Dear Millenials: Your Parents Lied to You - <AUTHOR> http://toughsledding.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/dear-millennials-your-parents-lied-to-you/

<comment><USER2> Now this is funny in at least two ways. First is this cute but silly idea that the study of PR is so difficult and rigorous that it makes people cry.

The second way this is funny, is just imagining young PR flacks crying because their papers were graded badly. That just warms up my heart. I mean the thought that a human being would be so depraved (or is forced by the economy into such a depraved condition) as to dream about being a PR person when they grow up is rather depressing. But thinking of them suffering along the way is a bit of a bright spot.

Unfortunately, the whole thing was written by a PR professor so I just don't believe it. He is probably just exaggerating in order to establish some cred for himself as a tough no-nonsense professor and also to create the idea that PR is a rigorous field of study.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think a related problem is that college professors are usually soft. I have been in a number of classes where a group of students take control and demand a curve, or an extension of a project, and in their defense, why not? Many if not most professors will cave.

The best classes were usually taught by strict professors with the confidence to stick up for their original lesson plan.

<comment><USER4> I think a related problem is that he is interacting with "PR majors".

<comment><USER5> You're ignoring the fact that almost all Americans ARE "PR majors" -- lots of other names for shitty degrees, of course -- but the hard sciences are dominated by indians and asians.

Communications, sports medicine, all these majors attract a disproportionate amount of slackers BECAUSE they are easy. The only reason the hard sciences are not AS BAD is because the subject matter makes it much harder to dumb down.

<comment><USER6> > You're ignoring the fact that almost all Americans ARE "PR majors" -- lots > of other names for shitty degrees, of course -- but the hard sciences are > dominated by indians and asians.

sod off, racist

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Millenials, those born between '78 and '95_

That's shifted a good five or ten years back from what I thought. I was born in '82; my parents are Boomers. I thought that made me Generation X.

I. . . I don't want to be a Millenial.

<comment><USER8> I was born in 80, and consider myself on the cusp. I identify w/ X in some ways and Millenials in others. It was actually highly amusing in college, there was a noticable shift between the oldest of my peers and the youngest of my peers, which when I described it to some of the older ones said they didn't notice between a similar variance of their peers. Obviously such things are fuzzy, but that is the general feeling we noticed. Overall 'start time' is usuall referenced between 80 and 85 somewhere. Generational stuff used in this sense is wierder still because those born in 1960 have a completely different gen X experience than those born in 1980. I mean they were adults when I was born...

<comment><USER9> I think for those born in the 1980-1982 range, which generation they fall into depends very much on their personal experiences.

I was born in 1980, but I had 2 older brothers and I was heavily involved in their social circles. MacGyver and the A-Team were the stuff of my generation. I always felt like my younger sisters were weird; Power Rangers was a show of their generation. I would consider myself at the tail end of Gen X.

My wife was born in 1982, watched Power Rangers, and doesn't remember the fall of the Soviet Union... but also grew up using UNIX, remembers Vinyl, owned a Walkman as a teen, and feels most socially comfortable with people in the 35-50 age bracket (who often assume she's in her late 30s.) I'd say she's more Gen X than Millennial.

Another close friend of mine was born in 1981, and I'd consider him 100% Millennial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Somewhat tangentially, I had very few writing teachers/profs that forced me to write better. The ones that did were not the hard-asses willing to bruise my ego and fill the page with red ink; they were the ones who could destroy my thesis and render my examples impotent with 3 comments at the end of the paper.

Invariably, if I got a teacher/prof who bled all over my creations, I'd start with B-s at the beginning and end up with As by the end. I didn't improve my writing. I just figured out the teachers pet peeves and learned to work around them. My teachers were invariably smarter and more experienced than me when dealing with the subject at hand, but that doesn't prevent them from being flesh-and-blood people with idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies.

I'd love to believe I'm just a millenial who could stand to learn at lot from an ego-crushing set of experiences, but just because a person hurts your feelings doesn't make them a better teacher.

<comment><USER11> I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you. The ego needs to be bruised in order to deflate the head of the youngster so learning can begin.

I too had my ego bruised and spirits crushed by hard-marking, discipline demanding examiners. In each case, they're the only the ones I remember. All the wishy-washy as-long-as-you-tried ones are as forgotten as they were useless to my learning.

Half the battle in teaching young people is making them realise the scope of the things they don't know, so they can appreciate how far they have to travel. Call me old-school, but I don't see how you can do this without brusing a few egos and crushing a few spirits. It's precisely the ego that says 'this is good enough, I'll submit that'.

<comment><USER10> I suppose I should have been more clear. There's a difference between drowning a paper in red ink and words like "trainwreck" and actually showing error. More bluntly, yelling at a student for being stupid and showing a student where they made their errors are entirely different, and I would argue that the second is much more effective.

To my point above, the vindictive teachers were not necessarily the most insightful, and they were not the ones who deflated my ego. The comments that hurt were the terse ones that showed both that they clearly understood what I was trying to say, and that I was wrong. Pointing out a logical inconsistency in my argument in a polite way is a much less abrasive and much more effective way of teaching.

Perhaps I should say that a students ego often gets in the way of producing increasingly better work, but being a dick to them isn't always the answer.

<comment><USER11> >Perhaps I should say that a students ego often gets in the way of producing increasingly better work, but being a dick to them isn't always the answer.

And I would agree with you there. As long as the point is driven home that the work is below par, and the reasons why, without any fancy wrapping or ego- massaging. Being direct without being a dick, though there are plenty of people who don't know how to do one without being the other.

I'm still appreciative to a Grade 8 maths teacher who humiliated me in front of the class for slacking off during the semester and letting grades slip. Because I sure worked hard to prove him wrong next time. I don't know if there would have been any other way to get through to me at that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Who are preferable, today's "helicopter parents" or the "because I say so" parents of the previous generation?

Or the "Beat you till you cry" parents of the generation before.

Or the "Off to the factory, brat" parents, etc.

<comment><USER8> Probably some happy medium. Helicopter parents don't really give kids a chance to just learn to be themselves...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Telling people to "toughen up" is missing the point. The University of Chicago is built around creating Nobel prize winners (which they do a damn good job of it). But they also drive students so hard that they often fail out or just commit suicide. No joke. But they don't mind sacrificing these people because the select group that survives will shit nobel prizes. Survivor bias will tell you they are a model school, but I don't think so.

Our culture is obsessed with degrees-- not learning. Because of this the education system doesn't let teachers actually do their job. In elementary and high school it's truly unconscionable how students pass from grade to grade. By the time they get to college it's way too late. Tenured hard-ass professors are the only people who can get away with it-- but if you think you can flunk half your students and still make tenure you're delusional. Incentives are completely misaligned. Make no mistake, Education Inc. exists to further the institution, not the student.

</comment><comment><USER13> My parents also taught me some jerk with a blog would put ads that have enormous popups on mouseover all over his page while ranting about how I'm too sensitive.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder how much of this is regional? I was born in the late 80s and didn't experience _any_ of the coddling people associate with my generation. Is it because I grew up in MN? Did any other HNers grow up in the same time/place? (Yes, I know, I'm young and still growing up).

</comment><comment><USER15> These editorials always make me wonder if my friends, cousins, and I are some sort of statistical outlier in my generation, or whether, maybe, it's just that the good workers my age don't get comment.

Then again, I've been told I'm too critical quite a bit.

</comment><comment><USER16> True enough, I guess, but this seems like a bunch of complaining. It doesn't really provide any measures to improve the situation.

Also, I don't understand the part about said kids having had "adult responsibilities" - wouldn't that create the opposite kind of person, one who can take failure? Perhaps it was ironic.

</comment><comment><USER17> This guy is lying to his students by riding the wave of this lingering assumption that contemporary conventional schooling works to garner the results that remedy what he is complaining about.It doesn't,and it never will. Conventional education is a crock of shit and so is this guy... and the "millennials".

Bypass it all be creating alternatives like this:

khanacademy.org

This kind-of-thing is the future regardless.

Problem solved.

He's one of the few that "survived" all that bullshit and is doing it how it should be done.</comment>


Show HN: TeachCraft – Learning Python Through Minecraft - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/teachthenet/TeachCraft-Challenges? <comment><USER2> Is this project related to the book: "Learn to Program with Minecraft: Transform Your World with the Power of Python" ? [http://www.amazon.com/Learn- Program-Minecraft-Transform-Pyth...](http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program- Minecraft-Transform-Python/dp/1593276702) I ask because the concept appears to be substantially similar.

re: the approach -- My kids are crazy about Minecraft, and being able to build very simple python programs that modify the world (build block structures, control creatures, etc.) is much more gentle yet engaging than the typical programming 101 tasks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat, I'd also recommend something like opencomputers for learning. The learning curve and asinine amount of time it takes to get started is a bit of a hurdle or thirty, but it helps to have more than one person involved.

At the end of my adventure with it, I had some code that would read a png from github from minecraft, then use the 3d printer to create a series of blocks by using the 'pixels' from all server allowed blocks. The personal requirement was to not do any sort of color manipulation and only use what was available. The pixel position from block to block doesn't change, and transparency could be coded outside of the png, so it became pretty damn difficult really quickly.

