Gladius: Mozilla's 3D game engine for the web - <AUTHOR> https://mozillalabs.com/blog/2011/09/rescuefox-the-value-of-a-prototype/

<comment><AUTHOR> Example Game: <http://rescuefox.mozillalabs.com/src/index.html>

Geek.com Submission: [http://www.geek.com/articles/games/mozilla-paladin- project-i...](http://www.geek.com/articles/games/mozilla-paladin-project-is- developing-gladius-a-3d-game-engine-for-web-browsers-2011101/)

(currently not responding, hopefully load will lighten up soon)</comment>


Xiaomi is stealing your search history - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1255969992123863041 <comment><USER2> Already discussed:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23035266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23035266) (469 points | 204 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23040802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23040802) (53 points | 4 comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for telling me I guess?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Rooting your Xiaomi is a bitch (some BS with a waiting time), but it's possible :)

</comment><comment><USER4> It probably goes straight to Baidu for analytics</comment>


Interviewed launches to let job hunters prove what's on their resume (YC S15) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/interviewed-yc-s15-takes-the-guesswork-out-of-evaluating-potential-hires

<comment><USER2> Technically a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9881672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9881672)

...which makes me confused what YC's content marketing strategy actually is. Since TechCrunch already does exclusives for batch companies, it seems redundant.</comment>


Show HN : The Simplest CMS - <AUTHOR>

Hi Hackers
Here is a very basic and simple CMS system I created for HTML websites. (BTW works well with all type of files) Its minimal, simple, lightweight and fast.
Have just few possible features ( customization ):-
0. Easy installation, just have to put on server. 1. No database required. 2. Login info can be changed in config.php file. 3. Can control which files can be created, Edited and Deleted.
Its all, no more.
Feel free to try demo here
http://motyar.info/simple/admin/ <comment><USER2> How is this any better than just editing static files in your desktop? This just mimics the basic create/edit/delete functionality that your OS already gives you, but then you have to give up your code editor, version control, and pretty much every other development tool...</comment>


Ask HN: CS related books for casual reading - <AUTHOR> Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> Code Complete 2</comment>


How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made? A Freakonomics Quorum - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/how-much-progress-have-psychology-and-psychiatry-really-made-a-freakonomics-quorum/

<comment><USER2> Great submission. The thoughts by Dan Ariely are especially insightful.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I work in DevOps or as a BA/PM? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a recent IT university graduate who has offers for a job as a DevOps Engineer and as a Business Analyst and/or Project Manager.
As a first job, and as a future career path, which does the HN community value the most? Would it be wisest to do a more low-level technical job like DevOps before getting into the business side of things?
Starting salaries are roughly the same, but my research suggests that more experienced DevOps Engineers can earn more than BAs and PMs. <comment><USER2> Once you get out of school, structured progression is over. The wisest choice is to choose the one that will make you happier.

If there's any sort of ruthless logic to be had, it's that it's probably easier to gain access to the business side coming from a technical background, than to the technical side after entering the field on the business end. But if your childhood dream was to be a project manager or a business analyst, then that's the way to go.

Good luck.

<comment><USER3> > if your childhood dream was to be a project manager or a business analyst

That's a rather well-concealed tongue in that cheek, sir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm puzzled that Project Management would be offered as an entry-level position. Among the more-important tasks of a PM is to estimate the time required to complete the project. I assert that requires someone with experience in the industry.

Project Managers work with people. It's helpful for them to know how to write code but they really don't have to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it's more of a graduate programme where you'll be trained to be a PM, not necessarily being the sole manager of a huge project to begin with!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If your long term plans are to keep growing into management, I'll say take the PM job. Those kind of graduate PM programs help you grow quickly than starting as an engineer and then make your way up.

It all depends on what you want to do in the future. I started working as a developer/consultant and now I'm moving into PM because I don't want to code forever. However, I have friends that only wish to code all their live and that is okay also. Just go for what you want and like and you will be happier.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you like building stuff, then stay away from the BA/PM jobs. If you would rather work with things than people go with development.

