Ask HN: Any startups focused on social news trends? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to know of a few examples of startups that tackle trending news topics based on number of stories, user engagement, social media stats etc<p>Found a few good examples in NewsWhip: http://www.newswhip.com/news-app/europe and http://timeline.com and wonder if there are any other approaches. <comment><AUTHOR> Now that I think about it, mashable.com is a great example.</comment>


About AI and neural networks - <AUTHOR> http://codeflow.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/about-ai-and-neural-networks/

<comment><USER2> A good writeup about the learning process of getting involved with AI. The author just got into AI A modern Approach, which is a book I highly recommend. When I find free time, I tend to work through that books exercises for a good challenge.

</comment><comment><USER3> Author notes he has postponed showing the soccer game, in favor of developing the ai engine first.

I highly suggest getting the visual feedback component in place first. There's nothing as motivating as quickly seeing the effects of your latest changes.</comment>


Using Gooey as a Universal Front End for Any Language or CLI Application - <AUTHOR> https://chriskiehl.com/article/gooey-as-a-universal-frontend <comment><USER2> I've been using this to wrap CLIs for internal tooling at my company [it's also my first accepted contribution to a FOSS project =D ]. Works well, but subject to the usual Python packaging issues. If I needed to wrap a CLI with a GUI for my users, that probably means I don't want to walk them through installing Python and dependencies either. That means using something like PyInstaller, which I can report plays well with Gooey.

<comment><USER3> Isn't the idea here that you're getting a binary at the end of it that doesn't require any of the dependencies? or do you need the full environment?

<comment><USER2> I don't think I'm understanding your question, and maybe I haven't laid down the situation fully.

My company is a Windows shop, and nearly everyone who isn't a developer (so nearly my entire internal customer base) does not have Python installed.

I want to be able to send over single file executables that have everything they need. I don't want to have to think about using pip, or distributing wheels, or making sure they have internet access, or if they have admin or not. And as internal tools, I can afford to deal with relatively large file sizes.

For example, I have a lot of tools that need numpy and scipy to accomplish their goals.

That all said, Gooey + PyInstaller typically does a good job at solving my problems.

<comment><USER4> I think what he was asking was, could there be some way of packaging a .exe with a full python environment and all dependencies built in (and so zero install basically)?

Edit: after reading the docs for pyinstaller, it seems that this is exactly what it does. vxNsr was either confused about what gooey does, or, like me, got confused by the name "pyinstaller" and assumed it was a tool to help you install a python environment on Windows.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you can compile the python script/program to a windows exe file. It is quite large cause it has to also include all dependencies. However it does work. Can't remember what I used but a quick Google search would bring it up.

<comment><USER4> I believe it's called pyinstaller

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Never heard of this, but I once wrote a Perl script (it was a long time ago ;-) that created Perl/Tk UIs around CLI tools by parsing the output from "$CMD --help" or "man $CMD".

It never worked perfect, but was "good enough" for the few simple things I needed it for.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is neat to see on Linux, it reminds me of Platypus on OS X [1], which in turn drew spiritual inspiration (that is, I don't know if the author of Platypus knew about these) from CLImax [2] and even earlier, Macintosh Programmer's Workshop [3] [4]. I don't know where MPW got the idea from, that just happens to be where I first encountered it. Thanks to user classichasclass in this thread for reminding me that the feature was called Commando in MPW. I'm curious if it originated with MPW.

[1] [https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus](https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus)

[2] [http://www.storiesofapple.net/climax.html](http://www.storiesofapple.net/climax.html)

[3] [http://www.storiesofapple.net/tag/mpw](http://www.storiesofapple.net/tag/mpw)

[4] [https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Macintosh- Programm...](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Macintosh- Programmer's-Workshop-Meyers-Parrish/846e90c6a250f83674b31718eecf11ed2452f498)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not a big fan of GUI in general but, ooo, this is nice.

Combine with python-fire for great fun, eh?

> Python Fire is a library for automatically generating command line > interfaces (CLIs) from absolutely any Python object.

[https://github.com/google/python-fire](https://github.com/google/python-fire)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's Commando for a new generation.

[http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.06/06.07/Co...](http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.06/06.07/Commando/index.html)

<comment><USER10> I was looking to see if Commando would get mentioned. One of the really nice things about Commando was that it would synthesize the command line for you and not just run the command, and it was integrated with the MPW editor. So you could go through the GUI for a program, press a button, and the command- line invocation is pasted into the script you're editing.

MPW was ahead of its time in a lot of ways, unfortunately behind its time in a couple ways (notably, pipes didn't work the way they did on Unix—I think there was something like temporary files involved).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks extremely cool. I used to enjoyed developing GUIs with WinForms but now as this technology is obsolete and no relevant replacement is available (both web-UIs and Qt are too complex and WPF is Windows-only) this seems extremely attractive. Can it also display progress and output data (a matplotlib plot and/or a data table)?

<comment><USER12> If you like WinForms, take a look at Eto ([https://github.com/picoe/Eto](https://github.com/picoe/Eto))

"This framework can be used to build applications that run across multiple platforms using their native toolkit, with an easy to use API. This will make your applications look and work as a native application on all platforms, using a single UI codebase."

<comment><USER11> Thank you, I'll take a look, but it hardly is a real replacement. Honestly, I liked WinForms because it had a visual designer where I could just paint the UI with a mouse, click a button and code what's going to happen when it's clicked. Nevertheless anything like WinForms probably is easier than web-based UIs, even if it lacks a visual designer. However, one should probably prefer Avalonia (a cross-platform WPF-like .Net UI toolkit) if going this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like a variant of dialog[1] and its many X11/gtk/qt/etc forms.

What was nice about dialog was that it was called to collect input by the application, so the application could ask (from a ui) some input, then later on ask for or display something else. Does Gooey support the same sort of use case?

[1] [https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2807](https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2807)

</comment><comment><USER14> Things that might be generally useful for cli programs:

 __creating GUI interfaces for them (what this does)

 __enhancing CLI interface to include autocomplete including help with options and arguments

 __wrapping CLI commands to turn them into APIs /make them programmable

<comment><USER15> > wrapping CLI commands to turn them into APIs/make them programmable

CLI apps are already very programmable. How would you API-ify them even more?

      system('yourapp --option1 --option2=something')

<comment><USER16> Input and output types would be a good start.

<comment><USER17> \--output=json

<comment><USER16> That isn't a type, but I like the direction you're going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool! I'm wondering if there's any possible way to automatically generate GUI's for command line applications. Including all the supported arguments.

Some type of crawler would interact with a program, parse its --help output, man page, or any other info available, to enumerate all possible options and their formatting.

It sounds like a really messy program considering how inconsistent CLI's are.

Anyways, a GUI could help massively with discoverability.

Such a tool could help bridge the gap a little between GUI and CLI.

<comment><USER19> I can't see how that would handle any of the hard bits (like dependencies between arguments, mutual exclusion)...

<comment><USER20> To the extent the command-line program returns proper exit codes, or gives other hints via its output/side-effects as to whether it did anything useful, I could see it working up-to-a-point.

Discovering exclusive options, or options that must be specified together, sound like exactly the sorts of things it _could_ deduce, when every invocation with/without certain pairs of options fails.

Perhaps wrapper-utilities like 'Gooey' or some sort of automated-probing could encourage a greater formalization for specifying de-facto command-line APIs. Then, command-line programs might want to offer not just the human- interpretable help texts and docs, but more rigorous usage-specs that _could_ drive automatic wrappers.

<comment><USER19> Probing at options sounds dangerous. There is no guarantee at all that attempted invocations won't change state.

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't wanna let it probe 'rm' :D

Perhaps the probing could happen in a VM / container image which would reset after each invocation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Makes sense, basically turns any CLI program into an API with the simple translation interface being the unix shell textual interface via simple JSON files which contain the commands.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd love to see a new python type annotation based tool that could decorate a function and let you expose it as a CLI, a GUI or a REST/GraphQL API (maybe even an html form).

pretty much a combination of Gooey, click and FastAPI

<comment><USER24> You might be interested in this, though it doesn't cover GUI stuff afaik:

[https://github.com/hugapi/hug](https://github.com/hugapi/hug)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have been using yad based on gtk ([https://sourceforge.net/projects/yad- dialog/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/yad-dialog/)) for some shell scripts and wrappers to external tools.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's using the wxWidgets library for the heavy lifting, so should be fast and have native feel on multiple platforms.

Very cool, going to try this out for some of our internal toolkits. Easier than reading the help files for newbies, still has CLI for automating.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is nice. But I have long since abandoned argparse in favour of click. And most 'serious' cli apps use click in my experience. Having click support would make this very interesting for many of my work projects.

</comment><comment><USER28> Gooey is nice, it could help in a wish I have had since foreveR and is the contrapositive: a way to convert any action I do on my Xubuntu UI into a command line.

Example: I pop the display config, hide the laptop screen, apply and confirm, and whish there was a "log" somewhere with a one line command I can use next time to redo the same thing.

In a way Gooey, if used a lot to make GUI apps, could help fullfilling this whish: I did not use it yet but I hope it displays somewhere the command line it generated from the GUI?

<comment><USER29> For your concrete example of display configuration, I think `xrandr` is the command you're looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It seems like almost a drop-in replacement for the widely used `argparse` standard library. Strange that there is no mention of this.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's because it IS a drop-in replacement for Argparse

Gooey began its life as a monkey-patch of argparse. GooeyParser came along later to extend the limited argparse API with additional options that made specifying more complex GUIs possible.