In the process I got to learn about png, cv2, jit (to pull the available blocks' pngs and eventually for an attempt in finding consistent transparency logic. Flowers.....), minecraft's internals, voxels, some lua, more python and some interesting algorithm stuff.

Life got in the way and I never actually finished, but the block directly to the left of the cursor was the last block created. Despite its ugliness, I'm actually pretty pleased with it. [https://imgur.com/dqwnnL2](https://imgur.com/dqwnnL2) which is part of [https://imgur.com/gallery/giajLha](https://imgur.com/gallery/giajLha) (dickbutt baby, nsfw kinda)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome. Much more engaging than finding the first 100 primes.

<comment><USER5> I think it's really time to move on from math puzzles in most programming classes and hiring interviews. If people enjoy doing Project Euler problems or find them beneficial then that's great. But using them to 'teach' others is like forcing your own weird fetish on unsuspecting strangers, and frankly the persistence of this tradition is becoming something of an embarrassment to both academia and industry.

<comment><USER6> While we're at it can we stop using animal or vehicle analogies to teach oop?

<comment><USER5> This is a good point. Because you can't make a car or an animal out of software these analogies always seem to lead to bad teaching.

Much better to use something like Person and Employee/Student, where it's easy to immediately grasp the value based on not having to duplicate the data fields you'd need for a basic CRM. (As opposed to having to make up ridiculous methods about the panda eating bamboo or whatever where no one understands what the fuck is going on.)

<comment><USER6> Exactly! Ugh I hate that. "A cat can be an instance of animal, but it needs a 'meow' function" ... What?

<comment><USER7> Adding a "meow" function is the wrong way to go about it. The base class just needs a protected sound function so that each derived class can set the sound in its initialization routine. So many programmers, so few who truly understand OOP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is also ComputerCraft mod with Lua programmable blocks and visual code editor (ComputerCraftEdu) [http://www.computercraft.info/](http://www.computercraft.info/) and [http://computercraftedu.com/](http://computercraftedu.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey emeth...thanks for making this awesome project. As a father of 2 sons (aged 9 and 11, both Minecraft fanatics) this is a perfect platform to get them interested in coding. Starting with Python is a nice easy on-ramp for them, and they'll even start using GitHub with this project, which is great too. Keep up the cool work :)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is actually something I was looking for. Very nice! Do you mind adding a license to the work?

<comment><USER11> Issue filed: [https://github.com/teachthenet/TeachCraft- Challenges/issues/...](https://github.com/teachthenet/TeachCraft- Challenges/issues/1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Give me screenshots.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there a good GPLed substitute for Minecraft ?

I am required to use a Free license as an educator and the massive appeal of voxels is undisputable.

<comment><USER14> [http://www.minetest.net/](http://www.minetest.net/) (LGPL)

[http://manicdigger.github.io/](http://manicdigger.github.io/) (Unlicense)

I am pretty sure there are more out there and as far as I know minetest is closest to minecraft with this mod for for redstone circuitry thing ([https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=628](https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=628)).

<comment><USER13> Thanks this is very useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A gateway to 3d rendering with scripts

once you've exhausted these lessons you can show them blender</comment>


Ask HN: When will the first HN account appear on eBay? - <AUTHOR>

In the times of World of Warcraft, virtual power positions quickly appeared on eBay and high point user accounts reached up to $2K.
Hacker News has its own karma based system, which gives high karma users a power to create destinies of stories and also users.
Since first page HN listing with an interesting title can generate 2000+ UQ visits in 6 hours to a specific target group, this definitely has some commercial value.
We've seen bots that automatically submit influencer blog posts to HN to gain karma. There are some Chinese farmers on HN which are building their karma to impress pg for YC submissions.
When will the first HN account appear on eBay? Or will it be single upvotes sold to generate long term income for farmers? Do you think this is already happening undercover? <comment><USER2> "Hacker News has its own karma based system, which gives high karma users a power to create destinies of stories and also users."

HN karma gives high karma users a power to change the color of the top bar when they're logged in.

</comment><comment><USER3> The rewards of owning a high-karma account are limited. You don't get to upvote a frontpage item more than once (or do you? not at 780). Your comments may receive an occasional fanboy upvote, but that only creates more karma and doesn't shift the visibility of your message by a large amount.

So in conclusion, I don't think HN accounts will be traded much. Perhaps more if the frequency of "free invites to our beta service for HNers with 1000+ karma"-promotions increases.

<comment><USER4> While you still only get to upvote once, as I understand it, that vote counts more than once based on your karma.

Regardless, while you might get high karma values based only on article submissions, that isn't going to impress anybody. When PG is looking at your HN account, he's almost certainly looking for insightful _comments_ , vs. just a high karma score.

It's really hard to farm out quality comments to somebody else, and have it matter at the same time.

<comment><USER5> _as I understand it, that vote counts more than once based on your karma._

Unless there's been a recent change, each vote has the same weight unless it triggers voting ring detection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        All: Who controls the British crown?
             Who keeps the metric system down?
             We do!  We do!

       Karl: Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
      Lenny: Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
      Alien: We do!  We do!

        All: Who holds back the electric car?
             Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
             We do!  We do!

      Skinner: Who robs cavefish of their sight?
        Homer: Who rigs every Oscar night?

      We do! WE DO!

</comment><comment><USER7> We have been maintaining a set of HN accounts used to rank stories on the first page and it has been a valuable asset in gathering instant attention of a fairly large amount of users in a short amount of time.

Works, as opposed to what some people suggested in some comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> I knew it :) Thx for being sincere.

<comment><USER7> I'm such a good liar.. On the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had thought about doing this for a while and giving the money to charity so that pg would look bad for banning me, but was convinced that it was more valuable to have my HN account. I think right now I'd value my Hacker News account around $5k, so would probably sell for $5k or more to the charity of my choice.

It's not my karma points that allows me to get things on the front page, but my intimate knowledge of the Hacker News ecosystem and voting process. The bonus I receive for having a possibly recognizable username is minimal.

As far as I know, Hacker News is the last reach of the social web that has not been hijacked by people selling votes. But I'm probably wrong.

</comment><comment><USER9> Meta-threads like this are a perfect illustration of how HN is declining. It does nothing to motivate/inspire hackers and startups. Instead we waste time up-voting/discussing things that have no relevance to real life. If someone wants to waste money buying an account based on "Karma", let them. Karma = nothing in real life

<comment><USER10> Someone could sell their HN account in real life.

"Relevance to real life" is not a good indicator of a submission's suitability for HN. The Minecraft CPU has less relevance to real life than this submission, but a Minecraft CPU definitely deserves the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Should happen soon because people are attracted to power by nature. Let's wait and see what kind of valuation one HN karma point gets.

<comment><USER12> My bet would be more like $0.01 and a $100 for a 1000 point account.

<comment><USER13> why the jump in valuation at 1000?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When the price of a high karma account becomes attractive to the owner. So, probably never.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wouldn't there be an escrow problem ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so, because this can be done over a cup of coffee. Everybody is in the Bay Area anyways :)

<comment><USER10> Will someone please explain why this has been voted down so far. I could understand a 0 or -1, but in this case, I don't understand what warrants another downvote when it is already at -4.</comment></comment></comment>


Social Game Monetization Startup Acquires SuperRewards from Adknowledge - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/vancouver-startup-acquires-50-million-ad-platform-superrewards-2012-08-16

<comment><USER2> Must have been a fairly painful writeoff for Adknowledge, who paid $50MM for the company a couple years ago just as social started to decline and were never really able to make any money with the product.

Seems like a great deal for Bailey, who was probably able to buy SR back with the interest on the money from the prior sale. Best of luck to Playerize with the platform.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very excited by this! We're really working hard to make technology easier for social/mobile games.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great to see another Vancouver company kicking ass.

</comment><comment><USER5> congrats guys!</comment>


Introductory Resources and Lectures on Lisp, Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkartificial.org/artificial-intelligence/introductory-resources-and-lectures-on-lisp-scheme/

<comment><USER2> I notice it mentions DrScheme but leaves out a link to "How to Design Programs", an introductory programming text (available in full online) designed to complement DrScheme.

<http://www.htdp.org/></comment>


3d Browser for Apollo 11 Command Module - <AUTHOR> http://3d.si.edu/apollo11cm/ <comment><AUTHOR> A little disappointing the resolution we get to see is missing a lot of detail. But pretty cool to see all the notes they scribbled on the walls.</comment>


Report that fair use generates $4.7 trillion in economic activity - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/fair-use-generates-trillions-in-the-us-alone.ars

<comment><USER2> Impressive, but doesn't pass a smell check. US GDP was $13.84 trillion. It seems extremely far-fetched that copyright restrictions account for more than a third of our nation's economic output.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article: "Doing these kinds of analyses is notoriously imprecise, in some cases amounting to little more than guesswork."

That is does not paint a very good picture, and when looking into the actual report and what industries are considered: "...rise of the digital economy, as fair use permits a range of activities that are critical to many high technology businesses, including search portals and web hosting."