</comment><comment><USER7> What do you desire to produce? What makes you happy? That is the first question. What ties closer into your passion?

I'd like to recommend two titles to you: "do what you love the money will follow" and "what color is your parachute".

Good luck and enjoy your career. Well done on having multiple offers. Keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if this sounds kind of unimportant/irrelevant, but knowing I will be able to use a Mac in the DevOps role seems to be swaying me that way. I really dislike using Windows/PCs, and I am almost certain that's what I'd be using all the time in the other company.

<comment><USER7> Hey, if it's important to you, then it's important. "Above all else, to thine own self be true."

Again, I recommend [http://www.amazon.com/What-Love-Money-Will- Follow/dp/0440501...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Love-Money-Will- Follow/dp/0440501601) \-- it's very well written deep book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the issues I see with being a project manager - your success depends upon other people doing what they're supposed to do. Other people have their own agendas which may not be aligned with what you need done.

<comment><USER8> The same could be said for developers, devops or any other role. At any company nothing is really done solo any more and all people have "agendas" or their own ideas of the path forward.

If you think writing software or doing sysadmin/operations work doesn't involve working with people then you are in the wrong trade sir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey PM here - once you go PM it's going to be harder to back to DevOps if you want to.</comment>


Ask HN: Identifying topics across languages on Wikipedia? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of a simple way (e.g. some clever bit of metadata) to find wikipedia articles in other languages on the same topic as a given English wikipedia page? <comment><USER2> [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=lang...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=langlinks&titles=Hacker&lllimit=500&redirects)

<comment><USER3> the interesting bit is that the german version lists a lot more: [http://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=lang...](http://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=langlinks&titles=Hacker&lllimit=500&redirects)

<comment><USER2> It looks like the big cluster refers to computing, as it contains the english "Hacker (Computing)" and the german "Hacker". The small one should be the disambiguation cluster: "Hacker" (which is a disambiguation page) and "Hacker (Begriffsklärung)", respectively.

Hacker has probably an unambiguous meaning in most languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> check out dbpedia - <http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess></comment>


Google I/O 2010 Session Videos - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions.html

<comment><USER2> Does anyone have recommendations on which of these to watch?

<comment><USER3> The talk on Go with Rob Pike was pretty interesting.

<comment><USER4> Can't find any talk with Go and 2010 in the title. Poor Google, they don't bother linking anymore because search is supposed to be so good...

<comment><USER5> Well, it is listed on the page ( [http://code.google.com/intl/fr/events/io/2010/sessions/go- pr...](http://code.google.com/intl/fr/events/io/2010/sessions/go- programming.html) ), but the video will be uploaded friday, according to [http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/coming-soon-videos- fr...](http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/coming-soon-videos-from-google- io-2010.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Er, are the videos actually up yet? I can't find any.

<comment><USER7> Here are the APp Engine Videos

<http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FBF991DAE0E02FED>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google Wave is insanely slow, trying to look through these pages is hell (using Chromium).

</comment><comment><USER3> Excited to see the session with PG and others that was completely full.

<comment><USER9> same here. looks like it'll be uploaded on friday</comment></comment>


Why Networks Need ASICs - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1330054& <comment><USER2> _" John Maddison is senior vice president of products and solutions at Fortinet."_

It's an ad for a crypto chip.

<comment><USER3> "It's a crummy commercial!" [1]

[https://youtu.be/2-H4LT-WZWE](https://youtu.be/2-H4LT-WZWE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> " _Setting aside issues like the shortage of available talent and the average of four years to develop and bring a new ASIC to market, the material costs alone are high. The manufacturing of a typical two-gram chip requires 1.6 kilograms of fossil fuel, 72 grams of chemicals, and 32 kilograms of water. The materials involved in making a 32Mbit RAM chip can add up to as much as 630 times the mass of the final product._ "

You realize that this is replacing a number of general purpose chips and reduces the new amount of materials consumed to accomplish a task, right? If you're not spending those 72 grams of 'chemicals' on your ASIC your spending 720 on general purpose CPUs.

