3 Ways I Would Improve Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jasonshah.org/post/16910604141/3-ways-i-would-improve-hacker-news

<comment><USER2> The number one thing I would improve is add some kind of alert system when someone replies to one of your comments or posts. Email me. Or put some kind of alert icon somewhere on the orange bar that someone has replied to something I'm involved with.

<comment><USER3> <http://notifo.com/hackernews>

<comment><USER4> Notifo is shutting down: <http://blog.notifo.com/notifo>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's what I would improve on HN: comments formatting.

Writing and reading long comment is absolutely painful and a sprinkle of markdown/GFM (beyond the current trivial em and code block supports) would make it significantly better.

Also comment preview/review, since the site is very often _bloody slow_ when trying to edit a comment, and the writing area is 1. too small to review long text and 2. not a good way to see if the comment's rendered layout is correct.

edit: and the current state is probably worse than nothing at all, as inline asterisks are rendered as <em> when they're multiplication signs or links to footnote, so you've got shitty formatting _and_ broken comments.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd love it if there was a way to view or highlight new comments in a thread. Quite often, I'll read an interesting thread that's got 120 comments, come back a few hours later and see the same thread with 180 comments--but I have no way of knowing which are new without trawling through the whole thing again.

<comment><USER7> If you are using Chrome then try this (made it a while ago): [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fpndmkcfggkffpablc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fpndmkcfggkffpablcooicmihgcgalil)

<comment><USER8> I'm finding it useful already, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry but I don't really care for all of these changes. They are just small UI additions which can be totally subjective. Plus, let's not forget, you could easily implement all the things you mentioned through browser add-ons, personalizing your own experience.

I'm a little more worried about the comment-karma being removed, which makes it harder for me to reach the best comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input. Agreed that these are small UI changes and building browser add-ons could do the trick. The removal of comment-karma is probably a bigger deal; this was my personal take on things I haven't necessarily heard talked about as much.

In my view, it's the small UI things HN and other sites get right that often make the difference though, and a bunch of browser add-ons just seems like a fragmented approach to changes that may benefit a lot of people on HN who may never discover or use the add-ons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is a bunch of cosmetic changes:

1) Include the second level domain on link preview next to title (e.g. plus.google.com)

2) Include some sort of graphics that link a comment response to original comment. It's very difficult to follow a conversation with a lot of comments. The Slashdot vertical lines are an elegant example.

3) Use CSS media queries. I find HN very difficult to navigate using embedded devices. The font, the vote arrow and the margins aree too small.

</comment><comment> eric-hu To #1 I would add: build in comment collapsing.

I've read many threads where the first top-level comment is fantastic. Then there's one or more screen-lengths of comments piggybacking off that comment.

My favorite feature of Reddit is being to sort comments by vote total, then collapse a thread after reading the first comment. Auto-collapsed low point threads would also be a good disincentive for inane posting.

</comment><comment><USER11> On the first idea:

I have an idea on how to indicate the value of a discussion. After comments, list a "buzz: " value that is the sum of all upvotes in the comments.

This works as an indication of how people feel about the contents of the comments. The higher the buzz, the greater interest in the conversion.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to be able to collapse a thread. Often the top comment is insightful, but not directly relevant.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there a way to see all comments I have upvoted? This is one thing I would really like.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice suggestions. I'd like to point out that there are already many great apps that improve hacker news: <http://www.hnsearch.com/apps> (many more on this thread).

<comment><AUTHOR> Useful link. Very comprehensive. I wish there was a better way to connect people who need these apps with this link and the pages for the apps since personally I knew of HN Search but never navigated to the Cool Apps page. I guess people just need to be aware of it. Maybe HN could promote it on the site at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Those are some pretty solid ideas. I also agree that improvements can be made to the comment system, possibly something for me to play around with in my spare time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think comment systems generally (not just HN's) can use a lot of improvement. Better and better sorting algorithms based on recency, user quality, responses to the comment, etc. seem incremental, honestly. It's helpful, but if I were to redesign commenting systems from scratch I would think about the current linear format, whether comments that relate to each other could intelligently be grouped together, etc. I feel like if companies like Disqus and Livefyre are going to compete with the added social value Facebook brings, they're going to have to figure this out and really revolutionize conversations on sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For #1 for now you can check out: <http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

</comment><comment><USER3> #1 thing I would want is speeding up the site. I've experienced a lot of slowness and empty pages when trying to submit comments.

</comment><comment><USER17> concerning comments: I would again recommend to order comments not just by their respective score, but to a degree by the score of the comments in reply. otherwise a controversial comment might get buried below the fold.

</comment><comment><USER18> To the author, would you consider making the fonts on your site maybe 2-3x bigger? 12px is _really_ hard to read against a solid white background. Plus visually, I think it makes your site look better at a bigger size.

<comment><USER19> 2-3x bigger seems fairly huge... You can increase the font size (in Chrome and Firefox at least) via ctrl+mousewheel up which should fix it for you, at least temporarily.

(I'm not the author, btw.)

<comment><USER18> Yup, I know. First thing I did. I didn't mean 2-3x pixel size, rather percentage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Or, at least, make it browse-able on iPhone and other smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER21> Fix the moderation system so it's not trivial. Trivial moderation is worthless.

</comment><comment><USER22> my only suggestion which is super easy to implement is to open links in new windows. :D

<comment><USER23> no thanks. That's breaking the usability.

<comment><USER24> How does that break usability? Reddit does it. Also HN is an aggregator, so it makes sense to keep it open in a tab and open the links in new tabs.

<comment><USER25> It's actually a preference on reddit, and one that (IIRC) is off by default.

In terms of breaking usability, people expect links to open in the current window/tab. Having them open a new window/tab is disorientating at best.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Power of Joining Forces - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizstone.com/2011/09/power-of-joining-forces.html

<comment><USER2> Great inspiring article Just reminding me of the old saying Unity is the strength. You told it with a very strange example of evolution of life on earth. Twitter and facebook, and all the other social networking sites are great ways to "join forces"

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm looking for a partner/co-founder to join and extend our reach. I should have worked at Blogger too I guess.</comment>


Analyzing Millions of Postgres Query Plans - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heapanalytics.com/analyzing-performance-millions-sql-queries-one-special-snowflake/ <comment><USER2> Can you share more details about the actual analysis once you have json plans for all the queries?</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone know of startups that have offices (or are based) in Hong Kong? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an US software developer that is interested in working and living in Hong Kong (I speak the language). I've got experience working for top 10 companies as well as early startups.
Does anyone know of any startups or software companies that are hiring out of HK? Has anyone done something similar?
Ty <comment><USER2> Suggest researching HK based startups that received funding in the last 6-24 months. Build a target list of interesting companies, reach out to the principals directly. Here's a good place for leads> [http://www.startupshk.com/](http://www.startupshk.com/)</comment>


So what is a designer? - <AUTHOR> http://helloform.com/blog/2010/11/so-what-is-a-designer/

<comment><USER3> I like — and by "like" I mean "am vaguely unhappy" — that this post and most posts like it are written by a person or people whose idea of web design is slapping a light color on another light color, adding padding, and then @font- facing in something that looks vaguely elegant. Is this design, meeting priorities in the simplest and most boring way imaginable? Is design simply matching proper lineheight to a fontsize, declaring it readable, and calling it a day? Is design making a vaguely pretty blog without also applying serious thought to what the contents of that blog will be?

When was the last time you saw Jon Hicks or Elliot Jay Stocks or Jeff Zeldman or Shaun Inman write vapid entries like this about the definition of designer? When do the designers at Twitter or Tumblr write entries about how they define the word "design"? They don't, because they know that talking about words and positions and statuses like they mean something is silly. Words are what we make of them. They're especially dolled up by people who don't have any toys to play with _but_ words.

Designers can _be_ anything and _do_ anything. Same thing with "advertisers" and "artists" and "engineers" and "rockstars" and whatever other terms people decide to throw about themselves. Designers can write. Engineers can build web sites.