I would bet that any user-generated content website is considered, and who knows what else.

<comment><USER4> Fair point. I still think it works as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the claims about the cost of so-called piracy, which rest on similarly shaky foundations.</comment></comment>


Hetzner and all v servers down - <AUTHOR> http://www.hetzner.de

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes seems to be all back up online again. Strangely I think outbound traffic seemed to run continuously, only inbound traffic wasn't getting through.

I think this is the first blip i've had with hetzner in a year

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks like the problem was somewhere between noris.net and hetzner - so it was unaccessable from some bits of the net.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah seems only the UK is suffering. At least the main site seems to be up again now.

</comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be a regional issue that mostly affects the UK.

<comment><AUTHOR> ah very interesting. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Germany's fine. Could it be a DNS thing?

</comment><comment><USER3> looks like its back up all over now.</comment>


The Ultimate Guide to Growth Hacking - <AUTHOR> Hominems, as an early stage start-up, reached up to 50,000 visitors across channels in the niche wearable technology market and without spending a lot of money in digital campaigns.
For this reason is soon releasing a Growth Hacking guide intended for our partners, affiliates, influencers, marketers, early stage start-ups, or peers in general.
It includes most of the free tools used with brief descriptions. Sample sheets for measuring the traction and for sharing among peers.
Stay tuned or subscribe to our newsletter. www.hominems.com
"Sharing is caring". <comment><USER2> Please submit again when there is such a guide. Right now nothing on the website even mentions the guide. The newsletter says "Subscribe to be the first to hear about our exclusive offers and latest arrivals." so you might target fellow partners and peers but it's not clear from the message.</comment>


Show HN: The Reader View of Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://thereaderwiki.com/en/ <comment><USER2> Pet peeve of mine... 'wiki' does not exclusively mean Wikipedia. Wiki is the name for all of the early directly editable content based websites.

All in all though, this is nice to look at, but doesn't really add anything over and above the mobile version. Maybe you should add theme options for people who really don't like the standard Wikipedia colour scheme (or for colourblind people / low-vision users) that would add a unique service that Wikipedia doesn't offer.

</comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't work on mobile. Looks like a fixed-width single column page that's too wide, but can't check for actual reason now because am on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER4> Layout-wise, this looks like the mobile version of Wikipedia: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It) (compared to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It))

What other features does this offer?

<comment><USER5> For one thing, it offers all the sections not collapsing every time you load the fucking page...

<comment><USER6> when opening m.wikipedia on desktop, none of the sections are collapsed.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for this useful piece of information. What browser are you using? Do you have JS enabled? Have you tried it on a mobile device, the target segment for m.?

<comment><USER6> On a mobile device, they are collapsed. On desktop, they are not. that was the point of my comment saying that on desktop they are not collapsed.

as a comparison to the linked reader view, which only works on desktop, the behaviour on mobile isn't really relevant.

<comment><USER7> And totally orthogonal to his point. It was pretty obvious his point was about using it on mobile, whereas your post came across as pedantic and flippant. Specially when you say things like "the behaviour on mobile isn't really relevant" about the mobile version of the website!

<comment><USER8> Why are people so aggressive towards each other on this website lmao

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really like Wikiwand and the Chrome extension that automatically redirects you to it. The layout can be a little wide for some but on a big 4k screen it's perfect.

[http://www.wikiwand.com/](http://www.wikiwand.com/)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikiwand- wikipedia...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikiwand-wikipedia- modern/emffkefkbkpkgpdeeooapgaicgmcbolj)

<comment><USER9> Example link: [http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paper](http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paper)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please do not remove the link underline in continuous text. It makes the links inaccessible for people who cannot perceive color differences.[1]

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/F73.html](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/F73.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Wikipedia lets you change its look. It has six themes. Plus you can add your own CSS. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw- prefsec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection- rendering)

<comment><USER12> Can you post screenshots of what they look like? I can't even see them without creating an account and logging in, and I don't really want to do that sight- unseen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm using a mobile browser with JavaScript turned off. Site isn't responsive. Requires horizontal scrolling.

<comment><USER14> It's not responsive with JavaScript enabled either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wikipedia has themes and also lets you add whatever custom CSS you want to your account.

My personal favorite is WiTeX, which makes Wikipedia look like a LaTeX document [1].

[1] [https://github.com/AndrewBelt/WiTeX](https://github.com/AndrewBelt/WiTeX)

</comment><comment><USER16> Removing everything related to editing is actually harmful. Wikipedia is losing editors as is.

</comment><comment><USER17> I recently learned that wikipedia allows you to set custom CSS for your user: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_style)

</comment><comment><USER18> For me, adding a simple .m between en and wikipedia in the url does the job well enough :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Very nice indeed! I was just in the user contributions view and article history view, those records are so horrendously aligned its nearly unreadable. Would be nice to have a table rendering of all that.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wikipedia Rotane theme for Stylish extension is better IMO.

</comment><comment><USER21> would be nice to be able to consume this via RSS

</comment><comment><USER22> Pretty amazing

</comment><comment><USER23> A blueprint for how the web should be.

<comment><USER24> No, doesn't work on mobile.

<comment><USER23> Needs bootstrapping!</comment></comment></comment>


Labor board will let more workers bargain with their employer's employer - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/27/labor-board-moves-to-make-businesses-accountable-for-their-subcontractors/ <comment><USER2> This is such a big win for the temporary / contingent workforce. The reality of the industry perpetuated by companies like Manpower, Kelly Services (Aerotek), Robert Half, Randstad, Adecco, etc. is rapacious and financially harmful to most workers. All the while being unnecessarily expensive (in my analysis) for the clients those workers are sent to.

The cut that these companies take from the employees they outsource does not justify the cost they're charging the clients. 50 percent sometimes for doing nothing more than posting a craigslist ad and shoving a contract in the face of some poor, but earnest, immigrant or a down `n out tech worker.

[edit typo]

<comment><USER3> How are the temp companies harming "most workers"? How would you do things differently?

<comment><USER4> While the news article didn't describe the percentage of people "harmed" by using a temp company, it did give examples including the Teamsters / Leadpoint / Browning-Ferris case, it described that it was a non-trivial fraction of people affected, and it explained the rule change for to do things differently. It also linked to the actual decision, at [https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board- issues-d...](https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-issues- decision-browning-ferris-industries) , so you can read the full details. That in turn says (emphasis mine):

> Consistent with earlier Board decisions, as well as the common law, we will > examine how control is manifested in a particular employment relationship. > We reject those limiting requirements that the Board has imposed— without > foundation in the statute or common law—after Browning-Ferris. _We will no > longer require that a joint employer not only possess the authority to > control employees' terms and conditions of employment, but also exercise > that authority._

What more information do you want on the topic, rather than shawnee_'s opinions? I ask because your questions here look like they are meant more to put shawnee_ on the spot than anything else, when shawnee_'s opinions are consistent with that of:

> labor advocates and academics who have described an increasingly "fissured" > economy, in which whole industries have been built on business models that > offer workers few of the protections of a traditional employer relationship.

Is it not more useful to look at the broader arguments already presented in the WaPo article?

<comment><USER3> I read the WaPo article and see no financial rationale for forcing this relationship between contractors and commercial organizations.

And since when is it wrong to "put someone on the spot" by asking questions? The "increasingly fissured economy" argument is an old one but the solutions are not at all clear. Legislating more lawsuits, forcing contractors and temps into an employee relationship with 3rd parties -- this is a temporary favor to unions and wage-and-benefit advocates but doesn't solve the real problems which are the prohibitive cost basis of hiring full time employees in today's economy in the U.S.

I would address the cost basis first, and make it less expensive to hire full timers, and then we'll see more hiring of full timers.

<comment><USER4> There's no financial rationale because the case didn't concern financial rationale. This is a question of how to interpret the existing National Labor Relations Act. Thus, your comments make no sense.

Regarding "put someone on the spot"; you are veering close to "JAQing off" territory. The question you had were general ones addressed by the article, and here are many easily found sources that would give you the insight you are looking for.

Your one line response to shawnee_ did not give any evidence that you understood the context, or cared to do your own research, it had a implicit assumption that a random HN should educate you, a full answer would have required multiple paragraphs, and would unlikely to be correct as HN readers tend to not be aware of labor law.

Plus, shawnee_ was clearly expressing an opinion and not trying to make provable statements that can be backed up by the specifics you wanted. Following up as you did is hard to distinguish from sealioning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was working for a small temp company when I was just starting. I was hired to do some server work, but ended up developing a system to automate most of it. So my job became more developer. However I was still getting paid as a server admin (and the low end of that to boot). So I asked to get paid more appropriately. After asking they gave me a really small boost, pretty much what you'd expect just as an annual increase. So I went to my manager at the company, said I get paid pretty low here i'm going to think about looking for other opportunities. About an hour later, I had the boost I wanted.

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps there was a time when they were a necessary check against industrial abuses in an economy with few choices and little opportunity for education, but nowadays unions seem like little but a market distortion extorting (with government support, as from the NLRB) money from the general public and transferring it to special interest groups.

