ServiceFabric: a distributed platform for building microservices in the cloud - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/06/05/servicefabric-a-distributed-platform-for-building-microservices-in-the-cloud/ <comment><USER2> Lots of developers today just assume that microservices = containers, and if you're already in containers, you must need Kubernetes, but, really, Service Fabric is years ahead of Kubernetes in lots of ways. If I were starting a major distributed systems project today that required serious uptime and scalability, I'd start on Service Fabric.

And, yes, I know... whatever feature I could name from Service Fabric has some sort of open-source thing for Kubernetes from someone that probably/almost/kind-of/sort-of/some-assembly-required does the same thing as Service Fabric. Or I could just use Service Fabric, and not play the Kubernetes equivalent of "what's in your node_modules directory?"

Microsoft has an existential-level bet on Service Fabric. It's 1) not going anywhere, 2) only getting better, 3) is already a better container orchestrator than Kubernetes, if that's all you want to use it for.

<comment><USER3> We have stuff running on SF in prod, using the SDK side of it and not the container-like capabilities. I have some counterpoints (but my team is also divided on SF).

First-off, you mentioned micro-services. The mechanisms that support service and application versioning seem well-intentioned and well-designed. In many ways the mechanisms run counter to some of the key benefits of a micro-service architecture (especially surrounding decoupling development teams).

If your latency is high, deployment times out. We had to use a remote desktop session to a VM near the cluster to deploy manually (solved with CI/CD). This impedes teams who are trying it out, when they are remote.

It has a pretty hostile development experience. Before you can even open a project in Visual Studio, you need the entire SDK installed. "Which SF installer did you use?" was a frequent question in Slack, because there are a bunch of places where it resides.

Whenever you add a project to your solution, you have to ensure that it targets x64 (not AnyCpu). Strange compilation errors abound if you don't. We get it Microsoft: the runtime only supports x64 - you don't have to enforce it to this degree. AnyCpu runs just fine on x64. It sounds like nitpicking, but it gets horribly frustrating.

They do (or used to do) strange things their .targets files. It doesn't behave like the C# build system, with a very clear happy-path. I spent about a week working around $(MSBuildProjectDir) not working. I would fix this by making the entire thing nothing more than a Nuget package. Anyone can understand having to have an emulator installed to debug, but the project system is _hostile._

It's a big pity because the tech is amazing. I've personally started championing Orleans+Docker as a more friendly alternative, but as I said: others on my team adore it.

<comment><USER4> We had a similar experience as well.. in our case, tried hard to like SF, but eventually moved out. The Dev experience is sub par and even with the one node cluster, things take a long time to come up. Also, the tooling that pushes for services to be in a single application means that boot up times are impacted negatively. SF's application model means that you can't just run it outside. One of the lead devs had previously got burnt with reliable collections (no way to have it write to an attached disk.. will only write to VM local disk.. reported to ms) and risk potential disaster if you have a cluster loss.

Eventually ported to .net core and Orleans 2 on k8s and it's been a more pleasant experience.

<comment><USER5> I'll add another voice on this exact same situation.

Trying to get .net core app running on SF was extremely frustrating and confusing. K8s was a MUCH more natural experience.

I was really disappointed in the tooling. The sfproj files were this incomprehensible mess. If the ui didn't quite work you are hosed.

I would go on but I'm on mobile

<comment><USER6> Their VS extension and libraries are always lagging behind. It seems the team do not have enough resource on the dev tool side.

But you could use `guest executable`, which has no dependency on their tooling. You can create exe with any language/stack.

<comment><USER5> Yes, this is what I had to do because of .Net core. I still had some trouble getting the cluster to deploy smoothly.

But honestly, K8s has first class support from MS, Google, AWS. Has major buy- in from the community, good docs, plenty of recorded talks, presentations and war stories and a very active community.

SF has basically none of that. At the end of the day, SF isn't massively better than K8s for my use case and It would have to be to make up for all those disadvantages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's worth noting that while Service Fabric as a technology does power a lot of offerings at Microsoft (as noted in the article), strategically it has been superseded somewhat by Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Most new development should really be on AKS. Even Azure Container Instances (ACI), a recently GA'ed Azure service, runs Kubernetes underneath.

Edit: As noted in the comments, SF is on Github. The following paragraph is incorrect and I retract what I said; leaving this here for context.

 _" Also, by going the K8S route, you potentially avoid being locked into a proprietary offering -- SF is only available from one vendor, whereas K8S is available almost anywhere."_

<comment><USER8> Service Fabric is different from Kubernetes. It's not a container orchestration platform but a full-stack distributed state and processing system with components that can serve as the foundation for building something like Kubernetes itself.

The naming is confusing and there is a Service Mesh offering from Azure that lets you run your own applications easily if they're using the Service Fabric framework already, but SF can run containerized code in any language, and it has bindings for C# and Java (for now) if you want to use the primitives directly.

SF is also now open-source and you can run it all yourself in whatever environment you want: [https://github.com/Microsoft/service- fabric](https://github.com/Microsoft/service-fabric)

<comment><USER9> SF has been opensourced very late though [1], to get some attention and trying to survive. Legitimate but very different from being an open source project. The cross-platform support is very weak [2][3], far from K8S, Mesos and Swarm developer friendliness.

[1] [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/azureservicefabric/2018/03/...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/azureservicefabric/2018/03/14/service- fabric-is-going-open-source)

[2] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service- fabric/servic...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service- fabric/service-fabric-get-started-mac)

[3] [https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en- US/b5045fe1-51a2...](https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en- US/b5045fe1-51a2-4c58-ae90-53c145d3ef59/using-mac-with-azure-service-fabric)

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's buildable on Windows yet. It's been like this for a couple of months now, not sure if MS is really trying to get others involved.

<comment><USER9> MS is going where developers are, and outside MS there is no community around SF. Hired one of K8S founders, built new products around k8s, advocates docker left and right at conferences, these are clear signals that the tech doesn't have a future

<comment><USER11> SF can also manage docker containers. They are doing lots of work with k8s, but this system has a huge amount of internal usage and has provably been used to build global scale services. Its strengths are different than k8s and the distributed system space has lots of options.

You (and others) seem to be enjoying some schadenfruede about SF not "winning" some competition. I don't think the world works that way. Lots of people will use it for big applications. More people will probably use something else. That's about it.

The type of comment you made doesn't get marked by the moderators for some reason even though it doesn't actually provide any insight. The article had detailed information about the internals of how it worked. That's the interesting thing here. The Ziff Davis style dev-adoption-horse race is pretty pointless.

<comment><USER10> I have to say, I'm evaluating some of the .net technologies for building distributed systems, namely Akka.NET, Orleans and SF, and using any of them requires quite a lot of investment and therefore time to learn to use them right.

The last thing I want to experience is that after a year or two, the tech I pick is going to be abandoned or at least put into maintenance mode.

Therefore I'd appreciate all insights (if possible data-driven) on the future plans about SF and how does it stack against k8s investments by MS. It would be great if MS themselves made an official announcement.

Seeing that SF doesn build on Windows for several months, makes me doubt whether the momentum behind open sourcing SF is real.

<comment><USER12> Theres a good presentation from the Build conference about the future.

In summary they will add the hosted "mesh" variant. And move the SDK towards polyglot libs for use in docker containers instead of a C# framework. The reliable collections part of the SDK will be just a lib providing storage for abitrarily shaped data needing replication.

They also mean to hav it all work similarity for your own clusters on-perm or on azure.

(And some one asked, yes managed service principles and secrets is coming up in 6.3 probably)

P.s There is also a regular q/a session over Skype they record and put on YouTube if you want more details or ask questions directly

<comment><USER13> (I'm Matt, from SF@MSFT, the same guy from up here [1])

So about those presentations and announcements! This[2] is the main presentation where we gave a bunch of updates and roadmap, including the upcoming changes to the SDK and the announcement of Service Fabric Mesh. Here's a short video that shows a demo of what that's really like[3].

So about the new programming frameworks and the changes/history here: You have a lot of choices for frameworks. Roll your own, Spring/Steeltoe, Orleans, Akka.NET, and the ones that SF provides, etc. For most of those though, they are just frameworks. They help you develop services, but don't have as much to do with how or where you run them.

...Except for the ones that came with SF, which were of course special in an unexpected and not entirely desirable way.

Previously the SF provided frameworks (Reliable Services and Reliable Actors) were different. They were coupled to the Service Fabric runtime environment. You had to run them in a SF cluster, you couldn't run them anywhere else.

And managing a cluster is hard work. You had to manage all the infrastructure, figure out the networking, figure out how you wanted to configure the drives and storage, manage certificates, all that stuff. Managing a cluster was real work and most of that work contributed basically 0 to how well the service actually worked. You had to patch and secure the OS. Some of this stuff was easier in Azure than doing it all on your own for sure. But easier still isn't easy in a lot of situations, and it's all boilerplate.

Just as an example, since you managed the hardware, at some level, you had to deal with scaling decisions yourself. SF could help you scale within the cluster, but because SF tries really hard not to get too wedded to a particular infrastructure, when you ran out of hardware, you were on your own to figure out how to add more.

