Spotify halved build times with just one script - <AUTHOR> https://labs.spotify.com/2019/10/23/when-in-rome-how-spotify-halved-build-times-with-just-one-script/ <comment><USER2> Although the impact is incredibly minor, I'm sure consistently removing features also helps with build times.

<comment><USER3> Why do they do this? It seems every update the Spotify client becomes less and less useful.

<comment><USER2> Money, most likely. Removing or obfuscating user choice allows them to push you towards content that they curate themselves, presumably to pay fewer royalties or something similar. I kind of ignored it until they started removing dislike options, at some point not even having hulu bundled will stop me from switching to a competitor.

<comment><USER4> or, you know, maintenance cost in hours/developer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All I could think of is, Rust already does this properly. It doesn't recompile libraries every time. It compiles them once, or again if the compiler is upgraded.

<comment><USER6> Cargo has the tools to do this properly, but in practice it's still a bit of a mess. Firefox was building half a dozen barely-different versions of libraries from different dependency chains, though someone eventually deduped most of these by hand.

Additionally, the Rust community has a propensity (from what I've seen) to ship dependencies on v0.x.y libraries. I mean, just look at the version numbers on [https://crates.io/](https://crates.io/)! Below v1.0.0, otherwise- minor sem-ver updates are breaking, and can't be de-duplicated. (0.6 is breaking from 0.5, though Cargo does allow 0.6.1 from 0.6.0 upgrades)</comment></comment>


How to Start A Niche Content Site - <AUTHOR> https://www.simonblogs.com/tutorials/how-to-start-a-niche-content-site <comment><USER3> Please rather do the opposite of all of this :( Sure a lot of this "works" if you want to make a quick buck, but at what price?

"Content farms" like this are related to the "tragedy of the commons" problem from Game Theory. Yes, you can do your part to make the internet a worse place by using these methods (invasive tracking, hideous pop ups, sneaky ads, spamming people for 'backlinks'), but you're also helping to destroy people's trust in free content and swamping search engines results with typically "bad" content. You're weakening the foundations of what you're building on: a trust- based internet with easy access to good content.

Rather try focus on craftsmanship[0]. Write content that you enjoy, or work with people who are creating content about things that they are passionate about and enjoy creating. It doesn't have to be a conveyorbelt. You don't need Facebook Pixel.

It'll take a bit longer and it won't make quite as much money, but it'll also survive longer. If you believe in any kind of deity, karma, or other spiritual authority, you'll also be better off in their books.

[0] [https://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/](https://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/)

<comment><USER4> My thoughts exactly. A site dedicated to a craft that is then filled with hundreds of poorly rushed articles rather than a few good quality ones without being invasive is contributing to the shitshow. I wish that there was an alternative index that valued quality rather than gamification of the crawlers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's exactly this type of thinking (and acting) that created the dismal state of search, especially in the product review space. I can't find anything but "content sites" when what I really want is genuine reviews or experiences from people who use the products I'm considering purchasing. It's obvious that most of the sites in the top results for almost any product search are using a playbook similar to this. I can almost never find trustworthy, real reviews.

Now I try to find communities on Reddit or elsewhere to find real information and opinions. In some cases I'm sure my purchases have been influenced by some marketing drone that gets paid to post positive reviews on Reddit as well. Finding and supporting great makers and products shouldn't be this difficult!

Please don't make everything worse by following any advice in this article. If you truly want to turn a hobby into cash (a potentially fun-killing enterprise as others have mentioned) then let it happen organically, or at least keep the end users' experiences in mind. For every person making $10k a month on terrible content sites there are thousands of people wasting their time sifting through hundreds "content" pieces in an attempt to find reality.

<comment><USER6> Reddit is also swarming with sentiment analysis by boths who downvotes anything negative, or even removes it. It's becoming a serious problem everywhere now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ha, this reminds me of the "How to get rich quick" books that start off with "To get rich, write a book on how to get rich."

Besides that, I loathe """content""" sites. There may earn $10k a month, but they aren't adding 10k worth of value to the world. Their motives are clearly in money-making, not in informing, and the huge swath of them on Google search has drowned out everything that isn't SEO-optimized. Man, I miss the old internet. Please don't make things worse.

<comment><USER8> There is definitely a pattern where people make a small amount of money on some initial content site, but they make their big bucks on courses that teach _you_ how to make passive income with a content site. Props to them for being able to successfully build online businesses, I just find it funny that the real money is in selling the dream onto the next person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see this exact thing with a lot of artists I've known. To be fair most of them are trying to make it their livelihood rather than just a hobby they're monetizing. Anyway they'll start hustling on twitter and Instagram, trying to build their follower count and drive people to their Patreon.

Most of them can only survive this grind for a year or so before they just implode from stress and depression and whatever else. It turns out to be less lucrative than they were expecting. If you sink enough of yourself into a particular identity (like being an artist) it can be an enormous blow to your ego to "fail" like that.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ik hate articled or books where people try to explain hoe to get rich OR succesful. The purpose of those articled is usualy not to educate other people, but for self gaining purposes. My hobby was and is creating software. 10 years ago I was extremely lucky to be into apps and I created a very profitable business arround it. Made more money in those ten years than a normal person in the US would get in a lifetime. But it all comes down to luck. I was lucky to be born in a rich country. I was lucky to have parents giving me endless oppertunities, I was lucky to have the right friends, I was lucky to have normal set of brains, I was lucky to be not a lazy dreaming person playing computer games 12 hours a day. I dont say you have no control in your path of life. But much is depending on external factors. An article or book will change nothing.

</comment><comment><USER11> One of my more favorite hobbies is complaining about star wars on the internet. I suppose I could just go and find all of my old forum posts and then create a website around them. lol.

<comment><USER12> Which Star Wars piques your ire?

You seriously probably could.

<comment><USER11> Recently I flipped and tried to talk about the things I like. For example, have you heard of Waru? Waru is an interdimensional jelly being covered in gold plates that is in constant pain and wishes to go back to its own dimension but can't without taking the power of the force from children. This is probably the most creative nonsense ever thought of for star wars and it comes from one of the novels considered just absolute trash, the crystal Star.

One of the things I really disliked was how much the Jedi purge was interpolated in the original EU stuff before revenge of the sith. It really played on the idea that it was difficult and time consuming and oversaw by Darth Vader and the Emperor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How to kill your favourite hobby

<comment><USER14> Then go and find some new ones with the $100k in your bank account

<comment><USER15> The fallacy of this type of advice is that marketing a certain activity, in this case a blog, is a full-time job in itself.

> This is the quickest way to [...] create a sustainable additional income.

The entire blog post starts with essentially a lie. The following requirement:

4\. Back-link building

> This is tedious work. Cold emailing, constant reminders and > outreach and > content creation. This person would focus > entirely on growing your > backlinks by creating > viral/shareable content and reaching out to partners > who > might want to link to your site.

is all but "additional" income.

It reminds me of that famous guy, let's call Tim Ferrous for anonymity, who advertised the dream of a 4-hours workweek, while working himself 24/7 in order to market himself and selling his products. Not counting the fake website(s) and fake reviews he's commissioned as part of his marketing.

<comment><USER16> That book written by that unknown author was pure drivel, how anyone was able to get through the whole thing, if anyone actually did, is beyond me.

<comment><USER17> The best sellers usually are left untouched on your kindle or even (physical) bookshelf if you fancy that.

I guess people just buys it and forgets about it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The original title is "How to start a niche content site", which IMHO accurately reflects the contents of the blog post.

I don't see the word "hobby" anywhere on the page.

<comment><USER19> He uses interests instead. "This is my unconventional advice: Start with your interests." To be fair he doesn't say to use your favourite hobby either - <USER2> says use the best combination of your interest in it, how niche it is and how good it is for easy high volume search keywords. Which seems like a reasonable enough criteria for a topic you can make a spammy content farm about.

<comment><USER18> Understood, and the focus appears to be very much on the creation of a content site and its monetization, rather than the hobby/interest bit.

I don't think that's inherently bad, but the (now updated - thanks whoever did that) title better reflects the content IMHO.

(For me at least, the original title was a bit click-baity too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is a reddit community all around this kind of approach:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/juststart](http://www.reddit.com/r/juststart)

However, as in all these things, the money is in selling the shovels.