Rather than special privileges for unions, I would prefer that workers negotiate contracts as individuals, but that the government or private philanthropy provide a massive subsidy to workers who wish to retrain and move from lower-wage to higher-wage industries.

<comment><USER4> The Taft–Hartley Act prohibits unions from carrying out 'jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns' (quoting Wikipedia). This is a form of market distortion which takes money from one special interest group (labor) and moving it to another special interest group (employers).

If you do not like market distorting laws then you should not like the Taft- Hartley Act, which weakens the power of the unions to maximize the market for the labor they represent. Yet somehow I think you believe that distorting the market in this fashion is correct.

Regarding 'negotiate contracts as individuals', do you disagree with the concept of inequality of bargaining power? Quoting from the National Labor Relations Act, which is the relevant US law:

> "The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess > full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who > are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association > substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to > aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the > purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the > stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and > between industries."

If workers negotiate contracts as individuals, then they are at a disadvantage to employers who, quoting now from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations":

> ".... being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, > besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while > it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against > combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise > it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer.

Finally, a massive government subsidy distorts the market in order that give some special interest groups (employers) free training for their workers. It's curious that you want market distortions that favor employers, but not those which favor labor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the low-skill stuff, treading dangerous ground. We had four part-time warehouse workers, each approx $11USD/hr.Did the mundane/grunt stuff. They were not poor employees, but they had no skills not easily replaceable, so managers gave little consideration to their joint demands for increased pay and benefits (not unreasonable requests). But the incremental difference of their demands did make it worthwhile for the boss man to block out several weeks of engineering time to automate. My employer now has ONE par-time warehouse worker.

And the result of this was essentially zero stocking error, and I learned pyQT.

<comment><USER8> I'm not exactly sure what the moral of this story is.

<comment><USER9> I read it as, "There is some value created by the work someone does. When the value created is capped, and there are on-going demands from the workers to increase pay/benefits/other in excess of the value created, the employer has an incentive to seek a replacement good [in this case automation; in other cases, other employees]"</comment></comment></comment>


Are Your Programmers Working Hard, or Are They Lazy? - <AUTHOR> http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html <comment><USER2> One of the most enlightening moments I had when working with engineers vastly more capable than me was the disproportionate amount of time they spent planning and designing versus coding, and how much faster they moved as a result.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to me that the kind of management the article is hinting as is what I like to refer to as ass-chair management (it's similar to asshat management, but that's a conversation for another time). To me, this speaks volumes more about the incompetency of the manager than the efficacy, or lack thereof, of the engineer. Unfortunately, most managers I've had have gauged work solely on the amount of time someone spends in an office chair.

Personally, I couldn't care less how many hours someone works. If the work is getting done, I'm more than happy to have everyone work four hours a day from home; then everyone is happy.

<comment><USER4> _" To me, this speaks volumes more about the incompetency of the manager..."_

Yes, and in particular, it may indicate that the manager knows absolutely nothing about software development, and couldn't tell good code from bad code if his life depended on it. Since the guy who wrote the article was working on billing and provisioning for a cable company, it's possible that his boss was someone like the head of the billing department - not a technical person at all.

It's even more depressing when tech-savvy managers, who should be able to judge employees by their actual contributions to the end-product, practice "ass in chair" management.

Also: Lots of interesting discussion from when this article was originally posted 2 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895502)

<comment><USER3> I've been programming for about 25 years now and my take on the situation is that people learn bad habits from those they've seen, which is why tech-savvy managers tend to act like their non-tech-savvy counterparts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hopefully they're lazy!

[http://threevirtues.com/](http://threevirtues.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> "Several of my colleagues complained that Dave made things overcomplicated.'

Maybe this is a big part of the problem, if your fellow coders don't realise the strengths of the way you have been working either.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lazy

</comment><comment><USER8> I agree that its wrong to be giving pay raises / promotions to employees solely based on who worked longer hours. Obviously, pay and promotion should be judged on the value delivered not the effort put in. However, in my opinion, great developers who build robust systems and leave at 5 are not necessarily hard working, probably just more experienced / competent. If you can get your job done by 5 while your co-workers are slaving away until midnight fixing bugs, whats stopping you from putting in another couple extra hours to deliver even more value to the company? Sometimes taking initiative and showing passion is just as important as being smart.

<comment><USER9> >whats stopping you from putting in another couple extra hours to deliver even more value to the company?

Probably the same thing stopping my employer from putting in another couple thousand dollars to deliver even more value to my paycheck?

<comment><USER10> No kidding. It's like rewarding employees for putting in 20-50% more time/extra effort on the job with a 10% bonus. It's mathematical proof that you don't properly value their time.</comment></comment></comment>


Heroku sees 33.8K FB apps go live in 24h after f8 Open Graph announcements - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/9/23/facebook_open_graph_momentum/ Been fun watching the log, it's non-stop.  Cat at FB did a nice screencast on how to use new Open Graph features in a new heroku app: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/564/ <comment><USER2> I created an app just to test the process with Heroku as I'm sure countless others did.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this include the (presumably) thousands of people who 'created' an app in order to get access to the Timeline feature, as explained on Techcrunch?

<comment><USER4> I would assume not since you don't need access to any form of web hosting to create an app on Facebook. You simply fill out a few fields and click submit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This includes also my 10 proof-of-concept test apps. And I bet I'm not the only one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wonder how much hosting 30k free apps costs them?

<comment><USER7> It probably helps a lot that free apps are unloaded when idle, then reloaded on demand when someone is actually making a request. Ideally, the cost could approach the disk space of 30k small git repositories.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2606190/why-are-my- basic-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2606190/why-are-my-basic-heroku- apps-taking-2-seconds-to-load)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course, the vast majority of them will be test apps, but it's still an interesting metric of the interest in both platforms. Even if Heroku makes it super easy, creating an app still involves at least creating an account with them, installing their command-line stuff, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> How do they handle the mandatory SSL (from 1st Oct onward) for Facebook tabs?

<comment><USER10> The piggyback SSL addon ( <http://addons.heroku.com/ssl> ) is free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any good examples that is using the Open Graph rightly?

</comment><comment><USER12> why is heroku the only PaaS option offered on facebook right now?

</comment><comment><USER13> Let me warm up my spam-blocking finger so I won't injure myself.</comment>


Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/02/why-is-it-so-hard-to-convince-people-to-care-about-privacy?CMP=share_btn_tw <comment><USER2> A huge part of the problem is that we taught users the wrong thing when the web was in its infancy. The lesson was "Look for the padlock" to check your connection is securely running over SSL. That was, and is, only half the story. You can't just defend against a man-in-the-middle attack and assume _everything else_ is secure. We should have been telling users only to share the bare minimum of their data, to use encryption, to use systems that enable them to revoke access to their data (although that would be a very hard problem now, let alone in 2003).

Ideally we should persuade the web industry to adopt a system for users to check how their data is being stored, who has access, and any relevant code should be opened for an audit by an independent expert group once a website hits a critical mass of users.

That's probably a somewhat unattainable goal though.</comment>


IPad lines around the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/ipad-lines-around-the-world-2010-4

<comment><USER2> Around the world means USA only i guess.</comment>


MIT Video lectures - Introduction to Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-046j-introduction-to-algorithms-sma-5503-fall-2005/video-lectures/ <comment><USER2> Question: would people be interested in summarized transcripts for these lectures?

The reason I ask is because I know I'm not going to watch 20 hours of the videos, and when I take a look at the transcripts they are good, but they are also long. It would take a while to even skim them.

I've been doing some work around machine text summarization, and it seems like these transcripts would be a great candidate to put it to work.

What do people think? Would you like summaries of the transcripts of these lectures?

EDIT: Thanks for the positive feedback, I'll submit them as a story here in 24 hours (right now I'm supposed to be getting ready for a big dinner tonight).

<comment><USER3> Peteris Krumins posted notes on his blogs, <http://www.catonmat.net/category/introduction-to-algorithms>

<comment><USER4> Thanks for linking! :)

<comment><USER3> thanks for making the notes :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OpenCourseWare is great but I sort of feel like it's been so hyped over the years. Think about how long its been around, now look at how few courses have videos or any content worth mentioning at all. I could understand some of the other disciplines lagging behind in content but really it's the computer science stuff that is quite sparse. They have a big list but most of the courses just have some assignments without solutions or some lecture notes, which are available from most university web sites anyway.

<comment><USER6> I agree with you on that point. The nptel by iits and iiscs is much better than ocw. I say this because I have used both and found that the nptel videos cover the subject more broad while ocw courses lack in number as well as some in depth stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm going to take this opportunity to plug my OpenCourseWare app for boxee. You can enjoy a lot of what OpenCourseWare has to offer (including this course) from the comfort of your couch (Currently the app has courses from MIT, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and UCLA).

