Say Something Nice About Every Language You've Used - <AUTHOR> http://blog.darevay.com/2010/12/say-something-nice-about-every-language-youve-used

<comment><USER4> English - The language I know best, at least in terms of reading/writing. A wonderfully expressive language.

Hebrew - My "mother tongue". Much smaller than English, but it's the language I use every day (in the real world, I mean.)

Spanish - A language I'm learning (pretty good at already). Very lyrical, very fun to speak. Exists in many countries, which certainly helps when travelling the world. Also, having a written language system which is phonetic, i.e. corresponds _exactly_ to how you're speaking, is so much better.

Russian - A language I'm starting to learn. Very difficult. Honestly, it doesn't sound as good as some other languages, but it is very fun to actually speak. Lots of unique sounds that you don't find in other languages, and they're really fun to make.

French - I barely know the language but I've learned a bit, and I'm planning to learn more. Very difficult, but it is a beautiful sounding language.

</comment><comment><USER5> BASIC - Got me started, taught me how to think like a programmer

C++ - Fun in a perverse sort of way, especially when using templates

C - Fast, simple, elegant, perfect

Java - Great keyboarding practice. I touch type because of it

PHP - I don't have to use it anymore

Smalltalk - Huh, so this is basically Inception?

Lisp - Promoted good beard growth.

Erlang - I now have an idea of how to go about building a telecom company

Perl - Because brainfuck was too legible

Python - Show me on the doll where TIMTOWTDI touched you

Ruby - How do you feel about writing psuedocode and then executing it (albeit very slowly)

Assembly - Helped me get into character for an 80s night party

</comment><comment><USER6> Programming language of aunt's calculator: turned a calculator (boring) into something you can program (cool!). Editing was tedious, so it made me figure it out on paper first (good thing!).

ZX Spectrum Basic - at your fingertips mere fractions of a second after powerup. Can your Eclipse do that?

Z80 assembly language - so fast and so powerful. Magic knowledge for gaining infinite lives in games.

Pascal - structured programming and type safety for the win.

C - nothing in your way, the only limit is yourself ;)

C++ - it has classes!

OCaml - the pinnacle of type safety without typing the types (excuse the pun). And its fast.

Smalltalk - all you need to know about the object-oriented paradigm is there.

Java - Has libraries for everything.

Delphi - I think it's still the fastest way for putting together a decent looking windows GUI app.

Python - I couldn't put it better than: <http://xkcd.com/353/>

Clojure - its constructs for concurrent programming are life changing. And it's a Lisp. With extra readability for the parentheses-challenged. With a very well thought out standard lib.

</comment><comment><USER7> In Order: Logo: HOLY SHIT I'M 8 AND I CAN MAKE THE COMPUTER DO SHIT! QBasic: Easy to get started and allowed me to write text games for myself

AGT: DOUBLE HOLY SHIT I CAN WRITE MY OWN TEXT ADVENTURES?! ZZTOOP: You gave the gamers a language to write their own levels. Freaking Schweet.

VB 4: Having controls is kinda nice!

Delphi: I don't remember much. I think I liked... That I was better then anyone else in my highschool class.

Java: Lots of libraries and lots of people in the ecosystem. Plus, I got good at typing.

Motorola Assembler: Hackity Hack! Whoo, LEDS! Made me appreciate higher level constructs, and also gave me a greater understanding of CPUs and how I am really standing on the shoulders of giants.

C: Very powerful access to the OS.

Haskell: Functional Programming hurt my brain but gave me an appreciation for the elegant.

Prolog: I just love the "Define Solution: Get Implementation" nature of Prolog.

Groovy: Having live scripting makes it much easier to do work with JMeter, which is otherwise annoying difficult.

Ruby: Makes things easy, unverbose.

C#: Lots of libraries, more cool language features in every version, the best IDE I've ever used. Not as verbose as Java but just as accepted.

Scala: Woah. SO much fun. I'm really liking how enjoyable and _simple_ it makes solving problems. My new favourite toy.

</comment><comment><USER8> Lua: Amazing how much you can accomplish in a tiny language that has just one data structure.

Perl: Proof that line noise can be executed.

PHP: A simple language for simple people.

FORTRAN: Accounts of its death are exaggerated.

COBOL: Still the world's biggest code base.

Erlang: When 5 9's just isn't enough.

Haskell: It will make you look leet.

J: Brevity is the soul of wit.

Forth: RPN great is.

</comment><comment><USER9> Basic: I love the 80s

Pascal: Wait, I can create my own types? HOT DAMN

Python: Incredible, no matter how untidy it is it still works

JavaScript: Ditto but faster

Visual Basic: admit it, that was an awesome IDE, especially for 1993

Excel Macro Language: before VB, Excel had macros in cells and you could do weird things with them. I wrote a really nice tax avoidance system in it for a bank once.

C: I don't know why I waited so long to take it up./n Unfriendly string handling offset by beauty of economy./n/n

x86 assembler: My, you're versatile.

56k assembler: Computers are so much more fun when you don't need an operating system

This thread: quite educational actually. I should go back and look at Lua.

</comment><comment><USER10> PHP - Everyone seems to hate you, but you've managed to help me get every job done. You may be a pain in the ass at times, but I love you and I'm sticking by your side.

</comment><comment><USER11> Lisa Assembler: I was really young and only capable of typing in examples from the manual and books I had taken out of the library. I liked the pre-made graphics routines best.

GWBASIC/QBASIC: I had lots of fun making games with these languages. It was very easy to conceptualize a program as a sequence of steps at that age.

C/C++: I'd bought one of those "Learn to Program Games in 24 Hours" books. It took a little longer than that with school and everything, but my friends thought it was pretty cool.

Perl: Wow. You changed everything. I started to think about programming as a _language_ rather than a set of formal instructions. I had a lot of fun making games, bots, and my first "web log" script.

PHP: I had given up programming for a while when I decided I wanted to get into music. But when that failed I was able to pick you up and walk into a job that really turned things around for me and kicked off my career. You were really easy to learn.

Python: You introduced me to concepts I hadn't heard of before in a way that was approachable.

Lisp: You spoiled me. I love conditions and restarts, CLOS, and real symbolic debugging. I come home to you after a long day of work and smile. You make programming fun.

</comment><comment><USER12> In order of appearance

\- Logo/hypercard. My highschool doens't even own a pc at this point as I command the turtle around

\- True Basic. Fast forward to the line-number free future. Also the birth of my first project, an implementation of ELISA.

\- Pascal. Let there be types! Also runs on a computer I can actually buy myself so I am no longer dependent on daddies apple. Also the first language my dad doesn't know. Both important factors if you are 14.

\- VHDL. Wow so this is how my VCR works.

\- Miranda. Met a hacker who managed to make pacman with it.

\- Assembler/C. Wow so this is how my computer actually works

\- Java. super('let there be objects')

\- PHP, breading ground of the "read php.net - code a zillion lines - <USER2> pretzel" SE methodology. Also pays bills.

\- Matlab. Working with images never was easier. Nurses unique coding skills through skillful (miss) use of find or cumprod.

\- Python. New found partner, we are in the exiting and slightly scary 'getting to know each other" period

</comment><comment><USER13> A great conversation starter. Something that I wanted to read about for sometime in HN. Hopefully more HNers will drop a word or more here

</comment><comment><USER14> Logo - first taught me that computers were programmable. that little turtle actually went where I told it to!

BASIC - Forget the turtle, this machine can actually do real stuff - interaction, graphics, solving my rubik's cube. For a young kid, the declarative style of programming was simple enough to make sense

FORTRAN77 - First taught me to think about how data was stored and the difference between the value and the address (and pointer arithmetic).

C - What can you say about C? It's the fundamental building block.

MIPS Assembly - At the end of the day, you've got to move bits and bytes around in registers. Programming assembly taught me how that all works.

LISP - opened my eyes to recursion and functional programming. moreso, it first showed me that programs could be elegant.

Python - It's fast and easy to read. I can show a program to non-programmers, and they can often get the gist of what it's doing. Python code is the most "readable" code I've written.

</comment><comment><USER15> Basic: easy enough for me to write silly scripts on the old Apple at the back of the classroom

Pascal: you kept me from falling in love with programming before I declared Physics

Mathematica: your ability to solve symbolic equations is astounding

IDL: you made it easy for me to produce ugly graphics and served as my union card with astronomers

Perl: you helped me get to python so much faster

C: getting good at you encouraged me to learn more about development best practices. basic debugging and version control make me a coding mastermind relative to my peers.

S-Lang: you convinced me of the horrible dangers of Not Invented Here

C++: you've kindly stayed out of code I've needed to do serious work with

Python: you've got so many packages, half of my work is already done. Plus you painlessly taught me some OOP!

</comment><comment><USER16> HP's RPN calculator - Wrote my first fractal calculation on it.

ZX Spectrum BASIC - "PEEK" and "POKE" to write into graphics memory.

GW BASIC - Loved "BEEP" and "PLAY". Made first toy music program.

