Ask HN: How was your Advent of Code 2018 experience? - <AUTHOR> I really enjoyed this year, the thing that made it quite interesting for me was the amount of people streaming in all kinds of languages with all kinds of approaches.
For me I found it quite a nice learning exercise, though oddly enough ( I was trying to do them as fast as I could ) I often resorted to mega functions and basic data types to solve the problems.  This worked out well early in the event, but later it would lead to many simple bugs.  I also found that it's nice when your language has a lot of toys to make life easier.  I started with Go, as a learning exercise, but swapped to C# as so many problems fit nicely with "Linq", however there were lots of missing niceties, so I spawned a NuGet package with a library of extension methods which I hope to polish now that AoC is over
What are your takeaways? <comment><USER2> I used it as a workout for the compiler that I'm writing. I solved every problem in my own language, so that was pretty cool. The language is now almost as powerful as C. I kept all the code in one file, which now has grown to 4500 LoC (non-empty, non-comment), producing 38k LoC in LLVM.

On day 6 I got a stack overflow, so I had to quickly implement new/delete. For the Elf processor I had to add in binary operators. Design-wise it taught me that good literals can be really helpful, e. g. an initializer expression for an array of structs. With Python's dict/tuple/array literals e. g. you could sometimes replace parsing entirely with a couple text transformations in Sublime. Maybe this is specific to these kinds of problems, but I think it would also be helpful for unit tests.

It was fun to learn a new algorithm (A*) and implement it. Day 23 part 2 was my favorite. I was stuck for hours, tried two solutions that didn't work out. Went to bed frustrated, then implemented the solution the next morning. I'm still thinking about it, it's an interesting problem.

<comment><USER3> Is there any particular technical reason behind the decision of having 4500 LoC in a single file? It sounds like a pain to maintain and extend.

<comment><USER2> I wanted to always compile everything, and I don't have modules yet. Every problem is in one function, so for AOC it wasn't a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually finished them all, most on the day on which they were published (I had the entire day, since the problems open at 06:00 in my timezone; I didn't try for any leaderboards :p). Some problems took me far too much time (day 15 with its huge simulation!), and overall I agree with the general sentiment that the problems were too finicky, with a lot of details to implement without much real thought.

Day 23 part 2 (teleportation nanobots one) was fairly difficult as well; I tried to implement an actual solution, but failed because of wrong assumptions about its correctness. (I tried to represent the intersection of a number of octahedrons with the bounded volume of 8 planes, but it seems that representation is redundant, so there are invalid configurations. I didn't feel like fixing that anymore after 8+ hours.) Looking at the solutions board on reddit, I wrote a smtlib2 script for Z3 that solves it; it works, but isn't all that satisfying.

The sheer amount of pathfinding amazed me; some of the plain pathfinding problems were good (day 22 with its pathfinding in the implicit graph where you split nodes up into the various combinations of tools), and I was happy to see that day 25 was just an unordered graph component analysis (i.e. a few floodfills).

I liked yesteryear more, and in general I'd like to see smaller problem statements (and thereby also less details to implement!), and possibly slightly more of an algorithmic challenge, though the latter is definitely not necessary (this is not a competitive programming competition, it's an advent calendar of all things!).

Still, big thanks to Eric for giving us this!

(I did the problems in Rust, to become more familiar with the language. See my implementations here[1].)

[1]: [https://git.tomsmeding.com/AOC/tree/2018/src](https://git.tomsmeding.com/AOC/tree/2018/src)

<comment><USER5> Finished them all, and enjoyed it, but Day 23 part 2 (part 1 was trivial) was a real bugbear.

In particular, Day 23 was pretty remarkable for the sheer number of "solutions" posted to the solutions board that worked for the person's own input, but only by luck -- they failed for other peoples'. The only possibly general solutions I've seen are the ones that set up external solvers -- either z3 or some integer programming package. (I wound up using the latter, and may have lucked out myself -- whether due to numerical instability or some fault in problem setup, I only got close enough to optimum to find it with a little local hill-climbing.) I'm not sure that's what Eric had in mind; everything else can be solved in Python or Ruby with no recourse to large external libraries.

For the most part, I had fun with this stuff -- even day 24, which I had to set aside for hours before a careful desk check found the reason why the answers I was getting weren't quite right. But rules that matter for some people, but not others, do take a bit of the shine off. There were more minor problems along the same lines with some of the other problems -- day 15 and day 24 had a _lot_ of fiddly rules which didn't matter at all for some peoples' inputs.

<comment><USER4> > Day 23 [...] I'm not sure that's what Eric had in mind

There is an algorithm for finding a maximum clique in a graph, and some people on Reddit seem to have used it: the Born-Kerbosch algorithm [1]. Your graph has a connection between two nodes if their ranges overlap. It relies on the assumption that overlapping of manhattan regions is transitive; no-one on Reddit seemed to know whether that assumption is true, and I don't know either. :)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bron%E2%80%93Kerbosch_algorith...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bron%E2%80%93Kerbosch_algorithm)

<comment><USER5> It's not -- the Reddit thread has a counterexample:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/a8s17l/2018_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/a8s17l/2018_day_23_solutions/ecdxr1u/)

That said -- one visualization posted elsewhere showed that that person's particular input was a bunch of singletons, plus one colossal clique that all intersected at a single point. That may have been structure that people were meant to discover -- but it's not clear that anyone did until after the fact. (The person with the visualization identified the clique as all the "bot ranges" intersecting with a solution point that they'd already found by other means.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used the first few days for learning Elixir.

On one day I just did not know how to create a solution at all, so I stopped.

Also, I did not have much time, since work and my musicianship were too time consuming. Did not want to come home late in the evening just to lose my mind on more problems that need solving.

They might have been easier using an imperative language, but using Elixir had been a joy nonetheless, despite my occasional cravings for indexes and imperative for-loops.

But I will definitely come back to AoC to further practice Elixir and watch some of Jose Valim's streams. They always add some further insight into the language.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not ashamed to say I found it too hard and didn't make it beyond day 3, but that's still great. It's a useful way to know what you don't know — although because I couldn't move on to the next puzzle, I still don't know what I don't know.

It made me go back to Hackerrank and try a few of those out.

<comment><USER2> You can skip days, though. Some are easier than others.

<comment><USER7> You can, but some puzzles depend on knowing the solution to another puzzle, or are basically advanced versions of the same thing.

<comment><USER2> Some do, but most don't. For most puzzles the only dependency is part 2 on part 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Day 15 should have been broken down. Or parts of it should have been earlier problems so by the time we got to day 15 it would be a time save to re-use code. I personally try to follow the order of problems, but I'm still on day 15 and with the holidays, kids etc haven't had the mental capacity to sit down and work on it so I doubt I will finish things this year.

I don't want to sound ungrateful though, I think the creator is doing an amazing service to software engineers/hobbyists everywhere and it's always fun to see solutions people come up with.

</comment><comment><USER9> Love AOC. Finished all puzzles last year and the year before that. Used it as a way to learn Python (coming from C/MATLAB/R).

However this year I found the puzzles way too finicky, after about day 5-6. Was taking way too long to load the problem into my head.

Perhaps I had greater mental bandwidth in previous years, this year work + growing kids was top of mind.

I don't mind problems that take a long time to think about, and/or take a long time to work through, trial and error, change approaches, etc.

What I do mind and what drove me away from AOC this year is that the problems seemed so detailed in ways that seemed arbitrary and ad-hoc, I didn't have the motivation to spend the time required to load the problem into my head.

</comment><comment><USER10> Really time-consuming and also an eye-opening experience to see how good some of the participants are. I haven't participated before and went into the forums for the first time after having spent 8+ hours coming up with a solution - only to find a video of someone solving the problem in 5 minutes!

</comment><comment><USER11> \- I never cared about the stories. I read as little as I need to solve the problems.

\- I wanted to solve some problems using Prolog, but I struggled and reverted back to C# for all of them.

\- I used LINQ a lot, including the query syntax which I rarely used before.

\- I never made it to the leaderboard. I always ranked between 500 and 1000.

\- I'm constantly surprised by how consistently fast top rankers are.

\- I'm constantly surprised by how fast time goes by when solving these problems.

\- I stopped participating at day 14, or when problems started to take me over an hour to solve.

</comment><comment><USER12> I took part for the first time this year, as an exercise in learning Rust (I have got up to day 20 so far). It's been pretty good for moving from "I sort of know this language" to being a bit more comfortable with it just by spending more time writing code, and I liked the way the problems get gradually more complicated and tricky. Plus, since each day is a fresh problem you can try different coding approaches without being constrained by having to rewrite a pile of existing code.

There are some aspects where things are easier if your language has good support for features which AoC leans on. Notably, almost every problem requires parsing an input text file, so good regex support is really useful. I found myself wishing for a serde regex backend so I could initialize into structs from a regex match without a lot of tedious Point { x: cap[1].parse().unwrap(), y: cap[2].parse().unwrap(), ... } boilerplate. And since a lot of problems use 2D grids of ascii characters, Rust's lack of native 2D arrays and insistence that strings are utf8 and thus not trivially indexable makes things a bit more awkward than they might have been in a different language. I definitely agree with you that a language with a wide ranging standard library helps a lot to make life easier, too.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'll tell you in March when I'm finished!

