What's the use of stories that aren't even true? - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2012/7/25/stories-that-arent-true <comment><USER2> I love this line of inquiry. "Big Fish" is a good movie to watch along these lines if anybody is interested.

 _Does fiction have a place in business writing?_

Yes, and it's sorely needed.

One point Swombat missed was that much of what we read as non-fiction is actually closer to very speculative science-fiction. For instance, nobody really knows what the year 1700 was like in England. We have various accounts, we make various assumptions, we fill in the blanks with educated guesses. In the end, whether we mean to or not, we create a narrative of things that happen that makes sense to us.

The same goes for 1900, or 1200. All of history in this way is a form of fiction. (A very good and very educational form, I might add)

The same goes for what constitutes popular science articles. Somebody wants to write a popular article on how human sexuality developed. So they accumulate lots of studies and data, then create an evolutionary-based scientific- sounding narrative around that. Makes for great reading, and most wouldn't even think of it as fiction, but I don't think it approaches the "truth" of something like 2+2=4, or even the validity of Newtonian Physics.

Our brains love narratives, stories, and will find them even where none exist. It's the way we are wired to learn. Pure fiction, by being unconstrained by facts, allows us to explore how various emotional states are reached and vicariously think about how we would act. It does a heck of a lot of good in a lot of ways, the least of which is that it helps us practice how to learn.

<comment><USER3> _One point Swombat missed was that much of what we read as non-fiction is actually closer to very speculative science-fiction. For instance, nobody really knows what the year 1700 was like in England. We have various accounts, we make various assumptions, we fill in the blanks with educated guesses. In the end, whether we mean to or not, we create a narrative of things that happen that makes sense to us._

I'd argue that you could say the same about supposedly factual stories and accounts. After all, people are highly subjective in the way they remember stories. For example, the way I would tell the story of how my first startup fell apart is very different to the way my cofounder would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the point you make here. There are two elements at play in our decision-making, the "cerebrally rational" element, with data, deductive reasoning, and concrete examples.

The other side is the "abstract" (the opposite of rational isn't irrational) element, where reason is inductive, and we can notice patterns in the stories we tell each other. That's the purpose of an archetype, and why Joseph Campbell's work lives on. If you want a good primer on this, pick up a copy of "He" by Robert A. Johnson. It's an easy read.

The purpose of telling a "myth" or sharing an archetype is to communicate something that is true about life, and let the listener induce the meaning. Deductive reasoning has its place, particularly where startups who have to make revenue or die are concerned, but sometimes the answer isn't one we can verbalize. We just "know it." Like Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in "Blink," Einstein's Theory of Relativity popped into his head suddenly one day, and he had to spend the next several years backtracking so he could _prove_ what his mind had unconsciously put together.

I guess my point is that, just because something isn't based in sensory reality, doesn't make it false.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for the suggested perspective, Daniel. It is interesting to consider using fiction to help spread business Truths. The trouble with that notion, however, is that business is not all that profound; at least not at the level where most people actually want to be informed. It's one thing to write about BIG ideas that relate to business (like the great education in professional excellence we got from Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead). But business non-fiction is dominated by, essentially, How-To books. I find it doubtful that the mundane requirements of transferring tactical and experiential business knowledge to lay readers are compatible with producing great literature. Even the "best" non-fiction business books (like Chris Anderson's Long Tail, for example) fall far short of literary greatness. Great literary works achieve their universality and timelessness by aiming higher, and for a bigger picture. Business books are concerned predominantly with business usefulness, which has a very short shelf life.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll tell you a story. Ten years ago I was thinking about trying to create a startup, and a friend of mine was interested in trying with me - but he just couldn't make a decision to leave his full time job.

I had just read a book about starting your own business - how to create a BP, basic accounting etc. - and the book opened with a story; the story of two cats. One cat lived at his owner's home, an easy, comfortable, boring life. The other one lived on the street, was never sure about what he could have eaten for dinner, had some scars and bad memories. But he was really living.

I lent this book to my friend, and he decided to go on with our plan. As he told me, it wasn't all the rational arguments, the data, the real world examples that did the trick, but that little fable at the start of the book.

So we left our jobs, used up all our little saved money and some from our families, failed to find the funding we needed, and our adventure didn't finish in glory. All thanks to that little piece of business fiction.

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of the codeless code - obviously fictional stories, but written in such a way to make commentary on design patterns and practices in software development. They make for a very entertaining read, and are excellent at driving the point home.

<http://thecodelesscode.com/case/45> as an example.

</comment><comment><USER8> Fiction was utterly destroyed for me in high school where it was rammed down my throat, and when I was examined on finding deep meanings where the author may not have even intended or wanted. Biblical stories would be my pick if I had to move toward fiction, if you can even call it that.

<comment><USER9> _Fiction was utterly destroyed for me ... when I was examined on finding deep meanings where the author may not have even intended or wanted_

Post-structuralism[1] has its place, and I'm a big fan of it now, but I also hated having it pushed on me in high-school literature lessons -- that seems to be a very common experience, and one that really can damage people's enjoyment of fiction thereafter.

I'm not sure whether the problem's one of presentation ("find the meaning! it can be anything you like!"; "er, say wot, miss?"), or whether the average teenager just doesn't have the right intellectual frame to really appreciate the idea "meaning is a product of the interaction between text and reader, not a product of the text alone".

Back in high-school, I overcame my frustration at the perceived arbitrariness by approaching the task ironically -- "sod it, I'm gonna pick the most outlandish reading I can think of". The teachers seemed to think the results were great, which I found pretty amusing.

[1] I refer to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- structuralism#Destabilized...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- structuralism#Destabilized_meaning) in particular.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I suppose English teachers like total textbook responses to texts (things they tell their students to say) or totally outlandish stuff to shake them from monotony. I remember creating essays that were great (at least to me) but not scoring particularly well, I also used to think if the author of a text would be marked on response to that text, they'd fair pretty poorly too. It really is a long time ago. I read things my old English teachers write now in school magazines and they are hardly impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fiction adds flavor that can help the point of a story stick in your head.

I don't think the hacker koans are necessarily retellings of actual events, but they get their points across concisely and memorably. Aesop's tales have the same quality.

<comment><USER11> Tangential: I recently re-read a book of Aesop's fables that I had as a child. I was surprised that the 'morals' of the stories are often not what we might regard today as good advice.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesops_Fables#List_of_some_fabl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesops_Fables#List_of_some_fables_by_Aesop)

<comment><USER3> They were good advice for most of history... I'll be happy if my articles are still providing valuable advice in decades, let alone millennia! :-)

<comment><USER11> Ha, true. Although I honestly think in some ways your posts are 'more timeless' as I think they're more considered. From what I remember most of the fables are sound advice about morality in general but there's also a recurring theme of not getting above one's station and knowing one's place in the world. It irked my inner entrepreneur.

But now that I reconsider it, perhaps Aesop was right. Ambition has never guaranteed happiness. Perhaps accepting one's lot in life is something to aspire to. In fact it most probably definitely is.

Ah bollocks. Now I don't know what to think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An important aspect when using stories to convey lessons, whether they'd be true or fictional, is to stay faithful to patterns grounded in reality, not simply theory. That usually requires a solid life experience or at the very least some considerable research. Otherwise, you would basically be writing your opinion and it might not sound _True_ in the end.

Just consider a teenager who decides to write a love novel out of her extensive knowledge on the matter. Some aspects of it might resonate with most people, those would be the more common patterns. Other elements however might be missing to the more mature audience, who has gone through a lifetime of more complex relationships.

I would imagine that fictional writing for business is similar. You could write based on general theories and sound somewhat "accurate", but the devil is in the details and having first hand knowledge of more subtle patterns (usually overlooked by most theorists) allows you to measure their importance in that context. Good examples of such intricacies can be found if you dig into the psychological aspect of running a business. What sort of poorly documented, yet very common patterns can you find?

Imo, that's what would give realism to an otherwise very entertaining fictional story and credibility to your lessons.

<comment><USER13> Case in point to your love novel example is the Twilight series :)

<comment><USER14> Or 50 Shades of Grey, which started out as a Twilight fanfic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this is really dependent on the author's skill and how gracefully he stretches our suspension of disbelief. Swombat has this skill, so I would implore him to try it.

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's quite a compliment, thank you. I hope I can live up to it!

<comment><USER15> Even if you couldn't live up to it now (which is really in your head ;) you would incrementally but surely improve to the point you can, so do not feel pressured when you write those first pieces. I know you know this, but perhaps it's a good time to be reminded of it :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Around 15 years ago, I read a fictional book that taught me about what it may be like to go into the field of computers. It was called Microserfs [1] and I absolutely loved it. I thought that it did a great job of describing the world around software development and what working in Silicon Valley may have been like.

