The Silicon Valley VC Disease - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2008/07/26/the-silicon-valley-vc-disease/

<comment><USER2> Scoble writes like Steve Gillmor with smaller words. I'm not sure what the point of this article is. The whole point of Venture Capital is to invest in small companies and grow them to a point where they can raise more money through other means - typically IPOs or acquisition. That they're failing badly is more about the US economy than some "VC disease."

So I guess what he wants is for investors to invest bucket loads of money for decades on promises and hot air. Or he wants someone to subsidize iphone usage...

My favorite part, though, is when he starts touting long dead products (Visicalc, Pagemaker) as examples of the kind of success that comes from a long term perspective.

</comment><comment><USER3> What the hell is he talking about? VCs routinely fund companies that don't have a business model or any near-term path to making "buckets of money". Twitter being a great example.

<comment><USER4> He was specifically calling out Dave Hornik for his bit about not investing in iPhone apps because it's too small a market. There's too much VC investment in junk they think will be the next big thing rather than things that might be smaller hits, but actual hits. It's the difference between a $1 scratch-off paying $5 vs. buying $30 of Powerball tix in hopes you hit the jackpot.

<comment><USER3> What Hornik says seems 100% obvious. iPhone is still a tiny percentage of the market. That said, they're disproportionately likely to use the web and apps I would think.

But still, you have all of the negatives you do with Facebook Apps (capricious overlords in total control of your fate) but with something like 5% of the user base. And while iPhone users are clearly more engaged with that platform than, say, Win Mo users, they're nowhere close to Facebook users.

<comment><USER4> iPhone has the App Store, through iTunes, and is already demonstrating that people will pay money to install those apps on their phones. Facebook apps plan to make money how exactly?

<comment><USER3> Some Facebook apps are making a killing. There are a number of ways to monetize other than low paying cpc ads.

<comment><USER4> The "killing" that they are making is by running ads for OTHER Facebook apps. Isn't that just passing the VC around?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"you gotta build apps for mainframes and DEC's, because that's where the market is, not in that Apple II toy."_

faulty comparison

"He forgets that the small, seemingly unimportant platform today that gets early adopters excited will become the large, dominant platform of tomorrow. It might take 10 years, though, which is too long for VCs to care about."

lets get real, the only thing that makes iPhone somewhat better (in some cases) is the UI. Where is the difficulty others making similar UI?

</comment><comment><USER6> I think Scoble has 20/20 hindsight disease:

 _... the small, seemingly unimportant platform today that gets early adopters excited will become the large, dominant platform of tomorrow ... How long did it take Visicalc to happen on the Apple II? Or Aldus Pagemaker to happen on the Mac?_

Most of promising technologies doesn't become dominant. For one thing, there are many small, seemingly unimportant platforms, but only one can dominate.

But I like his 5 reasons for targeting a nascent platform. Even if its market stays small, for a DHHian business, that may be right-size. Assuming it endures...

</comment><comment><USER7> Scoble doesn't know anything about VC. They are just the middlemen, they need to report back to their investor. Do you think they risk funding you and take the heat explaining to their investors?

I can criticize bill gates for not investing in my dog breeding business becuase it could get bigger, and keep on whinning, but what is the point?

</comment><comment><USER8> The article seems to boil down to timeframe and the idea VCs want to make money now. (nothing new there)

If you really are passionate about and believe in what you are doing, you'll do it anyway even if the market/segment is "small".

Small markets can often be the most lucrative (loyal, willing to pay more, etc.), especially if people love the products you make.

There is nothing wrong in making apps _just_ for the iPhone etc., people like Tapulous are doing well by it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Apple, liking to preserve quality don't allow clones. With iPhone cloning, the VCs would see a market, and this is an issue: to clone or not to clone?

</comment><comment><USER10> Curiously, Scobledober's blog is mostly unreadable without Javascript.</comment>


Plattsburgh, New York has imposed an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xk4qv/bitcoin-ban-plattsburgh-coinmint-mining <comment><USER2> After reading the article, I'm going to have to agree with the city. I would strongly encourage anyone who disagrees to read the article as well. They're not banning bitcoin mining, they're exempting commercial bitcoin miners from a cut-rate electricity deal designed to draw in industrial operations like factories.

Basically the city gives extremely cheap power to factories and other industrial enterprises in exchange for them hiring employees and generating revenue for the city. This was written overly broad, miners moved in and took advantage of it, and now the city is realizing their mistake and temporarily changing the wording of the law while they determine how to fix it long-term. Existing operations are not impacted, just new ones.

I think the disagreement here is the headline is just super shitty. They didn't ban bitcoin mining, they stopped subsidizing extremely cheap electricity for commercial bitcoin mining operations. Big difference.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we get a headline update on this?

Its not a ban, its not the first time a city has temporarily refused to issue new cryptocurrency mining permits, its not on Bitcoin specifically and the city is Plattsburg, NY. Every word in this headline is misleading or wrong except the word 'passed'.

Better headline is right from the same article: 'Plattsburgh, New York has imposed an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining to prevent miners from using all the city's cheap electricity.'

The city couldn't supply enough electricity at a certain type of discounted rate so they will refuse any new permits for any cryptocurrency mining operations until they find an approach that works without driving electricity prices up during periods of high demand. There have been temporarily restricted new permits in the NW for some time now as new substations were being brought online.

<comment><USER4> Let's try the subtitle instead.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish we could avoid the click-baity titles and replace "This City" with "Plattsburgh, New York"

</comment><comment><USER6> >Plattsburgh, New York Just Took Eliminated Cut-Rate Electrity Rates For Commercial Cyryptocurrency Miners

<comment><USER7> for New commercial cryptocurrency miners

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How many people does a commercial crypto mining operation even employ? Sounds like a lot of negatives for the locals without a lot of upside.

</comment><comment><USER9> The city is Plattsburg, NY. It's an 18-month moratorium on new commercial miners.

</comment><comment><USER10> I can understand the case but this is just littered with perverse governance all over.

I didn't know there would be places where you could be assumed to request a mining permit? What's it to anyone else what you're doing with your computers? And why would you even tell anyone?

I wonder if the mining permit applies even if you have your own solar farm to run your machines? If not, then why call it a mining permit and not "permission to buy huge amounts of electricity"?

But also electricity should be neutral just as internet should be net-neutral. It should be so that you buy electricity and then do whatever you want with it. If this causes problems it's more than fair for the city or the power company to charge progressively as a function of usage until it doesn't make any economic sense to buy more. If each 10kWh costs more than the previous 10kWh it will set some natural limits and if someone still wants that electricity badly they would be paying enough so that the power company can buy that expensive power from other networks.

It seems to me that a lot of problems were solved backwards there.

</comment><comment><USER11> Recent coverage of bitcoin mining in Plattsburgh: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/business/economy/bitcoin-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/business/economy/bitcoin- electricity-productivity.html)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16498776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16498776)

Gives you a sense of what the mayor was thinking in the weeks leading up to this. (And makes you wonder if the NY Times reporter's prodding is what got them around to actually banning it.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Would it be okay to train extensive neural nets?

</comment><comment><USER13> If it's just Bitcoin named in the bylaw, what's to stop the mining enterprises from switching to mining another cryptocurrency?

<comment><USER14> [https://www.cityofplattsburgh- ny.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=22...](https://www.cityofplattsburgh- ny.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=229)

The law itself says, "cryptocurrency":

>A LOCAL LAW IMPOSING A MORATORIUM ON COMMERCIAL CRYPTOCURRENCY MINING OPERATIONS IN THE CITY OF PLATTSBURGH

<comment><USER13> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How are they going to go about enforcing something like this?

<comment><USER16> Read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So the truth is that people are using electric heaters instead of gas/oil based heating systems, and they are somehow blaming it on bitcoin mining?

Also shouldn't the law be written to specify any electricity usage over a certain wattage? I don't know anything about Plattsburg, NY but why would a local factory that uses 100 megawatts be more "allowed" to use electricity than a bitcoin miner?

What if the bitcoin miner (or any high-wattage business) sets up their own 1 MW solar array?

If the city has power deals that is bad for itself, why punish its residents with a law like this?

<comment><USER18> It sounds like a bandaid to paper over a poorly-conceived program of incentives while they work out something more permanent. They were using their power plant as a loss-leader to attract industry. Which explains why the local factory is "more allowed;" it's presumably because they expect the factory to generate more jobs and tax revenue than the bitcoin miner.</comment></comment>


You have IPv6. Turn it on - <AUTHOR> https://blog.apnic.net/2016/05/04/you-have-ipv6-turn-it-on/ <comment><USER2> I turned on IPv6 on my router two years ago and found that my PlayStation 4 did not support it. I promptly switched back to IPv4. Sony has not implemented IPv6 in the PS4 since, and my home Internet use has not suffered for it. I don't really have any incentive to switch, and while I'm aware there are hybrid solutions that might allow me to use IPv6 and still keep my PS4 online, I definitely don't have any incentive to go to that trouble.