</comment><comment><USER14> Last year I did all problems in Scala, focusing on using pure fp, scalaz and cats. This year I wanted to bolster my Go and Ruby skills since I'm now working on a project that uses both. I found that Ruby was more fun to work with, so much more fun than Go that I only did one solution in Go. Many solutions I found could be solved in an elegant way just as I would have done in Scala or Clojure, but I found some rough edges in Ruby which were partly due to my ignorance of the language and partly because there are some inconsistencies in the collections api. I had to revisit more puzzles for performance improvements than in Scala. For example one puzzle required random access and insert and delete on a very large array which was incredibly slow in Ruby, but would have been acceptable in Scala or Clojure using the Vector collection. Rewriting as a double linked list improved runtime 1000x.

</comment><comment><USER15> If anyone is interested in programming challenges like this, I've also been working on a programming puzzle. The solution will be a private key worth 0.125 BTC (~$500 USD.) And there will also be a few smaller amounts when solve the intermediate stages.

It's going to be posted on my company's blog at 12pm EST on the 30th of December: [https://formapi.io/blog](https://formapi.io/blog)

I also did one last year [1], but this time it will be more of a programming challenge instead of a "treasure hunt". Anyway, hope you enjoy it, and good luck!

[1] [https://formapi.io/blog/posts/bitcoin-treasure- hunt/](https://formapi.io/blog/posts/bitcoin-treasure-hunt/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've made it up to Day 14 using Elixir after which I got sidetracked, but still followed the Twitch streams from the Elixir community by Jose (Elixir's creator) and James.

Fantastic learning experience.

</comment><comment><USER17> For the most part, I enjoyed it!

I was using it to get more familiar with Rust, and I feel a lot more comfortable with the language now. I doubt I did everything idiomatically, and especially not at the beginning, but I feel like I can solve problems now. I've been putting my code on github [1] as I go, if anyone wants to see how I did things.

One takeaway for me next year is that there are some common things that pop up on multiple days, and if I actually card about being competitive, I'd want to make generic solutions for them before the competition started. Things like working with 2D and 3D grids, pathfinding, and parsing input. But since I was learning a language, the repetition helped.

Another takeaway was that I should not check the problems immediately when they open, which is late for me. Probably about half the time I would tell myself I'd do some simple stuff, then go to bed and finish in the morning. But then I'd get into it, and stay up too late. I do look forward to not having such a messed up sleep schedule next month.

I'll definitely be looking forward to it next year. This was my first year, so I may go back and do some past years to fill the time until then.

[1] [https://github.com/steveherrin/adventofcode2018](https://github.com/steveherrin/adventofcode2018)

</comment><comment><USER18> It was interesting to me. I had to get up early due to the timezone I live in where AoC started at 6am. I didn't _really_ try to make the leaderboard (even less after the first day when I learned how hard it is) but I was in a competitive mode and appropriately nervous. On later days I learned to calm down which also improved my performance.

I was using Python which for me turned out to be the optimal programming language for problems like AoC. My reading of other solution on reddit confirms this. You often have to use maps (dictionaries) or lists and Python can be very concise in working with these. Also learned about convenience modules such as "collections" and defaultdict. Some people were able to produce concise and quite readable solutions with Numpy which I want to explore further in the future.

Overall I was impressed to see that some people were able to produce short but still very readable Python programs as solutions to the problems.

I gave up on day 8 when I didn't have the motivation to cut out the time between (or before) life, work and family to solve more and more complicated puzzles that became more and more arbitrary and didn't show any intrinsic motivation. (Although I did follow on some and found the CPU instruction set puzzle quite interesting).

</comment><comment><USER19> This year i wanted to learn Common Lisp ([https://git.sr.ht/~ttt/aoc18](https://git.sr.ht/~ttt/aoc18)). I think that there had been way to many problems this year that had huge descriptions with many small details to miss. When you add to it huge puzzle state (2d arrays for maps) it makes debugging simple mistakes needlessly hard - in fact solving day 15 for me was almost like working :(

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I'm not a massive fan of the "implement this huge spec" puzzles (like the insanity of the knots last year). Give me a geometric or algorithmic one any day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Darn, totally forgot about this. December is a hard time for puzzles, too much crunching. Anything like this coming up in the next few months?

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been doing it in Scheme this year, as a major branch of the LISP family I've never tried before. Super-impressed by the speed and solidity of the Chez Scheme implementation, but still a little undecided about how much I like Scheme for day-to-day use. (After Clojure, both Scheme and Common LISP seem to have a fair number of "why is this taking so many keystrokes?" moments).

I know a number of people thought some of the "simulation with lots of details to keep track of" problems were a bit over the top this year. Personally, I rather enjoyed them, and in particular found day 15 really satisfying to complete. Not something you'd want to do every day, but it's good to have some problems which pose a bit of a challenge _without_ turning into a "can you pattern-match this against an algorithms textbook" exercise. The overall breadth and balance of problem types was impressive as ever.

I hope it's back next year!

<comment><USER22> > why is this taking so many keystrokes?

I used to Scheme a lot, and this was a significant part of how Python ended up beating it for regular work. This year I tackled AoC in my own pet new Scheme descendant which tries to fix this problem: [https://github.com/darius/squeam](https://github.com/darius/squeam) \-- I'll check in my solutions later today.

Incidentally one thing I learned on Day 1 was that Chez Scheme's built-in hash function is not very good. Chez is generally awesome, so maybe it does work well in the context of Chez's built-in hashtable type, or something -- I didn't check. (My Squeam interpreter runs on top of Chez.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I solved all of the problems in Go. I feel like I programmed pretty quickly, but I rarely made it onto the leaderboard. I attribute this to Go's verbosity -- needing to write for loops manually instead of just map/filter/reduce. In 2019 I plan to learn a new language (perhaps Crystal?) that will enable me to solve Advent problems faster.

</comment><comment><USER24> I got up to day 8 before having to give up and start organizing for Christmas. I tried out Zig to do it and you can see my solutions here:

[https://github.com/meheleventyone/aoc-2018-zig](https://github.com/meheleventyone/aoc-2018-zig)

</comment><comment><USER25> I actually didn't have as much trouble with day 15 as most people seem to have. It took me a while but that was mostly just getting all the finicky details right.

Day 23 part 2 I had no idea how to solve correctly and in the end just wrote something that tries a bunch of spread out points, refining around the most promising point. Turned out to give the right answer but could have gotten stuck in a local optimum.

I did most of the problems the next day as I didn't want to wait up for the problems to be posted. I did get a few leaderboard positions on days where I did stay up.

All in all I enjoyed it, learned a few new things (how A* actually works) and improved my fluency in JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER26> I still haven't caught up yet as well as the time zone was not the best for me, but it was a _fantastic_ success.

As a mainly Python dev, I tried solving them in Golang during work breaks or afternoons with what little mental energy I had left :P to upload them on Github.

I learned so much more about Go, as some puzzles allowed me to use some nifty language features, and really liked the puzzles that featured recursion! In the end of the day, visiting the subreddit, there were tons of ingenious answers, people willing to help, or discuss the problem on a more theoretical basis. I still missed some of Python's minimalistic style, though.

Thanks Eric Wastl for this Christmas Gift!

</comment><comment><USER27> It was loads of fun. Decided to try out go, so the first couple of days were a bit slow but from then on it was pure fun. Even though the elves VS goblin game was a bit too much to handle in one single day...

</comment><comment><USER28> A friend gave me the problem for day 2 part 2, and I found it really cute.

Given a set of n strings, each of length m, find if there is a pair that differs in exactly one position.

It was not trivial to come up with an optimal and elementary O(nm) time algorithm. (by elementary, I mean something does not need a few hours to implement).

I've seen people getting running times of the form O(n^2m), O(n(n+m)) and O(nm^2) on multiple Reddit posts, and was surprised at all kind of different approaches.

<comment><USER29> _It was not trivial to come up with an optimal and elementary O(nm) time algorithm._

Compute the hashes of the _nm_ strings formed by taking each of the _n_ strings and zeroing out one of the _m_ characters. If you get any hash collisions, compare the strings.

<comment><USER2> Isn't that O(n∙m²)?

        for each string (n)
          for each char (n∙m)
            zero out char, compute hash (n∙m²)

<comment><USER30> If you hand code your own hash function you can compute hash(string with zeroed out i-th character) from hash(string) in O(1)

An example of such a hash is a polynomial hash (sum c_i * p^i modulo M, with p and M prime) such as the one used to explain [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabin–Karp_algorithm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabin–Karp_algorithm)

<comment><USER29> Right, I meant using a polynomial hash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The good : \- I used it as an opportuity to learn Rust and it is definitely a great way to practice with a new language. \- I managed to do all but two puzzle within 24h of their publications. \- There are some gems (solving the nanobots part2 was very satisfing).

The bad : \- Some problem took a lot of time because of sentences I found unclear. \- Some problems had very long specs (goblin vs elfes).

I will probably do it again next year (hoping that rough corners get smoothed).

</comment><comment><USER32> Never started. No time when you have family+little kid

</comment><comment><USER33> Super fun.

I'm not caught up yet. Finished day 17 earlier today.

I've been using the advent to learn Rust. I'm pretty happy with my progress so far. A few things were more difficult than had I used C++. But for the most part it's gone swimmingly.

I love the advent of code subreddit. Every time I solve a puzzle I check how other people did it in Rust. I learned several new things this way.

</comment><comment><USER34> I loved it (and donated to Eric for his amazing work on AoC). I do all the problems in Ruby on CoderPad, and stream it on Twitch. I love stumbling on problems that have incredibly concise solutions in Ruby (day 25 comes to mind) where you end up with roughly 20 lines of code that crunch the whole thing in a few seconds.

</comment><comment><USER35> Great fun, I was another solving in Go (Python programmer by day). I loved AoC, and learned a lot about Go!