MS Quick Basic - No line numbers! Yay! (compared to GW BASIC)

Pascal - Blazingly fast compilation! (compared to just about anything else)

C - The warm feeling of being close to the metal.

C++ - Destructor evaluation upon stack unwind.

Haskell - Beautiful syntax. If you can compile your program, it'll probably run as you expect it to.

Scheme - Just me and my code play. Nothing comes in between. Not even the parens.

Smalltalk - Late binding - messages live separately from objects and classes.

Erlang - My first intro to message passing concurrency.

</comment><comment><USER17> C: Simple and powerful.

C++: Nice library (STL) and RAII.

Java: Simple and fast enough for most tasks.

Bash: Great Swiss knife scripting.

Perl: Great all purpose hacking language.

Python: Is a very expressive language.

Ruby: Simple and expressive language.

Lisp: Clean, flexible, and beautiful.

ML: A very expressive language. Lots of fun.

Prolog: A kind of magic.

COBOL: It's Turing complete.

Pascal: It's Turing complete.

DBase: It's Turing complete.

Fortran: Short but better than a priory expected relationship.

GWBasic: A toy, lots of fun back in the day.

Visual Basic: It's Turing complete.

HTML: It's simple.

Javascript: Extrange but powerful language.

PHP: Useful for getting the job done.

z80 assembly: Not bad for the money.

6502 assembly: Simple and beautiful.

8086 assembly: Could be worse.

68000 assembly: Resourceful.

i386 assembly: Could be worse.

x86_64 assembly: Ugly as always but with more registers.

MIPS assembly: Lots of registers (32i, 32f), nice syntax.

PowerPC assembly: Lots of registers (32i, 32f), nice syntax.

ARM assembly: Just 16 registers, but very expresive instructions.

Spanish: A rude but phonetic-honest language (mother tongue).

Catalan: As musical as French, as simple as Spanish.

French: I like how it sounds.

Italian: I like its rithm.

English: Simple and beautiful language.

German: I like its grammar.

Latin: For Rome!

</comment><comment><USER18> PHP. My first language was a web language, not basic or anything like normal people. It just came naturally to me while learning html/css in 6th-7th grade, when I realized I could make online games. It's really fun for people who don't know programming.

Javascript. I can send stuff without refreshing my page using AJAX? Sweet deal.

Java. They teach it in schools, so what the heck. I learned recursion and objects with it!

Ruby. Is. Love. MVC, scaffolding, etc etc was introduced to me through rails. omg why does PHP look ugly all of a sudden?

Perl. I backtracked to learn about CGI. Helped that its syntax had similarities to PHP. Useful tool language for processing stuff especially text.

C++. Whoa I can get programs to run that fast?! Whoa I understand pointers, omp & tbb, and cool low-level stuff!

MIPS. Well, it was useful for learning pipelining.

Python. Useful/sweet language that everyone seems to be all over at least on campuses, but I discovered Ruby first so python was kind of "what's the big deal I can do this in ruby" for me.

Clojure. My first lisp! So weird. Cool? You're supposed to be good at parallel stuff, I can't wait to learn more about you.

</comment><comment><USER19> In roughly chronological order

Apple II Basic - the computer has programming built right in

Hypercard - designing a GUI by point and click is nice

C - there's very little between programmer and computer

C++ - you can have more between you and the computer when and only when you want it

PHP - deploying web apps is about as easy as deploying static pages

Javascript - prototypes less verbose than class definitions

Common Lisp - I still haven't used a more powerful language

Scheme - executable simplicity

OCaml - type safety can actually work, and need not be verbose

Ruby - did somebody do a usability study on a programming language?

Forth - low-level expressive and possible is

Python - other people's code is almost always readable

Lua - small, simple, expressive and fast can coexist

Arc - <USER3>

Clojure - the sanest way I've seen to get a computer to do ten things at once

Haskell - I've never seen an easier way to write a parser

Java - lack of power means the IDE can do half the work for me

Actionscript - at least it has closures

</comment><comment><USER20> In chronological order:

GW-BASIC - As a twelve-year-old, I could just sit down and write programs that worked.

QBASIC - I could pretty much take out the line numbers of the programs I'd written and compile them. Heady stuff.

Pascal - Easy enough to learn by myself with the help of a reference.

Turbo C - you could make pull-down windows!

VBScript - After a decade away from programming, I quickly discovered I already knew most of what I need to build dynamic websites.

VB6 - building applications with a full-fledged IDE is nice.

JavaScript - A compact, mostly-good language made much better through libraries like jQuery.

SQL - conceptually hard at first, but the natural-language syntax really helps.

Python - finally, a language that lets me think in executable code.

C# - it's well-documented.

PHP - it doesn't _actually_ drown kittens.

</comment><comment><USER13> Flirting with languages

BASIC: in an Amstrad CPC6128 for providing lottery pseudo-random numbers for my grandfather. I liked the GOTO. Learning what is a manual

Logo(?): make a square. the word turtle

Pascal: for teaching me that there is a thing called data structure, my first language in college

C: for discovering the archetypal textbook in KR

HTML: simple reminded me of the Basic days

Java: making a window with an active button is not rocket science. What is a class

Matlab: my PhD favorite tool. I was obsessed with its figures

TeX: for giving awesome output. HTML,BASIC experience. addictive

Python: for being my new Matlab the community

Lisp: thanks for surviving, I will stick to you

</comment><comment><USER21> C++: taught me life lessons the hard way, but made me a better programmer for it.

C#: Does everything and gets better with age.

Java: Let's face it - making a version of "Snake" using Swing was a hell of a lot easier than doing it with the console.

VB: Thanks for paying for my first car and at least one internship in college

PHP: The best one night stand I ever had.

MIPS Assembly: I never appreciated loops until I had to rebuild one using you.

ML: Thanks for failing out at least two of my classmates during Programming Languages - I didn't like them anyway.

LISP: Just keep adding parentheses...

Perl: I never really understood you, but you gave me my first test of web dev.

</comment><comment><USER22> HTML: Best markup language ever.

</comment><comment><USER23> There is a site for that: <http://mytechne.com/>

You will also be able to say something nice about your Operating Systems and Text Editors.

</comment><comment><USER24> French - mother tongue, nuff' said.

English - probably the language I'm reading the most...

Spanish - nice language, I should practice it a bit more. I've put spanish books in my e-reader.

Italian - almost too easy. I probably should learn the grammar, though.

German - I know very little of it, but I manage to read some bits. Funny language.

Latin - nothing beats latin. Particularly Caesar and Horatio.

Greek - I should probably work it a bit, particularly the grammar. I like reading Greek theater aloud (with a terrible accent of course).

BASIC - first programming language I've learnt. I know I've been burnt forever somehow :)

Z80 assembler - Rodney Zacks' book is so great. I liked this language, though primitive is was.

Turbo Pascal - a nightmare, I hated it. It's what I was taught in college, and I hated the homework, but the language actually is quite nice.

C - I never used it enough to be comfortable with it. Someday...

Perl - learnt it almost by accident. Love it. Nothing beats the Swiss army chainsaw.

Visual Basic - used it for 5 months in some troubled circumstances. Wasn't as bad as it could have been.

PHP - I too, did the mistake to start a quick and dirty hack that ended into some 20000 LOC monster. The horror.

HTML, Javascript - know my way through it, but never managed to like it. Unavoidable nowadays, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER25> COBOL... You paid the bills for awhile.

</comment><comment><USER26> visual basic - got me to start programming

c++ - umm, made me learn gdb, code formatting and good editor

c - best thing for low level stuff

pascal - easy, painless

ocaml - rewired my brain for thinking functional

common lisp - rewired my brain once again, fun to write

java - this is what c++ should be

python - fun! gets things done

ruby - blocks are fun

bash - cant imagine linux without it

</comment><comment><USER27> php: ah now I really know that html isn't programming VB: look when I click submit the stuff from the form prints C: Pointer are awesome spezially when you know how they work and the other people in the class dont :) C#: Array list rock if your used to C arrays Dylan: OO done write Clojure: Wow. FP is much better then OO. Wow. Lisp is as cool as I thought it is. Wow. Concurency made easy :)

</comment><comment><USER28> English: helps me get around, lots of cool curse words.

Japanese: was able to ask for the restroom in Tokyo, and got some cute girls giggling at me

BASIC: got me started in programming

Visual Basic: Let me make some fun desktop apps, like my Special Ed sound board with prank call capabilities. Also taught me I really needed to get back to using Macs.

Real Basic: Let me make some apps on the Mac like I did with Visual Basic. Then made me realize I didn't like using environments like VB and RB anywhere.

html: Got me started in web development.

javascript: Taught me that frameworks are freaking awesome and to love prototypal OO languages.

php: Sorry, I used it for years and it just taught me to orient towards frontend work. Hell, I can't even get a cute girl to giggle with php, so what's the use?

python: Dear Python, I just wanted to let you know how much I love you. You are such a great language. So simple and straightforward, so easy to understand and to get along with. Its like we were made for each other. I get along with you so much better than my old partner, php.

</comment><comment><USER29> OK I fail the challenge - I used VB6 briefly and I can't think of _anything_ pleasant (or even polite) to say about it.

