Ask YC: What are some of the Python blogs you read? - <AUTHOR>

What are some of the Python blogs you read? <comment><USER2> <http://planet.python.org/> is pretty much all you need, plus project-specific feeds such as <http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/>

<http://www.learningpython.com/> and <http://thinkhole.org/wp/> are great reads for beginners, but neither one have been updated very much in recent months.

<comment><USER3> There are actually two planet python's.

The official one: <http://planet.python.org/> The unofficial one: <http://planetpython.org/>

both are great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Guido ~ <http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=guido>

David Mertz ~ <http://gnosis.cx/publish/tech_index_cp.html>

Uche Ogbuji ~ <http://www.xml.com/pub/au/84> & <http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/>

Mark Pilgrim ~ <http://diveintomark.org/>

David Goodger ~ <http://python.net/~goodger/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Check out <http://python.alltop.com>. It hasn't been up for that long, but it seems like a pretty solid repository of python info; I haven't seen anything else this comprehensive yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Old school (news) but still going: <http://www.pythonware.com/daily/>

IronPython a bit more lately: <http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/index.shtml>

Reddit programming section gets some good Python (news) sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER7> I really like <http://www.b-list.org> for python/django related reads.

<comment><USER8> I have Simon Willison's personal site in Google Reader. Lots of Django there too.

<http://simonwillison.net>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Spyced (Jonathan Ellis): <http://spyced.blogspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> (i love the python community, esp the meetings at GOOG HQ.

voidspace.org.uk (great dev, great mind, but the un-design, ooh)

<http://sayspy.blogspot.com/> <http://blog.ianbicking.org/> <http://jtauber.com/python/> blog.doughellmann.com</comment>


(Founder Stories) Reddit's Ohanian: What Competition? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/30/founder-stories-reddit-ohanian-competition/ <comment><USER2> This may be a classic story of a founder who outsmarted an acquiring company. What hope does Conde Nast have of monetizing Reddit enough to recover its investment?

<comment><USER3> The future looks extremely bright. The only thing holding reddit back was that, until recently, Conde Nast didn't think the site needed more employees than could fit in a car. They didn't even have a salesperson assigned to the site until last September.

In other words, it's been less than a year since Conde Nast's even been _trying_ to monetize reddit. And I can't talk about the numbers, but note how much the site's been hiring to get a good idea of how things have been going.

As big as the last 12 months have been for reddit, the next 12 are going to blow them away.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Self-hosted blogging platforms without PHP or databases? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any self-hosted blogging platforms that don't require PHP or any sort of database?<p>I'd really like my site to be secure, without having to worry about PHP vulnerabilities or SQL injections. <comment><USER2> [http://octopress.org/](http://octopress.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Octopress + free Github or Heroku account</comment>


Google CEO: 'I don't regret' firing James Damore - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/19/google-ceo-i-dont-regret-firing-james-damore/ <comment><USER2> I wonder, if mass media existed at the time, whether this is what the Church vs Galileo affair would have looked like from the outside.

There have even been arguments that the "verdict against Galileo was rational and just" because they took into consideration "the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too."[1] This has been a major argument in the Damore debate also, that even if his entire menu was true, it was right to fire him because of the social consequences within the company.

Galileo's opposition also used less well-supported opposing theories (like geocentrism and others) to discredit his work, and on a personal front tried to shame him as a religious heretic for going against dogma and established "moral" order.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_the_Catholic_Churc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_the_Catholic_Church#Modern_view_on_Galileo)

<comment><USER3> There are many events you could have chosen, including those with mass media.

If you think the science is wrong (as I do), you might have selected Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. Or Ng v. Jacobs Eng'g Group, where an employee was fired for using "company equipment and facilities to proselytize for her evangelical Christian faith."

As you believe the science is essentially right, the Scopes Trial could be another comparison.

If you are for free speech, you might have selected Abrams v United States.

But since Google has no power to enforce house arrest, or levy fines, or apply other coercive power, all of these comparison are far grander than the case deserves.

Best would be to compare it to similar cases, like those described in the EEOC guidelines regarding a 'hostile workplace' at [https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm) . For example, it says "it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general", and gives guidelines on what 'offensive' might mean.

Along with [https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/currentissues.html](https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/currentissues.html) : "Unless the conduct is quite severe, a single incident or isolated incidents of offensive sexual conduct or remarks generally do not create an abusive environment. As the Court noted in Vinson, "mere utterance of an ethnic or racial epithet which engenders offensive feelings in an employee would not affect the conditions of employment to a sufficiently significant degree to violate Title VII." ... A "hostile environment" claim generally requires a showing of a pattern of offensive conduct". )

So perhaps Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson and similar workplace-related lawsuits are the better comparison. There are quite a few.</comment></comment>


Linkedin open-sources their distributed object store – Ambry - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/05/introducing-and-open-sourcing-ambry---linkedins-new-distributed- <comment><USER2> Also, a quick knee-jerk question. How did Cassandra, HBase fail to meet your requirements? I am sure you must have evaluated existing data-stores before you went ahead building your own.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those systems are designed for small values. Typically in the order of few bytes to KB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> side-question to OP who is probably the blog author: Which software was used to generate the diagrams?

Haven't read the blog post or the paper but SIGMOD is a prestigious conference. Congrats on the great work.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you. I used an app called paper on the IPAD.</comment></comment>


Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/kayak-bing/ <comment><USER2> Help me understand: is it a terrible problem to design one website so that it looks similar to another website, but not a terrible problem to reproduce a copyrighted musical recording and share it with your friends? I'm trying to figure out what the general principle of fairness (or morality) is here.

<comment><USER3> The culture isn't (completely) homogeneous here. The people saying it's bad to rip off web sites aren't necessarily the same people saying it's ok copy mp3s.

I would imagine that many people believe that the morality of stealing depends on who you're stealing from. Additionally, many probably don't consider it theft if there isn't an immediately apparent victim.

<comment><USER4> "Who you're stealing from" is a bad argument for (or against) piracy. The only sound (pun intended) argument for piracy that I know of is the fact that intellectual property laws are fundamentally a bunch of crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We had a discussion about this weeks ago, pointing out that Microsoft bought Farecast who had similar site design. But it's interesting to see it just now burbling up to the top elsewhere.

I love HN, I learn / find more sooner than through so many other outlets.

<comment><USER6> As much as I like to bash M$, this time M$ is not to blame... If anyone it's Farecast...

<comment> brown9-2 If Microsoft owns Farecast, they are in fact ultimately responsible. That's what ownership means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just an interesting note:

Kayak was founded in 2004. FareCast was founded in 2003.

I don't know when either site launched or iterated to their current base design, but even before Microsoft bought FareCast, it looked exactly like Kayak. I actually thought they were powered by the same company. It looked like this in the past: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/f/f2/200906...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/f/f2/20090601104302!Live_Search_Farecast.png) That was still pretty close (although it's more obvious now).

</comment><comment><USER8> Sometimes there's only so many ways to skin a cat, art is very much an influential process and converging ideas are common. I can dig up PRINT and INTERACTIVE magazines from the 90-00's and show you plenty of designs that have been "copied" a million times over.

[http://images.colinanawaty.com/screenshots/5b629b77aa8a247c3...](http://images.colinanawaty.com/screenshots/5b629b77aa8a247c38312284b0251ecc.png)

If Kayak thinks their design is so original, maybe they should check out eBay's two column layout; filters on the left, content in the middle. Unless MS copied code and a VERYYYY unique approach to UI, this is a weak case that should be thrown out, IMO. Notice too that the screenshot in the WIRED article uses the EXACT same search data so it's even more suggestive that Microsoft copied Kayak. Controversy brings eye balls...

<comment><USER9> Even if kayak loses the court battle, the amount of free PR they get from suing far outweighs the cost of the lawyers.

<comment><USER10> I think that bing will get even more free PR

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like Kayak and the team that runs that company, I've had several interactions with them, all of them positive. And I wish them the best in resolving this.

(One of these interactions was suggesting that they they make CNAME so that the URL "moc.kayak.com" would resolve, so they did.)

</comment><comment><USER12> In my opinion, kayak is in trouble. They're grossly overcapitalized (~ $200 million in investments) and are watching their product being commoditized. Resorting to lawyers is a classic reaction to that problem.

<comment><USER13> 200 mil?

It's funny because I built an effective copy of the site a while back.

Maybe I should put up instructions and open source it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One significantly better feature about Bing is that it doesn't have any "compare to x in another window" boxes checked by default. I switched from Kayak to Mobissimo because of that (despite the fact that their name is so annoyingly hard to remember that I kept inadvertantly going back to Kayak) and unfortunately Mobissimo eventually checked some boxes by default too. So now I'll use Bing.