The hardest puzzles were definitely the fiddliest ones, day 15 in particular.

I wish there was a way for non US people to get a leaderboard in different timezones, appreciate it's hard (impossible) to do fairly.

</comment><comment><USER36> I started in rust but switched over to C (just because I get to apply NIH and have fun writing out things I wouldn't have any reason to otherwise) – currently doing 15; will try to wrap up before the year ends.

This is my first time trying and I'm enjoying it a lot.

</comment><comment><USER37> I found quite frustrating that any non-zero score depends only on time of submission in a specific time zone. It makes it a race and a race for certain people only. But of course one can just take it as an opportunity to practice a language and learn new stuff.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've found out about it mid-December from social media contacts looking for hints.

I did the first few then life and work got in the way and I am finally catching up to it.

I also find that Python is an excellent choice for such ad hoc data explorations

</comment><comment><USER39> First few days were great! Fortan was interesting (...) and wow that C++ was not the same beast I used in college. Then uh... kind of got sidetracked.

</comment><comment><USER40> Stopped at day 15 as it was starting to spend too much time on it all :D wouldn't mind picking back up where I left off over my holiday.

</comment><comment><USER41> "oh ____I need to implement a circular list " ... reads about collections.deque ...

Done.

</comment><comment><USER42> Would love to see a list of languages that were tried and successful.</comment>


Meet ORWL. The first open source, physically secure computer - <AUTHOR> https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/09/29/meet-orwl-the-first-open-source-physically-secure-computer/ <comment><USER2> > If someone has physical access to your computer with secure documents > present, it's game over!

FDE? Or am I being dumb / naive?</comment>


Benefits of Napping in Healthy Adults (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2869.2008.00718.x/pdf <comment><USER2> Can someone explain the mechanics of things like how caffeine naps work? I never understand how people are supposed to implement these things, it always seems like they just assume you will fall asleep instantly.

For example, they say you should drink a coffee and then immediately take a 20 min nap. Seriously? It takes me 5-15min to fall asleep at night, let alone during the day. At a minimum this seems like a 45 min ordeal.

<comment><USER3> It takes me at least an hour to go to sleep at night, and it has done so since I was a very little kid.

Caffeine intake is not correlated, because there have been plenty of times when I hadn't had caffeine for weeks, months, or even years, and yet this pattern has not changed.

Not everyone reacts the same to these kinds of drugs, and not everyone can participate in the manner suggested.

<comment><USER4> How old are you? I had the same problem as a kid...first 20 years, really. Then I started 40+ hours/week and cramming stuff into my nights so soon I was so tired I was able to go to sleep very quickly. Then 10-15 years later I added kids to the mix, and now I can go to sleep basically on-demand any time of day. Power naps are critical; coffee and knock off for 20 minutes. Feel alive after.

<comment><USER5> I don't know about that poster, but I'm mid 30's and definitely still lie awake while thinking about how tired I'm going to be in the morning.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Physical excersise in the evening works for me. Knocks me out cold when I get home.

<comment><USER6> Physical exercise earlier in the day helps me sleep at night, vigorous exercise less than 4-6 hours before bed keeps me awake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the benefits of WFH is being able to just lie on my rug when I'm getting drowsy and take anywhere between a short (10-15 mins) to long (1-2 hour) nap. After that, I'll be razor focused for quite a number of hours afterward and not need another sip of caffeine for the rest of the day.

<comment><USER8> I take 15 min power naps during the day at work and encourage my employees to also. It's refreshing exactly in that way you said. I wish more companies encouraged napping. Better than a cup of coffee any day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here in Taiwan, and also in a previous summer job in China, the company turns off the lights at lunchtime so people can have a nap when they get back from the cafeteria.

It strongly encourages people to take a break instead of working through lunch, and my schedule has adjusted such that I enjoy the nap. That said, working hours here are longer than in other countries (I'm lucky to work from 9:00 to 18:30, many companies keep their employees until 21:00).

</comment><comment><USER10> Melatonin and St.John's improved my sleep to the point of no longer needing afternoon(feeling sleepy around1300-1500) naps.

Also keeping tabs on sugar and caffeine consumption.

<comment><USER11> Aren't there side-effects to St Johns?

Also, I just realised it abbreviates to SJW - hilarious..

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So what are we supposed to do about bed head?

<comment><USER13> If you're a man and over 25, become Australian. Baldness & a beer gut comes with citizenship.</comment></comment>


Bootlegging Jane's Addiction - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2017/11/13/bootlegging-janes-addiction/ <comment><USER2> I saw them at Fairfax Park in Virginia and it was mind blowing. This nice little park and all these freaks. They overturned a water truck because all the water was sold out. It was incredibly hot. Then a big tanker truck showed up to hose down the crowd. People were underneath the water trailer trying to get some drops of water. I overheard the truck driver saying "I wounldn't drink that, I justed sucked it out of a pond up the road" It was epic.

[https://www.restonnow.com/2014/08/07/throwback-thursday- when...](https://www.restonnow.com/2014/08/07/throwback-thursday-when- lollapalooza-played-reston/)

<comment><USER3> Yep! Then I saw them again a few years ago when they played a show at a park in Baltimore. I won't lie, it was enjoyable (if only because a band I grew up loving was playing at a park in my town) but me and my group of late-30's/early-40's friends couldn't help but laugh at Perry's "stage banter".

It was either the most rehearsed and corny thing I'd ever heard or a brilliant troll. Lines like:

"Hello Baltimore! My tailor's from Baltimore...she keeps me looking good in all my nice clothes...yeah...love my tailor...but back when I was younger, I didn't buy my clothes...I just stole 'em..." ( _opening riff to "Been Caught Stealing"_)

Every few songs there was another rambling, tangential "story" that was clearly planned out as the way to introduce the next tune. They still played and sang great, but it was a far cry from the shows I listened to on dubbed tapes as a high school kid in the early 90's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm an avid bootleg collector of certain bands. While I won't say that every good band necessarily sounds better live, most of them do. In exchange for an arguably muddy sound (which can be greatly improved by a good recorder or a soundboard recording), you get:

\- A band that has played the same set dozens of times and knows the songs backwards and forth, as opposed to when the songs were being recorded for the album and still in flux. The performance is tighter, and the band often makes (welcome) variations to keep it interesting.

\- New spins on old songs, or covers of other songs, made to fill out the setlist. Most of these never make it onto official albums.

\- The benefit of multiple performances for a particular lineup or point in time. There are so many amazing bands that only had a particular singer / lineup for one or two albums. But with recorded concerts, you can get a few more performances out of that lineup. Even if the lineup itself remained through the albums, the delivery may have changed. Anyone who's a fan of Queensryche knew that Geoff Tate by the early-90's and on didn't have half the vocal sustaining power that he had in 1983. 1983-1986 Queensryche bootlegs are some of the most enjoyable in my collection.

<comment><USER5> > "Anyone who's a fan of Queensryche knew that Geoff Tate by the early-90's > and on didn't have half the vocal sustaining power that he had in 1983. > 1983-1986 Queensryche bootlegs are some of the most enjoyable in my > collection."

Have you got any song recommendations for early 80's Queensryche? The whole Operation Mindcrime album is great, and I like the song Silent Lucidity (IIRC that was on a later album), but I haven't heard much early Queensryche.

<comment><USER4> Early Queensryche is _very_ different from later Queensryche. They got alot of crossover success with Silent Lucidity in the 90's, and basically went in that direction for the rest of the decade and dropped the metal sound altogether-- taking on a stripped down, grunge sound instead.

Operation: Mindcrime is their best album, bar none. Following that, I'd say their best effort was their original Queensryche EP:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aYPQBNk8I8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aYPQBNk8I8)

It's not terribly progressive, more of just an Americanized Judas Priest/Iron Maiden, but Tate sounds amazing. Warning and Rage for Order aren't bad, either.

Also, to qualify my earlier comment, this is what Tate sounded like performing their title song in 1984:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YklSwADBOkg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YklSwADBOkg)

And here's what he sounded like trying to do the same thing in mid-2000's:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isOwlIEeiSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isOwlIEeiSA)

It's incredibly sad how much his vocal range diminished, especially since the tone is still pretty good. Chalk it up to years of smoking.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the tips. I can hear what you mean about Geoff Tate's voice, though like you say the vocal tone is still good in the later stuff, which makes it enjoyable musically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> le-mark _When MTV first reported that the band was breaking up in 1991, I was just 16 and too naive to recognize how stories like theirs were shaping my own thinking about art and life._

This idea that stories shape ones early outlook on life is something I've been fascinated with for a long time. I sometimes reflect on the stories I heard growing up in a poor rural area, and consider the stories I imagined more affluent kids hearing. Where the same, how were they different? Do the stories impoverished kids hear contribute to "generational" poverty? Which leads me to think about fables and fairy tales, and where they come from and what lessons do they teach.

Does anyone else ponder these things?

<comment><USER6> Absolutely. Another great example - I used to think that Hollywood forgot how to make good movies, but now realize it's much more specific to the timing of my coming of age. There were certain movies from the mid 80s that were so powerful and memorable to me that, for me, they have never been surpassed in all the years since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tangential, but Fishbone is a band that should have gotten a lot more attention than they did.

<comment><USER2> They were fabulous too but its been painful seeing the band fall apart. First Chris then the rest. They were part of Lolapalooza #1 too. It was the high point of alternative rock I believe. I hated Souxsie and the Banshee's but when they played everybody was tossing their empty water bottles up in the air and there was something magical happening.