A book that would have been non-fiction on the subject, may not have captured my imagination as much, but this did a wonderful job. This is just one example of an introduction to the business of computers through the use of fiction. I think there's definitely a place for it.

For me, there's absolutely room for more fictional books that capture the startup experience and show what life may be like. This would not only be entertaining, but provide some sort of guidance for those interested in the field beyond the Hollywood'd tech movies [2] that are available for them today.

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs>

[2] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Network>

</comment><comment><USER17> I think that fictionalising stories to make them more palatable, or easier to digest, has its place, so long as it's obvious.

Dilbert, for instance, is famous for taking real life stories, adding a layer of humour on top, and thus making them more memorable and have more impact.

<http://dilbert.com/2012-07-22/> for example.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just wanted to note that fiction does have a prominent history in business writing in the form of case studies. Most issues of the Harvard Business Review include a multi-page fictional story about a middle manager and some dilemma he or she faces, along with a suggested course of action from 4 real- life middle managers.

</comment><comment><USER19> Some time ago I wrote a short story about a guy moving a boat. Really it was a story about overcoming entrenched thinking, and how small nimble companies can change the status quo.

It was pretty well received, so I've thought about writing a book in the same setting where the young man that moves into the entrenched and old fashioned fishing harbour gradually overcomes the old by using his wit and outlook and eventually ends up owning and running a fishing fleet.

I've spent quite some time thinking through the plot, and I can tell you that creating and telling a great story that also conveys sound and interesting business advice is extremely hard.

You can read the original short story here: <http://www.maximise.dk/moving-a- boat/>

<comment><USER3> _I've spent quite some time thinking through the plot, and I can tell you that creating and telling a great story that also conveys sound and interesting business advice is extremely hard._

I'd say it's impossible.

What is possible, at least in my experience, is to start with a good _story_ \- i.e. characters, a plot, a series of interesting interconnected events - and let the meaning of those events shine through. I've never managed to craft a story around a message - the message always emerged from the story.

<comment><USER20> If you drop the word "business" from "business advice," at least, it's not impossible. Fables (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable>) and parables (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable>) are both types of stories that are built around making a point, and there are examples of both that have been good enough to still be popular thousands of years after they were first written.

I would say that it's _harder_ to write a great fable or parable than it is to write a great example of a general story, though, because the structure of being built around an Important Point makes it easy to slip into preachiness or didacticism. You have to work extra hard to make the rest of the story not sag under the weight of the lesson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree, fiction has its place and relevance. Though my use of it has been to remove a lot of preconceived notions i have about a current problem. i.e: i have a decision to make and can't make up my mind, i go read a fiction(something i've already read) and then after a couple of hours, i come across some event/story-point and realization hits. Ah that's a similar situation to my current dilemma. Related link i think fits here. :<http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-literacy/>

</comment><comment><USER22> My favorite business book of all time (well, joint favorite, alongside the 7 habits) is The E-Myth Revisited. It uses a fictional story to weave together the lessons that the author is trying to teach. The narrative is based around a lady who opened a shop to sell home-baked pies. Now she feels trapped by a business that isn't thriving and that is actually making her miserable. In the story, she meets with the book's author who coaches her on how to turn her business around. The story is gripping, right through to the very end. You really truly want her to succeed! After I finished the book I thought a lot about not only the lessons on business that the book teaches, but also about the way that the book was written and why I liked it so much. I think the story worked so well as a way of teaching precisely because it was a well- written story, and being fictional doesn't change that one bit.

Later I read another book, Made To Stick, that kind of cemented this belief. That too is a great book, full of interesting little insights, and I'd highly recommend it. Stories, especially the simple kind that can hook our attention, are far more effective than facts alone can ever be.

Of course, if you have a real life story that meets the criteria of being interesting and contains all of the lessons you need it to contain, that would work every bit as well as a fictional story (maybe even more so, thanks to the true-story element). But real life doesn't often work out that way. Things aren't so neatly laid out, and you need to be careful not to get lost in the minutia. I think writing from a fictional perspective also helps you to focus on what parts of the story are truly important to what you are trying to say.

As a final, and tangentially related note, I think this crosses over to technical writing too. The best technical book I've read (and over the years I've read quite a few) is Agile Web Development With Ruby On Rails. I think it's down to the way there's almost a story there, with the web shop that they're building in the first half of the book. That makes the book interesting. I raced through that section. The second half has no narrative, it's just a bunch of technical facts laid out -- I don't remember anything from those chapters. No other technical book has made a lasting impression on me like that, and I strongly suspect it is because none of the other books have had any semblance of story or narrative.

</comment><comment><USER23> Unless you really know the guys in the story or they have influences on your life, what is the difference between a true and a fake story?

</comment><comment><USER24> A great example of fiction in business writing is "The Richest Man in Babylon". It's focused on principles of personal finance but you could easily construct something similar for start-ups.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_(boo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_\(book\))

<comment><USER22> Hmmm. I read that book a few years ago, and the only thing that sticks in my mind is the bizarre use of mock-biblical language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've read some "business" books like this before and always enjoyed them, even though I knew they really were fiction.

"The Richest Man In Babylon" is a good example of this.

I would very much enjoy a modern, more realistic take on business in the form of fiction.

</comment><comment><USER26> Any one interested in the power of stories, and the Truth of same, must read Don Quixote.

"OMG it's so long and there are so many Great Books I'm supposed to read." Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.</comment>


ODNI/DOJ statement on the Yahoo/PRISM document declassification - <AUTHOR> http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/97251906083/statement-by-the-office-of-the-director-of

<comment><AUTHOR> I shortened the title because the actual tumblr post title is obscenely long.</comment>


Stop Obsessing Over Comments on Hacker News (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://venngage.com/blog/why-you-need-to-stop-obsessing-over-comments-on-hacker-news/ <comment><USER2> I think a lot of HN comments, though not all, offered constructive criticism to these very early company's. Most of them weren't showing the product they have now so it's not a fair comparison.

Also there are startups where the product isn't aimed at a developer and it's quite understandable they might not see the value.

I'm not a millennial and still can't see the value in Airbnb, I value the services that a hotel provides and would never use their service. That blindsided me to the fact that younger people would think differently.

</comment><comment><USER3> I disagree. The comments here are always right.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

</comment><comment><USER4> Comments on hacker news focus on improving humanity, not making money.

No one cares what will make your evil faceless company money, and sure we don't help those kind of goals.

Those product companies have succeeded at making money. Seeing that Dropbox has to implement predatory subscription and other dark patterns, the company has already failed HN.</comment>


The use of Roman ingots to investigate dark matter and neutrinos (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2013-11-controversy-roman-ingots-dark-neutrinos.html <comment><USER2> Apparently, mined lead ore is already contaminated with Pb-210[1] from the natural U-238 decay chain, so currently the only way to remove the Pb-210 is to protect the lead and wait a very long time for the Pb-210 to decay naturally

[1][https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/8/5/211/htm](https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/8/5/211/htm)

If there was some way to get uncontaminated lead ore, perhaps from deep inside an old ore vein, then it would be very valuable, if it was possible to refine it without introducing Pb-210 contamination</comment>


AT&T to throttle your video quality in the name of 'data saving' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/att-video-throttle-stream-saver/ <comment><USER2> This was announced 72 hours after Trump was elected... a president who vocally opposes net neutrality.

[http://about.att.com/story/att_introduces_stream_saver.html](http://about.att.com/story/att_introduces_stream_saver.html)

Note that this is categorically worse than the T-Mobile deal. Unlike T-Mobile Binge On, this throttled data still counts against your data quota. Users get nothing in exchange. It's forcing a quality limit setting (one that most mobile video apps already provide) and making it difficult to disable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious to know how they are planning on doing this from a technical standpoint. I can understand them throttling video streaming for their own services (such as the U-Verse app), but to do it for other services? I also can't imagine that the processing power required to do this on-the-fly is trivial.

<comment><AUTHOR> After reading a little more, it looks like they're capping any video streams they can detect on their network at 1.5Mbps, and not attempting to re-encode anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of the downsides to our new net-neutrality laws is that AT&T can't charge users less money for a downgraded 480P video stream.</comment>


How GPS devices pinpoint the location of moving objects - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/02/AR2009110202431_pf.html

<comment><USER2> One thing really annoys me about these explanations. GPS units don't know the time accurately enough to do what they say. Instead, they compute the difference in the received timestamps, which gives the difference in the distances to the satellites. That puts you on a hyperbolic paraboloid. Enough of them and you can pin down your location.

Some GPS units work by iterating to a solution, effectively computing the time, but it's not as easy as simply knowing the time and computing the distances.