<comment><USER12> That's because there is significant income in the popups generated by those checkboxes. But hopefully bing is leading the way in making them disappear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel for Kayak. I used to get so angry when I'd catch a competitor blatantly ripping us off. Once I had to call a company's CEO and bitch at him about it (to which he completely denied any similarity between our sites and continues to ride our coattails). In the end, you just learn to deal with it because if you're better you'll usually stay on top regardless of how much of your talent they attempt to siphon. That's also why I stopped having a heart attack every time I'd post a blog entry just to have it slurped up by a dozen spam sites.

Though in this case, if Microsoft (or whoever down the chain is developing this site) were blatantly ripping off my design I'd PISSED OFF TO NO END. They have way more money for marketing. ;)

</comment><comment><USER16> "Stop copying me" belongs back in elementary school, along with "I'm rubber and you're glue" and "Nanny-nanny boo-boo."

Fortunately US judges seem to have graduated from elementary school, and they have pretty much smacked down look-and-feel lawsuits every time they've come up: Apple versus Microsoft, Lotus versus Borland, etc.

<comment><USER17> You do realize that's a headline right?

<comment><USER16> Yes, but I read the article too, and it seems like an adequate characterization of the C&D and the conflict, as far as the article describes it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Heh this site design is used by nearly every travel site and flights company, I doubt Kayak have much of a claim to it.

<comment><USER19> And just about every product company. Newegg is not far off. Left column to modify your selection, right column to list products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Kayak can cry foul all they want but there is nothing stopping MS or anyone else from copying the site design.

It is a shame that MS could not come up with anything more usable, original and innovative.

(I am avoiding blanket statements such as 'they haven't done anything innovative since xx)

<comment><USER15> You're right, nothing is stopping them. But people that rip off layouts are extremely lame and I'm glad that Kayak is complaining about it. Why is such a big company making these amateur moves?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Given the available research on consumer behaviour and given the available data on website popularity, isn't it to be expected that websites in a certain segement will start to resemble each other more and more, as they converge towards an optimally consumerfriendly design?

As the recent Coldplay - Cat Stevens - Joe Satriani love triangle shows: it isn't just website design. By now, the amount of output in any kind of creative activity is so large that there is inevitable overlap. When the output is filtered by the selection criterion of 'what the average human (in Western civilization) likes', chances of similar designs surviving becomes even larger. It would be more surprising if this _didn't_ happen.

This is interesting for entrepeneurs, in that you shouldn't be discouraged by ideas and 'designs' similar to yours popping up everywhere. It's inevitable and it's the details in the execution (or the fact that you are executing it at all) that matters.

</comment><comment><USER17> It does look like somebody at Microsoft fired up Firefox/Firebug and had a copy-and-paste party.

</comment><comment><USER22> The fact that someone is complaining over a service Microsoft is offering rather than ignoring it shows that they have indeed done something well with bing.

Now if they would only expand on their localization efforts so I could actually take advantage of this.</comment>


Hiring and keeping developers for the rest of us - <AUTHOR> http://www.happybearsoftware.com/hiring-and-keeping-developers-for-the-rest-of-us.html

<comment><USER2> TL;DR: how to avoid paying more money to developers using 10 simple tricks.</comment>


In 2010, Demand For US Fixed Income Has To Increase Elevenfold... Or Else - <AUTHOR> http://www.zerohedge.com/article/brace-impact-2010-private-demand-us-fixed-income-has-increase-elevenfold-or-else <comment><USER2> An interesting argument (as always from zerohedge) but one that seems to be predicated on the idea that the government has no intention of reducing the deficit. Opponents of Keynesian policies always argue as if fiscal stimulus is meant to function as a new normal rather than a temporary corrective.

By analogy, this would be like alternative health folks pointing out the downsides of permanent antibiotic consumption, although antibiotics are usually only administered long enough to overcome the progress of disease. The Fed will certainly put up interest rates, almost certainly during 2010; I just think they're trying to hold off doing so to any substantial degree until growth hits a steady 3% and unemployment falls below 10%.

<comment><USER3> History indicates that running at a deficit did indeed become the new normal.

"There is nothing so normal as a temporary government program."

<comment><USER4> Does your history include the Clinton Administration, which ran a surplus?

<comment><USER5> > Does your history include the Clinton Administration, which ran a surplus?

Yes, it does.

Clinton benefitted from the end of the cold war and a repub congress. They couldn't figure out how to spend the "savings" fast enough. (A Repub president with a dem congress might have had the same problem.)

What "war" do you see ending that will produce comparable savings? (Obama is winding down Iraq on Bush's schedule.)

<comment><USER6> Clinton benefited from the end of the Cold War and having a Republican Congress, but he benefited a lot more from the surge in government tax receipts caused by the contemporaneous economic boom. In constant 2000 dollars, in 1992, the US took in 1.2 trillion. In 2000, we took in 2 trillion. You presumably didn't remember the 150 billion added in yearly expenditures over the same interval because it got swallowed by the boom-fueled taxes.

Then, the boom ended, as boons are wont to do...

<comment><USER7> Clinton's deficit also benefited from passing in 1993 "the biggest tax increase in American history"([http://www.factcheck.org/treasury_tax_expert_to_bush_clinton...](http://www.factcheck.org/treasury_tax_expert_to_bush_clintons_increase.html)) The economy then proceeded to have the longest expansion in American history thus disproving all Republican tax-cut theories, though no one seems to have told them.

<comment><USER5> > The economy then proceeded to have the longest expansion in American history > thus disproving all Republican tax-cut theories, though no one seems to have > told them. reply

You use "disprove" in a very odd way.

No one has said that tax increases necessarily kill economic growth. The claim is that tax increases hurt economic growth.

A dollar taxed (or borrowed) and spent by govt accomplishes something. A dollar left in the private sector accomplishes something else. Do you really think that the average govt spending is more valuable than the average private spending?

<comment><USER7> "The claim is that tax increases hurt economic growth." You still have to square that claim with the fact that the 1993 tax hike was followed by the longest expansion in US history.

As far as the value of "average govt spending" vs "average private spending", it obviously depends. When the markets decided that the best use of capital was to build a massive oversupply of houses and condos that was not very valuable, when the government decides to fund more college tuition that's a pretty good investment in society's future. When private money decided to fund Brin and Page that was very valuable, when the government decides to spend billions on unneeded fighter jets that's not valuable at all.

<comment><USER5> > You still have to square that claim with the fact that the 1993 tax hike was > followed by the longest expansion in US history.

There's no inconsistency.

We had the dot-boom, the cold war ended, and we'd thrown a lot of underpriced real-estate onto the market. Any one of those three would have produced significant economic growth. All three at once was a bonanza.

> As far as the value of "average govt spending" vs "average private > spending", it obviously depends.

Yup, it does. However, you're asserting that it doesn't, that govt spending is better. That's what it means to say that tax increases are good.

> When the markets decided that the best use of capital was to build a massive > oversupply of houses and condos that was not very valuable

Not so fast. Fannie and Freddie and govt regulation etc had a huge role in that. I mention regulation because banks that didn't play were punished. Also, govt regulation was behind much of the securitization and "insurance". Fannie and Freddie was a double-hit - regulations basically forced banks to hold their stock, which pretty much guaranteed that they'd all have solvency problems when Fannie and Freddie hit the skids.

> when the government decides to fund more college tuition that's a pretty > good investment in society's future.

Oh really? Do we have a shortage of women's studies majors? A significant fraction of college degrees are dead-weight.

The bulk of financial aid goes to tuition increases that it causes.

<comment><USER7> I never said that tax increases are good in general, Republicans are the ones that claim that every tax increase is going to result in the end of the republic. My personal belief is that at the margins taxes have little effect on overall economic growth, especially when they are targeted at the upper income levels, and they are generally a better way of paying for government than financing it with debt which seems to be Republican's preferred way of paying based on the trickle down theory that tax cuts to the rich will pay for themselves by stimulating the economy and thus increase tax receipts. When I look at the economy that resulted from Bush's tax cuts (i.e. a slow jobless recovery) vs Cliton's tax increase my conclusion is that there's very little correlation between taxes and growth and that we are very far on the left side of the Laffer curve.

On the housing issue, we disagree very much on the cause of the problem. I believe the problem was the deregulation that allowed the creation of entities like AIG Financial Products which was probably the major sink of risks that drove the bubble, and also there was a catastrophic market failure that allowed Wall Street to run their companies into the ground for short term gain. But there's no way to deny that a LOT of private capital was directed at the building of useless condos.

<comment><USER5> > I believe the problem was the deregulation that allowed the creation of > entities like AIG Financial Products

AIG Financial Products sold products "encouraged" by regulators.

Regulators realized that there was some risk in securitized mortgage pools. However, they really wanted to be able to call them "no risk" investments so they could push them onto asset sheets and make them more popular among folks who they couldn't bully. (They were pushing cheap housing.)

The regulator's solution was "insurance", which they defined (regulators define what's acceptable for banks to hold as assets) and AIG (among others) sold.