I opted to leave that detail out of this one as I was trying to focus on the larger general capabilities, rather than the Python specific implementation details.

<comment><USER30> I would include it, at least as a footnote/sidebar! It will be a huge selling point for python projects that already use argparse, and there are a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. I'll do a quick update!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is there a repository of Gooeys people have made?

</comment><comment><USER32> I've always thought that a natural 'friend library' for libargs or libopts could be produced which parses the args and creates a dynamic gui from it .. but now I look at this and wonder, why hasn't someone done this already? It seems like obvious low-hanging fruit ..

</comment><comment><USER33> Something like this for the web would be awesome. Maybe closely tied with something like FastAPI.

<comment><USER2> I ran into [https://github.com/wooey/Wooey](https://github.com/wooey/Wooey) when I first ran into Gooey (years ago) and had the same thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> From the link:

gooey_options={ # NEW! 'validator': { 'test': 'user_input.isdigit()', 'message': 'Please enter a number' } })

'test': 'user_input.isdigit()',

'user_input.isdigit()'

'o'

</comment><comment><USER35> Gooey could use a GUI that generates the Gooey config at the press of a button.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't want to be a downer, and this is definitely a very cool product indeed, but doesn't converting command line tools into GUI apps sort of rob them of a lot of their usefulness? The reason I prefer to use the CLI (besides ergonomic reasons and having a horrific $5 mouse) is that I have a consistent interface which can be manipulated (pipes, redirection) and also are scriptable and repeatable. These GUI versions dont have any of that?

<comment><USER37> No CLI app is being robbed of anything, this is a layer over the top.

GUIs are very valuable because they can do things CLIs cannot, like show you at a glance what operations are available, promote the standard usecase of the CLI etc. Stuff that takes a bit of reading and clever typing with a CLI.

This tool allows you to quickly write a highly specific GUI that is using CLI app in the background.

<comment><USER38> > like show you at a glance what operations are available, promote the > standard usecase of the CLI etc.

I definitely agree with this. I think getting people up to speed on how to use a CLI tool would be a great use case for this.

I would probably use more cli tools if there was a clear GUI introduction that shows how the options map to the commands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Any screenshots of what it does with stderr?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. Check this out: [https://imgur.com/a/2TNi8SZ](https://imgur.com/a/2TNi8SZ)

It displays on the main screen and pops a modal.

Edit: pops a modal if the return code is non-zero, that is. If its just piping stuff over stderr as part of its normal run, it will be logged to the screen like normal stdout.

<comment><USER39> Thanks...seems like a reasonable approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Sounds exactly like the tool for spinning out quick mockups I was in need of.

</comment><comment><USER41> Finally, now people can make a GUI for git if they need one.

<comment><USER42> Yes, this is exactly what i'll use it for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Rebrand with better name and it has a chance for adoption. As dumb as it sounds , if you start pushing tech with that spelling and name to business types they won't like it

<comment><USER44> I don't think the goal of an open-source project is to push it to business.

<comment><USER43> well if you want wide adoption of your product (OSS or not), a good marketing strategy can't hurt -- including a good product name</comment></comment></comment>


Underwater Tunnels Revolutionize the Faroes - <AUTHOR> https://www.maritime-executive.com/features/underwater-tunnels-revolutionize-the-faroes <comment><USER2> In other news, it is apparently economically infeasible for the states of New York and New Jersey to build another railroad tunnel under the Hudson river.

The GDP of the Faeroe islands is in the $2-3bn range, with 3% aid from Denmark. That's less than 1% of New Jersey, and closer to 3 orders of magnitude less than New York City.

<comment><USER3> The article says the new tunnels will cost €50,000 per inhabitant.

I don't know that NY/NJ need it _that_ badly, and unlike the Faroes, what the area needs more are _alternative_ travel methods (or more capacity for existing alternatives), not more cars.

<comment><USER4> Tunneling costs have nothing to do with the population size.

If NYC has 100x the population they would spend 1% as much per person for the same tunnel. At most the question is how much demand you would get and thus how large a tunnel you want. But even then you could simply build one, charge enough to pay for the next and keep going that way.

<comment><USER3> Size and complexity of tunnels increases as the population it serves does. Railroad tunnels have stricter grade and curve requirements than car tunnels, as well.

It is also already _possible_ to get from NJ to NYC in a _relatively_ reasonable amount of time, which makes the cost/benefit different than the Faroes turning things from half a day to minutes.

<comment><USER4> Demand is related to population size, but it's far from 1:1. Many people in NYC would have no reason to use this tunnel where presumably everyone on a small island would use it if it's replacing the existing ferry.

Further demand is also a revenue source, if 100,000 people per day to use a tunnel that's a much large revenue stream that's going to pay for a larger tunnel.

What population size directly provides is easier financing. NYC could for example build a tunnel without going into debt and then use the revenue from tolls for other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That reminds me of an interesting 2017 BBC article on the Faeroe islands. Apparently women have been moving away more than men, leading to a gender imbalance. So there are 300 or so wives imported from Asian countries out of a population of 50k.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39703486](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39703486)

</comment><comment><USER6> "First Atlantic subsea roundabout".

Wow! Seems to imply there's already a non-Atlantic subsea roundabout, but my Google-fu is failing me...

<comment><USER7> Logically speaking if it is the first subsea roundabout then it is also the first Atlantic subsea roundabout. But due to how we normally communicate and interpret things one naturally might assume as you did. Our normal communication/interpretation does not follow rules of logic. It's interesting that this is so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The way US funds public transport sometimes feel really silly to me. It costs $5 to drive across the Bay Bridge. Traffic is a nightmare. But it costs at least $7 for the same trip on the Bart. Bart is still at full capacity showing a clear market for it. A new tunnel would ease the traffic on the bridge and provide better public transport. But, even the so called progressive politicians talk about building a new bridge. Similarly costs are absolutely outrageous - it could cost up to $400 million just to add a bike lane to the Bay bridge.

<comment><USER9> Misspelling public as pubic once may just be a typo, no big deal. Misspelling public as pubic twice in the same post... Maybe that says something about public transport in SF.</comment></comment>


How a Medieval Society Withstood Nearly 60 Years of Drought - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/how-a-medieval-society-survived-nearly-60-years-of-drought/559616/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> > Instead of clashing with the Chinese Empire to their south, the Uighurs > forged a durable but uneasy alliance with the Tang dynasty in China, a rare > feat for a steppe empire. The Uighurs traded their surplus horses with the > Chinese in exchange for silk. They then traded that silk with merchant > allies in the fertile lands to their west.

This paragraph seems to betray a deep misunderstanding of historical Chinese relations with steppe peoples to the north. This was the status quo. The Chinese empires more often than not tried to buy off the nomads with markets and the nominal tributary system. It was more often than not ruinously expensive and fraught with failure for the non-foreign Chinese empires to attempt to subjugate the steppes in the pre-gunpowder era; far cheaper to play them off against one another and create a buffer zone. This goes back more than 2000 years, to the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu, if not earlier.

<comment><USER3> > It was more often than not ruinously expensive and fraught with failure for > the non-foreign Chinese empires to attempt to subjugate the steppes in the > pre-gunpowder era

That isn't incompatible with what the article says, though. Just because China wasn't actively going out and attacking the steppe peoples, doesn't mean that _the steppe peoples_ weren't actively going out and raiding _Chinese villages_ , souring China's relations with individual steppe tribes (even if China never mounted any punitive expeditions in response.)

The difference being proposed here, I think, is that the Uighurs actively sought to pacify and build trade relations with the Chinese Empire, and actively prevented their citizens from engaging in raiding across the Chinese border.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's one thing I've never understood about the zombie shows. Instead of showing people banding together to deal with the problem, they almost always show people acting selfishly and tearing each other down. That's always seemed the biggest fallacy of those shows.

<comment><USER5> Well a zombie show where people acted sensibly would end after the first few minutes because:

\- The scientists involved used sensible precautions because they are pretty intelligent and have no interest in exposing themselves to dangerous pathogens.

\- After the first sign of a dangerous outbreak the government gets involved and unlike movie governments they know what they're doing and soldiers will actually just sit in armored vehicles where the risk of zombie bites is minimal.

\- It turns out brain tissue alone does not contain enough nutrients for a human-sized being to subsist for a significant amount of time and the outbreak naturally dies down after two days because the zombies run out of energy.

\- In any case, Australia will be fine because zombies are not smart enough to pilot a plane or boat all the way there. If the outbreak starts there, the rest of the world is fine by the same logic.

Same thing how horror movies famously depend on the protagonists making the worst possible decisions ("let's split up!"). Zombie movies started off as societal critique about the dangers of consumerism. A realistic scenario does not make for an entertaining movie, and non-entertaining movies don't get funded.

<comment><USER6> Has anyone written "rationalist fiction" about a zombie setting? Something like what _Worm_ [0] was for superheroes. Something that isn't just a genre- savvy parody of the flaws of characters in zombie films, but a serious exploration of a band of survivors working to build a community/society to survive and thrive against the zombies. It's probably hard to make it entertaining if one is in the mindset of mainstream tropes, but there's probably a way to make it work.