And I'm a forward-thinking user who enjoys fiddling with my devices and trying things out! Imagine how it is for all the other people whose personal devices still don't support IPv6 and who have far less patience for this stuff.</comment>


Transhumanism Victim of Google - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone,
Recently during a process of cyber harrassment, I discovered I was innocent of anything. Evidently it was not the choice of Facebook and google who put me a transhumanism Spyware. Now all my life is listened. How did I notice? When I did pentest my own website nothing special except two days later sounds and voices said I'm guilty of hacking. I said I would report an abuse no one is trusting me. 2nd suicidal attempt after a short trial that I did win. Who could help me please? How can I report an abuse if it is as new as transhumanism?
As weird as it appears I have no more consciousness and they even tried to kill me with an internal electrical choc.
What if someone here could trust me. Anyone at Google saying it is not darknet and really you? Both case could be a first step.
Thanks for reading, about to suicide. <comment><USER2> In case your are an US american

Call 1-800-273-8255 ( [https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/](https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/) )

Since I am not a US american, I do not know if this is a useful number. Let's hope it's correct.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need to speak to a doctor or mental health practitioner _as soon as possible_. Today. Don't wait.</comment>


Moxie: Incremental Declarative UI in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://blog.anp.lol/rust/moxie-intro/ <comment><USER2> Any discussion about incremental UI should include Yaron Minsky's talk about Jane Street's OCaml framework, incr_dom from 2016: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xX37RGJKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xX37RGJKE)

Incremental is essentially an implementation of Adapton from 2014: [https://www.cs.umd.edu/~hammer/adapton/](https://www.cs.umd.edu/~hammer/adapton/)

There is a big upset coming in the UX world as we converge toward a generalized implementation of the "diff & patch" pattern which underlies Git, React, compiler optimization, scene rendering, and query optimization.

Two sleeper startups in this space that are going to make _a lot_ of money are Frank McSherry's Materialize Inc. and Nathan Marz's Red Planet Labs.

incr_dom source: [https://github.com/janestreet/incr_dom](https://github.com/janestreet/incr_dom)

Differential Dataflow: [https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential- dataflow](https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow)

Declarative Dataflow Client: [https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df](https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df)

Crux adapter for Declarative Dataflow: [https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df](https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df)

<comment><USER3> > Two sleeper startups in this space that are going to make a lot of money ...

How are they going to make money if open source enthusiasts copy the ideas and spread them for free? See e.g. React -> Vue.

Selling developer tools these days is just a losing game.

<comment><USER2> You are right about developer tools, but these companies are not selling developer tools. Plus, the technical implementations are non-trivial.

<comment><USER3> > but these companies are not selling developer tools

Welll ... from their website:

> Red Planet Labs is pioneering a radically new kind of software tool.

Also, the Materialize "reactive SQL" solution sounds a lot like Firebase.

<comment><USER2> Firebase is a hosted database. Where does a dev tool begin and end? Is Slack a dev tool? Is HN? Where do you draw the line?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of innovative frameworks take the approach of forcing everything through a single paradigm, so that you can avoid solving a whole class of problems.

It seems like a good trade off—yes, everything must be done just so, and perhaps some parts of your app are a little awkward, or a little boilerplate-y, but there's a whole giant class of problems you can just totally ignore.

Until... you can't.

There's another approach to library authorship, where the goal is not to delete a class of problems, but to make a class of problems easily controllable. Not to make a large domain disappear, but to make it programmable.

I have found, with that as your goal, you will be pushed away from declarative models. Because declarative models are about making a surface which is not programmable but configurable.

You can't program arbitrary relationships across a React component boundary. You must flatten your intent into the very tight declarative interface which exists there.

Procedural models allow you to use the full set of capabilities that a function call and type system gives you. Ideally you don't use much of that capability at any one time. But the beauty is you can use exactly the right control structure for the specific concern you are trying to... not abstract away, but make controllable.

The set of "concerns" is the infinite set. And no possible declarative model can capture it. Functions can.

<comment><USER5> You just need to know where your escape hatch is.

       SQL -> SQL procedures

       Angular templates -> DOM manipulation

       Puppet -> custom scripts

And you may even find it depends on the context.

For example, HTML/SVG/CSS DOM scripting can be considered "procedural", but the in other sense the DOM is a rather declarative version of rendering, whose procedural escape hatch is Canvas/WebGL.

You may even find case where they are combined tightly:

A makefile has declarative dependencies and procedural recipes.

<comment><USER4> Sure.

But once you are out the escape hatch you will need to model both the new space you are working in, AND model the world you escaped from in order to interoperate, which is a special hell.

<comment><USER6> This hell has a name you will recognise: the leaky abstraction.

The idea is always to put a layer on top that simplifies things, so it's easier to use and faster to learn. But the end result is usually you have to learn both the abstraction and thing it was trying to hide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > the goal is to write the code "generically with respect to time," describing > the state of the UI right now for any value of now. I think this is clearer > in the above code samples, where the code always executes a complete > declaration of the desired UI rather than explicitly mutating prior state.

I almost wish the post led with this, anp. It's such a great and concise description of the aim for the project, and really helps clarify all underlying decisions.

Thanks for writing this post. It's great!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea on the intro. Moved some things around, should be online soon.

Thanks for the kind words <3

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For more in the Rust UI space, see also Iced, which has an Elm-inspired reactive model: [https://github.com/hecrj/iced](https://github.com/hecrj/iced)

<comment><USER9> Also Relm which is Rust+Elm-inspired+Gtk

[https://github.com/antoyo/relm](https://github.com/antoyo/relm)

<comment><USER10> Also yew. It's more web focussed, but it works great running in a WebView for a local application with RPC to a background server running locally.

[https://github.com/yewstack/yew](https://github.com/yewstack/yew)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > moxie assumes that the program will enter from the "top" of the tree each > time. [...] My suspicion is that Rust may be fast enough along with the > right memoization strategies to never worry about the time spent getting > from the root of the tree to nodes with changes.

I think there is reason to worry: consider a node with a lot of children, for example a list of many todos. Say you want to change the state of one single todo, for example marking it as done. With a top-down approach such as diffing you have to go through each child to see if it has changed. This is O(n). If you instead have components that know their position in the tree and can react to external changes, like react's Components or using hooks and useState, this can be updated in O(1).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I'm trying out an optional email Q&A format on the post, but will also be keeping an eye out here.

<comment><USER12> Website on mobile needs a bit of fixing. Also, what do you think of Svelte?

<comment><AUTHOR> screenshot? how does reader mode look on your phone?

<comment><USER13> Code blocks are too wide. Make them 100% wide and add overflow-x: scroll

I can't find reader mode on mobile chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip! Should show up shortly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not sure if it's because of rust (not super familiar with the language) but the syntax seems really awful

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of the syntax still either. That said, the phrasing of your comment is unkind and its contents don't provide any useful feedback.

<comment><USER15> _...unkind..._

Please don't misinterpret in this way. This is a candid reaction. As you indicate, it confirms your previous observations. This is not an opinion of you or any other Rust developer. It is an opinion of the syntax, period.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's unkind to call someone else's work "awful," even if its meant in a very minor way (even if I agree with it!). It's a low value comment when it doesn't provide any concrete feedback on top of that. Our industry has abysmal standards for discourse and I'm not sure why you think that's important to apologize for and normalize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone else plays "Surviving Mars"?

[https://survivingmars.gamepedia.com/MOXIE](https://survivingmars.gamepedia.com/MOXIE)

<comment><USER17> No, but I thought about it. Is the game any good?

<comment><USER18> The game is good once you get the hang of it, but there are bursts of micromanaging followed by long droughts of waiting for shit to happen. At max speed, the game will do 1 day/3 minutes. Most of the Steam achievements take about 60-100 days to do, which means 3-5 hours per game with lots of time spent not interacting much. Of course, to get to a "full fledged" colony it can take as many as 10 hours of gameplay, which again is mostly waiting for your commands to happen.

Also, because its a Paradox game, the interface is ass.

If you like the genre of games, this is one to lose a couple of dozen hours to. If you just think "oh, Mars is cool" its probably good to skip or download a mod that lets you zoom time faster.

<comment><USER17> > _Also, because its a Paradox game, the interface is ass._

Huh, it's a Paradox game? Thar alone makes me interested; I'm a big fan of Stellaris.

> _bursts of micromanaging followed by long droughts of waiting for shit to > happen_

Yeah, that sounds like Stellaris.

Thanks for the review; I'll check the game out.

<comment><USER16> > _Huh, it 's a Paradox game?_

It's published by Paradox not developed by them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of the issues with React-style "declarative" UI frameworks is that they have a hard time modeling transitions and animations. I'm not a Rustacean but that would be one of the things I'd look for here.

<comment><USER20> If you take the animation out of the DOM-level code and put it in the CSS, doesn't that fix the issue? React then does not need to know about or control the animation and the browser just does what it does natively as things get added or removed from the DOM.

<comment><USER21> That leaves you with very simple and bland animations, and very little flexibility.