Since "everyone" believed that the securitized mortage pools were "no risk", folks saw selling insurance as "free money". AIG did a lot of middleman work in this area as well as writing its own contracts.

> But there's no way to deny that a LOT of private capital was directed at the > building of useless condos.

"free money" pushed by govt policy (through loans and the like) isn't private capital.

> My personal belief is that at the margins taxes have little effect on > overall economic growth, especially when they are targeted at the upper > income levels

The median worker in the US pays almost no federal income taxes. (They do pay SS and medicare, but the former is an okay investment for such people and the latter will be a train wreck for everyone.) As a result, they have no incentive to get value for money.

Note that the income of "the rich" is somewhat voluntary and fairly portable - that makes it quite volatile. That's why CA gets hammered every so often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is "issuance"? Printing money?

<comment><USER9> From: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Treasury_security>

"Treasury bills are sold by single price auctions held weekly. Offering amounts for 13-week and 26-week bills are announced each Thursday for auction, usually at 11:30 am, on the following Monday and settlement, or issuance, on Thursday."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, this article is probably much more accurate than what you see on the corporate news media. Fortunately for our 'masters', there are always news stories about terrorism, etc. that they can use to keep public consciousness off of higher importance things like the economy. I got out of the stock market 2 years ago, started easing back in about 9 months ago, and now I want to get back out.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is this guy a nutcase? He reads kind of like a doom-and-gloom nutcase, but I am not an economist. Could one comment on his basic validity level?

<comment><USER12> He's trying to say that america needs to issue lots more debt, but soon no one will want to buy any debt.

He's also assuming america won't do anything about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Huh?

I wonder if a CS article would ever receive any attention on a finance website.

<comment><USER13> This isn't a CS website. "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER7> What I meant to imply is that the article is incomprehensible, at least to me, and I was wondering if a technical CS article would be of interest to finance people.

<comment><USER14> More the point, economics is just short of comprehensible to the vast majority of non-economists. Which is why the ability to know that you DON'T know shit, is so important. But few people have that kind of self awareness.

A long time ago the HN audience consisted mostly of people who knew at least that much. That's no longer the case.

<http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/01/hacker-news-disease/>

<comment><USER15> _A long time ago the HN audience consisted mostly of people who knew at least that much._

Every online community has this myth: that in the beginning all the members were as intelligent as Einstein, as humble as Gandhi, etc., etc., and that over time hordes of newcomers arrived and the quality fell drastically. But having been in on the ground floor of quite a few of them I can say with certainty that it's a myth.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Watching the Reddit readers falling - <AUTHOR> Someone posted that people are unsubscribing from https://www.reddit.com/r/news/ so I set up a script to watch it.
Output has been as follows:

    20160612195100 8957564
    20160612195200 8957356
    20160612195300 8957145

    ...

    20160612222900 8936378
    20160612223000 8936240
    20160612223100 8936094
 So from 19:51 (BST) to 22:31 (BST) there was a loss of some 21470 readers.  That's roughly 0.24% in just 2 hours and 40 minutes.  For reference, for the past (nearly) three hours they've been losing over 140 readers/minute.
Does it matter?  Is it significant?  It will be interesting to see what the numbers tomorrow morning (BST). <comment><AUTHOR> In case anyone is interested, here's the quick hack:

        #!/bin/bash

        echo $( date "+%Y%m%d%H%M%S" ) $( \
        curl -A ReaderCheck https://www.reddit.com/r/news/ 2> /dev/null \
          | grep -ho "[0-9,]* readers" \
          | grep -ho "[1-9][0-9,]*" \
          | sed "s/,//g" \
          | grep -v "^32$" \
          ) \
        | tee -a Reader.log

I'm sure there's lots wrong with it - don't really care, it's a throw-away.

</comment><comment><USER2> Slashdot is covering Reddit's censoring of the discussion

[https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/06/12/2231213/world- reacts...](https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/06/12/2231213/world-reacts-to- the-worst-mass-shooting-in-us-history)

<comment><USER3> The censorship on reddit, in general, is insane. There's a tons of deleting going on any time there's a topic that is just a little outside the political tastes of the moderators. Mods have no problem with purging 2000 comment long thread just because there's 100 comments that offend them. Some of them have a flat-out agenda and they're not afraid to show it at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I switched from Reddit to here because, although HN does do what they call 'moderation', they are fairly transparent about the process.

And they were successful in not going too far with their 'moderation'.

I'd still be on Reddit had that platform been as easy to use and not taken to shitty 'moderation' tactics.

<comment><USER5> Voat.co is worth checking out. It's like a smaller Reddit with an emphasis on preserving free speech.

<comment><USER4> I understand that but the website from last I checked loaded slow on my computer.

It was hard to use for my use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reddit, imo, is a joke for the simple(ton) reason that 90+% of new posts are nothing more than stupid questions. I created an acct. for the sole purpose of filtering the garbage, which apparently is the majority of the content.

<comment><USER7> Used to be all over reddit, but now I only check r/boardgames with any regularity. As the other person who replied to you said, the niche subreddits aren't too bad, but the main subreddits attract no end of stupid comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those wondering why this was done - "to prevent copycats from taking similar actions" is my guess.

There is evidence to suggest such events can "inspire" others to do the same.

I don't know why the mods have not clarified this as the reason, maybe admins sent the message and told them to keep silent, maybe it's even higher.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was a long time Reddit user and have recently stopped using it for my intellectual entertainment in favor of HN. I still use Reddit for my dose of humor and videos - that's what's so great about it - you can unsubscribe and curate your content to fit your needs.

</comment><comment><USER10> You are likely watching actions of bots.

</comment><comment><USER11> At least we still have 4chan, amirite?

</comment><comment><USER12> If news is the same a worldnews then hopefully the vocal racists are the ones leaving and the quality of news increases.

<comment><USER13> Supposedly from what I have seen it is due to a liberal application of shadowbans.

<comment><USER14> For some reason all the Trump supporters are upset that their vitriol is not acceptable in the real world so they have been targeting the /r/news mods. They have been doing a large amount of rule breaking behavior of the past months, mocking the other mods and admins, hoping to get banned, because they love to cry about censorship. It's amazing what a tizzy they have wound themselves up into based upon totally made up information.

Subreddits such as /r/the_donald were brigading the threads and hiding valuable information such as where people could donate blood.

<comment><USER15> The thread on where to donate blood was deleted by /r/news mods.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is there something mysterious about mathematics? - <AUTHOR> http://ideas.aeon.co/viewpoints/1829

<comment><USER3> I think we can all relate to an unclear sense of awe upon first encountering something like e^(i * pi) = -1 (which might have occurred around the first time reading Contact). It takes exposure to a certain amount of math to switch paradigms: it would be weirder if that identity _weren 't_ the case.

Dazzling inexperienced students with magical identities and coincidences isn't teaching mathematics, it's teaching numerology. I really appreciated this article.

<comment><USER4> In an ideal world, anyone trying to dazzle students with e^(i*pi) should immediately be rebuffed with the demand: "define complex exponentiation". While I was teaching calculus, I found that students have a tendency to assume that any function sufficiently familiar to them, must be defined for whatever values you can think to stick in it; if you were teaching the mathematics of chairs and tables, they wouldn't bat an eye if you mentioned cos(chair). This phenomenon also explains why there's such a ridiculously big deal made by laymen about the undefinedness of division-by-zero.

<comment><USER5> On the one hand, I agree with you.

On the other hand, to answer your demand: I define complex exponentiation by the formula e^(it) = -1 for all real, nonzero t.

Clearly stupid. Why? There are a lot of properties that one might naturally ask e^(i __t) to satisfy (for example, that e^(i __t) * e^(i __u) = e^(i __(t + u)), or that its derivative is i __e^(i __t)), and the usual complex exponential satisfies all the right ones. So writing e^(i * pi) with no context has, I submit, at least _some_ content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really enjoy Saunders MacLane's _Mathematics Form and Function_ for sight at the "answers" this article seeks. MacLane's argument is that mathematics arises from a relatively small number of meaningful forces and "good" mathematics arises when those forces all align in particular places. You could of course go further by asking what exactly it is that makes those forces all align—why in _these_ fields?—but the point of his book isn't exactly to answer the philosophical question but more to provide a little bit of a humanistic POV on the development of mathematics with just enough historical happenstance stripped away to make things intelligible but not so much as to lose the line of sight on why things (probably) developed the way that they did.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gregory Chaitin, the developer of algorithmic information theory, has repeatedly said that many or almost all mathematical facts are "true for no reason".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin#Other_scholarl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin#Other_scholarly_contributions)

A simple way of trying to understanding Chaitin's view is that if you try to take mathematical facts and match them up with explanations or proofs that humans could understand or recognize as useful or elegant, most facts won't be able to be matched up with any such explanation, because the facts inherently outnumber the explanations, even in a set-theoretic sense.

