GitHub was down - <AUTHOR> http://status.github.com/ <comment><USER2> Seems like things started to go down the drain somewhere around February 2020.

[https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime/kr09ddfgbfsf?page=2](https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime/kr09ddfgbfsf?page=2)

Wonder what was the trigger for the reliability hit - actions went GA on nov 2019, so it's something else (or possibly a combination of things)

<comment><USER3> COVID related work from home adjustments is my guess.

<comment><USER4> That might be the trigger but it wouldn't be the root cause.

For example web and backend servers for cloud services shouldn't be affected by whether people are sat in one location or another. However if those systems requires lots of maintenance to keep running and people are less available due to COVID then you'd see a rise in downtime. But that would mean it's not COVID that's the problem, it's the amount of maintenance required and COVID only surfaced that problem.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't have to be on service side either. Could be that user patterns are changing too, testing scenarios that aren't well worn on GitHub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am thinking when was the last time GitLab went down, I rarely or did not see downtime experience like this bad with Gitlab, I was seeing history,

[https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/](https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/)

They do have some latency or slowness issues, but couldn't find like whole system down thing,

Like in one of the comments here, reminded me of 2017 incident, [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of- datab...](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database- outage-of-january-31/) They should have improved a lot by now, but still I am curious, why such large or frequent downtimes are happening to GitHub. Is it due to making it more open for teams with Private repos, and more perks along with quarantine and WFH things

<comment><USER6> The correct link for history (at of now) should be:

[https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c083...](https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c08349f7)

Above link result in err 500.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 14 Days ago, they went down [0]. And today it's happening again. Twice in less than a month.

Another reminder to self host via solutions like GitLab or Gitea. [1]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675864](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23675864)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676072)

<comment><USER8> I would choose self-hosting for small to medium size teams any day. I can't fathom why people choose not to self-host at this scale. Your data. Your control. Your network. Your infrastructure. Your responsibility. Are people becoming more afraid of responsibility these days?

<comment><USER9> > Are people becoming more afraid of responsibility these days?

I wound't say people become more afraid, they just don't see the reason to bother. I'd choose GitHub or Gitlab for small teams at any time. I'd probably even be fine with the free versions.

I see little to no reason for self-hosting in a small team. I cannot imagine a performant server, bandwith and the employee it takes to maintain it to be cheaper than the 10€/month/user for a hosted solution.

<comment><USER10> From zero servers to one requires an employee with the skills, but from 100 to 101 (my situation) does not. It requires less than 1% more employee, since more is likely to be automated etc.

Many small companies already have VMs running other services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like they need some high level analysis on why these outages happen so often.

At this point it feels like it's no longer a series of accidents and that they should improve something.

<comment><USER12> after this downtime today. We're finally start discussing (again) to use our own Gitlab.

<comment><USER13> I love when people suggest this and when someone asks okay who do we put in charge of having better availability than github no one has a good answer.

<comment><USER10> In your case, maybe the same people that keep microsoft.com online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Post mortem for February events[1]. It was resource contention on their primary mysql cluster caused by unintended config change.

There's a total of 34 incidents in 2020 so far[2]. I wonder if all are DB woes or there are other factors at play (like move to Azure).

[1] [https://github.blog/2020-03-26-february-service- disruptions-...](https://github.blog/2020-03-26-february-service-disruptions- post-incident-analysis/)

[2] [https://www.githubstatus.com/history](https://www.githubstatus.com/history)

</comment><comment><USER15> Protip:

Always have an extra customer, like the flowershop downstairs. Let her borrow your wifi in exchange for some office flowers. Now she is technically your customer.

When your shit goes down and nothing works you can still write " _some_ of our customers are experiencing issues" in the statuspage as the flowershop still has wifi (hopefully).

</comment><comment><USER16> I still don't understand people who always mentions to Microsoft's acquisition. Until the official statement, it isn't Microsoft failure. Don't blame them.

<comment><USER17> You know if you use Microsoft products every day, and every day they let you down, and every day you experience the worst most unintuitive design in the world, and every day you have to deal with their reliability issues, and then MS acquires github, and github starts to behave like everything else MS touches ...

Clearly something about how MS runs is responsible for their past outcomes, why is it a stretch to assume it is responsible for another similar outcome?

It is like saying we don't know the rotation of the earth is why the sun rose this morning because we have not had an official investigation into the matter.

<comment><USER16> It's just your own feelings. I haven't had any issue with Microsoft products (and yes I use their services every day in my working life). All I can see from you is making a guess with your full of sentiments and negative thoughts. So as I said, don't blame them until official statement.

<comment><USER17> > It's just your own feelings.

Nope. Github is down, I don't feel it is down, it is down. Office 365 falls apart when two people try edit a spreadsheet at once. Outlook does not allow you to unreject a meeting invite. Windows won't report DLL errors over a powershell terminal, Azure takes 10 minutes to delete a VM instance, Azure DevOps is so poorly designed that nobody can figure out how to find a repo without someone explaining it to them first, I can go on, but none of this is my feelings, these are actual things that people have to put up with from MS every day.

<comment><USER18> You seem to have problems with online stuff. I don't use cloud and have no such problems.

<comment><USER17> I prefer my option which is to just not use MS products but to each their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there historical data of Github Uptime/Downtime? CSV format or other?

I'd love to do some analysis on how things were pre, vs post the acquisition (and trends in availability)

<comment><USER20> They have some self-reported data [1]. You could scrape that and transform it.

Eyeball analysis suggests it started in december 2019-february 2020, and rapidly went downhill starting april.

[1] [https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=2](https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have noticed a pattern than when I generate markdown from org-mode and have the text 'language' selected for highlighting push, this causes github to hang like crazy. I don't think I'm crazy in thinking it might be me. I push frequently to my blog and am starting to notice a correlation.

I export this into the below markdown.

        #+BEGIN_SRC text -n :f "translate-shell -s fr -t en" :async :results verbatim code
          I learned some French so that I can talk to
          you during tennis. I hope I know enough so you
          will not get bored.
        #+END_SRC

When I get a page build failure it's usually my fault for creating .

This is the markdown which was pushed to my blog. The 'Page Build failure' messages take a long time to arrive to my inbox and I can see that the page build is hanging.

        {{< highlight text "linenos=table, linenostart=1" >}}
        I learned some French so that I can talk to
        you during tennis. I hope I know enough so you
        will not get bored.
        {{< /highlight >}}

</comment><comment><USER22> Can't wait for the article about this outage, what will it be?

\- Auto-scaling issue

\- DDOS

\- DNS error

\- Datacenter outage

Any other possible problems?

<comment><USER23> \- Kubernetes control plane screw-up

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Second time in what, a week? What is going on at Microsoft?

<comment><USER17> What is going on that people expect something better from Microsoft? Really this is quite on par with the quality they deliver. The only surprising thing is that people are surprised by this.

<comment><USER25> I wasn't aware of that reputation, besides Windows ME, that is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, there goes my night. I was waiting on a build triggered by Github actions and was wondering what was up.

I guess this is my sign to get some sleep.

Microsoft needs to slow things down and focus on stability. This really isn't good. I need these weekend and late night hours for my side hustle. I already have enough trouble as is, I don't need an injection of additional difficulty. (That's just my frustration; I can't imagine what y'all are all going through.)

They're making some very frustrating choices lately. Their redesign broke READMEs with tables (which now require horizontal scrolling), and they don't seem to care about all the repos they impacted.

Pull it together, Microsoft.

<comment><USER17> Why are you not using an alternative?

<comment><USER26> > Why are you not using an alternative?

I don't need two CI/CD pipelines. Nor do I have have time to build something like that. I need to spend my time working on the core product.

The risk here is that my deploy SLA is tied to Github. I accepted this risk as the cadence of my deploys tends to be once to twice a day on average and Github is usually available (many nines).

I made a choice, and now that choice is biting me. Now I'll evaluate if I should spend the time and effort to migrate off it. If this is the last of it and Microsoft makes a commitment to not break things, I'll likely stay as the effort to move is nonzero. If this begins to happen every month, on the other hand...

<comment><USER17> > I don't need two CI/CD pipelines.

Maybe my question was unclear, but I was not asking why are no not using two services, I was asking why are you not using an alternative, and I meant instead of GitHub, not in addition to GitHub.

> If this is the last of it and Microsoft makes a commitment to not break > things, I'll likely stay as the effort to move is nonzero.

Commitment without liability is not a commitment. It is just empty words. And I don't see Microsoft making any commitments with liability on their part for a free service.

<comment><USER26> > why are no not using two services

Simplicity. Microsoft has a marketplace where they bundle a bunch of services together where developers already are. I didn't have to go elsewhere to look. It's a real competitive advantage they're building. That said, I may begin to look elsewhere.

> And I don't see Microsoft making any commitments with liability on their > part for a free service

It's not a free service. I pay roughly $50/mo for the features I use.

> And I don't see Microsoft making any commitments with liability on their > part for a free service.

I imagine they take their SLAs very seriously. Especially in light of this string of outages. If they don't, they're going to lose customers and good will.

<comment><USER17> > I imagine they take their SLAs very seriously.

What are the liabilities on them for failing to meet their SLA? Taking thing seriously is not a liability. Specifically in this case, what are their liability to you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That moment when you submit a very long comment on GitHub, and realise that it is down. :(

</comment><comment><USER28> I received a 500 error when I went to GitHub, and the first thought on my mind was to check Hacker News.