Perry really had a great idea there. A festival done right. Nothing Shocking. I saw a later Lolapolooza in Raleigh and it was more more subdued.

<comment><USER8> How could u hate Siouxsie? what kind of monster are you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jane is a real person

[http://www.aintnoright.org/Interviews/janeexclusive03.htm](http://www.aintnoright.org/Interviews/janeexclusive03.htm)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=jane+bainter&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=jane+bainter&tbm=isch)

</comment><comment><USER10> The title needs "[the band]" inserting:

>"Aaron Gilbreath considers the impact a live Jane's Addiction recording has had on him, and the effect heroin had on the band's — and his own — creativity."

</comment><comment><USER11> The article mentions Carla Bozulich in passing. I think that's a great counterpoint of an artist with copious output, because she got clean at an early age. Just look at the breadth of her work and think of what Jane's could have been.

</comment><comment><USER12> I got to see them live with NIN I think in 2009 or 2010 (NINJA tour reunion or something like that), and despite being in a huge venue in Irvine, their stage presence was amazing. One of the best I've been. Great band.

</comment><comment><USER13> One of my favorite bands! from their wild early days to their mature and unique later albums, Janes Addiction truly embodies the spirit of Rock & Roll in a way that most bands can only hope to achieve.

</comment><comment><USER14> While interesting, that article is littered with typos. Kind of takes me out of the moment.</comment>


Instagress Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://boostfy.co <comment><USER2> I have been using ( [https://Instajool.com](https://Instajool.com) ) for about 2 months, I can say they are way better than Instagress in terms of efficiency and pricing. They have a very powerful control panel where you can manage your system settings. The panel is appealing and mostly like the one that was provided by instagress. As of results, the growth of my account followers and reaction is really amazing.</comment>


Small / medium business Linux accounting - <AUTHOR> Are there any Python / Gtk / Postgresql developers out there looking for a small to medium size business accounting package? I started one for myself, and would enjoy collaborating with like minded people.<p>Even if you have no programming experience, but know the ins and outs of accounting, I would be pleased to correspond with you. <comment><USER2> Have you been following the series on accounting in LWN? [https://lwn.net/Articles/735334/](https://lwn.net/Articles/735334/)

Also, is Gtk the best choice for cross-platform development? I'd seriously also consider Qt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link to LWN. I had not known of that page.

As far as cross-platform goes, I don't really care. This is for Linux, as Mac and Windows already have plenty of accounting choices anyway.

<comment><USER3> Actually you might be surprised, even the desktop apps are all moving to subscription and a lot of what's left is abandonware.

<comment><AUTHOR> Accounting desktop apps? Or desktop apps as a whole?

If you are thinking accounting desktop apps, could you list which ones you have in mind?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beancount: [http://furius.ca/beancount/](http://furius.ca/beancount/)

Been meaning to start using this for a while, but haven't gotten around to it. So can't speak to it's efficacy.

The documentation is pretty thorough, however.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice find. Their goals are quite different from mine though. I want the ease of SQL + server even if it does make a bit more maintenance work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.gnucash.org/](https://www.gnucash.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Uhm... this post is to see if there are any other people looking to collaborate on a Linux accounting system using Python. Gnucash is C, and they clearly state they will not switch.

Thanks anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would be interested in collaborating on the development using Python.

<comment><AUTHOR> For a bit of insight, Python is the 'glue' that delivers information between Gtk (the frontend) and PostgreSQL (the backend). Python also creates the Libreoffice documents using the py3o libary. Python is an important part, but not the whole picture.

Are you looking to collaborate for the sake of Python alone, or is the accounting system of interest to you?

<comment><USER6> I've thought about creating something similar to this before however using a slightly different set of tools (Web/Python/MySQL). The accounting system is of interest to me because I personally know a small business that could benefit from this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which OS? Which country?

I live in New York, USA. Operating system is Linux Mint.

These two factors are pretty important when you get into programming accounting systems.

<comment><USER6> Ubuntu. I'm in California.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My first public github repo for humanity - Thumbs to S3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bbayer/thumbs-to-s3

<comment><USER2> Himm. İ think it is useful for me.

Thanks.

:)</comment>


Yes, You're Irrational, and Yes, That's OK - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/yes-youre-irrational-and-yes-thats-ok <comment><USER2> I often wonder if it's truly as irrational as we think, or if the fallacy is assuming that all our behavior should be viewed exclusively as centered upon the individual.

A lot of weirdness looks logical from the perspective of what I call "gene logic." If you frame us as containers for selfish genes, a lot of weird things might become "rational."

<comment><USER3> The fact that it ends up being beneficial to the species does not make the behavior any more rational. Strictly speaking, the label rational implies a cognitive phenomenon where some "thinking subject" represents a problem in an abstract way and applies the rules of logic to solve it.

Informally speaking, of course, people use "rational" as synonym of "smart", "cleaver" or even "good". In this case, I think the word you are looking for is closer to "adaptive".

<comment><USER2> I'm considering the idea that the thinking subject in this case is best conceptualized as a vehicle for genes. In that case survival/prosperity has a completely different and even alien meaning from what we typically imagine. To give a trivial example: if I kill myself in order to save my children, I have succeeded and this is rational from the genetic point of view. It's not rational from a _purely_ individualistic / hedonic point of view.

<comment><USER3> This is precisely my point. You attribute the capacity to reason to chemical molecules because their behavior seems purposeful. It does not occur to you that living entities may have goals and achieve those goals by using information processing means _other_ than Reason(TM).

By the same logic, you could argue that tables are indeed rational to fall down, because otherwise they would fly into the sky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great article and totally stand by this in how I've designed my consumer product. However, it is quite poorly written. If I had not spent a ton of time reading academic papers there's no way I would have been able to follow this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Indeed, heuristics and biases have evolutionary origins and served their purpose in the EEA (it really couldn't be any other way...), and indeed, manipulating people into correcting for these heuristics and biases without their knowledge may not necessarily be the best course of action.

I wonder how many people will take this to mean that the study of heuristics and biases is for Misguided Robotic Bad People (economists) and we're Perfect The Way We Are.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice article. I expect that there will be more and more acceptance that we cannot always be rational, and I expect there will be more and more products that help us to leverage our finite willpower to better make rational decisions. I think there is a relation between willpower and rational decision-making. (Which may be a reason why it is good to sleep on something before making a decision.)</comment>


Ask HN: Using ODesk to get developers, as a developer. - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I'm a developer!  I do things in Python/Django and also work a lot with .NET MVC, Html, Css, javascript, sql.  I'm a full stack web developer.
I have an idea for a website I want to pursue, but I don't want to code the whole thing myself.  I have a job that keeps me pretty busy.  I have some extra cash, and what I'd really like to do is contract with some (inexpensive) odesk developers to build my website for me.
Since I'm a developer I should be able to describe my technical requirements pretty easily, and also review their code pretty easily.  I would be happy spending a couple hours each night being a "project manager" and communicating with them.
Has anyone else here used oDesk?  Especially in a situation similar to this? <comment><USER2> I tried this a little bit back before I made much programming experience (but I had some), basically I realized it can lead to wasting a lot of money, it can work for small things but its really hard to manage unless you can get someone in a similar time zone, otherwise just too much time goes by between communications and its hard to stay on the same page, unless you stay up all night to be online with them.

You have to be careful too as some will start working on a project for a day or two and seem to know what they're doing but then all of a sudden productivity will drop to nearly zero, for whatever reason (they found a better paying gig, busy with other stuff, etc)

EDIT: Now that I think about it more, you can find some people who are definitely good but they are not going to be dirt cheap, the few good people I did work with I usually ended up hiring just for small tasks as it was something I needed done but I couldn't have afforded to employ them on a regular basis, usually it seems the minimum rate is $25-30 per hour, which is cheap for a company but it can be hard to swing that if you're just paying out of your own finances.

Also, these people tend to like to work on specific tasks to where they can estimate the hours and they would usually have a few clients at once, it would be hard to get them to give their full focus to you for an ongoing project, I think, unless you could demonstrate stability to them where they felt comfortable turning down other gigs to keep working with you.

They also don't usually want to invest any time in learning your project structure, setup, etc so if you want things done a certain way it can be hard to get them to do it unless you are going to pay them for time spent reading documentation, etc. You can find newbie dev's who will attempt to follow your structure, etc, but they tend to not be of the best quality.

</comment><comment><USER3> you should read Start Small Stay Small by Rob Walling, it has great advice on this stuff:

<http://startupbook.net/>

Also Rob has covered outsourcing in a couple recent episodes of "Startups for the Rest of Us" -

[http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-64-hi...](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-64-hiring- and-managing-remote-developers)

[http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-68-ho...](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-68-how- to-hire-and-manage-virtual-assistants)

</comment><comment><USER4> 1) Make sure you get people with English of 4.5+

2) The people who are actively responding to your posts are likely to be among the least talented people in the system, seek out people with high ratings and invite them to your project.

3) You have to recognize and play the numbers hiring on odesk, say 40% of the people are able to do what they say they can do. Hire 2-3 people, let them know they're in a runoff, after 2 weeks one will clearly be the most talented (or said another way will actually be able to do what they claim they can do), end the contract with the others.

<comment><USER2> This 'run-off' idea can get expensive very fast, maybe not for a company, but it would be expensive for an individual person without significant cash flow

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's very possible but initially a bit time consuming to get a relationship to the point where you can just give work to someone and get results. What I've done to get there:

Post a smallish job with a key element or two you will need (as a test). Require that you only want to hear from folks who have delivered very similar work and can provide links to it, and ask a pertinent question they should be able to answer in their response.