But it might be better to take a look at Chaitin's explanation rather than my paraphrase.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like he's talking about the incompleteness theorem, that there are statements that are true but we can never find a proof. That's closely related to the halting problem and the idea of computability. There are some programs that will run forever without halting, but we have no method for identifying all of them. ("true and not provable" matches "runs forever without halting, but we can't prove it")

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am not really surprised that there are patterns and connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. Why? Because I think they are way less unrelated than it may seem. After all everything is build on top of a pretty small number of axioms. Every result in number theory - proven or yet unproven - <USER2> essentially a consequence of the Peano axioms and the definition of the operations on those numbers. The Riemann hypothesis is a statement about prime numbers, which numbers are prime is defined by the Peano axioms and the definition of multiplication. The real numbers are in some sense build on top of the natural numbers by going through the rational numbers. And you can build the natural numbers on top of set theory. So in essence I think we are just exploring the structure of one and the same object - or maybe a few objects - and every branch of mathematics does this by making a few more assumptions and therefore looking only on a part of the whole.

</comment><comment><USER10> So, kind of a summary of/riff on last week's Nova? Then again, maybe just a coincidence.

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/great-math- mystery.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/great-math-mystery.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what opinion this author would have of constructivist mathematics

<comment><USER12> Why is that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Physics is about the way things are, whereas math is about the way things have to be.

</comment><comment><USER14> No.</comment>


37Signals acquires domain Basecamp.com, now redirects to Basecamphq.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.basecamp.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably related and to be announced with the latest updates to Basecamp.</comment>


Hikers Behaving Badly: Appalachian Trail Partying Raises Ire - <AUTHOR> http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150830/us--hikers_behaving_badly-5b704abb1f.html <comment><USER2> I thru-hiked in 2002 and at that point a lot of discussion was about the surge in hikers due to Bill Bryson's "A Walk In The Woods". The movie comes out this fall so I expect even more hikers next year.

Bad behavior by a few was a problem in 2002 and the offenders were mostly ignorant of the effects for those who came after them that year or in subsequent years.

Taking on an endeavor like a thru-hike is a huge challenge and a small number of hikers definitely let it go to their head resulting in the false belief that they are VIP hikers exempt from rules, regulations, and common etiquette.

It wouldn't surprise me if or more stringent permitting system gets enacted although I think some town complaints could be addressed by requiring some sort of a membership/registration system, perhaps administered by ALDHA (Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association).</comment>


Ask HN: review my tiny app - anonymous user generated madlibs - <AUTHOR> http://madlibber.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't find any other sites that allowed you to specify your own prompts instead of making you choose from a list like "noun", "adjective", etc. So, I decided to take a crack at it for fun.

It also supports backreferences, and doesn't look all dated like most of the other madlib sites.</comment>


A website has "stolen" my program and reselling it - <AUTHOR> Hi the website https://www.ektor.io has stolen my entire program https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/. He is breaking both my old license and my new. He does not credit me or the repo in any place and he has just excluded the license from my program which he sells for $49.
What can i do about this ? I am thinking contacting his host today.
Thanks <comment><USER2> It looks like until 14 hours ago, your project had an Apache 2.0 license, which explicitly allows any usage of your code. Additionally, the "you must include this notice" requirement applies only to redistributions of the code (and running it as SaaS somewhere isn't a redistribution).

I think the real question here is... why are you upset about this? Apache does indeed mean I permit everyone to use my software in anyway they see fit. Do you regret that? Or did you not fully understand the implication of the Apache license?

Maybe you think that bundling up your software and making money is immoral—-however someone put significant effort into making a pretty website, running it 24/7, and providing customer service, they are adding something on top of what you made.

If I take an Apache 2.0 JSON parser and make a website that pretty-parses JSON and I convince people to pay me, am I doing anything wrong?

<comment><USER3> Noticed that too, fully agree with you.

They also added a "Premium license" at the same time too which allows exactly what the person has done but under the new license, doesn't say how to get granted this license though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would that be similar to how you've "stolen" and re-licensed code from Instagram-API-python[1]? I don't see the MIT licence with Lev Pasha's copyright notice in your repo anywhere.

Your code[2].

Their code[3].

[1] [https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API- python](https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API-python)

[2] [https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/blob/132adf6b166c22...](https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/blob/132adf6b166c2244e19326e57ebb7e1594bd9a6a/instabot/api/api_story.py#L47)

[3] [https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API- python/blob/cf0fe1...](https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API- python/blob/cf0fe1d0167d153b0fc6c9be56e265e653c3da7a/InstagramAPI/InstagramAPI.py#L155)

</comment><comment> _-___________-_ The license you had until yesterday (which he's free to use the code under as it was available yesterday) allows him to sell a service that uses your program.

If he's actually redistributing the software without including the license then that's another thing.

<comment><USER5> How does that work btw, would I just use rollback the commit and branch from the old commit if I wanted the apache license version?

I've also seen people try to erase old commits to change licenses, I was wondering what that actually means for use since the code would have still had an older version with the more liberal license

<comment> _-___________-_ If you have, or can get, a copy of the code that was released with the old license, you can use it under that license.

<comment><USER5> Nice yeah. Most of the time I just skip the controversies on Hackernews and stick with my philosophy of "just clone and move on"

You can tell when some repositories are going to be hot and removed soon, often times that nukes the forks too. So just download.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Super shady. I wonder how often this occurs. Let's make a website just to index open source software being sold inappropriately/ against the agreement of the software. Seems like this problem will only grow if someone can grab some open source software on this corner of the web and put it on a shelf with a pricetag on this other corner. Rightfully the profits would belong to you, but it's free software, so people are just handing this person $50 to get access to your github effectively?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah that's a good way to describe it :) He also excluded my license which states "this license should always be included"

<comment><USER7> How do you know, did you pay the $79 to gain access and inspect the download?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can imagine this is upsetting. Still, the license was an Apache license 15 hours ago. Doesn't that license allow this type of thing?

[https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/blob/beab9871bf5633...](https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/blob/beab9871bf5633aa8788b0f657a6733af4976488/LICENSE)

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like someone violated the license of your software that's build to violate the ToS of Instagram.

<comment><USER10> Additionally, it looks like the OP's program is based on an open source program "InstagramBot" which seems to live as a copy in the OP's repo without a matching LICENSE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems like Github itself might be responsive on this issue.

This example might be helpful. [https://github.com/gsantner/memetastic/issues/17](https://github.com/gsantner/memetastic/issues/17)

<comment><USER12> Very impressive example, good find. How'd you initially come across it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Send a DMCA request? Since he's not following your license, he's infringing on your copyright.

edit: looks like other commenters are saying that it was previously licensed under apache 2, so this advice might not apply (I initially assumed it was GPL3).

</comment><comment><USER14> Contact the host. Contact a lawyer. Send a cease and desist. He just showed you a valuable market so take his spot and make that paper.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER15> Your repository had an Apache License up until yesterday, which parts of the License do you feel that is being violated?

It seems he is selling this product as a SaaS, so not necessarily redistributing the software but I could be mistaken.

<comment><USER16> product is being offered to be downloaded, which means re-distribution.

<comment><USER17> specifically what terms are violated by offering Apache-licensed code for download?

<comment><USER16> I see that usually you need to add a file mentioning the list of the original licenses.

See [https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#redistribution](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#redistribution)

You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License;

<comment><USER17> Is the top poster's main concern here that the person that resells their program does not include the disclaimer somewhere in the documentation?

Note how that information could be placed anywhere, even a remote and not well accessible or logical place. Would that solve the complaint the top poster has? Not really.

Would most people that potentially buy this software even read that information? Or be wanting to redistribute the code? After all, the code is already freely distributed and available!

Not that I condone the behavior - I think it is deplorable, it is stealing, it breaks the spirit of the license.

It is more about not fully understanding what licenses may be used for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Off topic, but from your site at [https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/](https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/):

> Try our remote solution:

> [http://www.instabotai.com](http://www.instabotai.com)

The contents of this page is just:

> > [http://www.NOTMAKINGTHISCLICKABLErankbabes.com](http://www.NOTMAKINGTHISCLICKABLErankbabes.com)

I added 'NOTMAKINGTHISCLICKABLE'.

<comment><USER19> Getting the same thing.

<comment><USER20> now i get [http://www.rankbabes.com](http://www.rankbabes.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Flagging this submission as the software is suspicious and likely breaks ToS. Additionally, the author changed licenses recently in an attempt to rewrite history.

</comment><comment><USER22> Best case for GPL 3.0 but every idiot out there uses MIT ... without even understanding it and the calling foul when other people use their code in SAAS.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just out of curiosity, how do you know it is your software?

</comment><comment><USER24> How do you know for sure they are using your program?

</comment><comment><USER25> Definitely a copyright issue, since they're not complying with the license.