I wasn't disappointed.

In all fairness, I GitHub has more or less been fairly reliable, minus whatever has been going on over the last week.

</comment><comment><USER29> Seems to me like a Deja-Vu after I answered this[1] on quora yesterday.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Github-now-allows-unlimited-private- re...](https://www.quora.com/Github-now-allows-unlimited-private-repos-with- unlimited-collaborators-Why-should-one-stay-with-Bitbucket-now/answer/Prahlad- Yeri)

</comment><comment><USER30> Move off Rails now GitHub, is clearly not working for you. It took you this far, now go move to something that doesn't sh*ts the bed twice every month.

<comment><USER31> Rails is (apparently still) a popular target for haters, but for projects at Github's scale it's rarely a code logic/framework-level blunder that's taking the service down. It's generally a cascade of failures in things like multiple database systems, auto-scaling, dns/caching, etc.

<comment><USER30> There are projects bigger than GitHub that do all of these things and still doesn't fail as much as GitHub. Honestly, both of us speculating. You can't say for sure if it's not Rails and I can't say if it's not anything else.

> for projects at Github's scale it's rarely a code logic/framework-level > blunder that's taking the service down. It's generally a cascade of failures > in things like multiple database systems, auto-scaling, dns/caching, etc.

This is just guessing. You can't honestly tell what is causing the issue.

<comment><USER31> Not guessing, postmortems are regularly posted on this site and elsewhere. These kinds of failures are generally not someone using some "magic" (or whatever other pejorative term) feature of a framework.

<comment><USER30> Agreed. Do we have postmortems for the number of spectacular crashes Github had this year?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Github is probably still more reliable than Bitbucket, that has weekly disruptions (small but you do get a performance impact)

</comment><comment><USER33> On June 29th they also had outage (lasting 2 hrs), does anyone know what was the cause back then?

</comment><comment><USER34> Why this is usually happen on weekends? The only time that I have for coding :)

</comment><comment><USER35> yet again - I have not experienced anywhere close the amount of outage before Github was swallowed by Micro$oft

</comment><comment><USER36> now we are talking about GitHub availability report!! happy Monday

</comment><comment><USER17> again ... well done microsoft. well done. I really don't get why people keep using it, gitlab seems objectively better to me.

<comment><USER37> Out of curiosity, what could have Microsoft done to cause this?

I'm not aware of the acquisition details. But did they make GitHub switch to Azure or make significant changes to infrastructure?

I've seen several people blaming Microsoft for GitHub outages and am trying to understand why this is a common thing.

<comment><USER2> When microsoft took over the rate of new features increased dramatically.

Adding new features fast often entails tradeoffs in other areas - such as reliability. Which seems to be what happened in github.

<comment><USER38> I haven't used their new features but am heavily affected every time they go down. I wonder if they are making the right trade offs here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> deleted

<comment><USER40> You are bad at trolling.</comment></comment>


Read the masters - <AUTHOR> http://www.federicopereiro.com/masters/ <comment><USER2> Or, if the masters are too hard at first, see if their pupils have written annotations. I tried Turing, couldn't even understand why what he was talking about was important (or why his "computers" seem so much... lamer than the ones I was used to), and then found Charles Petzold's "Annotated Turing".

<http://www.charlespetzold.com/AnnotatedTuring/>

He takes Turing's "On Computable Numbers..." and mixes in chapters giving the necessary background on the history of mathematics, number theory, logic, etc. in-line (albeit, it takes about 100 pages to get to the first sentence of Turing's paper). I whole-heartedly recommend it.

<comment><USER3> Another vote for The Annotated Turing. Really does a great job of shedding light on a rather esoteric paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Another thing that resonated deeply with me was how Newton studied a book by > a French mathematician (I don't remember which one): he started reading the > book – when he found it too hard, he started over. That's what he did until > he understood the whole thing. So, he didn't go and read something more > basic, or tried to found someone who could explain it. He just stayed with > the source until he groked it.

Approach this advice with caution. Yes, it might work great if you're working with a great book that has good coverage of all the fundamentals of the topic and presents it in a logical order. Many books don't do this. Starting over when you get stuck can just throw you into an endless loop if the required information just isn't in the book you picked to learn from. Know when to branch out to other sources of information instead of looping back. Don't be afraid to make a quick interlude to Wikipedia if you need to.

(Personally, I prefer to just backtrack to the information I missed instead of starting over from scratch. Starting over seems to waste a lot of time, but if you missed one concept, there's a chance you missed more.)

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Many brilliant, groundbreaking work is produced by geniuses who are lousy writers, so sometimes secondary sources are necessary to get past roadblocks.

Still, it's a good reminder to _try_ reading primary sources, when so many people seem to be learning from screencasts and blog posts three degrees removed from them.

<comment><USER5> "Many brilliant, groundbreaking work is produced...lousy writers." I, um, yeah. Oops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or the "original communicators." When you start to read the _masters_ of every field, you realize they are in some sort of a _conversation_ that spans centuries and you get to participate. One problem with this approach is these are _dead teachers_ so no question & answer session for you, and usually the material is hard to comprehend at first. That is exactly what you need it, a material that elevates you, something that pushes you from _understanding less to understanding more_. Lastly, during this exercise you will find amazingly that there are really only a few original teachers and that most of what we read today are simply digest of what was originally written and discovered by a handful of experts. So it is probably in your best interest to take it straight from the horse's mouth.

Yes, I am repeating Adler's How To Read.

<comment><USER7> One of my favorite stories in this vein:

You may know that we often read Plato but never read Socrates, and you might have wondered why the hell we don't go back to the 'originals'. Reading Plato's dialogue "Phaedrus" gives an answer near the end: Socrates apparently believed "that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." Socrates of course was famous for using questions to try and ferret out truth; the idea that you _couldn't have a conversation_ with a book seemed to make Socrates very cautious. He expresses other concerns as well: that memory must be exercised to be strong, and that writing would thus lead to a weakening of memory; also that writing makes it easier to pretend to know something which you don't really understand; and that people will write texts which cannot be used to learn the subject but only can be used as an aid to remember it.

Thus ironically, Socrates seemed to believe that books would end the existence of knowledge. This presumably was the reason that he never wrote down his own philosophy, and his students had to do it for him.

<comment><USER8> Feynman had some similar advice to not read too much. He'd get just the basic idea, stop reading, and try to solve the problem himself. There's a similar anecdote about Turing. You don't have to be a genius to profit from this approach, though of course it affects how far you can take it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I actually believe the mindset this author has (along with many university professors) makes learning far more difficult for students and discourages them from staying in STEM (math and science) degrees.

I have consistently found that for me to tackle difficult concepts I need multiple points of view, specifically views that simplify the topic tremendously. My professors never encouraged me to seek multiple sources and usually pushed overly complex, decades-old textbooks on my peers and I. The "masters" typically write to a niche, university-based audience and do not tailor their original works for the masses.

I certainly agree that if one wants a complete understanding of a field or subject they should eventually study original works, however to encourage them as a starting or leverage point for understanding difficult subjects is poor advice in my opinion.

<comment><USER10> I completely agree. As a high-school student, I was completely turned off by the quality of books that I was reading ('textbooks that conform to the curriculum set by the education board'). It was only when I started reading the masters (in this case Resnick Halliday for physics, Thomas & Finney for calculus) that I really started to like math and physics and chose to major in engineering

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> More silly, macho, "real programmer" nonsense. It's like saying that the best way to learn calculus is to pick up a calculus book in first grade and read it over and over until it all becomes clear. Yeah, that's the express lane to mastery.

If you want to master something, sequentially master its prerequisites and methodically work your way up. If you do that, then a lot of the ideas of the masters will have begun occurring to you before you even read their works, and you will be the sort of person they were writing for.

<comment><USER12> Trouble with this is that _prerequisites differ._ I taught myself multivariable calculus out of a differential geometry textbook that I lacked roughly an entire degree's worth of "prerequisites" to, in order to pass a bog-standard calculus course, because I found the ostensibly "easier" approach advocated by the undergraduate calc book utterly incomprehensible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When he writes that Newton too just read and re-read through the Master's, he's wrong.

"How Newton was introduced to the most advanced mathematical texts of his day is slightly less clear. According to de Moivre, Newton's interest in mathematics began in the autumn of 1663 when he bought an astrology book at a fair in Cambridge and found that he could not understand the mathematics in it. Attempting to read a trigonometry book, he found that he lacked knowledge of geometry and so decided to read Barrow's edition of Euclid's Elements."

<http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Newton.html>

When Newton failed to grasp something, he backtracked. When he failed to understand that, he backtracked again. I think many people when confronted with a failure of understanding may be disinclined, throw their hands up, and say, this isn't for me. Newton, instead, continued to work his way back up the chain until he found material that helped him understand.

I think this article does a disservice to the lessons we might learn from Newton by suggesting that he just smashed his head against the same book until he understood it.

<comment><USER14> I think the argument here isn't to reread a trigonometry book until you get it, regardless of your knowledge of the prereqs. The message I took is to find the book written by a/the master in the field of trigonometry, living or dead, in order to learn trig. If you don't yet understand geometry which is needed to understand trig, then find a book by the most renowned scholar in geometry.