With the new SF SDKs and roadmap a lot of this is changing. Particularly for the stuff SF provides out of the box like service discovery and routing, lifecycle management, and the reliable collections, we've separated these things out from the runtime. This means one of the following a) you just don't have to deal with them anymore b) we do the common thing automatically for you, or c) they're optional libraries you can include and that work anywhere you choose to run the service, even outside of SF.

As part of this, we're also introducing a bunch of different resources like routes and volumes that take a bunch of stuff that was previously much more implicit and making it explicit and declarative. The goal of the new SDK and resource model is that they're really going to help more types of workloads run on top of SF, especially ones that don't want to (or can't) use our SDK, while also making things easier to manage overall.

The goal of Service Fabric Mesh is to be an environment where Microsoft manages the cluster for you. This takes all that infrastructure goop and hides it, giving you a serverless, fully managed environment where you can run the stuff defined in that resources model. So now you get the power of the platform and some of the neat features that SF provides, and you don't have to do all that boilerplate work. This lets you focus on whatever your app/service was. And since the resources model is a core part of the product, you'll get a fairly seamless transition between building things on your dev box, running them in say some local test cluster, and running them up in Mesh in Azure.

I think it's really exciting and should help with adoption of SF since now a lot of the stuff that people had problems with is gone, and since the resources model and the changes to the APIs make it much easier to run arbitrary workloads than before.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257735](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257735)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ab2wIGMbpY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ab2wIGMbpY)

[3]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6GPH66i8pc&t=10m57s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6GPH66i8pc&t=10m57s)

<comment><USER10> Thanks. Is Service Fabric Mesh going to be easy to roll out without Azure? Are you going to provide a set of tools to set the cluster up and operate it, for those who need a self hosted version?

Another thing - how is the Windows build tools for SF going? Is it easy to build right now from the open source version?

<comment><USER13> Mesh is specifically the _serverless_ environment that MS runs for you in Azure, so there's no real concept today of running Mesh somewhere else (probably except for Azure Stack) - you have to manage the servers then, so it's not serverless anymore :)

But the thing to keep in mind is that all the _capabilities_ that you're thinking about are in the core product. So you could take SF and run it standalone and tell some people "hey you run the cluster" and another set "hey you write the services" and at least with the resource based model you have a pretty good separation of concerns. It's not _Mesh_ because it's not _serverless_ with MS running the cluster for you, but you can do almost all the same stuff.

Re: the Windows build, yeah what Mikkel said. Slow and steady.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In my estimation, now would be a rather poor time to adopt SF.

1\. It's poorly positioned against K8s. The "it can do containers" people are really not helping their case; SF's value proposition is clearly not in running arbitrary containers. Unless you're writing a new .NET app and will go all in on their SDK and replicated state model, it just doesn't make sense.

1a. It has no community. It has no presence outside of MS doc pages, the repo they threw over the wall, and the one external user that I'm aware of (who is already in this thread).

2\. SF was operationally not-fun. I'm being nice. Though, neither is Kubernetes, most days.

3\. SF is losing to Kubernetes, even internally, and even despite pressure from high-up-ish people.

4\. The rumors about SFs fate would not seem to lend themselves toward adopting it for new projects.

<comment><USER15> I don't know the first thing about SF (the product), and you might be absolutely right. But I find it discomforting to base engineering decisions on the equivalent of Facebook likes and Web presences/Googling rather than merit. For all I know, the media presence of the space of cloud orchestration software is highly manipulated by huge PR budgets (for example by Docker) and by media heavyweights competing in this space.

<comment><USER16> I agree with the sentiment, but what's sometimes overlooked is that the community around a technology is in many ways more important than the technology itself. Can I expect to find add-on libraries that help integrating with the rest of my technology stack? Will I find documentation, blog posts or StackOverflow answers that solve my specific edge case? How likely is it that I'll be the very first person to encounter a critical bug, because no one else uses it at that scale?

Many of those signals are not easily faked, as Microsoft itself painfully learned when spending billions in an attempt to artificially prop up a developer community around Windows Phone. If, as the grandparent suggested, Service Fabric is losing out even internally at MS where they can apply management pressure in addition to marketing, that's a very bad sign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like some of the metrics, e.g.

>>Azure SQL DB (100K machines, 1.82M DBs containing 3.48PB of data)

Makes you realize how different the scale of the top cloud companies is, compared to the average service/site. Pretty amazing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not sure why this comment was banned, it has valid points worth the conversation

—-

In my estimation, now would be a rather poor time to adopt SF.

1\. It's poorly positioned against K8s. The "it can do containers" people are really not helping their case; SF's value proposition is clearly not in running arbitrary containers. Unless you're writing a new .NET app and will go all in on their SDK and replicated state model, it just doesn't make sense.

1a. It has no community. It has no presence outside of MS doc pages, the repo they threw over the wall, and the one external user that I'm aware of (who is already in this thread).

2\. SF was operationally not-fun. I'm being nice. Though, neither is Kubernetes, most days.

3\. SF is losing to Kubernetes, even internally, and even despite pressure from high-up-ish people.

4\. The rumors about SFs fate would not seem to lend themselves toward adopting it for new projects.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is pretty similar to our project, Fabric: [https://fabric.fm](https://fabric.fm) — different tech stack, but similar name and seemingly project goals. Should we add you to the list of "other Fabrics" [0]?

[0]: [https://github.com/FabricLabs/fabric#other- fabrics](https://github.com/FabricLabs/fabric#other-fabrics)

<comment><USER15> It's also not dissimilar to fabric3, a Java implementation of the Service Component Architecture (SCA). SCA is a polyglot OASIS spec for a portable service runtime from the height of the SOA craze, originally by David Chappell [1].

[1]: [http://www.davidchappell.com/writing/Introducing_SCA.pdf](http://www.davidchappell.com/writing/Introducing_SCA.pdf)</comment></comment>


How old is too old to start a company, or create and market a killer app? - <AUTHOR> I've heard many times that "You're never too old," but it's often obscured by frequently hearing about teenagers and college kids making a fortune with their start-ups (started coding when they were 9, etc.). What about people who've past these stages in their life? Any motivating success stories? <comment><USER2> I know several people that only really made it big when they were in their 50's. I think for the most part those are relatively conservative businesses, not billion dollar affair from 'winner takes all' bets, but simply identifying a niche, building a product and then selling the hell out of it. (and with not billions I mean earning several million annually before taxes, which I think is pretty good by any standard).

The businesses that you start when you're 20-30, 30-40 or 40-50 in many ways reflect the amount of energy and the knowledge that you've gathered over the years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sam Walton started Walmart when he was 44.

Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 61.

Sakichi Toyoda started Toyota when he was 59.

It's not really rare at all to start successful companies when you're older. Just go look at the history of big companies and you'll find plenty of examples.

<comment><USER4> IIRC, Sanders used to drive a beat-up old car around to all of his franchisees, checking to make sure the gravy was just perfect and the chicken was being made correctly.

When it wasn't, they said that he would curse enough to make a sailor blush, kicking pots and pans all around the kitchen, having a terrible fit. In really bad cases, he would take his "special equipment" back with him.

The reason he ended up going big was because he couldn't keep track of all the payments and legal paperwork by himself. The lawyer that ended up being a partner was told to go help clean out a desk -- and found it stuffed with checks totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Not sure of the veracity of that story, but it makes for a colorful anecdote! And it reinforces the #1 quality of good startups: focus on delivering value to the customer and the rest will work itself out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My experience says that the teenage and college success stories are the outliers. But, they make for good press, just like a plane crash is more sensational than than 5000 individual daily car crashes (I just made the 5000 number up, but you get the point).

Too old would be 1 day before death, but you never know when that will be, so you might as well get started.

</comment><comment><USER6> Teenagers and college kids making a fortune is newsworthy. People making a fortune during their prime earning years isn't. You don't have a real question. You're too old to start a company when you're you're too old to work a full-time day.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would not recommend starting a company to anyone over 135 years of age or older.

</comment><comment><USER8> Availability heuristic and confirmation bias. It's not big news when someone who's 51 strikes it rich, but it's unusual when someone 21 does. So that what gets reported and that's what comes to mind when you think of starting a company. If you looked at the news you'd think everyone who's rich got there by starting a hot startup in college (or got a big Wall Street bonus), but it ain't necessarily so. Take a look at books like "Millionaire Next Door" for some more balanced info on the kinds of companies people start and what age they become wealthy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, yes and no - I think that becoming a millionaire at 20 is much more common now than it was 100 or even 50 years ago - especially since the advent of the www.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's much more about "when do you have too much responsibility to risk crashing and burning?" rather than just "how old"? A 22 year old with a wife and kid and mortgage and student debt is probably less able to focus and take chances than a cashed up 50 year old without those responsibilities.

</comment><comment><USER10> When you run out of imagination! Can't get motivated. Have no passion. For some it's at 19 for others at 99!

</comment><comment><USER11> When did you stop beating your wife?