[0] [https://parahumans.wordpress.com/](https://parahumans.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER7> The Day of the Triffids sort of counts here I think

<comment><USER8> It's a very smartly written novel that holds up very well. It's also unusually grim for the era.

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion also comes to mind as an example of a realistic, scientifically accurate depiction of an epidemic.

Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, while not being about zombies, is a very science/fact-based exploration of a hypothetical outbreak. A much less scary scenario, though; the pathogen only affects a single, isolated town which is quickly secured, and all of the action occurs in the experimental underground science lab where they study it. The 1971 film is also fantastic, and holds up really well.

<comment><USER9> Funny enough, the Contagion movie was funded by Jeffrey Skoll a billionaire philanthropist. The purpose was too educate the public on the reality of a pandemic and importance of health organizations.

There are other movies too, all designed to compel social change.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-giving-pledge-a-new-club- fo...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-giving-pledge-a-new-club-for- billionaires/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to add your blog in Technorati & What are the benefits - <AUTHOR> http://savedelete.com/how-to-add-your-blog-in-technorati-what-are-the-benefits.html <comment><USER2> Very Informative article. I didn't knew it before..Thanks for sharing Jaspal :)</comment>


Ask HN: Should I develop my new ios app as Hybrid or native? - <AUTHOR>

I have technical background and very good hold on asp.net mvc and overall Microsoft stack. I like to develop a new iOS app. I do not have any development experience with ios. I can learn xcode and objective c but i think it will get me side tracked from the over all focus of the application. There are lot of other components in the app architecure that I can develop like messaging platform etc. I have two options to deal with my scenario -
1. Develop a hybrid app for first release using phoneGap so that app is out quickly 2. Hire a seasoned iphone app developer.
I have read few story about not so great performance of hybrid apps and that is what worries me when I think about choosing this option.
What you would recommend? <comment><USER2> since you're a .Net developer you should take a look at Xamarin

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

Xamarin is way behind ios native dev platform and it have issues.</comment></comment>


U Can't Talk to Ur Professor Like This - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/opinion/sunday/u-cant-talk-to-ur-professor-like-this.html <comment> at-fates-hands A few points here.

One is that social media and the internet have killed language and along with it, formality, and respect. Not just respect for authority, but general respect for those around you.

Some better passages from the article:

 _Alexis Delgado, a sophomore at the University of Rochester, is skeptical of professors who make a point of insisting on their title. "I always think it's a power move," she told me. "Just because someone gave you a piece of paper that says you're smart doesn't mean you can communicate those ideas to me. I reserve the right to judge if you're a good professor."_

This was a real eye opener. A clear lack of respect for the people who are teaching you. I never prejudged a professor's intelligence to teach me, I always questioned my own motivation or the subject matter before simply discounting a professor's ability to teach his students.

 _The erosion of etiquette encourages students to view faculty members as a bunch of overeducated customer service agents. "More and more, students view the process of going to college as a business transaction," Dr. Tomforde, the math professor, told me. "They see themselves as a customer, and they view knowledge as a physical thing where they pay money and I hand them the knowledge — so if they don't do well on a test, they think I haven't kept up my side of the business agreement." He added, "They view professors in a way similar to the person behind the counter getting their coffee."_

This just supports the idea that millennials are entitled to whatever they are paying for. No, that's not how it works. It's interesting to see when I was in college in the late 90's early aughts, you chose to go to college as a means to get ahead, not as some sort of transaction where you just show up, pay your money and they give you a diploma. Your education is something that is _earned_ , it's not given to you.</comment>


Websrvr – Deploy your websites to a CDN using Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://app.websrvr.in/

<comment><USER2> Some questions that come to my mind immediately:

\- Does it share my whole Dropbox with the world? (It doesn't, but I only know this from reading this thread) If not, which parts of the Dropbox are shared?

\- What kinds of files are published? What MIME types are supported? Can I somehow override MIME types?

\- How are the files published? Do I get auto-generated URLs on the CDN's server? Do I have to update my DNS records? Some other way?

\- Are the files cached somewhere? (Other than the CDN) Can I delete them quickly?

\- How do I remove my account? Is all my data deleted as soon as I remove the Dropbox connection?

\- And of course the pricing questions: Is it free, will it stay free? Are there usage restrictions? (Bandwidth, traffic, etc)

The idea of this service seems really cool, as well as the one-click signup. But I agree with the others that more information before signup is necessary. I think a tutorial or a FAQ page would be really useful.

(I don't have any experience with Cloudfront, so apologies if some questions are obvious if you know their service)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Does it share my whole Dropbox with the world? (It doesn't, but I only know > this from reading this thread) If not, which parts of the Dropbox are > shared?

No. Even websrvr has access to just an app folder (a newly created folder inside your dropbox).

> What kinds of files are published? What MIME types are supported? Can I > somehow override MIME types?

Any file whose name doesn't start with a '.' is published, so all non-hidden files. Right now, MIME types cannot be overridden, but it sounds like a good idea, I'll implement it soon.

> How are the files published? Do I get auto-generated URLs on the CDN's > server? Do I have to update my DNS records? Some other way?

Every folder inside the websrvr app folder is published as an independent site. You get a unique host for each site. e.g. if you have a folder called 'foobar' with a file called 'index.html', this will be published to 'foobar.websrvr.in/index.html'. The cloudfront integration is not yet live, since I am still testing the demand for this kind of a product.

> Are the files cached somewhere? (Other than the CDN) Can I delete them > quickly?

Yes these are cached on our servers, and whenever a file is created we update our cache, whenever you delete a file in your dropbox it will be deleted from our cache.

> How do I remove my account? Is all my data deleted as soon as I remove the > Dropbox connection?

You can select and delete all folders from the websrvr app folder to delete the data from our servers. Once you do that, you can unlink your dropbox account from the dropbox website at [https://www.dropbox.com/account#security](https://www.dropbox.com/account#security)

> And of course the pricing questions: Is it free, will it stay free? Are > there usage restrictions? (Bandwidth, traffic, etc)

websrvr backed hosting: $1 per month - All the data would be served from our fast web servers

Amazon S3 backed hosting: $3 per month - All the data would be served from Amazon S3 servers.

Amazon Cloudfront backed hosting: $10 per month + overage charges - All the data would be served from the Amazon Cloudfront CDN. If your cloudfront usage goes above $10 we'll charge the difference in the next month's invoice.

There are more faqs at: [https://app.websrvr.in/help](https://app.websrvr.in/help)

<comment><USER3> Why the huge jump between S3 and Cloudfront served hosting? Just market segmentation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Signup without explanation of features or cost?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to make the signup process as simple as possible. I am looking for a good way to show the user the pricing and features. Maybe I should show it after the signup? Thanks for trying it out :)

<comment><USER5> Why not show it before signup? I'm not giving anyone access to my Dropbox just because they ask nicely.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, it is asking for access to only a folder that itself creates.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but it doesn't tell you that.

<comment><USER6> Dropbox tells you when asking for your permission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guys, websrvr has been approved for production by the awesome folks at Dropbox. Signups are open again, woot :)

</comment><comment><USER8> How is it hosted currently? websrvr's host?

<comment><AUTHOR> In beta, I am hosting it off of a single server. However in production I'll have a multi data center cluster, if the product is viable :)

<comment><USER8> Hosting yourself? Or somewhere like DigitalOcean?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hosted on Digital Ocean.

<comment><USER8> DO is pretty popular these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I love them, their performance is good too :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Connecting GitHub updates to Buzz - <AUTHOR> http://community.livejournal.com/evan_tech/272942.html

<comment><USER2> Excellent insight with chaining.</comment>


Scaling python for high load websites - <AUTHOR> http://yougov.github.com/pycon/slides/

<comment><USER2> Not sure why this is popping up years later, but mrshoe and I presented this at PyCon in 2007. Obviously, the landscape of individual technologies has changed since then, but the basic approaches are still true and pretty language-agnostic (it was just natural at a Python conference to have the talk in Python-centric terms).

<comment><USER3> Under what circumstances is storing static media in memcache and using a lighttpd/nginx module to serve them going to be faster than using the web servers' built-in sendfile support? Sendfile is a DMA operation, and as long as the disk cache is warm (same odds as having enough RAM for memcache to keep all media, I think), it won't hit the disk after the first time the media is requested. Is reading from memcache and then sending to the client ever really better than that?

<comment><USER2> Uh, iirc, the assumption here was that the proxy and the application server (and its resources) were not necessarily located on the same physical machine. Serving static content off the proxy is certainly another option, but it involves a different kind of deployment than having the application servers still provide the (initial) request for static content.

<comment><USER3> Ok, that makes sense. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To make this readable (all in one page), click the ø link in the bottom right

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems kind of generic, but applicable.

In my environment we've also observed latencies associated with some of the appservers referenced, so we rolled our own thin one with low-overhead in mind. We use multiprocessing as our means to saturate multiple cores, and avoid the nuisances associated with general-purpose multithreading.

The deck covers load-balancing but doesn't cover other patterns, such as the async variety. We increasingly use queues of various sorts. Zmq & mongrel2 offer really exciting possibilities, though we haven't tried the latter at scale so far.

</comment><comment><USER6> The points are probably applicable to most scaling discussions, and not particular to python. I'm surprised there isn't any discussion of using a CDN. Its easy to eliminate static load, and it reduces latencies considerably.