It's sort of like that telephone game we play in elementary school, where the message gets passed around the room and ends up nothing like it started. Learn from the source of these insights, not from someone else who learned it and is giving you their interpretation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A few days ago,i stumbled on Newton's Principia in my college library, and i could not help noticing how accessible he was relative to his pupils.On the very first page,he gives only one rule for finding derivatives that applies in ALL cases plus worked out examples on how it works.I felt like i had wasted too much of my time in college reading too many useless tomes.

<comment><USER16> Can you explain what rule this is? I'm highly curious as to what rule can solve all derivatives, and it might be useful for me.

<comment><USER17> f'(x) = lim h->0 (f(x+h)-f(x))/h

<comment><USER18> If that's the really the rule ekm2 is referencing, the rest of his comment falls apart. This rule is found in the first section about derivatives in any college or high school calculus textbook. They lead you on for a good many pages that calculus problems are actually practically solved by reference to this equation, then grudgingly admit (after forcing you to use it many times) that the power rule, among others, exists.

<comment><USER12> I assume he's referring to this [1], although Newton invented his calculus because _he_ couldn't use this approach to solve practical problems.

[1] [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of_Natural_Philosophy_\(1846\)/BookI-I)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sometimes this leads to a considerably different flavor as well, which is interesting. Often papers are remembered for their "results", but sometimes the results are only a small part of the paper, and positioned much differently by the original author.

This is the case with Turing, for example. If you go by Turing in the secondary literature, he comes across as very mathematical, formal, rigorous. Which he was, but he was also very aesthetically oriented, playful, and philosophical. Many of his original papers are really quite "weird" in a way, at times even allusive/metaphorical. So you get a bit different view of him if you read the originals. (Due credit: I was reminded of that in Turing's case by this article, which aims to convince humanities scholars that they should read Turing: [http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/why-arent- we-r...](http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/why-arent-we-reading- turing))

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not a programmer but I loved this line from the post:

 _But if you don't mind too much feeling like a baby, and if you can create some space in your life where you aren't forced to be an adult, then give the masters a try._

I think this is very good advice for many things.

</comment><comment><USER21> I can't agree enough with this, except the part about staying with it. I think sometimes we have to come at the same material from several different directions before it actually makes sense to us. Perhaps it's our preferred mode of learning, or maybe just how old we are and our personality types. Don't know.

So for a long time I avoided a lot of the literary masters. As a programmer, I thought they were way too artsy and "fluffy" for my tastes. I wanted something with hard science and boolean logic in it, dammit.

But around 40 I listened to the Learning Company's "Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition." It was like a guided tour of a huge amount of masterpieces. From this overview i could pick and choose what to consume. As I read each work, i had already been "prepped" by listening to a lecturer describe what made the work so outstanding.

So I picked up "Anna Karenina" Wow! Tolstoy could sketch a character like nobody else. I read some Dickinson. What a great, simple, yet complex way she had of describing inner emotional states!

Still couldn't get all of it. Joyce is on my list, but I procrastinate. I had another go at Melville and loved it, but I couldn't generate enough momentum to make it through Moby Dick. Both writing and reading styles have changed. I'd love to learn Greek and have a go at the true classical works, but I will never have the time, sadly.

I'm hoping to get another overview or introduction and then make a go at some of the rest of the material. I've loved reading the literary masters.

What I find is that you need a preparation or background to really absorb and appreciate the masters. This is the same as having to have a background in baseball to understand a baseball game. Otherwise, without context, it's very difficult to understand what parts work, what parts don't, and where the beauty is. (This is called a liberal education, by the way). The more broad and deep background you have, the more you can appreciate the masters in many fields.

Also I'd separate cargo cult liberal arts with actual understanding. To me there's tons of venues that exist to convince you that you're smarter than some other slob. They pitch quite a bit of snob appeal. I'd avoid that. You end up thinking you have class when all you're really doing is running around in a mob consuming whatever was on NPR last week. To me developing a sense of what the crowd thinks is beautiful versus truly coming to a personal grip with the masters is completely missing the point. I'm sure there's a social aspect to art consumption but to me a true master spans the test of time. While it's possible that something can be popular today and 100 years from now, for me using social proof as some form of merit for masterworks is almost diametrically opposed to the entire concept of what makes art truly great in the first place.

Fair warning, however: once you start consuming works from the masters it makes mediocre works hard to stomach. Oddly enough, _bad_ material is fine. I still love me some pulp fiction and trashy pop music. It's the stuff that tries to be highbrow but you know is going to be gone with the wind in ten years that's impossible to take.

<comment><USER22> While I empathize with your aesthetic preferences, I don't think that you're talking about the same thing as the article. _Everyone_ reads the literary masters in school. No one reads Newton.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice idea, however if you lack fundamental knowledge in an area, prepare for this.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334>

(P.s sorry about the title. I guess thats how they get more eye balls on it).

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure what the purpose of that was. Clearly, you CAN light a small bulb with a battery and wire, as done in the video and introductory physics classes everywhere. So... is it the fact that the students were unable to figure out that the battery produced insufficient power to light the big bulb? That shows a lack of "fundamental understanding about electricity"? More like a lack of knowledge about power requirements of household light bulbs.

<comment><USER25> Most of them weren't making a circuit -- just running the wire from one end of the battery to the base of the bulb. That shows a very fundamental lack of understanding of what's going on, without even getting into things like the power requirements of the bulb.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure they lack such understanding. Isn't this what psychologists call cognitive bias, or something like that? I believe there was a thread here on HK about it, a study showing that people often do irrational things because they assume they know everything. You know? People just think "geez, that is easy..." and rush to answear the first thing that comes to mind, just to discover that they missed the details and feel really stupid :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is so true: I remember in high school studying calculus from a random book which made me think that calculus was about was a bunch of tricks for doing integration and differentiation. A few years later when I first start working through Spivak's excellent book on Calculus, It was one of the hardest things I had ever done but the sheer magnificent beauty of the structure on which most of modern calculus is built on and how it gradually evolved comes to light. It is really both a journey in history and time and building mental models that reoccur through so many branches of mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER28> There is an interesting question. Does the advice "read the masters" also applies to teaching?

My teacher at university pointed me to Moore's method named by great american mathematician Robert Lee Moore. Moore selected students without previous knowledge of the subject and let them "invent" the subject - definition, theorems, proofs.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore#Unusual_teache...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore#Unusual_teacher)

So great teachers do not "teach masters" but rather teach to "think like masters". If you know how to think, "reading the master" feels more like a dialogue.

</comment><comment><USER29> The list of the article reminds me of this post [http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what- papers...](http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers- should-everyone-read)

</comment><comment><USER30> Be cautious when reading the "classics" of fields such as physics or philosophy (unless you are interested in the history of the field). Socrates was wrong about a few things and so was Einstein.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is just a nitpick, but why is SRP (Wu) in your list? Looks a bit out of place there.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very good question!

Although SRP may not be timeless, or even seminal (though I doubt this last statement), I found this paper to be beautifully written. Its concepts are very very clear. Above all, the paper seems to be so alive and enjoyable.

For these reasons, besides the practicality of SRP, I suspect that this paper may well turn out to be a classic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Three of the links are broke, here are the working versions for those.

[http://cm.bell- labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...](http://cm.bell- labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf)

<http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf>

<http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for noticing this! I've just corrected the links.

<comment><USER33> thanks! for this post...really a nice insight.</comment></comment></comment>


Raspberry PI 3: gets a 64bit CPU - <AUTHOR> http://m.imgur.com/exuZy58?r <comment><USER2> I thought the 64bit ARMs were usually "ARMv8", not "ARM 7"? In fact, doesn't "ARM 7" mean a series of ARMv3 and ARMv4 CPUs? (The pi1 and pi2 had ARMv6 and ARMv7 cores I believe)

There's a huge difference between "ARM 7" and "ARMv7". Even if it's a typo (missing "v"), it's odd it's not v8?

<comment><USER3> Indeed a typo, it's ARMv7 and it's indeed 64 bits according to Farnell: [http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/2020826.pdf](http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/2020826.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Strangely enough, this PDF appears to be a completely empty document. All I get is a blank, 1/1 page. Have to regard it as, well, not informative...

(Let's hope whatever the error, it gets fixed.)

<comment><USER5> I've never heard of a 64-bit armv7. So I decided to look it up. Looks like this Reddit thread already said a lot of these things, i.e. armv7 is 32-bit, the document is blank, one of these things (armv7 or 64-bit) is an error:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/47zqzz/raspbe...](https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/47zqzz/raspberry_pi_3_technical_specifications_sheet/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Arm7 is a 32-bit architecture: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM7)</comment>


It's almost 2017, and HTML5 audio is still broken on iOS - <AUTHOR> http://debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com/2016/12/13/its-almost-2017-and-html5-audio-is-still-broken-on-ios/ <comment><USER2> Build a native app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, that's what Apple wants me to do. And Google. And Microsoft and Blackberry and...

I don't _want_ to build multiple versions of my app for different platforms. The web is open, free, not in a walled garden. And it won't go away when a company or product disappears.