</comment><comment><USER30>
        Python taught me about list comprehensions and bound methods.

     I've never played with Python before, and I'm trying and failing to understand what bound methods are. Could anyone explain them?

</comment><comment><USER31> (started out chronological, then became stream of consciousness)

QBasic. Got me started, simple and easy to learn.

Java. While verbose, your libraries are second to none. You taught me event driven programming and were the vessel for many of my future endeavors

C. Fast, clean, powerful. I enjoy working with you when I can.

C#. A clone of Java! Your libraries are a bit different from Java, but when I got to know you, I found out you're not so bad after all :)

MIPS. There's something empowering about thinking at as low a level as you

Lisp(CLisp,emacslisp). Elegant, clean, brief. You have great power. Some day I need to dust off my parenthesis and try self-modifying code in you.

netlogo. Erm ... well, it was really easy to create complex systems using you!

Prolog. You are the most unique language I've ever worked with, period.

verilog. It was neat working ~that~ low a level! python. Working with you is like sex. Everything I want to do with you happens so intuitively, I love it.

Google's Go. Your type system is beautiful. I hope to work with you more in the future.

HTML. you're intuitive and straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER32> C++: this got me into computers

Mumps: didn't ruin my life, just a year of it

VB6: wow you could get a lot of pretty productive stuff done quickly

Matlab: This is how math on a computer should be written.

R: Convinced me there is nothing better than a long lived environment with repl which preserves state. In fact, this is how all code should be written. Also demonstrates open source and provide the best software at least in technical niches.

Java: convinced me garbage collection is good and made me a much better typist.

Ruby: wow you can get a lot of work done quickly -- at least in dev time.

Scala: this is what java should be</comment>


Slack is now the fastest-growing workplace software ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/31/7135639/slack-is-now-the-fastest-growing-workplace-software-ever

<comment><USER2> Who comes up with these names? Don't they realize that Slackware (which is now 21 years old) is commonly called Slack?</comment>


Tell HN:  Heroku is Down (update: recovering as of 10PM PST) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The AWS status page[1] is showing problems for EC2 East as of a few minutes ago. This <strike>might be</strike> is a more widespread issue.

EDIT: Various non-Heroku EC2-East-based sites (e.g. Quora) seem to be down as well, lending more evidence to this being an EC2/EBS outage.

1: <http://status.aws.amazon.com/>

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity do we know if <http://status.aws.amazon.com/> is hosted on AWS?

<comment><USER4> It's a key design constraint of status.aws.amazon.com that it not depend on any AWS services. (Or so I've heard.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dear Heroku -- I know it's my job to make sure my site is available (/thread). However, I think I speak for most enterprise customers when I say I will throw money at your company the second you come up with a multi-zone/highly- available.

<comment><USER6> I spoke to one of the guys from Heroku recently and he said they are working on it but he couldn't give me a date.

It couldn't come soon enough for us, but also for Heroku as AppFog seem to have its foundations built on a multi-zone/region/provider architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone should take a page from the book of Netflix right now. It's pretty embarrassing to be anyone that's entirely down and can't do a thing about it due to an EC2 outage.

How do you explain to your customers/users/etc that you were down and have absolutely no control of when you will be back online? How can you explain it to yourself?

<comment><USER8> Because this shit is really hard especially when you're trying to build a product at the same time.

It's not like you can just wake up one day and say "I'm gonna go build a fully fault tolerant distributed system that works across multiple data centers!" and then you're done by the time you go to sleep.

Go actually talk to some Netflix engineers. They'll tell you the same thing.

<comment><USER9> Yes, you're absolutely right. However, Netflix is distributed across multiple AZ, while Heroku has spent the last two years after their $212MM acquisition in the same AZ.

That makes it sound like Netflix has a more reliable platform than the PaaS company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Their uptime percentage is 99.97%, but I'm having a hard time fighting the recency effect that is telling me to get off the platform ASAP.

<comment><USER11> I just got up (it's morning in Israel), and a client of mine in the US with a major, mission-critical application was screaming (rightly so) that things are down.

We're already looking into alternatives -- perhaps not leaving Heroku altogether, but certainly not depending on them 100 percent. There's no way that we can entrust the business to something that can just catastrophically fail at any moment. I've been running my own servers for years, and they've never had such unpredictable issues.

I increasingly have to think that a few servers, on different providers, with the application deployed via Capistrano, will be more fault-tolerant than Heroku. At least, it seems that way right now.

<comment><USER12> > There's no way that we can entrust the business to something that can just > catastrophically fail at any moment.

Anything, including service providers, can catastrophically fail at any moment. Fault-tolerant architectures are based on redundancy (including infrastructure provider redundancy, as you mention), not on "guaranteed" SLAs.

<comment><USER13> Provider redundancy goes against the concept of PaaS IMO (ignoring the sci-fi future where there are multiple 100% compatible providers). Heroku needs to become internally redundant to really live up to its promise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've had so much more downtime with heroku/AWS than I ever had back when I was running my sites on slicehost.

I also feel like I've let my admin skills deteriorate because I've been dependent on heroku. Back when I was running everything myself, worst case scenario I could set up a new VPS from a backup in another datacenter. Now if heroku goes out I just have to twiddle my thumbs while I wait for updates.

<comment><USER15> ...or you can keep on working knowing that your services will be magically back online without you lifting a finger.

<comment><USER7> except for any potential data loss that just happened

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's the Heroko status site: <https://status.heroku.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like someone posted a link to a project that made self-hosting a previously Heroku hosted site simple, but I can't find it now...

...would be cool if there was a Linux package (or distro) that you could boot- up and then just change your git remote to and have your app up-and-running on your own hardware.

<comment><USER18> I made Dokuen a few weeks ago, maybe that's what you're thinking of? If you're willing to live with a few warts, it's working pretty well for my personal use. My blog is still on Heroku so you can't really read about it now, but you can check out the code.

<https://github.com/peterkeen/dokuen>

<comment><USER19> I saw this a while ago and will actually be using it very shortly to deploy 3-4 internal apps on our own mini cloud. I love Heroku and can't stand all of the open source "alternatives" like Cloud Foundry. Yours is exactly what I wanted and I can't wait to really start using it and contributing via github! Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If Heroku moved off of AWS they'd have better uptime and lower prices.

<comment><USER20> That'd depend where they moved to, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER19> At their size they need to be running and managing their own hardware. I'd use them more if it wasn't hundreds of dollars a month to host a few apps that might not be up when my customers are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can we get this title renamed to AWS outage as the problem is not Heroku.

<comment><USER22> It may be an AWS outage as the cause, but ultimately it's Heroku's problem. They're the ones touting:

      "Erosion-resistant architecture.

       Heroku takes full responsibility for your app's health,
       keeping it up and running through thick and thin..."

The thick happened today, something eroded, and people are holding them to their word: full responsibility for their app's health. Heroku could do load balancing between multiple independent providers rather than be solely dependent on [one region of?] AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another update from Amazon: "9:55 PM PDT We have identified the issue and are currently working to bring effected instances and volumes in the impacted Availability Zone back online. We continue to see increased API error rates and latencies in the US-East-1 Region." Been thinking that maybe most startups are seeing that cloud computing is the most reliable way to go, but today I'm reconsidering having another type of backup server. Just hope there is no data loss in the apps.

</comment><comment><USER24> Pocket also tweeted that they are having issues due to Amazon's issues.

<https://twitter.com/pocket/status/213481664670732288>

</comment><comment><USER25> Was at a Heroku "crash course" last week where they claimed they learned from their major outage in March/April Here is the link to the videos from the conference [http://zurichtechtalks.tumblr.com/post/24670375315/heroku- in...](http://zurichtechtalks.tumblr.com/post/24670375315/heroku-intro-crash- course-zhgeeks)

</comment><comment><USER20> One of mine went down, and I'm seeing folks on Twitter saying the same. Definitely something going on.

*edit: Came up 12:42 AM ET.

</comment><comment><USER26> A few of my us-east-1d machines are down.

<comment><USER27> One of mine is as well. The load balancers also seem to be haywire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Related: Right now when I try to cat /proc/mdstat or use mdstat to look at my RAID status, it just hangs. Seems it's trying to contact the EBS volumes and it's just failing. Any way to actually view my raid status?

<comment><USER29> It's probably best not to muck around with the RAID right now when the drives it thinks are there aren't actually there. If it were me, I wouldn't touch anything until Amazon fixes itself.

<comment><USER28> It's more a theoretical question than anything else - Say this outage had gone on for days, I'd have needed to be able to see which volumes have failed and drop them from the array. How can I do that when I can't view the raid status? I have these problems even If I purposely detach a volume to test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> And yet we continue to throw everything on AWS...

You know there are OTHER data centers, right?

<comment><USER20> Other datacenters can go down, too. In many cases, the complexity of running an application across different platforms (say, AWS + Rackspace Cloud) might not be worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> cloud.engineyard.com isn't loading either.

 _edit_ : I meant literally the EngineYard website at that address. Some EngineYard websites were up and some were down, no doubt based on region.