That said, if they complied by including the Apache license by restoring the copyright notices and license text, as I understand it there's nothing further you can (realistically) do. Putting energy into being upset about an Apache licensed program being "stolen" won't help you in the long run.

<comment><USER26> The repo switched from Apache 2.0 to Reciprocal Public License (RPL-1.5) about 14 hours ago: [https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/instabotai/instabotai/blob/master/LICENSE)

<comment><USER25> Which doesn't impact code pulled prior to the change. License changes are not retroactive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If it matters, hire a lawyer.

</comment><comment><USER28> Offer the same product for half the price. Market it free ektor.io or something

<comment><USER29> Yes. Copy the page wholesale, and put up a notice that the other site has pirated yours, and is trying to sell your software for twice the price.

<comment><USER30> > _Copy the page wholesale_

That's a bad idea, they can sue back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> a) hire a lawyer, what do you want us to do about it??? b) in the modern era of internet, next time embed some type of homing mechanism or simple license requirement checked in startup process to avoid unlicensed misuse.

<comment> _-___________-_ The OP's software is open source. The "homing mechanism" or license requirement check could simply be removed.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Qt binding for Go with support for all major operating systems - <AUTHOR> https://therecipe.github.io/qt <comment><USER2> This was heavily discussed 5 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12928526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12928526)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a bit confused by the docker part and emphasis on deployment. Is that just for contributors/early adopters because theres no release yet, or is that just part of the flow of using this?

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on how much you want to embrace docker. In general you can use this binding without touching docker at all. But if you want, you can use docker in every step of the process. It starts with the minimal setup that just depends on Go + Docker. Then continues during development, so if you would want for example test your application on android really quick, then you would just need to pull the android image instead of setting up the android SDK, NDK and JDK by yourself. And then in the end you can use docker for your CI and CD processes as well. For example by creating your own docker images on top of provided ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using c++/Qt for quite some time now, but i really prefer to work in go. Feels like i'm a lot more productive while writing, and i don't have to spend doubledigit minutes waiting for stuff to compile.

I recently stumbled over this project and have been using it quite a lot since. It works really well and coming from Qt-land it was really easy to use the provided bindings and generate the 'classes' for signals/slots. AND the docker images are great for cross compilation. They just work :). Thank you so much for working on this.

<comment><USER5> I recently tried out gold linker in a c++/qt project, and it nearly halved my compile time. I don't quite have incremental linking working yet, but I expect it to be even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious how this affects file sizes? I like my static binaries and portability, but I fear this would make things balloon quite a bit to get the same broad distribution.

I've been planning on using an embedded webkit + html app in an upcoming desktop project. Are there any resources for how difficult it would be to learn Qt and create a reasonable portable, easily downloadable app?

<comment><AUTHOR> The file size depends on the target and what modules you use, for dynamically linked projects I would guess it's around 50mb for an average project. Maybe 20mb more on windows because of the icu libs, but those can be replaced with your own (much smaller) versions. Static projects may weight half of what the dynamic ones do, so maybe around 25mb. But depending on how much you care about file size, you could also compile your own static Qt version and then strip everything that you don't need.

Here [1] are some infos about QML development and here [2] you can try out QML in the browser.

[1] [https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-appstudio- samples/wiki/Unders...](https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-appstudio- samples/wiki/Understanding-QML-Javascript-for-Web-Developers) [2] [https://qmlweb.github.io](https://qmlweb.github.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have used it and hang out in the Gophers slack channel. You provide great support and when I followed instructions it worked perfect!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am confused by QT licensing model. What are limitation of free QT plan used by commercial (downloadable) application?

<comment><USER9> The open source version of Qt is LGPL, which basically means you may use it in a proprietary application if you use dynamic linking. If you link statically or copy any of its code, then your program must be free software (GPL).

If you pay for a commercial license, you can link statically without restriction. The commercial version is also necessary for locked-down platforms like iOS where the dynamic linking can't be changed by the end user of the software.

IANAL, and there are a few details I glossed over, but that's the simple version.

<comment><USER10> "If you link statically or copy any of its code, then your program must be free software (GPL)." I don't the first part is true (the second one is though).

[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.en.html#LGPLStaticVsDyn...](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.en.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic)

<comment><USER9> The second part isn't technically true either. You can copy code without requiring a license if you meet the requirements for fair use. For example, copying function signatures for interoperability.

I was trying to be conservative and paint a simplified picture of the license that you can't go wrong by following, but I definitely erred in leaving out some possibilities and presenting it as if they don't exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> dumb question: will qtdeploy produce a single static binary for the whole app or is about some other sort of shared libraries deployment ?

<comment><USER12> I may be remembering wrong. But I believe back when I used Qt a few years ago, the most common interpretation of the GPL license the free version used prevented you from deploying with a single static binary.

<comment><USER13> Surely, that's "prevent you from deploying with a single static binary _unless_ under the GPL/binding offer of source code"?

<comment><USER14> You can technically deploy with a static linked Qt as long as you provide your compiled object files for download somewhere along with instructions for how to swap out the linked Qt with any other version of Qt. This keeps your code proprietary and honors the license.

For example, you must deploy as a static linked Qt on the Apple App Store, but since Xcode is free and no Apple dev account is needed to install an app on your iOS device, you can provide instructions for how any user could install your binaries with any version of Qt. Unlikely any user would ever do this, but by making the process publicly known, you honor the license (and you don't need to share your own source code).

<comment><USER13> Xcode might be without any cost, but the Apple hardware needed to legally run a copy of OS X (which also isn't free) - I don't really see how "Xcode being free" enters into it, as long as the software is distributed for iOS devices?

For the Mac app store, it might be different, as you need a Mac to access that anyway.

FWIW I think the issue here is that artificial limits on what code can be run on what hardware (legally) is in conflict with the (L)GPL -- and there's really nothing anyone other than Apple can do about it. Which is also why, as far as I know there's no actual legal way to distribute (L)GPL software on these locked app stores - there's no way for the distributor to actually honor the license, and so no way for them to be able to (re)use/distribute the code legally?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why is the -fast flag not the default for qtdeploy?

Edit: er, why the downvotes for a harmless question? I was curious why a flag named fast is not the default. This question is also very much related to the project page linked.

<comment><AUTHOR> qtdeploy is intended to be used for deploying and therefore will run qtrcc, qtmoc, qtminimal and do the actual bundling of your binary. the -fast flag re- uses the cached rcc_* moc_* minimal-* files and will also not re-run the actual bundling process. this works for the desktop targets but not for the mobile targets, therefore I made it optional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this require CGo?

<comment><USER17> Yes. For example, the dbus package: [https://github.com/therecipe/qt/blob/053d54a2eb0658bae6e3259...](https://github.com/therecipe/qt/blob/053d54a2eb0658bae6e32597a276af4245d10806/dbus/dbus.go#L5-L17)

[https://github.com/therecipe/qt/blob/053d54a2eb0658bae6e3259...](https://github.com/therecipe/qt/blob/053d54a2eb0658bae6e32597a276af4245d10806/dbus/dbus.cpp)

All of the code is cgo wrappers around messes of c/c++

<comment><USER18> Can gc load a cgo plugin [1]? If so, could you build therecipe/qt into a plugin and load it at runtime to avoid being forced to use cgo?

E.g. your project has `type Qt interface {`, and the plugin exports a global symbol that can be asserted to that interface to use the library.

[1]: [https://golang.org/pkg/plugin/](https://golang.org/pkg/plugin/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It could probably work, but plugins currently only work on linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I also prefer golang over c++ for simplicity. But does it have IDE support? I mean Qt Creator. In the meantime, my first choice for cross-platform GUI development is Lazarus - clean language, broad OS support, and full IDE support (drag-and-drop layout designing and integrated debugging).

<comment><USER20> Sorry for the newbie question, I've never written a desktop application. But do you write the UI in a different language than you write its business logic? For instance, you would write the UI in Delphi with the Lazarus IDE and then the "back-end" of your app would be written in C++, Go or something alike?

<comment><USER21> tl;dr: sometimes the UI can be written in a different language.

Qt used to have an XML markup language that auto generated C++ UI code.

Later, QML was introduced - which is a JavaScript based UI runtime.

There are Qt bindings for other languages, for example Python. So you could write business logic in Python and UI in QML.

<comment><USER20> Thanks! So is Qt used to write both the logic and the UI?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does this work on embedded devices without desktop environment?

<comment><AUTHOR> If Qt supports it, then you can probably get it working with this binding as well.

<comment><USER23> IS a beaglebone black sufficiently close to a raspberry pi3 that I can use the RPI3 environment for beaglebone black dev? If not, what's required to implement on a new platform?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you can't simply reuse the rpi3 env, but you can use it as a template to how to get this working for the beaglebone black. So you would need to get a cross compiler and then extract the sysroot to compile Qt on your own. After you got Qt compiled, you will also need to make some changes similar to these [1] But I think the hardest part might be to get Qt compiled for the beaglebone black, because the info I found online seems to be a bit outdated.