The real explanation is more complex, and way cooler. I wish people wouldn't simplify in a way that makes it almost trivial and loses the good bits.</comment>


I've used Apple computers my entire life.  why I'm never buying one again - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/why-im-never-buying-an-apple-computer-again-2018-11 <comment><USER2> Earlier discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18562478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18562478)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is HN ever going to stop falling for this type of headline? There's absolutely no new information in this article at all; it's just a summary of the basic history and recent news about Apple, with a couple personal sentences from the author thrown in. This is classic clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is telling that the author of this article has not yet given up his MacBook. My own move from Macbook to Dell/Linux took years, and I still find myself saying "this would be easier on a Mac." The user experience is really the best their is. Good luck with the switch... your values will be tested.

<comment><USER5> What makes you say "this would be easier on a Mac"? I'm curious, only because I've never said that. I've also never said "this would be easier on Windows" about anything other than needing to do something in Outlook. I've spent my career going back and forth switching between the major operating systems and somehow find Linux/Mac/Windows pretty similar for the work I do (obviously we all work different).

Now I'm a Linux sysadmin working on Linux stuff, so my main work machine is Linux, it would be a pretty easy for me to switch to a Mac, and now even Windows.

<comment><USER6> Windows10 did a good job right now from what i've seen, but the first time i went back on windows after a year of code on linux/mac with a friend high on tuning your tools and workstations to your needs, it never really felt "good". Granted, i had to use netbeans and this was on 7 (or 8), but when you're used to the tools and you understand the system (not system as in OS, but how everything work, where to look if you have issues etc), it's really hard to switch.

On the other hand, those 6 month using windows made me really respect windows sysadmins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Non AMP link [https://www.businessinsider.com/why-im-never-buying-an- apple...](https://www.businessinsider.com/why-im-never-buying-an-apple- computer-again-2018-11)

</comment><comment><USER8> In late 2013, I decided I _really_ wanted a new computer. And after looking at my bank account, I decided that a good way to treat myself without going totally overboard financially would be be the 2012 Mac Mini with the quad-core i7. I liked the machine very much, I eventually upgraded the RAM, but by late 2016, I was no longer happy with the machine's performance.

At that point, I took a look at Apple's lineup and found their machines underpowered, overpriced (at least compared to my budget), and some part of me no longer liked OS X as much as I had initially.

I waited for Ryzen to become available and for the first time in more than a decade, I built my own PC and am now back to using GNU/Linux. About 20 months later, I am very happy with my decision. But I might very well have chosen another Apple machine if they had one with reasonably current hardware, at a reasonable price, which I could have upgraded later on. It is sad, because they sure know how to build a sweet computer.

Note: AFAIK, Apple computers are significantly more expensive in Europe, so the price-performance ratio might be more favorable in the US.

<comment><USER9> Given the new Mac Mini, would you still build your own PC now? I was seriously considering going the Hackintosh route, but the new Mini seems to provide fair value for its price.

<comment><USER8> I spent about € 1100-1200 on my current desktop, it has a Ryzen 1700, 32 GB RAM and 750 GB SSD storage, plus a GeForce GTX960.

Let me just make a quick check: With a six-core CPU (my Ryzen has 8, although per-core performance is lower), 32 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD, the new Mac Mini would cost me € 2209 in Apple's online shop. If I take 8GB RAM and upgrade myself, the machine itself is € 1489, plus about € 250 for RAM, so about 1739 bucks. I have no idea how much that would cost me in the US.

Nah, I think I still would have built my own machine. Plus, it was surprisingly fun. More laborious than I remembered, but fun. I have to admit, though, the Mini looks gorgeous in Space Grey, and I like that they have upped the performance significantly.

I briefly considered building a Hackintosh, but from what I heard, it is too much trouble for me. I am pretty happy with openSuse Tumbleweed running the MATE desktop. Setting up additional repositories for proper video playback was a little annoying, but it was a one-time thing, and things Just Work(tm) now. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've never understood why people insist on writing articles detailing, "Why I'm switching away from X." If you don't like it then don't use it. There's no need to make a big deal out of it.

<comment><USER11> People write a whole universe of articles. The question to ask is why are we looking at the subset with this form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mid-2000's Apple catapulted us into the current era. OS X, iPod, the iTunes store, Macbook Pro (and Mac Pro to a lesser extent), and the iPhone, weren't just new products or good products, they were best in class. No, they created an entirely new class. They were the object of desire for anyone with eyes in their head to see how good they were. They did almost everything right, all the time, with relentlessly successful execution of features that actually made your life better in the ways that mattered. It's easy to forget how crummy and restrictive phones were in 2005. The business wins Apple pulled off against the recalcitrant music and telephone industry players.

But the fire of their innovation has slowly burned out, and with it, their vision. Like a star entering supernova, they have to try and burn progressively heavier elements to maintain the reaction. Apple doesn't profit from making desirable products any more, they have switched to exploitation. When's the last time you felt excited about an Apple product? For me it was the first retina MBP, which I ultimately didn't buy because I was waiting for a CPU upgrade... and waiting... and waiting...

</comment><comment><USER13> I started to contemplate this too. I love Apple products and I use a 13" 2017 tbMBP at work and a 15" 2017 tbMBP at home. I, of course, have an iPhone. I have my complaints like everyone else about these products and the decisions made for software and hardware but I recently had my first moment of doubt when Apple removed Freedom from the App Store [1]. It bothered me greatly that I wasn't free to install software that I wanted to on my iPhone that I purchased unlocked and paid quite a great deal of money for. Of course, this is exactly the sort of argument that Richard Stallman makes and has been making for years. Of course, he is more extreme than me but I now understand his point well.

It was the first time that I decided to look at Ubuntu again but I just can't go back to this. I like to use my Mac for more than programming and the Mac just excels at everything else. The iPhone is so much better of an experience to me compared to an Android device as well.

However, despite all of the complaints and issues, there really isn't a computer that does everything as well as the Mac can. If all I did with my computer was programming, it wouldn't be a big deal to go Linux but then of course my iPhone wouldn't have as nice as an experience so I'd likely have to go Android too.

Unfortunately, in this new age of monopolies, I doubt I'll see a new provider arise to challenge Apple, Microsoft, or Google with either a new operating system, hardware, and software. We have to chose the system that will work the best for us individually including the possible flaws that will come with the system.

I personally think the macOS will become more and more closed as time goes and it will resemble iOS further and further. I wonder what that will mean for developers and programmers who do more than use Xcode for our own development and need a nice full featured shell...

[1] [https://freedom.to/blog/freedom-has-been-temporarily- removed...](https://freedom.to/blog/freedom-has-been-temporarily-removed-from- the-app-store/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Understandable - but I think his criticism of the T2 is totally wrong we need secure computing devices, especially with biometric identification. There are banking Apps using Touch ID or Face ID.

<comment><USER15> Touch ID and Face ID are not necessarily more secure, they're a trade-off for higher convenience. And the T2 chip might have gotten a warmer welcome if it weren't also used for preventing any third-party repairs, which seems to be Apple's new hobby beside further restricting their customers' choices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've just gone through this experience and switched to PC after 12 years with Apple. My MacBook Pro (mid-2012 model) kept failing literally every 2 months, Apple replaced the failed SATA flex cable six times before I finally gave up on it as a lemon & bought a PC.

For anyone else switching, do your research carefully. There are still things Apple does right. I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga, and here's some of the problems I'm having:

* The Dolby Vision HDR screen isn't actually HDR capable (though it is bright & wide-gamut).

* The HDR display has a really bad red-tint (roughly +10% red shift). I'll need to buy a colorimeter to calibrate it correctly. It clearly wasn't individually calibrated at the factory like my Dell monitor was.

* The built-in speakers are really terrible & thin sounding.

* There is a nasty audio click at the start & end of audio playback (eg a sentence played back in Duolingo). That's probably a Realtek audio driver problem rather than Lenovo's fault. Most people won't notice, but if you work with audio & use headphones it will drive you nuts. It works perfectly with my Focusrite 2i2 audio interface & ASIO drivers, though.

* It doesn't have media playback keys, which I used all the time with Spotify while working. Even my Logitech bluetooth keyboard has them, but this laptop doesn't. (Looks like the Surface Book 2 doesn't have media keys either.)

* I can't figure out how to disable two-finger click (different from two-finger tap). It seems a registry hack is required to do this, but none of the registry hacks I've tried so far work on this model.

* The usual Windows gripes. While I could uninstall Candy Crush & Fitbit Coach on the Windows 10 VM I had on my Mac, every time I try to uninstall them on my Lenovo X1 Yoga, it reinstalls them again on reboot.

