down.html <comment><USER2> Nice reminder about a "glitch" happening in one of the datacenters use at the airline I used to work.

Went like this: Guy who shows around the new datacenter/ops guy demonstrated how the emergency power off works by lifting the protection plate. Protection plate unhinges suddenly and droppes onto emergency power off button. Hilarity ensues.

<comment><USER3> A data center where I work had a naked big red switch without a protection plate. Until I flagged up this lack and let the IT people know about it, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

There's a plate on the switch now, praise Eris.

<comment><USER4> I've seen many places where "the solution" to the unprotected EPO button was just a simple plastic cup!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a nagging (intuition? feeling?) that software safety/reliability/security needs are going to explode soon (because unreliabilities multiply in non-resilient systems interacting with each other) and that these are simply foreshocks.

(yeah, I know security is already a huge deal, but as we come to trust software systems more and more, the safety/reliability factor will come more into play)

EDIT: This is also part of the reason I've been learning Elixir ([http://elixir-lang.org/](http://elixir-lang.org/)) since it's based on the highly-resilient Erlang and is designed to embrace failure. This was also informed by me reading Nassim Taleb's book "Antifragile" as well as "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by the (late) Donella Meadows.

<comment><USER6> I doubt it. Nobody wants to pay for that.

<comment><USER7> You might be right, unfortunately. If it's cheaper to buy insurance that will cover the (expected) losses caused by outages, most organizations will choose to do that instead of making the software more failure-resistant. The problem is that insurance only works well for isolated incidents, but a software failure can cause a cascading failure with a huge impact. Insurance companies generally aren't prepared for that and don't have the resources to pay out to everyone.

<comment><USER8> But aren't the insurance companies smart enough to figure this out and start correcting their rates to be much higher?And if they actually have their acts together, wouldn't those same insurance companies start insisting on basic audits of their client's systems?

I actually don't know about this stuff, so any correction of my thoughts is appreciated.

<comment><USER9> A cynic in me feels that someone will figure out the problems with cascade case and insure from failure of insurance companies to pay out insure money. Just like during 2008 financial crisis.

<comment><USER10> That's what existing reinsurance companies do, if I understand correctly. They insure the insurance companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I worked on United's computer systems for a year (never that one though), and so I get nervous when I see a headline like that. True story: one of their systems still runs on a mainframe that has 9 bits in a byte!

<comment><USER12> I did not know that was ever a thing. I knew that bit counts had been lower - 5 or 6 - but assumed once we hit 8, the whole power-of-2 thing was too comfortable in a binary system to ever be anything besides a power of 2 again - and sure enough, we get 16 bit, 32 bit, and 64 bit systems, and double-byte and triple-byte char sets, etc. Need more space? Take another byte.

Was the 9th bit special? Or just a standard bit in the byte?

<comment><USER13> 36 bit was popular for scientific computing because 35 gives you a sign bit and 10 decimal digits (yes, that's weird, but that's the argument I read everywhere, including at [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/36-bit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/36-bit). 35 likely was skipped because it its only divisors are 5 and 7, limiting instructions to 7 bits even then was felt to be too restricting. For some architectures, the DoD had a say in this, too. See [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_2200_Series_system_ar...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_2200_Series_system_architecture))

36 bits got us the 6-bit character (10 digits, 26 letters, and punctuation) with six characters in a word. Because of that, some OSes had six-character file names.

If you want to get upper- and lowercase, you need more than 6 bits. 9 is the smallest divisor larger than 6 of 36, so nine-bit characters made sense.

On such systems, file names could still use 6-bit characters, while applications used 9-bit ones. Also, some instructions could work on words, half words, quarter words, or sixth words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I knew someone at United that once offered to give me a tour of one of their data centers: "It is like a computer museum - we have one of everything." Hard to imagine that they would have problems as a result. United is a really, really bad airline.

</comment><comment><USER15> I bet this is an issue with an old mainframe used somewhere in the booking system, something that has worked well but is difficult to fix when things go wrong.

I think there is / will be a lot of money to be made trying to solve the problem of software security and reliability. This is obviously an extremely difficult problem, however the number of ancient systems that we currently have interconnected I think more large scale outages like this are inevitable.

<comment><USER16> Truth is that most reservation systems are built on TPF and it isn't really easy to replace.

<comment><USER17> just in case we have readers to whom TPF isn't a household name: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facility)

<comment><USER18> That sounds like a heck of a system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Official status page: [http://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/jsp/summary_sys.jsp](http://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/jsp/summary_sys.jsp)

Currently says:

        ATCSCC  ADVZY 027 DCC 07/08/15 UAL GROUND STOP REVISION
        DESTINATION AIRPORT: ALL AIRPORTS
        FACILITIES INCLUDED: ALL FACILITIES
        GROUND STOP PERIOD: 08/1200Z - 08/1315Z
        REASON: USER REQUEST AUTOMATION ISSUES

<comment><USER20> Good to see the Sun Microsystems favicon on the FAA status page - not seen one of those for a while!