I do wish he went more into detail about DB optimizations, since this is usually where most people struggle to add performance to their applications.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a pretty general high-level overview on how to scale. Nothing really Python specific besides the web servers. I thought the how to scale Ruby tutorials on New Relic were much more useful and in depth.

<http://railslab.newrelic.com/scaling-rails>

</comment><comment><USER8> I stopped reading at "static assets in memcached, telling nginx how to get them".

Lrn2CDN, or Lrn2LinuxPageCache</comment>


The beauty of Japan's lonely vending machines - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/japan-vending-machines-eiji-ohashi/index.html <comment><USER2> Reading a little bit of the way through, to the part about farmers vending in a non-present way, I am thinking, this is the hangover from a culture that is wary of it's peers. Trade is done in such a way that no harm can happen. A way for tribes to trade. Trade between warrior tribes. So perhaps this is a remnant of Samurai culture? This is a big stretch on my part, I welcome any corrections or insight.

<comment><USER3> This still happens in Australia too. The primary reason to do it this way is that you don't need a person standing there all day to sell items. A working farm cannot spare a person full time.

I imagine that farms stop the practice when it's no longer profitable due to dishonesty and theft. It's only a small secondary source of income in any case. The main income is wholesale anyway.

<comment><USER4> It's quite common on country roads in upstate NY, too. I'm not sure why the author tried to posit it as something that could only happen in severely low- crime areas.</comment></comment></comment>


Nostalgia for Now - <AUTHOR> http://wilsonquarterly.com/stories/nostalgia-for-now/ <comment><USER2> Spot on with our ability to preserve the past being the cause of this.

Someone born in 1940 didn't grow up watching their favorite children's movies over and over and over on VHS, you know? You missed something then, it was often just _gone_. Maybe there'd be a picture or two of the event (or stills from the film) in a book somewhere in the library. (granted, yes, _now_ they can go back and see that stuff, probably, but they couldn't in, say, the 60s or 70s, for the most part)

It's been trending this way since the camera and phonograph were invented, but things _really_ took off right around the 80s—walkman, home camcorders becoming more affordable and the media cheaper, VCR, cassette tape, and so on.

It's only going to get worse. Kids born today will very likely be able to walk around entire recorded 3D _environments_ from their youth. Grandma's house at Christmastime when you were 9 years old? Done. Maybe we'll even be able to reconstruct semi-interactive versions of the people who were there. Your junior year high school dance? Don't see pictures and video of it, _live it_ again. We'll see what effects that has on culture when it comes, I guess.

<comment><USER3> You see the dark side of that kind of nostalgia in movies like Strange Days and Minority Report. There's a real danger to continually reliving the memories that should ordinarily fade into the past. It's almost a sort of self inflicted PTSD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> A few seconds later, I looked back at the family to see how their picture was turning out. They were gone. They didn't want to see Niagara Falls. They wanted a picture so that they could be seen forever standing in front of Niagara Falls._

This line jumped out to me - because it is how my mother is. She wants a photo for the memory but never pauses for the memory itself. She was confused when I visited a foreign country for the first time and _didn 't take a single picture_. Myself and the author seem to share the same feeling of wanting to experience something, not keep proof of it contained in a photo.

I still take photographs. But I do so to remember how things were. The photos I have of my family are mostly candid shots of them doing some mundane task and the idea of "3-2-1 cheese" is missing entirely. My grandmother bringing a birthday cake to my nephew, a smile on their faces. My sister investigating her sea monkeys with a look of curiosity. Things like that. Because they might not remember the experience - but I'm sure they'll remember being there. The experience, to me, is the important thing to photograph and not the fact they were there.

It's for that reason I find "selfie culture" to be somber. They aren't photographing the experience - they're documenting that "they were there" and they have proof they were because they have a selfie. But they _know_ they were there so what is the selfie for?

<comment><USER5> "They didn't want to see Niagara Falls"

But they did see it and then they had to run off to the next thing they needed to see. They just didn't have time to soak up the view and wait. There was something else waiting for them, a cab, a dinner, a flight, a job, a child, a pet or countless other distractions.

Every time I get to take even a minute to see something I cherish it. Then I have to run off to the next task to do.

I'm not sure I agree with the authors projection of possible motives of those they were observing. There is always danger in assuming you know what is going through someone else's mind.

<comment><USER6> > _Every time I get to take even a minute to see something I cherish it. Then > I have to run off to the next task to do._

Only people do the same on their spare time, for the whole duration of events, in the holidays, etc. Where there is no other pressing thing waiting for them like a flight, a job or a child. Besides all of those things could wait for 10 minutes.

As for non pressing things and "countless other distractions", that's the whole point of the author. They don't appreciate or cherish or stop to look at the things they visit, they just pass through to the next thing.

> _I 'm not sure I agree with the authors projection of possible motives of > those they were observing. There is always danger in assuming you know what > is going through someone else's mind._

Only we do know what's in most people's minds, it's mindless consumption of places and experiences, where they care more to post they've been there than of actually being there. Not to mention that the vast majority of those images (countless photos taken during a concert for example) nobody absolutely cares, not even the picture taking them will think about them twice.

<comment><USER7> > mindless consumption

It's funny how rarely I see people describing their _own_ actions in these terms, though. I mean, I'm sure it happens, but the dominant mode seems more like "my behavior is authentic, those other people are being fake".

I get annoyed by phonecam-mediated behavior in its extremes, for sure, but I sometimes wonder if I'm not being perceived that way when I'm doing things (sharing a concert photo with a friend who couldn't make it; trying to get just the right angle and exposure on some striking scene) that feel "authentic" inside my own head.

<comment><USER6> > _It 's funny how rarely I see people describing their own actions in these > terms, though. I mean, I'm sure it happens, but the dominant mode seems more > like "my behavior is authentic, those other people are being fake"._

I have been guilty of mindless consumption myself.

I any case, it's the mode of consumption that makes it mindless, not the persons intent (or lack thereof).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The highlight for me:

I'd waited 30 years to experience the wonder, and finally I was there, standing what seemed like mere yards away from one of the falls, vainly wearing a yellow poncho that was somehow supposed to keep me dry from the spray of water. The roar of the thing causing my insides to pound, the smell of wet rock, the mist almost too thick to see through — the moment was overwhelming.

Suddenly, a hand tapped me on the shoulder, and a young man about my age asked me in broken English if I would move away from where I was standing. He and his family wanted to take a picture in front of the falls, and I, rudely enough, was in their frame.

I wanted to deny his request, to tell their family, in my own broken French, that they would have to wait until I was finished experiencing the falls, or, better yet, that they should turn away from their cameras and have real-life experiences of their own. But I considered that noncompliance would seem rude, and so, taking one final look at the waterfall, nodded and left to find my partner. A few seconds later, I looked back at the family to see how their picture was turning out. They were gone. They didn't want to see Niagara Falls. They wanted a picture so that they could be seen forever standing in front of Niagara Falls.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if the author enjoys the Niagara Falls, or if they just enjoy thinking of themselves as someone who enjoys the Niagara Falls, unlike the masses with their cameras and lack of sense of propriety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This has eloquently described one of the reasons why I and many close friends have quit Facebook, well done. I did expect to see Mr Robot mentioned there, which mentions similar issues as well (although not as elegantly as Black Mirror, perhaps).

I've seen many instances of this revolting phenomenon at concerts. Illuminated audiences with arms raised, blocking the view of others and ruining their own experience, just to capture some blurry photo or shaky video with distorted audio.

As a millenial I grew up a diehard technophile, and even after becoming a software engineer and being fully immersed in technology daily, I've become wary and mistrusting of many "innovations". I don't know if this is a natural process of maturing (get off my lawn?) or if we are slowly realizing how damaging these new habits can be.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's most interesting that the vaporwave art form mixes nostalgia with subversion. Instead of just experiencing the past, it normally critiques it. For example, Hologram Plaza shows the darker side of 90's consumerism by portraying how soulless & empty visiting a mall can feel.

Hologram Plaza - [https://disconscious.bandcamp.com/album/hologram- plaza](https://disconscious.bandcamp.com/album/hologram-plaza)

A Brief History of Vaporwave - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdpP0mXOlWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdpP0mXOlWM)

</comment><comment><USER12> Nostalgia isn't what it used to be!

</comment><comment><USER13> Are selfies and jazzed-up status updates really part of the nostalgia phenomenon?

I think status updates and other posts are actually motivated by reward seeking: the approval/admiration of others via likes etc. Therefore a photo in the moment is not a nostalgic attempt to capture the present but rather a judgment that the experience itself is less valuable than the social reward that can be gained by sharing it.

Selfies are interesting; I think they are slightly related to the mass availability of media. However I don't think it's exactly as the author suggests. Rather, the problem here is that everyone has seen a picture of Niagara. So a selfie is a way of personalizing (and thus making, in a way, exclusive) a well-documented experience.

</comment><comment><USER14> How do we recreate or find a society of people who have technology, but are not obsessed with pre-remembering things? People who still enjoy where they actually are, rather than trying to edit and document everything for posterity as it happens?

Could there be special device-free venues -- bars, coffeshops, and so on where people go there to actually talk with people around them, where headphones and tiny screens are not allowed?

How do we fix this?

<comment><USER15> Wire up the walls to create a Faraday Cage?

<comment><USER14> How do you get enough people to want to go into the giant Faraday cage event space to make it economically viable to operate?