"Build a native app" was the answer in 1998 when the web was new and Windows dominated. That answer was wrong then, and it's still wrong now.</comment></comment>


Time tracking with promodoro technique - <AUTHOR> https://pomodoro.cc/ <comment><AUTHOR> leverages the concepts of the Pomodoro Technique to help you to keep your focus with mind-refreshing breaks.</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on REST API for managing DNS - <AUTHOR>

I am working on a DNS service that can be managed with a simple REST API.  I am looking to get feedback on the API.  So if you would, please take a look at the API documentation and share your thoughts.  Any sort of feedback is welcome.
REST API documentation is at http://wiki.burningbay.com/dns/rest-api
I am currently doing a private beta of the service with a few friends, with the plan to do a public beta in the near future.  If anyone would like to use the service before the public beta, please e-mail me.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> The api looks cool. I'd like to test it out before the beta if you need more people.

I have a question though. You've already described the exact format for all of the record types. So why not implement record creation with PUT and have the sender put the JSON for the record in the request body? You want idempotency for record creation so why not use the idempotent HTTP verb?

<comment><AUTHOR> If I understand your comment correctly, I believe the API already works this way, except instead of using PUT, it uses POST for creating new records and zones. To create a record, a client would do a POST with the record to create in JSON as the request body.

Is there some reason to use PUT over POST in this case? By my understanding, POST is typically used to create new resources and PUT is used to updated existing resources.

Also, I can see now that the doc is pretty unclear on how the API expects data to be sent in a request's body. I'll be sure to fix that!

Thank you for your comment and yes I'm in need of more beta testers! Please e-mail me. My e-mail address can be found under my HN account.

<comment><USER2> Well yes technically the API does "work." The problem is that most people are coming from rails land (which is also where I'm from, btw) and over there, they have implemented "REST" as POST=create and PUT=update. This doesn't even really make sense in rails actually.

For a proper PUT request you have to specify the full body of the resource to be "put." It literally is supposed to be telling the server, "hey, put this thing I'm giving you at this url." For that to work you have to actually be delivering the thing, and in rails with PUT you are just submitting form data, which is a set of paramater name/value pairs (this is also what's going on with POST but in that case it's ok). This mistake derives mostly from the fact that rails works off of forms, and form data is always passed in parameter pairs, so you are never passing a full resource to the server. I'm still not sure why they don't just do create and update with POST though.

Anyway yes, your API will work fine. You can define it any way you want, and you don't even have to stick to the original intention of the HTTP verbs. It's just that to me, create should be idempotent in the case of creating zones and records, so why not use the idempotent http verb?

I highly recommend this: [http://jcalcote.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/put-or- post-the-res...](http://jcalcote.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/put-or-post-the- rest-of-the-story/) and this: [http://www.elharo.com/blog/software- development/web-developm...](http://www.elharo.com/blog/software- development/web-development/2005/12/08/post-vs-put/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A link that you can click on...

<http://wiki.burningbay.com/dns/rest-api></comment>


How Parents Harnessed the Power of Social Media to Challenge EpiPen Prices - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/how-parents-harnessed-the-power-of-social-media-to-challenge-epipen-prices/ <comment><USER3> The funny thing is that Epipens have been really expensive for a while. Sure they took a 15% price increase over the past year. The price has been over $400 for a two pack for a while.

The reason why this has come to a head is high deductible health plans. This is where you pay the first $1000-$6000 in medical costs before insurance kicks in. When all it was was a $30 copay, consumers didn't give a shit.

So maybe, just maybe, pushing more medical costs to patients will actually create the pressure needed to reduce medical costs? Interesting thought.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that most doctors don't take treatment costs into account when writing prescriptions. They may not even know the cost themselves. And patients can't really be expected to keep up with the prescription drug industry enough to request cheaper alternatives.

There are competitors to the Epipen but they don't get prescribed as much. I would surmise that has something to do with marketing budgets. Maybe we should join the rest of the world and ban drug advertisements? Oh, and allow Medicare to negotiate a bulk rate for drugs rather than pay MSRP[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Part_D#Criticisms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Part_D#Criticisms)

<comment><USER5> > They may not even know the cost themselves. And patients can't really be > expected to keep up with the prescription drug industry enough to request > cheaper alternatives.

In Australia we solved this by requiring pharmacies to offer generic alternatives.

<comment><USER6> And in Norway, and I think the UK, and probably lots of other places.

<comment><USER7> Including the US. Unless your doctor names a specific brand and includes the phrase "dispense as written" on the prescription slip, you'll almost certainly get a generic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mylan didn't reduce the retail price. They're giving out coupons and offering deals for poor people. Insurance companies and schools are still paying full price.

A comparable device, the Emerade Auto-Injector, made by Bausch and Lomb / Valeant, sells for £26.94 in the UK.[1][2] The UK, of course, has socialized medicine.

The company behind Emerade is more into cutting deals with other pharmaceutical companies than bringing prices down.[3] "Valeant's strategy is to focus on the business of core geographies and therapeutic classes, manage pipeline assets through strategic partnerships with other pharmaceutical companies and deploy cash with an appropriate mix of selective acquisitions, share buybacks and debt repurchases. Our leveraged research and development model is one key element to this business strategy and will allow us to advance development programs to drive future commercial growth, while minimizing research and development expense."

[1] [http://www.emerade.com/](http://www.emerade.com/)

[2] [https://www.psuk.co.uk/everyday-items-disposables/dental- ins...](https://www.psuk.co.uk/everyday-items-disposables/dental-instruments- disposables/emerade-auto-injector)

[3] [http://ir.valeant.com/~/media/Files/V/Valeant- IR/documents/v...](http://ir.valeant.com/~/media/Files/V/Valeant- IR/documents/valeant-102315.pdf)

<comment><USER9> has nothing to do with socialized medicine. You can buy anything on amazon, where fierce competition keeps prices low. Try comparing prices for medical devices or hospital prices. The healthcare "market place" is completely disfunct and government ("social") is a key monopolizer.

<comment><USER10> The government is better able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies because of its size, which is part of why medicare pays them less than even private insurance companies do. Individuals, in comparison, often don't have time to do research or compare prices when they have an emergency, so the healthcare industry takes advantage of that weakness.

<comment><USER8> No, Medicare is specifically prohibited by law from negotiating drug prices. They can and do negotiate prices with hospitals and doctors, but not drug companies.

<comment><USER11> I've looked but can't find the rationale behind that law. I know the real reason was to keep drug prices high but how was this sold to the American people?

<comment><USER12> Just the usual story of corrupt congressmen and a Republican in the White House: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Part_D#Criticisms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Part_D#Criticisms)

<comment><USER11> The doesn't really answer my question and from what I can tell the measure was rather bipartisan.

<comment><USER13> The fear is the "bargaining power" that will be used is "give it to us or we invalidate your patent." And the fear is valid, because that's how most other countries' governments negotiate.

<comment><USER11> Thank you, that was what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What a heartwarming story that completely distracts the public from the real political scandal behind EpiPen.

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-epipen-ceo- bresch-...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-epipen-ceo-bresch- salary-20160824-story.html) [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/business/mylan- epipen-sena...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/business/mylan-epipen- senate-manchin.html)

<comment><USER15> That video on the NYTimes page you linked is a PR disaster for her... She did an awful job at trying to defend a poor idea. On top of that, she kept quoting statistics that make it seem like the EpiPen is more needed.... More needed, but the price is staying the same! Logic is confusing there.... To go with that, her posture/hand motion is just awkward....

This is terrible.

<comment><USER16> She pointed out most money spent on EpiPen has been going to getting laws on the books (in 48 states!) to allow non-designated EpiPens to be available in schools and other public places.

Wouldn't there be other good ways to ensure everyone has access? Eliminate the need for a prescription for instance? How does one go about doing that?

<comment><USER17> She doesn't say that most money has been going to the laws. She says they have expended resources on lobbying for those laws without specifying how much.

The CNN video that plays at this links says their margins were 9% in 2007 when the bought the drug and 55% in 2014.

[http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/25/investing/epipen-cost-ceo- lo...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/25/investing/epipen-cost-ceo-lowers-price- mylan/)

Any business with 55% margin is a nice business to be in.

It's also kind of scandalous that they've designed a method to reach around the insurance companies. I don't think drug companies should be allowed to offer consumers rebates that make them more likely to utilize their insurance. When they start from a high price, it's an accounting trick that doesn't cost the company anything. If a company so strongly believes they've miss-priced their product, they can simply reduce the price.

<comment><USER16> True statement - she doesn't say most. However, she stresses how most of their effort is going towards laws. There was a mention of some slight improvement to the injector, but the formulation certainly has not changed.

Going around the insurance companies is pretty insane, especially because there are multiple types of customers: individuals, schools, hospitals, etc. Should an individual get money back, but not a school? It's not like public schools have a bunch of cash lying around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Some of the most prominent groups — Food Allergy Research & Education > (FARE); the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA); and Allergy & > Asthma Network — all have partnerships with Mylan for patient awareness > campaigns and other programming. The groups aren't required to disclose how > much money they receive from the drug company, but Mylan, in its 2015 Social > Responsibility report, lists all three groups as "allies."

What Mylan learned here is that they didn't have enough social media presence. I bet their had a meeting and didn't say "Yap we have been assholes about this, let's roll back prices and appologize" but rather "People feel we are assholes. Who is responible for our social media and marketing? Action item 1) need to allocate more funds and hire a better PR company".

</comment><comment> Const-me What I don't understand in this story, who and how limited the competition?

The product costs a few bucks to produce, retails for $600, and not covered by patents: epinephrine discovered in 1901, the autoinjector is derived from military model likely in public domain.

How comes no one in the whole US wants to earn billions manufacturing a similar product and selling it for $50?