Ignore the folks that are not responsive to your request as dozens of individuals and outsource groups will respond yes to everything and reply only with a generic reply of work done.

Award the simple project to multiple folks who look like they've tackled things similar to what you want, done in a style you like. Set very specific milestones and structured release of payments for work against that and pay promptly. After completion, pick from them who to work with going forward on your project

BTW, I disagree with 'run-off' method. I think results of test are biased if they feel know are trying to win bigger job. Much better I think to assess completed small project, then offer a larger job only to those that you feel you would want to continue to work with on a larger or more extended basis.

</comment><comment><USER6> My experience posted before

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3314170>

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with hiring multiple people, some will be bad, you want to find good ones. Also VERY CLEARLY defining what you want done is important. They will do exactly what you ask for. Start with small projects and incrementally increase complexity. Don't be afraid to ask for updates.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've done this. I found it hard and had to cleanup a lot of code. Maybe my standards are too high, but I think outsourcing is best for things that you're not good at personally.

</comment><comment><USER9> I worked with some really good .NET MVC developers on my last personal project. They worked USA Pacific time zone (9 to 5) and were available via skype and google chat. Let me know if you need their profile and I can shoot it to you in email.

<comment><USER10> I'd be interested in this. Would you mind pinging me on Twitter?

<comment><USER9> sure will do.</comment></comment></comment>


Browser is the only validator (scroll down to "Validation output") - <AUTHOR> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.artlebedev.com&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.606

<comment><USER2> Specs without corresponding test-suites are problematic at best. Joel Spolsky put it rather well: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html></comment>


Alcatel-Lucent clocks 300 Gbps over 10,000 km submarine cable - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/14/were_fastest_underwater_yells_alcalu/

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing the innovation here is that this is a single 300Gbps channel. You can fit >50 of these channels on a single fiber. The 10,000km is more impressive if unregenerated.

<comment><USER3> Yea, that's what they meant later here:

> Ultimately, the company expects 8QAM to let submarine cables carry 15 Tbps > per fibre pair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The big question is how good was latency/jitter over that cable.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have an e-ID? - <AUTHOR> In Sweden over 75% of the population has an e-ID app on their phone and we use it for everything.<p>Do you have an e-ID? If so, how often do you use it, and how does it work? <comment><USER2> No - We don't even have a single standard state-issued physical ID, here in the UK, let alone an electronic version.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. How do you identify yourself to government services?

<comment><USER2> When registering for a doctor or something, you generally just tell them where you live and your name. You might also need your national insurance number. If they want more, its usually a utility bill proving that, or if they want photo ID, a Driving Licence or Passport, if you have one.

For things like voting, you don't need any ID at all on the mainland.</comment></comment></comment>


People tired of Apple news, please take a HN vacation today - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> It's not even news yet, it's all speculation for at least another half hour.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah have some respect and save same space amongst the top stories for violent ranting about node.js

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> HN will be flooded with Apple stories in about 30 min. It happens every 4 months. Please just deal with it instead of writing complaint posts that make the site doubly noisy.</comment>


Steve Jobs: "Please leave us alone." - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-in-email-pissing-match-with-college-journalism-student-exclusive-2010-9 <comment><USER2> I thought his response, though tactless and blunt, was refreshingly honest. He's running a business and the people in the PR department are not being paid to help students with their term papers. It could have been a learning experience for her but she apparently knows better. Perhaps she should count herself lucky that Steve didn't get to keep his ninja throwing stars when he left Japan the last time.

</comment><comment><USER3> This girl was operating under the premise that her needs and desires are a valid claim on someone else's life. This premise is wrong, and the more anyone accepts it, the less successful they will be, not only in business, but generally in life. True success can only be achieved honestly, by trading value for value with others, voluntarily. This is something that can only be accomplished through focused effort, the maintenance of which is a painstaking task in itself!

Suppose that you were to get thousands of emails a day from strangers, all wanting a piece of you in some way. The only way to deal with this is to act on principle, which is exactly what Steve Jobs did.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure this is the yin/yang of Jobs personality. He has helped Apple to achieve a huge amount through his determination, but at the same time he can be direct (or more than direct) which naturally people take offence at. Previously I have read stories of how he can deal with employees, but now he's answering customers we are seeing some 'interesting' responses!

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow. If this was really from Jobs, that is unbelievably bad for him and Apple.

I think everyone knew Jobs had this type of personality, but his recent screw- ups with this and the handling of the "antenna issue" (saying that people are holding the phone wrong) just show that, regardless of his health, this man should no longer front Apple.

Granted he is one of the personalities that makes the business. It's not hard to forget his history of (1) riding Woz's coattails to claim success for the original Apple computer, (2) jumping ship from the Lisa project he led to failure to the Mac and then taking credit for the Mac team's work, and (3) riding Jonathan Ive's coattails and those of Apple's impressive marketing for pretty much all recent Apple product successes.

I believe that he truly thinks he deserves what he has. I also believe that he has always thought of himself as above this customer base and his company. But, this is just nuts.

<comment><USER6> I am really surprised at the group think here. It is no big distortion of reality to realize that Steve is an elitist and has a contempt for people that he sees below himself. He would probably readily admit it.

Further he has road the coat tails of some really brilliant people. He is brilliant in his own right, probably one of the best business men of our times but just because he is and is worth of praise in that respect, does not give him a free pass on the fact that he generally loathes people he perceives as inferior and treats them in a socially unacceptable manner.

I purchase Apple computers and phones and could be considered and avid Apple fan because they are a great products, Just because one likes Apples products does not mean that they have to accept Steve's actions or worse yet justify them for him. He wasted more time and money responding to her than just forwarding to the media department to take care of and he did so for a purpose, to show her that he loathed such a peasant request.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I am really surprised at the group think here.

I think most people agree with both points. Steve Jobs was rude and gave an unusual reply for a CEO. On the other hand, the girl was insistent and didn't "make lemonade out of lemons". She took offence instead. She is arguably in the spotlight now, but I'm not sure it's for the right reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> By replying even once, he gave her a gift far greater than some filler quote the PR group could have given her about iPads in education.

A good reporter would have run with that -- new headline: "Apple's messaging focus comes from the very top" -- rather than whine about the right way for a CEO to communicate. (A 22-year-old college senior's 'enraged' opinion about the right tone for Jobs to take, or what his PR staff should prioritize, just isn't very interesting.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think she is ready to make lemonade from lemons.

<comment><USER8> I thought this thing was her attempt to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The girl has entitlement issues.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have to defend jobs here. The PR department of Apple does not exist to assist students get their grades. Yes, a person can walk into a grocery store and ask to see the ledgers for a school project, when the clerk says "no" he can complain about not serving the customers, I've been coming here for years, etc. In the end of it all, the store is still dedicated to making money, their customer relations does not need or should not include their customer's school or personal wants from the company.

If, however, the customer walked in and said "please let me see your department of health inspection information," it would be a completely different issue, as that directly relates to the business.

<comment><USER11> The PR department exists to do PR. Irregardless of the motivations of the people who contact them, sending a few official comments should be well within their ability.

That someone expressed interest in their products is something to be encouraged by a PR department. It's unfortunately that Steve responded at all. Surely ignoring the request would garner much less negative PR than repeated denials.</comment></comment>


Suggest HN: Write a book on business for Hackers - <AUTHOR>

We've seen numerous efforts on books for design, web, css, hipster frameworks, mobile apps and so on. Most of these fields are relatively easy to be picked up by a hacker since more or less we all grew up by them. But what about a book on business. On pricing rounds, debt, taxes, accounting etc. Something like "startup running 101" ... I don't know, seems like a good idea.. no? <comment><USER2> I'm working on a couple of books in this space, but not really those topic as I think they're pretty well covered elsewhere (see the writing of Brad Feld and Fred Wilson).

The first book I'm working on is on Startup Optimization which is a more practical guide to things you should be tweak to optimize for growth - hopefully I should have it done by the end of next month.

After that I'm planning to write another one about how to think about business models, user acquisition, metrics etc. focusing on more broader issue about how to analyze startup ideas.

Both are pretty experimental really, in that I've no idea if I can actually write about these topic in a way that will prove useful. But what's driving me to write them is that I've seen lots of startups mess up these areas and I want to try and improve that situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wrote a book that covers general/universal business principles: <http://book.personalmba.com>

For common funding and legal issues, I recommend "Venture Deals" by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson: <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470929820>

For finance and accounting, I recommend "Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs" by Karen Berman, Joe Knight, and John Case: <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1422119157/>

Here's my complete list of recommended business books, sorted by topic: <http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/>

Hope this helps.

<comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of Personal MBA - there are short, digestible chunks about the general business topics, with curated references if you want to dig deeper. Great format IMO

Thanks Josh!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I write marketing bits (<http://orangethirty.github.com/marketing_bits>). Its a blog/newsletter focused on marketing/sales/PR/advertising/protmotions with a touch of general business. It features real business wisdom from real startup founders. Check it out, you can always unsubscribe. No need to buy anything. No one will spam you with stupid offers.</comment>


Inline all the things - <AUTHOR> http://normanmaurer.me/blog/2014/05/15/Inline-all-the-Things/

<comment><AUTHOR> This bit is interesting:

"Inlining is a technique that will basically just "inline" one method in another and so get rid of a method invocation. The JIT automatically detects "hot" methods and try to inline them for you. A method is considered "hot" if it was executed more the X times, where X is a threshold that can be configured using a JVM flag when start up java (10000 is the default). This is needed as inlining all methods would do more harm then anything else, because of the enormous produced byte-code. Beside this the JIT may "revert" previous inlined code when an optimization turns out to be wrong at a later state. Remember the JIT stands for Just in Time and so optimize (which includes inlining but also other things) while execute your code."</comment>


Transmissions, for Django - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fellowshipofone/transmissions-for-django-e089e93c2227

<comment><USER2> This is really helpful. I might even use this in my next product.