<comment><USER32> I'm hosted on EngineYard and my app is up and running just fine.

<comment><USER6> are they on us-east-1?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone know if Amazon Fresh is hosted on EC2? I had the worst connectivity and performance issues with their site earlier today...and now all of my sites are down.

</comment><comment><USER34> So is Parse.com, they just announced it is AWS related.

</comment><comment><USER35> At this point, the internet may as well be dead to me.

</comment><comment><USER36> My AWS instances on us-east are unreachable :(

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems to be the elastic load balancers on AWS, can't blame Heroku this time.

My love hate relationship with Heroku continues...

<comment><USER20> It's not just ELB.

<comment><USER6> It looks like Amazon are worse at reporting their outages than Heroku...

<comment><USER20> During the previous outage (which wasn't AWS related), Heroku's status page was down entirely (among other things, it relied on static assets from heroku.com), so I can't say I agree with that.

<comment><USER6> Yep, but they saw that flaw and addressed it and it's ok for the time being. Amazons has been and still is crappy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> knocked out some other stuff? gothamist/chicagoist/laist/all those other blogs are out.

</comment><comment><USER38> We have an unreachable instance in us-east-1b but others in that region are reachable

<comment><USER2> FYI: Your 1b is not the same as other people's 1b: [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_can_I_make_sure_that_I_a...](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_can_I_make_sure_that_I_am_in_the_same_Availability_Zone_as_another_developer)

Various software used to hardcode 1a, so 1a received disproportionate load. Now, everyone's a-e is randomized among the "true" a-e, meaning that even if everyone hardcodes 1a, the load will still be evenly distributed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I want a credit on my Heroku account. Paying $71/month for shit like this is stupid.

<comment><USER40> Maybe for the database service, but dynos and workers are paid for by the hour, aren't they?

<comment><USER7> All services are billed based on time usage (its not hourly, its much more granular), including the database.

That said, an outage is still an outage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Not sure if it's related, but www.pythonanywhere.com is also down.

<comment><USER20> Doesn't look like it, their IP is owned by a German company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> google searches for "migrating off heroku tutorial" just spiked.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm getting a "Request limit exceeded" error in my EC2 panel.

</comment><comment><USER44> parse.com also down

<comment><USER45> I confirm this. Was working on an app prototype and when I reloaded the page it couldn't find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> quora.com is down

</comment><comment><USER47> This is why <http://AppFog.com/> is investing in multiple IaaS and is not being hit nearly as hard.

</comment><comment><USER48> 42floors.com is down.

</comment><comment><USER35> #AWSpocalypse

<comment><USER49> ...the sequel.</comment></comment>


A Guide to the Academic Writing Style - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303882903_An_Introduction_to_the_Academic_Writing_Style <comment><AUTHOR> My favorite is Tip #36: Integer numbers less than ten should be written in long-form unless they are measurements with associated units or are within a range (e.g. 2-5). For example, you shouldn't write, "There were 4 cats that scratched the researchers more than all others." For those of us that are old enough to recall life before we started publicly broadcasting 144-character reports on the nuances of our breakfasts (Forget my diet; I'm having 2 bowls of cornflakes this morning!), these low-integer numerals are particularly grating.</comment>


Tenus – Golang Powered Linux Networking - <AUTHOR> http://containerops.org/2014/07/30/tenus-golang-powered-linux-networking/

<comment><USER2> > There is no design document, no complete specification other than the source > code. Yay!

this is not correct. netlink is an rfc : [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3549.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3549.txt), and if you look for netlink sockets, you can get tons of great tutorials as well as references.

</comment><comment><USER3> It annoys me to see the language called _Golang_ , when it very clearly is just plainly _Go_. That said, the only way to find anything on Google is to search with "golang <issue>".

<comment><USER4> Which is exactly why everyone calls it "Golang". If you never refer to it as "Golang", any search for which your content might be a reasonable result is going to lose itself in all the other uses of the word "Go". It annoyed me to see it called "Go", as it does whenever I see a tool choose an extremely commonly used or ambiguous word for it's name.

<comment><USER5> It's a bit odd that Google didn't pick a name with an empty googlespace seeing as they should be the kings of SEO.

<comment><USER6> Especially since they have been down this road before... didn't MS introduction of C# cause all sorts of problems for their search initially?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This has awesome potential for orchestration tools, but I hope it's taken up as a separate tool -- I wouldn't want to pre-bake all of my networking into a Dockerfile, it would be best to have it done independently.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks awesome!

Minor nitpick: I wish blog posts about a software project linked more prominently to the source. I ended up searching the page for the word "GitHub" to find the link.</comment>


UK Hacker Won't Be Extradited to the US Because American Prisons Are 'Medieval' - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/british-hacker-wont-be-extradited-to-the-us-because-ame-1822721269 <comment><USER2> Hard to disagree with the headline. Our prisons are made for punishment. Everything from 2 meals a day to charging prisoner's families for basic crap like soap, basic health care, toothpaste, toilet paper, letters, phone calls, to decades of solitary confinement. And that's what's legal and on the books. Off the books is a whole new level of barbarism, not the least of which is the prison gang system, sexual assault, etc, and there's no denying that we ignore, enable, and allow that to exist. We know how to grind out bitter, desperate, and unemployable re-offenders like no other country can.

I welcome more public activism from countries in extradition decisions that raise awareness about our shit system. Voters in the US don't care so much about this issue, so the PR helps. We are so focused on eye for an eye that we forget the real outcomes of this set up.

Edit: An honest, non-sensationalist example regarding toilet paper and sanitary pads for female prisoners in New York. _" no access to clean underwear, feminine products, and toilet paper, forcing some of them to 'bleed through their clothes'"_ [https://www.attn.com/stories/4148/female-prisoners- toilet-pa...](https://www.attn.com/stories/4148/female-prisoners-toilet-paper- feminine-products) As a US citizen, I'm completely embarrassed about this kind of thing, and this example isn't the worst of it by a long shot.

<comment><USER3> I feel like the US system is focused on punishment of the criminals instead of protecting the public from these criminals. Locking them away should be a necessary evil since we have no better (more humane) solution, not an active punishment because it makes some people feel better or superior.

<comment><USER4> No better solution? I disagree.

Without getting creative, how about repeating the Australia experiment, for starters? That turned out pretty well for the world.

The US has a lot of land. Take some of it that few people want (Alaska, Rockies, Arizona, Dakotas, etc) and let convicts run their own society there in physical isolation.

One of the purposes of our justice system is to remove the offenders from amongst society. Separation does not require caging!

<comment><USER5> Sure it's easy a few hundred years later to look back and say that it was a great idea, but what amounts to a multi-generation exile was probably a bit overkill for many (not all) of the prisoners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Authorities have yet to spell out precisely what damage Love is accused of doing to American computer systems aside from saying that he stole the "personal information of users."

Dollars to doughnuts this is another Gary McKinnon type situation - e.g. a trivial perl script that found embarassingly weak username/password combos. They haven't told us what he did because it reveal horrifyingly weak security and shift the conversation into "how was this even allowed to happen" instead of "bad man hacked us".

As always, no quarter is given by embarassed people in high places.

<comment><USER7> Do you think the accusations against McKinnon are rubbish?

Under alleged crime: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> With Brexit the UK will likely drop the human rights treaties currently enforced by Strassbourg.

This isn't just a US problem by the way. There have been court cases involving extradition to Belgium.

</comment><comment><USER9> > "The way that mental health is dealt with in America is not in any way > therapeutic,"

True.

<comment><USER2> Amen. The dismantaling of our US state run mental health institutions in the 80s and 90s (despite their warts) created many bad outcomes. Speaking as the son of a good nurse that worked these places prior to the purge.</comment></comment>


HERA – Caling Database Access for 100s of Billions of Queries per Day PayPal - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/paypal-engineering/scaling-database-access-for-100s-of-billions-of-queries-per-day-paypal-introducing-hera-e192adacda54 <comment><USER2> I posted it here, yesterday, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20509984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20509984)</comment>


The Techies Who Are Hacking Education by Homeschooling Their Kids - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/02/silicon-valley-home-schooling/?mbid=social_fb <comment><USER2> Duplicate [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8997994](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8997994)</comment>


Domain for servers, which one you would choose? - <AUTHOR>

Hello there, I have a site which uses a .com domain, and I want to contract a server for its external services.
I don't know what domain I have to use.
Supposing my domain is: google.com, is it better to use google.net or googleservers.com?
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> .com beats .net

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I think that too, but in this case I will not use this as public domain but as internal support.</comment></comment>


Flying squirrels glow pink, thanks to fluorescence - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/01/flying-squirrels-fluorescent-secretly-glow-pink/ <comment><USER2> Pretty cool!

> Anich says that Jon Martin—a forestry professor and coauthor on the > paper—was exploring a Wisconsin forest at night, using a UV flashlight to > scan the canopy for lichens, fungi, plants, and frogs that occasionally > fluoresce. "One evening," says Anich, "he heard the chirp of a flying > squirrel at a bird feeder, pointed the flashlight at it, and was amazed to > see pink fluorescence."