<comment><USER19> There was competitor (Sanofi) but they had a product recall, because it wasn't delivering the right dosage.

What people don't seem to understand is - healthcare products are no laughing matter (literally). This isn't like software, where you can release early, release often, and where alpha quality is tolerated (to a degree).

For whatever reason, Mylan have done the FDA testing, and perfected a product that works reliably. That is expensive. (I suspect profit factored into it somewhere).

There's nothing stopping somebody for designing a different device (like Sanofi) did that does the same job - the devil is in the detail, and making sure you don't f_ck up.

Because believe me - the moment you screw up, and deliver the wrong dosage to some kid in anaphylatic shock, and he/she dies...your company is history (or facing a very costly recall and/or potential lawsuit).

My daughter recently had a health-scare. That moment, when I looked at her, and honestly thought she wasn't going to make it, was heart-wrenching. So I can tell you, as a parent, if my daughter was allergic to something, and the Epipen was $600, and I needed one around - sure, I'd be bummed about the money, but no, I wouldn't not pay it. And if you told me, these are the only guys so far who have made sure it's reliable, or you can get these cheap 3D printed copy that _might_ work 85% of the time, or she might die but it's only $100 and realy, what's 15%?? What do you think I'm going to go for?

If this was like, say, something else that wasn't literally life-saving, then sure, people's risk appetites would probably change dramatically.

<comment><USER20> As a paramedic: So the issue isn't the epi itself (which is just adrenaline). In fact EMS agencies around the country are moving away from the EpiPen (in my state, all ambulance and fire units are required to carry the pen itself) to drawing up from ampoules. In my relatively small county, Medic One throws away $100,000/yr of EpiPens, because they have a short shelf life.

"Wrong dosage", though? Dosing epi isn't a particularly exact science - <USER2> adult pen is 0.3mL, the junior 0.15mL. Quite often we will have to use multiple pens on the one patient.

Underdose is entirely common - especially in civilian-administered situations. Overdose is typically restricted to acute hypertension and associated symptoms which can largely be managed by EMS (who should be enroute anyway for any admin of epi, for reasons not least of which include that 'need for additional dose').

<comment><USER19> Aha, fair enough - I just interpreted what I saw on Sanofi's homepage for the recall:

[https://www.auvi-q.com/](https://www.auvi-q.com/)

> Sanofi US Issues Voluntary Nationwide Recall of All Auvi‑Q® Due to Potential > Inaccurate Dosage Delivery > ... > If a patient experiencing a serious > allergic reaction (i.e., anaphylaxis) did not receive the intended dose, > there could be significant health consequences, including death because > anaphylaxis is a potentially life‑threatening condition. As of October 26, > 2015, Sanofi has received 26 reports of suspected device malfunctions in the > US and Canada.

Or is it something that somebody like an EMS would probably not get wrong, but say, a non-medically trained panicked parent could?

I've heard the shelf-life complaints about Epipens.

For me, I figured it was pretty idiot proof, even for an untrained person in panick mode - take it out, stab it in leg, and that's it, as opposed to trying to drain an ampoule into a syringe. Fortunately, I've never had to face that bad situation....

<comment><USER20> Certainly it's worth clarifying that saying that many people need more than one dose doesn't mean that Auvi-Q shouldn't have to "guarantee" that their device delivers the dose that it is intended to.

There are some things that can be done to improve the effectiveness of EpiPen/equivalent administration - while the product is designed to be able to be used through clothing, it is better to be removed where possible. Due to the dosage size, post injection site massage is recommended for better uptake from the muscles.

When to administer is also another question - arguably by the time the patient is in significant respiratory distress, it should have been administered earlier. This can be a balancing act between a 'sensitivity' and anaphylaxis. Realistically, as soon as there is a deterioration into multi-system response, Epi should be administered.

Certainly, other than cost there's no real motivator for the lay person to need to be trained to draw up epi into a syringe. But in terms of ambulances / medic units who stock epi (typically used in cardiac arrest), the requirement to stock EpiPens is an unneeded redundancy, and an expensive one at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pro tip for anyone in the northern tier of the US: drive north to Canada where the same EpiPen product is sold over the counter for around 120 $CAD. And there is no rule that you must buy two at a time.

Source: my son has a severe peanut allergy and I have successfully purchased EpiPens for him at the Lethbridge AB Costco.

<comment><USER22> Wonder what happens if you post them to someone?

<comment><USER11> I may be able to answer this. Here in the US my asthma meds (two 100+ year old drugs again like epinephrine) are $75 a month each (I take 2 types so $150) with my insurance. I buy the same medicine for $20 - 25 from India (without a prescription). From what I can tell, nobody cares that I do this as I have received shipments every 3 months for the past 5 years or so. This results in me not having to take off work to go to the doctor every six months so he can say "So you still have asthma huh?" and write a script (costing me $50) as well. I just recently signed up for my company's cheapest insurance option due to this as the more expensive options simply were not providing value. Saving in total a little over $425 a month or the price of my car a year.

In short: Ship 'em.

<comment><USER22> It looks like you can buy the pens in New Zealand and ship them to the US for about US$100, maybe a little less if you ship several at a time. Not great pricing but better than US pricing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Only in the most extreme edge cases can anything be done about the fact the the drug companies control the government which allows them overall to do just about anything they want.

This is one edge case but the overall picture is that drug companies own the government and ensure legislation is in place to give them astounding amounts of government and consumer cash.

It's a silent coup.

<comment><USER24> I hope people think about this sort of thing when voting this fall. I'm surprised at how many people will agree that neither Hillary nor Trump are desirable candidates but will also refuse to consider Gary Johnson.

This year's election seems like a perfect time to re-think unflinching support for the two main parties in the US.

<comment><USER25> This would be great if it functioned like any other healthy democracy and coalitions formed, but unfortunately there is a concerted effort to ensure there are only two tents for people to get under.

<comment><USER26> First past the post is a contributor to a two party system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The EpiPen thing is a really great example of two facts:

(1) It's better to be in a business where you don't (literally) save lives, because nobody complains about how much money the Pokemon game makes.

(2) People won't actually take a lot of risk to market and develop life-saving products without a financial incentive.

Epinephrine is not patented. The only thing stopping a competitor from entering the market is coming up with a delivery mechanism for the drug that's as reliable as Mylan's. Apparently that has proven difficult. Sanofi used to make a competing device, until it was forced to do a mass recall because the device couldn't deliver an accurate dosage.

The difficulty of getting it right is compounded by the fact that a device that delivers epinephrine to children in anaphylactic shock is just about the highest-risk product you can make from a potential liability point of view. There is no market for a "slightly less good but much cheaper" product.

<comment><USER16> Here's a company getting it right but stuck waiting for approval: [http://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/compact-epipen- alternativ...](http://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/compact-epipen-alternative- fits-in-your-wallet-0001)

Of course, we want strong requirements on life saving devices. Just a bummer it takes such an awfully long time.

Anyone know the longest pole schedule item in getting a new drug/treatment to market?

<comment><USER27> That article says they didn't even submit an application until this summer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The government should just use 'eminent domain' and seize the rights to it. A few such cases would be enough to scare the rest of the industry to fall in line.

<comment><USER29> Eminent Domain is for securing land, not seizing property. Even so, the federal government has to pay a fair market price whenever eminent domain is used, which in this case would be a very large number that taxpayers wouldn't be happy to pay, because what comes after that? Does the government start a manufacturing business? The patents are already expired, so there isn't very much to seize.

<comment><USER30> Actually, its very easy. Government makes a list of life saving drugs. Then sets a maximum price on the drugs in the list. If a monopoly refuses to comply, the government calls for yearly bids from companies around the world (including generic drug makers from India). These companies fill the supply gap and in the meantime capitalism works and a local company steps in. There is no rocket science in manufacturing these drugs and pens - trivial once you have the recipe.

And countries, which put people before corporations, actually do this.

<comment><USER31> Setting a maximum price does not allow the government to take the patent away. The companies could simply refuse to comply, and the government would either effectively ban the drug or be forced to buy the patent/license at a fair market price.

<comment><USER32> All they have to do is write the law that says they can.

<comment><USER31> There is a Supreme Court decision that says confiscation of a patent is a constitutional taking, so they would actually have to change the constitution.

<comment><USER13> Curse the law of law!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder how long it will be before our infrastructure really starts to go south before people will wake up to what this country is becoming? I think a few bridges need to collapse before people get the idea that this is about "pump and dump" now, not investment in the future.

</comment><comment><USER34> How do people think drugs get made? Takes a lot of effort, time, energy to get a drug made and FDA approved. Shouldn't there be some incentive to accomplish this task? Wouldn't there be an overall decrease in drug innovation if there was no money in it?