One question though, I don't see a 'type' field in Notification class. Won't it be helpful if notification type can be saved to identify if the notification was an email notification or push notification and so on?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! In this last version, we decided to move all notions of channels (sms, push, etc.) to the classes. So each notification has a `trigger_name` linking it to the class form the @message decorator. So you can identify notifications that way, but you can't infer the channels they'll use.

<comment><USER2> Got it now! But why was there a need of message decorator? The same task could have been achieved using the Channel Class.

<comment><AUTHOR> The @message decorator allows transmissions scheduling logic not to have to be extended by your own code to focus on the actual Channel and Message logic. This way, the code is also magically indexing all the transmissions notification classes for when they need to be loaded asynchronously in the worker.

And if you meant that transmissions could have forced a couple of channel tasks, we would have missed the content of notification, the logic to check for validity, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Font Awesome 2.0 - 70 new icons, desktop font, vectors, IE7 support - <AUTHOR> http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

<comment><AUTHOR> Issues with squished windows fonts have been fixed and pushed. Looks like it might have been an issue using Font Squirrel.

<comment><USER2> I noticed the update does not have a svgz font file, however the css references that file. Last version I had did have the svgz font file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Missing all the characters altogether:

<http://imgur.com/ByrB9>

(Chrome 20.0.1132.21 on Mac OS X 10.7.3)

<comment><USER4> Working for me on Chrome 20.0.1132.21 beta-m, Win 7, but very jagged aliased edges.

<comment><USER5> The icons look awful at small sizes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice work, thank you so much for fontawesome!

I use them in every bootstrap project now; can't live without resizing and colouring my icons.

</comment><comment><USER7> I hate this trend so much. I must say it feels like it "Breaks" the web. I use Gill Dyslexic[1] on all websites across the internet and I'm tired of having to put in exceptions for sites like github. Icons should be images.

[1]<http://www.pixelscript.net/gilldyslexic/>

</comment><comment><USER2> I just upgraded. Is anyone else seeing the icons squished and less sharp than the previous version?

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue's been submitted and I'm looking into it. I suspect it might be a side-effect of using ttfautohint. What browser version and OS are you on?

<comment><USER8> Fonts are distorted for me too. Chrome 21.0.1155.2, Windows 7 x64: <http://i.imgur.com/OZDLr.png>

Thanks for the incredible work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if they actually have permission to include the logos of pInterest, LinkedIn, Facebook etc? Couldn't see anything in the article.

Aside from that, it's a nice collection which I could see finding a way into many of my projects.

</comment><comment><USER10> Unfortunately, like most icon fonts, this looks like a blurry mess at 16x16px.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but they look great on high ppi devices (new iPad, nexus one) even at 12px.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there anyone collecting all these great Bootstrap resources?

</comment><comment><USER13> Minor nitpick, but the element used to add icons should be a <span>, or even better, a pseudo-element added via CSS.

<comment><USER14> You mean in place of <i>? That's what Bootstrap uses. Also the meaning of <i> has been shifted in HTML5 [0].

[0] <http://stackoverflow.com/a/10001692/368409>

<comment><USER15> Yes, but it still has a meaning, and it is not "icon". I think you can be pragmatic here and use <i>, since it to my knowledge doesn't cause any real world problem, but it's worth exploring other options.

        <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==" class="i-icon" alt="Kitten">

        .i-icon {
          width: 32px;
          height: 32px;
          background-image: url(http://placekitten.com/32/32);
        }

The src is the data uri of a transparent gif. Screen readers will hear the alt text if you supply one. This will not work with font icons (img can't have ::before or ::after) but it should work fine for sprites or data uris in the CSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome! going to use these in my side project now =)

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank you for finally adding a feed icon!

</comment><comment><USER17> Originally the desktop font was going to be part of a "commercial version"... the developer appears to have changed their mind?</comment>


Show HN: Blueberry Landing Page (Made with Webflow) - <AUTHOR> https://blueberrydelight.webflow.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've been dabbling on and off with web-dev for the past 2 decades but truthfully always struggled to grasp core web concepts and so always felt some barriers to building cool/fun stuff.

Now, I'd heard about Webflow a number of years ago and how it makes building sites very approachable, and while I did try my hand at it, I have to admit, it still felt overwhelming to put something respectable together. This year, I decided to change that and threw myself at Webflow. I wanted to build something I could be proud of.

After many false starts, I managed to put this silly landing page together (inspired by the Potato Landing Page [https://dribbble.com/shots/2042501-Potato-landing- page](https://dribbble.com/shots/2042501-Potato-landing-page)). I wanted to learn Webflow while also seeing how far I could take it AND make sure to not get overwhelmed again. So I spent a few hours a week for a couple of weeks, first learning some basic Webflow skills, and then following along some tutorials. All in all, I'd say I put around 25 hours into this.

In retrospect, the biggest barrier to my seeing this project through was my own head. It looks super daunting when you're on the lower end of a steep learning curve, then you get on and realize the curve isn't scary steep, and then you're on the other side and thinking "gee, why didn't I push myself sooner?"

Anyway, hope you like it! It's still a little janky in parts and I'm not a big fan of scroll jacking (again, just testing and learning the limits), and it totally crumbles on mobile (for now), but I'm happy to get it out there so I can move onto other things now. Thanks!</comment>


Where does one Plug into the Internet to avoid Comcast? - <AUTHOR> Suppose one wished to avoid Comcast, at&t and others. Or suppose I wished to create a competitor to these services. Where does one plug into the internet? <comment><USER2> The superficial answer is, wherever Comcast plugs in to. But I doubt if those organizations want to deal with individuals; that's what Comcast and other ISPs are for.

Maybe you could go work for Comcast or another ISP, or one of the next level up organizations, and learn about it.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Infrastructure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Infrastructure)

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

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

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is a good question. Where does one go in order to find out about this topic?</comment>


Lessons From The Lost - help lower the entry barrier for gamedev - <AUTHOR> http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber/2010/06/lessons-from-the-lost/

<comment><USER2> Happy Happy BS. LOT of time spent saying to help other people, without any real information on how exactly to do that. Here's an example:

"Instead of spending our time moaning and griping how hard it is to make games or complaining about the frustrations, we spend some time encouraging people to have a go at it themselves."

That 1 sentence is what the whole post says over and over. It's not actually -helpful- to anyone. If a cheerleader could actually help people finish a game, there's be a lot more indie games.

He also talks about how when people ask how to start, they get a million different answers, and he thinks that's people trying to out-do each other. NO. It's because there are a million ways to start! And they're almost all valid.

Starting is the EASY part. Finishing is hard. If you can't even install a free IDE and get typing, there's no way you're going to bring all that logic and art together into a game.

People don't need encourage, they need information. Some need to learn to program altogether. Others need to know where to focus their efforts. Some just need to know how to do 1 specific task.

If there was a 1-size-fits-all answer for this problem, it would have already been found.

If you want to write a game, start writing a game. Don't diddle about looking for the perfect language or framework. Pick anything that looks halfway decent and has a community and just start working on it. If you find out half way through that it won't do what you need, you can switch. It's a bit heart- wrenching, but you will have learned a TON of lessons along the way already. It will have been worth the time.

<comment><USER3> If we had a dollar for every starry-eyed wanna-be game developer we get at our service, we'd be profitable by now! :-) We make cloud services for mainly Flash multiplayer games, and most of the developers are programmers and only need a little help to use our services, but there's always the occasional "Hi! I have a great idea for a game!" or "I want to make a game, but I don't know where to start lol".

I mean, we want to help them, almost everyone I know that works as a professional developer today started as a kid, wanting to make something. But where do you start with someone that doesn't know anything, and more importantly, someone that seems incapable of just downloading a development environment, ANY environment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dear Rob,

You know, I wanted to give you the benefit of a doubt, I really did. But I couldn't get past the condescension. Let's take a look at where you went wrong, apart from sneering at a lot of people.

First of all, let's take a look at just how high the barrier for making games _really_ is. Go and visit Kongregate, Armor Games and Newgrounds. Stop at Jay Is Games, too, while you're at it.

Now, as you might have noticed, what you can find on those sites ranges from utter "what the heck was the author smoking" crap to amazing "I would totally buy this on PSN" jewels. Some of that stuff was obviously done by coders who don't have substantial talent for art. Some other stuff was obviously done by an artist who couldn't code to save his (or her) life. And some was done by teams of people, each one proficient in one or more areas. But the aspect I'd like you to focus on, at this point, is the sheer, enormous _quantity_ of games.

With that out of the way, let's delve deeper into your post and acknowledge that you weren't really complaining about making just any old game. What you claim is that people who wanted to develop games felt that "stealing content was the only way to make an ambitious game become reality".

No, not really. I know a lot of people who want to make ambitious games and "stealing content" is not an idea that has occurred to _any_ of them.[1] If you ask them, they'll come up with plans that might be naive or realistic-but- hopeless, but they won't think of stealing. And if you offered them to "shared" or "recycled" assets, they would probably think you were well meaning, but seriously misguided.

See, the barrier for making "ambitious" games has nothing to do with the availability of the assets. The real barrier is twofold:

1) Making a good game is hard.

2) Selling games is even harder.