<comment><USER21> Last one I noticed was the FCC's comment system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ouch. And only a month after another major systems outage: [http://www.wired.com/2015/06/united-flights-grounded- mysteri...](http://www.wired.com/2015/06/united-flights-grounded-mysterious- problem/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Was reading this on HN and heard it on NPR simultaneously.

I have a sneaking suspicion that booking systems for most airlines run atop legacyware. It just seems like the type of thing that would've been put in place long ago and then be very expensive to migrate/updgrade.

<comment><USER24> Oh, it's not a suspicion.

[http://www.pacbiztimes.com/2012/04/06/united-takes-a-step- ba...](http://www.pacbiztimes.com/2012/04/06/united-takes-a-step-back-in-time- by-adopting-outdated-system/)

<comment><USER23> > The biggest problem, one that would drive any tech-savvy user crazy, is that > United junked an award-winning, state-of-the-art reservation system and > adopted the Continental Airlines model based on older technology known as > System One.

Well, that answers that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not a word about it on United's web site. Flight status page doesn't load correctly. "Today's Operations" gives an error message. United's Twitter is silent.

Meanwhile news articles and twitter complaints abound. [http://mashable.com/2015/07/08/united-computer-problems- flig...](http://mashable.com/2015/07/08/united-computer-problems-flights- grounded)

</comment><comment><USER26> United is a mess. I had the misfortune of flying with them a couple months ago. I ended up in a city a 2 hour drive from my actual destination and had to rent a car on my own to get to where I was going.

That was the worst of it, but almost every flight I saw on the way (both ones I was on and other flights at nearby gates) was delayed or overbooked or otherwise messed up in some way.

<comment><USER27> If I ever listened to horror stories like these, there wouldn't be an airline left I would fly with. This is textbook; replace United with Delta, Southwest, Air Canada, etc., at will. The only company I've used that I haven't heard exactly this type of complaint about is Widerøe, a tiny regional line in Norway with a fleet of prop planes. This is unfortunate, as I live in Pennsylvania and get motion sickness on those little aircraft. And I imagine that if I spoke Norwegian—it seemed to me that while many Norwegians speak English, they don't do much complaining in it when the native language would do—I wouldn't even have Widerøe left.

<comment><USER28> Overall JetBlue and Virgin have been great. AA and US Air have been good. United is the worst.

<comment><USER29> AA destroyed a piece of baggage of mine. They denied responsibility. I sued and won. Then I couldn't collect because that judgement was essentially nullified because AA was going through bankruptcy.

I have 1k status with United -- I fly internationally with them almost monthly. The problems I've had with United have been when bags have to be interlined to Brussels Airlines and occasionally (surprisingly) Lufthansa. I've also had Lufthansa somehow think it was a good idea for 2 toddlers to sit in scattered seats rows away from their parents (who were also rows apart as well, despite having checked in almost 24 hours before the flight and being Star Alliance Gold.) I've had Brussels Airlines say they were going to "gate check" a stroller only to have it show up days later. I've been stranded in Detroit back in the Northwest Airlines days when aircrews hadn't showed up to work. I've been stuck in Paris when the Air France pilots decide that salaries up to $300,000 per year just aren't enough. On a recent United trip from Hartford to Marseille, I was stuck in Hartford for % extra hours for an airplane that was stuck in Newark (just a <50 minute flight away.) I then missed a cascade of connections leaving me rather miserable. However, United sorted the problem and got me on my way as quickly as possible. Let's not forget Jet Blues antics on multiple occasions a few years ago: a 10.5 hour tarmac delay, a 7 hour tarmac delay among several other extremely long tarmac delays. AA had 14 long tarmac (over 3 hours) delays in February. United had zero long tarmac delays during the same period. Envoy/American Eagle was in last place for on-time arrivals last year.

I'm not defending United. I'm not disparaging the others. The fact is that the air transport industry is extremely complex and perceptions of quality are as varied as their are passengers in the sky.

Every airline sucks and every airline is great. Pick a day, pick a destination and roll the dice. When you fly often enough it seems like it all averages out to just one level of melancholic service; unless you're flying on Singapore Airlines -- then it just becomes sublime.

<comment><USER30> That's not accurate about the Air France pilots -- they were striking because the airline was moving to replace them with cheaper pilots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What does "all airports" mean? Global or just US domestic?