EDIT: I see that the guy who wrote this post is on HN responding. Fred, I hope you can forgive my irritability and frustration — I really don't mean this as a jab at you. But I'm bothered that you try and define design in the basest terms — "a designer does X, Y, and Z" — and refuse to discuss the goals that design can achieve. You're talking about design like the whole point is to make a company a quick buck. I know a fuck of a lot of designers who'd really hate their jobs if that was all they were doing.

<comment><USER4> Valid points - although I certainly didn't expect my words to be taken at face value and judged by the layout of the site itself, which I decided should be as simple as it could. My work is not this blog, I am not a writer, so when I write, I keep things simple (much like I like them when I read). Also, sometimes I'm just lazy when working for myself :-)

I appreciate that you named a few people I'm friends with and whose work I respect. I also know they're not writing pieces like this - which I see as a problem. I do think awareness to the shifting role of the designer is necessary at this point. I've been in this industry for over 10 years now and design and designers are still undefined. Years ago I used to joke that everyone is a designer. Now that I'm taking less of an engineering (and design) role in companies and more into investing/advisory, I feel entrepreneurs and designers SHOULD be aware of what the market needs (and will expect soon)

To answer your main point, which is that I didn't say what design should achieve. I didn't indeed - not in this post (check the previous posts for that). I am CERTAINLY (and this is where we'll disagree on the interpretation of my words) not saying design is a way to make companies a quick buck - <USER2> _is_ a differentiating factor in the success at startups (and I've seen quite a few in my work, trust me). I would _really_ hate my job if that was all I was doing. My other posts may be more interesting if you're looking for actionable stuff.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. :-)

 _I also know they're not writing pieces like this - which I see as a problem. I do think awareness to the shifting role of the designer is necessary at this point._

But I still don't agree with this. If anything, I think we need more designers to step up and say "The idea of a 'designer' is dead. Stop pretending like it's possible to be a professional in this day and age; we're all amateurs of differing degrees. There's more to learn than you'll ever be able to learn, so all that matters is that you learn the things you care about learning. Stop wasting time defining things, separating them into canons and non-canons, pretending like success necessarily defines designers or adds an extra meaning to their work."

I'm primarily studying advertising right now — though it's certainly not my only or even primary interest — and one thing that attracts me to the study is that the top advertisers on the planet have been saying this for a decade. Agencies like Wieden+Kennedy and the Barbarian Group turn out some work that's so beyond the kin of what we recognize as advertising that it forces you to acknowledge that the old definitions have been thrown out the window, regardless of whether some people insist they're still there.

Design hasn't gotten there yet: It's a more conservative field than advertising. (I mean, so is everything. That's the whole idea of being in advertising.) Even the people I just named tend to be more conservative with their designs than the half-generation following them is going to be. Of all the ones I named I think only Inman and the Twitter team are really doing something new, and even they aren't off-the-walls crazy. Not that there's anything bad with that.

But certainly one of the reasons I'm not primarily a designer is that it's one of the few artistic fields whose education focuses on old tried-and-true standards rather than on the crazy things that happened last week or yesterday or earlier today. A whole lot of design feels appallingly stagnant.

(I'd love to talk this with you more in-depth, by the way — would you mind if I shot you an email?)

<comment><USER4> Your second (technically, third) paragraph won me over - you are absolutely right :-) That needs a more prominent place to live than a comment here at HN - people need to read it.

I don't mind you shooting me an email - not at all. I'm swamped with email, however, so I may take a bit to get back to you. But I definitely will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Design has never been about using Photoshop. This isn't a "2010 thing". Design is no more about Photoshop than it is pen, paper, or pixel. If you believe any different, you're deluding yourself.

I know how to use Photoshop and Illustrator, but would not consider myself a designer. The tools don't make the designer.

Design is about communication. That's all it's ever been and all it ever will be about (a user interface is a communication to the user how to interact with your product/idea).

<comment><USER6> I would say design is about problem solving more than straight communication. Here's a great talk from Michael Bierut that kind of touches on what a designer is: [http://the99percent.com/videos/6056/michael- bierut-5-secrets...](http://the99percent.com/videos/6056/michael- bierut-5-secrets-from-86-notebooks)

<comment><USER7> I think it could be said that "solving a problem for someone other than yourself" is semantically equivalent to "communicating with someone."

<comment><USER6> Possibly, but just saying "communication" doesn't get across the fact that designers are always working within a myriad of constraints.

<comment><USER8> Agreed... the previous comment goes to far. he might not have meant it to come across that way though. "Communication" is probably too general.

Design might be about communicating the experience to the user, but it is still about designing that experience in the first place. When you are at your computer mocking up your amazing designs, are you "communicating"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just watched Frank Chimero's talk at Build. He mentions his search for what a designer is. It's a pretty great talk. Chimero puts out some incredible work and his thoughts on design are hardly about the "design" most people think of.

<http://vimeo.com/17084347>

 _The designer you want isn't the guy that just knows photoshop and delivers .psd files (or the html-illuminated designer that delivers html+css)._

Are you suggesting that this person was ever a designer? As if the definition has shifted in the past few years? I don't think that person should have ever been considered a designer. It seems like the internet came up behind what design really is and shook it around for a while. Now the dust starts to settle.

Or maybe not. The guy who can throw together a PSD and the people who hire him aren't going anywhere until our thoughts on design spread outside of the design community. We're kind of insular, aren't we?

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not a designer or even a graphic artist. I see tons of tutorials on 'How to do Photoshop technique X' but I think they are teaching how to do something, not the understanding you need to be a designer. Being a carpenter is not about the tools. And, even if you are a craftsman, it is about the quality tools you employ. From my brief foray into furniture making a while ago, good woodworkers know how to adjust for mistakes - they know if you get to step 25 and you can't proceed - how to change course. It's not going to be perfect, shim stuff up.

Dieter Rams' 10 principles of Good Design

<http://www.vitsoe.com/en/gb/about/dieterrams/gooddesign>

</comment><comment><USER11> Here is an example of what this kind of thinking leads to:

Craigslist SF: Web Designer/Front-End Guru Intern

• Demonstrable years experience creating consumer web/mobile applications • Masterful command of the Adobe Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator • Sophisticated knowledge of HTML, XHTML, CSS • Experience with JavaScript, AJAX, and a JavaScript framework such as jQuery, MooTools, etc • Knowledge of browser compatibility issues and web standards • Embrace the practice of rapid prototyping, and working in a fast-paced environment where constant change is the norm and the bar for performance is set high. __Sense of humor and a positive attitude are non-negotiable. Brownie points for: \- Advanced Flash skills \- Illustration \- Experience with mobile application design

//

Guru Intern = ¡LOL!

This is from Formative Labs, veteran entrepreneurs, backed by blue chip angels, yet...they don't see the need to actually pay anything for the task of doing the actual design work. (it dangles the plastic carrot of 'it could easily turn into a full-time job,' presumably meaning it's a full-time job to start, but they might decide to pay...someday.)

//

Again, I don't totally disagree with the premise of tfa, but it's just to closely linked to the penurious thinking behind getting a design 'guru intern.'

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't know the author's work, but I do know that this vision is nothing new, and it's often why a startup, or many other well-meaning businesses think all they really need is a design intern. It also points toward the old trope of 'I'm a television expert, because I watch a lot of tv.' (Mr. Olivera, I don't think you hold this position, however, it is on the same spectrum, imo)

Again, it does work, but design is relegated to being 'adequate' rather than being a potential source of innovation and differentiation. It plays to this crowd, but that doesn't mean it's right – kind of like going into a design forum and saying that your developers don't need a CS degree, because everything is about frameworks these days.