[https://github.com/therecipe/qt/pull/226/files](https://github.com/therecipe/qt/pull/226/files)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is the wrapper C++ code generated or hand-written?

<comment><AUTHOR> it's automatically generated against the Qt version you use when you run the setup. the generator is also used to power qtmoc and qtminimal.

<comment><USER24> To clarify myself, I wondered if the _wrapper_ code is generated (like here [https://github.com/therecipe/qt/blob/master/websockets/webso...](https://github.com/therecipe/qt/blob/master/websockets/websockets.cpp)), not the moc-generated code.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, the _.cpp_.h and *.go files are all generated

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> what are the differences with go-qml? [https://github.com/go- qml/qml/blob/v1/README.md](https://github.com/go-qml/qml/blob/v1/README.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> go-qml, like the name suggests allows you to use QML together with Go. This binding allows you to also use Qt's C++ API. And it contains some tools to simplify deployment and development processes.

<comment><USER26> Just wanted to say, thanks for working on this! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice to see this happening.

FYI, the 'examples' link on that page is broken

<comment><USER28> it works from the README on github and goes to [https://github.com/therecipe/qt/tree/master/internal/example...](https://github.com/therecipe/qt/tree/master/internal/examples)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is this an official package?

<comment><AUTHOR> no

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would be nice if Google put resources behind a project like this. Same with gopherjs.</comment>


Fake News Is Unbelievably Cheap to Produce - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608105/fake-news-is-unbelievably-cheap <comment><USER2> Gets even cheaper if you:

1\. Remember that most people don't care about how 'well written' an article is, and simply care that it tells them something they wanted to know about (or reaffirms their pre existing opinions).

2\. Go even further and remember that most people don't even read the article to begin with. They just look at the title and icon on a social media site, and share it based on that. Quite a few really lazy fake news sites don't even write real articles. They just post attention grabbing headlines and simply have realistic seeming gibberish on the page itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well obviously, making something up requires no effort or reporting or verification. You just make something up.

It takes infinitely more resources to refute and disprove BS then it does to produce it.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article really only focuses on organized fake news campaigns directed by a larger organization. But that's not the only source: sometimes fake news comes from a single individual looking to score fake internet points, such as the St. Olaf note that was fabricated by a student for a personal reason:

> ... they confronted a person of interest who confessed to writing the note.

This case was one of only two examples given in the article, and it doesn't even support the thesis that the sources of fake news are organizations. So, we shouldn't automatically assume that all instances of fake news or Twitter trolls are being _paid_ to do what they do ... some people are simply trolls because they _like_ to be trolls.

<comment><USER5> For that matter... could it be the case that some instances of "fake news" are constructed by PR groups as demonstrations of their influence? If misinformation is being sold as a product, after all, the easiest way for a vendor to distinguish themselves is to have some samples available...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What cost? Fake News pays for itself and turns a profit.

[http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying- mac...](http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-macedonian- teen-earns-thousands-publishing-lies-n692451)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm reminded of a throwaway line from the book Anathem by Neal Stephenson (well worth reading by the way)

"If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me." "Asamocra?" "Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction."

I'll bet that Stephenson was probably inspired by the way auctions for Google AdWords work. In any case, the idea of conducting an auction to determine reputation of a data source is intriguing.

<comment><USER8> For those who have not read Anathen, some context may be interesting.

> "Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless > because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading > information," Sammann said.

> "Crap, you once called it," I reminded him.

> "Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were > built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make > more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum > deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back > out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the > Reticulum. But it had to be good crap."

> "What is good crap?" Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

> "Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random > letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document > that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was > subtly false. It's a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to > hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate > documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. __But it > didn't really take off until the military got interested. __"

> "As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy's reticules, you > mean," Osa said. "This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial > Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R."

> "Exactly!" Sammann said. "Artificial Inanity systems of enormous > sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has > mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and > spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that > there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita > forerunners were able to bring matters in hand."

(Emphasis mine.)

<comment><USER9> That book is awesome in many, many ways.

<comment><USER8> I really enjoyed it. That said, I also really enjoyed this in-depth takedown of the novel and its ideas: [http://gmfbrown.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/why- anathem-sucks.htm...](http://gmfbrown.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/why-anathem- sucks.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of the bullshit asymmetry principle:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle)

</comment><comment><USER11> Not just fake news, inaccurate or lazy journalism is also cheaper to produce. It's largely the reason for mainstream distrust of MSM over time as they've sensationalized the news and gone more for what's interesting more than accurate. See Buzzfeed, blog style news sites, and also some of the stuff that's been put out by WSJ and Forbes of late.

Part of that problem is that it has to be cheaper to produce so corners are cut because of the loss of revenue in the news business. It's become cut throat and a war for views to get pennies in advertiser revenue with slim to no margins. It's become a case of we get what we pay for, but even the subscription news sites with pay walls have gotten sloppy of late.

<comment><USER12> I wonder what enables them to do this with impunity though? I mean it looks like Fox does it frequently and it recently turned out from the FBI testimony that NYC did it on the Russia Trump connection but I don't know if they apologized.

PS: भारतीय recently moved to Americas lol so pardon me for my ignorance of your politics.

<comment><USER11> They all kind of do it with impunity, if there is a later retraction or correction, it's kind of too late, and they don't exactly put it on the front page that "we got the facts surrounding this event wrong or were originally misreported from erroneous or unverified sources".

</comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo You don't even have to produce fake news. If you want to drive discussion on a topic, how much would it cost to hire people to sit at home and comment/upvote/downvote in various portals? Those are chokepoints for information; control them, and you can control the flow.

Correct the Record got 10 million dollars in funding last year. That goes a looong way. It wouldn't be surprising if disinformation campaigns were rampant.

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

<comment><USER13> Is Correct The Record primarily an anti Fake News organisation or a pro US Democratic Party internet marketing wing?

It seems to me, as an European that the last US election got many "rustles" "jimmied" particularly about finding reasons for why Trump got in, and more than why Hilary didn't. one factor that is mentioned is that people believed lies on the internet. CTR appears to me as an outsider as fighting the very real issue of Fake News but is actually fighting for the Democrats.

I could be wrong though.

Mainly I think it's interesting (and worrying) that popularist politics is associated with propaganda and manipulation and the those who see the lies are minority enlightened educated people.

<comment><USER14> They and Share Blue are just propaganda wings and aren't set out to provide accurate news. Both parties were pretty shitty and it's nice to see they both lost in their own way.

<comment><USER15> They are left wing examples, but I know that during 2003 during the propaganda campaign that got us the second Iraq War that there was an unacknowledged but very real effort of the same size and scope going on initiated by the neocons. I am absolutely certain of what I observed back then. No one--no one--would believe me, though.

I would add that the comedian Dennis Miller was also drafted into spouting pro-war propaganda on late night tv.

It was all very deliberate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems intuitive. Fake news relies on people's fears, assumptions and misconceptions, so it's not like creators need to spend time actually researching or reporting, which doubtless makes it cheaper.

This is not to say this article isn't useful—it's good to get some confirmation. My only qualm is that someone selling a service to create fake content is by definition untrustworthy, so the prices they list might be unrealistically low.

</comment><comment><USER17> It won't stop the army of fact-checkers debunking articles for having no reliable sources, and denouncing them on social media. Social being both the main distribution for fake news, and also the platform where articles are routinely ridiculed and mocked. Something like Wales' WikiTribune[1] are a response to fake news and propagandists, and are a welcome step to try and address the issue. Facebook are also up in arms about this and are trying to spot fake news either algorithmically or using a paid taskforce of highly trained fact checkers (the mechanical turk approach). Reddit also warns users of posts which are regarded as fake news and warns users to take them with a pinch of salt.

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

<comment><USER18> The problem is targeting and segmentation. If a hundred thousand people see evidence for X and a hundred thousand people see a debunking that always convinces you of not-X, the debunking doesn't matter unless it's the same hundred thousand people. If the segment is the roughly 100M voters in America, you'll reach one in a thousand unless you've got the same targeting/segmentation filters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One hilarious exercise is to check your favorite fake news URL's in archive.org and also try a whois lookup.

Some of these operators are incredibly sloppy using (presumably) real home addresses. Their "origin story" on archive.org is equally sloppy-- immediately starting with primitive, thoughtless slurs against their targets and sometimes a glimpse into the genuine interests of the operator.

Unfortunately, these people don't have to be clever to "get the job done." Stupid is perfectly OK, when the only way of dealing with this problem is effectively a game of wack-a-mole.

</comment><comment> sven-j Turn the counts off. The retweet, view, like counters do not need to be running in real time. It's a great way to program people's behaviour. And those counts need to be regulated.

If the public is interested in news why the fuck does the public need to know the view count?