</comment><comment><USER12> Never too old</comment>


Bank Loans Have Not 'Dried Up' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9685 <comment><USER2> The article links to the federal reserve website, which has updated information for the week after the article was published: <http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h8/data.htm>

The new numbers also support the idea that all this hysteria over loans drying up isn't factually based, but I don't really know much about this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> obviously. the banks just want to charge higher interest rates, which they should. i would too given the debt load of the average consumer or company.

what this boils down to is the govt legislating low interest rates. they can't. even lowering the fed rate won't stop the rise in intrabank and consumer interest rates

<comment><USER4> Good point, although I think it was disingenuous of the author not to mention that interest rates are higher. I think that is clearly another type of "tightening."</comment></comment>


Poll HN: Where do you spend more time, FB or HN? - <AUTHOR>

Where do you spend more time, Facebook, or Hacker News? <comment><USER2> By _far_ and away HN.

I just use FB for sharing photos with close friends and family and keeping (passively) in touch with others.

</comment><comment><USER3> HN by far. Facebook doesn't offer me anything interesting except the convenience of not having people ask "when are you going to get a Facebook account?" (answer, 2004 when it didn't suck).

</comment><comment><USER4> I check HN at least twice a day. I find myself going nearly a week between Facebook visits now. Many of my friends the same. I don't want to delete my FB, but I feel like it's becoming less and less relevant.

</comment><comment><USER5> HN everyday.

FB about once a semester. I already spend too much time on more worthy information to even remember it exists. Its emails are automatically moved to a maildir folder that i tend to ignore.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hacker News, like spooneybarger I've got no Facebook.

BTW is de-friending Facebook the 'big thing' these days?

<comment><USER7> you mean disconnecting?

<comment><USER6> yeah, just trying to use pseudo-Facebook lingo for humor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> HN, because PG never asked for any personal information. I've never had a FB account because they do . . .

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hacker News

<comment><USER9> i don't have facebook account so my vote is a bit of a no brainer.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Facebook

</comment><comment><USER10> HN, by far.

</comment><comment><USER11> HN</comment>


LA Metro API - <AUTHOR> http://developer.metro.net/ <comment><USER2> Not to piss on LA transit, but the API would much more compelling if the services were much more frequent.

Here is London's high-frequency services, trains running >4 per hour: [http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/high-frequency- servic...](http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/high-frequency-services- map.pdf)

(Almost all of the busses in zones 1, 2, and 3 run at 15 minute headways or better.)

Here is LA's high-frequency services, both trains AND busses running every 12 minutes or better:

<http://www.metro.net/riding_metro/maps/images/12_min_map.pdf> (see the last page)

An API for the Metro becomes much more compelling when trains start whooshing along, for example, an elevated right of way down 8-lane Wilshire or Santa Monica, and you don't need 45-second timers for crossing streets.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm glad to see that the government (and government run services) are opening up more and more in terms of easily computer readable data sets.

Awesome step forward. I live in LA so I wonder what I can do with this data... hm...

<comment><USER4> The problem with LA buses is of course that when they show up has nothing to do with the timetable...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> God, I wish Houston METRO would open up something like this.</comment>


Ask HN: Any good examples for dashboard for performance analysis - <AUTHOR> I am building a performance dashboard for my team. We have a Software as a service offering. The users access our product/service via a web based UI, We want to achieve following from the dashboard. 1) Break-up of TTI (Time to be interactive) at 50th, 80th, 90th and 95th percentile (configurable), e.g. Network time, Server time, Resource loading time at client, Client rendering time etc 2) From the client we make several async calls during the page load that are part of TTI. We want to show all the calls made from client and time taken for each. 3) We have very detailed data available for all server and client activities, including stack traces and how much time was spent in each function.<p>The objective of the dashboard is to quickly identify if TTI is regressed for a page and possible causes of regression (which async call, or which method call at server, or we started loading additional scripts at client side which are causing the issue). I am looking for some good examples of such dashboards if exists and what you like and don't like about them. My objective is to get ideas about the best way to represent this data for quick analysis. <comment><USER2> Get a performance tool like NewRelic, Dynatrace, Appdynamics.

They'll give you all of that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can not recommend www.datadoghq.com enough, cheep and a load of integrations.</comment>


Show HN: My 7 Days Startup - <AUTHOR> https://bluedeliveryimp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, creator here!

Recently I came across 7 Days Startup book, and wanted to see how it would work in practice. Being a part of YC School, and also working in a shared startup office - I often heard how hard it is to find a product-market fit, ask customers for their opinions, and get first leads.

I thought this could be a great problem to tackle, and may be solved fast enough. Since I am not personally or emotionally involved in other founders' projects, it is much easier for me to survey potential clients about their honest opinions. Using my network, plus the 6 degrees of separation, I can easily reach professionals across different fields - and collect their opinions on project pitches - for 20-25% cut for their time.

Over the week I built Blue Delivery Imp - very barebones, but allows startups to post surveys, and me to deliver them in PDFs (plus a free demo!) - its now in a usable state, so I'm curious if anyone is going to find it actually useful?

Its a bit of manual labor, so I was thinking of subscription model $59/mo. - making it around $15 or less per report. I think it may save many new startups a lot of headache and time in their early days, and be more reliable than Google Ads.

Would love to hear your opinions!</comment>


A man who was mugged and beaten started to see the world in a different way - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/02/18/dnt-sudden-mathematical-genius.komo

<comment><USER2> He became a Republican.</comment>


How the RIAA uses bullshit numbers to spin for public support - <AUTHOR> http://www.stereogum.com/1886541/but-whos-buying-a-column-about-the-music-business/franchises/but-whos-buying/ <comment><AUTHOR> Seriously, this is a very enlightening article about how the music trade groups are trying to enact change in the digital sector.

It would be wise to pay attention to this battle, as it may pertain to other industries via "disruption" in the future.</comment>


Facebook revamps its photos product - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.fb.com/News/A-More-Beautiful-View-of-Photos-197.aspx

<comment><USER2> The Android Google+ app has a really neat instant upload feature that privately, conveniently uploads videos and photos to Google+ as soon as you've taken a photo/video. In fact, it's the only thing I use Google+ for, aside from Google+ youtube movie nights with friends.

If Facebook had this feature, there'd almost be no reason for me to use the Google+ app. With the new photos revamp, Facebook should try an automatic (default: disabled) uploading feature.</comment>


Mobile SEO for Beginners: How to Improve App Store Search Ranking  - <AUTHOR> http://500.co/2012/08/06/mobile-seo-for-beginners-how-to-improve-app-store-search-ranking/ <comment><USER2> Its just sad that people have to turn to these kind of products to 'reverse engineer' the app store. The volume of business app store generates should require them to give more info to the developers, specially around SEO.

<comment><USER3> Developers will soon turn to Google Play and the Amazon App Store which offers much better customer service.

<comment><USER4> Developers will faster turn to these sorts of products before abandoning half the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the first I've heard of external ratings affecting App Store ranks. Is this true?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nobody knows exactly, but it sounds like true. We have seen many cases that the search results for "radio" contain apps which do no have "radio" in any places. The new Apple's algorithm indexes some external sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another similar tutorial (by us/AppCod.es): <http://slideshare.net/kolinko/app-store-seo-tutorial>

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice article Naoki!

</comment><comment><USER8> Great read thanks.</comment>


Vietnam Going Solar After Nuclear Power Plants Shelved - <AUTHOR> http://investvine.com/vietnam-going-solar-nuclear-power-plants-shelved/ <comment><USER3> So they want to be ~20% carbon free in thirty years? That is not a very ambitious goal. Especially if you consider that they want to _increase_ the amount of energy produced from coal from ~30% in 2015 to ~50% until 2030. [1]

[1] [https://news.mongabay.com/2017/05/vietnam-makes-a-big- push-f...](https://news.mongabay.com/2017/05/vietnam-makes-a-big-push-for- coal-while-pledging-to-curb-emissions/)

<comment><USER4> Yeah that's what I got from the article.

> Currently solar power only accounts for 0.01 per cent of total power > generation capacity in Vietnam, but the government plans to increase the > ratio to 3.3 per cent by 2030 and 20 per cent by 2050.

This is not very impressive, they plan to add 3.3% solar in the next 12 years, I don't find that revolutionary at the moment.

<comment><USER5> having them moved away from that nuclear power plant is a big relief for Vietnamese people already. This is still a huge leap, I would say. Basically, they are just following what China is doing (slowly) so if renewable energy could make a huge impact in China, they might accelerate the program.

<comment><USER4> > having them moved away from that nuclear power plant is a big relief for > Vietnamese people already.

Why so exactly? It would have massively reduced emissions to have that nuclear power plant, now instead you have a vague promise they put on 2050, purposely far enough that it does not bind the government to anything.

<comment><USER6> Vietnam doesn't have a good track record on public infrastructure projects. Due to corruption and cronyism they have a hard time even building roads to spec. The prospect of running a nuclear reactor in that environment is horrifying.

<comment><USER7> I'm a Vietnamese and your 2 words "corruption" and "cronyism" are 100% correct for Viet Nam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The incremental roll-out possible with solar, and the simpler project management, give it a huge advantage.

The coal roll-out is alarming but as soon as it was pointed out that Vietnam has large coal reserves it was unsurprising. This is where the richer nations need to step up and find a way to pay to leave resources in the ground rather than extracting them. It's the cheapest form of "carbon capture".

<comment><USER9> Do you mean like the United States or Germany which are increasing or fighting a reduction in coal?