You acknowledged the problem #1 in your post, but you don't seem to be taking it seriously enough and it tells, because you said that "making games isn't hard". Sure, compared to "heart surgery", it isn't hard. Compared to most other forms of software development, it's _damn_ hard. And making good games is a hell of a lot harder than that.

Incidentally, this is why a lot of people will react with what you call "exclusion" against people who ask "I want to write a game but I don't know where to start." It's an impossible question, unless the asker elaborates. What is it you want to do? Do you want to do the coding, but don't know what to use? That's just nuts and bolts and I'll happily point you in the right direction, but it won't help unless you have a group of people who'll help you make the game (or you're incredibly multi-talented) _and_ you've played a boatload of games available in the same place where you intend your game to end up _and_ , well, you know where you want your game to end up. Which brings me to the heart of the matter.

The toughest part of the barrier is the problem #2. You don't _need_ someone to share, recycle or otherwise give you assets. There are people out there who are perfectly capable of creating those assets. Most of those people feel disinclined to do it for anyone who can't answer the big question: "How are you going to pay me?" Even for "non-ambitious" games, such as those you'll see on Flash portals, selling your game is not a trivial matter.

To sum it up, the real barrier for game development is not that people who have done it or are doing it on a regular basis are elitist snobs. It's not the lack of freely available assets either. The real barrier is that it's an entertainment industry. Sure, you can "get into" music by picking up a guitar and learning how to play. You can "get into" game development by picking up, say, FlashDevelop, Flex and FlashPunk. But there's no magic formula to make you a star.

Regards,

Vojislav Stojkovic

\----

[1] Sure, mine is just an anecdotal claim, but then again what do we call a claim based on the story of _one_ game featuring exclusively stolen content?

</comment><comment><USER5> The indie gaming scene is absolutely _full_ of guys who're just getting started - the barrier for entry is negligible!

Every day on Kongregate and Newgrounds you can see guys who're producing shit but at least giving it a go, and on FlashGameLicense.com you can see everyone trying to take it to the next level and turn their hobby into some kind of revenue stream.

There's a community at play there that does actively help, offer feedback, collaborate, offer quality art,graphics and support etc, even if some of the players are douches.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a great article; thanks for posting it.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your thoughts on the Thiel Fellowship? - <AUTHOR>

I'm relatively new to HN, but I was hoping to get your responses on what your thoughts are on the new Thiel Fellowship of offering up to 20 entrepreneurs under 20 years of age $100k to pursue their passion and "stop out of school" <comment><USER2> There was a very good discussion on it, here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799700>

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's a really interesting way to challenge established social structures. Schooling into the 20s is a pretty recent invention, and one which is more and more lucrative for the providers of eduction. Opening up new alternatives could play a part in challenging the future growth of tuition, because college then wouldn't be the only visible way to make a good living.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am 2 months shy of 21 or I would have definitely applied. :(

</comment><comment><USER5> he wants to start a cargo cult, apparently.</comment>


The Most Successful Ethnic Group in the U.S. May Surprise You - <AUTHOR> https://www.ozy.com/around-the-world/the-most-successful-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s-may-surprise-you/86885/ <comment><USER2> > Today, 29 percent of Nigerian-Americans over the age of 25 hold a graduate > degree, compared to 11 percent of the overall U.S. population, according to > the Migrations Policy Institute

> ..overt racism hasn't stopped Nigerian-Americans from creating jobs, > treating patients, teaching students and contributing to local communities > in their new home, all while confidently emerging as one of the country's > most succesful immigrant communities, with a median household income of > $62,351, compared to $57,617 nationally, as of 2015.

</comment><comment><USER3> > And what about Nigerians who come to the U.S. and don't succeed? Wey, the > activist chef, says there's a lot of pressure to fit a certain mold when > you're Nigerian. Choosing the right career is only one part of that. "You > have to be heterosexual, you have to have children, you have to have all of > those degrees," he says of the cultural expectations he was raised with. "It > limits the possibilities of what Nigerians can be."

Sounds like pretty common immigrant culture.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not exactly understanding why this is surprising.

There are some 250+ million Nigerians. It is the largest country in Africa by population. Sheer numbers alone demonstrate a minority of its citizens would excel despite the long-standing discrimination issues in the US.

It's like being surprised that there are so many Chinese and Indian students at university.

It's like being surprised that there are a handful of Black American billionaires and many more millionaires.

What is surprising? That these people continue to be hopeful despite America's problems with healthcare disparities, wage inequality, police brutality, redlining, predatory lending and underfunded school systems that disproportionately affect them.

</comment><comment><USER5> this begs the question if nigerians who had no legacy of jim crow or slavery and are the most succesful ethnic group should be recipients of affirmative action</comment>


Why I'm leaving Linux - <AUTHOR> http://jeancarlomachado.net/blog/why-i-left-linux.html <comment><USER2> During the years since I use Linux I experienced some of those issues too. But many times when I came in contact with mainstream operating systems like Windows and MacOS I saw similar problems and thought many times: "Good to know that it isn't any better outside of the Linux world"

Two extreme examples:

\- A Windows which takes 4 hours to upgrade itself, after it did a forced reboot on the day the bachelor thesis had to be submitted

\- A MacOS which brought itself to an unbootable state during a major upgrade

At least with Linux I have complete control over when updates happen (unlike on Windows). That way I can test the functionality of my system before it will be required.

<comment><USER3> And on linux you can always boot a live usb and mount your file system to it and try to figure out whats wrong. I had to do that only a few days ago to repair the bootloader that had fried itself somehow. Of course you have to know what to look for, maybe this is possible with windows and macos too, but the way I always went with those was to do a fresh install.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Used all three major OSes. HDMI not working is an extremely common problem on MacOS. every event I go to has either only VGA or HDMI that doesn't work after three adapters between thunderbolt and HDMI/VGA/etc. Networking can become a problem in MacOS and Windows and when it stops working on these OSes, the only thing to do is restart your computer.

MacOS also freezes a lot if your computer is about 3 years old. Won't even consider using macbooks older than that. Used Android studio and Robomongo on a couple year old Macbook and it would keep freezing now and then. The most painful 3 months on the job. So, problems exist on all OSes. The grass isn't lush green anywhere, it's a pale green everywhere.

I have been using Ubuntu on the desktop and laptop for 5 years and it has been stable. There have been problems, but I haven't run into anything show stopping yet. I haven't been doing this long but I believe that the key is to think about all the different ways things could go wrong and ensuring you handle a reasonable amount of them, without going too crazy about it.

eg: set up your demo on a digital ocean droplet (I do this when the demo doesn't have any GUI). create a throwaway SSH key and keep the private key handy (say email) and add the pub key to the droplet. if your laptop completely crashes, you still have your demo. slides backup is completely standard no matter what OS you have. so you have handled one of the worst possible cases :)

<comment><USER5> >MacOS also freezes a lot if your computer is about 3 years old.

On my 2011 Mac mini, I've experienced less than one event that deserves the description "freeze" per 1000 hours of use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can understand his reasoning in some way.

I liked to play around with compiling kernel and install stuff from source to get a very personalised experience.

Now I just want to be an end user and have an OS which I install and majority of things work right out of the box, or at least they are easy to configure. So I can concentrate on other things.

A lot of times there is something that is missing from the UI and you have to dive deep just to have it fixed. Editing config files etc... Even just simple things as a touchpad sensitivity.

Not to mention some special stuff like handling a discrete GPU in a gaming laptop.

I want a distro that works well and has most of the configuration accessible in the UI so I don't have to hunt the internet for information about how to fix something on a particular distro with a particular version.

Ubuntu comes close to this dream, but not close enough.

<comment><USER7> IMHO debian comes closer. I like to install the server version and then install gnome-core on top of that, sort out the dependencies of what I need and I'm golden.

apt is way better than apt-get anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> After reading these gems:

      For long my opinion is that to be a real Linux user one should use as few GUI as possible

and

      the Linux kernel is optimized for servers, not for desktops

I can't tell if this is satire or not.

<comment><USER9> The author appears to be serious. His desire of being a 'True Kernel Developer' probably led him to google something like "best distribution for Linux Hacker", perhaps the first result was Arch. At some point our "Linux Hacker" probably started to feel confortable running pacman -Syu twice a day to be on the cutting edge.

<comment><USER10> Why don't you ask him instead of just making shit up?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using Gnome on a Dell XPS 13 for a few years, and it's fine. In many ways the user interface is considerably better than the Macbook Air I had before.

In particular, connecting external video always works really well. And connecting printers always works really well. And it always goes to sleep and wakes up. Those weren't the case 10/15 years ago with Linux desktops.

So yes - buy hardware by a company which actually ships it with Ubuntu, and use Ubuntu... Linux isn't the problem here, compiling kernels and not using a desktop distribution are.

</comment><comment><USER12> Even Windows was split into desktop and server variants. IIRC, OS X was briefly offered as a server product before being discontinued, in large part because it was awful on server-like loads. Android's UI smoothness is still lagging behind iStuff, and that has Google money behind it. Seems natural that systems optimised for one thing would be bad at others.

And unless there appears a compelling and profitable business case for Linux on the desktop/laptops, it's likely better to let the "Year of Linux on the desktop" meme die.

</comment><comment><USER13> So if you use a distribution that requires you to set up everything yourself - you have to setup everything yourself ? No way ...

</comment><comment><USER14> In my experience the distributions with longer release cycles like RHEL are really stable and don't have as many issues like this or you experience them only during the initial setup and then run normally for years. I had a very good experience running a CentOS desktop for two years, even considering the initial hassle I had with sound, installing Skype and video-card drivers.