</comment><comment><USER21> Can't imagine having to write 100 articles a year for some kind of niche, lets take electric mountain bikes, most of the articles would have to be reviews of some kind and that means first getting your hands on them.

Maybe I'm missing something.

<comment><USER22> You're probably right, but I believe mountain bike owners search for things like "how to change tires effortlessly", or "how to take care of mountain bike injuries". Maybe "how to paint your mountain bike", "how to remove adhesives from a mountain bike".

Things like that. You can write 100 of those and people will find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Some useful stuff in here, will bookmark.

My wife spent a lot of time a few years ago putting together content for a book targeted at new parents, aim was to be practical tips/tricks/do's/dont's rather than than a theory book (plenty of those out there). It was based on her 10 years experience in childcare and input from some co-workers. It was bit of a hobby but the goal was to monetize it at some point.

Then kids came along and she parked it but now we are looking at how she could extract some value from the collateral that's sitting there in a word doc.

Aside from the obvious publish an ebook we started to toy around with extracting and using the collateral in a blog style publication with revenue coming from products, being conscious that the goal should always be to recommend what she thought was the best product (even if that means making no money from it as not all products have affiliate scheme).

We somewhat tested this by putting out a piece in certain forums for car seats offering specific advise to certain problems people were having. From a handful of posts she is making ~$30 a month from amazon. Nothing to shout about but it was very little work just highly targeted to certain demographic with a specific challenge. I guess message being here good content in the right place can help you win but yea its a lot of hard work to scale this to a $10K a month.

</comment><comment><USER24> A side hustle would be great but I hate websites that throw a pop up in the users face and ask them to subscribe. The quality of these sites is often quite low, but they often rank near the top because they have good SEO. I wouldn't feel great about putting out a site like this, especially if I was pushing products I had not personally used, which I think you would have to do if you were going to write dozens of articles on a niche topic.

I think a SaaS is a be a better way to go, but it's probably a lot harder.

</comment><comment><USER25> While I agree with most posters (content farms are bad; sounds like a great way to kill a hobby) - I thought the post was a nice shortlist of how to build an audience and options for monetizing - and while the tone is a tad optimistic - it does manage to indicate that it likely is a lot of work.

Could do with some better proof-reading.

I'm also a bit surprised about:

> 6\. Without a doubt, Wordpress is the best option for a quick and easy > setup.

> Your domain/hosting provider will likely have some sort of installer for > Wordpress available in the backend (Softaculous, usually) which will do it > for you.

Why not recommend (paid) hosting on WordPress.com?

Self-managing WordPress (properly) is a lot of work, and with the poor quality of plug-ins almost impossible to do in a somewhat secure manner?

Anyone familiar and up to date with (hosted) wordpress/ghost/netliftcms vs self-hosted WordPress?

<comment><USER26> Wordpress.com has a lot of limitations:

\- You can not run Google Adsense or other advertising programs to serve ads on your WordPress.com blog. \- You can not write paid posts, sell links, review products, etc. \- You can not extend the functionality of WordPress.com by uploading plugins. (it comes with a certain set of plugins, but you can't add just any plugin). \- Same applies to themes as to plugins.

These were gleaned from [https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/what-are- the-limi...](https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/what-are-the- limitations-of-wordpress-com/) which lists others also.

<comment><USER25> Appears you can use adsensense on business plan and up?

[https://wordpress.com/support/monetize-your- site/#advertisin...](https://wordpress.com/support/monetize-your- site/#advertising)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fill the internet with crap for advertising cash. What a great model.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ironically SEO farms like this will cause a return to the Yahoo model of search, where everything is hand-curated instead of relying on an easy-gamed algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER29> That just sounds like work, you write and get money for it ... like a writer.

On top of that those websites are almost always terrible, full of long article saying nothing.

<comment><USER30> On top of that, how practical is it, really, to make over $100,000/year writing content for the web?

> If you convert only 0.1% of your traffic (30 users), you'll yield $15 000 a > month ($180k a year).

Well, how likely is it that you will reach that 0.1% conversion rate? 0.1% might sound like a small, easily achievable rate, but is it really?

If it were easy to make a good living this way, everyone would be doing it. The article doesn't seem to acknowledge that good writing is hard to do. It doesn't even mention the word 'skill', for instance.

<comment><USER31> First-hand experience here.

It is not easy, at all. Especially because it takes time to bootstrap a niche website to a level of traffic that's monetizable to the level you mentioned.

However, in the niche I have a website in, myself and many competitors are definitely reaching these levels and expenses are rather low. The problem is that we are at the mercy of the few strong ad and affiliate networks. So it's very uncertain (without even getting into SEO and Google's changes).

Many of my writers left me to do it on their own (i.e. write their own niche site) but came back after losing patience (for the right or wrong reasons).

The best niche sites are those having a balanced range of income streams, and their own products. But that's not easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> While I think these affiliate sites ruin the internet, I can some value in this technique.

What is you are doing something truly amazing for the world? What if you are providing some amazing value? But, no one knows you exist because you do not know how to market your site.

Here is where I think this method could add some value to the world.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hm, I see the story is flagged now - anyone know why? It certainly is a bit click-baity - but I don't think the article itself warrants flagging? Some vote-ring/spam thing going on - or just enough readers feeling it deserves flagging?</comment>


Ask HN: Legality of using artwork from GPL-ed games - <AUTHOR> I realize you guys aren't lawyers, but I want to see if any if you have dealt with this before.
Here's what I am considering doing: I want to use the art work from GPL-ed games, and I don't want to distribute my source code under the GPL.
Here's what I'm considering doing:
* write my iPhone game (not releasing it's source)
* when run, my iPhone game contacts the debian (or source forge) servers; downloads the corresponding .tar.gz or .deb
* my iPhone game then extracts the art work + boots up and runs the game
* this artwork, of course, will then be cached on the phone for future uses
I'm thinking of doing something similar for desktop games too.
1) has anyone tried this? 2) has anyone considered this? 3) before I pay expensive lawyer fees -- is this clearly legal or clearly against the GPL?
thanks! <comment><USER2> > * write my iPhone game (not releasing it's source)

> * when run, my iPhone game contacts the debian (or source forge) servers; > downloads the corresponding .tar.gz or .deb

...

> is this clearly legal or clearly against the GPL

It is clearly _against the spirit_ of the GPL. Do you really want the negative publicity of being a parasite, even within the letter of the law?

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to be summed up by 2(b) in the GPL:

        You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
        whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
        part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
        parties under the terms of this License.

That suggests you need to GPL your application to use art from a GPL'd game.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why go through all of the angst? Most people find it too hard to put pirated stuff on their iPhones, so why don't you just GPL and release your own source code? It's highly unlikely that you have some amazing new algorithms hiding in there that no-one else has thought of...

I've been thinking quite a bit about this myself, and for my current project, that's exactly what I'm going to do.</comment>


Ask HN: Am I crazy not to pursue a machine learning masters, given free tuition? - <AUTHOR> I work as a software engineer at a U.S. university that is arguably tops in the world in AI/ML. I took advantage this semester of our free tuition benefit and enrolled in a graduate-level intro to machine learning class. Given my full-time work and family responsibilities, the course proved to be a lot of time and work - but in the end I learned tons and did well enough that I'm considering pursuing a professional master's degree in ML here.
My goal with getting the degree is to remain relevant in this industry as a technical contributor (I'm in my early 40s), open up new opportunities, and very simply to make more money. Pursuing the degree, though, is a significant time and effort commitment: it will take me about four calendar years (taking one class at a time) to complete. The opportunity cost of pursuing it is spending more time with my family, having less stress, being able to work on side projects from time to time, etc.
I'm curious to see what folks in the HN community think. On one hand it seems like an absolute no brainer that I should take advantage of this.  On the other hand... I dunno. <comment><USER2> Getting a job at a large tech company like Google, Facebook, Amazon, or a startup, will likely teach you about applied ML much quicker than a school will (with likely much higher pay too). I guess it depends on your end goal though. Working at a university is typically pretty relaxed, so it probably is a no brainer, especially if you get some type of pension.

<comment><USER3> Getting a job at those place means you will need to get training to pass their interviews. Free tuition sounds like a good deal especially if its a good university.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A key question is: Did you enjoy taking the class?