<comment><USER20> Hm, have you seen some of the incredible and fine-tuned animations possible with all the CSS features for that? I think it's pretty amazing and relatively easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> r-w > Each time the button is clicked, the closure in boot runs in entirety but if > you open your browser's devtools on the iframe, you should see that only the > necessary DOM nodes are seeing updates:

Isn't that still radically inefficient?

<comment><USER22> Not really. The assumption is that modifying the dom directly is the expensive part.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't seem like a good bet for the long term. There's no practical reason why modifying the DOM couldn't be practically free. Especially if we can hint to the layout engine that we're working in a well behaved subset. (Or the layout engine can detect such)

<comment><USER23> Hi, I work on a browser, layout and styling are expensive.

Browsers already to _tons_ of work to avoid recomputing too much of this stuff whenever the DOM changes, and it's _still_ inadvisable to poke the DOM too much. I don't see this changing anytime soon. There are various new features that allow for some level of hinting, but it's not going to obviate this. Browsers need to have incremental layout/styling prepare for any kind of potential change, whereas if you have a reactive UI framework you know what kinds of changes can happen, and can optimize diffing based on that.

There's a reason why a lot of JS UI frameworks use a virtual DOM. It sounds expensive to maintain, but directly operating on the DOM is more expensive.

<comment><USER24> At some point the JS->C++ FFI was just slow in most browsers, but I guess this has seen improvements lately?

<comment><USER23> I don't think that's too slow. It can be, but it's not the main bottleneck in my experience.

That said there are various tricks that browsers use to avoid introducing these boundaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can this be easily built as a static binary? I mean, really static, as in pop it onto your mother's windows laptop and let her double-click it and run the program?

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't see why not, although to do so you'd need to use moxie-native which is still very new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This looks great, was kinda disappointed they didnt have a DOM demo for the calculator, woulda really sold it even more honestly. It looks great otherwise. I wish Go had more efforts like these, Fyne is as nicely a UI as I could find for Go thus far. I think every modern language should really produce a UI library as part of the STD lib even if it's rather basic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea to make a DOM example for the calculator! I'm very behind on examples.

Someone recently got very close to having the moxie-native calculator working in a browser's wasm/webgl, which will be mindblowing if they get it to work.

<comment><USER26> I think even for documentation it would sell it amazingly well if you can see sample GUI code and run it in the browser and try out the result, even if it's not interactive editing wise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So... semi-serious question, what does html/css give us that imgui doesn't? e.g. taking this idea in another direction - why not just replace the dom hierarchy with a single webgl node and compile imgui to wasm in order to drive it that way?

<comment><USER28> Text rendering is extremely difficult. Even today, Chrome/Firefox are not fully hardware accelerated on this front.

[https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates- you/](https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/)

<comment><USER27> Good point and thanks for the link! However, doesn't it imply that text rendering is a bottleneck anywhere - games, digital signage, etc.?

No doubt there's good reasons for the slow browser performance (like text as you mentioned, layout, event management, etc.) ... but it's still kinda crazy that with the power of computers today, tearing down and building up a tree that results in calculations for no more than a few thousand sprites or so is a performance killer.

Would be nice if I could just re-render the entire DOM every tick. I've been playing with doing exactly that via lit-html and it seems to be working fine... but still, the idea is "the dom is sensitive - don't change what you don't need to" :\

<comment><USER23> > Good point and thanks for the link! However, doesn't it imply that text > rendering is a bottleneck anywhere - games, digital signage, etc.?

Yes, and this is why non-Latin text in many games is at best a texture, and at worst, horribly, incorrectly rendered.

The state of the art for Arabic in Unity is I believe a plugin that basically does manual shaping by replacing code points. There may be a Harfbuzz plugin, idk.

<comment><USER27> Interesting. So does all text in the browser go through the same problem space? Canvas, SVG, and HTML?

(also a question to the siblings here! I'm not totally clear on HN etiquette when one wants a "reply all"...)

<comment><USER23> SVG and HTML use the browser's text rendering stack, which is pretty good. (Native UI elements also benefit from native rendering stacks).

Canvas has the same problem, though there are tricks like compiling Harfbuzz to wasm to get around that. There are proposals for a Web Shaping API to expose the underlying shaping engine used by the browser.

<comment><USER27> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> brisk-reconciler[0] is in the same vein but implemented in ocaml/reasonml. Its currently used by brisk[1] and revery[2].

[0] [https://github.com/briskml/brisk- reconciler](https://github.com/briskml/brisk-reconciler)

[1] [https://github.com/briskml/brisk](https://github.com/briskml/brisk)

[2] [https://github.com/revery-ui/revery](https://github.com/revery-ui/revery)

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not clear on something: is this translated into javascript or does this provide an HTML render with native Rust hooks?

<comment><AUTHOR> moxie-dom is compiled to WebAssembly, and mutates the DOM using APIs from javascript. The Rust isn't translated into JS, but it does run alongside it. moxie-native doesn't have anything to do with JS or HTML, aside from reusing some concepts from CSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Whats the advantage over just writing vanilla html5?

Regarding your mental model: This looks quite similar to IEC 61499

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that's a good reference for a more modern "control loop" idea. I agree that there are many similarities with that specification and I need to read in more depth. Thanks!

Honestly, there's limited advantage over vanilla HTML5 if HTML is actually what you were going to write. The website at moxie.rs is plain HTML/CSS/etc. The reason to reach for tools like this on the web is if you want interactive state, complex data transformations, etc.

I think it will be hard for moxie-dom to compete directly on ergonomics with purely web-focused tools (especially JS frameworks), because the underlying tools will always need to maintain some distance from platform semantics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is it safe to call this "React.js for Rust?", or is there a nuance I'm missing?

(Don't intend that to be dismissive; I'm a huge react fan)

<comment><AUTHOR> From far down in the post:

> I have described moxie a few times as "what if a React in Rust but built out > of context and hooks?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you have a chance to start fresh on building a UI DSL, why would you choose XML?

<comment><AUTHOR> Familiarity. In short order it'll be easy enough to write moxie functions without the xml macro, at which point it becomes a matter of preference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> the syntax, it is HORRIBLE

they'll go nowhere with that

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not happy with the state of the syntax, but I'm pretty sure it'll take me farther than this attitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's nice to see that the traditional desktop GUI programmers finally realize that the way the Web people do GUIs is right (React/Vue/...) and the way they did it until now (QT/GTK/WPF/...) is wrong.

Many think that the only reason people use Electron is that it's cross- platform, when that is actually a minor benefit. The big one is just how much more better and efficient React/Vue/... are at creating GUIs. I say that as someone who programmed GUIs in pretty much everything, starting with MFC.

<comment><USER35> >It's nice to see that the traditional desktop GUI programmers finally realize that the way the Web people do GUIs is right (React/Vue/...) and the way they did it until now (QT/GTK/WPF/...) is wrong.

What? How is WPF any different than a web based ui framework. It does differential rendering, it uses hierarchical components in XML. WPF can update the UI with state changes on the backing C# without update commands, etc.

<comment><USER28> When I used it, WPF only had two way binding. The recommended way to use React/Vue is with one way unidirectional binding (Redux/Vuex). It's a huge difference, and simplifies things a lot.

Maybe WPF can do this today, I don't know, haven't touched it in 10 years.

Another aspect, while WPF might check the feature list of React/Vue, using it in practice is kind of clunky.

<comment><USER36> .NET Framework 3.0 was initially released November 21st, 2006. React.js was initially released May 29th, 2013.

There were 2381 days between differentiating between various binding types in WPF (which include one way, both OneWay and OneWayToSource) and React's release. There were 2378 days between React's release and today.

So it took React longer to copy one way bindings from WPF than it took this project to "copy" React.

Too bad you didn't make this comment on Thursday.

<comment><AUTHOR> If moxie brings anything new to the table, it's _only_ because I copied liberally and shamelessly from React and other successful and interesting projects, learning and improving on them in the process. If it doesn't bring anything new, then it's because I copied liberally and shamelessly from successful and interesting projects :P.

I'm flattered to be compared to long standing paradigms I've had in mind (and others I am learning of now) while working on this.

<comment><USER36> I'm really only commenting on the idea that wpf doesn't have one way binding. People saying dumb stuff on the internet makes me mad. Personal failing. Like that was added in 2006. That feature was coreleased with Windows Vista and IE7. Google had just bought YouTube for $1.65bn and people were incredulous about such a stupid decision on Google's part. One way binding in wpf was released to the public three months after jQuery. It's a year older than silverlight, which is significant because silverlight just took everything that wpf was and said, "what if we could make web pages this way?" Arguably without silverlight the react folks never ask, "what if silverlight wasn't completely shitty?"

I'm not really qualified to compare wpf to react or moxie.

Second, liberally copying the best parts of other things and leaving the crappy parts behind _is_ bringing something new to the table. Don't sell yourself short.

<comment><USER37> Can you point me to a good introduction (document, blog post, video) to the way WPF does this? I'm actually quite interested in the older systems, especially because a lot of them come from a place where massive complexity is not seen as a good thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lists.design — Real data, ready to be placed in your design - <AUTHOR> https://lists.design/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, just wanted to share my latest side project. It essentially is a gallery of lists of data that you may need in your mockups. It pairs well with the Craft by Invision Sketch-plugin.