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-is-set-to-roll-back- restric...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-is-set-to-roll-back-restrictions- on-coal-burning-power-plants-1534622001?mod=hp_major_pos7)

<comment><USER10> Coal jobs are this bizarre holy grail of right-wing politics in the USA and Germany. It really makes very little sense in a macro view, because renewables are cleaner for the local populace's air and water, and renewables add some 5X-10X more jobs than coal. Coal extraction and processing is increasingly automated, the ole' miner with his pick is a thing of the past - these jobs are stagnant or decreasing in numbers over time. It's an industry in a steady decline, and yet the electoral college, and the coalitions built for Angela Merkel's party in Germany, prop up coal.

<comment><USER3> Coal jobs are usually available in areas with few alternatives. Whole regions depend on mining. It's hard to tell people that their whole city needs to change jobs when there are none available.

<comment><USER11> West Virginia has more renewable energy jobs than coal jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i'm sad to see a decline of nuclear energy everywhere in the world. While renewables are the end goal, nuclear was gonna be the perfect transition source for the next decades, providing emission-free and continuous energy to the grid.

I have the bad feeling that cancelling a nuclear power plant, means building coal/gas plants in its place. This article actually mention the renewaleble goal of Vietnam which are really unimpressive. 3.3% solar inputs by 2030...WOW, in the mean time how are they gonna keep up with the energy requirements of a developing country? Probably coal.

<comment><USER13> Nuclear is good as long as it has _very stable_ , secure and responsible local governance. You can't have political instability, people cutting corners, lack of oversight, lack of security or lack of resources ... or you have problems.

To me that's the problem with Nuclear. Following specific rules and conventions, some nations will be fine, but so many ... it's iffy. If Vietnam gets a couple plants, Burma, Laos, Cambodia etc. will want one too and then the risk of something bad happening just starts to crawl up.

<comment><USER14> > Nuclear is good as long as it has very stable, secure and responsible local > governance.

...and no terrorist attacks. And no war.

And the governance remains stable and responsible for the next 100 years.

<comment><USER15> They've managed to not break even though they've been in counties which have been at war (Israel), experienced a military coup (Pakistan), disintegrated (USSR), and experienced terrorism (UK, USA), so none of that is strictly necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the greatest irony of our age is the progression of climate change due to environmentalists protesting against the development of nuclear power. While nuclear power admittedly has risks, the tradeoffs are clearly worth making if you look at emissions and deaths per megawatt hour. We didn't curtail energy demand, and future generations will pay the price for using fossil fuels instead of nuclear.

<comment><USER17> Nuclear hasn't suffered because of environmentalists protesting.

Nuclear has suffered because it is expensive and uneconomical. The only way it is even feasible is by having laws that protect the owners from liabilities caused due to catastrophic failure.

Blaming environmentalists gives them way more power than they possess. Environmentalists have struggled to even stop pipelines running through the US whose sole purpose is to make Canada richer. Far more than environmentalists it's NIMBY folks who have affected nuclear (but still not as much as basic economics).

<comment><USER18> Western countries are desperately trying to keep 1960s and 1970s reactors open for as long as they can because the prospect of building new ones is a financial and political nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The biggest advantage of PV energy is that it is almost scale agnostic - <USER2> single panel on top of somebody's rooftop is as efficient as one installed in a gigawatt scale plant. This is something no other commercial power source has.

Rather than giving lump sum subsidies, a nation can make much much more by just ironing out feed in rules, and making sure the grid can accommodate that. It takes around 6-8k usd (5kw setup) to make an average Asian single family house energy neutral during summer using Chinese panels (basically we talk about 1 aircon and a fridge).

Now just compare payout periods of such setups.

Now, the last moment that can't be overstated, but almost always forgotten: the economic effects of feed-in tariff gets greatly negated when there is no real time pricing. See, in Asia aircon usage peaks proportionally to insolation, and so is the PV electricity production.

</comment><comment><USER18> I never understood how a country like Vietnam could afford nuclear powerplants when in Europe costs of building new ones skyrocket to 10 billion euro.

<comment><USER20> Standards. Not to say that Vietnam is unable to maintain the same quality, but doing something "right" is tough and expensive. Every little thing needs to be thoroughly planned and inspected which costs money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The EU and US massively restricting / taxing Chinese solar has its upsides. This might be quite the leapfrog and actually getting solar into countries with lots of sun is quite a meta-efficieny effect. I wonder though how a country like Vietnam can get it's grid in order to cope with a lot more natural energy.

<comment><USER22> We (the west) should be strongly encouraging this in developing countries. We have the money, we have the instruments, all we need is the will.

The US put men on the moon using 1960's technology and brought them back alive. Switching the world to 100% carbon neutral energy production should be more than achievable.

<comment><USER23> There's no political or economic will. It won't happen.

<comment><USER24> It all depends on economics, people will switch if the new technologies are cheaper, or if they face tariffs for not doing their part.

<comment><USER25> If the west tariffs developing countries there will be an outcry over neocolonialism and forcing the poor countries to our will and whatever.

The only thing the west is allowed to do is putting money into developing countries without any guarantees and hope they do something useful with it. It's frustrating.

<comment><USER22> We pump plenty of money in now for specific infrastructure projects; which is exactly what we should be doing here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article briefly mentions security fears (alongside cost) as one of the reasons for not going ahead with nuclear. Is this code for a certain foreign power throwing their weight around?

</comment><comment><USER27> How are they going to balance supply from solar (which peaks at midday, and goes away entirely at night) with demand (which usually peaks in the evening)?

<comment><USER28> Same way anyone else will. Displacing demand to easier times. If most demand is aircon based then moving it to pre-cooling (make ice during day/defrost during evening) etc... and economics will do that for the largest consumers.

A bit of storage, and peaker plants. Storage kinds do not really mater as it is all about what is locally price efficient.

Otherwise, it is the same as the nuclear case. Production does not match demand curve so fix it with storage, pricing and other tools. (i.e. if nuclear is baseload something else needs to produce when demand peeks, which in other words makes it rather similar in practice (see also why all the pumped storage in the UK was build in the 60-80's))

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Well this will give some place for the output of FirstSolar Inc. two Vietnamese manufacturing plants to go. (2.4 GW DC capacity a year, all online from Q2 2019)

To be honest, nuclear industry hasn't done itself any favors by not building the plants they sold on anything close to time and budget. 15 to 20 years from idea to operation is just not nimble enough.

I don't even think that the all of the proposed coal power will all be build to completion and in operation for long just due to the infrastructure costs.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like a sound decision, plenty of sun in Viet Nam, all year long.

<comment><USER30> Coal is what is actually being built.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm really curious if there will be massive storage systems?

</comment><comment><USER19> Nuclear is too expensive, and small nuclear is even more so, but one has to remember that nothing can replace atomic energy as the closest one to ideal, flawless power source.

<comment><USER32> We built profitable nuclear plants in the past. One might wonder how with mind bogglingly better designs and a much richer world, we can't afford to build them today. My money is that the blame lies between political reasons and that Nat-Gas is cheap, relatively clean, and wildly abundant energy source in N. America.

Right now in N. America you'd be a fool to build anything but a mid-sized Nat- Gas generator which can be spun up/down quickly and costs less to run than anything else, while gaining major political points for outputting far less pollution than coal.

<comment><USER33> Well that's interesting, because University of Minnesota ran simulations with MISO that stated batteries and solar would outperform a gas peaker on that grid financially in the next few years.

[http://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas- grid-...](http://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid-an- economic-analysis-of-energy-storage-opportunities/)

<comment><USER32> My state's power companies all run solar and wind installations, and are incredibly heavily regulated, and all charge extra if you want power from them. Without a doubt wind and solar cost more in my southern state than Nat- Gas. Solar is a complete waste as other providers require contracts to stay available to pick up the slack on cloudy days, and that price is directly accountable against the solar energy making it far less competitive.

<comment><USER33> The Department of Justice took Entergy to court for this sort of behavior; that's why they were forced to join MISO.

[https://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/columnists/2018/...](https://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/columnists/2018/03/10/jim- hood-entergy-tricked-psc-approving-rates-misleading-info/411305002/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Camera Sensor Eliminates Need for Flash - <AUTHOR> http://www.technewsdaily.com/18220-graphene-imagining-sensor-takes-clear-pictures.html <comment><USER2> What a strange story, basically "Oh gee, we've created a sensor that is better than all other sensors using the material that everyone thinks is a super material" followed by "If the industry chooses to adopt his design, Wang said it could lead to cheaper, lighter cameras with longer battery lives for all."

Really? Ok so if you really create a sensor with a 1000x the light gathering capacity of CMOS sensors and a commensurate 1000x reduced sensitivity to noise, and if it can be manufactured in volume, why _wouldn't_ someone build a camera with it? So why the 'If' in that last paragraph?

This guy published a paper two years ago [1] on creating light cavities in Graphene, This is the paper that they article is working from [2] apparently.

[1] <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11468-011-9260-1>

[2] [http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/abs/ncomms2830.ht...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/abs/ncomms2830.html)

<comment><USER3> From a different source:

"In reality, though, and contrary to some big-name publications, this graphene sensor isn't going to replace the silicon sensor in your camera. Graphene is still incredibly hard to work with on a commercial scale (here the researchers are still mechanically exfoliating graphene and placing it on a silicon substrate with tweezers), and there's no indication that this method would ever scale up. What is far more likely is that these graphene photodetectors might be used in optoelectronics, where optical and electronic components are squeezed into the same system/chip, or in enabling faster fiber-optic networks."