There are things I like about the Lenovo, so I'll make it work. I love that I can replace/upgrade the SSD myself, that it has a touchscreen & pen, the keyboard & trackpad are better than Apple's latest butterfly keyboards. And it hasn't broken down yet! But it seems that PC makers & Microsoft still aren't painting both sides of the fence yet. If the MacBook Pros had decent keyboards & replaceable SSD / HDDs, and I could somehow trust Apple's build quality again, I'd switch straight back to Apple.

</comment><comment><USER17> If the author loved Macs for being upgradable he was in the wrong platform.

The original Mac Pro née Power Mac, with its handle to open the case was the exception, not the rule.

The original Mac was as closed a box as you could get. RAM upgradability was a feature _sneaked in_

<comment><USER18> True. The discussion goes back to the original Mac: [https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...](https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Diagnostic_Port.txt)

</comment></comment><comment> village-idiot Great, someone is changing their personal computing choices.

But, why should I care? I bought a nice new pair of shoes, toe shoes in fact, should I post an article to HN about never wearing Nikes again?

<comment><USER19> Click the flag link and move on

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can you not link the AMP page? Thanks google.

<comment><USER21> Isn't the amp page better? It loads faster, has just the content I want, no extra JS scripts and less adds. Just because google defined that format people shun it?

<comment><USER22> It has terrible formatting on a desktop, with the text spanning the full width of the browser window.</comment></comment></comment>


Sandman: A Boilerplate-free Python REST API for Existing Databases - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2013/07/23/sandman-a-boilerplatefree-python-rest-api-for-existing-databases/ <comment><USER2> Over the past few years we've also been working on a HTTP based API for SQL databases -- [http://htsql.org;](http://htsql.org;) it has insert/update/delete features in a plugin.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really hope this makes it to production. I'll be contributing code and money to see that happen. Thanks for this extremely useful tool.

<comment><USER4> Contributions are always welcome. I've been making reasonably quick progress on it and it's getting more robust by the day. Already added features include a Django-style admin interface, user-defined HTTP methods per Model, and user- defined, per-method validation.

The two main features needed to make sandman really usable are authentication and the generation of "rel" links automatically from foreign key information. I'm working on authentication as we speak...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very very cool. With a django-admin style gui, and some method of auth, this could make prototyping new apps extremely quick for legacy (or other- department maintained) databases.

<comment><USER6> I've messed with inspectdb a few times, it's a good trick to know if you're in the land of django:

[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/legacy- databases...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/legacy-databases/)

<comment><USER7> Caveat: It's also frigging miserable if you are in the minority of developers using Django with Oracle DB. It gets quite a bit wrong, but my main gripe is that I can't inspectdb against an Oracle table and then syncdb the resultant models and get the same (or even necessarily working) tables.

YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice. I could've used this earlier. Tastypie is nice, but it really kinda assumes your models and relationships are already designed for a public API.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know of a PHP version of this? Would make my life so much easier.

<comment><USER10> Why would you need a PHP version? If you like this idea, just use this and consume the services with your PHP front end.

<comment><USER11> As a for instance, PHP has a native driver for Microsoft SQL services.

<comment><USER10> And Python doesn't?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A few lines of code added on django-admin will get you this as well.

<comment><USER13> New to django, care to share a link?

<comment><USER14> from app.models import ModelName

admin.site.register(ModelName)

Django documentation for this: [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/)

<comment><USER4> The point is, with Django you'd have to painstakingly reverse-engineer a Django Model from your existing database. sandman does all of this without writing any boilerplate code (aside from listing the names of the tables you want included in your API).

The difference in LOC and general frustration is huge.

<comment><USER14> I agree that is extremely awesome. I was just responding to his question. I have already started playing with your project, and have enjoyed experimenting with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Engineering managers, what do you wish more developers understood? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Two things:

1) its not personal, its about the money. thats why we have to do this / that etc, and not this or that

2) everyone is replacable (or will choose to leave at some point) - make your code / system / database in such a way that your replacement admirers you for the clarity of your documentation, not hates you for that clever trick you implemented. Corollary: all code that is not well documented is throw away crap when you leave.

</comment><comment><USER3> I ran a software company and a team for 4 years, here's my experience:

1\. I'm in this with Sloaken, it's about the money. Code artesans won't make it in the real world. I mean, you might get very lucky and have a huge budget and all the time in the world, but unless you count on winning a lottery it's not happening. Deal with it, it's about making money with the code, not vice versa.

2\. That one little extra thing you decided by yourself to code turned into 2 bugs, 4 feature requests, missing documentation and a duplicate tool library since another developer / team was working on something similar. In other words: don't go solo.

3\. Getting shit done is the number one quality of a developer.

4\. This is more towards designers but applies to developers as well: The customers' opinion about our UI/UX comes first, your opinion second.

<comment><USER4> 1\. Totally agree, you've gotta work with constraints and engineers need to work towards generating revenue for the business as the primary goal.

2\. 100% agree.

3\. Getting shit done usually means things done shitly. It's the point you made I disagree with the most, whilst I understand the sentiment is towards engineers that complete tasks I feel that usually expressed this way (and coming from an engineering manager perspective) is that they favour the happy path engineer who completes tasks quickly.

Need authentication in your app? They'll have it done quickly and it'll work for the manager happy path and they'll already be onto the next task. To the manager and whatever task tracker you have this engineer will be the 'one getting shit done' but to the team and velocity they'll be the one leaving exploits, broken functionality and zero tests/documentation.

I'm guessing your sentiment was more along the lines of 'developers who pragmatically take on tech debt to deliver crucial features earlier to impact the business bottom line whilst planning to pay off the debt in a timely manner'. Long winded I know :)

4\. This can be tricky, which customers to please and follow? A good designer allowed to come up with a consistent vision will most of the time be more productive/pleasing than following the changing opinions of your customer base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Couple of things I can rattle off:

It takes a lot of work to make a technology production-ready. I've seen MySQL go from being derided as a toy database, to powering some of the largest, highest scale consumer apps out there. It took years of work from both the core teams, and many contributions out there from people working with it every day to make that possible. It's important for engineers to know their history when they pitch the latest tech they read about on HN and ask why they can't use it on a new project at work. The fact that you can get it up and running isn't enough, you need to be able to keep it running. If you aren't willing to put in that work, then don't pitch the tech.

Secondly, emergent architectures are often more resilient than deliberate architectures. Frameworks and platforms extracted out of real products tend to have more longevity behind them than those that are deliberately designed to solve a multitude of needs from day one. If it doesn't feel right to bring a library or platform in to solve your problem (rather than build something yourself), then don't do it. You might find yourself spending more time fighting the platform or bending it to your will than by building something by yourself.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are five things I wish developers with whom I work understood:

1) At the end of the way, we're a business. The purpose of the business is to make money. Not work on cool things, not release a cool product, but to make money. It's not about experimenting with the latest, greatest technology all the time. If we don't make money, you don't have a job.

2) I'm juggling a lot of priorities, and I've _always_ got the bigger picture in mind. The tasks I assign you might seem dumb or not useful in the moment, but trust me, either someone is _paying us to do this_ or gets us closer to a goal on our roadmap.

3) I believe as engineers that we have a unique skillset among most people in our respective industries: we can automate repetitive tasks. Automate all the things. Most of the time, it will make all of our lives better.

4) As a corollary to #3, I wish more developers were willing to adopt a mindset of being willing to shoulder more work to make their colleagues lives easier. In 95% of cases, I would rather that my team take on the burden of doing X, Y, or Z, because I know we can automate it. Not only does this earn goodwill among the rest of our company, but it makes us look like absolute powerhouses of engineering.

5) Delete the phrase "it works from me" from your vocabulary. People don't complain about things that work for them. If it works for you but not them, then there are two possibilities: there's a bug or the user is doing something wrong. _Always_ assume that there is a bug, unless proven otherwise. It's just good, professional communication policy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Get developers more into creative "what if" thinking.

Quite a few are like robots that needs to be told what to do to the letter.</comment>


Mobile 5G Specs Announced - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/5g-imt-2020-specs/ <comment><USER2> How utterly pointless. We don't need 5G; we still don't have 4G deployed that widely, and even there it isn't all that useful because mobile data costs in the US are ridiculous. This isn't going to change that.

<comment><USER3> _This isn 't going to change that._

I doubt it's intended to. It doesn't make sense to restrict people from improving technology and providing specifications ahead of full adoption. I'm pretty sure 5G devices, when they're available, will fall back if 5G isn't available where they are. Depending where I am, I've seen my phone go the full gamut from No Service, Edge, 4G, and 4G LTE while I'm traveling.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Interactive deep convnet visualization for Keras and Tensorflow - <AUTHOR> https://jakebian.github.io/quiver/ <comment><USER2> That looks useful for getting insights into what is happening in a NN.

What is it visualizing in a convolutional layer, does it average all the channels, or select just one?