The project has been online for a week, so feel free to give me your feedback as well as new lists that you think would be good to have on there.

All lists are available on Github.

Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: Why is AI the big tech prediction for every upcoming year? - <AUTHOR> The new year is right around the corner, and, as usual, everyone is already predicting what will be the next big thing in 2019. Obviously, AI heads most of the lists this year.
Oddly enough, AI was also the next big thing of 2018, 2017, 2016, and ever since technology predictions are a thing.
Why is that? <comment><USER2> ML and automation _have_ been a big thing for a few years now. The evolving technology has enabled an increasing number of use cases and business models so in that sense the hype is justified.

'AI' on the other hand is a buzzword mostly devoid of meaning. Salespeople and executives spend a lot of time hyping up things they don't understand, and the flavour of the year(s) is 'AI'. It is telling that searching for 'difference between ML and AI', returns top results from Forbes and Medium rather than stack exchange or any other place of meaningful technical discussion.

A comparable buzzword is 'blockchain' which the same demographics embraced with equal vigour. It lasted until technical realities became clearly different from the visionary BS that was being peddled.</comment>


Wil Shipley on TED 2010: Wolfram uses conversation tracking numbers - <AUTHOR> http://wilshipley.com/blog/2010/03/ted-2010.html

<comment><USER2> I have to ask: Did you _completely skip the part about zombies_? Because, to me, that was far more interesting then how Wolfram keeps track of things.

I think what I'm really trying to say here is: There are many funny/interesting anecdotes in this post and singling one out doesn't do the rest of them justice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair call I guess; the Wolfram anecdote just resonated with me personally! I thought that it had several interesting snippets, but wasn't sure that "Wil's overview of TED" would be that interesting so it needed something else.

But yeah: Zombies, damn interesting!

<comment><USER3> Note to others: if you want to find the 'zombies' part, search for [Mark Roth], because the word 'zombie' isn't used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> shipley on Wolfram: "If he were a patent-troll I'd have no patience for him, sure, but he's a man of science in the truest sense of the word."

Wolfram is extremely litigious: <http://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2002-July/005692.html>

He's also notoriously skimpy on giving credit for ideas.

while I haven't heard any specific claims of patent troll-ism, I suspect he has a ton of patents on Mathematica and Alpha.

<comment><USER5> Case in point on credit for ideas: Shipley reports him saying he invented a parameterization of shell designs in nature. That subject got a few pages in a Richard Dawkins book, and I'd remember if Dawkins had credited Wolfram. (Maybe Wolfram got it independently. I don't know.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm just glad he didn't tell any Matt Groening stories. That would have been over the top.</comment>


One Last Party for Drew's Eatery after Disastrous Discount Deals - <AUTHOR> http://chicagoist.com/2011/12/09/one_last_hurrah_for_drews_eatery_af.php

<comment><USER2> There are quite a few reviews on Yelp that indicate they had real problems with service, food quality, menu selection, and price. Their menu basically consists of expensive vegan hot-dogs and fairly generic sandwiches, which is a tough sell in Chicago when you have some very good food around for very cheap. It also seems like the owner is now backing away from any claims that it was Groupon which actually did him in.

If I had to speculate, it seems like the restaurant was likely faltering already, and the owner tried to attract new customers with some Groupon deals. It didn't end up generating the kind of revenue he had hoped, it didn't result in new returning customers, and the restaurant closed down. I think if you have a restaurant that is really great and you want to the word out, Groupon can be a real driving force in getting people in the door. However, if you cannot guarantee the kind of experience that is going to make them come back, and/or you are already walking a tight line financially, it might not be a good idea at all.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, Yelpers are an exceptionally tough crowd. I mean, I really don't know of any place offhand that is widely regarded as "good" in meatspace, anecdotally, that doesn't get savaged on Yelp. When I read Yelp reviews for a place, it's because I'm curious about the worst things that dickish, self- proclaimed connoisseurs have to say about it, not to get any real baseline for what the place is actually like. It's never even a tenth as bad as Yelp says it is.

Also, the owner mentioned utilising many different discount/coupon programs. Groupon may stand out because it's kind of emblematic, but there's no reason to think from anything that has been said that it was the majority of their coupon activity. Is there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I truly hope local businesses will come to accept that a $5 for $10 deal, where the customer has to jump through some hoops to get it[1], is almost surly a terrible way of attracting new customers. Why would anyone want a customer who is willing to go through that hassle to save $5? I don't think it even takes math to realize this is a crazy promotion idea.

[1]: last I recall it was click through to purchase, login/enter credit card, wait a day, return to print

<comment><USER5> _Why would anyone want a customer who is willing to go through that hassle to save $5?_

My cheapest (and not frugal, actually cheap skates) friends are the ones who would jump through all sorts of hoops for a dollar. They are also the ones I'd never want as customers. It's odd to me that businesses don't recognize this.

<comment><USER6> They probably do recognize it, but it's easy to get flustered and forget things when you're dealing with someone who's trained in high-pressure sales tactics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No doubt, it is sad for your friendly neighborhood restaurant to go out of business, but at the end of the day it is every owner / manager's responsibility to understand and own up to their pricing and discounting decisions. Of course if you'd offer to give up a dollar for a quarter (exact economics of a Groupon deal) you'll get swamped with takers and get ruined.

Groupon salesforce surely sold them stories on how great it is, but at the end of the day there is no excuse for not doing your own math. I suspect many "Groupon drove me out of business" stories are simply a way to blame someone for the overall business failure. Might as well say "it is due to economy" or "changing neighborhood demographics" or "to spend more time with family" or really anything.

EDIT: When I say "blame" I mean anything listed as a "reason". People often like to be indirect when they do the blaming.

<comment><USER8> > ...but at the end of the day there is no excuse for not doing your own math.

You're over simplifying it. Just about every merchant can understand that they are giving up a dollar for a quarter. They get that. What they don't understand, and what the hard sell is, is customer retention. Being sold on repeat customers that will drive revenues in the long term based off of a one- time loss lead (advertising cost).

<comment><USER9> Understanding all that is the biz owner's responsibility too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The relevant part of linked statement (PDF):

* Drew's Closing Statement / 12.05.11

Drew's eatery: established in March of 2008.

Drew set out to open an Eatery that was both sustainable & organic. Over the course of 3+ years and listening to his customers requests we expanded our menu to offer more vegan and gluten free options. Our latest menu is about 50% vegan and offers over 70% Gluten Free. Trying to keep up with our competitors we began working with the online deals (groupon, plum, kgb, living social, reward network, price bunch, and others) We soon realized that these deals are not what they seem but yet are silent killer and only build false hope. We accept full responsibility as nobody forced us into Groupon or any other deal. We stopped doing any future deals in October and had hoped we could recover, but it was too late.

<comment><USER11> I don't think so. He clearly realizes the problem lies with him and his business, but manages to blame someone else anyway. It doesn't just take realization. It takes action.

You have to realize that the fault lies with you and then you have to act on that realization. Seems he realized things were going sour, but his solution was to jump in with the daily deals sites, instead of fixing the real problem with his business.

You can use Groupon in one of two ways.

You can sell off excess inventory. In the case of a restaurant, this may mean running a "breakfast only" deal if most of your clientele comes in for lunch and dinner. Or you can run a "dinner only" if most of your customers are a breakfast and lunch crowd. There are other creative ways and I have truly seen "Groupon done well" in this way. You focus the Groupon customers to fill gaps.

The second way you can use Groupon is to temporarily keep your failing business afloat. If this is all you do, your business will fail. It'll just take longer. Groupon is like a credit card. They'll give you cash fast and you better use that cash to fix whatever is wrong with your business. If you simply sit on your ass and do daily deals, you're just delaying the inevitable. Don't blame Groupon, blame yourself for not fixing your business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If your business isn't going well and you discount your prices and sell on mass, what exactly is meant to happen..

Would be good if the deal sites did some kind of business model check/chance of profiting check. But realistically it's not up to them and they can't understand a business owners business better than the actual owner.

The business owner is having one last give stuff away for free day...

</comment><comment><USER3> I was just in Sheridan Park, and this makes me very sad.</comment>


The New CSS Logical Properties (Talk) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emdg4aj8O6U <comment><AUTHOR> A new world in CSS, which will give you new abilities with this new technology to support all types of languages, like Hebrew / English / Japanese / Mongolian, without the need to make new styles!</comment>


Red Hat files CVE, omits their own vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/crosbymichael/status/1015289667577679872 <comment><USER2> This is just drama. The tweet thread he's responding to acknowledges the cri-o vulnerability half an hour before he responded.