The love of money is a dangerous mistress.

When you have a family at home, spending time studying can often feel like you are cheating your kids out of your being a good dad.

You can keep yourself relevant without a masters. Can you get a Grad certificate? Or can you learn a lot on your own? In your current job? Better yet can you get your university to pay you a salary while you go to school full time?

</comment><comment><USER5> I am a software engineer that works full time (and have a family:), and have just handed in my masters thesis. What made it easier for me was picking a problem I was already very familiar with (and passionate about) to do my thesis on. After that it was just putting in consistent hours in the evening after everyone went to sleep.

<comment><AUTHOR> Working in the evening certainly helps. For the most part I have been doing the same thing. By 9pm both wife and kids are in bed so I can easily get a couple of hours of work in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe think of it incrementally in the sense that you can start out with the goal of pursuing a masters, with each completed course adding to the completion of that goal as well as adding to your current knowledge and skillset, with the understanding that at any point in time it might make sense to stop.

</comment><comment><USER7> You have a job, first-hand experience from within a top environment in ml and a family? In your shoes, I would gently ask my direct supervisor to test the waters and eventually take the master's path in case a new / better paid job is lined up for me in advance through the internal route.

</comment><comment><USER8> Do it. The investment will pay in spades... Your SO

</comment><comment><USER9> What would you even do if you had more money?

<comment><AUTHOR> Stop working forever, sooner.</comment></comment>


The banking information of 29,000 Facebook employees was stolen - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-employee-data-stolen-payroll-data-thief-car-2019-12 <comment><AUTHOR> Reminder that no data is safe, online or physical unless strongly guarded with best practices (which seems to hard to be/not enforced in this case) and tools like encryption etc.</comment>


"How To Write Good" by Frank L. Visco - <AUTHOR> http://homepage.mac.com/mseffie/handouts/writegood.html <comment><USER2> Is everyone seriously missing the joke(s)?

PS This is hilarious. :)

<comment><USER3> "Profanity Sucks"

The only one that didn't "work", probably because the author and I have different definitions of profanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't it meta-ironic for a style guide to use MS Comic?

<comment><USER5> 24\. Use appropriate font.

<comment><USER6> 24\. Use comic sans.Always.Everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This should have a (1986) tacked onto the end of the headline. Hard to believe it made its way onto the front page of HN. I guess if you've never seen it, it's new to you. There must be more Internet newbies on HN than one would imagine.

<comment><USER8> Hate to break it to you man, but most readers of HN probably weren't even born yet in 1986, much less using the internet in 1986.

Maybe there is a Zen Koan in here:

"What did your spam look like before your parents were born?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Prohibiting sentence-ending prepositions? "This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put," -- Winston Churchill

</comment><comment><USER10> Splitting infinitives is done so frequently today that it sounds more natural. Consider: "I was hoping to completely finish the project before the teacher called on me"

<comment><USER11> From the _Oxford A–Z of Grammar and Punctuation_ by John Seely:

split infinitive

The infinitive is the form of the verb made by adding _to_ to its stem:

to go

Some traditionalists say that you should never place anything between the _to_ and the stem. They argue that since the infinitive is a part of the verb it should never be split. So it is wrong to say _to boldly go_. You should instead say _to go boldly_ or _boldly to go_.

There is no grammatical justification for this so-called 'rule', and people have been splitting infinitives for centuries. Indeed sometimes it is impossible to convey your meaning unless you do split an infinitive. For example:

Everyone else thought they were too young _to really cope_ with adult responsibilities.

If you move _really_ to another position you change the meaning of the sentence:

Everyone else thought they were too young _really to cope_ with adult responsibilities.

Everyone else thought they were too young _to cope really_ with adult responsibilities.

(Amazon link to book: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199564671/ref=as_li_qf_sp_...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199564671/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=trevor-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0199564671) )

<comment><USER12> "Everyone else thought they were really too young to cope with adult responsibilities"

If you word it like this, the emphasis of 'really' is moved to 'too young' but the sentence's meaning is the same, right?

<comment><USER11> But then 'really' modifies 'were too young', not 'to cope'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I the only person who thinks most grammatical rules are complete crap? Everyone has their own writing style, which is what makes reading works by different authors so enjoyable. The one rule I especially dislike is the 'never end sentences with a preposition' rule, which if always abided by, will dramatically overcomplicate many sentences.

<comment><USER14> Most rules of grammar are wonderful, unless you enjoy trying to extract meaning from sentences like, "their works by makes enjoyable everyone has style, which own what authors reading different writing".

The "rule" about dangling prepositions isn't much of a rule at all. Most grammarians shun it and it's never been followed widely in prose and certainly not in speech.

One related rule that _is_ worth following is: "don't end a sentence with a preposition if removing it wouldn't change the meaning of the sentence." For example, "where are you at" should be "where are you" since the "at" adds no meaning (unless you want to convey a colloquial voice).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/research/groups/protein/pert/safir...](http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/research/groups/protein/pert/safire.rules.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> first I thought he's serious, and decided to write a comment that I don't think he is right. Now I got the Idea</comment>


Ask HN: Are you using emoticons in commit messages? - <AUTHOR> ...or what would Linus Torvalds think of emoticons in commit messages? <comment><USER2> I'm not, but why would I care what Torvalds thinks?

</comment><comment><USER3> And animated GIFs.

¯\\(°_o)/¯</comment>


Iron Man 3 and the Human Chain - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/iron-man-3-and-the-human-chain

<comment><USER2> There's that scene in Iron Man, in the desert, in which Tony Stark's first attempt at a suit runs out of power and crashes into the sand after a fall from a decent altitude. The first time I saw that, I thought, "They just killed the hero in the first 10 minutes of the movie!" My mind raced, trying to figure out how they were going to make this work. That was way too many g's. He was surely very dead. Was he not actually in the suit? Was the story going to focus on a protege of some sort? Was there a clone or twin or something?

When he walked away from the wreck, I was disappointed. But I knew then with certainty what sort of physics engine we were using.

<comment><USER3> I've long hypothesized that a normal human from the "superhero universes" dropped in our world would still seem bizarrely sturdy, if not actually superstrong.

Another similar one that really bothers me is Oliver Sansweet's fall in The Incredibles. He attempts suicide by leaping off of a building, gets about twelve stories down, then is "caught" by Mr. Incredible leaping at him and re- entering the building he jumped from. Mr. Incredible exerts enough force to instantly stop his downward descent _and_ enough force to also give him at least a good 20mph horizonally, probably more, and from this Oliver gets... a neck brace. That catch should have killed him, too. Yes, the maximum acceleration might have been smaller than an impact with concrete since Mr. Incredible could give him a very small buffer with his arms... though I see no evidence he does. Mr. Incredible impacts Oliver and within two frames tops Oliver has matched Mr. Incredible's velocity. Mr. Incredible also appears to have incredible mass, as he does at several other points in the movie, as Oliver's impact appears to leave his trajectory entirely unaffected. He seems to mass at least 3 or 4 tons, probably more.

Oliver is an incredibly sturdy guy by our real-world standards.

<comment><USER4> Oh my god, these are comic book movies. Get over it.

<comment><USER2> Well, it's not really something you can turn off. When I saw Tony Stark crash in the sand, the effect on me was very much the same as if I'd seen his head disintegrated by a shotgun blast. I was viscerally _sure_ he was dead.

If you haven't seen it recently, here's the scene. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ1cyUN9RuY#t=5m01s>

I mean, I know it's a superhero movie, and I still wince at the force of the impact. It's like watching someone get hit by a speeding bus -- only the average superhero would destroy the bus and slow down over its length. The sand actually _stops_ him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first section is a really roundabout and overly technical way of thinking about the force exerted on each person, and as a result, even gets it completely wrong:

> The sixth person in the human chain (the top person in a chain of six) would > have to hold up a force of 660 pounds. This assumes an average human-chain > person weight of 130 pounds

No. A chain of 5 would be a force of 650 pounds for the person on top (only the hand they're grasping with matters, the force of the chain against a link's ankle is pretty irrelevant, the human body has pretty good tensile strength and can probably lift quite a bit before getting dislocated joints, etc); a chain of 6 would be a force of 780 pounds.