I like that we're literally hunting for fluorescent organisms. I suspect that kind of bioprospecting for high-value exotic genetic traits will become more and more interesting as we move forward with our biological engineering capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER3> I volunteer to test whether their diet (90% truffles) can cause the same issue in humans.

</comment><comment><USER4> Obviously this is just a coincidence and not adaptive. Squirrels didn't evolve in an environment where people are going around shining them with UV flashlights.

<comment><USER5> That might be obvious if they only fluoresced when illuminated with a UV flashlight held by a person.

<comment><USER4> When else are they going to encounter that much UV?</comment></comment></comment>


Australia will update its latitude and longitude after moving 1.5m - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-28/why-it-matters-that-australias-coordinates-are-moving/7668014 <comment><USER2> >Self-driving cars, for example, must have infinitesimally precise location data to avoid accidents.

I'm sure surveyors, machinists, and physicists would be interested in how "infinitesimal" location data can be obtained. This article doesn't really spell out what is going on. Did Australia use some other datum than WGS84 and now they changed it?

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is even true though, it's not like self driving cars are driving on GPS alone. They use GPS to know generally where they are and then sensor data to actually navigate in the space. That said there aren't a ton of mapping providers so rolling out a change should not be very hard.

<comment><USER4> But why would you bet the farm on the assumption that there is no bug anywhere in important code that takes GPS too literaly.

True, the GPS coordinates might have a errors much greater than this 1.5 metres. But:

(1) bugs can be devious, and I don't trust them to respect this particular insurmountable barrier, and

(2) this error accumulates roughly linearly over time and it is better to make frequent small changes than to wait until you have to make a big, panicked one.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but this particular example is pure FUD in regards to self-driving cars. That's not to say there are no bugs, but this sort of GPS inaccuracy is not an issue for safe autonomous travel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DON'T USE GPS ALONE FOR SELF DRIVING CARS.

Not even DGPS. Really. Don't. A ton of metal moving under its own volition really needs to be looking at the things around it, directly, using some kind of vison. Cameras are good.

<comment><USER6> It would be criminally negligent to use GPS for any control decisions in a self-driving vehicle.

Aside from wishy-washy long term tasks like what route to take, or which street has traffic, GPS simply cannot be used.

GPS can fail, be jammed, or lose accuracy. I can't imagine there is any risk of any production vehicles using GPS alone. Certainly GPS matching physical reality will be helpful, but no car is going to drive on a sidewalk and plow through fire hydrants because GPS was off by 1.5 meters.

Before a car can enter a physical space, it should verify with at least two local, independent, physical sensors that the intended space is unoccupied and that no detectable objects are on a trajectory to occupy that space. Our brains do these calculations very easily and with minimal conscious thought. However, our brains' attentiveness and accuracy leave much to be desired.

<comment><USER7> I think the potential issue with GPS being a couple of metres out issue is less cars driving through fire hydrants and more the car driving down what GPS thinks is the correct route and looks like a nice open stretch of road to the computer vision, but is in fact the wrong lane...

<comment><USER8> A common problem I've had with standalone GPS units is that they get confused when two roads are very close to one another. Highway overpasses, on-ramps and off-ramps, routes right next to highways, etc. You wouldn't want your self driving car to think it's on a freeway and should do 65 when you're really on the dirt farm road right next to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of the great Melbourne earthquake of 2012. And by great I do mean my flatmate came to my room and said, "Was that an earthquake?" "um....maybe. I .. I think so?"

My fizzy drink fell over. It was a mess. Never forget!

<comment><USER10> Heh, the East Coast of the US had a similar experience in 2011, leading to great jokes like [http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/friendlyatheist...](http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/files/2012/08/Never- Forget.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Self-driving cars, for example, must have infinitesimally precise location data to avoid accidents.

With GPS having at best three metres accuracy? It's nice that they keep their data up to date, but I'm not so sure self-driving cars have anything to do with it.

<comment><USER12> Differential GPS can hit ~10cm level accuracy.

<comment><USER9> Those are also $3k ~ $5k and have to be configured to use a GPS base station. A professor once let us borrowed his. It had a full backpack and was supposedly accurate to 3cm using the airport as our base station.

<comment><USER13> DGPS is much cheaper than it used to be as it is a feature of most GPS chipsets, though its poorly documented how you enable it. You also need to provide a serial data link between the two GPS units (for most applications this is over RF).

Also, from my understanding, you only know the relative position of the two stations accurately, not the absolute world location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Australia will update its latitude and longitude after moving 1.5m

I imagine a guy in a Commodore's outfit climbing a ladder to some bridge (but on the land), making an observation, swatting the dust off a log book with his hanky, making an entry, closing the book, looking around with satisfaction, and then climbing back down the ladder.

</comment><comment><USER15> Here's an animation showing Australia crashing into Indonesia in 25 million years and into China in 50 million years.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2It3ETk2MGA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2It3ETk2MGA)

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow, 7cm/yr seems fast. I thought I read once it was 1-2 cm/yr, about the same as your fingernails grow (it was a rule of thumb). Probably different plates are moving at different speeds.

I think it's exciting to see examples of continental drift on the human scale. Usually, all the models talk about Pangea and hundreds of millions of years, and our brains have trouble seeing the context.

But I wonder if we don't need a more flexible system, maybe like leap days and leap seconds that get added much more often. Or just have a global reference and an offset for the local datum that can be updated yearly.

<comment><USER17> "1-2 cm/yr"

IIRC that's the speed South Africa and South America are moving away from each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How is it related to GPS? Usually GPS devices return coordinates in WGS84 which will not be changed. They're just updating old maps which was based on their local datums?

<comment><USER19> they are basically changing the official WGS84 coordinates of a number of famous Point Of Interest.

The way they do it that they measure the position of some reference point in WGS84 on every tectonic plate, then they measure the relative position of a bunch of point of interest from the local reference point. At a regular interval, they re-measure the actual coordinates of the reference point in WGS84, and that automatically moves all of its dependent points of interest in WGS84. Tectonic plate movement is why WGS84 is not always the best way to store your points of interest, keeping them in the local reference also helps propagation when an update occurs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wouldn't this also be relevant to boring old human-driving cars and loads of other applications?

<comment><USER21> Humans don't really navigate at a meter scale when they are driving. A nav system giving directions 19.9 seconds before the turn isn't going to be noticeably different than one doing it 20 seconds before the turn.

<comment><USER22> One would really hope the steering in self driving cars is derived from sensory input and not nav system waypoints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In a few million years, it would have moved so much that it will cut down commute times from U.S to Australia. Obviously riffing here but I am curious where it will end up in a few million years.

<comment><USER17> See this comment for a video simulation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12189301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12189301)

It'll seemingly hit Asia in the guts while part of siberia leaves with Korea moving east. And my poor little city's gonna get squashed and move north to replace some cold Russian city...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Slightly more detail - [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-28/why-it-matters- that-au...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-28/why-it-matters-that- australias-coordinates-are-moving/7668014)

<comment><USER25> Thanks, we updated the link from [http://www.cnet.com/news/australia-has- moved-1-5m-so-its-upd...](http://www.cnet.com/news/australia-has- moved-1-5m-so-its-updating-its-location-for-self-driving-cars/).</comment></comment>


The Story Of Groupon: From Failure To An Industry-Changing, Profit Machine - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/andrew-mason-groupon-interview/ <comment><USER2> Another good interview from Andrew at Mixergy. What is interesting here is how Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon, describes the idea of collective action and then applying that to commerce, what he calls social commerce. A good takeaway at that point is that the concept of collective action is far from exploited in the market place. Groupon exploits this concept in the commerce space but you could see that the idea has legs.

I like how Andrew Mason owns up to a mistake, around ~47min in, regarding a company they bought in Brazil that was creating discounts just to test the market without actually landing those deals. Good on him. Looks like they are going through some growing pains.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm very curious to know the experience of business owners who've used Groupon - I've just made a post questioning its value at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490096>. I'd love to get HN's feedback on whether or not we should use the service.

<comment><USER4> Never used Groupon, but you might want to try emailing/calling some of the Retailers that have used Groupon in the smaller cities and see firsthand how effective it is.

Might be hard to find a "Retail Owner" here on HN.

<comment><USER3> Thanks - that's a great idea. I actually am friends with the operator of one of these clones and she herself has expressed that it might hold dubious value for most business owners. I will try to hunt down some retailers offline who've actually worked with them.</comment></comment></comment>


Gambling geniuses. - <AUTHOR>

Ever since I read 'Bringing down the house' by Ben Mezrich, i've been curious and amazed by guys who game gambling. This forum is populated by people who fit the intellectual profile. Has anyone here ever done anything like that? Just curious. <comment><USER2> Because of house edge, coming out ahead in the long run is difficult if not functionally impossible for most people. Card counting in blackjack will give the player a small edge if done at the correct games. I believe at one time there were internet casinos which offered blackjack games which gave the player a small house edge with optimal play, but those games are likely no long available.