</comment><comment><USER5> Actually, large data centers are using FPGAs at the network edges. The FGPA does data compression and/or encryption. This optimizes network bandwidth and does not tie up the CPU. I expect to see distributed network routing code so the communication can be peer to peer with no routers. I expect to see firewalls specific to a node (e.g. only web traffic from the traffic splitter). I expect to security code (e.g. no exfiltration from the confidential store-only machine).

All of this without involving the CPU... ASIC is too expensive but FPGAs are great. Intel bought Altera (about 45% of the FPGA market) which annoys me / excites me because I use Altera. I expect the next Gen CPUs to have an embedded FPGA so you can make your own instructions.

<comment><USER6> ASIC is expensive at low volume, but cheaper than an FPGA at high volume, so it depends on the application.

<comment><USER7> From what I've heard, "high volume" is now so high that hardly anybody really expects cost savings from "true" (i.e. new full layout, one customer) ASICs anymore. The vast majority of "new", "custom" chips are sold to multiple customers and/or are light customizations of existing designs.

<comment><USER6> Right, I think this has been a trend for awhile -- standard product ASICs ending up in multiple brands of similar products.

Just the masks for manufacturing these large chips on the newer processes are millions of dollars -- not even factoring in all the design work to get to that point. But they achieve far higher density than you can get with an FPGA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Networking seems to be moving towards Programable ASICs with companies like Barefoot Networks, Netronome, Cavium, and other developing programable network card, switches, and routers. So yes, its Application Specific to networking, but what the chip actually does with the packets is up the whoever buys it.

If Xilinx / Altera can get P4 to compile to their FPGAs (Xilinx has a basic version of this), I suspect the use of FPGAs in networking will become more widespread. FPGAs seem to get higher throughput SerDes before ASICs. Current FPGAs have up to 144x 30Gbps SerDes.

<comment><USER9> [http://p4fpga.github.io/](http://p4fpga.github.io/)

<comment><USER8> Cool project! I read your poster from the P4 summit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was quite confused by the article. It's old news. As one of the comments there said:

 _Custom ICs for networking were first developed decades ago. Everything from carrier class routers to home routers contain networking ASICs. Cisco and Juniper consume many ASICs._

<comment><USER11> The article is a rebuttal to NFV hype that proposes to run all firewalls, NAT, IDS, IPS, DPI, VPN, SD-WAN, etc. in software.

<comment><USER12> As bandwidth goes up general purpose CPU's become inefficient at handling traffic again. Hell, pfSense on my Xeon E5-2403v2 at home eats up 25% of a CPU core WITH TSO and TCO enabled when maxing out my 100Mbps, meanwhile my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X running on a whimpy little lower-power embedded processor sits around 2% utilization doing the same task. This is without any crazy firewall rules, IDS, etc, just three port forwards in place. I can't imagine what kind of hardware I'd need to even handle a 1Gbps with software routing, let alone handling the duties of my 24-port TP-Link switch at home that sips ~20W of power with all ports active and can handily route (and yes, I mean _route_ , it is a Layer 3 switch) 1mpps.

<comment><USER13> Netmap-fwd on an atom is faster than your edge router.

And yes'm pfsense is getting some netmap/dpdk love.

I am the owner of Netgate (company behind pfsense)

And your figures ar full of shit. I do 1gbps on a 2.4GHz Atom

<comment><USER12> To be fair, this was running on ESXi, so there was a performance penalty to be had there. Got really annoyed when I switched to XenServer and I had to disable all hardware offloading (because XenServer is stupid and FreeBSD doesn't like stupid virtio drivers) and it would regularly peg a core at 100% when maxing out the connection, which was ultimately why I switched to a cheap hardware solution (still eyeing the cheap ~$300 pfSense appliance, because EdgeOS lacks a _TON_ of features I used regularly).