<comment><USER8> why would this ever get downvoted? a link would be nice though.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, boxee doesn't have a way to link to apps. The best I have is a link to my site - <http://www.roshweb.net/projects/> \- which is also very light on details. I need to work on getting more information up there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can get a lot of CS lecture series on Academic Earth including MIT's Intro to Algorithms:

<http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science>

There are other disciplines there too:

<http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/>

<comment><USER10> <http://videolectures.net/> has some interesting lectures as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can't replace CLRS as a reference, but I recommend the following free draft if you're looking for an algorithms text to start out with: <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html>.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's a good set of lectures.

My girlfriend recently did several as she was learning about CS as a postgrad, and found them very useful.

They, and many more, are also available on 'iTunes university' from within the iTunes interface. The Stanford CS courses that are up are also well worth a look; there's a good Machine Learning course up there.

The only issue is that the videos often aren't properly edited for the Internet. They don't strip out the class administrative parts, and the lectures would go a lot better with a navigable text index to allow you skip to different parts of the video. The Khan Academy is also worth a look as a similar project.

With a little more care and attention to editing and presenting for the web, this could have a big impact on education.

</comment><comment><USER13> Aw, no video for the "Ethics, Problem Solving" lecture? Now I'm really curious!

<comment><USER14> I had the good fortune of taking this course from Prof. Leiserson a good many years ago -- and ended up having him as my Masters thesis advisor.

His ethics pep talk, which is a mainstay of all his courses, are about not cheating on the take-home exams. I still remember him saying to the class, in a fatherly, earnest way: "You've got to learn to make friends with that feeling in the pit of your stomach" and to face the fear rather than give in to the temptation to cheat. One of the MIT CS department's great teachers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not to hijack the thread too much, but are there good resources on learning about algorithm correctness, complexity, recurrence relations, automata and proving techniques? At the moment I'm not doing so well in the proof by induction department, and the course material at UToronto is quite lousy.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think those lectures can be summarized a lot if the audience has some advanced background. The authors could put some tag in the content, revealing what type of content is about background and core material. Going directly at the core is great when you know well the background material.

</comment><comment><USER17> I just watched the first lecture.

What is a recitation assignment? I am not familiar with the american school system.

<comment><USER18> There are two types of classes, Lectures and Recitations. Lectures are large (hundreds). Recitations are small (~20).

The recitation assignment is simply which recitation you are in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Now I know what I'm doing with my Sunday afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER20> IMHO I feel that CLRS is a great book. I consider it to be my bible of algorithms. I have viewed almost all the videos the course ware apart from the last few which constitute of advanced topics. :)</comment>


Swift, HTML and C++ make the list for languages and technologies in high demand - <AUTHOR> http://sdtimes.com/swift-html-and-c-make-the-list-for-languages-and-technologies-in-high-demand/ <comment><USER2> Two recent startups I worked with in London are using C++14 as a main part of their architecture, in addition to Python, JS and Erlang. Its 2016 and performance is back in vogue.

For years we have been told, Developers are expensive, embrace frameworks, ignore the bloat, just ship quick, even if it needs a billion servers to run.

Both firms are building amazing products on very conservative hardware requirements, so they can scale if required, but they actually know and understand their full stack, and it shows.

One had started with too much Python and Go, before realising the error, the other took a detour into JVM country, before getting back onto the main roads with C++.

<comment><USER3> Go and Java aren't slow. The JVM is highly optimized and is competitive with C++ . I thought that was settled a decade ago.

<comment><USER4> With regard to speed and pure portability, neither are comparable to C++. Also, C++ is not a corporate controlled language like the others. It's an ISO standard. So there's no comparison to be made there either.

Corporate controlled languages do not allow developers to fully control the software that they produce. C++ allows this and it's very fast and safe (even safer since C++11).

Microsoft has C#. Google has Go. Apple has Swift. Oracle has Java. Which would you want to lock your software into? Also, most all of those languages (or at least the critical parts) are implemented in C++ (hotspot).

<comment><USER5> > C++ allows this and it's very fast and safe (even safer since C++11).

The security track records of large-scale security-sensitive software written in C++ support the opposite conclusion.

> Also, most all of those languages (or at least the critical parts) are > implemented in C++ (hotspot).

Go is not, and never was, implemented in C++.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure you're not thinking of C?

At any rate I'm not sure that you can say much more than C is a popular language, and thus has a larger share of poorly written code. It _would_ be nice to see the number of security flaws in a given language graphed against language popularity, but I don't buy that code written in one language or another is necessarily more or less secure.

<comment><USER5> > Are you sure you're not thinking of C?

Yes. Modern C++ is neither memory safe in theory nor memory safe in practice.

> I don't buy that code written in one language or another is necessarily more > or less secure.

The entire security industry, more or less, disagrees with you.

Though I should qualify this with the obvious statements that (a) dynamic languages admit classes of security bugs that static ones don't; (b) no language will magically eliminate all security bugs. But it's just an empirical fact that C and C++ admit lots of memory safety bugs that result in security problems way, way more often than memory-safe languages do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Either the reporter or the Toptal report itself conflate percentage growth with absolute usage. Sure Swift has had huge growth--it's coming from nothing. JVM and python have huge market share; their numbers are just saturated and mature probably.

</comment><comment><USER8> So Swift replaced Objective-C?

A friend of mine, who was a iOS dev from the beginning told me about this, but I didn't imagine it going so fast. He's a bit sad about this, because he did a few years of web stuff and wanted to switch back to mobile, now he fears his Objective-C skills are wasted.

<comment><USER3> Programming in iOS is more about knowing the API's. Switching from Objective C to Swift is not difficult. With Swift there's actually less code to write. Compare the snippets in this blog:

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use- objecti...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-objective-c- or-swift-for-writing-ios-apps/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A chart and the related data would be useful here.

<comment><USER10> Wholeheartedly agree. I couldn't find the source report - anyone manage to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And HTML pretty much includes JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER3> Objective C has fallen much more than Swift has risen. Is iOS development falling off?

<comment><USER12> If you look at NSHipster and other sources in the iOS community converting their code samples to Swift only months after its initial release in 2014, it says something about the pent-up demand for a nicer language than ObjC. Plus Swift seems to be designed for ObjC devs to have an easy transition, although slightly less dynamic (and unsafe).

Demand for iOS development could be tapering due to app market saturation; saw a post recently around here about that.</comment></comment>


Adblock Plus for Google Chrome to be released soon - <AUTHOR> http://adblockplus.org/blog/adblock-plus-for-google-chrome-to-be-released-soon

<comment><USER2> I recently stopped using Adblock ([https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepj...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom)) a month back when I landed on an interesting article ([http://www.universetoday.com/81662/voyager-1-has- outdistance...](http://www.universetoday.com/81662/voyager-1-has-outdistanced- the-solar-wind/)) that obviously wasn't written in 5 minutes... and realized that I had just ripped off the author. They put in the time and energy to write this wonderful piece that informed me about something that was truly fascinating to me and they were going to get nothing in return. They have ad's on the site but my Adblock plugin had blocked it all. It felt nothing short of theft so I emailed them saying that if they ever needed any design help to give me a shout.

/tangent

<comment><USER3> Another angle: ads are pollution. Blocking ads and reducing ad revenue will expedite the creation of an alternative business model that doesn't pollute my entertainment. Giving in to the ads only validates the polluting business model.</comment></comment>


Taking a break from Adblock Plus development - <AUTHOR> https://palant.de/2017/12/20/taking-a-break-from-adblock-plus-development <comment><USER3> Many comments are bitterly unfair against ABP. Wladimir/Eyeo changed how we use the web, gave us means to fight back against abusive advertising. They built a business model to make the extension sustainable and find a strategy to legitimate themselves, fight in the courts, etc. Not to mention that ABP never tried to close the market. Alternatives were easy to build thanks to EasyList.

Today there are many alternatives to ABP. I am extremely grateful for his work. He's going on a well deserved vacation. I wish him success in his future projects.

(In case anyone wonders, I am not affiliated. Just a happy user of ABP.)

<comment><USER4> Come on, as if ABP innovated so much? ABP wasn't the first. I remember using an adblocker native in Firefox back around 2004 (and IIRC I even used on on Mozilla milestones). Back then, there were already /etc/hosts based alternatives (which also have always worked in Windows btw) as well, and a so- called personal firewall could also block ads. These existed for Windows 9x. We're talking end of '90s here.

As for the current direct comparison: uBlock yields _better performance_ and doesn't have _a shady track record_ [1]. Other than "I've always used this" or "I benefit if other people use this" (ie. am affiliated which you're not) I just do not see your point. So could you explain us why you pick ABP over uBlock?

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock- vs.-ABP:-effic...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock- vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared)

<comment><USER5> > ABP wasn't the first

Sure, and the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone either, but it did bring the concept to mainstream attention. Same goes for ABP

<comment><USER6> > So could you explain us why you pick ABP over uBlock?

He's not asking you to explain why you appreciate ABP.

He's asking you why you still use it.

<comment><USER7> You replied to wrong comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Adblock Plus sold out a long time ago by taking money from big players to let their ads through. I've been using uBlock Origin for a while and haven't looked back. Plus it's way faster and less buggy.

<comment><USER9> The ads still have to satisfy the Acceptable Ads criteria and they only have to pay when they exceed a certain volume (as in everyone besides the big players doesn't have to pay a cent). There is an opt-out checkbox in the settings.