<comment><USER20> Sure it's a way to control the flow of bullshit, but the folk at YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will never do it until everything is burning. In that sense, they are as robotic as the people who buy into the fake news.

<comment><AUTHOR> But the reason they won't do it is entirely logical. They won't do it because the counters are part of what make their services so addictive to their users. Pushing buttons and seeing the counters go up turns their service into a kind of video game, or slot machine -- entertainments that we know are very hard for some personality types to put down.

What this means in practice is that, if one of the services was to unilaterally take down these kinds of features, its users would flee to the other services which still offer them. Addicts need to feed their addiction. Which would be suicide for the service that did it, which is why none of them will ever do it voluntarily.

Which in turn is where the parent's mention of regulation comes from -- when economic pressures force companies into a race to the bottom like this, introducing exogenous pressures like regulation can be the only way to stop the race.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> True, but fake news can be quite expensively produced as well.

</comment><comment><USER22> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552553)

</comment><comment><USER23> I do hope no-one on here is surprised by this?

</comment><comment><USER24> Not to mention it's trivial to set up a blog using a news template with a reputable-looking TLD.</comment>


Dangerous Curves - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/12/students-boycott-final-challenge-professors-grading-policy-and-get

<comment><USER2> Previous submission (not, like this one, of the canonical URL and original article title, which is preferred):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5217066>

The most extensive discussion of this story was from an article released by JHU:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229076></comment>


Sourdough Starters, Recipes, and Baker's Handbook - <AUTHOR> http://www.sourdo.com <comment><USER2> Another simple way to get started is to make no-knead sourdough bread that is cooked in a Dutch oven. I used to make that regularly (before quitting all flours and wheat), and it's great.

You use less starter and let it rise longer. Then bake it in the Dutch oven the next day without kneading it.

<comment><USER3> great tip on the Dutch oven, I graduated from there to making freeform/traditional sourdoughs and loved making both, really loved it. and while i didn't give up wheat or anything I did just end up with a ton of bread all the time which isn't good long term for me so mostly had to give it up.

<comment><USER4> Give it to neighbors, trade for pickled things or something :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For a more in-depth / intermediate book, I recently purchased "Open Crumb Mastery" ([https://trevorjwilson.selz.com/item/open-crumb-mastery- for-t...](https://trevorjwilson.selz.com/item/open-crumb-mastery-for-the- intermediate-sourdough-baker-1-1)) by Trevor Jay Wilson ([https://www.instagram.com/trevorjaywilson/?hl=en](https://www.instagram.com/trevorjaywilson/?hl=en)). It's a really deep dive into chasing that open crumb dragon. I'm really enjoying it.

<comment><USER6> I don't really get the open crumb fad. To me, the perfect bread is dense, rich and has a crumb that is stout and slightly chewy, definitely more crumb than air, and the air pockets should be small and even in size and distribution.

I want a reasonably even surface to spread butter on, with no gaping holes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My girlfriend and I been working through Lutz Geißler's BrotBackBuch, his buttermilk bread (advanced version) is by far the tastiest and most satisfying bread we have made so far. Dense, complex and just the right texture.

We started our own sourdough on whole grain rye, and have been adapting it for wheat bread as well, as needed. It is rather fun keeping our little buddy alive and happy.

The book has some amazing recipes and very solid chapters on theory and practice in regards to yeast, sourdough, oven steam, baking methods and a while host of other things. Highly recommended. I don't know if there's an English version, but I'm finding it very helpful to improve my German skills as well. He also has a blog at ploetzblog.de, which has even more recipes.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maurizio over at the Perfect Loaf [1] has some great some great instructions on capturing, feeding and cooking with sourdough starters.

[1][https://www.theperfectloaf.com](https://www.theperfectloaf.com)

</comment><comment><USER8> I have been extremely happy with Weekend Bakery's rye sourdough starter recipe:

[http://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/rye-sourdough-starter- in-...](http://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/rye-sourdough-starter-in-easy- steps/)

I keep it in the fridge and feed it once a week or so with a 50/50 mix of rye and white bread flour.

Have also had excellent results with their Pain Rustique recipe:

[http://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/our-version-of-a-pain- rus...](http://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/our-version-of-a-pain-rustique/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Wait, is this the second sourdough link to this the front page in two days? Am I missing some important bread-tech connection?

<comment><USER6> Baking is science, there is some surprisingly complex chemistry that goes into a good loaf of bread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anybody has any data on how do these cultures compare to starting your own sourdough from cultures caught from the air?

<comment><USER11> I created my own starter about 4 years ago and have been feeding my little family of four using it ever since. I'm very happy to not have to buy that terrible bread that they offer in the stores anymore.

My understanding is that it really doesn't matter where you get the culture from. It takes a couple of weeks to get a starter started so if you want to get into sourdough baking I'd recommend just buying one if you can get one from anywhere else.

(I created my own mostly out of curiosity, it's fun, but it takes a couple of weeks)

I often hear about how for example the sourdough bread in San Francisco is special and that this has something to do with the culture. I don't think this is the case. My understanding is that you tweak the taste using temperature and proofing time (and flour mix, obviously). Personally I don't want my bread to be sour, so I generally feed the culture frequently and proof the dough at around 27C. If you lower the temperature and proof for longer you get a more sour tasting bread.

If you just want to make a tastier bread then simply using very small amounts of baker's yeast and a long proofing time (at low temperature) will get you very far. It takes time to develop the flavours and the main reason the store bought bread is so bad is simply that it's produced so quickly.

Oh and I can also recommend the dutch oven trick, with sourdough or not, it really is a very simple way to make great bread at home.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure if we agree or not. I'm not at all after the classic sourdough taste, and am not really interested in keeping a friend. I buy bulk dried yeast and always use yesterdays dough as a starter, do a slow ferment in the fridge, or keep a fresh sponge fermenting for a day before I actually make bread. lots of fermentation really does develop a richer flavor.

if I do want to grow a friend you suggest I turn my culture over often to stop it getting too funky, and use proofing chamber to get rapid yeast development when actually baking?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've purchased his book and a few dehydrated starters.

Definitely recommend both. The book is overly technically with various temperatures but was a soft read otherwise. I've been baking now for the past few months.

Still trying to get a very sour starter or loaf.

<comment><USER14> If you want to make a very sour loaf all you have to do is use well-ripened kefir [1] instead of water in the dough. Not only does this make the dough extra sour, it also adds some extra raising power by virtue of the yeast in the kefir.

For those who don't know, kefir is made by fermenting milk with kefir grains, a combination of yeast and lactic acid bacteria which forms a symbiotic colony.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any idea if seitan recipes appear anywhere?</comment>


Diversity and the Death of Free Speech - <AUTHOR> https://spectator.org/diversity-and-the-death-of-free-speech/ <comment><USER2> " There was a time, not that long ago, when college students were encouraged to expand their minds further."

It would be helpful if Mr Glynn put a closer bracket of dates around this. While trying to figure out if this statement is true, I came across the Wikipedia page on the "Free Speech Movement" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement)). "Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on- campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom.". I guess "not too long ago" was after 1965, because apparently before that, it was common for college campuses to ban political speech and activity. I assume that UCB was, as always, a fore-runner, and that most campuses had such bans until much later.

I think we can all agree that "not too long ago" means some time before 2008, when Obama was elected. So we can bracket this utopia of free speech to between 1965 - 2008. Before 1965, it appears that it was typical to ban all political speech. With that bracket in mind, ask yourself if Mr Glynn's essay makes any sense at all, or if it's an exercise in wishful thinking.

I'm eager for evidence to tighten these brackets further. I vaguely recall that some campuses were considered bastions of conservatism on into the 1960s, but I can't find any references easily. I'd love to see something about that.

<comment><USER3> I've been following the free speech issue on universities for almost a year now, and I think the 2008 may be on the mark, though the first well known incident I can name is the Lawrence Summers controversy in 2005 [1].

The free speech issue is mainly a talking point of conservatives because these are the ones most impacted. Students complain about being afraid to voice their opinions for fear of being ostracized or punished on grades.

It's enlightening to read through a few issues of The College Fix [2].

Relevant interesting book is The Coddling Of The American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Luka off.

But it gets really entertaining when you watch some youtube videos on this subject, for example the great, 3-part, documentary[3] by Mike Nayna.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers)

[2] [https://www.thecollegefix.com/](https://www.thecollegefix.com/)

[3] [https://youtu.be/FH2WeWgcSMk](https://youtu.be/FH2WeWgcSMk)

EDIT: and just after I wrote this, a research paper popped up, about army veterans going back to college and experiencing culture shock: [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17475759.2019.1...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17475759.2019.1592770?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app)

<comment><USER4> As they say, conservative orthodoxy is the new punk rock.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: How many people don't have/disable java script on their browsers? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone out there developing a java script heavy app?  How you cater to users without js? Or do you even bother? <comment><USER2> To avoid potential catastrophes, I use different browers and settings based on the situation. This way it's unlikely that a scripting exploit or corruption I encounter can access, modify or propagate much data.