<comment><USER21> US domestic would be my guess. ie: All airports under FAA authority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Very little news about this on Google News, but heard over the local Chicago ABC affiliate that the FAA attributed this to an "automation error"

Edit: And its Twitter account has been relatively inactive, with more than 30 minutes since the last reply-to or general tweet...presumably a lot complaining tweets have come in in the last 30 minutes [https://twitter.com/united/with_replies](https://twitter.com/united/with_replies)

<comment><USER5> Just a minute ago they tweeted about it: [https://twitter.com/united/status/618769524544942081](https://twitter.com/united/status/618769524544942081)

<comment><USER33> Took them until just now to go "oh, we should probably post something that isn't a @reply".

[https://twitter.com/united/status/618777538865799168](https://twitter.com/united/status/618777538865799168)

<comment><USER21> I bet they could have saved themselves untold numbers of telephone calls in the support queue, and thousands of in-person queries to ticket agents and other airport staff with one or two tweets and a facebook post or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting bits:

"Departing DEN; taxied and then returned to gate. Pilot says nationwide failure of "three or four" computer systems. Only information from airport staff is that since the computers are down UAL can't book pax onto any other airline ..."

"Systemwide Ground Stop posted at FAA: Due to USER REQUEST DUE TO AUTOMATION ISSUES. UAL AND SUBS ONLY., departure traffic destined to ALL airport will not be allowed to depart until at or after 13:15 UTC."

</comment><comment><USER35> How do you know it's a glitch(whatever that means) and not a big problem such as a data center outage or hacker caused?

<comment><USER36> Yeah, "glitch" seems to imply something minor, while this seems anything but.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Considering just yesterday their flight system didn't believe they flew from SFO for 2+ hours in the morning (I have screenshots), i'm not all that shocked.

</comment><comment><USER38> Currently in the air on a United flight, EWR -> SFO. Took off at 7:30ish. No mention of this in the airport or on the plane. Yikes

</comment><comment><USER39> "Automation error" rings a funny bell in my head, since I'm currently re- reading "A Fire Upon The Deep".

</comment><comment><USER40> Is anyone familiar with the UA tech stack? I'd be curious to see what they're running.

<comment><USER41> They're running SHARES internally; most everything else is specific applications with hooks into shares for data processing and return.

<comment><USER42> Lol HP system. I used to work for SABRE, its far more dependable despite its antiquity. HP is a marginal player in this market which is dominated by SABRE and Amadeus.

<comment><USER43> Were they a good employer? Sane codebase?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I was able to get checked in via the United android App around 9am ET.

</comment><comment><USER45> Perhaps someone wasn't following the bug bounty rules?

</comment><comment><USER46> Off-topic: Please use ISO 8601 format(YYYY-MM-DD) for dates in titles. The US date format hurts my poor logical soul.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601)

<comment><USER47> There's little endian, big endian, and the US date format, which I like to call middle endian.

<comment><USER2> Well, to attribute that to SHARES, we should go with big endian ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Let's just be thankful that we haven't had a major air-based catastrophe due to an outage or hacking!

<comment><USER49> Planes with pilots in them are mostly autonomous and can avoid each other as well as the ground.

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

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberlingen_mid- air_collis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberlingen_mid- air_collision#TCAS_and_conflicting_orders)

<comment><USER2> Yes, mostly.

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

<comment><USER50> I wouldn't get on a Russia autonomous flight for a million dollars. Between the corruption, hackey engineering, and complete disregard for safety standards, Russian accidents surprise no one. The Tu-154 accident list is long and scary. Hell, look at all the fires that broke out.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-154#Incidents_and_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-154#Incidents_and_accidents)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> That's twice in a short time now - 'coincidence' on Ian Fleming's scale. A third time is enemy action. Airlines do seem like a pretty juicy target for cyber war operations - you can cause a gigantic amount of disruption with a successful attack on a single system.

<comment><USER52> That seems like quite a leap given how often complex computer systems fail without any malicious act.

<comment><USER53> Indeed. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)</comment></comment></comment>


How to raise money: it's a journey not an event - <AUTHOR> https://steveblank.com/2020/02/26/how-to-raise-money-its-a-journey-not-an-event/ <comment><USER2> Looking at those numbers, it seems like VC focus exclusively on high risk - high reward companies. What do the businesses do that have less risk and less reward but where a portfolio of these companies can make the same average profits?

I am thinking of the Ben and Jerrys [1] kind of businesses. Apart from getting loans, is there a way for them to rise money?

[1] [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy- letter-i-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben- and-jerrys-vs-amazon/)

<comment><USER3> If you don't take high risk you can't have high returns.

<comment><USER4> Why not? You can have a lot of "potential energy" stored up and make sure you don't fail because you have endless opportunities to try high-return ventures.

This happens because software has near-zero marginal cost to copy.

Take for example [https://worldaftercapital.com](https://worldaftercapital.com) written by a VC

Or [https://qbix.com/token](https://qbix.com/token) ecosystem which aims to achieve a new economic model for open source projects

<comment><USER5> I agree with this skepticism. There is no strict link between high risk and high return.