It reinforces the old trope that designers just make graphics, wireframes, flows, etc. while the programmers do the 'real work' of making it live. A company or startup can get away with a 'functional' designer as described in the post, but it removes design as a differentiator or potential source of innovation. It's true that almost anybody can mock up a landing page and mini- site, but that is a supremely limited conception of a designer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Am I the only one who's thinking, "If he's really a designer, he's got awfully poor taste in fonts?" Its because I'm seeing this: <http://imgur.com/gGrVm.jpg>

That font would be fine on a page of paper but seeing it on a screen just hurts my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER13> From my perspective, the question is more of how would you hire the right designer to turn an application from an eyesore to a polished professional look ? We are never going to meet , so how does one go about separating true designers from PSD/HTML hacks when one encounters them on Elance. What question do you ask ? what do you look for in the portfolio ? And of course --- by what formula do you divine how much to pay (this one is a big issue for all tech. bootstrapped start ups)? And is Elance the right place to find them ?

<comment><USER3> "The right place to find a designer," goes the adage, "is wherever the designer happens to be." Frustratingly, there is no official hub where every designer goes, so you have to look in a lot of places. Elance has some talented people, but it doesn't have all the people you should be looking for.

When you're looking for a designer, the rule is you try to find somebody who makes things you like looking at first. That's the most important part. Looking through their portfolio, then, you're trying to see the extent of their prowess. Do they rely on the same design tricks with every single layout they make (gradients, pretty buttons, slidy things), or are they making sure each web site does what it's supposed to do? Have they got any subtlety of understanding what a web site's needs are, or are they designing a bunch of things that look the same no matter what they're meant to be?

Then you talk to them. See if they "get" what you're talking about. Don't plan your questions in advance — conversations work better than interviews. Do they intuit your needs? If you have to clarify something that at first isn't clear, do they catch on to where you're going? You want somebody who's going to make the web site you want to make.

As for price: Offer what you can afford, and see if they'll take it. With designers, you never know. My team has taken $200 contracts because the work was simple enough and we liked the team offering. We've done freelance work because we liked the cause or liked the challenge and had an opening in our schedule.

The best way to find designers is to stick to people who've made work you like, or people you know, or people who've said interesting things, and contact them directly. Sort of like how directors stick to their favorite actors and cinematographers or, if they don't have any, they ask their friends to help out. Keep it personal. Personal does better work for you.

(If you're not speaking hypothetically, by the way, feel free to write me — we're open again for business starting Thursday. [/selfpromotion])

<comment><USER13> I will. Is the email listed under HN profile correct ?

<comment><USER3> Yep!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"He's the guy that knows how to approach customers, figures out what they want ..., how to collect and analyze statistics, comes up with success metrics ..., design the right experience to meet business goals ..."_

Perhaps a better title for this article would be "What _is_ a internet marketing consultant".

This post screams "I'm not really a designer, but am really good at managing designers and talking about design to other non-designers".

</comment><comment><USER15> Graphic design is 'clear thinking, made visual'.

The best graphic designers are problem solvers; closer to visual engineers, than they are to decorators.

<comment><USER7> My personal gestalt of the word "design", such as it is, is that it is the second step of the creative/problem-solving process: to come up with good solutions, you first generate novel connections between concepts (brainstorm); and then evaluate those concepts, and sort them on, how well they solve the problem, and prune the ones that sort "badly" (design.) You then connect together the ones that sort well (brainstorm again), and prune those, and so on. When someone says that a product "lacks design," it means the bad ideas have not been pruned from it. Good design is minimalist, because it has been pruned incessantly. And so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The blogger forgot to mention that designer is communication artist & scientist.

Designers build (design) communication. Not .psds or html/css

<comment><USER4> I did indeed - thanks for the reminder! But I also believe that not just designers but anyone who wants to succeed in this industry needs to be a great communicator. It is also a skill most people don't seem to value.

<comment><USER16> Indeed. If you can't communicate. It's a dead end.

But speaking of designers, they are also scientist. They just don't communicate what they want to but hello loads of other things.

Visual communication amuses me no end. That's why I'm a designer - and that's why, IMO, every designer is a designer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So much wasted time on talk. Blogging. Blabbing. Socializing:))) Do your job, with passion and deep knowledge. That's enough.</comment>


Knuth's 15th Annual Christmas Tree Lecture [video] - <AUTHOR> http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/seminars/knuth/091208-knuth-500.asx

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind these are fairly dense (judging from the ones I've attended in years past) and assume a reasonable amount of background - they're not google tech talks. 'Christmas Lecture' makes them sound universally accessible but that's not quite the case. It's helpful if you're familiar with the sort of topics covered in his _Concrete Mathematics_. Also if you're expecting a lecturer in the Feynmanian stratosphere, you might be disappointed. Certainly interesting stuff, with those caveats.

Edit: A few minutes into this lecture after drawing a graph and its Laplacian matrix on a bit of paper he says 'I'm not going to use high-powered determinant theory in this talk but if determinants scare you, too bad, just enjoy the jokes'.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll download all his lectures, convert to a good format, re-upload to youtube, and then write summaries of all of them!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking forward to the summaries, but are you sure Knuth wants his videos on YouTube? I'd ask, first. Right now they are available via iTunes and SCPD-- I imagine if he wanted them on YouTube, he would have had them put there....

<comment><USER4> Knuth doesn't use email so the pkrumins will need to call him or send him snail mail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent! I attended this talk in person and it was great to see him work. (I'm the "the guy from Boston" that Knuth referred to.) Picture with Knuth: <http://twitpic.com/sqxku>

My note-taking pages were absolutely loaded by the end of the talk. I'm glad I got to hear from him at least once in my life!

<comment><USER6> You both are my heroes. One from academia, and another javascript guru.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone find a working link to the actual video file? I tried [http://proedvid.stanford.edu/knuth/091208/091208-knuth-500.w...](http://proedvid.stanford.edu/knuth/091208/091208-knuth-500.wmv) with mplayer but it tries again and again without ever starting. Inside seem to be more links. Curl has no luck either.

<comment><USER8> The .asx link works with Firefox or VLC, but not with Safari 4 on Snow Leopard. I guess it's a codec problem.

Update : it stopped after a few mins ... server overload as others guessed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> He is maybe one of the greatest computer scientists of all time, but he doesn't seem to be very good talker. Kinda surprising.

<comment><USER10> I might be one of the few who enjoyed it, didn't watch the whole thing yet. Even though I have never watched his earlier talks to make a comparison, at 71 he might not be in his best form when giving talks.</comment></comment>


Mary Beard 'cut' from US version of Civilisations - cirrus-clouds https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/17/mary-beard-cut-us-version-civilisations-fearing-slightly-creaky/ <comment><AUTHOR> PBS often edit UK-produced shows, or change the voice over, for their US audience. Whenever I've had the opportunity to compare the two versions, the British one has been vastly better -- less pompous, more intellectual, less fear-mongering, more curiosity-enhancing; also, including moments of silence. Further, unfortunately, PBS tend to cut material to fit within a shorter time- frame, e.g. a 60-minutes long drama or documentary will have lost about 5 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sounds like they didn't want to be too offensive towards Christians and risk even more conservative backlash.

For a little context, the Republicans are currently trying to kill PBS.

<comment><USER3> Haven't they always been gunning for PBS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish the entire series was just Simon Schama. Even though I disagree with his politics, at least he knows how to string a narrative together. Beard talks like she's reading a Wikipedia article, and the US editors noticed.

<comment><USER5> What exactly do you find objectionable with his political views? He's an school British Labour Party liberal with the full meaning of that word behind him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The BBC and PBS versions were made by the same production company, but the > two broadcasters were each responsible for their final chosen edits.</comment>


Ohio State University Gets Armored Military Vehicle, Dodges Questions About It - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/blog/2013/09/19/ohio-state-university-gets-armored-milit

<comment><USER2> Q: Why do colleges cost so much these days?

A: All that military hardware is sooooo expensive!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be interested to know more about the actual uses and capabilities of the vehicle. For example, the article states that the military has had problems with using the vehicles off-road and that the vehicle is prone to flip.

Elsewhere it is described as resistant to mines and ambush (how exactly?). I'm wondering what situation a university campus is likely to encounter where this vehicle would be superior to, say, a four-wheel drive.