This isn't rocket science, and really is so intuitive that this explanation is just beating around the bush. Here's how you really calculate it:

> The force exerted on the top person is the total weight of the chain.

The end. A chain of two 130-pound people exerts the exact same force as a "chain" of one 260-pound person.

</comment><comment><USER6> This completely ruins this movie and its predecessors for me. Here I was thinking that, say, everything the Hulk does obeys the laws of physics.

One major quibble -- why the hell does his chart's y-axis start at 100?!

<comment><USER7> For the same reason it ends at 700: because there are no data points outside the range [100, 700] so he can crop the chart without losing any useful data.

<comment><USER6> Not the same thing at all. You're losing the relative scale, and the benefit in this case is minor. If you're trying to emphasize near-term changes in a range with a very high base (e.g. stock fluctuations) this might be justified if you make the broken scale clear, but it's probably better in such a case to make the graph into log change from baseline (which is how, for example, yahoo charts stock prices).

In this case, for a very minor space saving and extra work the -- borderline useless -- graph is made misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of Randell Monroe's new series What If? Really awesome to see this major publication have some interesting math even if it's just for fun!

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting analysis, but this is just the initial shot. There is lots of CG work ahead, and I would be surprised if this kind of thing is not included in the effects necessary to make it more realistic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me immediately of "Intuitor Insultingly stupid movie physics": <http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Cartoonists would exaggerate a person's response when they're, for example, hit by a mallet, or kicked hard. This is especially true in anime. In the real world, a person isn't bent in half from a kick, they're lightly dented; but, to emphasize the power of the kick, they'll bend the person in half. Why can't this same thing occur in movies with real actors? Perhaps they thought this bend would better convey the motion of flying, rather than a bunch of people just hanging in the air. If they were just hanging in the air, the average view would think something along the lines of "wow, that's a bad green-screen effect" or "huh... they're not moving, they're just going straight up..." vs "they're being carried to safety by Ironman! and they're having to cross distance to do it!"

<comment><USER12> The woman hanging on Iron Man is holding up 4 people with 1 arm.

They could capture much of the scene by having them ride a girder or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> well, it's a superhero show, so just say human chaining ability is part of his superpower. his suit makes little metal tendrils that reinforce the structure or something</comment>


Where to buy a Nikon Camera - <AUTHOR> Where can I buy a good quality Nikon camera around Orlando FL or Miami?. Also which one do you recommend for photo of products for an online store.<p>Thank you so much. Really appreciated. <comment><USER2> My preferred shop for photo stuff has been B&H for the last couple of decades. I got my D850 from them, they're usually well supplied with Nikon stuff. No. 2 is Freestyle, but that's mainly for darkroom stuff, and you probably don't care about that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks !</comment></comment>


US sells $2.6B in tanks, missiles to Taiwan - <AUTHOR> https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3718443 <comment><USER2> I'm sure they have other procurement projects going on, but in my _uninformed opinion_ I'd think they should probably concentrate on anti-ship and anti- aircraft weapons. They've probably already lost if they need to use tanks and anti-tank weapons.

<comment><USER3> True. I would argue that Taiwan cannot stop China from having a successful invasion. They can only make it so costly that China would not be willing to pay the price. Both in manpower and political blowback.

<comment><USER2> I'm not so sure they can do that with tactical weapons. I know it's not the 50s anymore, but IIRC, wasn't the PRC known for using massively wasteful human wave attacks in Korea? They have a political system that's more tolerant to wasteful losses than a democracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I mean given current market prices thats like what? Two tanks and a missile?

<comment><USER5> It says right in the article: 108 M1A2 Abrams tanks - US$2 billion 1,240 TOW anti-tank missiles - US$299 million 409 Javelin missiles - US$129 million 250 stinger missiles - US$223 million

<comment><USER6> Formatting:

* 108 M1A2 Abrams tanks - US$2 billion

* 1,240 TOW anti-tank missiles - US$299 million

* 409 Javelin missiles - US$129 million

* 250 stinger missiles - US$223 million</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How's my landing page? - <AUTHOR>

Recently worked on a personal project this summer and finally soft launched it with a private beta. I've created this landing page for it at:
http://www.dailychomp.com
I'd like some feedback on the landing page design and ways you think I could improve it as I've never really done landing page designs before.
Just want to see if others could pick out ways to improve it.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> _edit_ typo

Nice twist on not collecting email addresses into some bucket that will sit dormant for 2 years - pretty clever of you to poke twitter & facebook instead (which, I imagine, would result in more 'OMGVIRALZ' too).

I had actually had a very similar idea to this myself, but never got around to implementing it.

The design looks clean and very appealing, but why did you create it with a hashbang link approach? It doesn't _appear_ to gain anything by doing that (click on the 'about' link)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

It's using hashbang links simply because the mobile web application uses a similar approach in order to reduce the assets being transferred over 3g connections.

The desktop web application is bootstrapping the same JavaScript at the moment so it uses a similar approach in requesting the assets that change.

The idea is so the desktop can easily inherit most of the functionality of the mobile web application with minimal modifications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The page is basically blank if JavaScript isn't available. Turning it on shows that it is only being used to populate the main content pane.

This is a bad design decision since (a) not everyone with JavaScript off will bother to enable it if they haven't already seen something interesting, (b) not everyone with JavaScript off can enable it, and (c) you're giving yourself this problem in exchange for no apparent benefit.

Your main pitch should always, always, always be visible in the broadest compatibility case - even if that means falling back on a static mockup.

</comment><comment><USER4> Currently at work so I'm using IE8. It seems to be completely unusable. I hate thinking about it just as much as the next guy, but it's probably wise to support at least 2 versions back for IE.

I recommend keeping the landing much simpler and more focused. I have no idea what is trying to run when I load the page, but whatever it is probably isn't strictly necessary for the front page. Link to the more complicated stuff for those who become interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Guilty as charged. I did absolutely no cross browser testing with IE for DailyChomp mainly due to time constraints with school starting. No excuse but thanks for the good reminder. I will try to fix up the IE issues as soon as I can. Sorry about that!

I've made a screenshot for you to see how it looks at the moment: [http://f.cl.ly/items/3r1H280A2U3G1w0N1d1w/Screen%20Shot%2020...](http://f.cl.ly/items/3r1H280A2U3G1w0N1d1w/Screen%20Shot%202011-09-12%20at%2012.07.33%20PM.png)

I did try to put a focus on simplicity. Let me know if you think there's still some unnecessary stuff on the page :)

<comment><USER4> Looks great. I love the subtle rainbow effect on the left side of the header. Those little things are what usually impresses me the most because they're so subtle I'm surprised anyone ever thought to do it.

I think the message is perfect. The complication I was talking about is the (likely) unnecessary script running on a landing page. It seems like the intention of the page is simple enough that very little (if any) scripting is necessary. For example, I have a "coming soon" page that is solely meant to collect email addresses (<http://soupnextdoor.com>) and I'm more interested in everyone being able to see it than how it looks, so I made sure it will work for anyone. I may be wrong about your page's need for scripting since I haven't seen it with a browser that can handle it. I'll take another look with chrome when I get home. Great design tho, and the message is clear. Good idea btw. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks good overall. Couple small things: 1) Show a couple more screenshots so we know what exactly it does 2) I see this a lot and it drives me nuts: DailyChomp, but the logo shows dailychomp. The logo also looks a little out of place. 3) I would give the option to collect email addresses too.

Lastly, and the most important... start A/B testing right now. Try testing the wording in that button first and go from there.

<comment><USER2> Just on 2) - I actually prefer to see all lower case in the logo, as opposed to CamelCasing the whole lot

Certainly agree on 1) though

<comment><USER5> I'm fine with logos being all lower case or whatever, but to me it should match how you write it in the text. If you don't do that, it is hard for people to write about you because they don't know how to write the name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does it matter what it looks like if it is effective? The stats you get from this should matter more than our opinions.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it looks pretty good. The best landing pages are the ones that simply explain the idea. Perhaps you could create a short video to let us know how it works once you launch.

</comment><comment><USER8> You need to have a way to go back to the main site from mobile browsers. I'm on Firefox/Ubuntu and it takes me to your mobile site with no way to get back to the normal site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link for convenience.