<comment><USER15> Trial it in the gallery space?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Oxdpus – attaching prebuilt XDP bytecode to network devices in Go - <AUTHOR> Hi, I built a small tool (https://github.com/sematext/oxdpus) to complement the write up (https://sematext.com/blog/ebpf-and-xdp-for-processing-packets-at-bare-metal-speed/) about XDP (Express Data Path) internals. The tool basically consists in CLI that offers various options for attaching XDP programs to the network interfaces, managing IP blacklisting, and so on. Unlike in my previous blog post, this time I had to come up with a fork of gobpf to bring the support for XDP programs in ELF object files. There is also a PR in the upstream repo which I hope will be merged soon. <comment><USER2> What is required to use XDP for packet capture? Special NIC or drivers?</comment>


Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases - <AUTHOR> http://scim.ag/2p0WGK9 <comment><USER2> The paper and title implies it's absorbing these stereotypes from humans. I think there is another explanation. Remember these models are trained on a dataset of news or Wikipedia articles. And it's 'goal' is to find vectors that predict what contexts words are more likely to appear in.

So if 34% of doctors are female, then you would expect 34% of doctors in news or Wikipedia articles to be female. Even if the articles are completely unbiased and the writers have no stereotypes whatsoever. And so the word vector would naturally label "doctor" something like "66% likely to occur in a male context".

And in fact this paper confirms that. Figure 1 shows that the word vectors are highly predictive of the actual gender distribution of various occupations. Probably much more accurate than most people would be. So it's not mindlessly absorbing human stereotypes. It's learning reality's stereotypes.

This result is completely expected and desirable. What makes word vectors so powerful is how they can learn complicated correlations between words and their contexts. The famous example is how it learns that "Queen" is the female equivalent of "King". Which is a gender stereotype as well. If it wasn't able to learn that doctors were a bit more likely to be male, that would be more surprising.

<comment><USER3> I think you are making a distinction without a difference. If the word vectors pick up biases from wikipedia text, than for all practical purposes, they are (indirectly) absorbing stereotypes from humans. This is an expected result, but not necessarily desirable in the end.

<comment><USER4> The GP is saying that the bias isn't an attribute of the Wikipedia text, but of reality.

If the reality is that only 34% of doctors are female, why is it not desirable for the machine to learn that?

<comment><USER5> It depends on what you want the machine to do. If you are making a gambling machine that looks at pairs of names and makes bets as to which name belongs to a doctor, you want it to learn that.

If the machine looks at names and decides who to award a "become a doctor" scholarship to, based on who it thinks is most likely to succeed, you don't want it to learn that.

<comment><USER4> I agree that if your goal is to build a machine that decides who gets to become a doctor, you need to do more than just let it loose on a bunch of text.

But I don't think preventing it from learning the current state of the world is a good strategy. Adding a separate "morality system" seems like a more robust solution.

<comment><USER6> What do you think of Bolukbasi's approach that's mentioned in the article? In short, you let a system learn the "current state of the world" (as reflected by your corpus), then put it through an algebraic transformation that subtracts known biases.

Do you consider that algebraic transformation enough of a "morality system"?

I hope you're not saying we shouldn't work on this problem until we have AGI that has an actual representation of "morality", because that would be a setback of decades at least.

<comment><USER4> > put it through an algebraic transformation that subtracts known biases

> Do you consider that algebraic transformation enough of a "morality system"?

I would consider it a sort of morality, yes. But keep in mind that the list of "known biases" would itself be biased toward a particular goal, be it political correctness or something else.

<comment><USER6> Yes, every step of machine learning has potential bias, we know that, that's what this whole discussion is about. Nobody would responsibly claim that they have solved bias. But they should be able to do something about it without their progress being denied by facile moral relativism.

If we can't agree that one can improve a system that automatically thinks "terrorist" when it sees the word "Arab" by making it not do that, we don't have much to talk about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Coauthor here. Some of the press articles about our work didn't have a lot of nuance (unsurprisingly), but in the paper we're careful about what we say, what we don't say, and what the implications are. Happy to engage in informed discussion :)

<comment><USER8> Do you have any evidence that this effect results in machines making systematically wrong inferences?

Near as I can tell, your paper shows that these "biases" result in significantly more accurate predictions. For example, Fig 1 shows that a machine trained on human language can accurately predict the % female of many professions. Fig 2 shows the machine can accurately predict the gender of humans.

Normally I'd expect a "bias" to result in wrong predictions - but in this case (due to an unusual redefinition of "bias") the exact opposite seems to occur.

(Drawing on your analogy with stereotypes, it's probably also worth linking to a pointer on stereotype accuracy: [http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp- content/uploads/Jussim-et-al-...](http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp- content/uploads/Jussim-et-al-unbearable-accuracy-of-stereotypes.pdf) [http://spsp.org/blog/stereotype-accuracy- response](http://spsp.org/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response) )

<comment><USER3> I think your questions would be answered by reading the article. Particularly:

"In AI and machine learning, bias refers generally to prior information, a necessary prerequisite for intelligent action (4). Yet bias can be problematic where such information is derived from aspects of human culture known to lead to harmful behavior. Here, we will call such biases "stereotyped" and actions taken on their basis "prejudiced.""

This definition is not unusual. This is about inferences that are wrong in the sense of prejudiced, not necessarily inaccurate.

<comment><USER8> The usual definition of bias in ML papers is E[theta_estimator - theta]. That is explicitly a systematically wrong prediction.

In any case, the paper suggests that this "bias" or "prejudice" is better described as "truths I don't like". I'm asking if the author knows of any cases where they are actually not truthful. The paper does not suggest any, but maybe there are some?

<comment><USER3> Again, per the article "bias refers generally to prior information, a necessary prerequisite for intelligent action (4)." This includes a citation to a well-known ML text. This seems broader than the statistical definition you cite.

Think for example of an inductive bias. If I see a couple of white swans, I may conclude that all swans are white, and we all know this is wrong. Similarly, I may conclude the sun rises everyday, and for all practical purposes this is correct. This kind of bias is neither wrong nor right, but, in the words of the article "a necessary prerequisite for intelligent action", because no induction/generalization would be possible without it.

There are undoubtedly examples where the prejudiced kind of biases lead to both truthful and untruthful predictions, but that seems beside the point, which is to design a system with the biases you want, and without the ones you don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was a neat study, but the authors really do throw around a number of speculative and unsupported claims in the discussion about linguistic relativity/determinism.

> Our findings are also sure to contribute to the debate concerning the Sapir- > Whorf hypothesis (17), because our work suggests that behavior can be driven > by cultural history embedded in a term's historic use. Such histories can > evidently vary between languages.

No, not really. Linguistic relativity makes a claim about the direction of causation--from language to thought. This study does nothing to test the direction of causation, which is usually considered possible only with controlled experiments. This chicken and egg debate has been going on for the better part of the last century--it is not an easy problem.

> Our results also suggest a null hypothesis for explaining origins of > prejudicial behavior in humans, namely, the implicit transmission of > ingroup/outgroup identity information through language. That is, before > providing an explicit or institutional explanation for why individuals make > prejudiced decisions, one must show that it was not a simple outcome of > unthinking reproduction of statistical regularities absorbed with language.

Once again, this was not an experiment capable of producing causal evidence. The authors have shown that human biases can be replicated by statistical learning of language corpora--admirable work, but nothing new here for Sapir- Whorf.

</comment><comment><USER10> > That is, before providing an explicit or institutional explanation for why > individuals make prejudiced decisions, one must show that it was not a > simple outcome of unthinking reproduction of statistical regularities > absorbed with language.

This is an extraordinarily bold claim. I'd be quite interested in how peoples' responses to the article changed if this was the lead.

<comment><USER11> > This is an extraordinarily bold claim.

Very bold. The full quote is worth reproducing:

> Our results also suggest a null hypothesis for explaining origins of > prejudicial behavior in humans, namely, the implicit transmission of > ingroup/outgroup identity information through language. That is, before > providing an explicit or institutional explanation for why individuals make > prejudiced decisions, one must show that it was not a simple outcome of > unthinking reproduction of statistical regularities absorbed with language.

I'm reminded of Parable of the Polygons[0] which illustrates Shelling's model of segregation, showing how quite small initial biases can be amplified and result in very large segregation.

It would be seem very sad if tribalism in all its forms is simply an emergent behaviour, a result of a random fluctuation (e.g. one or two racist individuals) causing a chain reaction throughout society, where biases become gradually amplified even if most individuals are, themselves, generally well- meaning. How do we escape from that?

[0] [http://ncase.me/polygons/](http://ncase.me/polygons/)

<comment><USER12> > _It would be seem very sad if tribalism in all its forms is simply an > emergent behaviour, a result of a random fluctuation (e.g. one or two racist > individuals) causing a chain reaction throughout society, where biases > become gradually amplified even if most individuals are, themselves, > generally well-meaning. How do we escape from that?_

Sadly, that seems to be the case.

I wouldn't even turn racism into a "special case" here. Humans are capable of dividing themselves into ingroups and outgroups over everything, no matter how trivial. I suspect the segregation process will occur with all in/outgroup divisions. Separations along the race and gender lines are particularly prevalent because those are the most obvious, noticeable differentiators between people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfRDUsvu5fE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfRDUsvu5fE)

</comment><comment><USER14> Be careful with the word truth. You don't know what it means.