<comment><USER10> Opt-out didn't actually opt-out of certain features of the ad deal. For example, YouTube's Up Next list contained risqué Sponsored videos at the top of the list. Prior to the deal they could be blocked. After the deal they couldn't, not even with AdBlock Extensions.

<comment><USER9> Good to know. I can't remember the last time I've seen an ad on youtube that didn't go away after updating the block list. I've since switched to UBO for performance reasons, but as far as I can tell ABP always did exactly what it said on the tin.

Edit: I haven't actually spent enough time with the opt-out unchecked to come across one of these. I suppose it's the nature of the implementation - <USER2> you have humans reviewing the ads or something of the sort, you'll never be able to filter them with 100% certainty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most tech people now seem to use uBlock Origin. But I use uMatrix (from the same developer) and I am super happy with it. It took me a minute or so to understand the interface. But then it is super intuitive and exactly the way I would have designed it myself.

Since I only allow the hosts that I need, I almost never see advertising. And the web is blazingly fast.

<comment><USER12> What about Ghostery?

<comment><USER13> Depends on your opinion of this decision: [https://adexchanger.com/data- exchanges/ghostery-sheds-ad-tra...](https://adexchanger.com/data- exchanges/ghostery-sheds-ad-tracker-sells-off-plug-focus-compliance/)

<comment><USER14> Thanks, I hadn't heard about this. Per [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1406647](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1406647) where Firefox is tying in with Cliqz:

> Cliqz is a well-known Adware from Germany[1] and it was a plague

Not sure what data Ghostery is collecting now, or how opt-in vs. opt-out has changed (if at all), but it looks like based on the reputation of the new owners I will no longer be using it.

Edit: the small HN discussion seems to cover this a bit more evenhandedly: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13652126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13652126)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Who is even using this anymore? ABP lost all its cred when it took money from ad business.

Just use uBlock Origin.

<comment><USER16> > Just use uBlock Origin.

Has there always been a uBlock extension for Safari? That was my last holdout for using ABP. I've now manually installed the downloadable extension but ABP is prominently displayed in Apple's Safari extension app store.

<comment><USER17> The port seems to be in a separate repo until it's considered stable. The development of the port is quite a bit behind and doesn't seem to be actively maintained. I guess no one wants it badly enough to maintain it themself until it's stable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is even the point of Adblock Plus now? uBlock Origin seems so much better

<comment><USER19> You're asking what the point in developing alternatives are?

Microsoft said the web was done at Internet Explorer 6.

It looks like it was also rewritten for webextensions from that blog post.

<comment><USER20> But AB isn't an alternative with pros and cons so much as it's a worse version of uBO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find it odd that I never see AdNauseum recommended. I switched from ABP a few months ago. Screws over trackers by making me appear interested in everything.

[https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've always been a control freak. Long before ABP I used ipfw to block ads at home. I remember having to use Opera on my poor laptop because Firefox was becoming too bloated to run.

And Opera at that time had ads in the INTERFACE of the browser. So blocking those at the router level left big blank spaces in the interfaces that were more satisfying to me than ads.

So I'll give this guy credit because I used his plugin, but not too much credit when you sell out to the people you've basically made a business model out of blocking.

Like many others I've switched to ublock and I'm a control freak so I also use noscript extensively.

For many years now the browser has been the number one threat to the average internet user so I firmly believe in noscript.

You should in fact take it even further and use qubes os.

</comment><comment><USER23> A bit unrelated, but does anyone else think the new NoScript has an absolutely awful interface?

<comment><USER24> Here [1] is a post by the NoScript developer explaining how the new UI works and which buttons map to which legacy functions. After reading it and letting myself adjust for a few days, I'm perfectly comfortable with the new version.

[1] [https://hackademix.net/2017/12/04/noscript-quantum-vs- legacy...](https://hackademix.net/2017/12/04/noscript-quantum-vs-legacy-in-a- nutshell-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > I also want to spend more time doing security research again, which should > help pay the bills as a side effect.

I would have thought he would have savings from Adblock Plus deals.

</comment><comment><USER26> And so, XUL is returned to the TLA pool.

Anyone got any claims for what XUL should mean now?

<comment><USER24> TLA?

<comment><USER27> Three-letter acronym.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm confused as to what ABP does that is more useful than just adding a blocked list to your /etc/hosts file. Moreso, as to how someone could work on it for 12 years. Exactly what am I missing here?

<comment><USER29> 1) There's a lot of cases where blocking an entire domain is either excessive or insufficient -- important assets can be located on the same domain as ads. Adblockers can target specific files and specific elements on the page. They also provide much better ease of use for the average user than updating a hosts file.

2) The list of ad domains, URLs, and elements has to be constantly updated. The plugin has to be kept up to date with changes in browsers. Advertisers occasionally come up with new techniques to bypass or detect adblockers, so those need to be worked around.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Fakesocial – Fake social network using generated content - <AUTHOR> https://fakesocial.net <comment><USER2> Where did you get the mug shots?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com)

I initially wanted to generate them myself using [https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2](https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2) with pre-trained networks but ran into issues with NVCC.</comment></comment>


It's Goodbye QWERTY, Hello Emojis as Apple Rethinks the Keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/its-goodbye-qwerty-hello-emojis-as-apple-redesigns-the-keyboard-1476869408 <comment><USER2> Terrible headline.

In the article it looks like Apple is replacing key markings with an e-ink display. Sounds expensive.</comment>


Coronavirus Vaccine Prospects - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/15/coronavirus-vaccine-prospects <comment><USER2> For those who don't recognize the author, he is a well-known biochemist working in pharmaceuticals whose blogs are generally very well informed and well worth the read.

Also sometimes extremely funny. Read [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things- i-wont-work-with) for good examples of that.

<comment><USER3> I think Derek might object to being called a biochemist - he is actually an organic chemist by training.

<comment><USER2> Ah. Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to believe we will start mass manufacturing all promising candidates long before testing is complete.

The stakes are so high this time that it's important _as soon as_ testing results are deemed adequate, they can start distributing them, even if it means manufacturing stuff that doesn't ultimately pan out.

<comment><USER5> You need to have some selection beforehand. There's not enough manufacturing capacity to go around.

<comment><USER6> Worse: a WHO official (apologies to trump supporters) said that you can't divert much capacity because that risks causing outbreaks of other diseases. So have to create a lot of new capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I want to point out that 5 vaccines (out of 78) are in phase 1 trials (4 of those actively looking for volunteers, visit clinicaltrials.gov links below to see if you qualify):

1\. mRNA-1273 (lipid nanoparticle encapsulated mRNA vaccine encoding S protein) by Moderna: [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04283461](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04283461)

2\. Ad5-nCoV (Adenovirus type 5 vector that expresses S protein) by CanSino Biologicals: NCT04313127.

3\. INO-4800 (DNA plasmid encoding S protein delivered by electroporation) by Inovio Pharmaceuticals: [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT04336410](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT04336410)

4\. LV-SMENP-DC (Dendritic cell modified with lentiviral vector expressing synthetic minigene based on domains of selected viral proteins; administered with antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte) by Shenzhen Geno-Immune Medical Institute: [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04276896](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04276896)

5\. Pathogen-specific artificial antigen-presenting cell (aAPCs modified with lentiviral vector expressing synthetic minigene based on domains of selected viral proteins) by Shenzhen Geno-Immune Medical Institute: [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04299724](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04299724)

Ref: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5)

</comment><comment><USER8> The history of rushed vaccines is not good. The first attempt at a polio vaccine was rushed through with inadequate safety measures and resulted in 40,000 children getting sick, some with permanent paralysis.

There are good reasons vaccines take years to be approved. I'm very worried we'll see a repeat of historical mistakes in the current rush.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#The_Cutt...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#The_Cutter_incident)

<comment><USER3> No that it matters, but it wasn't a safety issue with the vaccine, but a manufacturing issue. The vaccine was perfectly safe, it just wasn't manufactured to the correct specification.

<comment><USER8> The method of manufacture is part of the FDA approval

<comment><USER3> Yes it is, but if it isn't followed then you can't blame the vaccine. Many other companies made the same vaccine using the same processes without issue. The Salk vaccine is very safe if manufactured to specification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I might be wrong, but I thought any human trial needs at least a full one-year follow-up to make sure that the vaccine didn't cause any damage, side effects, reactions, etc, and that indeed created long term immunity.

It seems to me that rushing the timelines potentially opens up a lot of risks for post-vaccine side effects. Doesn't it?

<comment><USER10> That's what the article says, human trials in fall this year and then a regulatory filing a year later. There is basically no chance of a vaccine for this being widely available before 2022. That assumes that one of these vaccines works, despite no vaccine for a coronavirus ever passing regulatory approval (hence this is a hard problem, and plenty of incentive to vaccinate against things like common cold which would be a nice money earner for a someone).

<comment><USER11> I laugh every time someone telling me we will have something by winter... We will live with quarantine and social distincing for quit for a while.