<comment><USER3> Antonio Murdaca's tweet thread: [https://twitter.com/runc0m/status/1015216562129825793](https://twitter.com/runc0m/status/1015216562129825793)</comment></comment>


Archeologists Criticize Smithsonian Over Java Objects - <AUTHOR> http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/archeologists-criticize-smithsonian-over-java-objects/?src=twr <comment><USER2> I was hoping this would be about a controversial museum exhibit featuring archaic programming languages.</comment>


A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students - <AUTHOR> http://alexeymk.com/a-brief-guide-to-tech-internships <comment><USER3> I didn't see this on there, so let me add: There is no reason, in the year 2012, for a CS or engineering student to take an unpaid internship. Depending where you go, you can expect over $20/hour as a student intern--if you're doing work of real value, you deserve to be paid!

<comment><USER4> ...really? It's not about the money..it's about the experience. Granted, an internship that pays you + gives you the experience you're seeking is a jackpot, but I would always rank experience over money.

I worked 20 hours a week in college (and my summers) mostly for free, and I don't regret a second of it. Learned more through those opportunities than anything that would have paid me.

<comment><USER3> I'm coming here from a slightly different angle, as a computer engineer, but here's how I see it.

If you're going to work at a tiny little startup of 2-3 people, maybe they can't pay you. Of course, maybe they shouldn't be hiring interns at that stage of the game. I worked as an intern for a startup that size, though, and they still paid me $15/hour.

If you're working somewhere larger, it only makes sense that they should pay you if you're doing work of value. Telling you it's all about the experience is like that oft-told story where clients want web designers to work for free, because it's "good exposure" and will "expand your portfolio".

As an intern, I've laid out, soldered, and debugged PCBs, designed and assembled test equipment setups, made fiber optic cables, tested cameras for surveillance drones, re-written UIs to use WPF, done significant kernel hacking, and published several papers, among other things. All of these tasks generated value for my employers, and it only makes sense that they should pay me for it.

That's just my 2 cents, though.

<comment><USER4> Yep - I agree, you should get yours. Maybe there should be a more robust culture of giving interns equity at early stage startups. VC's hate cluttered cap tables...but it would be a fair way to compensate students for their work if the startup can't afford to pay them.

<comment><USER5> If you can't afford to pay someone for work [edit: in the US, can't speak for other countries], it's illegal for them to work for you. It doesn't matter if they're a student and you call it an internship, even if they get credit for it.

<comment><USER6> What's the purpose of this law? (I would normally expect opposite -- that it is illegal for you to hire them if you can't afford it.)

<comment><USER5> Perhaps you misunderstood me, so let me state it another way: you must pay people who work for you, even if their title is "intern." To do otherwise circumvents the minimum wage laws.

<comment><USER7> There's often exceptions for interns. I don't know about the US though.

It's a common dodge in Australia to put people on as "trainees". I think it can be illegal if they aren't really being trained, and there's lots of other rules (like it must be an educational course requirement).

<comment><USER5> There is no exception in the US. The only way a company can have an unpaid intern in the US is if that intern does no productive work for the company - that is, they don't profit from the intern's labor.

My understanding is that it's actually rare for tech companies to violate this law. But I have heard that it is common in the publishing industry. See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412255>

<comment><USER7> That is an exception - US interns just can't be "productive". FTA: "50 percent of graduating students had held internships". Face it, most of them will be doing unpaid clerical work. It will be "educational", in that they will gain valuable office skills, but it won't really be legal.

<comment><USER5> My _point_ was that doing what you described is illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Startup internships tend to be semester-long job interviews, which means that you'll be doing the same thing that the full-time employees are doing but with more supervision at first. This is a huge win for you, the intern, for two reasons:

1\. Instead of doing menial grunt work you'll be doing real work for real users, which is a _way_ better learning experience. Finding out what people want isn't something that can be taught. You have to make things, put them in front of large numbers of people, and see how they react. You can get this experience by building a startup and going on the long march of getting traction. Or you can work for a startup that already has traction and observe their users. The latter is obviously way easier.

2\. If you're good you'll probably get a job offer right away instead of an option to take a job after you graduate. If you're the sort of person that needs a piece of paper in order to feel like you're worth something this might not matter. But if you're in it for the work itself, you can save yourself two years of salary plus tuition.

In a related note to point 1, work for a consumer-facing startup if you can. The way consumers behave and the way business customers behave are completely different, and consumers are a lot more fun to work for.

<comment><USER9> In reply to 1 (having done internships at Facebook, Google and RIM), all of these large companies try _very hard_ to avoid having interns do grunt work. These internships are as much about advertising the company to the intern (and the intern's peers when they return to school) as they are about getting work done. In every internship I've done with these big companies, I've had interesting projects to work on and was specifically shielded from doing some of the menial work that full timers had to do. I think some of them even had explicit policies about this.

<comment><USER10> I second this.. at Bloomberg we also craft specific projects for interns that can be completed realistically in the amount of time that they are there and are genuinely useful either internally or inside an external-facing product. Much of what is produced by interns is released into production.

<comment><USER8> That's not at all the same to working on the core product. Launching a new public-facing project isn't going to have the user base that the core product has.

<comment><USER10> I generally meant some kind of digestible deliverable within the context of the core product. You need to have a well defined goal that is achievable within the amount of time the person is there, otherwise it will not be a good experience for the intern or the company. So let me correct... most of what is produced by interns is part of the core product and released to production.

<comment><USER11> As a former Bloomberg intern, you're right – you try very hard to make sure interns are working on real projects that are deliverable over the course of the summer. That said, the projects are often completely isolated from what will have real impact on users on a day to day basis. This isn't a problem, per se, but I've had other internships where the work I was doing over the summer was virtually indistinguishable from that of a new full-time employee. I imagine this was largely because it was a much smaller company with a much smaller product.

I don't mean this as a criticism – Bloomberg tries very hard to make sure interns have a great experience and usually succeeds. But there is a difference and I, personally, preferred the other experience.

<comment><USER10> It also depends a lot on what team you wind up picking. Just speaking for the interns in our infrastructure team, we try to make them develop things that have an impact. You should let me know what group you were with so I can deliver the anonymous feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll add that if you do multiple internships, do them at multiple places. At this point in your career, getting breadth of experience is far more valuable than depth.

<comment><USER13> Can't agree enough. For me, internships were largely about being able to say "Okay, now I know I don't want to do that." Places I interned:

* Quigo (acquired by AOL) twice, before and after freshman year

* AMD, after sophomore year

* Goldman Sachs (as a developer), after junior year

* Microsoft, between the two years of my MS

* NASA, while doing my MS

I'm not trying to name drop, but to point out that I optimized for diversity and to emphasize how valuable this was. I worked for a startup (at two different sizes), an EE company, a bank, a big software company, and as an researcher at a government agency. Ultimately this helped me figure out what I wanted to do after school (work on my startup, then go to Google). I could easily have ended up doing something miserable (like going to Goldman - <USER2> would be miserable for me, at least) if I hadn't sampled so widely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone describe what level of programming competence is needed for internships? I am really intimidated about applying and think I might drag a team down

<comment><USER15> You can't get hired if you don't apply. They'll flush out your skills in the interview and, if they hire you, they'll find a place where you can use the skills you have (and learn more!). I landed an internship after my data structures course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really like the "try to have at least two internships: one at a small start- up and one at a tech company" sentiment. Internships aren't just for your resume, they're for you to figure out what areas in the business you like and to gain a variety of skills and experiences.

</comment><comment><USER17> I got a lot out of interning (my background is physics) in high school and college--and in many cases, it was just learning what I didn't want to do.

Now, I work at a government lab--but I like to give back by serving as a mentor for internships. If anyone is interested (it may be a bit late), here is a link: <http://nist.gov/surfgaithersburg/>

I have taken on students from CS, physics, math, EE, etc. One student is applying for grad. schools in robotics, another is looking to join a startup in Alaska (if anyone has any pointers for him, let me know--he was a math/CS major and really good--we did some work on using comet to do web-based data analysis and to display live data from instruments)--others have gone on to physics grad. school, and one is working in industry. So, some of my interns have also learned what they don't want to do ;> My projects often involve a combination of science and programming--but there are other groups that have been working on android apps, cryptography, etc.

Generally, my goal (and for my colleagues) isn't to crank work out of students, but rather to give them exposure to research. I try to think of projects that my interns can own--I usually have several possibilities and try to match the students with the project. For our particular program, we pay for housing and a stipend of $5500 for the summer (11 weeks).

For high school students in the area, we also have a summer internship program (which doesn't pay--sorry), but again, I try to provide the students with projects that they can own.

One final thing--we are limited to US citizens...

</comment><comment><USER18> As a Junior at Berkeley who's had some internship experience, let me add me two cents worth.

Definitely start looking for an internship during your freshman year. Chances are almost nobody will call you back, you won't get many interviews, and the ones you do get you won't be able to answer anything, but all you need is just to get one person to agree and it'll make your resume look infinitely better for the following years.

Startups are definitely a good option for an internship. What I see a lot of the time, especially here at Cal, is that nobody wants to work anywhere besides Google, Apple, Microsoft or Facebook. People don't bother with any company that doesn't have a huge name and since many of these students don't have any prior work experience before applying to these tech giants, they get rejected. I think that's a huge mistake. I learned more from my summer working at a startup than a years worth of schooling (and it's not bad learning while being paid).