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/157082-graphene-sensor- is...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/157082-graphene-sensor- is-1000-times-more-sensitive-to-light-could-enable-ultra-low-light- photography)

<comment><USER4> If it's possible to do a manufacturing process by hand with tweezers, I'll bet it's possible to invent a machine that does the same process faster and at scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "1000 times more sensitive"

What does that even mean?

Even 10 times higher quantum efficiency shooting wide open on optical band targets would be physically impossible.

On top of that, 'Eliminates need for flash' is not a great title - most people who care about photography don't use flash much for direct illumination; very flat targets, indirect illumination, close-range zoomed in macro shots, and filling in a dark foreground are the exceptions. Cell phone shots look like cell phone shots in part 1) because they compensate for the tiny sensor with crappy LEDs, not even proper xenon bulbs, but mainly 2) because a 1/4" class sensor can only offer 1/3 the SNR of a cheap point & shoot 1/2.3" class sensor on a good day, for the same level of illumination: they _need_ the flash to work, and so you get flash-based shots, which usually look horrible because of the distinctive way it lights the scene.

<comment><USER6> > ...most people who care about photography don't use flash much for direct > illumination...

You might want to tell that to the nice people at Elinchrom, Profoto, Broncolor, Hensel, Bowens, Quantum, Paul C. Buff, and so on. Even on-camera flash for good wedding and event photography is normally the primary lighting indoors, since it can be controlled when the environmental (ambient) lighting can't be. "People who care about photography" master the light rather than letting it master them.

<comment><USER5> I was careful with my wording: 'direct illumination' - point xenon/LED directional flash at target, shoot, enjoy off-axis vignetting, severe distance limitations, extreme inverse square contrast effect, & sharp nearly-incident shadows. Reflectors ('umbrellas'), big diffusers, aiming the flash at the ceiling, all the hardware that the places you mentioned sell, are aimed at avoiding these effects while still controlling the light quality.

Amateur photographers don't know this. They use on-camera flash because their cameras _force_ them to use flash to get a reasonable signal to noise ratio. For them (who will never even attempt to use specialized flash diffusers/reflectors), the best option for dynamic indoor & evening scenes is a bigger sensor camera, or if they want to get really fancy, aiming a speed flash at the ceiling.

<comment><USER6> Much of the lighting I do is very much direct lighting; softboxen and other play-it-safe modifiers have their place, but you couldn't emulate, say, Karsh's style with them. And the inverse-square law is your friend, not your enemy. Light is merely a tool to get the shadows in the right places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's the PDF version of the paper, <http://cdpt.ntu.edu.sg/Documents/ncomms%204%201811.pdf>

This is very exciting and has multiple uses:

1 - drastic improvement to P&S and mobile photography (largest source of photos now). Most of these photos at night suffer from noise and harsh flashes and significant redeye

2 - improving dynamic range in SLR by providing two photodiodes per each pixel. One for high sensitivity (large) and one for low sensitivity to preserve highlights.

3 - providing a great boost to the micro 4/3 systems. The 4/3 makes a great portable platform (size, weight, etc.) however suffers from tremendous shadow noise and as such make it less ideal as a replacement for full-frame (35mm sensors ) SLRs.

4 - might give a new life to Lytro and similar systems. It would allow them to provide higher resolutions images to make them appealing to more demanding phitographers.

5 - worst nightmare for people concerned with government intrusion. It enables cameras to operate in dark streets or other places and keep people under constant watch-day or night.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if it'll affect the 'look' of the image too (when you put all of these things together). I've never been a fan of the way digital looked (curse you Bayer filter!!), except for maybe the Foveon sensor now. I've actually been having a lot of fun shooting film lately, and scanning it. Skin tones baby!

<comment><USER7> With increase resolution, Bayer's side effects become less and less visible. Nikon has started to remove antialiasing from their recent cameras. Color analog film may look better SOOC for soe images, but you can exceed that in post-processing

<comment><USER8> I guess the problem I still see is like in this image (film left, digital right): [http://annawu.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2011/03/81420015b_...](http://annawu.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2011/03/81420015b_rt-900x299.jpg) The shadows just fall differently, the skin has a nicer tone (my opinion)... less harsh. I'm sure you could Photoshop/grade it to match more, but only to a certain extent.

I'm all for the convenience of digital, just wish they'd improve sensor technology rather than megapixels. But anyway, I'm getting a bit off topic...

<comment><USER9> Well the film image looks slightly out of focus and the lighting looks marginally different, so it is not the best comparison. But there are differences, although they are much more noticeable on larger than 35mm film - if you really want something with a different look shoot medium format or large format. You can't really do stuff like George Hurrell any other way <http://georgehurrell.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just recall that less than ten years ago, nobody even _knew_ of this material and it was only the subject of strange theoretical research at ivory tower universities.

Please continue to fund science. =)

<comment><USER11> Today a lot more people know of the material, but it is still known as the subject of strange theoretical research at ivory tower universities.

I 100% support the idea of funding science and graphene is very exciting, but you still can't buy any of these wonder products it is going to be responsible for and you won't be able to for many years yet because nobody knows how to manufacture it at useful scale.

IMO this is probably one of the areas in which most commercial entities limiting or eliminating their long-term R&D in the name of short-term gains is probably hurting us. If there were more effective cross-over between industrial manufacturers (which have mostly moved the manufacturing offshore anyway) and theoretical research, there would be a better pollination of ideas that might help solve these problems quicker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article says this new sensor is ~1000x more sensitive than the sensors in today's cameras. Comparing it with the extremetech article linked by _chaz_ , it's clear what's happened:

The sensor is _not_ ~1000x more sensitive than the sensors in today's cameras. It's ~1000x more sensitive than _previous graphene sensors_.

(And the 1000x improvement is when you measure amps of current generated per watt of incident light, which isn't necessarily the best measure of how well the sensor will actually perform.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Might benefit the casual snapshot photographer, but pros use flash more for fill-in lighting when there are sharp shadows and for freezing motion e.g. in sports photography.

<comment><USER14> _Avoid making a commotion, just as you wouldn't stir up the water before fishing. Don't use a flash out of respect for the natural lighting, even when there isn't any. If these rules aren't followed, the photographer becomes unbearably obstrusive._ \- Henri Cartier-Bresson

"American Photo", September/October 1997, page: 76 <http://www.photoquotes.com/showquotes.aspx?id=98>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds interesting although I suspect it's the fact that the sensor uses graphene that makes this a news item.

I wonder how fast a sensor like this would be. If it's so sensitive I'm guessing that you can build a super-fast camera, which is something engineers are always looking for. For our high-speed applications in the microsecond exposure time it's hard to get enough light and fast enough shuttering. Even if this thing isn't going to replace CMOS and CCD it could be interesting for high speed metrology.

</comment><comment><USER16> If it gathers light in the infrared spectrum, how is noise eliminated? Ambient room temperature is an infrared-peak blackbody. I'd like to see more on the filtering that has to go into images taken with such a sensor.

<comment><USER5> "infrared" is actually an extremely large portion of the spectrum when viewed on a proper log scale. It's a poor label because it often leads to this confusion.

400nm to 700nm is 'visible light', a factor of 1.75x, infrared is 700nm to 1mm, a factor of 1428x.

Only a small portion of this is significant for thermal infrared applications, which at room temperatures are about 8um-15um.

Near infrared, up to about 1500nm, acts pretty much like light we can't see, and can be detected well on the same CCD/CMOS sensors (which need filters to block it out).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> But then how do I use my phone as flashlight?

</comment><comment><USER18> I've actually read this (in my mind) as: "No need for flash plugins to connect to a computer's laptop"...</comment>


Are Bitcoins Here to Stay? - <AUTHOR> http://thisorthat.com/blog/are-bitcoins-here-to-stay

<comment><USER2> I posted yesterday on how Google or Apple could run their own blockchain: [http://www.bitrific.com/2011/06/my-eureka-moment-could-be- go...](http://www.bitrific.com/2011/06/my-eureka-moment-could-be-googles.html)

It'd be great to see a tech giant do crytocurrencies no matter whether it's bitcoin itself (I doubt it for the time being,) based on bitcoin or a whole new system - in all of those cases I think it would support bitcoin as it currently stands.

<comment><USER3> Wait, Lincoln was murdered by "existing bankers and the British ruling class"?

<comment><USER2> Yeah - please correct me if I'm wrong: I watched a documentary on it called: "The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America." That was the impression I got from it.

edit: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIjxXEZyhzU> 1:25:00 - bankers were originally opposed to the greenback, and also Lincoln's efforts to remove the debt based system that had to be introduced to fund the war when the greenback failed -- the bankers wanted a gold-backed currency. (look at 1:18:00 onwards for full background)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Nomad Projects - <AUTHOR> https://nomadprojects.io <comment><USER2> Why nomad to nomad? What is the relevance of that? Why not "person with idea" plus "person looking for a project"? It seems to me that adding this additional condition unnecessarily limits the candidate pool for no apparent reason.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason we choose for digital nomads as our target audience has multiple reasons.