<comment><USER3> As slick as this kind of thing looks, I don't think it _does_ help much to see raw filters on an image-by-image basis. The kind of insights that I think are more important are the abstract ones, like the recent paper about universal adversarial perturbations and the geometry of the decision boundary.

Visualizations can help, but more in the sense of rapidly iterating through bespoke visualizations to generate and test hypotheses. And to do that efficiently you don't need a slick tool that does one kind of visualization, you need a slick 'grammar' to efficiently build new visualizations with, Bret Victor style.

<comment><USER4> Do you have a link to the paper you are referring to?

<comment><USER3> [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401v1.pdf)

Sorry, I have to ask.. any relation to Dan Fortunato? Maybe that's just a really common name in Boston.

<comment><USER5> No relation... I think Fortunato is pretty rare. Also: hey Tali! :)

<comment><USER6> No... He was referring to me! I'm from Boston...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be nice to also have a way to visualize filters (eg. [https://blog.keras.io/how-convolutional-neural-networks- see-...](https://blog.keras.io/how-convolutional-neural-networks-see-the- world.html))

</comment><comment><USER8> I created an account just to say that this looks really fantastic. Thanks for creating this! I'm looking forward to steady improvements in neural network tooling, and it's people like yourself that keep that train moving forward.

</comment><comment><USER9> License file missing, but setup.py seems to imply MIT.</comment>


Google to Demote Sites With 'High Number' of Copyright Complaints - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2408341,00.asp

<comment><USER2> This is ridiculous considering millions of sites are powered by user content. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and even GOOGLE themselves have a very high number of copyright complaints and of course Google will make exceptions for them. Is it just me or is Google taking over the world?

<comment><USER3> It's either Google the MAFIAA. Neither are great choices.

Hopefully this cuts into the number of bogus claims made?</comment></comment>


Database Lab – Full-size staging databases as a service - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/postgres-ai/database-lab <comment><USER2> My advice - go all the way into RDS territory.

This is a killer feature. But it is hard to adopt it by itself, while being on RDS, which is what most people end up doing.

If you can build a management layer that gives better-than-RDS features ...while allowing me to BYOB my own cloud, you are on your way to win.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's necessary, and it might even detract a bit.

At my last company, we built a very similar tool in-house, using LVM w/ thin snapshots, instead of ZFS. The database snapshot host would receive streaming logical replication from our UAT and Staging environments.

Users (developers, QA, etc) could then take an instant snapshot of a multi-TB database, provide a Git hash/branch, and we'd instantly clone the DB, spin up the application and migrate it to the latest version.

That worked great, and the same thing could work with RDS. You could use something like AWS Database Migration Service to replicate from your RDS installation to your Database Lab host.

This way, you get to keep RDS for your actual test and staging environments, but you get streaming replication into your Database Manager instance for Dev/QA.

<comment><USER2> > _You could use something like AWS Database Migration Service to replicate > from your RDS installation to your Database Lab host._

my guess is that then your market will be restricted to those who are already running their own databases. Because RDS restore-from-snapshot is good enough to not go through the DMS hackery (which is exceedingly nasty) and probably will negate some of the "instant" features that you have.

Just my $0.02 though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love the idea, but is this essentially then just a faster version of _pg_dump_?

      pg_dump -C -h remotehost -U remoteuser dbname | psql -h localhost -U localuser dbname

<comment><USER5> Well, not really. Two key differences:

1) dump/restore approach is one of "thick cloning" methods. It will take a really significant amount of time. Roughly, thick cloning speed for modern hardware and networks is somewhat ~1 TiB / hour just for transferring over network and writing to disk. Additionally, in the case of dump/restore, the timing will depend on the number of indexes that need to be built, materialized views to be refreshed, etc.

2) Dump/restore is "logical copying", it means that physical structure is not preserved. Logically, you'll get the same data. Physically – a completely different database. Bloat is gone, indexes are "fresh and good", and so on.

With Database Lab, unless you're on RDS, initial copying is preferably done using some "physical" methods (pg_basebackup, or just rsync, or – the best option – restoration from WAL-G/pgBackRest/Barman/etc backups). The physical structure is preserved. You have an identical copy of the original database. Then you request "thin clones", it really takes a couple of seconds for a multi-terabyte database. And can do various kinds of performance troubleshooting and experiments before you deploy your changes to production. Request 5 thin clones and check your idea 5 times, each time adjusting it a little bit. This is what usually really needed in development.

<comment><USER4> Ahh okay, that makes sense. I wasn't aware that using different methods of copying + backing up data had tangible effects on it later. Super interesting, and vital if you're looking to gather accurate data from experiments.

By the way, I recognized you guys from the other tool you publish, Nancy. While I don't have a direct usecase for it myself, I thought the idea was super valuable as well.

I am a huge Postgres guy (did you know you can build an entire web app in JUST Postgres?[0]) so I had bookmarked a couple of your projects.

Thank you for the response, you guys do some fantastic work.

[0]: [https://github.com/aquametalabs/aquameta](https://github.com/aquametalabs/aquameta)

<comment><USER5> Thank you! I'll check out aquameta, looks interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Question: Can this clone a database, but also apply certain operations to it?

I work at a small company, and currently we clone our production database to our dev machines for testing. However certain information in the database is sensitive and we don't want to include it on our dev machines. (This specific sensitive data is also stored in an encrypted format and the key is not included, but we'd still prefer it not included).

Basically I'd like to be able to clone the database, and run some SQL to replace the data in some tables with some mock data. But I can't think of an easy way to do this without cloning the database, starting a temporary one, run the sql, then clone it again - and distribute that final build to the devs.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't appear to be able to at this point, no. Just clones the existing DB.

There are masking tools out there that can mask data from production in-flight before dropping it into a dev environment for testing (so you can get the same data with the sensitive parts changed), but this doesn't appear to be one of them. I know people who work in the field, it's a tough nut to crack to keep the database good enough to test with while making sure you don't have devs running around with customer data on their laptop/server.

<comment><USER6> > There are masking tools out there that can mask data from production

Thank you so much! "Masking" was the phrase I needed to find some potential solutions! I wasn't able to find much before, that points me in the correct direction. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> There are various approaches here, and there are some FOSS tools that you can use.

Some links:

\- [https://blog.taadeem.net/english/2019/01/03/8_anonymization_...](https://blog.taadeem.net/english/2019/01/03/8_anonymization_strategies_with_postgres) – description of methods, and a tool for Postgres, postgresql_anonymizer

\- [https://habr.com/en/company/yandex/blog/485096/](https://habr.com/en/company/yandex/blog/485096/) – not for Postgres, it's for ClickHouse (open-source DBMS for analytics) but covers the topic very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would it be practical to use this in an automated regression testing context to give each test its own copy of the database that it could mutate, check results, then throw away?

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks like open source Delphix using Postgres. It even seems to be using ZFS under the hood.

Any comments from people using it? I designed a CI system using Delphix at an old client and it was awesome!

<comment><USER10> I saw them contributing often to ZFS on FreeBSD, what is their product? Is it equivalent to NetApp?

<comment><USER9> Not seen NetApp but from a quick Google it seems to be more intelligent database management.

Delphix is more using the power of ZFS and Copy On Write to give you instant database copies with minimal storage footprint. We used it to give every developer their own Database that they could do anything to and not worry about locks etc. Refreshing to a more recent copy was a very quick operation and required a developer running one command. Had a nice web interface and a REST interface for automation.

I'd recommend it but with the caveat that I've no idea how much it costs as it was a Dev thing a client was encouraging use of. Was really nice to work with though.

<comment><USER10> Ah, so this indeed looks like Open Source version of Delphix.

As for NetApp, probably the do other things but most popular is their NAS which internally uses Copy On Write filesystem similar to ZFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This helps a lot in developing and testing for postgres.

Maybe that's one of the tech which "John Carmack" meant when he said sophisticated tech is indistinguishable from magic.

<comment><USER12> John Carmack was not the first to say those words, see [Clarke's law]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does such a thing exist for MySQL? If so I'd appreciate a link. We have weekly snapshots that we use for development, but it would be amazing to have a way to reset/throw away any changes quickly, especially to repeatedly test a specific use-case against some prod data.

</comment><comment><USER14> Snowflake does something similar since it's a metadata store and cloning is mainly copying the metadata. It does scale with data volumes though so it doesn't seem like it's be as quick.

Really great idea here!

</comment><comment><USER15> A bit tangential, but this reminded of an idea I had when I was learning about containerization and overlayfs. Would postgres work with data stored in an overlay and allow a similar workflow?

</comment><comment><USER16> What are people using these days for data sanitization? I.e. to remove PII data from dev snapshots

<comment><USER17> Short answer: Different databases.

We have PII, analytics, catalog, transaction etc databases. We only let people clone non-sensitive databases. Others are cloned only at schema level and data is left out.