One last note, GPA doesn't seem to matter as much as work experience. While it can never hurt to have a good GPA, I've been on dozens of interviews and not once have I been asked for my GPA.

<comment><USER19> Chiming in as a sophomore from a liberal arts college: you don't even have to be from a top tech school like Berkeley to get an internship your freshman year. BigCos _are_ unlikely to call you back, but you do have a shot at startups. And once you've got some work experience under your belt you'll have a better shot at the BigCos (and anywhere else, really).

Quick plug: Mozilla is another place which cares more about what you can do rather than what stage of schooling you are at. They're hiring and they have an excellent program.

<comment><USER20> I also went to a school nobody has heard of, but haven't really had issues getting job offers straight out of school (or for that matter, an internship while a high school student). Of course, as you've said, once you have some industry experience under your belt, it ceases to matter altogether.

By the way, awesome handle! I'd refer you for an interview based on that alone.

<comment><USER19> Heh, thanks :) though I often get asked why 'int3' when an integer has at least four bytes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any advice for high school students who don't have Upperclassman to look up to for advice?

<comment><USER22> I reached out to Mixpanel (mixpanel.com) last spring as a high school senior (with no professional programming experience, but a couple of decent sized projects and a decent amount of experience). I ended up going through their interview process, getting an offer, and then going out to San Francisco and working at Mixpanel for 3 months. The experience was indescribably valuable, and if you think you are experienced, I'd definitely recommend going for it. Even if you don't think you are experienced enough, I would recommend going for it, because worst case is you don't have an internship, which is the exact same as if you don't do anything at all.

The "Who's Hiring" monthly threads are a good place to start looking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I interned at Apple in 2006 and it was a blast. I worked on the short-lived clickwheel iPod videogames team, one floor below Steve Jobs on the main campus. Apple has a great tradition of having all of its executives give informal hour-long talks with open Q&As to each summer's crop of interns.

It was one of my favorite work experiences, having been an Apple fan since childhood. But it also taught me that I wasn't super interested in working my way up in a huge company as a longterm career, at least at this point in my life.

</comment><comment><USER24> I work at Microsoft right now. Our intern program is by far the easiest way to get hired on. Tons of people on our teams are former interns. That's another thing to take away from this - if you get an internship with a larger company, you'll probably get an offer if you do well. Use this to your advantage, don't wait til you've graduated to start looking for jobs. Use your internship capabilities to give you a leg into the field.

</comment><comment><USER25> I did a summer internship at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, NM and had an awesome experience. I got to hack video cameras, sola panels, and Wireshark. Also got to see the Trinity site.

My biggest piece of advice with summer internships: go somewhere else! Moving to Albuquerque for the summer was awesome and gave me a great experience of what it's like to live on my own.

</comment><comment><USER26> Ah hah, the first comic on the page <http://i.imgur.com/zmhnE.png> has happened to me -_- No matter what though, it still is a lot better than sitting on the couch applying to clean the bathrooms in Walmart. At least I have my "In."

</comment><comment><USER4> You're totally spot on Alexey, as usual. Referrals are king...according to our data at Meeteor.com, every person in your network is connected to 200 people across 20 different industries. Pretty powerful stuff - chances are the job you're looking for is just a friend away.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone know anything more about interning at US companies as a foreigner that's _not_ studying there? I know you can apply for the J1 visa, but I'm not sure how hard it is for companies to take on interns on such a visa. I'm from the Netherlands by the way.

<comment><AUTHOR> <https://twitter.com/#!/startuplife_in> are a great resource for Finland, at least -- and I imagine the rules are about the same. Linda & co are great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised that none of the first few comments I read thought engineering internships might NOT be such a good idea.

I tell every engineering student I meet not to get an internship, which is why I always have a hard time hiring internships. Instead, I recommend creating projects of your own, if it's not in IT, it might be in the community, the student body or some other organization. Try to improve or create something on your own. As a CS student it's likely you'll find a job after college and you'll quickly learn all the things mentioned in the article and comments (including discovering what you don't like).

During your college breaks you're free to be completely self-directed. Depending on your career choice it'll take a long time (if ever) until you get that opportunity again!

I think I might b

</comment><comment><USER19> Minor correction regarding OPT durations: you're allowed up to 12 months by default, and you can get a 17-month extension on top of that if you're a STEM major.

</comment><comment><USER29> Either the article is completely wrong about GPA or I must be an outlier. I barely had a 3.0 in college and got multiple internships at "Major" companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting - which companies/school, if I may ask?

I think if you've done extraordinary things outside classes (great internships, awesome research, major open source contributions or own projects), you don't need a great GPA to stand out. But for most students graduating today, that's not the case.

<comment><USER30> Same here. I currently have a 3.2, but before last semester, it was a 3.1 (I'm done with 6 of 8 semesters). I had a internship with Amazon this summer, and they invited me back for this winter/summer (8 month coop). Before that, I was at Philips medical. I know a classmate that also has a 3.0/3.1 and had an internship with Google this summer.

I don't go to a extremely highly ranked school either.

Just reread the article, and I'm going to call nonsense on the GPA part again. From my exp, if you have a >3.0 you're good to go, as long as you know your technical stuff. The only co I have ever had a problem with is NVIDIA, which explicitly required >3.5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If anyone is looking for a tech (or online marketing) internship at an early stage startup in DC, send me an email. Address is in my profile.</comment>


SQL pagination in constant time using the "seek method" - <AUTHOR> http://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/partial-results/fetch-next-page

<comment><USER2> Awesome article, highly recommended.</comment>


Ask HN: Dark Patterns on HN - <AUTHOR> Maybe I am biased, but increasingly feel HN is subject to number of dark patterns related to potentially meritless rep-mining, voting, flags, etc.
What are examples if any that users are seeing and how might they be better addressed?
Would HN consider being more open about their policies or allowing trusted 3rd party to audit the effectiveness of these policies? <comment><USER2> You seem to have asserted there is meritless rep-mining and provided no details. Then you ask others to provide details about where they see meritless rep-mining. I know you already know about this repository documenting HN

[https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news- undocumented/blob/m...](https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news- undocumented/blob/master/README.md)

So I'm really not sure what more you are after with respect to how things work.

Why would HN be interested in having a 3rd party audit their policies? What possible positive outcome would be in it for them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, I am a HN super user.

I repeatedly get accounts to 500, then move onto a new account; no reason other than by doing so I am never able to downvote regardless of the desire to do so, let's me easily benchmark perception of my comments & excluded community's bias to upvote known users, it's a minor form of OpSec, etc.

Here are a few examples:

\- HN automates a lot of mod related tasks, but to my knowledge rarely prior to establishing such automation defines a measurable outcome, then tests to confirm the desired outcome holds true;

\- Recently discovered user that's been shadowban 5 years will likely never know they are ghosted unless I tell them;

\- Other examples which are likely considered "secrets" that might not be appropriate openly disclose; I personally object to this;

\- as for the audits, it would allow HN to get an independent opinion in a way that doesn't result in data they normally withhold from being public.

Happy to address or clarify anything on request.

<comment><USER3> > Right, I am a HN super user. I repeatedly get accounts to 500, then move > onto a new account

Please don't. For HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. If you change your identity routinely, you're interrupting that functioning. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0). This is in the site guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

If you don't want to be able to downvote, I'm sure we could figure out a way to make that work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, understand; unfortunately that means I will just stop posting on HN, since I neither have the desire to have "an identity" on HN, nor do I intend to disregard any guidelines. Thanks for all the work you do to keep HN running, please don't take this personally, understand and agree with your position, just not good fit for me. Cheers!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Motion Induced Blindness - <AUTHOR> http://michaelbach.de/ot/mot_mib/ <comment><USER3> It seems a variation of this well-known illusion: <http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/images/illusions/pinkdots.gif>

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think motion is required. I remember staring at a patterned ceiling in 8th grade algebra class - if I focused on one point long enough, the further out patterns "disappeared."

<comment><USER5> That's called Troxler's fading, caused by the gradual adaptation of photoreceptors in the retina to the recent average light level. But in the OP, the yellow dots are high in contrast, disappear in less than 5 seconds, and then seem to blink on and off at random. So I think this might not be the same effect.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troxler%27s_fading>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me somewhat of a visual field test, which I cannot pass to save my life.

I expected this to affect me either 1) Not at all, since I have monocular vision and a lot of optical illusions don't work for that reason, or B) ridiculously well, since I have a visual field of only about 15 degrees, a rather significant, centrally located cataract, and severe nystagmus.

However, it seems the reactions I was having to the dots pretty much mirrors others' experiences, which is, to me at least, rather interesting.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was able to have the dots come on and off while I focused on the center. Turning them on and off at will when i wanted them to. What shocked me is that you can make the yellow dots 5 times there size, and they will still disappear.

I think this shows there are multiple modes of human vision. During the first few hundred milliseconds we are in "situation assessment mode" where we see the outer dots perfectly, during "focus on something" mode, the dots go away. This provides insight into the exact algorithm our visual cortex uses to parse whatever data streams come from the eyes. Amazing!