<comment><USER4> My understanding from some of my Iraq war veteran friends is that Humvees lack adequate undercarriage armor and they aren't designed for/can't be properly modified to carry the proper armor. There are newer ones with beefed up engines and suspensions but it's kinda like deciding you want to jump ramps/obstacles in a vehicle and trying to supe up your pickup truck rather than building a race truck[1].

MRAP is not a single vehicle but a class of vehicle[2]. The name kind of says it all: Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected.

My friends were stationed in bases inside Iraq and never really had to do any "off road-ing". They had to convoy between different installations within the country. Typically on poor roads but roads none the less. They worked with the Iraqi Defense Force to transport prisoners, supplies, etc.

This[2] is the kind of stuff that they were scared to death over and why they wanted MRAPs. Apparently Humvees don't take kindly to those sort of explosions or rockets, mines, IEDs, etc.

[1]My buddy and his friends do this with their Tacomas and regularly blow out suspension and drivetrain parts. CVs especially. This is no fault of the Tacoma, they are NOT designed to jump large gaps at speed like a Trophy truck.

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP)

(GRAPHIC)[3] [http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=02b_1189545597](http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=02b_1189545597) (GRAPHIC)

Edit:

That said, I have NO idea why they'd want these in a city other than the bling/super Ninja Robocop ego factor. Using the same SWAT vehicles as the local PD seems like a better choice since the support network would already exist.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, thanks for the info.

It still leaves me wondering:

1\. Why a university would be expecting vehicle mines or even IEDs on campus; and

2\. What value an armoured vehicle responding to that situation would have anyway.

My understanding is that a vehicle mine is pretty useless once you know it is there. This seems like a vehicle designed for regular trips over highly contested or hostile (but reasonably well-maintained) roads.

<comment><USER4> Another commenter mentioned the police's vehicles get flipped by rowdy sports crowds. The vehicle is probably surplus from the Iraq wind down. Some of LAPD's helicopter fleet is, apparently, military surplus.

I would think that even if their MRAP is free the logistics would make it more expensive that whatever vehicle SWAT is using. I would think that an Armored car (like a bank would se) would also be a good choice if they're just looking for a heavy and protected vehicle.

Realistically, it seems like if the crowd is that ugly, the local PD should be called in. I don't think riot dispersal is really a great responsibility for campus police.

Re the mines: I'm guessing you don't get much of a chance to check for mines, especially on convoy routes. Car bombs at checkpoints (like the video I linked) are probably impossible to detect before someone is in the blast zone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Colleges of OSU's size have had problems with riots after games and at the end of frat parties ( in fact, I believe OSU has had both, I know they have had football riots [0]). Vehicles, including police cars, get flipped and set on fire.

Since this is likely surplus military equipment from the US draw down in Iraq bought for cheap, perhaps it was a cheap way to get a vehicle for riot control?

Certainly, they aren't expected to drive across IEDs on campus.

Keep in mind, the police forces at large state schools are actual sworn law enforcement officers who carry guns, arrest people, and are responsible for crowd control. OSU is more than 56k people, well past the point where a town would have it's own police force.

Of course, this says nothing about whether any police forces should have this type of equipment.

[0][http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIHxDZwxloY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIHxDZwxloY)

<comment><USER6> when 5+ people are going to pacifically hold signs in some park they have to inform the authorities so they can provide public "protection".

why a game of that proportions is different? i take it that more than 5 people are guaranteed to show up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> To their defense: there has been a worrying trend recently where the perpetrators of thus shootings have been much better equipped. Until recently thus shootings was mostly done with 9-mm semi-automatic weapons. But for example both the batman theater shooter and Anders Behring Breivik her in Norway did use at least some bullet resisting equipment and assault rifles.

It is totally possible that the next shooter will have full tactical armor and a fully automatic assault rifle with drum magazines. When this happened first responders has to be prepared. They shouldn't have to wait on SWAT while someone is going around shooting others. (This was what happened during the Utøya attack in Norway. The police that first reposted did not have the capability to stop the perpetrator, so they was set to direct traffic instead, while they waited on the national counter-terrorism unit to come to aid them. In the meanwhile Breivik could go around executing children.)

</comment><comment><USER8> I remember a discussion on HN where this came up. IIRC someone suggested that it was more about the price - for some reason there was / is a surplus of this kind of vehicle. Unfortunately I can't find the thread again.

I wouldn't call this a tank, though.

<comment><USER9> Might have been this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186569)

Radley Balko discusses this at some length in "Rise of the Warrior Cop", cited in the article. Fascinating, scary read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> at reddit when this showed up weeks ago, ppl in the military were commenting how driving those are the worst thing they did on service. that its dangerously jumpy to the point they would question driving over speed bumps or crosing over sidewalks.

seems that some company developed something for military no-price-limits market that turned out so bad that they started a bargain sale to civilians.

ohio was just the first sucker that had to spend last minute budget to not lose it next year. and knowing how prevalent is this, expect a lot more to pop up.

<comment><USER10> > _ohio was just the first sucker that had to spend last minute budget to not > lose it next year._

Spend it† or lose it was my first thought, too.

†And then decide what, if anything, to use it for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For definitions of 'tank' that include 'armored truck' and exclude a cannon, treads and other features you kind of expect on a tank.

</comment><comment><USER12> Riots after Ohio State/Michigan game get pretty intense, there's usually a fleet of helicopters out already.

<comment><USER13> Why does campus security have to deal with that? If it's really as bad as you claim, shouldn't it be up to the state or city police departments to deal with.

<comment><USER14> The campus security IS the police department. A lot of large state schools have fully-fledged police departments, not private security.

<comment><USER15> Not true. There are two separate groups in Columbus: OSU Police and the Columbus Police Department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I assume the intended use is an invasion of Michigan.

<comment><USER17> Happened once before (sorta) in a dispute over state boundaries.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War)

Ohio ended up getting the area around the Ohio/Michigan state line and Michigan got the upper peninsula.

<comment><USER16> Yup. Was intended as a nod at both that, and the ongoing UM/OSU rivalry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Always keeping it classy in Columbus. Go blue

</comment><comment><USER19> Ah, shades of Kent.

Four dead in Ohio.</comment>


Alcatraz – Package manager for Xcode 5 - <AUTHOR> http://alcatraz.io <comment><USER2> Um. Don't run the installation instructions.

While the download itself is served using https (from amazon), curl will contact the google url shortener using HTTP. Honestly, if I wanted to MITM one thing on any network, URL shorteners would come first.

Edit: The website switched from googles link shortener to git.io (http) and download to github downloads. git.io's https version seems to have certificate issues.

        > curl https://git.io/lOQWeA -vvv
        ...
        * SSL certificate problem: Invalid certificate chain
        ...

<comment><USER3> If someone is wondering, the short url points to the latest release tgz, at the moment to [https://github.com/supermarin/Alcatraz/releases/download/1.0...](https://github.com/supermarin/Alcatraz/releases/download/1.0.1/Alcatraz.tar.gz)

<comment><USER2> Yep. The original post contained the links, but fell through the spam filter ;).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first thing that stuck out to me was the name and logo. Alcatraz sounds cool (and I like the logo), but I'm not sure if something that evokes imagery of being confined and locked up is what you want associated with an open- source package manager.

<comment><USER5> _I 'm not sure if something that evokes imagery of being confined and locked up_

Given that it's for Xcode, the one dev-tool to rule them all, in the walled garden where Apple has all the keys, I think it fits perfectly.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I would agree except that AppCode does Xcodes job a lot better than Xcode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice! I've been following this for some time and am very happy to see this stable release!

An aside: Has anyone tried the Clang Formatter plugin? I want to format property declarations like:

      @property (nonatomic, strong) NSString *string;

But setting 'ObjCSpaceAfterProperty' to true or false both output:

      @property(nonatomic, strong) NSString *string;

My format config is based off llvm's. Maybe some other configuration is stomping on the 'ObjCSpaceAfterProperty: true'?