<comment><USER15> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116195) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


Ancient Tomb in Spain Destroyed and Replaced with a Picnic Table - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/27/435203455/ancient-tomb-in-spain-destroyed-and-replaced-with-a-picnic-table

<comment><USER2> Serious question here: what's the actual historical significance of this tomb? I don't see anything here indicating what was actually in it, just that it's really old.

Not every historical site is actually of any importance. I don't know much about this site, but I do know that there were literally thousands of nearly- identical archaeological sites in the area of Israel where I lived for a while. Not all of them were even excavated, and many times archaeologists would excavate a site, only to leave behind literally tonnes of artifacts lying in piles at the site. A historical site of value teaches us something about the people who lived there, but a bunch of identical clay amphorae made in the same style from the same clay, containing the same foods and wines, in houses constructed identically, don't teach us anything.

Stuff like the destruction of Palmyra (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) is a real tragedy. This, not so much.

<comment><USER3> True, nothing critical to understanding of history was probably lost here. But I would consider it a city planning level tragedy, if I lived there.

We cannot preserve every tidbit our ancestors have left behind. But if a site has been settled since the neolithic times and there are artifacts remaining from those days it would be nice to leave a piece of history as a reminder of continuity and a personal connection to history. To me, while I appreciate academic knowledge, actually laying my hands on items carved and touched by previous generations creates a sense of connection that being merely cognitively aware of the facts cannot evoke.

The similar difference in looking at a picture of a fossil, and actually observing and touching one.

I have no idea of the density of historical relics in the area, though. And, yeah, I know, it's all in my head. But still.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On a related note, on my bucket list was to visit the ruins at Palmyra ... now that is never going to happen.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/world/middleeast/islamic-s...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/world/middleeast/islamic- state-blows-up-ancient-temple-at-syrias-palmyra-ruins.html?_r=0)

[http://www.businessinsider.com.au/isis-executed-the-top- arch...](http://www.businessinsider.com.au/isis-executed-the-top- archaeologist-in-the-ancient-syrian-city-of-palmyra-2015-8)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is not accidental, probably, because it was happened before a lot of times. And we are talking here of historical remainings from 3000-6000 years age. Afganisthan buddas by comparison were carved in the 6th century.

Example: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petr%C3%B3glifos_en_Galic...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petr%C3%B3glifos_en_Galicia#/media/File:Laxe_das_cruces_2.jpg)

Area of protection of the archaeological collection of petroglyphs in A somoz -> granted administrative permit for creating a feeedlot for pigs in the area

Some areas where just cleared for corrupt majors and petrogliphs ended in the local landfill "nobody knows why".

A Laxe do Cervo: the deer grabbed in stone vanished. It was unprotected and part of a path.

january-2015 A company is hired to clean an archeological park. Deletes an entire labyrinth with the chain of a tractor.

2013 "Coto de caza" (game preserve) painted over petrogliph

Lots of dissapeared stones and lots of "oups we deleted 4000 years art for mistake... again. How bad luck. Now lets build the new route over it, as planned"

</comment><comment><USER6> In fairness, it looked a lot like a dilapidated picnic table and chairs to begin with. At least the park will look nicer now.

<comment><USER7> You are not serious, right?

<comment><USER8> As the top post points out, while obviously a bit of a pity, losing this piece of the puzzle is not going to majorly impact our understanding of history, in fact this 'funny' article may bring about more appreciation of artefacts, maybe some people will register those they know about in response, the net effect could well be a positive !</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I attend Startup Weekend? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently an university student, taking a technical degree (not computer science though). I guess I should mention that I live in a smallish European country, so the StartupWeekend event is probably not that big.
I have only dabbled a bit with web development and programming in general. E.g. I have some half-finished Django sites, written a few Python automation scripts and stuff like that.
My point is, I don't have any experience in shipping anything. Therefore I'm not sure if I'll have anything to offer to any of the teams and will just be standing on the sidelines with nothing but a SW ticket in my hands...
Should I attend anyway?
If I won't be on any teams, what's in it for me?
Also if someone could share their experience attending for the first time or point me to blog post about that, that would be great! :) <comment><USER2> Why not? You might meet some interesting people and maybe even see what it takes to ship/demo something really quickly. (Not that this kind of cadence is really healthy for you or the software product long term..)</comment>


Ask HN: How to choose which dentist or doctor to believe? - <AUTHOR> When you get a medical opinion, you have to rely on the medical expertise of doctor. You don't have a better option. If you get a second opinion, and it is the same as the first one, you intuitively know it's more trustworthy. But what happens when the second opinion contradicts the first one? Who do you believe? How do you rank each scenario by the "trustworthiness" of opinion? How would one go by valuing the trustworthiness of multiple differing opinions, as is common in dentistry? <comment><USER2> One instinct I've learned from software engineering and the internet is that professionals are often wrong. The symptoms of a bad doctor are very similar to that of bad developers. Same with bad cooks, bad contractors, and so on.

The main symptom is contempt. You ask them a few questions or mention a second opinion, and their face turns into a scowl. Some are outright insulting, saying that X is a moron, without having enough information to make that judgement. Whenever I meet a doctor like this, I look for a second opinion, and very often it contradicts.

The next is buzzword. My child had a fever for a very long time and was hospitalized. A good pediatrician said "It could be Kawasaki disease... but it doesn't meet any of the other symptoms". A not very good one said "It's definitely Kawasaki disease, can't be anything else."

The third is well, passion. I know everyone hates the word, but I find a correlation. The worst doctors I've met are often trying to do anything except their job - they pitch unnecessary supplements, overcharge, talk about their stock investments. The great ones try to make you healthy; they end up undercharging, recommend cheap alternatives to their pills, volunteer for charity organizations, waive their consulting fees, and so on.

I realize this is a very subjective and biased way of looking at it, but it's worked well for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some people are unable to control their emotions in stressful situations. You can't really know if someone is outraged by you questioning their authority or by the fact that you clearly don't want to hear the truth. Or by their inability to counter other doctors who woo patients with sweet talk, although obviously doing poor medical job.

Some people can't suppress bad habits like using buzzwords. Maybe they have been taught to use them, maybe they are just too good at what they do to need worry about convincing you. Some people are great actors, and will make you believe they are truly passionate about their job. This is what I am talking about: [https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like- surg...](https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like- surgeons-23b0e2cf6d52)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Like emteycz I check the science. I will also ask others who might have the same issue. And depending on severity get a 3rd, 4th, or even 5th opinion. Like emteycz said: Its your health. Of course this depends on how serious the issue is. Often its an issue where both can have valid solutions. Or there could be something one missed that the other caught.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, in order to do your job of __maintaining your health __, you need need to do all of these jobs:

1\. Learn about the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of your health problem 2\. Assess the severity of the health problem 3\. Learn about the experience of other people 4\. Get multiple opinions

Bonus: 5\. Learn about multiple valid solutions 6\. Find doctor's blind spots

While doing all that, you pay for healthcare, which includes all that. You pay a doctor to know no1, do the no2, remember no3. You then pay for multiple of them to do the same.

But then you still get to the point where you have to decide who to believe. And it would be easy if 4 of them say the same thing. You can be pretty sure they are right[1] because statistics. But what happens when they give multiple differing opinions, like here [2].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R13BD8qKeTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R13BD8qKeTg) [2] [https://digitalsmiledesign.com/files/Old-Website- Assets/PDF/...](https://digitalsmiledesign.com/files/Old-Website- Assets/PDF/How-Dentists-Rip-Us-Off.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If opinions differ, I go check the science.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you really do that? It feels like a lot of wasted time...

<comment><USER2> My wife does this too (she's of engineering background). It's surprising how well this works even with a quick search. Many times even the doctors have asked her whether she's actually a doctor.

It's also useful for having proper discussions. The doctors will discuss the details they're unsure about, which also helps you in discussing with the next doctor. If one doctor is very sure about one thing, and another isn't, that's a yellow flag.

<comment><USER5> That could be a yellow flag in either direction - a less knowledgeable person might be overly confident, or the less knowledgeable person might be unsure.

<comment><USER6> Honestly for gp not sure and consults a source and a database is my preferred option. The publication are going to be more up to date then what's in your doctors memory banks from med school over a decade ago

<comment><USER5> I would like that too. It seems like none of them have the time or incentive to do that though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've had this happen to me b4 and honestly I got a third opinion... But truly, u just gotta trust yourself. you know your body, so if a doctor is telling u things that ur unsure of, u needa ditch them.</comment>


My $5k/month Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://hillfold.com/2015/01/starting-the-5000-dollar-per-month-challenge/

<comment><USER2> I earned $5,000.00 from Google AdSense in two different months, with an average of $3,500.00 per month for about three years, with one single well- researched essay on legal music downloading:

[http://www.warplife.com/tips/law/copyright/music/legal- downl...](http://www.warplife.com/tips/law/copyright/music/legal- downloads.html)

Lots of people earn money from web advertising by writing articles and essays, but a common mistake is that their articles are not long enough. They only make them long enough so that the ad units look nice next to the text.

What you want is an article that is worth someone's time to read in-depth, and that they will want to recommend to others by linking it from their own sites, from Facebook and the link. Ultimately it was those links that paid off, not the adsense directly.

A problem with making so much money from just one page is that it's fragile; the revenue fluctuated wildly. These days I'm working to build my site by writing a wide variety of articles and essays.