However I actually don't install them because I want the latest toys and so do most users. Honestly my desktop experience has decreased on both Windows and Linux in the past 10 years. Windows 10 also has begun to have the same stability issues for a lot of users - so rolling release seems to be the wrong approach for desktop users.

<comment><USER15> > "I want the latest toys"

Fortunately now a lot of linux software is being released as distro- independent packages like AppImage, Flatpak, or Snap. And they contain the particular library versions. So that allows you to have your base OS be something stable while still being able to use the latest version of a particular program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >> all Linux interfaces sucks

I use KDE everyday, works fine. Sometimes a bit rough but "sucks" sounds far fetched to me.

>>> Twice I was going to the podium and the remote display connection failed.

Why not check before ?

>>> The answer is simpler than that: the Linux kernel is optimized for servers, not for desktops.

Really ? I'm sure the Ubuntu team might say something else.

And to add to the "this is my own opinion" stuff : I use linux because it allows me to escape the grips of Windows and Apple (a bit). I do it because I'm a dev therefore I can technically do it. If I don't, who will ?

</comment><comment><USER17> Then use a dual boot with Windows. It's quite simple to set up.

Linux is the best os for programming imo (especially if you develop software for Linux servers), so why not keep both?

<comment><USER18> Very few cases can't be covered by either WSL or a VM, and having dual-booted for years I can tell you that after a few days you get into the habit of only booting the more convenient OS most of the time. It's twice the maintenance and 5-15 minutes of context switching every time you need to do something else.

<comment><USER19> Ah, WSL... which gives you the best of both worlds: unpredictable and unreliable Windows updates combined with whatever grievances you have about Linux applications.

If by 'booting to the most convenient OS' you mean 'booting to the OS which does not usurp your machine for internal housekeeping purposes (plus a little side of snooping here and there 'to enhance your experience') the moment you switch it on that would surely mean booting to some variant of Linux? Windows seems to think it is more important to try to install the _1709_ or _1803_ update pack for the umpteenth time, try to stuff the 'Windows 10 update assistant' down unwilling users' throats, ignoring all those 'do not update' flags and settings they were told to hack into the registry. Where the OS can suddenly decide that you obviously are not using that _FileHistory_ backup so let's remove it altogether. In other words, the OS which isn't at the whim of a supplier with an agenda different from yours.

<comment><USER18> I didn't specify which operating systems, which makes it ironic that Windows was not involved at all in that process. I've used WSL, but on my Windows-only desktop that mostly runs games. See, my work machine never ran Windows. Good job going on a rant about it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the many complexities with running Linux (Especially Android) on many different devices is why Google is creating Fuchsia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia)

</comment><comment><USER21> to sum it up: if you use a distro where you have to configure everything yourself it will be hard and things will break

<comment><USER22> I think that's fair. My take was that the person chose a bleeding edge rolling release to feel 133t but had an unrealistic expectation about stability.

I love ArchLinux, and used it on my primary dev laptop a while back. But you have to expect breaking changes that take some manual maintenance from time to time, and choose your update window accordingly. Maybe not really close to a conference presentation.

There isn't a shortage of distros, and the person could have chosen elsewhere on the spectrum according to needs.

<comment><USER23> You can try Manjaro, it's a tamed arch. It's what I use. Very happy with it...

<comment><USER22> More than happy with Arch itself on various machines :) Was just pointing out that it's good to factor in a little time in case troubleshooting is needed. Although that's mitigated by keeping up to date with their news feed...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Okay then, bye.

P.S. Looks like you want a Mac instead.

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGcHNnI2mh4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGcHNnI2mh4)</comment>


Spheres - <AUTHOR> http://inference-review.com/article/spheres <comment><USER2> Quote: "SLOTERDIJK HAS ATTEMPTED to rewrite the history of the human race using the notion of a sphere. It is a concept that encompasses topological, anthropological, psychological, political, social, immunological, and semiological aspects."

Only in philosophy do people use geometric terms to try to inject faux logical weight into their private ruminations.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd never heard of this magazine before, but it has quite a bit of interesting stuff in it. For example, a philosophy of mathematics piece by Gregory Chaitin (known for developing algorithmic information theory): [http://inference- review.com/article/doing-mathematics-differ...](http://inference- review.com/article/doing-mathematics-differently)

</comment><comment><USER4> _Sloterdijk's sphero-immunological thoughts_

..... eh? ....

</comment><comment><USER5> Tried to read this article and am now unsure if it is just extremely erudite and beyond my ability to grasp or just complete horse shit.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sloterdijk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sloterdijk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Offenbarkeit

Does that translate to something like "openability"? (I've had the occasional brush with Heideggerian terminology before.)

<comment><USER8> It's not a common word. Reading it as normal German you would understand it as "obviousness, plainness, evidentness" (from 'offenbar' = 'obvious, plain to see'; 'openable' would be 'öffenbar'). But Heideggerian can obviously be quite distinct from standard German usage, to put it mildly.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for correcting my mistake.

It seems like there's a way of taking some part of speech, adding a suffix to turn it into a different one, and then adding another suffix to turn it back into the original kind, then declaring that the meaning of the word thus constructed is now whatever one chooses it to mean. So the meaning of the original word is subconsciously palpable, but you make yourself see the new word differently and there's a bit of tension.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: 30 vs. 3000 lines of code for very simple MEAN app - <AUTHOR> http://blog.allcountjs.com/post/128771961651/compare-efforts <comment><USER2> Anyone here has experience using allcountjs? From the first look this looks promising, just never heard of it before.

<comment><USER3> Hi willyr! Thanks for your question! I'm co-founder of AllcountJS. It's relatively new framework. We recently finished 4 real world projects using it and pushed them to production already. If you interested please join our Gitter chat where we can discuss it in detail: [https://gitter.im/allcount/allcountjs](https://gitter.im/allcount/allcountjs)</comment></comment>


Solving the problems of early stage me-too product startups - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/2009/05/13/solving-the-problems-of-early-stage-me-too-product-startups/

<comment><USER2> Isn't the real solution to avoid "me too" solutions in crowded spaces? If you can't segment or develop a unique appeal to a niche when you are starting out it's not clear how much value you will be able to create as a startup. An established company may launch a "me too" as a part of a brand extension or to have a complete line of products, but I can't think of a good reason for a startup to do so.

<comment><USER3> I think the author of the article considers segmentation and "unique appeal" as me-too solutions, albeit good examples of them.

So you two are saying the same thing.

<comment><USER2> That wasn't my intention. As an example look at what SmartSheet has done with SmartSourcing <http://www.smartsheet.com/product/smartsourcing> they are taking a "me too" on-line spreadsheet and integrating it with Amazon's Turk in a novel and useful way. If it takes off it will be a different service from other on-line spreadsheets (provided they are not copied). I am not affiliated with SmartSheet but was impressed by this idea.

<comment><USER3> I'm still not sure what your intention is:\

I think the original author would consider smartsheet as a me-too solution(ie. excel, google spreadsheets)--but an innovative one for using Amazon's Turk.

<comment><USER2> If it's me too what other apps act as a general purpose front-end / aggregator for Mechanical Turk. If it's me too it should be compared in that category, not as an on-line spreadsheet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Forward idea

A bit off topic, but while we are on the Back/Forward subject, I am suprised why there is no standard for implementing a "Forward Link" meta tag for website.

For example in HN news there are pages (next page), and so do most websites. Wouldn't it be great if there was a meta tag that specifies what this logical next page is... and pressing the forward button will take you there!

<comment><USER5> Actually, such a standard exists: <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC- html40/struct/links.html#h-12.1.2>.

I think Opera is (or was) the only browser to support this.</comment></comment>


How Ransomware era might finally end - <AUTHOR> These tools are taking a new approach to the problem, which is to constantly monitor for encrypted files and stop the relevant processes, thus often limiting the loss to the first few files. Some have proved far more efficient than any standard antivirus as of now:
Linux, Windows: https://github.com/unixist/cryptostalker
OSX: https://objective-see.com/products/ransomwhere.html
more theoretical information on Cryptodrop's paper:
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~traynor/papers/scaife-icdcs16.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> all the links in a clickable fashion:

Linux/Windows: [https://github.com/unixist/cryptostalker](https://github.com/unixist/cryptostalker)

OS X: [https://objective-see.com/products/ransomwhere.html](https://objective- see.com/products/ransomwhere.html)

Paper: [http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~traynor/papers/scaife- icdcs16.pdf](http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~traynor/papers/scaife-icdcs16.pdf)</comment>


Amazon Cloud: An Introduction to AWS OpsWorks + Tips And Tricks  - <AUTHOR> http://cel.gs/OWEIm7

<comment><USER2> great post</comment>


Vivian Maier: Amazing unknown street photographer - <AUTHOR> http://www.monoscope.com/2011/01/vivian_maier_amazing_unknown_s.html

<comment><USER2> The photos are amazing, in the style of Robert Frank, WeeGee, and some of Annie Leibovitz's work.

The story is also compelling -- about Maier's life, work, death in obscurity, and the fortuitous circumstances of discovery by John Maloof, who has now made this his life's work.

However, the OP should link to the primary source:

<http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I know nothing about photography and I fully expected to be underwhelmed by this link, but damn are those some awesome, compelling photos. This woman had a natural talent.

</comment><comment><USER4> Link to a Kickstarter project for a Vivian Maier documentary: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding- vivian...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding-vivian-maier- a-feature-length-documentary)

It has already reached its goal, but figured I'd share anyhow.</comment>