<comment><USER8> That's probably a fair general characterization of what is going on, but the core part is that our perceptual systems respond primarily to change - <USER2> things in our field of vision are not changing, they produce less of a "signal" in our brains. It's not our perceptual system that is switching modes as much as it is the world changing between active and static.

In the MIB case, most of the field of view is constantly changing, providing a lot of signal, but the yellow dots are low signal, and so our brains happily fill in the static dots with the in-motion background around it. Moving your eyes, blinking, or moving your head around all introduce enough visual change to re-set the full visual field, which is why the yellow dots reappear.

Through top-down attentional control, you can have some influence over whether/which dots disappear - in effect, you are turning up the signal gain on particular receptors in the visual field around the target dots.

You can also see why this affects people with monocular vision just as well - a lot of this perceptual processing happens at a very low level, well before binocular cues get integrated.</comment></comment>


What is a Cessna 172's maximum altitude? - <AUTHOR> https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/32718/what-is-a-cessna-172s-maximum-altitude <comment><USER2> So many variables.

How powerful is the engine today? How good is the fuel today? How humid is the air today? What's the temperature and air-pressure today? How turbulent is the air? How smooth are the lifting surfaces? Are they free from lumps and bumps? Are they polished smooth? How accurately has this wing been manufactured to correct aerofoil shape? How heavy is the total weight? How good is the pilot?

And those variables are ones just off the top of my head.</comment>


Something about DNS - <AUTHOR> http://cdybedahl.github.io/ <comment><USER2> This article is well-written, but its consideration of DNSSEC is superficial.

Illustrating example: the article asserts that, unlike X.509, DNSSEC has a "single root of trust". DNSSEC advocates like to make this point because it sounds like it makes sense: the DNS tree has a single root, DNSSEC is a PKI built on the DNS tree, ergo: single root of trust.

But that's not really true. In reality, every .COM name has at least the equivalent of two CAs: whoever controls .COM, and whoever controls the DNS root.

What's worse, both .COM and (less importantly) the DNS root are overtly supervised by the US government. In fact, all of the most popular TLDs, most especially .IO, are similarly influenced by US intelligence partners.

Further: if you want to analyze X.509 and DNSSEC in terms of "roots of trust", here's an interesting thing to consider: X.509 has a different kind of "single root of trust": the browser CA store. When a CA misbehaves, browsers will blacklist it. When .COM misbehaves, browsers will _not_ be able to blacklist the TLD operator.

Here's more, of course: [http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against- dnssec/](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/)

<comment><USER3> VeriSign (.COM) already is a CA, and browsers _cannot_ blacklist them. The CA is just too popular for that: any browser that did that would be seen as "the browser that randomly presents scary warnings", no matter how justified.

ICANN isn't, to my knowledge, so I guess the question is whether you consider ICANN more trustworthy than the least trustworthy of the other 170-odd organizations your browser trusts.

DNSSEC certainly has other problems, and yes the trust model is bad, but it is not somehow worse than X.509.

<comment><USER2> Sure it is: X.509 might be _de facto_ controlled by NSA and GCHQ, but DNSSEC is _de jure_ controlled by them.

We're in the midst of what will be a decade-long X.509 cleanup effort, disentangling untrustworthy CAs (all of them) from the outsized role they have in the Internet trust model. CT logs will play a role. Nuking egregiously bad CAs will play a role. The adoption of new cheap/free CAs like LetsEncrypt will play a role. Certificate pinning and HPKP will play a role.

We are _not_ in the midst of _any_ effort at disentangling NSA and GCHQ from the DNS, nor will we ever be: that entanglement is by design in DNSSEC.

<comment><USER3> X.509 is _de facto_ controlled by _every major intelligence agency in the world_ , which is obviously worse than just one.

And the "X.509 cleanup effort" you refer to (really several entirely separate initiatives) has basically no chance of disentangling CAs from governments. Certificate pinning is the only piece that can gain traction without explicit support of governments (except cheap/free CAs, which solve a different problem). That's great for things you use all the time from a single device, but otherwise useless.

<comment><USER2> Why do I care how many intelligence agencies have their hooks into CAs? DNSSEC is permanently compromised by the two I'm most worried about: NSA and, worse, GCHQ, the world's most unhinged SIGINT agency.

I gave a whole list of ways in which "the security system formerly known as X.509" is being repaired. You rebutted basically no part of that list. For instance: I remain totally unclear on why you think CT logs require government cooperation.

You've also oversimplified pinning. Pinning isn't simply "trust on first use" for TLS. It works in conjunction with the CA system. To break a pin, you have to implicate a CA. That means every time someone tries to deploy a fake CA certificate, they risk bumping into one of the tens of millions of deployed browsers that check pins; if they do, the browser vendors get evidence that the CA is compromised.

<comment><USER3> OK, then, if you insist on a point-by-point rebuttal:

\- CT logs will play a role.

Requires CA cooperation, and therefore government cooperation because the largest CAs are owned by governments.

\- Nuking egregiously bad CAs will play a role.

This can only be done for small (i.e. non government owned) CAs, or you create the perception that your browser does not work.

\- The adoption of new cheap/free CAs like LetsEncrypt will play a role.

This solves a real problem, but a different problem than this.

\- Certificate pinning and HPKP will play a role.

This only helps in two cases: sites I use often and widespread attacks. Widespread HTTPS MITM is detectable anyway.

<comment><USER2> Large CAs, including Symantec, are already cooperating with CT. CAs will enroll in CT because if they don't, they won't be able to sell higher-value products (like the EV bar) to their users.

The problems with DNSSEC seem so obvious to me, and, obviously, I have problems taking pro-DNSSEC arguments seriously. I'm curious though; you sound plenty smart. What is it about DNSSEC that you _actually like_?

<comment><USER3> Oh, don't get me wrong: I actually like absolutely nothing about DNSSEC.

I just don't think "It has a worse security model than HTTPS" is a true statement. I think smart people need to keep working on the authentication problem, because we clearly have not solved it yet -- including with DNSSEC.

<comment><USER4> Yea, I have been thinking about a DNSSEC2 that would for example uses online signing for a while now, in addition to things like DNSCurve/DNSCrypt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I keep on reminding people is that DNS is/was the first scalable, high distributed, key value store.

Not only that it can be partitioned into subdomains. There is also the concept of scope, which means you can adjust default records

So for things like service discovery you do things like this:

metrics-server.datacenter1.example.com A 10.10.20.1 metrics- server.datacenter2.example.com A 10.20.20.1

on each client the search scope will be set by the DHCP server. This means that if you lookup metric-server in datacenter1 you'll get 10.10.20.1, and in datacenter2 you'll get 10.20.20.1

however it can be a pain in the arse.

<comment><USER2> It's easy to scale a KV store with no online updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty good, but some minor nits -

>A name and all the names below it that are not delegated to someone else is collectively called a zone

I don't understand this statement. For example, the vast majority of the 'com' zone are NS records for subdomains, and that is considered part of the com. zone.

The DNSSEC section is decent. NS rrsets don't get signed, and a distinction in DNSKEY types should probably be pointed out. Also, the talk of 'shadow nodes' is confusing and I still don't know what they are referring to.

<comment><USER7> _I don 't understand this statement. For example, the vast majority of the 'com' zone are NS records for subdomains, and that is considered part of the com. zone._

The NS records themselves are within 'com' so they are part of the 'com' zone. It is the NS record itself that forms the delegation. The article elsewhere makes a mention of "someone else" but of course you can delegate to yourself. What makes a delegation is an NS record. What makes a zone is really an SOA record (and the corresponding sibling authoritative NS records in that zone).

FWIW, RFC 1034 and 1035 are very readable.

[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034)

[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1035](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1035)

Aside, I always found it somewhat interesting that the DNS RFCs go into the implementation details of BIND. It's not really relevant to the operation of a other DNS implementations what the syntax of a zone file should be. Or how replication (AXFR) should be handled. The SOA record itself contains information that only BIND even cares about.

<comment><USER6> Heh, I'm very familiar with DNS and the RFCs. I was questioning the wording of the statement. "A name and all the names below it that are not delegated to someone else is collectively called a zone". The names in the com zone are delegated to someone else, hence the NS records. Just murky wording to me, but maybe I'm reading it wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not sure if you're the author, but thanks for the DNSSEC section!

<comment><USER9> The defenses of DNSSEC are a bit confused.

First, the proper comparison for X.509 trusted sources is between the root anchor and the _browser vendors_ not the specific trust sources chosen by Mozilla (or Microsoft or whomever).

Second, we _can_ tell how many entities we have to trust, and the author just counted them: Mozilla's 177 delegates. Arguably, with DNSSEC, we can't tell how many entities to trust: how many zones has `com.` signed?

Third, X.509 allows the signing of arbitrary names largely because DNS isn't trustworthy. (And also because DNS isn't the only naming system people care about.)

Finally, with only one trusted path, there is only one place you need to attack to fool _everyone_.