<comment><USER7> We might yet have a vaccine in 6 months (optimistically) [0] though 12 to 18 months is much more realistic. Different categories of vaccines have different manufacturing and safety profiles [1] depending on which we a vaccine candidate might be approved sooner than expected, especially since 3 novel, previously untested platforms have made it to clinical trials, already.

[0] _Even if shortcuts ... can be found, it is unlikely that a vaccine would be available earlier than 6 months after the initiation of clinical trials. Realistically, SARS-CoV-2 vaccines will not be available for another 12–18 months._ From: [https://www.cell.com/immunity/fulltext/S1074-7613(20)30120-5...](https://www.cell.com/immunity/fulltext/S1074-7613\(20\)30120-5#%20)

[1] [https://www.cell.com/action/showFullTableHTML?isHtml=true&ta...](https://www.cell.com/action/showFullTableHTML?isHtml=true&tableId=tbl1&pii=S1074-7613%2820%2930120-5)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I do wonder how effective and safe an old-fashioned inoculation could be in the absence of a vaccine.

A small quantity of the virus could be introduced to your leg where it is away from your lungs and bloodstream. Your body could fight the virus there.

<comment><USER13> That's a type of vaccine. If you want to figure out how safe and effective it is, you need to run a clinical trial. Same as amy other vaccine. If you got started now, you'd be running behind some of the other approaches that are already in clinical trials, so, um, get started fast?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the off chance that China develops a working vaccine first, how could America ensure its safety?

<comment><USER15> The exact same way as with every other vaccine from any other country.

<comment><USER16> I don't know what inspired GP's question, but I think he's getting at the fact that China is known to be faking their numbers from the beginning of the outbreak to show how effective the leaders are in combating the virus. So, in reality, we have no idea whether their methods are successful or not. Same with a vaccine, if China reports an extremely effective vaccine, available immediately, invented thanks to Xi's vision and leadership; Then do we just start using it here in the US, or do we have another year of hiding in our houses while we run trials while the rest of the credulous world gets back to work?

<comment><USER17> "China is known to be faking their numbers"

I haven't seen an explanation of South Korea then. Are they faking their statistics too? If not, then China's reported stats don't seem so incredible.

<comment><USER18> Personally I haven't even seen a more detailed accusation than "China is faking their numbers [because they obviously are, they're China]" \- that is, other than flat-Earth level "oh look at the mobile phone number cancellation data that's definitely trustworthy and definitely indicates people being erased".

Not to mention any attempts at quantifying what's the level of the alleged manipulation of the data. Is it suspected to be undercounted by an order of magnitude? Two orders? Three orders? Why?

<comment><USER19> It's Gordon Chang-style propaganda. Before this, it was china was faking their economic data. China was a house of cards about to collapse. I guess all the chinese made iphones, computers, everything was not real either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _Roughly estimated, even a seasonal flu vaccine might kill about one out of > every ten million recipients though such a reaction – we give it to everyone > possible, though, because far more people will die if we don't._

Yeah that's frightening, but really true? I've never heard of a single person dying from the flu vaccine locally.

</comment><comment><USER21> The numbers involved are just so hard to imagine. Even if we create a vaccine as safe as flu shot it will kill on the order of 1000 people worldwide (1:10m). We have to hope that they will be randomly distributed and not the first volunteers who take it...

<comment><USER22> There's also a good chance we might force this on people against their will (If the current panic is any indication.)

<comment><USER23> Look at the current death rates. Requiring a tested vaccine is a reasonable response. Requiring an untested vaccination is not something I see happening. I guess we could get to "you can't do certain things like go to large gatherings" if you don't have the vaccine or evidence of having had it.

Meanwhile, In the US 12.x k people at a minimum died of this in the last 7 days, doubling the previous total deaths. There's also a much higher death rate overall than in the past, many of those must be related to covid-19 [1]. If current trends follw, In another week the 25,000 total current deaths will double, in other words, 25,000 are on track to die of covid in a week. It's not just new york; from that same site, in the last 7 days new york's total went from 7k to 15k total cumulative deaths - new york is still doubling every week, even though they look to slow down.

The deadly statistics are fantastically interesting. NY itself had about 8k net new deaths the last week, the rest of the us had about 10k. Both are doubling on a weekly basis.

1\. [https://covidtracking.com/data/us- daily](https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I worry that the vaccine won't be effective. To stop this coronavirus we basically have to quarantine and stop human activity for a few months. We are already down that rabbit hole so we just need to stay the course and really isolate as much as we can. The govt is going to have to help people to get through the next 6 months.

<comment><USER25> So what happens when we end quarantine in 6 months? We'll just have a COVID epidemic 6 months from now. Isolation does not stop the spead, it only slows the spread.

As soon as isolation is lifted, whether that be in a month or 10 years, the spread will resume. Unless of course either a) herd immunity is developed or b) a vaccine is developed.

We've only ever eradicated one infectious disease in all of human history (smallpox) and we had a vaccine for that. See: [https://www.historyofvaccines.org/index.php/content/articles...](https://www.historyofvaccines.org/index.php/content/articles/disease- eradication)

<comment><USER24> Well, no, if you have enough isolation then the virus runs out of hosts. It goes extinct unless it can survive latently or in some other host species. If we are getting infected by bats consistently then we are in trouble.

<comment><USER25> That's wishful thinking. The virus will survive in Africa, or India, or many of the other places that are incapable or unwilling to enforcing a complete lockdown (many of these places are in the US itself).

As I mentioned above, we have only ever erradicated _one_ infectious disease in all of human history. The chances of COVID, with its highly infectious nature, being the second are quite slim.

Just like the first outbreak, all it takes is one person with the virus to start the whole process over again.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it goes along with strong border control.

All international travel is going to be restricted for a very long time regardless of antibody and PCR tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As a lay person, I found this to be a very informative article.

One thing I didn't see mentioned was a recent article that caught my attention - apparently, tobacco may be used as means of production for a potential vaccine [0].

Given that the linked article was published on April 1, I initially thought it to be satire. Upon further consideration, though, it not only seems to be genuine but it makes sense: tobacco is likely one of the best understood plants from a genetic standpoint, with a long history of successful genetic modification using both traditional and modern approaches. It's certainly one of the best understood that also has large-scale production capabilities, and I would imagine that the tobacco industry has more incentive than most to seek the positive PR that this could bring.

Finally, setting aside the greater political context, it seems to me that the FDA under the Trump administration is more flexible and risk-tolerant than any point in my lifetime (and perhaps in living memory). There are certainly many challenges that will have to be overcome before we get to the point that we're able to widely roll out an effective vaccine, but I strongly suspect that this flexibility will result in a speed of development and approval that will surprise many of us. Of course, that speed will come with associated risks, but that's just the nature of things.

I would not be surprised to see widespread voluntary human testing of promising vaccine candidates in the next six months - perhaps even sooner if a promising candidate ends up being derived from the past few years' work in creating a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1.

0: [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8175855/BAT- claims-...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8175855/BAT-claims- Covid-19-vaccine-breakthrough-using-tobacco-plants.html)

<comment><USER27> I am really concerned about the fact that the FDA is trying to fast track stuff.

I just want to offer a perspective of why this is dangerous. We are having some serious issues with flouroquinolone antibiotics. The side-effects of the medication are insane and under-reported. 9 years ago I was given the antibiotic for an infection, my body went into shock, I was released the next day with some odd neurological issues. None of it reported to the FDA, few months later I got tendon pain. I go to mayo clinic, they disagree the antibiotic caused it. Seen 30+ physicians in the span of 2 years, 2 agreed that it is possible. One of them said to wait it out, and refused to actually put it in my chart. The antibiotics carry a 'black label' and clearly state side effects may occur up to 1 year. I reported it to the FDA, then I found groups of people suffering from chronic fatigue, tendon raptures, weird neurological symptoms, some had diagnosis of 'fibromyalgia', some had chronic tendinitis, yet after reviewing their medical information they found they took a flouroquinolone antibiotic but nobody ever even suggested that it could be that.

This bring me to Tamiflu fiasco. Governments have spent billions of dollars to purchase Tamiflu to fight the flu. Later reports came out about issues with the studies, the maker picking positive studies and withholding neutral or negative information. It has not proven much better than the drugs we already use to treat the flu.

Fast tracking a medication can have terrible results, cost billions of dollars, and cripple hundreds of people. Doing any scientific research with panic in the back of your mind and high pressure from politicians and people is dangerous IMO. Especially, in a profit driven healthcare system.

<comment><USER28> _Fast tracking a medication can have terrible results, cost billions of dollars, and cripple hundreds of people._

All of this is true, and yet in our current situation, _not_ fast tracking can have even worse results, cost _trillions_ of dollars and _kill millions_ of people.

<comment><USER27> It is a difficult situation, but the cure should not be worse than the disease. I just offered my perspective. I am not an expert in medical research, and hope that qualified people can do their jobs and find a safe treatment/vaccine. However, I am scared that people that say 'No' will be silenced or removed, kind of like people in Theranos, who were experts in their fields.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Hacker News the superior commenting system? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hopelesscom.de/2012/3/4/is_hacker_news_the_superior_commenting_system_.html

<comment><USER2> No, it's not. Often the topmost comment, although interesting, is at a tangent to more relevant comments. There is no way to collapse a tree of comments like this.</comment>


Smartcrop.js – content-aware image cropping in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jwagner/smartcrop.js/ <comment><USER2> Really awesome, and the test cases look just as good as I could do.