(Does anyone have a .clang-format file that that matches Apple's style?)

<comment><USER8> I actually wrote that patch! Are you sure you are using a version of clang with support for it? As far as I know a new release hasn't been cut with the included patch. At Facebook we use clang-format with that patch and it works.

I should note that Alcatraz's clang plugin looks to have a compiled version of an old clang-format in the tree...that's likely why this doesn't work with that plugin.

<comment><USER7> Thank you! That was causing my issue.

Thanks for adding that ObjC option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady What are your reasons for starting another package management system when we already have CocoaPods? What does this offer over CocoaPods beside the UI?

<comment><USER9> Alcatraz manages 'Xcode packages', e.g. Xcode plugins and color schemes. CocoaPods manages dependencies of your Objective-C project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using this and it works great for the packages it has, I don't use too many but if you document your xcode methods I highly recommend VVDocumenter.

It allows you to generate a doc string for a method if you type '///'

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks really cool, but I don't know what problem it's solving for me. Maybe I'm not an Xcode hacker/ninja/whatever, but it has constantly met my needs as-is. Sure, I've wanted to add a color scheme before, but these are a lot of hoops to jump through when Dusk is fine.

<comment><USER12> There are a lot of really great plugins for Xcode, you should browse the package repository to get an idea of what's out there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A huge congrats, I've been working with Alcatraz HEAD for a while, with helping out with the design, and occasionally wanting to make my own plugins.

I'm super excited to see it out and one-click installable again. Looking forwards to seeing what Marin/Delisa/Jurre do with the blog.

I use this regularly, it's not felt any less stable for the few plugins I use mainly; open in github, one in appcode & fuzzy string matcher. They really make Xcode easier for day to day life.

<comment><USER14> A colleague of mine wrote that Open in Github plugin when we worked together - it's incredibly useful if your code's hosted there and you do pull-request code reviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Xcode doesn't have a public plugin API. Every single one of these packages, including Alcatraz itself, is relying on undocumented and unsupported functionality. I would very strongly caution against installing _any_ of it.

<comment><USER12> Apple has reached out to plug-in developers and implemented a compatibility UUID system for plugins. What exactly are you worried might happen?

<comment><USER15> No, Apple gave up and implemented a compatibility UUID system to try and reduce crashes (since any Xcode crash is going to be reported to Apple and Xcode engineers have to figure out what happened, which means Xcode engineers get bug reports triggered by unsupported third-party plugins).

The existence of the compatibility UUID does _not_ mean that Apple has blessed plugins. They're just trying to reduce their support load, and reduce their users' crashes at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really want to use this, but I'm having a lot of trouble with the interface. It could just be me or my environment. I don't know.

Are you planning to have a forum somewhere for feedback and support? I suppose I could open an issue on Github, but I'd really rather just ask a question. Enough people seem to be using this that I suspect the problem is on my end.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow! Thank you for this. In 5 minutes I found 5 plugins I had no idea existed but truly brightens my day. Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER18> Just curious, how to implement the scrolling effect like this site? Does it require JavaScript or just CSS?

<comment><USER19> It's not an answer to you directly but more of an observation: The effect for this page is very laggy on a 1-year old MBP, and makes the text barely readable until a certain scrolling point is reached. I do not understand the purpose of using the effect here or in 9/10 cases I see it on sites. It introduces pointless visual candy with usually zero or negative practical benefit. Makes me think of the DHTML days.

<comment><AUTHOR> unfortunately we wrote it on an Macbook Air, where it worked pretty good. It lags horribly on an MBP retina, we might fix that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting that just a little bit ago there was an article on software installation security (albeit from a different angle).

Theoretically speaking, is it safe to curl and install something via plain [http://](http://) and no checksum verification?

</comment><comment><USER21> Very nice tool, though it seems the installation of ClangFormat[0] fails somehow. I guess I'll try to install it manually.

[0]: [https://github.com/travisjeffery/ClangFormat- Xcode](https://github.com/travisjeffery/ClangFormat-Xcode)

</comment><comment><USER22> As someone who spends most of their day in Xcode, Alcatraz is an invaluable tool to grooming my Xcode setup and keeping up with the latest plugins and what not.

Congrats on the launch Marin! Been following the repo for a few months now, I'm really digging the design.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not sure why this was posted, when the pre-built version doesn't work on 10.9.1. It doesn't properly detect that command line tools are installed.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think it's awesome. A part of me wishes there was a drop down summary of each plugin when you click on it, rather than heading to the github link.

</comment><comment><USER25> How stable do people generally find Xcode plugins?

The few I've tried haven't been great (they've tended to crash a lot and break with Xcode updates)

<comment><USER26> I've been using XVim for over a year now and it's been reasonably stable. They have an issue with code folding but then I don't fold while the plugin is enabled.

<comment><USER27> Fwiw. Folding shouldn't (big shouldn't) crash it but navigation is not like vim is.(the cursor is hidden inside the fold while you do navigation stuff. It eventually moves out of the fold though. It's on my list of things to fix with xvim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there a plugin to use vim mode or emacs mode comments? Tabs vs spaces and tab length consistency are big annoyances at my company.

</comment><comment><USER29> Crashes XCode for me when entering the package manager.

I work for TheMan® (with Firewall) and assuming it is due to some non-http ports being used?

<comment><USER12> What OSX are you on? We're 10.9 only since we're using NSURLSession

<comment><USER29> Ah, doh! 10.8 :(

#EnterpriseLife

<comment><AUTHOR> we will consider bringing it back to 10.8, just after this all launch thing is over

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Are the plugins run in any kind of sandbox? Is there any security review performed on plugins other users submit?

<comment><USER31> Apple doesn't sanction Xcode plugins and I'm pretty sure Xcode itself isn't sandboxed once you enter your developer password. I'm not sure of the details though.

As to the security review or process, perhaps badging -- that sounds like a good feature request. I'll bet there's an issue tracker... ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Now, add a price field, and sir, you got yourself a sustainable business!

</comment><comment><USER33> YES! It's back!

</comment><comment><USER34> Great work, now the next big thing is to mix this with Cocoapods to that once you select a package, it does the pod install command for you automatically and you are good to go.

<comment><USER35> Alcatraz isn't a CocoaPods wrapper, it is an installer for Xcode customizations like plugins and color schemes. You can use it to install a CocoaPods Xcode plugin to handle installing and updating pods though: [https://github.com/kattrali/cocoapods-xcode- plugin](https://github.com/kattrali/cocoapods-xcode-plugin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> OMG! It's like "XCode on Rails"!

At last!</comment>


Red's $15,000 'Red Raven' Camera Kit Available Exclusively at Apple Stores - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/01/red-raven-camera-kit-apple-exclusive/ <comment><AUTHOR> MKBHD made a video about it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywk2-xx0LP0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywk2-xx0LP0)</comment>


The Pirate Bay's IPREDator service is accepting beta signups. - <AUTHOR> http://ipredator.se/

<comment><USER2> Related discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=529694></comment>


The simple Secret behind wonderful Products - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/product-love/6ebe62a31176

<comment><USER2> Zukerberg, ["[W]hy were we the ones to build this? We were just students. We had way fewer resources than big companies. If they had focused on this problem, they could have done it."]

Enterprises are large, lumbering behemoths. Not necessarily the dinosaurs that disappear collectively, mysteriously but dinosaurs all the same.

Focus is not their strength. Keeping multiple balls in the air simultaneously, that's the strength of the Enterprise.</comment>


Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

<comment><USER2> Previously submitted

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79642>

but worth talking about again. As regular readers here know, this is my favorite link to post to comment threads about other links.</comment>


Show HN: MCServer – A FOSS Minecraft server in C++, with Lua plugins - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mc-server/MCServer <comment><USER2> One thing that Minecraft has been missing, and that servers such as Bukkit tried to implement is an API for plugins. Looking through the docs, the LUA API[1] makes it seem as easily extendable as Garry's Mod.