<http://www.dailychomp.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> For those who just want to see a screenshot: [http://f.cl.ly/items/3r1H280A2U3G1w0N1d1w/Screen%20Shot%2020...](http://f.cl.ly/items/3r1H280A2U3G1w0N1d1w/Screen%20Shot%202011-09-12%20at%2012.07.33%20PM.png)</comment></comment>


Node-Data is unique framework to support sql,nosql,graph in single ORM layer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ratneshsinghparihar/Node-Data <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Could you publish test coverage statistics?</comment>


There is no sane reason for the dock connector to not be micro-USB. Discuss. - <AUTHOR> http://jwz.livejournal.com/1300359.html

<comment><USER2> Well Micro-USB was standardized by the USB-IF in 2007 and the dock connector was first used in 2003, so I'm going to go with "linear time and a desire to be backwards compatible with the enormous ecosystem of products which provide them with a significant competitive advantage".

I mean, I can go to most hotels now and more or less count on the fact that even if I forgot to pack a charging cable, I can stick my phone on the alarm clock's dock connector. That's a big factor contributing to the low-friction iDevice ownership experience.

*edited to reflect the fact that the dock connector came in with the 3rd gen iPod in 2003, not the 1st gen in 2001.

<comment><USER3> Wait—hotels have clocks with Apple dock connectors?

<comment><USER2> The last 4 or 5 I've been in certainly did. These were in and around Seattle, Portland, and Vegas.

<comment><USER4> Also seen them pretty regularly in NY, Boston and Atlantic City. Typically can't use them to listen to music off an iPhone, but it will still charge.

Definitely saved me a few times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maintaining compatibility with iPod integrated cars has been one of the big reasons to stick with the dock connector. It's _very_ expensive to upgrade cars with fancy new head units especially if you want things like steering wheel controls to continue working. Conservatively I'd say anywhere between $1-2k with a professional installation. Plus what's the alternative? I don't know of any standardized control system for micro-USB based players. I think Bluetooth will ultimately solve the integration problem.

The funny thing is over the same time period that the iPod has used one connector devices like cell phones have gone from proprietary connectors, to mini-USB, now to micro-USB. It hasn't exactly been a smooth ride. micro-USB was only announced in 2007 and wasn't widely deployed until 2009. Are we going to have nano-USB in 2 years and repeat the whole process yet again? I'm not arguing against standardized connectors but the mini/micro debacle certainly didn't help consumers much did it?

<comment><USER6> I always thought so too, but it was surprisingly much less than this at my local Fry's. I didn't opt to buy, but these services ran in the $200-400 range there, IIRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No need for separate ports for video/audio out is a pretty compelling reason.

<http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml>

<comment><USER8> Why is a separate port a big deal? You could easily put a micro-USB port right next to an HDMI port, take up roughly the same amount of space, and still have a quasi-proprietary but just as easy to use cable that is just an HDMI cable and a micro-USB cable in the same sleeve.

<comment><USER9> Haha, you really think apple would put two ports on their devices?

<comment><USER8> Well obviously not because they would prefer they be proprietary. But if you put them right next to each other, you can have your magically minimal design and still let your users get by when they're short a cord.

<comment><USER10> Don't get why you were downvoted..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> By 2011 or 2012, can't remember the exact deadline, their mobile phones must have Micro-USB. At least if they want to continue selling them here in Europe. The ruling for it passed a while ago that all mobile phones must be chargeable with the same micro-usb connector. Apple agreed to those requirements. I don't see Apple doing Dock AND Micro-USB.

Unless they provide an adapter, don't know if this is allowed or not.

EDIT: Ah screw it, if this site[1] is to be believed Apple will only provide an adapter.

[1] [http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/25149/next-iphone-charges- vi...](http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/25149/next-iphone-charges-via-micro- usb)

<comment><USER12> What's wrong with only providing an adaptor? This satisfies everyone doesn't it?

<comment><USER10> What's the point?

This law is to make all your gadgets chargeable through one cable. Now i have to carry adapters for all my gadgets instead of different chargers/cables? That's just about the opposite of what that law tries to achieve!

I just hope this will be forbidden. Please! All my gadgets use different connectors and chargers it is so annoying (and all seem to be USB but with different layouts.. that's laughable).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just as a note, HTC uses something called "ExtUSB" which lets them get extra pins (and therefore features) out of something that can still do normal USB functions (like charging, syncing, etc).

<http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/index.php?title=ExtUSB>

<comment><USER14> _clap clap clap_

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Among other things, the port was/is/will be a:

\- Firewire Port

\- USB Slave Port

\- USB Host Port

\- Audio Line Out

\- Audio Line In

\- VGA Video Out

\- Micro SD Port

\- Future Port 1

\- Future Port 2

\- etc...

I suppose I might care about the complaints if I were not already swimming in iPod-USB cables.

On the other hand, I have a micro-USB phone and exactly one micro-USB cable that I use for charging both at home and in my car, and for sync. One time I misplaced my one micro-USB cable and decided to go shopping for an extra, only to find that every store I visited had no idea what a micro-USB cable was.

And my micro-USB phone is a lot more finicky about flaky USB power sources than any of my iDevices, so I have a very difficult time understanding the complaints about the iPod port.

</comment><comment><USER16> From a physical design perspective...

\- micro-USB doesn't provide anything to hold the connector in whilst the dock connector uses small clips.

\- Also, anyone who has used the WD Passport drive with dock knows that the micro-USB port isn't very suitable for holding an iPhone-sized device vertically. There's too much play so the device can wobble or not be seated correctly, and this can damage the usb pins. There just isn't the same positive physical connection as with a dock connector.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can't stand Apple's iDevice ports. They are wide, difficult to plug, and feel like they will break or snap off. They also collect lint like there is no tomorrow.

Apple's magnetic power plugs on the other hand are awesome! I suppose magnetic interference prevents them from becoming a digital port, but it sure would be nice!

<comment><USER18> The magnet plug will not interfere with the signals on a digital port.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> USB used to need a bit of charge to negotiate a session with the host so you couldn't charge a completely dead battery by connecting to a PC. I'm not sure if that is still true. I just tried to charge a dead Canon point-and-shoot camera over microUSB and it didn't work.

The dock does a/v out without needing another connector. For example, the HTC EVO has an additional HDMI out port.

Apple has added additional features like the control capsule on headphones.

It'd actually be nice if the 30-pin dock connector was standardized and everyone used it. Apple probably isn't too keen since USB beat Firewire the last time Apple tried to standardize a connector interface.

<comment><USER20> MicroUSB can do AV out, it just can't do HDMI. I would imagine the apple connector can't do HDMI either. Although I really don't know how many "free" pins there are in the 30 pin connector that could be purposed for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is an eminently sane reason, at least from the perspective of Apple's wanting to keep the switching costs of it's customers high. It may also be an aesthetic and design choice, but the primary function of the specialised dock connector is to prevent competitors from producing drop-in replacements for Apple devices and to raise the switching costs for committed apple customers. If you already have a dock connector in your clock/radio and in the dashboard of your car, you aren't going to switch to a usb based device for music or phone or casual browsing.

</comment><comment><USER22> The A/V connection seems to be a valid reason, but...

Ever used a Ford with MS Sync? I rented a Focus with this on vacation last summer, and it works quite well - a surprisingly innovative and compatibile product for Microsoft.

It hooks up to your iPod/iPhone with the standard USB cable, and can play audio, so it has to stream it over the USB connection somehow, or it rewires the port, which seems unlikely to me, as you'd run out of pins (stereo audio, power, control, ground = 5 pins minimum).

I really wonder how this is accomplished, as it can play back protected AAC music, which must be decoded on the phone, so it isn't just using the device as mass storage...

<comment><USER23> I can't imagine it's accomplished very much differently than any radio- transmitting iPod attachment for a car.

<comment><USER24> A radio transmitter for iDevices will use the audio out lines on the dock connector, whereas the USB cable purely breaks out data, as far as I'm aware, so they must be doing something different.