I would say that discipline and controlling your emotions is more important than being any sort of a genius. No strategy will hand you a win if you fall apart when you're losing.

I don't want to say that nobody has ever figured out how to beat the casino fairly over the long run. I'm sure there are a small number of professional gamblers who have figured out various strategies for coming out ahead, even though the idea of overcoming the house edge (if there is one) goes against logic. If there are people out there like that, I can assure you that they wouldn't be posting their strategies unless they were totally finished with gambling, and even then they probably wouldn't post their knowledge.

If you would like to try to "game gambling" then my first suggestion would be online poker. Essentially the players, set the "pot odds" for you. I would guess that most players don't even know what "pot odds" means (look it up if you don't.) That means a lot of poker players are playing blind. As long as these uninformed players are creating opportunities (inefficiencies in play) for better players, then this is the best place to make money in gambling.

Other than poker and counting cards in blackjack, I'm not sure there are any other opportunities for playing with the edge in the players favor. Betvoyager is an online casino which offers many casino games with zero house edge. Betfair does the same, though Betfair is much more restrictive with betting limits and other things. That's still not a player edge, but it's the lowest you will likely find. So if you would like to test out strategies, then Betvoyager with their zero edge games is a good place to check out.</comment>


Twitter's Ban on Russia Today Ads Is Dangerous to Free Expression - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/twitters-ban-russia-today-ads-dangerous-free-expression <comment><USER2> The quote that begins this article is from 1943. That brand of freedom of expression was predicated upon a model of limited resources: That is, in order to get your message to thousands of people, you needed to have a big megaphone. Lots of people had to actively help you, be it printing newspapers or pointing your radio antennas. It required effort.

Much of what is being touted as "in need of protection" is low-effort content or content easily spread, or both. These developments ought to inform how we understand corporatations' free expression policies.

That quote did not consider free expression in the context of hackers with spam bots. Is that part of free expression?

It did not consider organizations buying bulk user tracking data and creating targeted ads to influence behavior. Is this part of free expression?

Is manipulation of the masses through technology a human right?

Does using an algorithm to filter content for individuals violate free expression? What if the content is universally reviled and never seen? Is this censorship?

Do corporations have a responsibility to give people things they don't want?

<comment><USER3> By "manipulation of the masses" are you referring to RT as the manipulator, or is it Twitter by deciding what people should see?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would agree with this if it could be shown in practice that the U.S. is incredibly impressioned by propaganda. I don't think it's bad for a private company to decide that advertising interests that represent a foreign adversary.

While purely it is correct that it is "dangerous to free expression", I think it is worthwhile to take a step back and ask if all free expression is worth protecting in a world where demagogues are elected by a relatively uninformed public, where just enough of the voter base has a disdain for science and fact-based reasoning to elect officials that corrode the democracy that is, in part, responsible for upholding the tenet of free speech anyways.

<comment><USER5> Well, what's the alternative to free expression? State sanctioned expression ala China? I don't think that's better.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't referring to the state, I was referring to a privately run business.

<comment><USER6> Still, I'm afraid once the precedent is stablished, it can be just a matter of time until other bans follow. I mean related to less "black and white" situations, such as ads from national entities/groups/NGOs etc that are portrayed as "nocive" by a political party or the media in general.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My first native Android application - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.guled.devstash <comment><USER2> Hey (zohaibility from Devstash here) congrats on getting the app out. It would be awesome if you open up source code of the app, that way people can contribute :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey zohaibility, thank you so much for your comment. I'll make sure to get it up on Github soon. I need to clean up the source with good comments first. Thank you for the reminder, that a great idea!</comment></comment>


Why to ask questions at conferences - <AUTHOR> http://cecinestpasun.com/entries/i-can-haz-question-or-five

<comment><USER4> This courtesy was drilled into me over and over again by my mentor. Asking a great question is shows respect for the speaker, who not only took time out of his day to show up, but put a lot of time into putting his presentation together and showed the nerve to stand in front of a crowd to air his ideas.

It's also an opportunity for you to challenge the speaker if there was something you disagreed with. Phrased correctly, a question can make both the speaker and the audience re-think something that was stated earlier.

One thing I see missed sometimes is proper form when asking questions. Standing up, stating your name and where you're from, and thanking the speaker for coming and for taking your question add just a few seconds to your question, but they can go a long way to making the speaker feel welcome. From the tech conference videos I've seen, I think this is something we can improve on in the hacker culture. We know what it's like to offer up our work without appreciation to people who don't understand what we do -- but I want to work on being more appreciative of my fellow developers.

<comment><USER5> "One thing I see missed sometimes is proper form when asking questions. Standing up, stating your name and where you're from ..."

Is it okay to say where you work - the name of the company? Or is it better to leave it out? Can it be considered rude and something like trying to get some free marketing for the company? I am asking because I am not sure, and I heard both opinions so far...

<comment><USER6> It's fine to state where you work if:

\- It's relevant to the question (i.e. the question has to do with a particular application at work).

\- You're at an industry/trade show (where "where you work" is more important to fellow attendees than "who you are").

\- It provides information the speaker needs (i.e. so that she'll know you're a colleague/partner/competitor).

It's not okay if:

\- You waste any more time on your employment than "I'm So and So, developer at Initrode, and I'd like to know..."

\- You're going to hijack the time to talk about your company.

\- You're trying to "get some free marketing".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Once upon a time, my dad told me that I should always make a point to ask at least one intelligent question at every conference. I think it's great advice.

Worth adding that your question should be concise and clear. Far too many times I see cretins asking so-called "questions" that are nothing more than an excuse to ramble on about their own opinions on the topic.

Tip: If your "question" begins with "I believe that" and doesn't end with a question mark within about 20-30 seconds, it's not a question. Keep it to later or earn the hatred of everyone else in the room. I was at a singularity conference (UK Humanity Plus) a few months ago which seemed filled with idiots who didn't know how to ask concise questions - or thought that the question time was their chance to ramble on about their views on the topic at hand. I really honestly believe that those people should be forcefully kicked out of the room and barred from later talks. Wankers.

<comment><USER8> Twenty years ago, when I was in college, I went to hear William F. Buckley give a lecture. At the end of the lecture there was question time. The second or third person at the microphone started their question and it turned into a 90 second monologue weaving obscure historical facts together with personal conjectures. At the end of the "question" Buckley leaned into his podium microphone and simply said, "My, aren't we educated." It was beautiful.

<comment><USER7> Awesome. I'll keep that one in mind for when I'm a world famous intellectual giving a talk. _grin_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also, asking questions in a public forum is a good hack for practicing public speaking, if you need practice.

<comment><USER10> No, it's not. It's the difference between lightning and a lightning bug (with apologies to Mark Twain).

<comment><USER11> I personally find asking questions more nerve racking than giving a talk. With a talk I've probably practiced it 20 times and have pretty pictures to help illustrate my points. For questions you have to think rather quickly to make yourself not sound like an idiot in the 20 second window you have, possibly on a topic of mere interest, but little expertise.

<comment><USER12> One of the reasons to have a notepad out during a presentation is to write down questions as they occur.

Generally, I find interesting questions hit me in the middle of a talk. That's usually where the presenter is rushing through a little, or sketching out main points that may not all get followed up later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _During most talks, that means I'm actively sitting there trying to work out what question I'm going to ask._

I am utterly fascinated by this self-editing process involved in question asking. It has its roots early in child development and we learn that through better questions, we'll often get better answers. The self-editing forces us to reconsider our basic assumptions and in regards to the speaker's. What we don't know becomes preeminent.

</comment><comment><USER14> A good moderator will have a question ready for each speaker, just in case there are crickets.

I've certainly seen dumb and ideologically or politically motivated questions, but I think almost any discussion is better than no discussion. And if you can't publicly discuss your topic, you've no business presenting on it.

</comment><comment><USER15> At least in the PL conferences I've been to, the session chair is expected to have a softball question for the speaker if there are no questions being asked. That question usually serves the same purpose as the one that this individual has.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm opposed to this, because a lot of times the personalities who do this are asking the question not because they want an answer, but because they want to show off in front of a large room.

You're also putting the speaker on the spot; rarely does the public question result in a meaningful conversation between the asker and the speaker.

If you want to show interest in the speaker's topic, talk to him after the presentation. It's a lot more comfortable for all involved, particularly those in the audience who genuinely aren't interested in anything either of you have to say.

<comment><USER17> I'm really conflicted on this topic: I do agree there is much value to be had from asking at least one question per conference... but what would happen if all attendees had the same attitude.

Aside from massive lines to the microphone, the main concern is that really important/pressing questions might be lost because more eager beavers got up to the mic to ask their token 'must as at least one' question first.

<comment><USER18> Note that that's not what the author of the article says.

"If it looks like nobody is going to ask a question, I get up and ask my prepared question. If someone actually does run to the microphone, I won't try and beat them (unless I have a question that I really want to ask). It's not that I need to ask a question -- I'm happy as long as someone asks a question."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How about those guys that ask a question, and then another question, and another after that, and then some more... And all of the questions are not so much related to the topic as they are to something specific they are currently doing and cannot solve at the moment. In the mean time, the rest of the room is rolling their eyes and waiting for the whole thing to finally finish.