[1] [http://mc-server.xoft.cz/LuaAPI/](http://mc-server.xoft.cz/LuaAPI/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. The API is very good, and we already have some plugins that work quite well - for example a copy of the Bukkit WorldEdit mod: [http://forum.mc- server.org/showthread.php?tid=870](http://forum.mc- server.org/showthread.php?tid=870)

<comment><USER3> Any plans to support Forge?

<comment><USER4> forge is java. unless they somehow manage to run java mods, I doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tried out MCServer for a while. I put it back on the shelf after discovering that the redstone simulator was not as functional as the official server, and there are subtle behavioral differences in the things that do work. Between the two, some complex device designs that work on the official server break on MCServer.

But with respect to system resources, it's very frugal.

<comment><USER6> I'd imagine MCServer to be extremely valuable to server hosts, no? As far as I know, the official server uses a ton of resources

</comment></comment><comment> slipstream- Nice. A bunch of friends of mine play Minecraft, but I never really got into it. So I decided to look into the protocol, and coded a chat-only minecraft server in dlang, which the Mojang client can connect to. (I never released it, even though I meant to as OSS)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is an interesting project. There _DOES_ exist Minetest, which is c++ based, and uses lua entirely for running the worlds it serves. It's GPL for server + client.

See [http://www.minetest.net/](http://www.minetest.net/)

<comment><USER8> Minetest isn't compatible with minecraft though. This project lets players connect using the Mojang proprietary client (and currently that's the only client).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They should pick a _working_ donation medium though. Gratipay seems broken beyond recognition and I'm desperately throwing my cc to my monitor for the last twenty minutes.

</comment><comment><USER10> The link should be [https://github.com/mc- server/MCServer](https://github.com/mc-server/MCServer)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why yet another one? There is already [https://github.com/fador/mineserver](https://github.com/fador/mineserver) which could use more people working on it.

<comment><USER12> Is that one better? Why?

<comment><USER11> Dunno, but it has been under development for longer and seems to have the same goals so I was wondering why the creator made a new one or if he/she was unaware of the existence of mineserver. From the downvotes I've got I take it that such a discussion isn't welcome around here though.

<comment><AUTHOR> MCServer is actually an older project than mineserver, it was originally created in 2011 by FakeTruth.

<comment><USER13> Both projects seem to be quite mature, but according to the git history, mineserver is older. The first commit of mineserver was on Oct. 12, 2010.

[https://github.com/fador/mineserver/commit/399bca07f66b2882b...](https://github.com/fador/mineserver/commit/399bca07f66b2882b3907d6a721bb3245bd26503)

The first MCServer commit was about a year later, on Oct. 3, 2011.

[https://github.com/mc- server/MCServer/commit/cc2b15a2335db9a...](https://github.com/mc- server/MCServer/commit/cc2b15a2335db9a2c1f2e8549b028b179b105a1a)

<comment><USER14> Though I'm not completely sure which one is older, MCServer was closed source for a while, so there are no commits before that time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Demons: A short film about depression and suicide - <AUTHOR> http://demonsfilm.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a traditional HN post, I'm aware, but seeing as depression (in particular) is covered a lot here I thought some of you might find it interesting.

Long and short, inspired by a blog post of the same name, my brother made this film after a friend of his went to take his own life in a place near to them that so many others have done the same. A year later they revisited the spot and talked about what happened.

He stuck it online yesterday and so many people have reached out to say thank you and talk about their own demons, I figured it was worth a share.

<comment><USER2> Somewhat related - I always thought the werther effect was interesting. People seem to romanticize aspects of suicide.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Raw.

Definitely worth watching, honestly told.

That webpage is well designed too.

<comment><USER4> This might not be the place to discuss it, but I can't stand websites messing with my normal scrolling experience. I expect scroll bars to move content along their respective axis, not control animation.</comment></comment>


Lectures from Princeton on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7il1sx/sixty_free_lectures_from_princeton_on_bitcoin_and/ <comment><USER2> For such an extensive academic course it's interesting the economic model of Satoshis mining algorithm isn't explained.

Satoshi used a production model that produced the most amount of coins for the lowest amount of work/capital input, to reward the smallest user group.

Satoshi could just as easily have used a linear growth model knowing more users and more hash power should match the production output. Instead, Satoshis algorithm exploits new users.

Old users than have incentive to manipulate new users and psychologically propagate the myth of rarity when in fact the abundance of the supply was taken early easily and users are attempting to sell for more capital than it takes to acquire or produce, often simply by hording these low effort counts coins.

ecash should not exploit new users.

New cryptocash systems can easily be started.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a course that was offered through Coursera a while ago.

Very good course, it focuses on concepts (there are many) with a little theory too, but just enough to sample the soundness of claims being made.

Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are a few good points here too [https://medium.com/@alexanderwestin/5-icos-with-solid- fundam...](https://medium.com/@alexanderwestin/5-icos-with-solid-fundamentals- ready-to-rocket-off-the-launch-pad-ca2d8de4fce2)

"There's a lot of noise out there. Choosing which new cryptocurrencies to focus on can be hard. At the core of many of today's cryptos planning to launch are are scams, half-baked ideas for projects, inexperienced teams, bloated capital structures or a goal more focused on the ICO than the importance of getting listed as a proper trading vehicle on secure exchanges thereby benefiting original token holders.

There are sites out there that do a fairly good job of curating and screening these kinds of factors. What it takes to be ready for a successful lift off can be defined by the following points:

Motive: Why are they doing this? If it's simply to provide a return on an investment, then buyer beware. If they lay out a clear vision where the value proposition is easily understood this would be a good sign. It should be more than just a "we're making the world a better place". This will help it pass the scam test. What really helps pass the scam test is whether or not they have a working product you can take for a test drive.

Experienced Team: What has the team executed on in the past, together? It should first and foremost be technology related. You should be able to quickly look this up on the net. Get them on the phone if possible to see if the team even exists at all. I do this with every team I invest in.

Capital Structure: How much crypto are they offering to the public? Gauging demand for a crypto is key. Not everyone is going to want to take a position in it. These factors should determine how much crypto should be offered to the public. If these numbers are way off then it's going to be hard for the crypto to move up without enough demand. As a token holder, this is an important aspect to analyze.

Raising the right amount money during their ICO: This connects directly to the point above. If they raise too much money during the ICO, they're going to have to clear loads of 'flippers'. These flippers are those that purchase tokens during the ICO and as soon as the team lists the token on the first exchange, they sell right into it creating a massive amount of sell pressure they'll have to clear before anyone makes any real returns. It can take months and sometimes years before a team can clear sellers like this before the token can appreciate with any kind of real value."

<comment><USER5> Sorry to say but it looks another of those cryptocurrency things which talks big but deliver very little.

The very first ICO fails on the metric set above. The capital structure is skewed. It says pre-sale at no lock in. That is nearly 2 million dollars at current IPO price. Public sale accounts only for 35% and 65% by foundation, team, apitode etc. So much for decentralization. Then they also value themselves at 450 million dollars. Based on what market?</comment></comment>


Official starter template for TypeScript and React - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript-React-Starter <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I'm yet to try this out but it looks great - especially the fact that it is integrated with create-react-app, and the documentation covers a lot of common questions. As someone who is a huge fan of Typescript, and who has set up a lot of Typescript React projects, written about doing so and helped others do so, I'm really excited about this providing a much easier and officially supported way to get started!</comment>


People - <AUTHOR> https://patrickcollison.com/people <comment><USER2> I like the idea of this list. I will copy the idea for my own site.

I may tweak the idea by adding "tags" to each name, though.

<comment><USER3> I like this idea, too. Maintaining a reading list of personal sites you find valuable or interesting (and _especially_ discovering new and interesting/relevant content from sites you currently follow, rather than from a search engine or social media site) has a very 90s feel to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> +1 for David Deutsch [http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/](http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Lots of US/UK folks, apparently. Many of these lists seem like echo chambers for the Valley, a few surprises there though.