I would warn web designers to not blindly apply this to everything though. It scans all the pixels of an image, which can take up to 100ms each, especially on mobile devices. A good use case would be a file upload box with a suggestion to crop the image upon upload.

<comment><USER3> It can be used as a node.js module on the server-side which I suspect would be the better place to run this kind of thing.

<comment><USER4> I'm not so sure you'd want to throw away all of that processing power on the client though. Running some performance testing on different types of devices and figuring out which ones can handle it fine to good enough (especially if you can do it in the background with a web worker) while sending really horribly performing devices right to the backend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cropping images is a massive problem for social media. Here is a talk from 2013 by Christopher Chedeau a front end engineer at Facebook describing some of the problems with their image layout algorithms.[1]

Initially, they tried to solve the problem by getting users to tag people inside the image and then use location of the tags as parameters to crop. If someone is tagged in a photo, Facebook makes sure that person is always inside of the cropped version.

Here is the write up from Christopher's blog.[2]

Was Instagram only using square images at one time? That would have been a brilliant way to have solved this problem.

1\. [http://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/image-layout-algorithms- htm...](http://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/image-layout-algorithms- html5devconf.html)

2\. [http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/best-cropping- position.html](http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/best-cropping-position.html)

<comment><USER6> >Initially, they tried to solve the problem by getting users to tag people inside the image and then use location of the tags as parameters to crop. If someone is tagged in a photo, Facebook makes sure that person is always inside of the cropped version.

Do they still do this? A lot of the times people aren't tagged by where their face is, but just tagged off to the side or something. I feel like this wouldn't work in a lot of cases.

<comment><USER5> Now when I upload an image to Facebook it automatically uses facial recognition to tag my friends. In the video from 2013 he mentions they had already solved the problem using heuristics to find faces in images. Before that, circa 2012, they might have been relying on people to tag their photos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you are interested in a similar approach by a Facebook developer: [http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/best-cropping- position.html](http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/best-cropping-position.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Damn this is cool. It's kinda amazing that it is all done in a few hundred lines of code. I see there is a skinColor method and setting defined as

        skinColor: [0.78, 0.57, 0.44]

I was curious how it worked with darker skin (I admittedly don't understand what the numbers mean without further analysis), and It came out pretty well (it may default on lighter skin, i don't know)

[http://imgur.com/a/CKUIo](http://imgur.com/a/CKUIo)

images found on google

<comment><USER9> Almost all skin colors, e.g. black and white, have the same chroma. Only the brightness changes. I have worked on video projects that took advantage of this to have skin-color auto-adjustment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is called "salient region detection" and some current approaches (there are many) include detecting the contrast between each pixel and the global or regional average color or luminosity. Areas of high contrast are likely to be regions which are considered interesting. Once you have those regions, you would have to have a separate algorithm which maximizes the placement of a rectangle (the crop) to get the greatest coverage of "interestingness".

You could also combine this with face detection, so that a picture of someone in a bikini doesn't end up cropping just to their midsection, since going by surface area, the torso could have more high-contrast pixels than the face.

Here's one approach which has open source C++ code: [http://mmcheng.net/effisalobj/](http://mmcheng.net/effisalobj/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Two others in this space: [http://thumbor.org](http://thumbor.org) [http://magickly.afeld.me](http://magickly.afeld.me)

But neither seems to get as much love as they need, so always good to have more players.

<comment><USER12> thumbor is an on demand service that hosts and responds to image requests. this is a JS based smart cropper. they're not quite the same thing.

<comment><USER13> thumbor has a similar feature built in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome work.

As it happens I'm working on an image cropping front end (using CropperJS [1]) - I'm going to integrate this so that the initial crop selection is set using the results from SmartCrop.

Thanks again.

[1] [https://github.com/fengyuanchen/cropperjs](https://github.com/fengyuanchen/cropperjs)

</comment><comment><USER15> Very cool. The Ken Burns effect application of the algorithm is particularly impressive.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've actually been looking for something related. I need to quickly classify if an image contains a face and also if it contains any text. The former seems to be relatively straightforward, but I haven't found anything for detecting text, only OCR'ing it which I don't need. Anyone seen anything like this?

<comment><USER17> I haven't tested this, but the package [https://github.com/subokita/Robust- Text-Detection](https://github.com/subokita/Robust-Text-Detection) apparently implements methods described in the paper "Robust Text Detection in Natural Images with Edge-Enhanced Maximally Stable Extremal Regions." by Chen, Huizhong, et al. ([http://web.stanford.edu/~hchen2/papers/ICIP2011_RobustTextDe...](http://web.stanford.edu/~hchen2/papers/ICIP2011_RobustTextDetection.pdf)), which sounds like it might be the sort of thing you want.

In particular, the figure on the first page of the paper shows detection (not OCR) of a textual logo in a photo.

<comment><USER16> Awesome, thanks! This should be fairly easy to wrap for Python I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Worked well with the pictures I dropped in, very nice.

Wish someone would make a solid angular dropzone+cropper.

</comment><comment><USER19> If Imgix could implement this server-side, that could be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER20> How long until this has native support in CSS?

</comment><comment><USER21> Exactly what I was looking for. Will give it a try! Thank you.</comment>


Lots of People Are Losing Distance Vision, and No One Knows Why - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/02/silent-epidemic-myopia/ <comment><USER2> Actually, we've a pretty good idea why, from looking at countries with very, very high levels of short sightedness. The article itself actually references these (mainly conducted in South Korea and the US).

It appears that it's down to people not getting enough sunlight as children. The sun is, obviously, very bright, which forces your iris to have to contract and relax a lot, which keeps both those muscles and the lens in good health.

With populations increasing having children that stay inside, they're not exposed enough to that much harsh, bright light, so their irises weaken, leading to short sightedness.

Caveat - a lot of the research of this is looking at factors that correlate with the levels of vision reported, so the cause is being inferred, rather than know. However, it's a decent hypothesis, and the more recent meta- analysis studies done seem to be supporting this.

The problem is that once it's happened, it doesn't appear to be something that can be "cured" by re-introducing bright light exposure.

<comment><USER3> I read somewhere (it was a while ago so can't remember) that it was to do with people spending a lot of time indoors, and never needing to look off into long distances.

Personally I do a fair bit of outdoor sports, and I have one eye thats fine and one that is quite badly short sighted.</comment></comment>


Making Music Currently Free - <AUTHOR> Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers, is temporarily free.
PDF https://cdn-resources.ableton.com/resources/uploads/makingmusic/MakingMusic_DennisDeSantis.pdf
MOBI https://cdn-resources.ableton.com/resources/uploads/makingmusic/MakingMusic_DennisDeSantis.mobi
EPUB https://cdn-resources.ableton.com/resources/uploads/makingmusic/MakingMusic_DennisDeSantis.epub <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/ideas-offers-making-music- ho...](https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/ideas-offers-making-music-home/)</comment>


Silk Road owner can't be guilty of money laundering if Bitcoin isn't money - <AUTHOR> http://theverge.com/2014/4/1/5570984/alleged-silk-road-owner-says-he-cant-be-guilty-of-money-laundering <comment><USER2> Still the fact remains that DPR attempted to hire at least one hitman for a job. He won't get out of this one easily, I'm afraid.

Also, the Feds might pull a Capone on him and fine/imprison him for not reporting the (significant!) income from SR.</comment>


How to Turn a Boeing 747 Into an Indoor Water Park - <AUTHOR> http://www.asb.tv/blog/2011/04/747-wave-pool/

<comment><USER2> Um, this place a space & aviation museum AND water park.

That's so awesome! It's in McMinnville, OR if anyone wants to go.

[http://www.evergreenmuseum.org/#/the-museum/about-the- museum...](http://www.evergreenmuseum.org/#/the-museum/about-the- museum/contact)

</comment><comment><USER3> Once while driving down to the Oregon coast, I was very surprised to be driving through a rural area and suddenly see a 747 parked near the highway, at what appeared to be a very small airfield. Now that I know what the place is, I definitely won't visit the coast again without going to the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum.

If you're not into water slides, maybe some of these exhibits at the museum next door will interest you:

\- Spruce Goose

\- Mercury Space Capsule

\- NASA X-38

\- SR-71 Blackbird

<comment><USER4> The museum is awesome. It's amazing what you can accumulate if you put your mind to it and have a ton of money to back up your intentions.

They were hoping to get one of the space shuttles, but that didn't work out. Seattle's Museum of Flight lost out on that one as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the extremely likely event of a water landing, your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device!</comment>


The Incredible Shrinking Sears - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/business/the-incredible-shrinking-sears.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> The author's thesis seems to be that Sears' woes are due to its CEO trying to run it like a hedge fund. I wonder if other ex-managers of hedge funds have done well in charge of other types of companies.</comment>