The first reason is we feel that side projects have a better chance when you team up with someone like you. We experienced that people with regular day jobs have a totally different schedule and lifestyle. When you want to start a side project you need someone who understands the life of a digital nomad.

The second reason is that we need to separate us from our competitors. The idea certainly isn't new and thus we need to target a niche market which for us is digital nomads.

<comment><USER3> Who are your competitors? I'm not a nomad so maybe some other service would be better for me, even though it looks like you've got a lot of cool people registered.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://meeet.co/](https://meeet.co/) is a platform that does something similar.

True that, signups have been great. Also lots of side projects that already started, proud of that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hiya all,

Nomad Projects is a platform for digital nomads who want to start a side project. Connect with other nomads so ideas don't stay ideas, but grow into a side project with mixed expertise.

The idea started when we ourselves had problems finding a fellow nomad that was open to a sideproject. We had a lot of knowledge on different spectrums, yet we needed the missing link to actually start: in our case a back-end developer. Thus we came up with the idea of Nomad Projects. To find or join a fellow nomad that complements your own skill set so that together you can bring ideas to life.

Let me know what you think of it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Although the design is fresh & modern, I found it pretty hard to navigate the site. I would have preferred an infinite scroll with uniformly sized cards when viewing nomads. The pagination made me stop prematurely. In addition, I would like an easier way to view projects/ideas without having to initially view a candidate's profile. Great idea and execution otherwise!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We'll take your UX ideas into account. Feedback is appreciated!</comment></comment>


Craig Federighi confirms ARM Macs will not support booting other OS's - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg9F1Qjv3iU&feature=youtu.be&t=3772 <comment><AUTHOR> I think I jumped the gun with the title. It appears that you can still turn off secure boot entirely on ARM Macs, per this WWDC video [https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm doubtful it would be possible but if there was an AppleTV sized MacMini with the Apple ARM chips they would make one hell of a home headless server if you could install Linux on it natively.

</comment><comment><USER3> Back in my day they used to add features in new versions

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23640746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23640746)

</comment><comment><USER5> We have to wait and see.</comment>


How is $455 per week comparable to $27.63 an hour? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17e_computer.htm

<comment><USER2> $455/wk is equal to $11.375 per hour, assuming 40 hours.

At a rate of $27.63/hr, you'll earn $455 in about 16.47 hours.</comment>


SocialCam's sale deflates social video sector - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/17/socialcams-sale-deflates-its-flavor-of-the-month-social-video-sector/

<comment><USER2> What are the Pandodaily writers smoking? SocialCam raised probably somewhere around 2 million (seems to be the normal 'seed' round nowadays) in April (that's what Crunchbase says) and sold for $60 million. That's a 30-fold return in 4 months.

<comment><USER3> Your math is wrong. You're assuming they raised at a $2 million valuation. If they raised equity funding at a valuation above $60 million (which is likely since Viddy raised at $350M+) then the investors lost money.</comment></comment>


Introducing Messenger Kids - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/introducing-messenger-kids-a-new-app-for-families-to-connect/ <comment><USER4> fuck this. i'm sorry i know this isn't language appropriate to hn but fuck this.

does anyone believe this is really for the betterment of any child's life? say anything you want about how children use messenger apps now and this just improves that experience for them but accommodations aside that's basically the same excuse that drug dealers use - "they're going to get it from somewhere so they might as well get it from me". we all know this is just another vehicle for ads (their promises notwithstanding) and we all know that fb/social media has pernicious effects on psychology, let alone child psychology.

i don't live in a cabin in the woods and i'm not amish and i'm not a luddite (i consume technology more or less like everyone else) but yet still i challenge someone to show me the intrinsic value (as opposed to circumstantial to the fact that fb/social media inundates us).

<comment><USER5> I actually agree with you that this is "drug dealer" tactics but for totally different reasons. I think this is a classic "the first hit is free" move.

It's a long-term play. I believe FB when they say they won't show ads to kids, or use their chats for ad scraping. What they really want is for those kids to become so familiar and dependent on the system (FB), that they naturally transition to being active FB users as adults.

It's not a secret that FB has a perceived "uncool with kids" problem - <USER2> the rise of things like Snapchat. If you hook them when they're really young, though, then FB just becomes an unquestioned part of life.

As far as the tool itself, i dunno - I mean messenger tools have been a fact of life for quite some time now. AIM, ICQ, etc. I don't think FB messenger is particularly different other than the fact that it's attached to, well, FB.

<comment><USER4> >I believe FB when they say they won't show ads to kids, or use their chats for ad scraping.

why do you believe this? i have no reason to believe it (since their entire business model is targeted ads) except the "first hit is free" alternate hypothesis.

does fb have a single "loss leader" feature?

<comment><USER5> > why do you believe this?

Because why say it otherwise? Facebook could've easily left all of that out and just said "Introducing messenger for kids! We're making sure it's carefully curated and safe for your children" etc. etc.

People would've speculated that it was being used for ads, sure, but it wouldn't have caused a major outrage. I'd bet significant sums of money that most (not all, obviously) parents don't really care about their children being advertised to or used for market research - I mean hell, TV was doing that way before FB was a thing. Most parents probably worry about more obvious things w.r.t. children chatting online: Bullying, talking to strangers, etc.

Saying "we're not scraping childrens' messages" and then turning around and doing exactly that would be such a monumental PR disaster if it ever came out. I don't think FB is quite that stupid. They're clearly focused on the long- term.

Another possibility is that they're actually just legally barred from scraping messages sent by children, and this is them putting a PR spin on "we're complying with the law!"

So basically, I just don't see a lot of benefit to promising not to scrape messages if they really want to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TLDR, Facebook wants your children to connect to you via a chat app.

I'm more than saddened to see that among the tech giants, they are encouraging _children_ to just use face filters and video chatting, rather than encouraging them to go outside and interact with friends in person. Why does an app made specifically for children and families need filters at all? It doesn't really matter that they are not putting in ads in this app. It is still an app and it is still imprinting children to accept artificial, screen- based relationships as equal to real, in-person conversations with your family.

Facebook is transforming the most important relationships in your life to a product. Commericalized.

<comment> ng-user Going to play devil's advocate and ask, did you really expect a tech company to encourage children to avoid all of their products and go play outside like they did 30 years ago when these companies never even existed? Of course they want children and people of all ages on their services. It's in their best interest to get the majority of folks using their platform.

I seriously have no idea why this is so hard to understand.

<comment><USER7> Niantic doesn't seem to have a problem with this.

<comment> ng-user Their situation is not an either/or, it's both. It's an awesome model and I think eventually a lot of companies will replicate something similar using AR.

Thanks for pointing that out though!

<comment><USER7> Sure. I am thinking of the classic "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World," in which there is a discussion of natures. It strikes me that Niantic produced a product which resonated with the nature of kids. Apple in the Jobs days strove to produce technology that was consonant with human nature, which meant they sometimes seemed slow but built things that made sense, and made obvious decisions quickly (no ad tracking in iMessage, for instance). Even Google in its early days built a search product that was quite more human than competitors. Products that irritate human nature can succeed, but perhaps not for too long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow. Just like tobacco companies targeting kids[0] Facebook is making sure their targets get hooked even younger.

> After talking to thousands of parents, associations like National PTA, and > parenting experts in the US

Which "parenting experts" are in favor of giving kids more time on electronics?

[0]: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco- companies...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-companies- still-target-youth/)

<comment><USER9> It's not about giving kids more time on electronics, it's about giving kids access to a more sheltered and moderated environment. As mentioned earlier, a lot of "us" were on completely open and unmoderated IRC and ICQ networks back when we were the age this app is aimed at. So many underage people have gotten their share of perverts and abuse and whatnot on those. I'm not saying this app is good or Facebook saves the children or whatever, I'm saying that the alternative is unfiltered chat.

<comment><USER8> Ok, that makes sense. So, it's essentially a necessary evil. In the end, though, facebook wins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >your child's information isn't used for ads

I'll translate: Your child's information will be used, but not for ads.

<comment><USER11> The seed planted in youth need not yield fruit. At maturity, it will provide a lifetime of advertising revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whenever Facebook talks about trust, privacy and confidentiality they imply that they are to be trusted.

That's simply not true.

> _Facebook is opening up to children under age 13 with a privacy-focused app_

I feel like I want to throw up.

</comment><comment><USER13> Another brick in the walled garden of the Facebook internet of the future.

Now even kids below the age of 13 will have a Facebook account, setup by their parents who are already on Facebook anyway and enticed by exactly what they want to hear ("More Fun For Kids, More Control For Parents") thanks to the marketing team.

<comment><USER14> > Now even kids below the age of 13 will have a Facebook account

They already had, they were just lying about their age. Anecdata: all of my colleagues with children let their child create a Facebook and Whatsapp account (that one is really big here in the Netherlands) at age 10, because not doing so means having your kid be the one child in class without it (with all the bullying and ostracization that implies).

<comment><USER9> This comment needs to be higher; kids will get on messenger apps regardless. The previous generation used MSN Messenger and such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm shocked by the overwhelmingly negative response here. Honestly I expect better when I come to Hackernews.

Facebook announces a novel app trying to solve common problems with kids using and communicating on the internet and everyone in the comments just comes out with their personal ax to grind with Facebook.