<comment><USER23> I must have misunderstood you, and now I'm intrigued: what connector does an iDevice have other than the dock connector and the headphone connector?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The dock connector, started back in the days when the iPod was firewire* and since the iPod charged over firewire on Macs but firewire ports on PCs were often unpowered, Apple needed to provide a way for one iPod model to be plugged into both windows and mac machines. This was also before Apple gave up on firewire and went USB only. Further people have enough confusion hooking things up, so giving them a failproof solution is pretty ideal. People really do have trouble confusing video and audio RCA jacks, for instance. This single port has allowed Apple to transition thru dozens of product and models over almost a decade without having any compatibility confusion or hassle, and no special $20 adapters, etc. Compare this to the situation we've seen in the last decade with video ports-- and they only do one thing, yet there have been a half dozen different "Standards".

What is most interesting here is the default presumption that Apple is doing this for proprietary "monopolistic" reasons.

*though the first ipod had an actual firewire port, a later model which was intended for windows as well had the dock connector which supported both firewire and USB and Apple shipped different cables for mac and windows iPod users.

<comment><USER26> Another thing people forget is the variety of devices Ipods plug into. Your high-tech treadmill, for example, uses pins dedicated to video out.

<comment><USER27> Indeed. I'd have to say this form of laziness is a benefit. Even the extra cost in firewire controller chips helped to doom it outside of pro use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It has USB, power out, serial control, audio, video out, and remove features. Probably some others I can't think of off the top of my head. This means it's doing a lot more than just USB.

There are a lot of products like FM tuners and other aftermarket offerings that are only possible via the dock connector. A USB connection would require the dongles to be much more complicated and work a lot closer to the hardware.

PS If you made all the Audio digital over USB you'd need more complex hardware. You want to have the cheapest headsets and output cables to get the audio and video out of the machine. That means old fashioned analog audio/video. It's all in one connector so you can "dock" it with simply one connection.

</comment><comment><USER28> There shouldn't be any reason for 4 different micro-USB standards when we already had usb-C!</comment>


Ask HN: What is a good introduction to neuroscience? - <AUTHOR> I could just browse reviews on Amazon.com to find a good introductory book on neuroscience.<p>But I want something that's both good and appeals to a technical mind. Which books do you recommend? <comment><USER2> I'm a computational PhD student in the field -- I think you'd most enjoy "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins, an inspiring book written by a hacker himself!

If you'd like a very excellent, fascinating title on mathematics and art and mind, try "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstadter. Another fun, classical book with more of an AI bend is "Society of Mind" by Marvin Minsky.

For more classical neuroscience, "Phantoms of the Brain" by Ramachandran, well-known in perception research, is good. I haven't read it, but "In Search of Memory" is supposed to be excellent by Kandel, a memory researcher superstar. (I've found that many of the books by non-scientists about the brain are often shallow, claim to know too much, and use the same familiar stories over and over.) For neuroscience at a lower level (i.e. the biology of neurons, neural networks, cells), I'm not aware of a good popular account.

I also recommend picking up a copy of Mind magazine from your bookstore! And if you can get a copy of a Scientific American magazine special on the brain (every few years I believe), those are usually very well written as well :-)

<comment><USER3> I second that. "On Intelligence" is a great book, and although I like physics and CS more than biology, it has seriously caused me to think of pursuing a career in neuroscience, simply because it shows how little we truly know about ourselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My undergrad neuroscience textbook was the classic "Principles Of Neural Science" by Kandell, Schwartz, and Jessell.

[http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric- Kandel/...](http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric- Kandel/dp/0838577016)

If you're looking for something a bit more digestable, you could try "Biological Psychology: An Introduction to Behavioral, Cognitive, and Clinical Neuroscience", which is more appropriate for a survey level (100, 1000, depending on your school) course.

[http://www.amazon.com/Biological-Psychology-Introduction- Beh...](http://www.amazon.com/Biological-Psychology-Introduction-Behavioral- Neuroscience/dp/0878937056/)

<comment><USER5> Upvote for Kandell, not BioPsych. The latter just emphasizes the wrong things and too broadly.

<comment><USER6> What about MITECS? [1] Is it outdated?

Eliezer Yudkowsky recommended it[2]. But I'm not sure if he still would.

I know you work at MIT, what do you use?

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/MIT-Encyclopedia-Cognitive-Sciences- MI...](http://www.amazon.com/MIT-Encyclopedia-Cognitive-Sciences- MITECS/dp/0262731444)

[2] <http://sl4.org/wiki/MITECS>

<comment><USER5> That's just a reference volume. It's fine for what it is, but really as a launching off point for specific topics. And reading it cover to cover would get old, fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I worked at a neuroscience lab for a bit. I was focusing on EEG, the signals, oscillations, and emergent patterns in the brain. For this, they highly recommended I read Buzsaki's Rhythms of the Brain: [http://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Brain-Gyorgy- Buzsaki/dp/019530...](http://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Brain-Gyorgy- Buzsaki/dp/0195301064) .

</comment><comment><USER5> Could you be more specific? Are you looking for a populist read, a textbook, or an anthology of review articles? Straight up neuroscience is usually lower- level or a more cognitive/psychology high-level slant too? Research oriented or general principles or abstract ideas?

Your purposes might also help. There's been good work done on Bayes and datamining and I think some has made it into a book format.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need a textbook - I'm looking for something that would be given to first year Neuroscience students. I would prefer something low-level, but it would be nice if the book ties high-level concepts to the low-level concepts.

I've wanted to do a Ph.D. for some time, but neither pure CS nor pure Maths (I have a masters in the latter) excites me anymore. Neuroscience interests me, but I want to make sure that I'm not deluding myself; therefore I'd like to work through a proper introductory text before making the next move.

EDIT: Listened to my inner grammar Nazi and fixed capitalization & sentences.

<comment><USER5> Okay, that helps, thanks.

For neuroscience first-year grad students, the gold standard is:

[http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric- Kandel/...](http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric- Kandel/dp/0838577016)

The fourth edition does a good job at higher-level stuff. But be forewarned: It is biology intensive.

For less biology and more cognitive neuroscience, you can try:

[http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Neuroscience-Second- Michael-...](http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Neuroscience-Second-Michael- Gazzaniga/dp/0393977773)

or

[http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Neuroscience- Neuropsychology...](http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Neuroscience- Neuropsychology-Student- Text/dp/0618122109/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225647507&sr=1-1)

I used the Gazzaniga when I taught Intro to Cognitive Neuroscience even as I wasn't super impressed (which is a common complaint - tolerance, not true acceptance). I know some folks like the Banich book instead.

If, with your Math background, you're interested in neural computation and modeling there are also some good books along those lines. Just let me know and I'll hunt down the links.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks robg & toddml, I was particularly interested in Principles of Neural Science and it's good to see both of you endorsing it.

I've already started teaching myself some first year biology (from a borrowed textbook), so I'm going for Principles.

<comment><USER5> Happy to help. Focus on ions and channels if you're interested in neuron functions. That's a typical hangup for those new to biology. Some knowledge of the vascular system also helps. Otherwise, it mostly comes down to classifying cell types then brain and body regions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mapping the Mind is a fun book. It probably doesn't serve as an introduction to neuroscience, but it has a lot interesting, useful information.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for your excellent answers.

I just bought Principles of Neural Science (it's pretty damn expensive in South Africa), but I'll look at almost everything else mentioned here.

HN is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you want to develop new ideas, do so before you read many books, otherwise your ideas will never break out of the orthodoxy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Robg, are you out there?

<comment><USER5> You called? :)

<comment><USER10> Seems like you would have the best answer for this one, mate. Have at it.

<comment><USER5> As you can see in my reply, I wish there was a simple answer. But I'm afraid the field is so young there really isn't a great general purpose read. The more popular ones leave me wanting. The more research oriented ones are a slog. The problem is, I think, that the field is so young relative to something like physics so the general themes are hard to discern for everyone involved - generalists and specialists - to relay out to a wide audience.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tech companies: make remote work part of your diversity and inclusion efforts - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@margotcodes/tech-companies-make-remote-work-part-of-your-diversity-and-inclusion-efforts-b100ab74bf97 <comment><USER3> Companies have to be serious about a culture of remote work for this to happen. That means including the remote workers in all of the meetings, code reviews, etc. It means making a conscious effort to include the remote employees even when doing so is a pain for the onsite employees. Otherwise the remote employees become second-class citizens and miss out on a lot of what is going on.

For that reason, I think remote-only companies are probably easier to run than companies with a mix of remote and onsite workers -- at remote-only companies, it's not possible to intentionally or accidentally exclude the remote workers from things they ought to be involved in.