<comment><USER10> I'm becoming a serial defender of DNSSEC here :)

You are inverting your second question. Every zone that we trust 'com.' to sign can only be singed by Verizon. There's one single point of trust here, you know what it is, and can choose what point you want when getting a domain.

About that one trusted path, you are also inverting the issue. With X.509 there are 100 places you can attack, any one of them being enough to fool everybody. With DNSSEC you have one single place (more like 3) you can attack, and can only fool people about a limited number of sites.

Really, DNSSEC is objectively better than X509, as for every flaw in DNSSEC, there is one equal or worse equivalent flaw on X509. Except of course for the issue of publishing all the signed names, that is a different trade-off between DoS protection and obscurity, so you can have a subjective opinion about.

<comment><USER9> (I assume you meant to s/Verizon/Verisign/ there.)

Are you saying that if I don't trust [current .com delegate] to manage my naming authentication, I can choose .ly or .io instead? I was trying to point out that DNSSEC can't do anything about googIe.com or similar i18n-style attacks.

I'm glad that TACK exists, and I'm glad people like tptacek are advocating for it. But DNSSEC and X.509 aren't the only two possibilities for the future of secure infrastructure.

<comment><USER10> Funny thing that TACK and the Google project for certificate transparency have exactly the same failure point of DNSSEC, in that both will make all the names public.

TACK is great. Google's certificate transparency isn't. And, yes, we need more proposals. The more, the better.

And, by the way, yes, it's Verisign, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only one whos sad no one is really picking up dnscurve? DJB has some very interesting things to say about crypto in dns, and there nothing to stop you from having dnscurve and dnscrypto working with dnssec for a pretty nice potential future of dns.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great article. I'm going to start sending this to my DNS-confused friends now!

</comment><comment><USER13> Hmm, the link is no longer valid. Has the site moved?

<comment><USER14> Indeed, check here : [http://calle.dybedahl.se/dns.html](http://calle.dybedahl.se/dns.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> BTW, since the article doesn't mention it, the C in CNAME stands for canonical.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you automate 100 acres of farmland - <AUTHOR> I have the opportunity to draft a proposal to farm 100 acres of urban farmland.
It is iffy financially mostly because of labour availability. And costs. But. I am still going to go ahead and create a proposal for a working farm ..a kind that has never existed. An automated urban farm with a kitchen-sink/duct-tape approach wrt available Agtech.
Even if it gets rejected, it will become part of public records(it is public land). I am ok with it. Maybe someone will take it up some day and run with it even if I can't now...but perhaps it might go through..regardless..
I am familiar with how the previous farmer farmed it as he has been mentoring me for the past 6 something years with my own farm. I want to take all that and modernize it.
1. Starting with minimal and automated tillage.
2. Swarming robots for cultivation, weed management and data collection of pest/inputs/yield prediction.
3. Updated paperwork and certification. I want to create my own protocols, compliance and audit standards for automated farms. Including traceability and best practices.
Bad news: it's super cost prohibitive. Because I have to be grounded in reality, I am going to chisel it to suit the project.
Having said that...I can't help fantasize about cutting edge futuristic farm of the future..with existing Agtech.
Any ideas? Forget about the costs. Just vision. <comment><USER2> Forget robots.

Gather data on how the plans are doing (think lora-wan sensors) and try to minimize both waste and costly investments (like unneeded fertilizers and treatments).

Hire a someone who knows how plants grow and when they are in their better condition.

Surprisingly some plants give the sweetest fruits when they are near death (think grapes and wine).

When you have data, you can focus on investment and ROI. It is also more prudent ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a labour problem. There aren't many people who are willing to do repetitive manual labour for minimum wage. We need robots.

Plants grow without data. Farming needs manual labour and mechanization(that requires skilled labour). We need to automate farming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is [http://agrokruh.sk/](http://agrokruh.sk/) (sorry could not quickly find english version).

Instead of robotic swarms that would be difficult to maintain, it uses simple rotating arm with farm implements attached as needed. It is independent from fossil fuels, runs silently on modest amount of electricity. The emphasis is not on cutting-edge tech but on self-sufficiency and on improving the quality of the soil.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea.

There are many ways automation can help. Data, self sufficiency, labour, water, environment etc. for me..I want to focus on small urban Ag and labour saving tech automation. Our challenge here in the states ..California..is labour. Labour availability and affordability.

I also envision that plant breeding and hybrids will be integral to any kind of farm automation. I am already working with a couple of plant breeders on this. But only for a few main crops. Lots of work to do.

<comment><USER3> Full automation in the open field is bound to fail as there are so many factors you can't predict, weather, pests, market demand. You will inevitably end up with some kind of warehouse hydroponics under artificial light.

In urban environment there is always (at least leisure) labour available. You have to stop fixating on labour as a problem and instead think how to attract people to come and maintain the garden.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do not have labour. Those who do not actively farm for their living do not understand how serious the labour issue is..

100 acres is not a 'garden'. The denial of labour availability as a problem by non farmers and tech sector is why there is no labour automating innovation in Ag.

Why isn't anyone listening to us?

<comment><USER4> People are listening. Look at Ag Funder. They invest in agricultural tech.

There have been advances in automating aspects of agriculture. Tractors that can drive themselves, irrigation systems based on soil moisture, etc. One of the problems is that small farms are less and less viable since the 80s and have been consolidated under large companies. There's not much incentive to develop solutions to small farm issues when the big farms source labor for a couple cents per pound. Even when the solutions are available, they will price out the small farms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Thanks for your input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just got hired on a ~100 acre farm to basically do this. We have one other person who's been working on a auto weed puller (autonomous driving over rows and computer vision to pick weeds). Would love to talk more about this! my email is email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will reach out! Yes..the farm is actually 136 acres right in the middle of Bay Area!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your best bet is to plant blackberries and semi-dwarf fruit trees. Then open it as a pick-your-own place. You would need minimal labor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Harvest would be brutal. Can't automate that!

<comment><USER4> That's why you crowdsource as a pick-your-own.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is not a viable business model. High foot traffic and liability issues.

Would a person running a factory allow random people to enter and do part of the work for DIY inside their premises? Just because Ag happens under the open skies doesn't mean that it's a park with free entry to all. Working farms are professional spaces and are for profit.

<comment><USER4> LOL. Pick-your-own is a common model found at farms. Do some Google searches.

<comment><AUTHOR> With all due respect..I don't know what your domain expertise is, but I am not going to ask you to 'do some Google searches' for you do your job.

This is about automation and latest tech enhanced mechanization of small farms. Not how to sell produce.

<comment><USER4> Actually the premise of this post is about writing a proposal to farm 100 acres of urban land. Automation could help in that endeavor and was listed as one of the aspects that could be explored. Often the best solution is the simplest. Pick-your-own is a common model used by small farms to reduce labor requirements for some types of produce such as apples, strawberries, etc. This approach would also require less capital investment than specialized automated machines.

There's nothing wrong with googling aspects of your job - how else will you discover new things if you don't seek them out. In fact, most software devs research job related information via Google searches all the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Thanks for your input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Satellite and Drone imagery.</comment>


Show HN: (Our startup) DistilBio, a search engine for life sciences data - <AUTHOR>

Link: http://www.distilbio.com
DistilBio lets you look up detailed information on drugs, diseases, proteins etc. You can ask questions like "Find drugs which interact with Tylenol, and proteins which are targeted by these drugs", or build more complex queries if you like.
While it is targeted at scientists in the life sciences field, we've found that many people like finding out more about drugs they're using, diseases they know about etc. We're continuing to add more data and make it more useful for the layman too.
We thought we'd like to show our app to HN users and solicit feedback before we embark on a big PR push. We rely on this forum heavily for info on all things startup related :)
Thanks <comment><USER2> Looks cool. Small bug: When you search for something and hit the "back" button, you get stuck at a "searching" modal dialog that can only be cleared by hitting refresh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch! We added a fancy "Searching" when transitioning to the SERP and that broke the back button :|Will find a better solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is fantastic. Do you mind telling us about how you get the data and your search tech stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, most of the data is publicly available databases well known to people in the bioinformatics domain (entrez, drugbank...). Our tech stack is a mixture of Java/Scala, off-the-shelf frameworks and homegrown components. Our job ad from a few months ago should tell you more - <http://jobs.hasgeek.com/view/rrh98> or follow our engg. team on twitter - @metaomedevs

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.distilbio.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a great product. Being a biopharma guy I can say it has a lot of potential. My suggestions is to push this product aggressively to launch globally so that you will have a threshold number of users to survive the startup.

Couple of caveats: 1\. When I type a product I have to click on search button to get the result. Can it be such a way that only clicking on enter tab should do the search? 2\. When I deliberately misspel a drug name it just does not return anything. Does the search engine has auto suggestion method like google's?

Few questions: 1\. What will be the revenue model? Will it be a SAAS? 2\. Will there be a free version on the web? If yes then how will it be different from paid SAAS service? 3\. Will it be limited to drug molecule and genes or it will extend to other categories in future such as scientific literatures and metabolic pathways?</comment>