Edit: Netmap would be lovely.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


F# Units of Measure – A Worked Example - <AUTHOR> http://stevenpemberton.net/blog/2015/03/11/FSharp-Units-Of-Measure/ <comment><USER2> This is neat stuff, and I've looked into it before. One question I have, though, is regarding interoperability with C#. If I have a units library that is in F# using what's shown in OP, would I be able to use the UoM in C#, or would I have to revert to unitless values on the C# side of the interface?

<comment><USER3> From the article @ "Units of Measure at runtime and interoperability ":

One key point to take heed of, is that units of measure do not exist at runtime. They are intended for static type checking only and therefore prevent us implementing functionality based on checking units.

They are also not part of the wider .NET type system and can therefore not be consumed, or used, by any non F# assembly. If exposing units of measure to consumers, the units are simply not visible and all values will be treated as there underlying, dimensionless type.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's the biggest problem with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I could easily imagine a language extension that would automatically create "companion" number types for any other type ( you create a type "animal" and you automically get a "number of animals" unit of measure type.

This way you would almost never have "raw" int or float types.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure type providers can do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> F# is perfect for a part of our application, I just dislike that we can't mix .NET languages within the same Visual Studio project without going through hoops. I had expected this to have been solved by now since they all compile down to IL anyway.

Hmm, maybe we'll just have to put it in a separate project even if it feels silly to just have a few classes there, which in turn are strongly related to others. It just feels so perfect for these particular classes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Every language should have this. Simple idea but it makes so much sense.</comment>


Restrict use of riot-control chemicals - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02594-5 <comment><USER2> Also the problem of _expired_ tear gas, which will "breaks down into cyanide oxide, phosgenes and nitrogens that are extremely dangerous" according to a 2017 study.

This is how HK police uses Hongkongers for human experiments: [https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/08/09/hong-kong-reporters- co...](https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/08/09/hong-kong-reporters-coughed- blood-developed-rashes-tear-gas-exposure-doctors-say/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not according to China's CCTV news:

[https://twitter.com/wailly/status/1165183278011142145](https://twitter.com/wailly/status/1165183278011142145)

<comment><USER4> Poisonous CCTV news is immune to any poisonous chemical/gas

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In particular Israel uses vast amounts of tear gas against Palestinians. I think if anywhere we will see the deleterious effects on human health and the environment there first.</comment>


What's rising faster than health care? College costs - <AUTHOR> http://lifeinc.today.com/_news/2011/08/11/7349127-good-graph-friday-whats-rising-faster-than-health-care-college-costs

<comment><USER2> Blame cheap, easy loans from the US Government combined with the cultural belief that a college degree will guarantee a living wage. The colleges should be issuing the loans. I can bet that if they did, they'd be a heckuva more selective about who attended and have a much larger vested interest in making sure their students became successful financially after graduation.

<comment><USER3> Based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010 data[1] the average college graduate has nearly double the weekly wages of someone with only a hs diploma ($1038 vs $626/week) and is nearly half as likely to be unemployed (5.4% vs 9.2%)

So I think it's a bit unfair to say that this is merely a 'cultural belief'. Do you have any data to support that dramatically improved salary and employment rate is just a myth?

I do agree with the points on students loans, but I just hear way too often how "college isn't worth it" without any data to back this up what-so-ever

[1] <http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm>

<comment><USER4> I can assure you there are correlation/causation issues with those stats. I come from a demographic and gene pool of people likely to hold degrees--aside from me everyone in my 6 person family has at least a bachelors and my girlfriend has a masters. However, despite no degree, I had no trouble obtaining a lucrative career as a developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> College costs are just like any other bubble: they rose and continue to rise due to the ease of financing. Why we allow 18-year olds to blissfully sign up for a lifetime of crippling six-figure debt is beyond me. At least make them get an engineering or business degree from a public college. In-demand colleges can keep raising tuition because students will just get bigger loans to get the name on the degree.

<comment><USER6> They're adults and aren't being forced to sign up for an out of state private school that costs 40k a year. Intelligent adults will pursue scholarships and go to school in state for for a reasonable price.