<comment><USER35> In the case of the EpiPen, the FDA approval process is _long_ over (as in, decades ago). The price has increased several times over in the past decade, despite no increase in the production cost (it's $0.50 worth of epi and a couple bucks worth of plastic).</comment></comment>


TLS handshake that crashes Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2014/03/04/8

<comment><USER2> Patch review: [https://codereview.chromium.org/178003011/](https://codereview.chromium.org/178003011/)</comment>


Solutions to some problems from cracking the code interview ( C language) - <AUTHOR> Uploaded code solutions for some problems of the book in https://github.com/dariogithub1/cracking-the-code-interview-solutions , I would like to know your rating and potential improvement of the code I wrote.<p>Any suggestion or advice is welcome, thanks for your time. <comment><USER2> You might want to try the subreddit r/codereview or [https://codereview.stackexchange.com/](https://codereview.stackexchange.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I will do a try. Thanks for your feedback</comment></comment>


Funambol To Offer An Open-Source Competitor To MobileMe . . . As An iPhone App - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/10/funambol-to-offer-an-open-source-competitor-to-mobileme-as-an-iphone-app/ <comment><USER2> I've used Funambol for some time on WinMo. I'm not quite sure how it would work on the iPhone without being able to run as a background process. Anyone know?</comment>


Who Killed Prolog? - <AUTHOR> http://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/who-killed-prolog/

<comment><USER2> Article assumes technology is adopted top-down, from the powers that be. While that was true at the time of mainframes, for a while now, technology is often adopted bottom-up, particularly in startups that are free to use the most effective tool for the job; and in non-mission critical systems within the enterprise. For example, this is often how open source was adopted.

The picture is complicated by libraries and tool-chains that can make an established language (c, java, python) a better choice by giving an enormous (e.g. x1000) boost to productivity, obscuring the intrinsic merits of the language itself. (Although, languages that facilitate library and tool _use_ will promote creation of their ecosystems).

"Logic programming is a cool idea, but not that useful for most things" would be a better explanation for why it's not popular _today_. It strikes me as a rather narrow and dogmatic AI technique; and one that you're better off reimplementing on demand (Greenspun-style), or using in a library.

<comment><USER3> "Logic programming is a cool idea, but not that useful for most things"

Except that many regard Prolog as a precursor that little used language SQL.

<comment><USER4> Sql is slightly older than Prolog. They may have come from similar roots. And sql is used as an embedded subset not a whole systems programming language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few followups:

A elaboration from van Emden, which describes part of the problem as Prolog being pushed by Lispers who had only recently become enamored with Prolog: <http://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/the-fatal-choice/>

A different take that blames "technological and cognitive issues" at least in part, especially debugging: <http://synthese.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/prologs- death/>

A different take that blames competition from more specialized declarative- programming languages: <http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html>

<comment><USER2> Nice point on competition (the last one), that SQL (and even LINQ!) replaced some aspects of prolog. I would guess that mathematica/matlab/R also have...? BTW In academia, a related competing paradigm is <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_logic_programming>.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I'd say some use of constraint-programming in lp is now nearly standard, though sometimes in a better-integrated way than other times. Nearly every Prolog system now has both clp(fd) and CHR built in, for example, but they don't always interact with Prolog derivations in an ideal way ( _especially_ not with Prolog negation-as-failure).

Answer-set programming has constraint stuff more as a core feature. A common paradigm in asp is to mix "normal" lp type rules, where you specify how to derive exactly the correct solutions, with a generate-and-test style where you over-generate (with choice rules) and then filter with constraints (called integrity constraints in asp), which is sometimes easier to specify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My explanation at LtU, in response to a question from Ehud Lamm:

        I think that Prolog has lasting interest as a teaching language, and is one of
        the handful of PLs that everyone with a broad interest in programming should
        learn, but that the limitations of its basic computational mechanism make it
        uncompetitive as a general PL. I find that Haskell, through the list of
        successes paradigm, is usually a better language for writing the kind of
        programs Prolog is good at than Prolog.

        I think the LP community should be seriously looking for a successor. There's
        no shortage of candidates.

\- <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2803#comment-41684>

As I said in that thread, I think the LP community is in denial about the unsuitability of Prolog as a general-purpose programming language; this article echoes the Lispers claim that Prolog was killed by its association to over-ambitious AI projects: I think the argument in the case of Prolog is much weaker than in the case of Lisp.

<comment><USER5> I don't think most of the LP community still promotes Prolog, although it's hard to delineate exactly what the LP community is. Going by papers presented at AAAI and IJCAI, the bulk of the research is on answer-set programming (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_set_programming>), which tends to be used as a more specialized solver rather than as the top-level loop of a program. In other corners of the world, multiparadigm logic/functional languages like Mercury seem to be what people are hanging their hats on.

<comment><USER6> That's a good example. I've always thought of ASP being more influenced by SAT solvers than Prolog, but following the links from the WP article, there's a lot of Prolog culture there: Horn clauses, Herbrand interpretations, &c. So maybe LP is moving on. I should take a closer look. (I probably should have years ago: I've done a fair bit of refereeing for IJCAI over the years).

Multi-paradigm languages are not so great for the Kowalski-esque LP world, because the elements of these languages don't fit in the Kowalski/Pierce picture of knowledge representation and reasoning. Something like lambda- Prolog, which uses higher-order unification to model functional programming within a clausal language, seems to me to be a much better, more conservative step for this community.

<comment><USER5> I think ASP's a bit of a merger of the two cultures. The implementations are heavily SAT-influenced, with all existing ones based on eliminating variables to ground to a finite program that's then solved. But its semantics (stable- model semantics) originated in the early-90s flurry of attempts to come up with a solid logical semantics for LP (alongside other attempts like the well- founded semantics), to replace Prolog's operationally defined "whatever SLDNF resolution returns" semantics, and especially its displeasing-to-logicians property of the semantics depending on statement order. And the most widely used surface syntax, sometimes called "AnsProlog", is an adaptation of Prolog syntax.

This research group in particular is now pushing it heavily in the programmability/expressivity direction, which is pretty interesting: <http://potassco.sourceforge.net/> . There is even some other research floating around on more software-engineeringish things like ASP debugging techniques.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a dupe. Original -> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648711>

<comment><USER8> There are some really good comments and links there, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the article:

"Fast forward to 1992. The world looks very different. In 1990 the Nikkei Index, which had risen strongly for an unprecedentedly long period, from the beginning of the FGCS project, was about to breach 40,000. But instead of continuing its rise, it started a decline and was down to half the peak value by 1992. Most of the Toyotas and Hondas driving around in the US were mostly made in the US. If MITI was mentioned at all, it was in studies revealing that MITI had never sponsored a successful project; that industry, far from being helped by MITI, had been hindered by its meddling."

From Wikipedia: "The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (通商産業省 Tsūshō-sangyō-shō or MITI) was one of the most powerful agencies of the Government of Japan." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_International_Trade...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_International_Trade_and_Industry)

</comment><comment><USER10> The recent comments by Eric Schmidt about school level CS education in the UK (even though there is no UK-wide educational system) made me look at what my 12 year old son might be studying in a few years.

Interestingly enough it appears that Prolog is alive and well and in Scottish schools - for example see this exam past paper:

[http://www.sqa.org.uk/pastpapers/papers/papers/2010/AH_Compu...](http://www.sqa.org.uk/pastpapers/papers/papers/2010/AH_Computing_all_2010.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Prolog is great for teaching: I don't many disagree with this, and I don't that this is what's at stake in <i>Prolog has been killed</i>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> ?- "Who Killed Prolog?"

yes

</comment><comment><USER12> My experience with Prolog was that of a very arrogant CS student which got __very __confused by the non-procedural way of prolog and the (for me) weird syntax.

So it's probably the root cause for me that we've not got an proper introduction to non-procedural languages. What left is a horrid experience of trying to solve backtracking problems with prolog.

For my personal universe, prolog got killed by my education.

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=PROLOG%2CLISP%2CF...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=PROLOG%2CLISP%2CFORTRAN%2CCOBOL%2CJAVA%2CC%2B%2B&year_start=1940&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

poorly formed google ngram query is poorly formed.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's not dead yet - it was used for NLP in Watson.

</comment><comment><USER15> yes</comment>


What Environment do you use for Javascript dev? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I'm a C coder, occasionally I use Java so for most of my development I use VIM or eclipse.
Now I'm trying to build some web application: javascript applications (looking also into phonegap). I'm having a hard time finding a good dev environment. So far I'm using firefox + firebug and Xcode for editing.
I'm new to web dev, so I'm afraid I'm missing something. Is there a very powerful IDE ? So I don't have to open my things in firefox and hope they work ?
Thanks ! <comment><USER2> Sublime Text 2 is the best IDE for everything. For some useful plugins for web development take a look here: [http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and- tips/essential-s...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and- tips/essential-sublime-text-2-plugins-and-extensions/)</comment>


British pupils taught by Chinese outpace their peers in experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/expateducation/11811235/Take-note-Chinese-teachers-a-little-classroom-chaos-can-be-a-good-thing.html

<comment><USER2> I'm all for better education - but this compulsion for everyone to excel is a problem. Not everyone wants to excel academically - and they shouldn't need to. I think the problem is that we have set up an economic system with winners & losers - and where the cost of losing is high. In the USA the top 1% has about 90% of the wealth - and those who don't win can face real poverty and real hardship. Really, we live in an era when everyone can have a good life - if we can fix our economic system.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's funny how they gravitate to things people will hate for why it worked (extreme hours)

Where as we know things like rote learning, large classes and not wasting time on critically thinking work from experimental results.

But somehow these became not PC.

Critical thinking is fun and there's no reason school can't also be fun. All of ones life should be fun, not just the adult years.

But because people have been brainwashed into thinking these things are 'better' the whole system has suffered rather than a healthy middle ground.