Also for that reason, adding a culture of remote work to the kind of company where any onsite employees can grab a room and start whiteboarding stuff is going to be very difficult.

<comment><USER4> Not to say anyone here is wrong, but I'll weigh in with my experience, which is success with a team that was a mix of remote and on-site. Maybe it was just a unicorn, but it worked quite well. The downside to that, though, is the remote workers have to be prepared to feel a certain amount of disconnection from the rest of the team who are probably having lunches together and group activities that leave out those who aren't physically present. Otherwise, I think it ultimately comes down to how the team and the leaders of the organization view the remote employees – not as synonymous with freelance "techies" working in their underwear, but playing on the same field as everyone else and having as much value to bring despite not having their butt placed in a specific chair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I honestly think remote work is pretty detrimental to innovation and progress. Many of the best projects that I've worked on started as hallway conversations.

Obviously, this isn't true for everyone and all situations... It's just like, my opinion... man.

<comment><USER6> Someone needs to tell all of those open source project things about this. They've been doing it wrong the whole time!

<comment><USER7> Open source development as "obvious" proof of remote work superiority is often brought up but proponents don't realize they aren't the same.

E.g. open source project like Linux kernel where _volunteers_ choose what they want to work on, with little or zero effects on careers for missing deadlines has different dynamics than businesses.

If we want to convince businesses to adopt remote work, the Linux kernel is not a relevant example. Businesses have:

1) finite budget

2) deadlines

3) pressure to innovate for marketplace acceptance or go bankrupt

We need a better explanation for why business-related success of Google Pagerank/Bigtable, Apple iPhone, Facebook, etc comes more from teams in the office rather than remote workers on Skype. The Linux project -- even though it is "successful" \-- is not that explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Remote work is a boon for anyone with kids. You get to cut the commute out of your day, and so long as day care is nearby, recoup that time with your family.

But AFAICT, the tech industry is generally hostile to the notion of having children, or aging past thirty-five.

<comment><USER9> That has not been my experience at all in comparison to other fields I've been in. My managers especially have often left early to pick up kids, or take a day to care for sick children. People talk about their children vomiting the night before to excuse their sleep deprivation. Every programming job I've had comes with maternity and paternity leave. Two-income households are far more common than stay-at-home parents, and the pay is sufficient people can afford childcare.

It is at least much less hostile than most of the rest of America.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A big part of the rational and moral justification for diversity initiatives and affirmative action programs, as I understand them, is as a means to help correct the history of institutional racism and discrimination in this country.

So while the idea that meeting and working "with folks from all over the world—Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, the Philippines, Mexico, and others" is appealing, for me it sidesteps the major issues diversity efforts should be addressing. And as an outsourcing mechanism, it can serve as a means of wage suppression, which has also exacerbated social divisions in this country.

<comment><USER11> I think more emphasis should be given on the benefit that diversity brings to the organization. A university or a company with lots of young white middle- class people will miss a lot of ideias that people from other backgrounds might bring.

<comment><USER12> This is dangerous thinking. Its skin-deep diversity. This makes it ok to look at a person and assume they have a typical middle class upbringing, but you don't know anything about that person. They could have grew up doing hard labor on an almond farm in central California and then lived a few years in haiti before going to college.

Diversity _does_ increase innovation, but its a diversity of experience and a diversity of thought and not based on skin color and gender.

<comment><USER9> You can't have a representative group without diversity of gender and race. They may not be sufficient, but they are necessary precursors.

Additionally, of course, a system that even implicitly excludes people on the basis of gender or race is inherently unjust, whereas experience can reasonably be a requirement for a particular position when it results in necessary skills.

<comment><USER7> _> You can't have a representative group without diversity of gender and race. _

I think devmunchies' point is that if you have a finite set of job positions... e.g. 3 jobs, you might have the following situations:

Group 1:

      1) white man (Democrat Stanford grad)
      2) white woman (Democrat Stanford grad)
      3) black man (Democrat Stanford grad)

Group 2:

      1) white man (Democrat Stanford grad)
      3) white man (Libertarian Kansas kid self-taught)
      2) white man (South Africa bootcamp grad)

Depending on what's important, Group 2 would be seen as "more diverse and representative" even though the skin color is all the same. In that case, diversity of _thought_ is valued more than diversity of skin color.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From what I can tell, most diversity efforts are more like a fig leaf. They don't want to change how the company works so it can be more diverse, they want to fit more women and minorities into how things work now. It's all about status quo, and maybe having an "event" or hosting a "girls who code" type class in the office space, that sort of thing. And don't get me wrong, doing those kind of things is perfectly noble and good, nothing wrong with it. But ultimately this only seems like an issue the industry wants to fix if it doesn't have to really do much of anything.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ain't not gonna happen. From what I can tell from articles and company brochures diversity means young, good-looking people in an open office all staring at the same screen.

There will be no diversity regarding introverts, shy, disabled, fat, ugly or other types of people.

<comment><USER15> This made me wonder: What does it take to become a protected/victim group?

Ugly and socially-unskilled people are not protected/victim groups even though their lives are harder.

My current hypothesis is that the main reason that a group gets that status is that they have an emotionally compelling victim-story (although I think there's some randomness due to political movements).

Under this hypothesis, the struggles of the ugly and socially-unskilled may be less emotionally compelling because they are less likable and so we have less empathy for them.

Disclaimer: All of this is just descriptive speculation. I don't very well understand the relative struggles of different groups and don't endorse poor treatment of anyone. And I'd love for anyone to show flaws in my hypothesis or present a better one.

<comment><USER16> Conventionally ugly and socially-unskilled people might get rough treatment from their peers, but generally haven't been subject to special laws against them, pogroms or even the relatively mild insinuation they should be avoided as a group because of their "immorality" or "agenda".

Also, appearance and social skills are gradients which don't fit neatly into groups, and many people who might widely be considered to sit at the ugly/unskilled end of the spectrum have absolutely no desire to identify as such.

<comment><USER17> Is it that society hasn't discriminated against them, or that we haven't been made aware of such discrimination. Many extremely racist laws that directly discriminated against minorities have fallen out of common knowledge and we are only aware of it because the common understanding of past injustice (and a few specific stories) are in the collective knowledge.

So perhaps such discrimination has existed, but too few have worked to add it to the common knowledge of our society. For example, maybe ugly people get significantly lower pay and longer prison sentences (all else being equal), but no one has spent the time researching such data? Should laws against sexual harassment end up being considered, to some extent, laws against the unattractive and socially awkward since the same interaction may or may not be considered harassment? Maybe treatment of socially awkward children (which can get very brutal and lead to suicide) hasn't been considered an issue of a group because no one has yet made the emotional argument it should be discrimination of a group.

>and many people who might widely be considered to sit at the ugly/unskilled end of the spectrum have absolutely no desire to identify as such.

There is a lot of history of who was considered black and who wasn't that might be of note.

<comment><USER16> Nobody is pretending that ugly and socially awkward people have never been discriminated against by individuals and peer groups; all kinds of people are cruelly and unusually treated on a large variety of arbitrary and non- arbitrary criteria on a daily basis, and many more are marginalised.

But social awkwardness isn't something which was only decriminalised 14 years ago in the US and still illegal in 72 countries. Influential religious leaders do not deliver sermons on the duty of ugly people to subordinate themselves to their partners. Beautiful, socially adept people don't hold tiki-torch-lit rallies to venerate people that lead the fight to keep ugly or socially awkward people as _property_.

Maybe nobody influential is making the emotional argument that kids bullied for their individual awkwardnesses should be protected as a group because nobody influential is making the emotional argument _for_ discriminating against socially awkward children as a group...

Protected discrimination classes haven't emerged as a consequence of extensive research to find hints of systematic discrimination, they've arisen as a response to obvious, organised and usually very open attempts to encourage and enforce systematic discrimination. If you're inclined to make the mistake of assuming that discrimination against protected classes is historic or the result of statistical fishing expeditions, it's probably because - <USER2> other mistreatment or misfortunes you might have suffered in your life - you're not in a group that is subject to organised and systematic attempts to suppress it.

<comment><USER17> > because nobody influential is making the emotional argument for > discriminating against socially awkward children as a group

Why is the metric about who is making the argument, instead of what is actually happening?