One should always be aware of the significance of the question, time constraints of the talk and the rest of the people in the room.

<comment><USER19> Or how about those guys who ask a question, then follow up with another question without really listening to the answer. They're up at the microphone not because they really want an answer, they simply want to ask 'gotcha' questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Question Etiquette #457 State your name [not titles] and affiliation - <USER2> helps the speaker try to pitch her/his answer. Thank the speaker - <USER3> flourish - for the talk. Ask one tightly framed question - one - of minimal duration and wherever possible phrase it such that the speaker is able to extend an undeveloped point or elaborate on an intriguing element of her/his talk. Sit down, maintain eye contact, and say thank you again when the speaker has finished.

</comment><comment><USER21> I talk at conferences a lot (like 20 presentation in May/June much), and I know I've done it right when I get a lot of questions.

If I don't get any questions, I go back and review my material because questions means that people's brains are working and no questions means that for some reason I switched everyone in the room off.</comment>


Ask HN: Questions About Resume for Entry Job - <AUTHOR> First:
Objective -- yay or nay?
Education -- bottom instead of top? I currently have it on the bottom, because my personal projects are on the top.
Second (this is off-topic):
Three months ago, I asked for advice about finding an entry job (you can read about it @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10350972)
I'm still looking. Should I also be applying for internships? <comment><USER2> Objective - I'm about 51/49 on this. I don't see many, if any, cases where it really helps, but can imagine corner cases where it might hurt (eg, if you look too ambitious, or not ambitious enough, etc.). All in all, I'd probably leave it off.

Otherwise, while most people default to chronological resumes, there's a case to be made for a functional resume for recent graduates, people changing careers, or people with non-traditional educational careers, etc. The idea is, emphasize your skills and what you can do, rather than what you have done.

If you're not familiar with functional resumes, here's a pointer or two:

* [http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7770-functional-resume.html](http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7770-functional-resume.html)

* [http://career-advice.monster.com/resumes-cover-letters/resum...](http://career-advice.monster.com/resumes-cover-letters/resume-samples/sample-of-a-functional-resume/article.aspx)

Now, the flipside is, there are people who argue that "functional resumes are bad", like this:

[http://www.quintcareers.com/functional- resume/](http://www.quintcareers.com/functional-resume/)

My feeling is that if you're using a functional resume to try and _hide_ something, then this kind of thinking holds. But if you're young, recently out of school, etc., that will be pretty obvious anyway, and a functional resume may still be better at emphasizing your skills and strengths.

FWIW, if I was reviewing a resume and it was for a entry level job, I would not in any way "ding" the candidate for using the functional style. In fact, I'd probably appreciate it, because it makes my job easier than trying to infer things from your description of your various class projects, internships, summer jobs, whatever. Just go ahead and tell me what you think you can do, and an interview will be the opportunity to dig deeper.

If you'd like specific feedback on your resume as it is, feel free to email me (email@example.com) or post a link in this thread.

<comment><AUTHOR> For anyone else who reads this, I won't post my resume publicly due to privacy reasons (even if the details are garbled), and I like having tangible connections to people whom I receive advice from. So I will be e-mailing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have never understood objectives or why they end up on resumes. I think that must be some bad advice from 20 years ago.

Instead of listing personal projects, just have a link to a portfolio. I like to see and not be told.

Education is nice to have on top. Generally keep it pretty terse: where you graduated from and what your degree was in.

Internships can be a fantastic leg up, but may be hard to get into if you are a bit out of college.

</comment><comment><USER4> Objective -- absolutely not

Education -- top if it's more unique/impressive than personal projects, otherwise below that

If you want to email it to me (see my profile for the address) then I'd be happy to take a look and give you other tips. My office is in a software startup incubator, so I can also pass your resume around if you seem like the kind of person other companies want to hire.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Objective -- yay or nay?

The objective is obvious, the job you're applying for. So, nay.</comment>


In Great Silence there is Great Hope (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/fermi.pdf <comment><USER2> Another thing to consider is the Fermi paradox arguments assume something like a steady state universe. However, another hypothetical would be this; suppose life appears many places once the universe gets cool enough and thus whatever life has appeared on earth has been developing at a similar speed to whatever life that exists elsewhere. So it's reasonable to think societies as advanced as us exist but it may not be reasonable to expect societies a whole lot more advanced than us exist. Again, how practical and how time-consuming the hypothetical "colonization of a galaxy" would be is relevant and very hard to answer question.

<comment><USER3> There aren't many reasonable reasons for life not to appear ~2 billion years earlier than we did in our own galaxy.

<comment><USER2> A) Some level of residual radiation or lack of complex chemicals might have delayed life ~2 billion years.

B) Proto-life might indeed have evolved 2 billion earlier than earth and have been brought to earth by asteroids. Which is to say it took ~2 billion years for a primordial soup to become single-celled organisms (with viruses being an intermediate stage).

C) If life evolves "everywhere", then the odds are we are "typical life" (axiom of mediocrity), so the odds are for whatever reason life was ~2 billion later than some estimates.

<comment><USER4> Dinosaurs existed in the Triassic ~250 Mya. Following multiple extinction events primates showed up something like ~80 Mya. Australopithecus only dates to something like 3 Mya, Homo habilis to only ~2 Mya, and humans to a mere ~0.3 Mya.

250 vs 3 (or even 80) is a huge difference, and it's unreasonable to assume that all planets would experience extinction events at anywhere near the same rates. To put it in terms of your axiom of mediocrity, it looks like the "typical" timeline we followed has a _lot_ of wiggle room so why don't we see anyone else?

<comment><USER2> _To put it in terms of your axiom of mediocrity, it looks like the "typical" timeline we followed has a lot of wiggle room so why don't we see anyone else?_

Arguably, on a log scale, the total complexity of organisms is increasing fairly regularly. Extinction events may just be ways the increased complexity manifests.

Further, there might be wiggle room but maybe our current explosion in scientific knowledge doesn't yet put near the jumping off point. The sci-fi paradigm is imagining galaxy colonization as akin to the colonization of islands and continents around the world by sea faring but the scales aren't comparable, the effort isn't comparable, etc.

<comment><USER4> I dunno, dinosaurs seem pretty biologically complex to me. We've got examples of just about all the features you'd come across today (possibly even venom).

I suppose if we take intelligence as a sort of measure of overall complexity it could work, the obvious issue being that we can only make the roughest of estimates for it.

<comment><USER5> If the killer meteorite had waited a few million more years some intelligent descendants of theropod dinosaurs might have sent up a rocket to stop it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _A_ Great Filter? Just the one?

Unaddressed is the scenario wherein multiple filters exist. One or more could be behind us; one or more ahead. And so, not finding life on Mars or Titan or anything nearby would be nothing to celebrate.

<comment><USER7> That's covered on page 6:

> Nothing in the above reasoning precludes the Great Filter from being located > both behind us and ahead of us. It might both be extremely improbable that > intelligent life should arise on any given planet, andvery improbable that > intelligent life, once evolved, should succeed in becoming advanced enough > to colonize space.

<comment><USER6> Oh good, I was wondering if I had missed it.

I tend to think of the Drake equation as a series of hurdles, myself. It's unpopular but each level of "advancement" doesn't seem to be a given to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any of the following suffices to account for silence. All three could be true.

1\. Advanced societies develop controlled fusion energy, and lose interest in terrestrial planets. Future activity occurs in the resource-rich Kuiper belts of their and neighboring stars. (Perhaps the most valuable resource there is low temperature.) Extreme primitives stuck on rocky inner planets have nothing of interest to offer, or to say. Aliens who happen by get no closer than Neptune.

2\. Expansionist civilizations soon encounter other expansionist civilizations, and annihilate one another. Remaining civilizations are not expansionist, and therefore do not arrive. Humanity will likely be expansionist unless long communication delays make participating in society too difficult. If not, we will eventually encounter another, and either join it, annihilate it, be annihilated, or both of the latter. Having joined, expansion continues until the next such encounter.

3\. Life we would recognize develops only on an inner terrestrial planet with a large moon. A planet otherwise like ours with no large moon develops like Venus, as solar tides nearly halt its rotation, and thence its tectonic processes and magnetic field. Earth-like planets equipped with a large moon could be vanishingly rare.

</comment><comment><USER9> _" If – as I hope is the case – we are the only intelligent species that has ever evolved in our galaxy, and perhaps in the entire observable universe, it does not follow that our survival is not in danger. Nothing in the above reasoning precludes the Great Filter from being located both behind us and ahead of us. It might both be extremely improbable that intelligent life should arise on any given planet, and very improbable that intelligent life, once evolved, should succeed in becoming advanced enough to colonize space._

 _" But we would have some grounds for hope that all or most of the Great Filter is in our past if Mars is indeed found to be barren."_

It would not give grounds for that hope; it would merely, and at most, not give grounds for suspecting that the hope is in vain. Bostrom cannot quantify how likely his hope is, and what he is praying for here is to maintain that ignorance - to not learn anything that might help quantify the probability in a direction inconsistent with his hope.