Microsoft was not high risk (as noted by Gates), and it provided a return that is so large it might as well be off the scale for the purposes of this discussion (their market cap was recently up around $1.3 trillion; Gates will have pulled over a hundred billion dollars out of his ownership in the company over ~45-50 years).

\- Microsoft had very high margins from the beginning. They operated thin and were very cash rich within the first few years. Just a few years in, Gates had Microsoft hoarding multiple $500,000 government bonds (~$1.5m in today's money) from accumulated profit, because they were already very profitable (there is a story about the secretary misplacing one of these bonds).

\- Microsoft was founded for relatively little money - $10,000 - and with zero outside VC money. Gates & Allen came up with that capital from working various industry jobs in the prior years.

\- They nailed down a serious customer (MITS) and then founded a company, rather than the other way around (found a company and then try to find business for it).

\- Sales went from $16,000 in 1976 (first months of operation), to $8m for 1980, and $17m in 1981 with 40 employees ($17m is $50m inflation adjusted). Three years in they were gushing cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have experience seeking funding from games publishers? How similar/different is it from VC fundraising?

<comment><USER7> I've never heard of that. Interesting. Is that a thing?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Convincing teacher on Python vs VB.net [an update] - <AUTHOR>

Thanks a ton for the responses in the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1885594).
I have now found out that the main reason he would rather do VB.net is because he isn't sure that it Python is easy to use databases with (SQL I'm guessing).
Being a non-programmer currently, I am not really sure, but I would assume that it is just as easy to interact with SQL through Python compared to VB.net?
Could anyone write something that I could show or relay to him? <comment><USER2> Yes, it is very easy to interact with databases from Python. There are libraries available for all of the popular DB engines, as well as great database abstraction layers like <http://www.sqlalchemy.org/>

Depending on how much of a non-programmer you are, it might be worth investing the time learning to write a basic script which interacts with a database. Writing this in both Python and VB.net should demonstrate that the task is simple enough in either language.

If you manage to convince him that Python can access DBs as simply as VB.net, I suspect he will come up with yet another reason why he prefers VB - in my experience, people always shift the goalposts in situations like this. Once you have answered about ten of these 'objections', he will probably put his foot down and say 'Well, I still say we use VB.net, and I am the teacher, so deal with it".

</comment><comment><USER3> While I do not know VB.net at all, or how hard or easy it is to access databases with it, Python has quite a few modules to ease DB access.

<http://www.sqlalchemy.org/> would be a good starting point, in my opinion.</comment>


The Linguistic Interface - <AUTHOR> http://lubutu.com/soso/the-linguistic-interface

<comment><USER2> This has strong similarity to the thesis of the classic article "The Anti-Mac Interface": <http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html>

The connection to the ideas in the Kingdom of Nouns, though, is new and intriguing. It's obvious only in hindsight that job-specific apps can be thought of as nouns, while unix-style tools can be thought of as verbs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another way to think about it is that a shell has some of the same advantages as functional programming. In particular, everything is easily composable. Taking small primitives and combining them systematically leads to significant expressivity. This is an important advantage over GUI apps which are not really composable in any consistent way.

<comment><USER4> > _GUI apps which are not really composable in any consistent way._

Production-biased GUI apps not being composable and linkable is a consequence of the political economy of software production dictated by their makers; not an inherent trait of the GUI as a form.

Some related reading:

<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NoApplication>

[http://openendedgroup.com/index.php/2007/10/17/using- photosh...](http://openendedgroup.com/index.php/2007/10/17/using-photoshop-is- writing-code/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previously by the author: "Ivo – a reimagined Unix terminal system" - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3300264>

</comment><comment><USER5> The piece reads like an extended explanation of the saw "Unix is user- friendly, just very particular about its friends." And well-done -

A real-world analog is being in a foreign place where you don't speak the native tongue. You're thirsty and need to use the bathroom. You'll likely be able to make your point through pantomime or by mimicking "language with an arrangement of pictographs," but knowing the correct vocabulary and syntax would get you there much more quickly. Needs more complex than water or water closet would be difficult or impossible to express without the verbal language.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating article. I hadn't thought of the noun-verb analogy you made.</comment>


Ask HN: iPhone Chips vs. App experience - <AUTHOR> It is really great to see Apple announcing A14 Bionic chips with 5nm architecture... on the other hand, my iPhone 11 Pro still struggles to scroll Twitter (mostly text, a few auto-playing videos)...
Why is app optimization still such a poor experience? and what is the purpose of even faster chips when Software optimization still suffers like that...? Shouldn't list scrolling be better understood by now?
As a developer myself (but not a mobile developer) things like that feel incredible frustrating. <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law)</comment>