<comment><AUTHOR> Studying hard and mastering a subject can be fun too, though the fun only comes after hard work. Too often this message is lost in today's schools.</comment></comment>


Today's $100M+ Late-Stage Rounds Very Different from IPOs - <AUTHOR> http://abovethecrowd.com/2015/02/25/investors-beware/

<comment><USER2> As a counterpoint, the two companies most commonly criticized for having a shoddy business model; Groupon and Zynga, both managed to go public before their valuation imploded. The IPO process did very little to burst their hype bubble.

<comment><USER3> ZYNG is holding one hand on a life raft in a hurricane. Their bubble burst as soon as the market realized they were over hyped on Feb 27 2012.

They are the prime example of a company that can do fine in a private market but is getting murdered in a public market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I suspect a problem with late stage investing is that some of it is marketing for the investment funds. You make a late stage investment in Uber at $40+ billion valuation so that you can tell people you invested in Uber. People who aren't paying much attention assume you are very savy, making a 10-100x return, when you may only be making 1-2x at best.

People assume institutional investors are "smart" so they won't fall for things like this. In some ways they are smart because they tend to be systematic (less emotional than individuals), but in other ways they follow the herd. They need to be involved in whatever is hot.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find it hard to believe that any late stage investor doesn't realize the difference between net and gross for marketplaces.

Obviously startup founders talk about gross because it's the bigger figure, but even early stage investors ask what cut the marketplace is going to take.

I'm not really sure who the article is aimed at, I would have though that most non-VC late stage rounds are done by the like of investment banks or private equity firms who have a reasonable idea of what they're doing.

<comment><USER6> Hmmm. A lot of late stage stuff is being done by sophisticated investors, but ones who are sophisticated about _other asset classes_. Very often large public equity investors are lining up at the pre ipo round thinking they can get some alpha. Think names you associate with mutual funds and retirement accounts.

The other ill matched category that is getting a lot of exposure at these rounds is the private wealth groups of large ibanks. They get an allocation in the pre ipo round and farm it out to private wealth clients, because 1. PWM clients are all accredited investors so they can do it as a reg D exemption, and 2. The PWM clients feel special and like they are getting insider access from their PWM. I'm not super clear on why the companies take the PWM money, although I suspect that in fact it is a shrewd form of pre-marketing the IPO by getting private wealth clients to go bragging to their friends about the hot pre ipo deal so the friends want to buy it when it goes out.

Even private equity firms who would seem well matched to the size and structure of deal, often IMO come with mismatched expectations. The PE guys love complicated terms, dividends, fees, promotes, and all manner of East Coast legal wrangling which is often quite out of place in a relatively "clean" West Coast tech deal.

Disclaimer: am a West Coast tech venture investor</comment></comment>


What do you think about a NLP for spanish language blog? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software engineer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. We use spanish as our primary language and I've been working on several applications with the help of different NLP features.<p>I've been thinking about launching a blog with practical examples and code that I use and I'd like to know if you think it'll be interesting to write an english version. To make myself clear, I'm talking about building a NLP for spanish blog written in English, so the question is, for the people here on HN who are on this industry, are you interested on applying NLP for the spanish language or are you mainly interested in the english branch? <comment><USER2> [Hi from Argentina too!]

I think it will be interesting, in particular if you discuss the additional problems that appear in Spanish. For example: non ascii characters, declination of adjectives by gender, more declination of verbs, ??? These problems may appear in other languages as German, French, ... so the material may be interesting for anyone trying to do a localized version of a tool in other languages.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd definitely be interested in reading about how NLP for Spanish compares to NLP for English, particularly since I don't speak Spanish :)</comment>


Debugging with node-inspector - nodeknockout - <AUTHOR> http://nodeknockout.posterous.com/countdown-to-knockout-post-4-debugging-with-n <comment><USER2> Nice. On the first sight it just looked like Chrome's JavaScript debugger, but it is a full featured (remote) debugger using Chrome/webkit as a front-end. Really nice.</comment>


Versity open-sources ScoutFS - <AUTHOR> http://www.versity.com/blog/versity-open-sources-scoutfs <comment><USER2> "The super block is stored in two 4KB blocks at a known location at the start of the device."

There should be more than 2 slots for the super block, e.g. at least 64 slots for the super block, to allow for better wear-leveling for SSDs. AFAIK this has been a problem for some filesystems, which wear out the device due to the high frequency of super block updates.

The latest super block should also be replicated 2-4 times on disk to survive corruption. Otherwise, the loss of a mere two contiguous disk sectors could result in loss of the entire disk.

A super block of 4KB also looks like they might be relying too much on the device to guarantee atomic sector writes (this is almost always the case, but not necessarily), instead of using a cryptographic signature to verify that the super block was written atomically. Also, 4KB seems small these days for a super block, especially if the super block needs to include replicated information relating to RAID sibling devices etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> If anyone from Versity is reading this, there is a typo in the release:

"We are __releaing __the technology under the GPLv2 open source license."

<comment> meghan-versity Doh! Thanks for letting us know, will get that fixed. Of course, patches/contributions are always welcome.... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the difference of archival filesystem vs. distributed filesystem? I assume other distributed filesystems could be used to archive files as well, namely [https://github.com/moosefs/moosefs](https://github.com/moosefs/moosefs)

<comment><USER5> The focus here seems to be on _very_ high scale, not just capacity but also number of files and scan performance which would be important for an archival store and which are often pain points for other distributed filesystems. Similarly, ensuring data integrity is a high priority for such a system. I certainly wouldn't compare it to a single-metadata-server pseudo-distributed filesystem that doesn't even honor O_SYNC writes.

<comment> meghan-versity Couldn't have said it better myself! For more details on requirements as we designed the filesystem and why current filesystems didn't meet our needs, see this blog post: [http://www.versity.com/blog/versity-open-sources- scoutfs](http://www.versity.com/blog/versity-open-sources-scoutfs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I didn't see in the white paper, is whether the contents of each file are checksummed?

It seems only the metadata is checksummed.

I have used ZFS and the ability to run a check on the entire set of metadata and actual files is very reassuring (though it is definitely time consuming).

<comment> meghan-versity Both metadata and data are checksummed. A unique feature of the filesystem is that it doesn't trust what the storage tells it, it actually verifies it. Thanks for pointing this out - we'll get these details in the next version of the paper.

<comment><USER6> That is great to hear and I look forward to reading more about it, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks interesting, and apparently it's _really_ a filesystem unlike so many thing that just slap "FS" on the name and call it a day. _tears of joy_ White paper etc. is a bit low on details, though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Linux mainline soon?

<comment> meghan-versity Definitely.</comment></comment>


A Bot Panic Hits Amazon Mechanical Turk - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-mechanical-turk-bot-panic <comment><AUTHOR> The blog post mentioned in the article - [https://www.maxhuibai.com/blog/evidence-that-responses- from-...](https://www.maxhuibai.com/blog/evidence-that-responses-from- repeating-gps-are-random)

In the past day or two, I discovered that a large number of responses in my latest Mturk survey appear to be random responses. I detect that a large portion of these random responses have repeating GPS locations. So far, a relatively large number of social psychological researchers also seem to have noticed a drop of data quality in their Mturk data and detected concerning patterns using the GPS method (see the related discussion threads on Facebook PsychMAP).

</comment><comment><USER2> I find this article interesting because I did not know that MTurk was used by psychologist to survey people. The only usage I had heard of was data labeling for machine learning. This surveying usage seems very strange because I expect the data to be very biased: the (human) respondents will be located in places where the average salary is close to what is paid by MTurk, will be abe to use a computer, etc...

<comment><USER3> If you're interested, there is more on that (linked from the article) here:

[http://journal.sjdm.org/10/10630a/jdm10630a.html](http://journal.sjdm.org/10/10630a/jdm10630a.html)

Effectively, without the bots, the paper contends that the Turkers are at least as representative a sample as undergraduate students.

<comment><USER4> One thing that the paper does not address is MTurkers becoming professional survey takers who recognize typical psychology surveys thus skewing the responses.

Personal anecdata: I took many MTurk surveys for about a month in 2012. It is mind crushing work.

There were countless near identical surveys presumably by psychology undergrads.

Pretty much anything in Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow was there.

Very quickly you recognize the typical priming experiment and then is your response any valid?

If you know the idea behind the baseball bat and ball pricing question then is your correct answer made in a split second helping?

Most survey givers wanted MTurkers with high ratings.

If you think about it, those MTurkers with high rating would have likely seen all those survey questions already.

Thus experienced MTurkers would really distort the answers compared to a random sample of undergraduates.

Maybe you can compensate for that somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't it ironic that a service named after a person pretending to be a machine may be subverted by machines pretending to be people?</comment>


8 tips for "scaling" CSS development - <AUTHOR> http://blog.roninapp.com/2008/09/22/8-tips-for-scaling-css-development/ Techniques for scaling CSS development to multiple developers just like you would any major component of your code-base. <comment><USER2> The IE hack recommendation is great advice. I won't use conditional comments, it's much easier to maintain a few IE hacks in the main stylesheet.

I've never been in favor of breaking up a stylesheet very much. I'm writing a "CSS framework" right now that will only involve one extra CSS file, simple to use and easy to read. I'd much rather have a few marks in the file and fold code as needed than fumble with 10 tabs to make a few changes. And where does layout depart from pure styling? This is a question that confuses me when dealing with broken-up CSS. Border-width is layout, yes, but it's definitely also a visual element and doesn't feel like layout.

I think that this is the best way to format code, and almost all coders are familiar with it. Better to use a coding standard, I think.