<comment><USER6> You have to wonder why he even felt the need to make this. I mean isn't it enough to have an idea in your head about who your favourite people are? No, I think he is saying 'hey this can be your echo chamber too'. It's like he's trying to make his chamber more echoey by boosting all the people who think almost identically to him, to a group of people on the internet who also think identically to him.

<comment><USER7> " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize. Assume good faith._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment></comment>


State Department Announces Great Firewall for the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200805/22310845056/state-department-announces-that-great-firewall-us-blocks-chinese-apps-equipment.shtml <comment><USER2> They want to safeguard "America" which basically means the government. If they want to safeguard citizens then we need a firewall that keeps out American agencies, and makes it illegal for companies to sell information to the US government. It should also put the users in control of what data companies can take without consent.

</comment><comment><USER3> Insofar as China is a dystopian nightmare that's paved the way for surveillance and genocide augmented by technology in ways that (from what I've seen) make something like Abu Ghraib seem a mild human rights offense - I'm not super upset about stricter measures against the usage/ubiquity of Chinese technology, infrastructure, etc.

That said, we need to safeguard the fundamental freedoms of American society; accessing even dubious telecommunications, etc. should be balanced against the ideal (accepted ontological reality of the American founding) that Americans have "god-given" individual autonomy and freedom.

I'm not sure how we reconcile this, but I think freedoms must be treated as inviolable (of course people will always have the ability to violate them).

Ideally, the government would advise companies to remove the apps, and American society and companies voluntarily reject Chinese apps, hardware, etc. Rhetoric and persuasion is the best way to respect freedom and individual autonomy yet accomplish stuff like this, imo.</comment>


The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This Headline - <AUTHOR> http://www.good.is/post/the-top-5-things-that-bother-me-about-this-headline <comment><USER2> I forgot who it was that said he wasn't so much worried about computers thinking like people as about people thinking like computers.

So now writers and designers are in it too ...

P.S. and sports managers (The Lessons of Moneyball for Big Data Analysis, via <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3030144>)</comment>


Intel's first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/intels-first-optane-ssd-375gb-that-you-can-also-use-as-ram/ <comment><USER2> Somebody linked an "Intel to mislead press on Xpoint next week" article from SemiAccurate to another thread on the same topic. Interesting read and adds some context to the announcement. [http://semiaccurate.com/2017/03/10/intel- mislead-press-xpoin...](http://semiaccurate.com/2017/03/10/intel-mislead- press-xpoint-next-week/)

<comment><USER3> By "broken" SemiAccurate seems to mean "only twice as fast, 10x lower latency, and 3x the endurance of NAND." So who is misleading whom?

<comment><USER4> Probably just marketing hype.

Some numbers:

Modern DDR4 RAM quad channel: 50,000MB/s

Optane SSD: 2,000MB/s

Also nothing on the PCIe bus is going to have a latency of RAM to the OS, unless mapped as RAM.

<comment><USER5> Using memtest86 on dual core Opterons got a measurement of about 2200 Mbytes/second, I think, with DDR1 PC3200 ECC RAM.

I think you could get a lot of work done with a 750GB RAM (2 of these, or one coming later) and dualcore Opteron setup.

<comment><USER6> DDR1 PC3200 single channel should give you 25.6 GB/s in theory.

<comment><USER7> Isn't the PC component an upper limit on performance of a DIMM? PC3200 means 3200MB/s. While a single DDR3 1600 PC12800 DIMM would max at a theoretical 12.8GB/s.

Expand the tables here: [http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-memory-speeds- compatab...](http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-memory-speeds- compatability)

<comment><USER6> Err I made a mistake, you are right. PCx means a limit of "x" per channel. My brain read PC3200 as "DDR-3200" ie. 3200 MT/s.

High-end server CPUs such as Intel Broadwell support quad-channel DDR4-2400 PC19200 which is 76.8 GB/s, a lot more bandwidth than the Octane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a big deal.

We've always made a distinction between memory and disk. Much of computer science is about algorithms that recognize the difference between slow, persistent disk and fast, volatile RAM and account for it somehow.

What happens if the distinction goes away? What if all data is persistent? What if we can perform calculations directly on persisted data without pulling it into RAM first?

My guess is that we'll start writing software very differently. It's hard for me to predict how, though.

<comment> Const-me To some extent, that change has already happen.

The RAM is no longer fast: unless cached, it takes around 150 CPU cycles to access the RAM.

The RAM is no longer byte addressable. It's closer to a block device now, the block size being 16 bytes for dual-channel DDR, 32 bytes for quad channel.

Too bad many computer scientists who write books about those algorithms prefer to view RAM in an old-fashioned way, as fast and byte-addressable.

<comment><USER9> > the block size being 16 bytes for dual-channel DDR, 32 bytes for quad > channel.

For most practical purposes I believe in x86 computers, the block size to consider should be at least a cache line, so 64 bytes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Originally Intel claimed that this new technology would offer 1000x shorter latencies and 1000x better endurance than NAND flash, and 10x better density than DRAM. The figures they're quoting now are more like 10x shorter latencies and 3x better endurance (compared with flash), and 2.5x better density (compared with RAM).

The article linked here says "3D XPoint has about one thousandth the latency of NAND flash" but I don't see any actual evidence for that. The paragraph that says it is followed by a link to actual specs for a "3D XPoint" device, saying: "the Intel flash SSD has a 20-microsecond latency for any read or write operation, whereas the 3D XPoint drive cuts this to below 10 microseconds." which sounds to me more like a 2x latency improvement than a 1000x improvement.

So I ask the following extremely cynical question. Is there any evidence available to us that's inconsistent with the hypothesis that _actually there is no genuinely new technology in Optane_? In other words, have they demonstrated anything that couldn't be achieved by taking existing flash technology and, say, adding some redundancy and a lot more DRAM cache to it?

[EDITED to add:] I am hoping the answer to my question is yes: I'd love to see genuine technological progress in this area. And it genuinely is a question, not an accusation; I have no sort of inside knowledge here.

<comment><USER11> I'm from the nand flash industry. There seem to be a few fundamental improvements in XPoint. For one, achieving a 3X endurance improvement while keeping the same process size (dimensions of the memory cell) is new.

Given that XPoint is byte addressable is rather impressive as the circuitry and metal layers (wires) needed for this is a lot more than page addressable nand.

The true test is when they connect it directly to DIMMs versus the PCIE bus. Latency numbers there may further prove fundamental improvements in technology.

<comment><USER12> I think the byte addresability is a software layer from ScaleMP.

I have no idea, but some concern how that might affect latency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At previous employer, we built a system using Druid as the primary store of reporting data. The setup worked amazingly well with the size/cardinality of the data we had, but was constantly bottlenecked at paging segments in and out of RAM. Economically, we just couldn't justify a system with RAM big enough to hold the primary dataset. As the result, we had to prioritize data aggressively, focusing on the more recent transactions and locating them on the few servers with very high RAM that we did have. Historic data segments had to go through a lot of paging in/out of RAM. User experience on YTD (year- to-date) or YOY (year-over-year) reports really suffered as the result.

I don't have access to the original planning calculations anymore, but 375GB at $1520 would definitely have been a game changer in terms of performance/$, and I suspect be good enough to make the end user feel like the entire dataset was in memory.

<comment><USER14> Make sure you're looking at updated prices for ram too. 16x16GB of registered ECC DDR3 is about the same price and enormously faster.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but I believe we were limited by the available chassis to a lot lower than 16 slots.

<comment><USER14> Well the first google result for "1u 16 dimms" is a refurbished chassis+motherboard+PSU for a hundred bucks. Brand new costs more but not terribly so; the main cost is the ram whether you go 8 slots or 16.

These SSDs have situational uses but unless you want 10+ TB in one server you can get a system with >50% as much actual RAM for the same price.

<comment><USER13> It's not the cost. We ran standardized chassis, so whatever our ops had is what they had...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yay! Nice to see these things becoming more real. The choice of U.2 is interesting, it might force wider adoption of that form factor.