In December I got 38,000 page views. I'm not doing anything right now to monetize the site, just a few affiliate ads for books. I do not yet aim to make money from my site, rather I want to build organic links.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had some very insignificant ad revenue on my hot rod blog, but it was to the tune of two or three dollars each month... :) I do enjoy writing but I am more looking for something with recurring revenue, that I can improve and iterate on.

Thanks for reminding me that there is more to money making than just products and services!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this spam or am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> It might be, but he has a point, you don't have to build a service or product to make money. On the other hand, in his case, his product is his content.

Interesting thought.</comment></comment>


Monday: Paramount to release thousands of film clips on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/03/09/paramount-facebook.html

<comment><USER2> It's the video version of bite-sized Snickers bars. There's no way this won't be popular. There's also no way they're going to be able to see any direct revenue from the project.

Pretty good marketing idea, though.</comment>


GitHub Import Statistics - <AUTHOR> https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer?orgId=1&from=1527506761853&to=now <comment><USER2> I'd be curious to look at the list ported over and see if anything moved really mattered.

The whole boycott was nonsense anyway. Microsoft has only agreed to buy GitHub; they can't actually buy and own it for about 6 months. So even if you had a legit fear of Microsoft, why would you even bother yet? Anything of importance on GitHub is going to take a while to move over anyway which is why I suspect the majority of these "moves" were people moving over repos that no one cares about.

Microsoft's cloud business is up and coming and is already worth many billions of dollars. They are not going to jeopardize user trust, which could harm Azure, by messing with your little GitHub project.

<comment><USER3> There may be some people migrating from GitHub to boycott Microsoft, but most of the old guard free software folks weren't on GitHub to begin with.

I think the biggest concern is just a lack of trust that Microsoft will fuck things up out of incompetence rather than malice.

Another rationale is that, even if you reason it through and conclude that Microsoft isn't going to screw it up at all, the mere risk of GitHub being a SPOF is enough to support some alternatives. That might be a risk that existed pre-acquisition, but it's definitely come to attention.

Also, GitLab has been getting better and better for awhile and capitalized on this really well from a marketing standpoint; let's give them some credit instead of assuming it's purely a negative reaction to GitHub and Microsoft.

<comment><USER4> > but most of the old guard free software folks weren't on GitHub to begin > with

This is important to remember. Some people were also openly hesitant to GitHub, but used it anyway due to its network effect. This seems like a perfect moment to reevaluate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Making their grafana dashboard public is an interesting move.

<comment><USER6> It is. I love it. Extreme transparency is a norm I hope to see become more and more common in the coming years/decades; extending the open source principles beyond the code.

Gitlab is exemplary there. Mozilla is very good at it as well. Another company I've recently found out about and gained a massive amount of respect for is Buffer. [https://buffer.com/transparency](https://buffer.com/transparency)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have never seen one of these Silicon Valley "boycotts" have any effect whatsoever.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure if Microsoft still had 95% PC OS market share they would be a much bigger (crappier) company today than they are.

If a group of people get annoyed with a product they will flock to the next available one and drive that business to become competition. So while you don't get that instant gratification of being pissed and getting results you do force companies to make changes.

People suffered through IE for years, and when Chrome came around it practically took IE's market share overnight because people were so willing to blindly abandon IE.

<comment><USER7> But that's one product beating another. It happens all the time. I'm talking about a departure from a product for ethical / philosophical reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its easy to forget that Microsoft hasn't actually taken over control of GitHub yet.

The big announcement was that they have entered into an agreement to acquire GitHub, after slogging through (perhaps) months of legal, accounting, and regulatory paperwork.

There very well may be more bumps in that graph, as the news sinks in, and when the deal actually closes.

</comment><comment><USER10> What are the reasons for distrusting Microsoft to be good stewards?

<comment><USER11> As far as I can tell, it's because they did some bad things in 1995 and therefore can never be trusted again.

<comment><USER12> Not just 1995. Windows 10 spyware/crapware is a fundamental violation of the customer's interests in my book.

EDIT: is/was, I've heard they turned some of it down supposedly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like in the low 10s of thousands of projects over a period of around 7-8 days. Would be interesting to see how many GitHub stars that equates to, or if you assigned a metric to a GitHub project by counting number of unique contributors, and then aggregated that across the Gitlab import data.

This might mostly reflect the values of projects or single maintainers who place a super high priority on Microsoft-avoidance. Many more people might migrate though after waiting a while to see if Microsoft begins trying to push any agendas through GitHub.

I for one am super happy to stay with GitHub as long as no part of it starts to feel like there is any type of Azure agenda, VS agenda, etc. Keep my tooling, CI, deployment, etc., choices separate from the git platform, and I'm fine with it being a Microsoft subsidiary. The minute that changes, I'll move all my code.

<comment><USER14> It takes time to organise changes for a team/project, surely that would suggest most early transfers will be individuals repos. Also people are likely to shift smaller projects first to be sure there are no complications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You only have to import a repository once.

<comment><USER16> In terms of code hosting, you can always have two remotes and push to both. Since this config would only be known on developer machines there's no way to know if GitLab is getting true converts or just a bunch of people kicking the tires while the real work is still happening elsewhere and might never move for real.

<comment><USER17> My `g pum` alias pushes master to 4 remotes. GNU dislikes GitHub and has 2 gitlab instances plus their primary savannah git hosting. I don't care, GitHub is still the best to work with internally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Graphs aren't working right now

</comment><comment><USER19> I was already started do moving to my own (a-la VPS on digitalocean) this just added some extra velocity to it.

its not that i dont like github, i do. But keeping internet decentralized is important (imho).

Also given that I live in Turkey, government can block all github just because someone shares bad stuff about current leaders in gist. (ps. they did block google drive because someone posted some photographs/documents)

Many people here using somehow their own vps, just adding push-hook to sync with other github/gitlab is not a trivial thing.

tl;dr: push to your repo, sync with cloud providers' one.

</comment><comment><USER20> Original title:

The "mass exodus" from GitHub to GitLab: 10 days later

</comment><comment><USER21> The relevant data is how many new projects (open source) will open on github in the future. I've delted my account and no longer collaborate on project who are left on github.

What's important is _open source_.

Microsoft is an acceptable option to many still, no matter how bad it proves to be, over and again.</comment>


Windows 10 upgrade to be 'free' for one year - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30924022 <comment><USER2> Guys arguing about what "free for a year" means, be aware they DID specify this and if you think they haven't communicated it, you probably weren't there!

"For the first year after Windows 10 is available, we will be making available a free upgrade to Windows 10 for all devices running Windows 8.1. Once a device is upgraded to Windows 10, we'll be keeping it current for the supported lifetime for the device."

If that's not clear enough for you, I don't know what to say! Furthermore the actual public awareness campaign hasn't started (this announcement came two hours ago, remember) so chill out for a second before calling something a poor job of communicating. They have a limited time to show off a huge amount of features including a goddamn _top-secret holographic VR helmet_ , plus the details on the release aren't even ironed out yet, so if they didn't spend an extra five minutes drilling down on the release strategy (8 months away at this point) you're going to have to forgive them.

<comment><USER3> Here's the smallprint from the page on their current Windows 10 promo site[1]:

> It is our intent that most of these devices will qualify, but some > hardware/software requirements apply and feature availability may vary by > device. Devices must be connected to the internet and have Windows Update > enabled. ISP fees may apply. Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 Update required. > Some editions are excluded: Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 8/8.1 Enterprise, > and Windows RT/RT 8.1. Active Software Assurance customers in volume > licensing have the benefit to upgrade to Windows 10 Enterprise outside of > this offer. We will be sharing more information and additional offer terms > in coming months.

1: [http://windows.microsoft.com/en- us/windows-10/about](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/about)

<comment><USER2> No RT! That's harsh, but the truth is dropping RT like a bad habit is the best thing they could do. Sucks for anyone who bought a copy on a cheap tablet, though.

<comment><USER4> RT would have been amazing if they had been able to create an x86/64 emulator. Even if it ran 50% slower than on a native CPU and even if it ate battery like crazy at least it would have given the platform a nice back-catalogue.

Instead not only did RT have virtually no software on it, but Microsoft went out of their way to make it "impossible" to build ARM-native software for it without essentially hacking into your own system.

Microsoft set RT on the road to ruin from almost day one. It is unsurprising that they're pulling the plug. I will say when they announced the Surface Pro 3 without a Surface RT 3, the writing was on the wall as far as end of life...

<comment><USER5> Or supported Win32 API which would have brought with it a number of open source and free applications, such as VLC, OpenOffice.org, AbiWord (smaller, so more suited to RT), and Firefox.

It seems that Microsoft is working on a new UI for Office which will eliminate the need for Win32 support on devices such as RT in the future.

At the same time they restrict what native applications can do on Metro devices, which limits the usefulness of existing codebases and forces Metro tablets to start over without the long time catalog of Windows software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not the price of Windows that was keeping people from adopting Windows 8. It's the irrelevancy and the fact that corporations don't see the ROI. The time it would take to upgrade their company isn't worth the gains, which are minimal.

Unless Windows 10 proves to be a massive improvement in performance or usability, I suspect it's uptake will be just as anemic, free or not.