I use Firefox for all my work-related internet stuff, Safari for serious personal things, Opera for almost everything else. Opera lets me easily turn on and off javascript/plugins/etc on a per-site basis (right click -> Edit Site Preferences).

</comment><comment><USER3> It was 6% Jan. 2007 <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp></comment>


ShopLocket Announces Support For Stripe, Helping Bring Stripe To Non-Developers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shoplocket.com/2012/05/02/shoplocket-announces-support-for-stripe-helping-bring-the-payment-solution-to-non-developers/

<comment><USER2> Given that ShopLocket is based in Toronto, does this mean that Stripe is now offered in Canada?

More related, ShopLocket has been working extremely hard, and their site looks great.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your support! Today Stripe really only supports US bank accounts. But they are working really hard to make it available outside the US. You can submit your information to Stripe and they are trying to keep people updated. We had to do a lot around getting ourselves setup in the States to use it for our own invoicing, but it was worth it :)

<https://stripe.com/global>

<comment><USER4>
      We are working hard to make Stripe available outside the United States.

What does this even mean? You've been saying this for a long time now. Is there really no other status update besides this? Why not be a bit more transparent about the process to _people who want to give you money_?

<comment><USER5> Because people who say "Do this, I want to give you money" often turn out to:

a. Not really have money to give. b. Not really want to give money.

And frankly, "getting money" is probably low on Katherine's list right now. She has a product roadmap that she's executing on and doesn't want to be pulled away from. The money stuff will come later if she charts the right course.

It's counterintuitive at first, but as an entrepreneur, once you get burned a few times creating a feature or changing course due to a request from "someone who wants to give you money", you start learning to tune out the folks who demand stuff with that kind of domineering urgency. I've found this very difficult on my end and have people on my team help spot when to tune people out so I can get better at it.

<comment><USER4> (For the record, I'm not talking about Katherine's business; I'm talking about Stripe.)

I'm not disputing that, and I totally agree with your points, however unrelated to my questions they are. I'm not even going to use Stripe (as I have nothing that could utilise it at present), but I keep seeing that line appear over and over on this site.

People are going to get tired of being led on at some point. Something as simple as "We're handling regulatory/bureaucratic issue X at present in country Y" would be tremendously transparent compared to their handling of the situation at present.

The Stripe team is failing on this point.

<comment><USER5> They raised a gajillion dollars from A-list investors and have the most incredible team I've ever seen on their "About" page. That's enough for me to think they'll figure it out and to give them time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The combination of the two services is about a 5% cut. As a non-developer, this combination looks appealing (I'm still waiting for someone to completely kill paypal), but that's a pretty big cut.

Maybe I should just spend a few weeks learning to program instead :)

<comment><USER3> This is Katherine, Co-Founder of ShopLocket. Definitely understand where you are coming from in terms of fees. We've thought a lot about this. What we ended up doing for the pricing model is very much taking a cue from other services like Eventbrite, Etsy, and even lower plans on Shopify. Some competitors bring both there fees and the processing fees together, but it still usually ends up around 5%. This is actually a lot lower than tradition Marketplaces, say eBay that will charge much larger percentages. We're certainly open to feedback though!

<comment><USER6> hey katherine,

thanks for replying. i guess my biggest question is what really differentiates you from shopify then?

I have a shopify store for an e-commerce site I run and a wazala store (don't ask) to sell apparel items related to a blog I run. While shopify is great, but if i was going to pay the 5% or so percentage fee, I'd probably spring for shopify's fuller featured site capabilities over shoplocket.

I get the lower setup fee for Shoplocket, but when I heard of Shoplocket, I was really hoping i'd be able to use this as a lower-cost, less-featured alternative to shopify that was less expensive as well so i could finally get rid of Wazala and host stuff on my site.

I still might give it a try - I'm really anxious to get rid of wazala, but it'd be interesting to know your ideal customer usage of the product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not wanting to rain on your parade but here's some feedback on the www.shoplocket.com site: the out of focus images hurt my eyes. Please designers, keep it sharp! Why is the "Buy" not centered vertically in the example buttons?

</comment><comment><USER3> If any one has tried out the actually connect with Stripe flow we'd love your feedback on the process!! Think connect with facebook, for merchant accounts. This is Katherine from Shoplocket, btw :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Hijack warning: this seemed like a potentially relevant thread to a service I am looking for so I'm just going to post it in case any HN readers know of or provide this service.

I'm looking for an online service that can automate our order processing workflow.

Our current workflow is: (For additional clarity, I am surrounding separate entities in [ ])

        [Distributor emails] a Purchase Order to [OurCompany]
        [OurCompany] forwards this Purchase Order to the appropriate [3rd Party Warehouse], who then picks and ships the order to the [Distributor]
        [3rd Party Warehouse] sends [OurCompany] a Bill of Lading confirming product shipment
        [OurCompany] forwards this Bill of Lading to [Distributor]
        [OurCompany] invoices [Distributor] based on Bill of Lading (using QuickBooks)

I'm trying to find a service that will help us automate this, totally or partially, via a centralized website & automated emails.

Anyone know of such a thing?

<comment><USER9> Pegasus mail. <http://www.pmail.com/></comment></comment>


Show HN: Studio1 – Automate your screencast videos for customer support - <AUTHOR> https://studio1.io <comment><AUTHOR> Through launching software companies in the past, I know the frustrating work of creating good screencast videos for customer support. It's practically impossible to move the mouse smoothly enough and avoid typos. When you do something wrong you have to start all over again.

With Studio1, you create a manuscript using simple text. The manuscript consists of actions such as "Go to", "Click" and "Type". When rendering the final video, Studio1 will repeat these actions, giving you a smooth video.

You can record your repeatable actions by controlling a remote browser running inside Studio1. As you click/type, your actions are automatically added to the manuscript.

For voice-over, you just enter what you want it to say, and we instantly synthesize speech using Google's Text-to-Speech API, which gives you almost- human-sounding speech immediately. That makes it easy to iterate on your wording.

We'd love feedback and questions. Cheers!</comment>


Mars Viking Robots 'Found Life' - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/space/mars-life-viking-landers-discovery-120412.html

<comment><USER2> From <http://www.gillevin.com/> , the fourth co-author's site:

"Based on his sensitive radioisotope microbial detection method, Dr. Levin proposed to NASA and was selected for the Viking Mission to Mars. He was designated Experimenter of the Viking Labeled Release life detection experiment which landed on Mars in 1976. The experiment got positive responses at both Viking landing sites. However, a consensus did not accept his results as proof of life. After years of study, in 1997 Dr. Levin concluded that the experiment had, indeed, detected life on the red planet, and published his conclusion. Subsequent findings of environmental conditions on Mars and research on organisms found in extreme environments on Earth have been consistent with his claim. Pursuing the life issue, Dr. Levin was a member of the Scientific Instrument Team for NASA's experiment on the ill-fated Russian '96 Mars Mission. He has since developed, proposed and published on a Chiral LR life detection experiment as a way to remove any doubt about the original Mars LR results."

Somewhat removed from any idea of disinterested scholarship.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks less like evidence that the Viking robots found life than evidence that somebody figured out how to get their research topic in the news.

Using techniques this many steps removed from the raw data are irrelevant no matter how clever they are, because there's just too many things that can go wrong with no way to validate what the problem is, without going back and collecting more data. We're not going to come to a consensus about something as big as life on Mars on a result this meta.

</comment><comment><USER4> More accurate headline: "USC research team claims level of order found in Viking data set is indicative of biological processes, rather than prevailing consensus view which holds it was geological in nature."

</comment><comment><USER5> The inundation with links to other articles (inline and sliding in) makes this site basically unreadable. It's impossible to concentrate! Really just shameful for a purported science site...

</comment><comment><USER6> * Maybe.</comment>


No one will sell No One Lives Forever, so let's download it - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/07/05/no-one-will-sell-no-one-lives-forever-so-lets-download-it/ <comment><USER2> These games are absolutely awesome but never made that much money. So I guess there is not a lot of interest for all those companies involved to make a claim and run the risk of getting sued by the others. Well it's only good for the consumers. More free games.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, that's one way to get lawyers to figure out who own what...</comment>


Remarkable map: Where can North Korea's missiles reach? - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-16/north-korea-missile-range-map/8880894 <comment><USER2> That is remarkable, buttery smooth on mobile too AND really informative.</comment>


'Oral sex' definition prompts dictionary ban in US schools - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/25/oral-sex-dictionary-ban-us-schools?CMP=twt_gu

<comment><USER2> Yes. We know. Some people are morons. Not sure why this is on Hackers News.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is from january 2010. Why has my downvote button disappeared?

<comment><AUTHOR> There never has been a downvote button on submissions, and the karma threshold for downvotes on comments/replies is now 500.</comment></comment>