      .single .selector {
          /* indent four spaces */
      }

      .multiple .selector1,
      .multiple .selector2
      {
          /* indent four spaces */
      }

      /**
       * Block comments
       */
      .single .selector { single: property; }

Over-documentation means your class names and HTML semantics are incomplete. Most CSS code is very, very easy to figure out (you can pick a page apart with a glance at Firebug if it's tableless), and you either need to strip it out or unnecessarily increases load times.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point about breaking up CSS into multiple files helps when the lines of CSS get to be too much. For example, I'm looking at a CSS file right here where I've got 1162 lines of CSS to sift through. Just like code is fragmented into .cpp, .java, .rb, .php files per logical component, it's useful to do the same for .css.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A pretty good article, but I heartily disagree about not using a conditional style sheet for IE.

I develop for FF and Safari on a Mac. When things are how they need to be I run through the various IE versions and make sure they work like a real browser as much as possible.

I much prefer knowing that all of my IE hacks will ONLY be shown to IE browsers and I don't run the risk of screwing up the layout for non-IE browsers because some hack has leaked through. Besides, it is much more readable to have the styles as intended be as simple as possible as opposed to ,things like..

      div.middle {
        min-width: 300px;
        width: auto !important;
        *width: 300px;
      }

There is nothing dumber than wading through stuff like this when you aren't specifically building for IE.</comment>


Ask HN: Swift for web development? - <AUTHOR>

With Swift becoming open source soon, does that mean it will be possible to use Swift for web development? Are there any web framework for Swift projects out there? <comment><USER2> I'm sure there will be many swift web frameworks that spring up after swift is open sourced, and I could see it as a very real challenger to the similar apps written in Go. Especially if you've already written the frontend code for the iOS eco system, the reusing code for any web based backend system just makes sense. Although I do wonder if swifts primary advantage, its speed, is negated by the speed of making web requests.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not yet but there probably will be. Personally I think using Swift for webdev is waste of time however it's just my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm guessing you haven't tried Swift yourself no?

</comment><comment><USER5> Swift for web development? You might as well kill yourself.

</comment><comment><USER6> Try Swift. You could use it, but why would you put yourself through that sort of pain???</comment>


Jayfor: LLVM based programming language written in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jayfor-lang/jayfor

<comment><USER2> May as well add to this, but we're actually looking for contributors to help out, so if you're interested in working on a fairly new language then send us a PR :)

</comment><comment><USER3> 500 commits and the tests and examples seem bare. I don't really like the look of that tbh.

<comment><USER2> Jayfor/Ink is still far from complete, it's been in passive development for a month or so. No clue why it was posted to HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this stack up against 'go'?

<comment><USER2> Hi. I'm the guy that made this :) We're just having fun, we don't see this to replace any existing language like Rust, C or Go. It's still a really small project.</comment></comment>


Bootstrap Tour: Quick and easy way to build your product tours - <AUTHOR> http://pushly.github.com/bootstrap-tour/

<comment><USER2> Interesting! This is really similar to Guiders.js from Optimizely. We've just done some hacking with Guiders for our latest product demo/lead gen landing page for Decal CMS[1] but this seems as though it might be a bit more flexible since it's based on Bootstrap popovers.

[1] <http://30s-demo.mockups.decalcms.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm wondering (aloud, I suppose) if it would make sense to support keyboard navigation. From a lazy perspective it would be nice not to have to mouse to each popover and hit "next" but then you might lose the "tour" feeling with people just moving on indiscriminately. Any folks who actually study/do UX care to comment?

<comment><USER4> Don't study/do either of those, but was thinking the same thing. Keyboard nav would be great.

<comment><USER5> Agree - this is also needed for accessibility reasons. Either something like Spacebar for next, or Tab/arrow keys.

<comment><USER6> We will definitely add that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great idea, but you need to spend some more time on the implementation. Especially the box was at least in my browser kind of a mess. You need clearer call to actions for your next.

Also I found it hard to orientate myself because of the stacatto moves between the steps. Perhaps some sort of animation with some easing would make it easier to follow.

<comment><USER6> That's some great feedback! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome. I was experimenting with Bootstrap Popovers yesterday to guide new users. Your implementation is much more polished. Will definitely give this a try.

</comment><comment><USER9> For those that are interested, there is something similar for Zurb's Foundation framework:

[http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature- tour-p...](http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-tour-plugin)

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome. I was just about this make this yesterday when I found myself customize optimizley/guiders to work with Bootstrap skins :D

</comment><comment><USER11> I just built something very similar on top of bootstrap for my company two weeks ago. Even some of the methods and naming are the same! Oh well, we needed something slightly more customized and it only took a day or so to write.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is great. Super easy to implement, too.

</comment><comment><USER13> yea this is cool, I was just making a guide with these same popovers on Thursday....Guiders.js looks cool too.

</comment><comment><USER14> It looks great! and I can't restart tour once more. Keep watching the project :)

</comment><comment><USER15> great work!

1 q: no "previous" button?

<comment><USER16> This framework is just what I've been needing. I'm working on a big tutorial that just used popup windows and relied on the user to find what they needed on the page.

I'm going to start using this and if the OP doesn't add a previous button I'll probably submit something myself.

<comment><USER6> I am the OP. A pull request would be very welcome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> this is awesome

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a very handy piece of js. thank you

</comment><comment><USER19> Great, I could use something like that in the current project. Oh, twitter bootstrap.. too bad.

<comment><USER6> You can just use the popover plugin from Bootstrap. You don't have to use the full framework.

<comment><USER19> oh, if so, that's cool, tx. OP should tell about it on the page.</comment></comment></comment>


Dart vs. node for flutter app server side - <AUTHOR> Hey,
I want to start a new project to learn flutter. I would like to know your opinion about which language should i use for the server side.
thanks, <comment><USER2> I had the same question and ended up with Node, just because there are a lot of resources and a big community to help. Also, I can't share code between server and app, so I can't save code by using Dart on the server. But in the end both can be used and is your choice, none is better. If you go with Dart, I recommend you to check out [https://aqueduct.io/](https://aqueduct.io/)

<comment><USER3> There is also Angel: [https://angel-dart.github.io](https://angel- dart.github.io)

People tend to ignore it in these conversations (which frankly, is often disheartening), but it's been used in production, and is nearly done with a large upgrade.

(disclaimer: I am the creator)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing and great job btw! I will give it a try soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depends on what you want to do on the server side. For many, it is enough to have a Postgresql database backend, and a very limited amount of other services needed, in such cases Dart is great for server side.

If you rely on many third-party services, chances are that the client API coverage is not that great, and you are better off with node at this point.</comment>


Unionized Programmers? - <AUTHOR>

Programmers in the US Postal Service have union representation.  This union also represents accountants.  Members have the option to join the union or not join the union.  Either way, the union negotiates wages/benefits for programmers and accountants.
I understand the benefit for unions that represent  lower skilled workers and skill tradesmen.  However, it seems absurd there is a union that represents programmers or accountants.
We can discuss the problems in the news section if there's interest.
But for now does anyone else know of other unions in IT? <comment><USER2> Back in 2000/2001 I worked for an Irish broadcaster on their online presence. The company was heavily unionised. Because they weren't sure which union us techies should be in, the local chapter of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) decide that we belonged under them.

Their reasoning was that they had technical print workers part and the Internet was a form of electric printing. Few of us joined.

And when a inevitable round of lay-offs came the union members got better severance packages. In a heavily unionised environment it's definitely worth the membership dues.

If you think it's absurd for a programmers union what do you think of an employer's union? <http://www.ibec.ie/> has always been called, and behaved as, the employers union despite dropping union from their name in 1990.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had a friend who was a programmer in Italy, where he was part of the machinists' union or something. In the US there's a Programmer's Guild but they're probably more of a PAC (Political Action Group) than a union.

</comment><comment><USER4> when i worked at cerro tololo inter-american observatories (la serena, chile). there was a union and i was a member. seemed to work fine - they were smart people, did good work, and the wages were higher than average. nothing absurd about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> what you describe does sound like it worked out well.

my opinion is that there is enough demand for good programmers for the market to determine good wages/benefits. the usps union in question is working on a new contract. rumor has it they are agreeing to a whopping 3.5% raise spread over 5 years. the last annual raise was 1.2%!

there are a large percentage of "obsolete" CoBOL programmers that weren't transitioned properly to web applications. many of whom perform non- technical/light-duty tasks. the mostly younger folks carry the majority of the load. it's mostly a result of incompetent management whom never enforce accountability.

<comment><USER5> The IRS has unionized workers. 5 weeks vaca, 3 weeks sick pay, overtime.. It's a sweet gig and deserves to be - they control the biggest money collection in the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> The benefits are great at the USPS. However, salaries aren't great. It's difficult to witness much of the waste of deadbeat full-timers and even some incompetent staffed contractors. Outsourcing to Accenture and IBM are often just massive give-aways with no-bid contracts. It's a demoralizing environment along with finicial state of the Postal Service.

Managers have the same benefits. Plus, they get to telecommute 2-3 days a week! Since that benefit was given a year or so ago many of the managers have become even more disconnected with their job.

Managers also get bonuses which they deny. The bonuses are called "pay for performance". That's a joke because the metrics used for the PFP bonuses are ridiculous and encourage micromanaging which creates resentment towards supervisors. The entire workforce is demoralized. For most, it's difficult to leave the benefits.</comment></comment></comment></comment>