Also, many influential people make arguments such as 'kids being kids' that open tolerate bullying. Especially people directly involved in the school system that should be protecting these kids. There is no one in the national spotlight for it because it isn't outrageous enough for our society to put it in the national spotlight.

>Influential religious leaders do not deliver sermons on the duty of ugly people to subordinate themselves to their partners.

Writers at major news organizations, who have audiences that would make most pastors jealous, have written such things. Especially if we talk about people who openly support discrimination against short men. And the attack on men's sexuality is pretty brutal as well, yet openly tolerated (just look at how often virgin is equated to someones who hates women and wants to enslave/kill them).

> they've arisen as a response to obvious, organised and usually very open > attempts to encourage and enforce systematic discrimination

And there are still groups who have experienced such who haven't yet been made into a protected class. For an example I think we can both agree on, sexual orientation hasn't yet been made (federal level in the US at least) into a protected class.

Also, this doesn't explain why the majorities are also protected. Race is a protected class, not just being a minority. (Age is a weird one where being old is protected but being young isn't, despite massive historic discrimination against young people, namely the forcing of young men to die in wars on behalf of old people.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Convert JSON to a Unix-friendly line-based format - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dvxhouse/jsonpipe

<comment><USER2> "Everyone I know prefers to work with JSON over XML, but sadly there is a sore lack of utilities of the quality or depth of html-xml-utils and XMLStarlet for actually processing JSON data in an automated fashion, short of writing an ad hoc processor in your favourite programming language."

Actually there is just such a suite of utilites! See <https://github.com/benbernard/RecordStream>

<comment><AUTHOR> RecordStream seems more complete but requires much more dependencies. I really like the simplicity of jsonpipe and how easy is to use it:

          curl -s "http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/adulau  | jsonpipe -s "#"  | grep  "\#u" | cut -f2 | sed -e"s/\"//g" | xargs -d"\n" wget -r -l 1 –p –-convert-links

A simple example to take a local mirror of my last del.icio.us bookmarks...

<comment><USER3> "simple"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe you're solving a different problem, but I'm not sure emitting one key- value pair per line is ultimately the way to go:

      $ echo '[{"a": [{"b": {"c": ["foo"]}}]}]' | jsonpipe
      /   []
      /0  {}
      /0/a        []
      /0/a/0      {}
      /0/a/0/b    {}
      /0/a/0/b/c  []
      /0/a/0/b/c/0        "foo"

In my own work, I've built up a suite of stream-based nested record processing tools that accept & produce JSON, protocol buffers, and a unix tab-delimited format. For the unix format it's been more useful to stick to the standard one-record-per-line thing, and let the user specify what fields to extract and their order.

Here's a depressing example of the fun you can have with new media and old unix tools, to give you some idea:

      $ mill io -r json -w texty -W fields=in_reply_to_screen_name < tweets.json | \
        grep -v -E '^(None|)$' | sort | uniq -c | sed -e 's#^ *##' | \
        sort -k1,1 -nr | head -5
      258 justinbieber
      248 ddlovato
      184 gypsyhearttour
      164 Logindaband
      145 Louis_Tomlinson

</comment><comment><USER3>
        import os.path as p

Renaming imports to single letters bugs me. I went to see where it's used, and it isn't. Binding pyflakes to Cmd+S in TextMate was the best thing I ever did, and it would have caught this. pyflakes is seriously awesome in that role, and pylint before committing.

I'm also surprised that simplejson is used, instead of the built-in json in Python 2.6 and up. A good solution is:

        try: import json
        except ImportError: import simplejson as json

<comment><USER5> > I'm also surprised that simplejson is used

2.6's json lacks simplejson's C accelerators [0] which makes it roughly 20 times slower than simplejson (2.7's simplejson is also ~50% slower than simplejson, as new performance optimizations were added in 2.1.0, as well as memoizations). Simplejson is also updated more often, which lead to it having less bugs, and interesting new features (the ability to natively serialize decimals was added in 2.1 for instance)

simplejson should be the preferred import, with json as a fallback if available.

[0] 2.6's json is simplejson 1.9; 2.7's is 2.0.9; the latest release of simplejson is 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 is in preparation

<comment><USER3> I elect to stick with the standard library in all cases, so I know how my software will perform everywhere without a redundant external dependency. Sticking with the standard library means you'll eventually get those improvements, too.

<comment><USER6> > a redundant external dependency

Is pip install that hard? Surely any deployed project is already managing a requirements.txt/buildout/setup.py/etc.

> means you'll eventually get those improvements

The C speedup extension for simplejson existed well before it was merged into Python stdlib as "json". Are you so sure you'll eventually get said improvement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is my contribution to Unix friendly JSON command line tools (requires Node.js and NPM): <https://github.com/zpoley/json-command>. Here are a couple other good ones: <http://kmkeen.com/jshon/> <https://github.com/micha/jsawk>

</comment><comment><USER8> Why not just use Rhino or any other stand alone javascript interpreter?

<http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/>

a simple example

echo 'x=[1,2,3];x[1]'|js

</comment><comment><USER9> Line-based processing is still important! This work reminds me of an article I wrote 11 years ago covering Sean McGrath's work on PYX—a line-based format for XML—see <http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/03/15/feature/index.html>.

That work derived from that of Charles Goldfarb on SGML, dating from 1989 on ESIS, ISO 8879.

We'll always be downsampling to something we can use with sed, grep and awk. They're too handy not to.

<comment><USER10> Does line-based processing still hold up? I tend to use it less and less these days, in favor of tools that process records instead of lines. There's only so much you can meaningfully store in a line of text, there is no standardized parsing, and it has all kinds of escaping issues if you have fields with embedded newlines / separators.

(FYI even syslog is moving from strictly line based to a more structured format, RFC5424/5425)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Because the path components are separated by / characters, an object key > like "abc/def" would result in ambiguous output. jsonpipe will throw an > error if this occurs in your input, so that you can recognize and handle the > issue. To mitigate the problem, you can choose a different path separator:

Ugh. I should never ever have to pick details of the format to work around content in the format. The only real solution is escaping, though it does add complexity.

<comment><USER12> Hahahah he uses a Unicode snowman as his example delimeter!

$ echo '{"abc/def": 123}' | jsonpipe -s '☃' ☃ {} ☃abc/def 123

I'm ready to face the day with a smile on my face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> cat foo.json | python -m json.tool

<comment><USER14>
      $ cat foo.json
      { foo:"bar" }
      $ js -e "var doc=`cat foo.json`; print(doc.foo);"
      bar

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. For faster flattening of nested structures into paths -- and the inverse operation, unflattening -- you could use this Python C extension:

<https://github.com/acg/python-flattery>

Full disclosure, I'm the author. ;) It uses "." as the path separator, but would be easy to allow "/".

</comment><comment><USER15> The use case is a bit different, but I wrote a little converter to TSV, adding in a header. I mostly use it for input into R, but I use it a lot. It only works for fairly flat JSON objects. <https://github.com/brendano/tsvutils/blob/master/json2tsv>

</comment><comment><USER16> I've written a "json" command line tool with nodejs that offers transformation of JSON with modern javascript expressions (with support for Array.map, Array.reduce etc).

<http://fforw.de/post/scripting-json/></comment>


The Future of America's Contest with China - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/the-future-of-americas-contest-with-china <comment><USER2> Though trade with China flows both ways, if you look at know-how and production capacity, it only goes one way - towards China.</comment>


Apple aims to protect kids' privacy. App makers complain about it. - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/20/apple-aims-protect-kids-privacy-app-makers-say-it-could-devastate-their-businesses/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am all in for that and believe that Apple and others should ban these trackers or at least display a warning on what sdks are being used directly in the app store. that would be a good starting point.

<comment><USER2> That'd be less than useless. Not only would it junk up the UI in the App Store, it doesn't provide any useful information to the user. What does it mean that the Yahoo Finance app has the Flurry and New Relic SDKs in their app? And what is the user supposed to do with that information?

These kinds of "transparency" rules is something I imagine a legislator would come up with after fierce lobbying by the ad-tech industry. Fortunately Apple is not a government and they can and should ban these SDKs. Developers will always complain and these days they'll claim it's anti-competitive, but that shouldn't stop them.</comment></comment>