This is definitely going to change the way you build your computational fabric. Putting that much data that close to the CPU (closeness here measured in nS) makes for some really interesting database and distributed data applications. For example, a common limitation in MMO infrastructure is managing everyone getting loot and changing state (appearance, stats, etc). The faster you can do those updates consistently the more people you can have in a (virtual) room at the same time.

<comment><USER16> The U.2 form factor has had no trouble catching on in the datacenter, which is where these first Optane SSDs are intended to be used. Intel is also offering standard half-height half-length add-in cards, and M.2 is simply too small to accommodate much 3D XPoint memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> With drives like this, the approach of "throw more hardware at it" continues working for databases to the point where most database loads in the world can be handled on a single machine.

<comment><USER18> Scaling beyond what fits inside one computer is a reasonable concern that this addresses, but ultimately that one computer can be sucked up by a tornado at an inconvenient time, so distributed systems will always be necessary for availability and durability.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Resiliency, yes, but maybe not performance. Still a great win :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what the performance of these are with PostgreSQL's pg_test_fsync, which is one of the proper tools to benchmark a SSD. I get 4000 iops with my Intel 320 SSD and 9000 iops with Intel S3700. For comparison, Intel 600p maxes around 1500 iops, and Samsung 750 Evo at 400 iops.

<comment><USER20> "Why IOPS Suck and Everything You Know About Them is Probably Wrong!" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEb270L5Q1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEb270L5Q1Y)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The smart thing that Intel is doing is making stuff that they know big cloud providers like AWS etc. will pay crazy amounts for and buy in huge volumes. The "use it as RAM" is incredibly valuable -- especially to bring down costs for databases. For example, running a database with an allocated 32GB of RAM is pretty expensive per month.. And if somebody like AWS sold a cheaper DB instance version that ran from this drive as its memory (or was smart paged), then that could bring down the cost of allocating huge databases to memory with a performance hit that many people would be willing to take to save the money.

<comment><USER22> 64 bit machines (given the right controllers etc) should be able to map the whole 375GB / 750GB directly into the memory space. You'd almost certainly need a kernel driver, similar to the way a graphics card is mapped into the address space but isn't treated as regular RAM. With the right driver you could just mmap() the address space.

<comment><USER16> Intel's strategy here is actually to continue using the standard NVMe interface for Optane SSDs, and to offer a hypervisor that does the job of presenting to the guest OS a pool of memory that is backed by a combination of DRAM and 3D XPoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The big limitation of this device is wear. "Optane SSDs can safely be written 30 times per day", says the article. That implies a need for wear monitoring and leveling. Although you can modify one byte at a time, the need to monitor wear implies that just memory-mapping the thing isn't going to work.

Wear management could be moved to hardware, though, using a special MMU/wear monitor/remapping device. If you're using this thing as a level of memory below DRAM, viewing DRAM as another level of cache, something like that would be necessary. That's one application.

This device would make a good key/value store. MongoDB in hardware. Then you don't care where the data is physically placed, and it can be moved for wear management.

<comment><USER24> It doesn't say that the wear leveling is not present inside the box already. It could mean rewriting the whole storage 30 times a day effectively.

<comment><USER23> If writes can be done at the byte level, the bookkeeping and indirection for byte level wear leveling would take more space than the data. If wear leveling is required, it has to be done on blocks of some reasonable size. They might be smaller than for flash, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's the endurance like if you actually use it as ram? How many times can you do a "label1: inc [rax]; jmp label1" loop having rax pointing to a particular byte address on the SSD? (With GHz CPUs, wouldn't that mean giga- writes per second? Isn't NAND rated for 10k-100k writes total, and if this is rated for 1000x more than that, you'd still hit a 10m-100m total writes in like a second?)

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder why no one mentioned application of this technology in mobile phones. Most obvious case: it will be posible to bring entire system from hybernate state while user pulling phone from the pocket and pressing "awake" button. Power and computing cost of hybernating/restoring system would be slightly north of zero, which leads to dramatic increasing of battery life.

Not to mention size factor and lower power consumption of chip itself.

</comment><comment><USER27> Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi is using a garbage microSD controller that corrupts cards… the divide between cheap and high end stuff is just mindblowing these days.

Also, normal (NAND) NVMe M.2 SSDs are still TWICE as expensive as good old SATA ones, at least in my country… And they want to push Optane into the consumer space later this year… who even needs that much performance at home?

<comment><USER28> > who even needs that much performance at home

In the next ten years (closer to ten than not) we'll need it for massive and or hyper intricate 4k VR worlds, the assets of which you won't want to download every time you load up the world/s. You'll want to hold as many of the assets locally in something extremely fast, if not ram then the next best thing. That is until we commonly have 10gbps plus to the home.

<comment><USER27> RAM and VRAM these days are huge, and SATA is definitely fast enough to stream assets from. Heck, I load most of my games from an old 2.5" spinning HDD that I pulled from a dead laptop.

I think more improvement is needed on the VRAM side than on the disk side, so HBM2 hype > Optane hype :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It would be useful to move some SQLd indices to an Optane drive with DB rows on arrays of m.2 flash drives. SQL consolidation/redundancy over network out of band, slowly. This to scale somewhat cheap OSS SQL clusters.

This starts to make sense in a single server node with enough 4 channel pcie interfaces. AMD Naples?

</comment><comment><USER30> So finaly we're going to get from Intel what HP promised years ago as "memristors".

<comment><USER31> Memristors theoretically go further than mere storage. They enable the idea of data storage and processors eventually becoming the same thing. I hope they continue with the work because some of what I was reading about it was fascinating - rather than have caches, you could, in theory, write temporary routines that ran in physical locality to the data they had to process.

<comment><USER14> You can already do that, it's just that dumb storage can be packed more densely than smart storage.

Memristors can make things more dense, but that applies to both options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Tried to look up modern memory latency numbers but could not find. Because "numbers every programmer should know" are about 10 years old as I understand.

</comment><comment><USER33> It _feels_ like Intel are putting this out in lieu of actual hardware. As always remain skeptical until real silicon appears on the market.

<comment><USER34> Isn't the article about real silicon appearing on the market?

"Initial limited availability starts today, for $1520"

<comment><USER33> The "limited availability" is almost certainly for those with per-arranged deals with Intel and 2H is almost always Q4. It's not to say this isn't an interesting product but I've a feeling Optane won't live up to the hype. But I'm reserving judgment until it gets into the wider market/ has more real world exposure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems like this would be ideal in cases where you are waiting for file sync in multiple locations which I assume a lot of banks/corporations do.

Interesting it seems to be marketed as cheaper memory. You'd think at first they'd try and rip super high margins out of banks/corps by selling it as "persistent" memory.

Although I guess if your waiting for file writes in multiple locations the network overhead makes the actual write sort of irrelevant.....

</comment><comment><USER36> I would opt for a more conventional solution, you can get 256GB of ram for under $2k, and then enable write caching.

<comment><USER37> /dev/null is also pretty fast

But for use cases where data matters, fsync seems like a reasonable idea.

<comment><USER38> You can also attach batteries to the RAM. This is already a solution people ship in production.

<comment><USER37> Any references? I tried to find something but I failed. I'm assuming we are talking about something different than UPS + going to sleep? It seems very tricky to just keep RAM powered.

<comment><USER39> They are called NVDIMMs. One example [http://www.vikingtechnology.com/arxcis- nv](http://www.vikingtechnology.com/arxcis-nv)

I think some of them are protected by both a battery and flash memory for long term backup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is this based on memristors? That's pretty amazing. I thought hp owned that.

</comment><comment><USER41> Ramdisks are back. This time persistent.

<comment><USER42> I was under the impression that this is the opposite. It's a 'disk' (ram disks are just storage that can store files, so I'm pretending disk means it stores files) like a SSD that's fast enough to act like ram?</comment></comment>


File transfer over sound card - <AUTHOR> http://awesomegeekblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/file-transfer-over-sound-card.html <comment><USER2> By george, he's reinvented an acoustic modem.</comment>