This also allows us to move and scale independently across different applications. But that's just a symptom of this design.

There are some complications with this approach but it's a trade off and we try to come on top using foreign-data-wrapper approach and using a database application router for read and writes. We have open sourced a Django db router which routes queries on the basis of tags/app name/table name etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this just using zfs to copy the data directory? Why do o need a tool to do that?</comment>


When a cold case is solved, why can't internet sleuths move on? - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/4994/when-a-cold-case-is-solved-why-cant-internet-sleuths-move-on <comment><USER2> I once unsolved a murder I discovered online, causing very unwelcome consequences for the victim's family. So I can relate to some aspects of this story.

First, trying to solve a cold-case can utterly consume you in a way that is impossible to truly comprehend unless you've lived it. It haunted my dreams and waking hours, even ones when all I wanted to do was think about something else for long enough to relax.

Second, no matter how good your intentions or how just your cause, there will be people who resent your work. It could be law enforcement or forensic experts, who don't want an "amateur" to expose their mistakes and oversights. It could be the victim's family, who don't want to revisit the loss of their loved one, even if the reality they've made peace with is built on falsehoods and errors.

I was fortunate that my work freed an innocent man who was serving life in prison, which retroactively validated my otherwise bizarre decision to start obsessing over a 15-year-old murder.

It would be really, REALLY difficult to develop a similar obsession, feel like your time and effort produced a breakthrough, and then not get any closure. That doesn't excuse their behavior, but I understand the emotional frustration.

<comment><AUTHOR> _my work freed an innocent man who was serving life in prison_

If you are allowed to, can you share the story?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I didn't mean to imply the story was a secret. It was the murder of Michelle O'Keefe, for which Sgt. Raymond Jennings was wrongfully convicted.

I wrote about Ray's exoneration in the Washington Post: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-jeff-sessions- ca...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-jeff-sessions-can-offer- justice-to-the-wrongfully- convicted/2017/04/12/ea3b3a3e-0e42-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html)

There's more details in a prior post on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760)

NBC News also did an episode of Dateline about it: [https://www.instagram.com/p/BMnDkslA3wi/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BMnDkslA3wi/)

<comment><USER3> How did you train yourself to solve cases? I cant help but let the hacker mindset speak for all of us and ask how did you "disrupt" this case, how did you learn, self teach? yourself what's necessary to solve a case? What were the legal channel you took to get someone exonerated? What hunch inspired you to investigate in the first place? And why that case? Surely there are many cases where the evidence just isnt compelling? What steps did you and your father take to go about getting this man out? How did you convince the DA?

<comment><USER2> These are great questions, but I feel awkward hijacking a thread that isn't really about my experience. The Dateline NBC episode does a great job telling the whole story, including how I got involved. My Washington Post article explains how we persuaded the DA's office.

I am an autodidact, so diving into new subjects is something I naturally enjoy doing. The obsessive focus and intellectual flexibility that helped me in other areas, like computer programming and missile-defense research, worked just as well for forensics and criminal-profiling.

One example that sticks out is how I was able to refute the opinion of the FBI's top criminal profiler by going through and reading the reference text that is the equivalent of the DSM, but for behavioral analysis. He was listed as a co-author, so it would have been easy to assume that he was applying the standards correctly, but I was able to show that his thesis did not match the evidence.

The hardest question to answer is "why this case?" It is as close to a miracle as I've ever experienced ... some force I can't explain caused me to stay up late one night and watch an old TV-special about the murder on my computer, even though I don't watch TV and had zero prior interest in the true-crime genre.

The words of the accused professing his innocence before God were so powerful that, even as an atheist at the time, I felt compelled to look into the case more.

Being used as an instrument to correct a horrible injustice made me reconsider my belief in a higher power.

<comment><USER3> Well congrats man.

That's impressive and im glad it was such an intellectual as well as spiritual journey for you.

Teach me, or share with me some of your self lerning tips. You seem to be a high functioning autodidact, whats your method? Where do you get your knowledge? sources?

Also, what is DSM?

Missile-defense research? That sounds impressive, how would someone even get started on that??

And now forensics And criminal profiling. Now that you have a working proficiency in these subjects, what would you recommend others use to learn these subjects?

<comment><USER4> DSM is the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders [0]. This is the reference text that describes and classifies mental disorders

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really interesting:

 _It was then that the realization set in in the subreddit: after all these years, after hundreds of thousands of hours of theorizing and plotting and thinking and organizing, they might never find out the true identity of Lyle Stevik. His identity was known to the police, and to DNA Doe, but it was never revealed to the subreddit. And it might never be; as of press time, the family has declined to share the information._

It seems like there's two ways to look at this. The first is... the subreddit didn't materially contribute to solving the case, apart from putting up $1500 for DNA sequencing. The critical research was done by a specialist volunteer org, and law enforcement located and contacted the family.

It seems like being able to identify folks using genetic ancestry is a really valuable service; it also seems like a good thing that, to the average redditor, this service is a black box that produces a single bit of output. If the person (family, in this case) who has been identified doesn't want their name to be public, that should be their choice.

So, that all is working as intended. But at the same time...

In 20 years, nobody ever put up the money for DNA testing. Why would they? There must be millions of cases like this, and for most of that time sequencing cost a lot more than $1500.

The price is still going down, so _eventually_ someone would have done this. Maybe once the cost of sequencing hit $50, or $1. I don't know, at what point do we start DNA testing every single cold case Doe, since forever? Probably not for a long, long time. Maybe long enough to be forgotten entirely.

The folks on the subreddit _cared_ , is my point, when no one else did. They picked this person to care about, out of all the unsolved mysteries to choose from. I don't think there's any particular explanation; he just happened to catch their fancy, and then they spent a lot of time thinking about him. In a weird digital-era way, he was kind of their friend.

And it makes a lot of sense that there would be some shock and isolation at having their care rejected, having their "friendship" invalidated. I can get that. And I kind of think that if the family grokked how much these folks cared about their person, and how little anyone else did, their response might be a little different.

<comment><USER6> What you say makes sense, but no one asked them to care. Further, those feelings do not in any way give them the right to intrude into the life of a family they've never even met. It's a classic case of "none of your business."

But perhaps some still feel otherwise. What happens if some stranger starts "caring" about their depression and anger over their "loss"? There's a real problem when people cannot recognize that some boundaries should not be crossed.

<comment><USER5> That seems stronger than what I'm saying. The folks who can't let it go, who are still trying to circumvent the family's privacy, they obviously are motivated by something besides concern for the victim and his kin. I don't have any sympathy for them.

But I think the point I'm trying to make is that there's a lot of distance between "right to intrude" and "none of your business". The fact is that the identity of this person _was_ their business, for a decade, simply because it wasn't the business of anyone else.

Of course there's no right to know the name of a stranger. But I am glad they made it their business — I'm glad _someone_ cared — and I'm sorry the outcome hurt them. It's not any more complicated than that.

<comment><USER6> In hindsight, I think my strong reaction is directed more toward those who want to intrude than toward you.

I get that a lot of people invested a lot of time into this, but there's a suggestion in TFA that implies that this effort merits some special privileges, whether that inlcudes knowing the identity of the suicide or some other kind of recognition. It doesn't.

It was a voluntary act, perhaps a kind act, perhaps not from the perspective of the family. The implication is that the family either _wanted to know_ or _ought to have_ wanted to know. We have no information to evaluate those judgments, and there's enough gray there that it's irritating as an assumption.

The reality is that it is morally no different than participating in a subreddit on cats or submitting articles and commenting on them on HN. We're all voluntarily spending time on the internet rather than doing something else.

<comment><USER5> I hear where you're coming from, and we seem agreed that there's nothing internet sleuths are _entitled_ to. I do think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this:

 _The implication is that the family either wanted to know or ought to have wanted to know. We have no information to evaluate those judgments, and there 's enough gray there that it's irritating as an assumption._

I think if someone has died — even if it was a fairly long time ago — it's safe to presume that there are people somewhere who still care about them, still think about them, would like to know what happened. From a state of ignorance about who those people are, I think it's compassionate to try to let them know, especially when no one else is trying.

And naturally, the same compassion instructs one to respect their wishes after that point. Again, all working as intended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if there's a word for it, but this is a common problem with any group, institution, or organization: it is very difficult for them to voluntarily shut down once they have achieved their purpose, even if the mission ended in total success.

<comment><USER8> I don't know if there's a single word, but a closely related concept is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > And, probably most, they want to know why he did what he did — hole up at a > hotel in the middle of nowhere, and end his life. And that is almost > certainly an impossible question, one that no amount of internet sleuthing > will answer.

That's a strange statement. Outside of "can you ever really know another person, man?" there are plenty of suicides and attempts that are very straightforward to explain.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone watched the recent cluster-fuck that was internet sleuths solving the murder of XXXTentacion?