<comment><USER7> I haven't used Windows in 10+ years, so I've got some questions for those who are smarter than me on the subject of Windows:

Does it come with package management yet? Can I easily avoid DLL hell these days? Can I add my own local repository and use it to maintain a fleet of workstations, making sure they always have the same configuration no matter what?

Is it easily possible to connect to a Windows machine and administer it from a command line/scripting environment? Can I disable the GUI and use Windows without tying up resources for unneeded functionality - i.e. no graphics card required?

Is all of this onboard, or does some/most of it require the involvement of a 3rd-party add-on? If its not onboard, can I validate that 3rd-party with signed keys? Is there an onboard key agent that will make this possible?

Is there an easy way to get a compiler onboard without requiring registration and so on, or does it ship with development tools already set up and configured? Are these tools usable without requiring GUI involvement - i.e. remotely?

These are earnest questions, I honestly don't know. If the majority of the answers are in the affirmative, then I'll give Windows 10 a try - it would make a nice change from what I've gotten used to with my Linux machine.

<comment><USER8> > Does it come with package management yet?

No. There is the Windows Store (all or most Metro apps, GUI) and things like NuGet for Visual Studio, but that's not what you're looking for. There are third-party solutions.

[EDIT: See sibling comments; W10 adds one.]

> Can I easily avoid DLL hell these days?

DLL Hell is no longer a concern. It's not a matter of avoiding it, it won't happen except perhaps in very unusual edge cases I'm not familiar with.

> Can I add my own local repository and use it to maintain a fleet of > workstations, making sure they always have the same configuration no matter > what?

You can do this. This is one reason Windows is so big in enterprise.

> Is it easily possible to connect to a Windows machine and administer it from > a command line/scripting environment?

Yes.

> Can I disable the GUI and use Windows without tying up resources for > unneeded functionality - i.e. no graphics card required?

In Server 2012 onwards, the GUI is optional.

> If its not onboard, can I validate that 3rd-party with signed keys? Is there > an onboard key agent that will make this possible?

I am not 100% on what you want, but yes, Windows executables are commonly signed and that is integrated with the OS.

> Is there an easy way to get a compiler onboard without requiring > registration and so on, or does it ship with development tools already set > up and configured?

Windows does not ship with a compiler or other developer tools installed. You can install Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition, which has all the features of Professional Edition, for free and without registration (afaik - I'm doing it right now, so if I'm wrong, I'll edit). You can of course install all the free-software development tools you want. Most tools support Windows reasonably well.

> Are these tools usable without requiring GUI involvement - i.e. remotely?

Yes, although most people don't do so. I've only fiddled around. I've heard that manually fiddling with msbuild is actually more pleasant than using the GUI.

<comment><USER9> >You can install Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition,

If you prefer to use the compiler and build system at the command line and you're only interested in managed development (i.e., C#), you can download the Microsoft Build tools package[1], which contains the compilers and MSBuild for headless development.

[1] [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=4493...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=44931)

>> Are these tools usable without requiring GUI involvement - i.e. remotely?

Yes, I do most of my building on the command line. Editing, of course, is in VS, but I've also had fine success with Vim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Windows 10 looks pretty awesome. And if you like me down graded to an android phone from a pretty good old windows 7.8 phone you'll realize that the voice recognition stuff on android hardly works. I use a nexus 4 which is too new to change again, but I hate that I can't reply to texts with the headset. Yeah I know there is probably an app out there and probably a mode. I didn't figure it out. Win 7.8 phone did it automatically and switches off when you turned the headset off. So the Cortana feature looks even more amazing to me. One note that I've realized the voice rec on the latest version of Android works acutally pretty good now. It's been like 4 years. And still doesn't work great with the headset. All apps on android are scary since they want all kinds of access to contacts, messages, phone. Oh boy, I can't install anything because I'm too afraid of what it might do with that access. I only really trust the native stuff.

What I wonder is how they plan to monetize free windows 10 as a service. I'm not going to be happy if I find it's another yearly fee like Office 365. I searched forever to find a legit activatable copy of office 2010 to avoid that.

<comment><USER11> Supposedly the big money has never been in Windows licenses. For example, Office is a big money-maker for them. So it is in their interests to have everyone run Windows, even if they don't get license revenue.

Hearsay though.

<comment><USER12> Windows licenses is a big money maker, but nearly all of it comes from OEM installations and enterprise customers. Few people shell out for upgrading their old computer, they tend to run what came installed on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think this free upgrade is much of a shock.

People who bought a Windows XP machine in 2001 enjoyed 6+ years of free OS upgrades from Microsoft. Likewise, people who buy a Mac enjoy 5+ years of free OS upgrades from Apple.

If Microsoft wants to shift into a yearly release cycle and they don't give away the updates to their existing customers then they're essentially charging for service packs, which won't fly.

<comment><USER14> It's not a shock but it's outside the norm for Microsoft. Typically you do not get free upgrades from one version of Windows to the next.

You can free updates to your current version. But never a free upgrade to the next major version.

WinXP users enjoyed six plus years of free updates to WinXP.

I don't see this type of release from Microsoft changing their update/upgrade model. They're just doing it as a means to push the user base harder to transition and possibly as a small admittance of the screw-up over Win8.

Apple, on the other hand, went from cheap upgrades to free upgrades over the last few versions of OS X. It's not the same thing as Microsoft's release pattern.

<comment><USER15> Let's be a little honest, though - this is a spectacular rebrand for 8.2, along with large user-visible changes (not forcing Metro) and some cool backend stuff. A lot of this stuff was originally going to be in the second service pack for 8.1, if I remember correctly (most distinctively, the start menu returning).

They've said themselves that they needed to get away from the stigma that is associated with 8.* - and that's great. Charging for it would be a bit harsh.

<comment><USER14> Well, sure, it's like what happened with going from Vista to Win7. But since they are mostly a software company I don't have much issue with them having a business model that makes them money, and that involves charging for software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does it mean that if you do the free upgrade, once the year is over you'll have to pay to continue using it? Or does it mean instead that the upgrade will be free for the first year, and if you want to upgrade after that it'll cost you?

<comment><USER17> From what I understood from the video it means you get the chance to upgrade within a year of release. They also said you'll be receiving automated updates for the supported life time of the device (whatever that means)

<comment><USER4> They've done a really poor job of communicating that.

The free upgrade for one year thing is fairly cut and dry. However what they meant by that "we'll support updates for the lifetime of the device" is completely meaningless and confusing. As opposed to what they've been doing until now..?

Also they keep on talking about "Windows as a service" with zero clarification on what that means. Is Windows becoming a paid subscription? Is that just meaningless marketing speak?

I'll say this, Microsoft has a bad track record of making these events 50% longer than they should be and filing in the gaps with marketing department nonsense that doesn't mean anything. There were some bits of that that were simply cringe and or a huge time waster.

Some fruit-named company do these presentations better. They're still better than Google however...

<comment><USER18> I agree that the language "This is more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device – at no additional charge." found on Terry Myerson's blog ( [http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/01/21/the- next...](http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/01/21/the-next- generation-of-windows-windows-10/) ) is troubling at worst and confusing at best.

Since when does Microsoft decide what the "supported lifetime of the device" is? All of my devices running Windows were hand built by me from best-of-breed components that I frequently swap out.

I could see it making sense if it was for the supported lifetime of Windows 10 because that at least is something where Microsoft should be expected to define a final end of support date. But that is not what it says, and even that would be odd...Microsoft is going to either turn off my OS when they decide to no longer support it, or make me start paying to use it at that point?

Makes no sense any way you slice it, at least as currently (poorly) communicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Probably they are changing business plan to take 25-30% of each app ever sold for the OS instead of just charging for the OS itself.

Finally, you do not have to port your app to all devices.

And hopefully you, as a user will be able to control how much access each app has to the computer.

Imagine buying a new smart-phone with lets say Android, then you install Windows 10 on it instead and everything just works.

The only problem I see is that they need to make the SDK easier for me to start making native apps instead of web apps. Especially the UI part.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone explain why it would only be free for the first year? To spur adoption? It just seems like more trouble than it's worth to start charging people for it sometime in the future.

<comment><USER21> Ever since Amazon Web Services nothing has ever been the same. Maybe one day we'll all go back to actually "owning" the software we buy instead of just timed licenses and logins.

<comment><USER22> You haven't owned software for a while, long before anyone every thought of AWS.

Remember XP having to be re-authorized if you changed too much hardware? It was before then too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if they'll let the (vast number of) pirated versions of Windows 7/8 participate in the free upgrade program. It'd be an interesting change to the dynamic of Windows.

<comment><AUTHOR> Especially in emerging world markets, where it's often impossible to buy a legitimate copy of Win 7/8 even when you want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Clippy: I heard no one likes our phone OS, so we are going to put it on your desktop for FREE, arent you glad? Metro squares for everyone!

<comment><USER25> Actually, a lot of people who have an WP 8 phone do like the OS a lot.

I know I do at least.

<comment><USER26> I doubt the OS was ever an issue.

The issue was the lack of applications for the OS.

<comment><USER27> Or more importantly the lack of quality of the apps that do exist. As a part time WP8 user I've never really suffered from a lack of apps, but I often find that the apps that are there never live up to the quality and finish of equivalent apps on Android. Don't get me wrong, they're all fine and all get the job done, but never quite as nicely as on Android (or iOS).

The only exception where the Nokia Here navigation apps.</comment></comment></comment></comment>