I get it. You hate Facebook, Facebook is a drug, Facebook kicked your dog. All of those might be valid criticisms, and if this was an article titled 'Facebook is destroying everything' I would be very interested in reading those opinions.

But as it is, all I see are shallow criticisms of Facebook as a whole rather than any kind of nuanced discussion of the Messenger for Kids app.

Personally I'm intrigued by the idea. Kids want to communicate using the internet (and before the internet it was phone numbers and texting), but this is the first time I've seen an approach that really helps parents to monitor who their kids are connecting to on the app.

Maybe Facebook is the wrong company to present this app; maybe the connection to Facebook is concerning. But the app itself I think represents the right direction to go in designing apps that minors can use to communicate and helping parents to keep their kids safe online.

<comment><USER16> I would use Signal instead to communicate with my kid if necessary.

<comment><USER15> That works if you need to communicate with them one-to-one. But does Signal let you easily add any other Signal user as a contact? What about when your kid wants to talk to their friends on the app?

To me the appeal of what Facebook is doing here is that it lets you give your kids freedom to use the app while letting you as a parent create the whitelist of who they're able to talk to.

<comment><USER16> Signal works with phone numbers, so you can talk to any contact that is also on the app. There is no parental control but how do you assume kids can't text random people. Blocking/banning makes users highly creative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > There are no ads in Messenger Kids and your child's information isn't used > for ads.

I do wonder what quantity of data Facebook will collect on child users of this service though, and how that could be used. I'm not too well versed in COPPA outside of account creation restrictions, but I would hope that it has provisions for data collection on children.

<comment><USER18> There you go... data shared with pretty much who they like (Within the mighty Fb group):

"Our vendors and service providers. We may transfer information we collect to third party service providers that support our business, such as companies that provide technical infrastructure or support (like a content delivery network), provide customer service, or analyze how Messenger Kids is being used to help us improve the service. These partners must adhere to strict data confidentiality and security obligations set out in the agreements we enter with them (such as compliance with data privacy and protection laws and maintenance of administrative, physical and technical safeguards to prevent unauthorized access or disclosure of data) that are consistent with this Privacy Policy, including obligations that they only use the information we provide for performance of the services we specify.

Facebook Family of Companies. Messenger Kids is part of Facebook, and we may share the information we collect in Messenger Kids within the family of companies that are part of Facebook to support the uses described above, and to improve the services provided by the FB family of companies. For example, parents use Facebook Messenger to communicate with their children on Messenger Kids, and Facebook uses information from Messenger Kids to support seamless cross-service communication."

[https://www.facebook.com/help/118909212153483](https://www.facebook.com/help/118909212153483)

(Edit for typo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The current situation is that if you leave Facebook you risk missing out on friends or family's various events, updates and so on but that is mostly just annoying. This moves the needle slightly. If Facebook can convince families to organise themselves through Facebook, not being on Facebook becomes much more stigmatising than before. Very powerful stuff.

</comment><comment><USER20> There is already a secure app for kids, it's called Signal. I'd say secure channels are what kids need and not constant parental surveillance. In my opinion, when you decide that kids are old enough to use a smartphone, you should teach them how to use it responsibly and not censor / snoop around unless they have a problem and ask for help.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just a question of time until Europe starts having issues with this. Rightfully so.

<comment><USER9> Does Europe have an issue with Youtube Kids? With kids using Facebook / Messenger / Whatsapp / etc without being the age they are supposed to be according to the T&C?

<comment><USER21> Well, I was thinking of this case (from a German Newspaper, but I am sure there are English sources somewhere as well.)

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zeit.de%2Fdigital%2Fdatenschutz%2F2017-11%2Fkinderuhr- ueberwachung-monitorfunktion-verboten-bundesnetzagentur&edit-text=)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Doesn't this contradict FB's terms and conditions [1]

I quote:

> You will not use Facebook if you are under 13.

[1]: [https://www.facebook.com/terms.php](https://www.facebook.com/terms.php)

<comment><USER9> This isn't Facebook, it's Facebook Messenger for Kids. It's linked to a parents' account (who usually are above 13), so they are legally responsible in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What can we do to protect our world from the the mega-corps degrading society and eating our souls with their moral compass lacking commercialisation of our very existence? Serious question.

<comment><USER13> I'd hate to go all political but it seems pretty obvious lately: go out and vote

Don't vote Republican. In the EU it's much less of an issue thankfully but still, vote for the right party and not the popular or nationalistic party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> And this is why we must force our kids to watch "Enemy of The State" and perhaps "Person of Interest " (episodes where Samaritan is up) every holiday. I think its a good introduction to the value of privacy for kids.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think about 95% of posts in this thread are currently negative (IMO a great thing!). I'd be interested what the reception will be like in the broader population. If this sentiment is universal, Facebook has a big problem - <USER3> would mean trust has eroded to the point that most people only grudgingly use it, and to me that cries for disruption.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is messed up

</comment><comment><USER27> Get them hooked early. Revenue for the future.

<comment><USER28> It might also get at least 1 additional adult that may not have had an account otherwise :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> >> This preview is available on the App Store for iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone.

Does FB typically not include Android on betas?

</comment><comment><USER30> See Pied Piper? This is how you legally surveil underage users.

for the lazy: [https://www.facebook.com/help/118909212153483](https://www.facebook.com/help/118909212153483)

</comment><comment><USER31> What a great move by Facebook.

Understanding how kids engage with software is the perfect way to figure out what the future of software will be.</comment>


Hacker News API Wrapper for Node - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chasefleming/node-hn-api

<comment><USER2> Your requests are not async and so the item will always be `undefined`. You should add a callback to your functions.

        hn.item(8863, function(err, item){
            console.log(item);
        });

Edit: Actually, there is a lot that isn't correct about this library.. you should add a disclaimer that this is a WIP and is not in a usable state.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes WIP (just started throwing it together now), not stable yet. I'll add that. Thanks.

A lot still needs to be fixed and done. Hoping this is a good way to get people involved. Would love any contributions you might want to make.

UPDATE: Made some updates. Give it a look now.

<comment><USER2> Much better. I would also suggest you check out this library for ideas on how to better structure your code:

[https://github.com/edwellbrook/node-hacker- news/blob/master/...](https://github.com/edwellbrook/node-hacker- news/blob/master/index.js)

(This isn't my library)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just started whipping this up. Would love if people wanted to help contribute to make it awesome. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice!</comment>


How I Hacked My Husband's Programming Addiction - mck- http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/suzanne-ma/computer-programming-women-html500-vancouver_b_4739610.html?utm_hp_ref=canada-british-columbia#306792682 <comment><AUTHOR> _> >"Damn it! I'm a human, not a boolean condition!" I'd declare, clearly emotionally compromised._

This will probably be an unpopular comment on HN, but I think there are a lot of vulcans[1] in the tech scene that would be more socially amiable & better understand others if they stopped trying to exclusively use cold-logic on people and understood that emotions are just as important as logic when dealing with humans.

 _" All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness."_ \- Tennessee Williams

 _" Honesty without Compassion is Cruelty_" [https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140121033617-3...](https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140121033617-36792-honesty- without-compassion-is-cruelty)

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(Star_Trek)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_\(Star_Trek\))

<comment><USER2> If your goal is to manipulate people into doing what you want, then yes, you should consider their emotional state above rational argument.

If your goal is to pursue the truth and make correct decisions, you must not pay any heed whatsoever to the emotions of the person(s) you're trying to reach a decision with. That is, you can try to be delicate, but you mustn't allow their emotions to prevent the argument from being rational.

<comment><USER3> > That is, you can try to be delicate, but you mustn't allow their emotions to > prevent the argument from being rational.

Trying to be delicate _is_ paying heed to their emotions, and this kind of "manipulation" is an important part of communication. You are manipulating them to follow the same thought process as you, so that they can understand your (supposedly) rational conclusion, and if they respect you they will be happily allow themselves to be manipulated in this way.

Completely ignoring their emotions is an excellent way to convince an otherwise rational person to ignore your argument. People are not rational, and being right is not sufficient to be persuasive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I missed the part where she hacked her husband's addiction ... what I heard is that she went from being an enabler to a co-junkie.

On the other hand, my wife has said some of the same things about me. She doesn't complain when I bring home a paycheck though, and she really does help me stay "balanced enough".

<comment><USER5> "Hack" is a slang term that has many different meanings depending on the context. Here it's a play on two different meanings: computer programming, and coping with a situation. [http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/can't+hack+it.h...](http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/can't+hack+it.html)

<comment><USER6> And the article doesn't really match either of those reasons!

<comment><USER7> Sure it does. She had a problem (not being able to share her husband's interests), and instead of the obvious solution (pull him away from his interests) she found a novel and better one (join him in his interests). It's a perfect hack.

<comment><USER8> so she "hacked" their relationship, not his addiction

<comment><USER6> She didn't hack their relationship at all, that's my point. She learnt about hacking and that's the closest the article got to the title.