<comment><USER11> I heard about the murder but not the cluster-fuck. Was it another Boston Bomber situation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For all the legal scholars:

1\. Aren't death records public?

2\. Would anyone else have a claim to knowledge of the deceased's real name? (ex: if "Lyle Stevik" didn't pay his hotel bill)

<comment><USER13> Records are public, but the problem is one of searching for a small needle in a large haystack: ~7k people die in the United States every day.

I can think of a couple ways to narrow that down and get to a _probable_ answer, but they all would take money, manual effort, or both.

To your second question, any debts owed by the deceased would be paid out of his estate. There's no guarantee that creditors would actually bother, this long after the debts were incurred, or that an inquisitive third party would be able to usefully find records of the debt being pursued.

<comment><USER12> Interesting, thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People like to be know it alls. The internet amplifies it.

</comment><comment><USER15> pored over _

<comment><USER6> One of the more common (and grating) errors in contemporary writing -- twice in this article alone. I always envision the subject pouring something disgusting over the object.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That was interesting, but could it be a disguised ad for DNA Doe?

</comment><comment><USER17> Mobs of internet people with too much time on their hands will never be a force for good, ever.

<comment><USER18> Weren't they, in this case? Somebody died and wasn't identified, and they helped get this person identified.

<comment><USER17> If you had a missing loved one would you invite them to solve it?

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't even have to—they volunteered, and even paid the money for the DNA test themselves.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Search Flickr inside Photoshop - <AUTHOR> http://pictura.madebysource.com/ <comment><USER2> This is going to be super useful. Thanks a bunch!</comment>


Why Google A.I. is the last user interface - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3129098/artificial-intelligence/why-google-a-i-is-the-last-user-interface.html <comment><USER2> Guess I won't be using computers then because google doesn't understand a word I say.

So long, it was nice knowing you all.

<comment><USER3> Term "understanding" will be banned by then, replaced with "backpropagation". And if you fail to backpropagate whatever you are told, you will be pronounced a fascist on the spot.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Want to study SSL, HTTPS, and the works. Where to start? - <AUTHOR> I want to study SSL, HTTPS, CAs, certificates, installation and management of certificates, and other things that I probably don't know about this domain.<p>Where do I start? Any advice as well as references to blogs, books or papers is appreciated. I am fairly technically competent, so technically heavy references are okay. <comment><USER2> I recommend beginning at the fundamentals. For example here's a video that walks through Diffie Hellman, so that anybody can follow, you can probably sprint through it, but by taking it slow they avoid accidentally forgetting anything important.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEBfamv- _do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEBfamv-_do)

Grasping the fundamentals means that when it comes to policy decisions (e.g. in the management of certificates) you can see what the consequences of a particular decision are, rather than just hoping that whoever proposed that policy knew what they were doing.

For example, I think a lot of people today use Certificate Signing Request (CSR) files without understanding them at all. But once you have a grounding in the underlying elements you can see at once what the CSR does, and why it's necessary without needing to have that spelled out separately.

Or another example, understanding what was and was not risky as a result of the known weakness of SHA-1. I saw a lot of scare-mongering by security people who saw the SHA-1 weakness as somehow meaning impossible things were now likely, but it only affected an important but quite narrow type of usage, people who understood that could make better, more careful decisions without putting anybody at risk.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm more of a learning by doing person. Here's three exercises that you'll learn a lot doing:

1) [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/) \- try to get an A+. It's not important to in most cases in practice, but you'll learn a lot getting there. Their rating guide is also handy: [https://github.com/ssllabs/research/wiki/SSL-Server- Rating-G...](https://github.com/ssllabs/research/wiki/SSL-Server-Rating-Guide)

2) MITM yourself. I've done this using Charles, you can do it with any HTTP proxy that lets you rewrite requests on the fly - I hear Fiddler is popular. MITM yourself and try changing the page for an HTTP site. Then try doing it on a website that is part HTTP part HTTPS (e.g. HTTPS for login page for example) and "steal your password". Try again on a website that redirects from HTTP to HTTPS using a 301 but does not have HSTS. Finally try on a site with HSTS (nb: you won't manage this one). Congratulations, you now truly understand why HSTS is important and what it does better than most people!

3) Set up HTTPS on a website. You've probably already done this. In which case maybe do it with LetsEncrypt for an extra challenge?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome. I prefer to learn by doing too. It is way more effective and practical. Thanks for the advice. These steps, along with a book to read on the topic, should work very well! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out High Performance Browser Networking. Ilya Grigorik is a very smart cookie and will take you right up to the present day state-of-the-art:

[https://hpbn.co/](https://hpbn.co/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a sweet resource. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To study SSL, HTTPS, CAs including installation and management of SSL certificates, You can consider following references:

[https://www.sslshopper.com/what-is-ssl.html](https://www.sslshopper.com/what- is-ssl.html)

[https://www.cheapsslshop.com/blog](https://www.cheapsslshop.com/blog)

[https://www.whichssl.com/what-is-ssl.html](https://www.whichssl.com/what-is- ssl.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I learn best by example, and I have learned so much just by evaluating and implementing hashicorp vault: [https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/pki/index.html](https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/pki/index.html)

It doesn't hold your hand at all, but it gives you a nice "task" to accomplish. Reading up on all the terminology and exactly how and why it works was really fun.

</comment><comment><USER7> I hear good things about _Bulletproof SSL /TLS_ by Ivan Ristić:

[https://www.feistyduck.com/books/bulletproof-ssl-and- tls/](https://www.feistyduck.com/books/bulletproof-ssl-and-tls/)

There was also a nice web page presenting all kinds of PKI concepts that I came across a few years ago but haven't been able to find since then. :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> That book should cover pretty much all that I am concerned with. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Startup Guild - <AUTHOR> http://startupguild.net/

<comment><USER2> Good.

What is it? I won't sign up without knowing what it's really about.</comment>


Flojack Dead on Arrival - <AUTHOR> http://flomio.com/forums/topic/flojack-dead-on-arrival/#post-5031

<comment><USER2> Paragraph 1: It's likely your fault, luser

Paragraph 2: If it's NOT your fault, stop whining about the shipping costs. Do you know how expensive it is for us to pay for that stuff?

Paragraph 3: If we made stuff that didn't break we wouldn't make money. So we make stuff that breaks.

Paragraph 4: We've ditched this anyhow. Why are we still talking about it?

OK, maybe "NFC ubiquity" is crazy hard, but so, apparently, is customer service.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good summary. We definitely underestimated the cost of customer service. I'd say that after a year of having our KS campaign, we've spent 40% of our time keeping people informed. The irony is that with that time we could have easily added the quality and polish that most customers are upset about.

<comment><USER3> That's not irony, that's bad decisionmaking. It's akin to saying that it's ironic that the cost of the cleanup at Fukushima outstrips the amount of money saved by not building it well enough to withstand a large tsunami.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe so. We're not building nuclear power plants though, but NFC readers for iOS. We're doing it more to bootstrap an industry than to sell widgets. The mistake was to not consistently reiterate that message throughout the campaign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone had an experience with KS where:

\- the product shipped on time

\- the product worked as advertised

\- the founding team didn't go overboard

In all the Kickstarters I've seen, it seems like the founders lose interest in actually delivering a product after they get the money. They run up against the challenges of support and manufacturing, and they seem to just skip on to the next thing because that's what they enjoyed in the first place - having a cool idea and getting it funded. Sometimes the next cool idea is just scope creep for the current product ("Sorry we're 3 months behind on shipping, but now it can also mine Bitcoins and chop salads!").

My point being, I don't think KS will ever work for technology, because the funding comes at exactly the point where the project stops being fun. Besides the guilt of providing a product to backers, there's not a ton of incentive for a small team to keep building after they get funded, so they'll just delay and peter out, or punt on key objectives and move on.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that it's a tough deal, one that's filled with unknowns. If you overestimate, you price things out of the range of what the market will bear and you get no backers. If you underestimate, you get pissed off customers. What motivates us is not the money we raised or the guilt of delivering, but the potential of what we're doing. KS has done a good job of giving us an audience to speak to. An audience to educate on what we can do. Without this connection it's likely R&D projects like ours would take much longer to surface, even though their impact on society is a good one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks like they've been sideswiped by iOS 7 changes that make their product infeasible. A common problem of proprietary APIs :(

Also, software people developing hardware seem not to have realised that it's _much_ harder to fix problems after shipping, which sadly makes good quality small run hardware very rare.

</comment><comment><USER6> >We cherish every dollar we get from our community and would not do it justice to spend it unwisely. So yes, we expect you to cover the postage back to us.