This strikes me as contrary to the ideals of philosophy.

<comment><USER10> I do not see how you came to that conclusion - nowhere in the piece does he hope or pray to maintain such ignorance.

<comment><USER9> He does not put it that way explicitly, but what he is saying is that he hopes we do not gain knowledge that he would would regard as diminishing the likelihood of his hope for humanity being realized. Note that gaining that knowledge would not actually change humanity's chances for colonizing the galaxy; it would only make that probability more clear to Bostrom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The idea that the "great filter", if there really is one, remains in our future seems to me to be extremely improbable. The fact is, we _already_ have the ability, just about, to colonise space. That we haven't yet has more to do with economic reasons than technological ones, and it's entirely conceivable that we'll see substantial non-Earth settlements in our lifetime.

Now, that isn't to say we _won 't_ nuke ourselves get turn into grey goo or something before that happens, but the point is, but we're close enough to it that, even being pessimistic, there's got to be a reasonable chance we'll make it (over 0.01, say). And that's not good enough for a great filter. Any catastrophe that happens so close to the point of becoming a multi-planetary civilisation simply wouldn't catch enough species. There'd be too many who would make it through.

<comment><USER12> > Any catastrophe that happens so close to the point of becoming a multi- > planetary civilisation simply wouldn't catch enough species.

Unless you're missing some sort of fundamental serialization of events, like technology A that enables colonization is also so destructive that it wipes them out. Nuclear power could have been an example.

Perhaps we would need to master genetic engineering in order to survive the ravages of long-term space exposure, and that might inevitably lead to an outbreak that wipes out most of the species.

Or perhaps sufficient automation is needed because biological brains are too slow and imprecise, but sufficient intelligence and automation inevitably yields an AI that supplants them.

<comment><USER11> As I said, we already have technology to colonise space. Not to spread throughout the galaxy, no, but at least to get to multiple places in our solar system. At that point the feasibility of a single event like a genetic accident _always_ occurring and _always_ wiping out the entirety of every species seems unlikely.

Not impossible, of course, but my argument wasn't about possibility vs impossibility, but probability.

<comment><USER12> > Not to spread throughout the galaxy, no, but at least to get to multiple > places in our solar system.

To get there, yes. Not necessarily to _live_ there. I was saying that we might need to actually engineer ourselves to live in these other environments, and the path to that might itself lead to the great filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think there are just too many unknowns around topics like the existence of intelligent aliens, etc., to draw any firm conclusions about anything.

We don't seem to see conclusive evidence for aliens. Okay, _maybe_ a few anomalous UFOs, but none of that stuff is anywhere near firm enough to conclude anything as significant as aliens. We have lights in the sky and funny radar blips, and those could have many explanations.

That doesn't mean there aren't any aliens. It just means _if_ they're around they are not advertising their presence. There are many rational reasons not to do so, some altruistic and some self-interested.

An ET studying us might want to avoid contamination just like we do when landing probes on other planets. It might also fear that we'd be hostile, and looking around at how humans behave that would not be an irrational concern. If we did respond with hostility or fear, our ETs might face an awful moral conundrum: risk letting us continue developing to the point where we become a danger to other life (including them), or exterminate us preemptively. Might be best just to not make contact and avoid that situation.

What about SETI's great silence? It's pretty meaningless. Radiation diminishes with the square of distance. It would take an incredibly powerful directed radio signal to be detectable even a few light years away, and it would have to have simple modulation to have any chance of being noticed.

That means an intentional transmission, and one of incredible power. I don't remember exactly but to reach stars dozens of light years away I recall seeing numbers in the hundreds of gigawatts of radiated signal power. That would be on the order of the entire output of the USA power grid fed into a transmitter array to send e.g. Fibonacci numbers and say "yes we are here." That's unlikely for many reasons: it's expensive, a literal shot in the dark, and potentially dangerous. You don't want to get an answer in the form of a relativistic velocity impactor in a few thousand years.

Incidental radiation is just not going to be detected at any range. It's not powerful enough. Not only that but as we evolve toward more advanced and efficient technology we are abandoning powerful transmitters in favor of low power cellular systems with lots of small transmitters or mesh networks. Our transmissions are becoming quite a bit harder to detect over time. You couldn't detect an 802.11 network from the Moon, let alone another solar system.

There are just so many unknowns. Nothing firm can be said. If people want to get apocalyptic when reasoning from the Fermi paradox, it says more about their attitude than the universe.

<comment><USER2> _What about SETI 's great silence? It's pretty meaningless. Radiation diminishes with the square of distance. It would take an incredibly powerful directed radio signal to be detectable even a few light years away, and it would have to have simple modulation to have any chance of being noticed._

Absolutely. It's worth highlight that Fermi is saying something like "why societies we don't understand using technologies we don't know of to communicate to us."

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> _There must be some kind of barrier that prevents the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced, space-colonizing civilizations._

Speculation of this sort is interesting but I think it's important to realize it's extremely hypothetical. It can't help but have many hidden assumption and fail to say many "unknown unknowns".

One key unstated assumption is that a interstellar space faring civilization could be achieved through technological advancement in short -or-medium order on earth. That a "sci-fi" world is just around the corner.

Our current society has indeed been based on constantly, even exponentially increasing technology. But there's no visible way to sustain that exponential growth to the scale of the stars. Indeed, our society's growth is increasingly, visibly unsustainable and our ability to counter our destructive tendencies isn't making progress. So maybe what has to replace our unsustainable trajectory is a society with no technological progress.

You could this as "maybe the 'great filter' lies ahead of us" or maybe you could say the image of both the Fermi Paradox and science fiction is based on a belief that Earth's future has a strong potential, a strong tendency to look like the previous 300 years of the increasingly technological expansion of European capitalist society over the globe. And that belief, for good or ill, may be not at all justified.

And the thing is that such "filtering" might imply that a given technological species fails, just that it reaches stability and isn't part of this a stellar colonization effort.

</comment><comment><USER14> If humanity turns out to be the most intelligent thing the galaxy has produced... then the galaxy really needs to do better.</comment>


Ask HN: Slashdot rejected my story, what next? - <AUTHOR>

What other places I could submit the story? It is about the future of 3D web and how big companies have started to support open source projects around it. <comment><USER2> Try print computer magazines - especially ones with an online version too. They usually take freelance/unsolicited content and pay fairly well for it if it is good.

Some tips (I write on/off for such mags):

* Give them a deadline to reply by - otherwise they could take ages to get back to you. Set it for 2 weeks. After 7 days send a follow up email.

* Ensure you tell them you want "reprint content permission" which will let you publish it on your blog or elsewhere _after_ they publish it (usually the grace period is a month afterwards).

* 5p per word is minimum price for articles under 5000 words - if they offer you less haggle :) (the most I get under 5000 is 7p a word, above 5000 words it will be done on fixed rates depending on the mag & the content)

* They will try to bully you gently - stand up strong. It will get you further :)

* Be bold in your initial email (but dont gush, I learnt the hard way the "I love your mag" doesnt work with editors because they dont love it, it is their job :D). Include anything that qualifies you as an expert.

* Link to previous work that has gone down well (if there is any) and also link to obviosuly respected industry experts with similar views (so they know your not just an upstart :)).

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe you could turn your story into an iPhone app, publish it on Apple's App Store, and then submit a story about the app about your story to Slashdot.

<comment><USER4> then submit a blog post here about how well the app did and why.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Okay, thanks for your comments, I appreciate you took time to answer my question. I got really interested about <http://Kuro5hin.org> (thanks Thorax!) and may try that at some point, they seem to have editorial feedback system too. If I was planning to sell my article, I would have loved ErrantX comment, thanks! I decided to publish the article at my own blog, even it doesn't fit in 100% there. I will post the link here tomorrow for your comments, the title will be: "IT giants back up open source 3D Web".

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want thoughtful advice, it would be good to post a link to your story here.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right I would, but it is not published anywhere yet. I will post a link here once I have submitted it and it gets published... but I need your advice first to submit it.

<comment><USER6> Exactly what do you mean by "published"?

If you mean "made public", just put it on your blog. (If you don't have one, make one-- there's a zillion free services.)

Or are you looking for a publisher to edit it and pay you for it? If so, you're pretty much out of luck-- the fact that you wrote it without a market in mind is a good indicator that it's not ready for that type of publication.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could publish it first on my own blog. But isn't it possible to submit the story somewhere without first publishing it at own blog? At least that is possible at Slashdot. I don't need to get paid.

<comment><USER7> You can post it here as a self post, or on reddit as a self post. Or maybe you'd like something more like kuro5hin.org.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> umm... post it on here?

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's a few places you could try: * reddit * digg * Facebook * MySpace * del.icio.us * StumbleUpon * Buzz Up! * Mixx * Technorati * Google Bookmarks * Yahoo Bookmarks * Yahoo! My Web * Windows Live * Propeller * FriendFeed * newsvine * Xanga * LinkedIn * blinklist * Furl</comment>