<comment><USER8> yeah, I agree with you- I wouldn't use the term 'hack' at all. Just that if we had to use the term, the least bastardized way of doing it would be to say that it was the relationship being modified, not his addiction. She literally did nothing about his addiction. I suppose you could say she "hacked" (again, disgusting choice of words) her PERCEPTION of his addiction...

either way, it's a poor choice of words

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm glad the author was open minded enough to try it herself and stop judging. The other women she mentions sound like monsters who are unsupportive of their husbands. If they were writing a book, I doubt anyone would make a big deal of it, let alone write an article about it. I'd expect the wives to be supportive or leave. Programming might be addictive, but it is productive. It's a far cry from drinking or using drugs. Instead of trying to stop their spouses, perhaps programmers' significant others should learn to embrace their spouses' work just as one might try to embrace and support a writer they were married to.

To compare programming to drug addiction is unfair to both programmers and addicts.

<comment><USER10> > If they were writing a book, I doubt anyone would make a big deal of it, let > alone write an article about it.

I doubt that. Complaints -- including articles, and whole books -- about spouses being obsessed with their work or hobby rather to the point of neglecting a spouse have been common for a lot longer than computer programming. And writing and other arts have been _very_ well represented as subjects of those complaints, far more than computer programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's... Not really what an addiction is. And someone hiding my computer from me because they've decided they don't like me programming? Well, that's just odd...

All in all though, a decent motivational story -- although I wonder whether it's a good thing for everyone to know enough programming to be dangerous: I certainly wrecked our home computer a number of times while learning as a kid ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> "I often see the effects of coding manifest in his daily habits and tasks: the way he meticulously organizes his sock drawer and how he does the dishes using the least amount of water and soap yet somehow achieves the highest level of cleanliness."

"I commiserated with other women -- girlfriends and wives of computer programmers who told me how their partners often forgot to eat, drink or go to the bathroom."

I'm sorry lady, you're not married to a programmer, you're married to a robot.

"The task was to build a website in six hours. We were guided through the basic concepts of HTML and CSS during two morning lectures led by teachers from Vancouver's Lighthouse Labs, then we were let loose to start creating our own projects."

"Organizers told me 60 per cent of the participants at the HTML500 were women. Everyone had different reasons for choosing to spend their Saturday learning computer science:"

Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren't even programming languages!

<comment><USER7> > _Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren > 't even programming languages!_

If a kid gave you a crayon picture, would you throw it in her face for having a shaky hand and a poor grasp of anatomy?

Everyone has to start somewhere. For a complete newbie, HTML works as well as anything for teaching the basic idea of language grammar, and better than most for giving immediate positive feedback.

<comment><USER12> "If a kid gave you a crayon picture, would you throw it in her face for having a shaky hand and a poor grasp of anatomy?"

This analogy is awful, although I admit I was being a bit pedantic: my point was that learning to use markup languages isn't "learning computer science," although it does qualify as learning software development.

I also thought the idea of "spending a Saturday learning computer science" to be kind of funny. It's like if you spent a day making popsicle stick catapults and described it as "spending a Saturday learning physics."

<comment><USER7> I'm the king of the pedants over here, but mocking a newbie for making an honest effort at trying something new and not quite having the terminology down after her very first day is kinda lame. Yeah, her language is humorously awkward, but she's getting out there and trying. We need to encourage this, both as programmers and as scientists.

<comment><USER12> Or maybe we should discourage it instead, for job security purposes.

Yeah you're right, I just chortled when I read that bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks like spam for learning to code dressed up as some kind of supposedly true anecdote. One of these husbands is believable, but an entire cluster?

</comment><comment> mck- Okay now, please be nice, she is really trying :) Sounds like PhasmaFelis is the only one on this thread who got the point.

I think most of you here really enjoy what you do for a living. I can't be certain, but I'd venture to guess that the tech industry scores the highest when it comes to the happiness factor.

As for me personally -- having come from investment banking and consulting -- it was the best choice I made for my career and personal sanity. It was clear to my wife how much happier I had become -- not working for some faceless corporation and actually contributing tangible value to society.

Journalism is a noble, but unfortunately, a declining field. It is stagnant. There isn't much funding [1]. I have been urging her to get involved with the vibrant tech community, which she has been. When I told her that I was volunteering at the HTML 500, she jumped at the opportunity -- and blogged about it :) yes yes.. HTML is not _real_ programming (even though it is probably the single technology that touches most people's lives) and yes, Lisp does not have semicolons, but Javascript does, so there.

By the sounds of it, she seems to have finally garnered the curiosity and drive to dive deeper in the rabbit hole. At least to give it a try, it might not be for her, but she will understand me better. This kind of behaviour should be condoned.

It is also her first time on Hacker News, so we should show her how great a community this is (and that we are _not_ a bunch of pedants)!

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324429)

Edit: Now why did this post get penalized and bumped all the way to the third page, where it was sitting in the Top 10 just 30 min ago?

<comment><USER14> Kind of off topic, but people have been talking about "programming" their remote control for a very long time. And what does it involve to "program" your remote control? Simply going to the menu on your TV, and setting up some of the buttons to carry out specific tasks.

Likewise, I really don't see how HTML _isn't_ programming. If anything, HTML is a language that _programs_ the browser. It tells it _how_ to generate the DOM tree. It's a declarative language. And lately, I've been seeing a rise in declarative style. Look no further than Express.js, and its routes. You can pass more than one callback functions per route, allowing you to specify _what_ a route does in a more declarative manner.

So to everyone that have been saying that your wife isn't really programming, I highly suggest that they re-evaluate what programming is. If they are still convinced that HTML isn't programming, then at least they can be sympathetic with her efforts to be more involved with what you are so passionate about.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _Computer engineers go by a number of different stage names: they are software developers, programmers, coders, hackers._

Computer engineering is an umbrella term, although it's usually implied that they have an above-average understanding of hardware. It's not a synonym for programmer.

 _Marc 's mind was a symphony of brackets, tags, semi-colons and logic operators. To me, it was just noise._

Yet at the end she mentioned him specifically writing in Ruby (Rails) and Common Lisp.

Otherwise, it was a decent sentimental story. I'm not particularly a fan of emotionally manipulative glurge and I can't help but smirk at the whole "learn to code = write markup" equivocation and the general try-hard tone, but it was okay. I can see it being motivating.

<comment><USER15> > _Computer engineering is an umbrella term, although it 's usually implied > that they have an above-average understanding of hardware. It's not a > synonym for programmer._

I've given up on explaining that to most people. My degrees are CS and Math. I work in a software shop. There is hardware work being done, but mostly of the "did we hook up the right cables?" sort of work. However, whenever I start explaining that it's not engineering in the sense that they mean (which really is the computer/electrical engineer sense) they start thinking I'm in IT.

<comment><USER16> I gave a shot at it here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956528)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "When we disagree on something, for example, he always presents the most goddamned rational arguments laying them out in an obnoxiously coherent and systematic way."

If politicians did this, the world would be a much better place.

<comment><USER18> > If politicians did this, the world would be a much better place.

If politicians did that, they wouldn't be elected. The last approximation of an intellectual to run for high office was Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. The voters didn't trust him -- he seemed to be too smart.

<comment><USER19> _The last approximation of an intellectual to run for high office was Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s._

In Canada, we had Michael Ignatieff -- former Harvard professor and holder of 11 honourary degrees -- as a "candidate for prime minister" in 2011. (We don't elect our Prime Ministers directly, but the leader of the winning party inevitably becomes Prime Minister, and polling has found that a lot of voting is determined by whom voters would like to see become Prime Minister.)

Ignatieff led the Liberal party to a disastrous defeat, in large part because whenever he was asked about an issue, he would respond by explaining in detail the merits of two or three different positions -- and never quite say which position he himself held.

It wasn't that he was too smart or that voters found him to be untrustworthy; voters simply couldn't figure out what policies he believed in.

<comment><USER18> I think there's a certain huckster and salesman instinct in successful politicians, a base sense of how to appeal to common values that becomes second nature, no rehearsal required. Lyndon Johnson had it in excess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Loathsome pop-psych, loathsome relationship pattern ... and redeemed by turning it on its head. Well played. Had me hate-reading in the middle and happy by the end.

</comment><comment><USER21> 'How I stopped my husband making money so he could give me more attention, in- turn creating the perfect future argument that we don't make enough money'

</comment><comment><USER22> Programmers know nothing of logic. This article is a fabricated advert like most of HuffPo's content.

A true programming addict would even bother with the dishes.

Now Yahoo pay attention! if you could only insult the average persons intelligence while selling ads that look like content! (oh wait)

<comment><USER22> And while were broadsiding barns with the word "addict", lets take a moment to reflect what addiction really is!. Phil Hoffman RIP.</comment></comment>


I Have a Reason to Live - <AUTHOR> https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kristin-walker/precarious/e/69171906 <comment><USER2> Elana Miller always knew she wanted to be a doctor. In 2013, the finish line was in sight. She couldn't wait to start this new chapter of her life practicing Integrative Psychiatry. Elana's life took a detour when in December of 2013, she went to the ER because she was having trouble breathing. The chest x-ray revealed a huge mass in her chest. She was diagnosed with Stage IV Acute Lymphoblastic Lymphoma, a rare and deadly type of cancer. She was 31 years old. She survived and rebuilt her life when in the fall of 2019, she relapsed. Listen to her inspiring story of courage and resilience. "I have reasons to live!"</comment>