I'm not sure I would've worded it this way. There is a lot of negative connotation is those two sentences, and some of it is in reference to the character of the company founders.

Good luck, and I hope you have less customers inserting their batteries wrong in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting.. how would you have worded it? I mean we charged KS folks $39 per device, which pretty much worked out to our COGS. Covering postage was something we included as a good faith in our early backers and the patience they've had with us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> charging, or not, for postage for the (hopefully) 99%+ of people who don't need a replacement is something that you factor in to your costs, and tell people upfront so it factors into their decision. your call.

charging for subsequent postage for the (hopefully) <1% of people who have a problem and who need your love and attention is a really bad idea.

because - even ignoring the terrible PR from forcing someone to spend cash because of your product issues - you lose the best friend you have: a backer with a problem who's WILLING AND HAPPY to actually work through this problem with you and help you fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our quality yields from the factory were more like 90%:10% but we did basic testing before shipping to reach the 100% target. First customer defects were covered but we quickly discovered these were user error which led to our current policy.

I feel Kickstarter backers of hardware projects should have a certain sense of tolerance. If they are expecting "commercial grade" products they should stick to buying retail as we're angling to test a concept and knock out the kinks with early backers.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about? - <AUTHOR> Has to be applications of machine learning for me. <comment><USER2> Regrowing teeth from your own stem cells - but that seems on the same timeline as fusion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Improvements in construction.

Affordable housing that is really affordable (ex. subsidized is not affordable.) Being able to build nuclear power plants on schedule. Things like that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Flying cars. Open-rotor engines. SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System. Skylon/SABRE rocket engine.

</comment><comment><USER5> Self-driving cars obviously. They will change so much! More practical applications of gene editing.

<comment><USER4> Definitely yes self driving cars - I'm sick of road rage. Also hopefully more efficient petrol and electric will dispose of filthy diesel.

There's also some interesting developments in improving maritime transport efficiency.</comment></comment>


Apple Is Set to Announce Two iPhones - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/technology/apple-is-set-to-announce-two-iphones.html

<comment><USER2> "cheaper version of the soon-to-be-outdated iPhone 5, coming in a variety of colors, with a plastic case instead of aluminum. "

I somehow feel that Steve Jobs wouldn't have compromised like that.

<comment><USER3> Don't most iPhone owners use a case? The shiny beauty of the phone is really wasted.

<comment><USER4> People use cases because iPhone is fairly susceptible for screen cracking on drops. In that case, it costs $600 for replacement. Search for iphone screen cracked and you would see how popular this search term is and how many businesses have mushroomed around this.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, the last time my 4S screen broke, I got the whole phone replaced at an Apple Store for $200. What's more, they recently started replacing just the screens in-store for $150.

[http://9to5mac.com/2013/06/06/apples-149-in-store-iphone- scr...](http://9to5mac.com/2013/06/06/apples-149-in-store-iphone-screen- replacement-service-and-the-machine-that-makes-it-possible/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Still, even if the price is fairly high, a cheaper iPhone should appeal to a subset of people in developing countries who flaunt gadgets as status symbols, like jewelry."

As opposed to the subset of people in developed countries that do exactly the same ?

<comment><USER7> Pretty sure the iPhone stopped being a status symbol in the US when everyone got one.

However, I'm sure it's still used as a status symbol in the US when you get your 7 year old kid one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This would be in effect a statement by Apple that there is nothing much left to innovate in Smartphone arena. Only way to beat competition is by price difference. It used to be that every year new iPhone release was actually exciting making me crave the latest model. After 4S, new innovations have been basically faster CPU, thinner body and resolution. The improvements are on border line justifiable to be even called "incremental". And still, there are so many things left to do with Smartphones. Here is my nerdy wishlist for iPhone (please add on yours too :)):

* Ability to use phone as walkie-talkie.

* Weather sensor

* FM HD radio

* NFC chip

* Built-in programmable FPGA

* Ability to put out digital, analog signals from iPhone (turning it to Arduino)

* Higher precision gyroscope and accelerometer

* Infrared LED

* Ability to run apps in background listening mode

* Infrared 2nd camera

* RF transmitter/receiver (900 MGHz range)

* Pen input

* Pressure sensitivity

* Continuously dimmable screen (all the way to 0)

</comment><comment><USER8> You know what's amazing about Apple? The iPhone 4 is still a fantastic phone. I use it every day and it runs great. It's what 3 years old now? It might be hard to sell consumers on how great a 3 year old phone is, but gosh, it's still pretty fantastic.

I can understand why they would want to do the 5C, if only so they can get customers and developers unified around the larger device size, and so that they have a newer product that people are willing to pay for.

Still, it's astounding just how good the iPhone 4 still is, especially in light of the other phones that launched around the same time - the original Galaxy S and the Motorola Droid six months before that).

<comment><USER9> In your opinion, what is it about Android phones that were contemporaneous to the iPhone 4 to be inferior in quality?

<comment><USER10> I'm the biggest Android fan out there and would only own an Android device ... but they don't stand the test of time as well (especially if you're not into the ROM scene). An Android phone from that era with stock software is going to be very very slow compared to an iPhone 4. I don't know why, but it's true.

<comment><USER7> Does it slow down over time (why?) or was it slower to begin with?

<comment><USER11> Prior to Jelly Bean (when "Project Butter" brought heavy optimizations and enhanced GPU acceleration to the UI), Android definitely exhibited some interface lag. Combined with older hardware, the lag makes the older handsets age less than gracefully. I'm optimistic that the more recent versions of the OS will change that for the better going forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> poor man's iphone.

Would Ferrari manufacture a poor-man's car?

<comment><USER13> Actually in the world of cars, most expensive luxury car brands are manufactured or owned by the "poor man's" version. Fiat owns Ferrari. Honda owns Acura. Tata owns Jaguar.

Summing this move into "poor man's" is just too simplistic.

Daimler manufacture Mercedes and Smart. Smart isn't a poor man's mercedes

<comment><USER7> Yea but they segregate the brands, which is what I think the OP is getting at.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. Starting a new brand would take a long time to push, whereas using iPhone and Apple names for their cheaper phone automatically guarantees sales but might hurt them in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a little skeptical of breaking technology news in an article that refers to Tim Cook as "Timothy D. Cook."

<comment><USER14> Why???

Anyway, FYI, using people's complete formal names is a long-standing editorial policy at the NY Times and some other established papers. They referred to Steve Jobs as Steven P. Jobs, too.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> further title to this would be something along the lines of "the state of and movement in the Global Mobile Market"

There's like 10 companies in here I have either never heard of or not heard from in a good while.</comment>


Ask HN: Java Scheduler in a cloud environment - <AUTHOR> What schedulers are people using and enjoying? After some preliminary research it seems as if the two most appropriate choices would either be Quartz or Obsidian,
Quartz doesn't promise a lot, but it also appears low-level enough for one to build on top of it chaining, failover, and building one's own execution context. These are not pros, but rather a statement that its drawbacks can be worked around. Not looking forward to having to include JDBC job store (already have another DB-backend for other stuff) and a time-sync service just to get clustering up but I'm not surprised that it is required either.
Obsidian on the other hand seems more feature complete, I'm not sure why no-code, no-xml job configuration is spouted so strongly by its advocates as a feature as I'd rather be able to version control things but one appears to be able to do everything programmatically if one wishes. The wiki isn't complete, http://obsidianscheduler.com/wiki/Admin_Job_History#Job_History_Details and unlike Quartz there seems to be fewer resources available online on "How to do X in Obsidian".
The licensing fees aren't too enticing either.
The dream scheduler would support failover out-of-the-box, and be designed for high availability. It would have a REST API (Obsidian has it, one can be built on top of Quartz), it should be possible to chain jobs, and it should also be able to consume system events so that one could phrase jobs such as "run this job sometime after midnight as long as this event has happened" <comment><USER2> What are the inconveniences behind using a JDBCstore? Wouldn't it be fairly simple to plug it into AWS's RDS or Azure's SQL Database?</comment>


Is this a reasonable way to implement React/Flux with Backbone? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shaohua/todomvc-react-flux-backbone

<comment><AUTHOR> Trying to migrate large Backbone apps to React/Flux. Need help on best practices to implement the Flux architecture. The team is very familiar with Backbone, hence trying to re-use Backbone.Model and Backbone.Events. However, I couldn't see a clear way of implementing store.waitFor() without introducing a promise library...

[https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/examples/todom...](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/examples/todomvc- flux/js/dispatcher/Dispatcher.js)

waitFor: function(/ _array_ / promiseIndexes, / _function_ / callback) {

        var selectedPromises = _promises.filter(function(/*object*/ _, /*number*/ j) {
          return promiseIndexes.indexOf(j) !== -1;
        });

        Promise.all(selectedPromises).then(callback);

      }</comment>