<comment><USER7> While it is true that they are (or almost are) adults and should be able to make their own decisions, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that there is nothing wrong with a bank giving a $200,000 dollar loan to someone with absolutely no income.

Because you can't get out of student debt, the banks are more than happy to make loans to people who shouldn't really be taking them. Eventually, the bank will get its money back. For the education bubble to be popped, there's going to have to be a change in legislation allowing people to be protected from student loans if they go into bankruptcy.

Once that's the case, banks will start being more careful with the loans they make, there will be less cheap money available, and people will have to start making more rational decisions about which college they attend.

<comment><USER8> >change in legislation allowing people to be protected from student loans if they go into bankruptcy.

I think there is a balance there, but that is the huge deal: no one should be able to co-sign, and you should be able to go into bankruptcy after a long period of trying to make it work and drop the student loan dept too.

I don't want to swing the other way and see chapter 7 bankruptcies right after school driving rates up to absurd levels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Government policy: everyone should have as much health care as they want. Result: health care prices soar. Government policy: everyone should own a home. Result: home prices soar. Government policy: everyone should go to college...

<comment><USER7> What "government policy" are you referring to exactly?

<comment><USER10> Medicare/Medicaid, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, and government gauntness of student loans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hate histrionics, but I feel compelled to connect the dots here.

Colleges charge more and more -- the growth rate is way above anything most of us would consider reasonable. Why? Because the feds guarantee loans for kids attending. That is, the person directly paying is not the person receiving the benefit. In fact, for many people the goal is to have the feds completely pay for education using loans, thereby giving everybody the chance to make an easy trade: take on some debt which you will have to pay many decades from now, and in return you get a few years of attending a super cool school, learning incredible stuff, and making new friends.

Except, you can never default on these loans. Once you make them, you are stuck with them for life. And those things you choose to study? Many of those will never offer you the chance to make the money you need to pay the loans back.

So now you're out of college with a degree that doesn't offer the income potential you need to pay for all those loans you signed for.

So how is this any different from indentured servitude? It's not to a particular person, but to society at large. We give you a piece of paper, you sign it, you have fun and work hard for a few years, and then you're in such bad financial straits that you'll have to take anything you can find that makes money in a sad attempt to ever get even again. How many PhDs are waiting tables in college towns? Does this appear to be a functional system achieving necessary societal goals?

There's a big discussion over whether college is necessary. No clear answers there. But there is also a discussion over whether the money trades that we make as a society are actually doing any good. We keep paying more and more, getting lots of good folks in debt, and when we ask if college is supposed to help them pay these loans back, we get a speech about how college is a special time in a person's life and shouldn't be related directly to money. It seems fine to relate it directly to money when the kid is signing his life away for a vague promise, but when we ask where the payoff is we're told we're being crass. It's about more than money. It's about the experience.

That might be true, but there are a lot of special times in a person's life. Why are we letting people trade a few good years when they're young in order to limit their options for decades afterwards? Where's the sense in that, not to the person involved necessarily, but to the rest of us?

<comment><USER12> Depending on the job market, college grads may or may not have a hard time find a job to get on track to pay off their loans quickly, so what? Everyone has a rough patch, some more than others.

The high school student who chooses NOT to go to college might be better off for a few years after high school, but on average, their LONG TERM economic future is not as bright as that of a college grad-- even if the college grad has a rough time find settling into a career after graduation.

This is perhaps more clear if you look at people in their 30's and 40's. The college grads are, I think, generally better off (modulo some outliers).

<comment><USER13> Correlation or causation? It seems to me colleges often accept people who are already poised to be successful.

Imagine if a university decided to randomly pick people to educate. (Not randomly pick among the applicants -- randomly grab people off the street.) Do you think those students would be very much better off after being educated?

(Btw, yes, I'm very happy I went to university.)

<comment><USER12> It depends. I think there are lots of folks who would excel but do not make it to college simply because of economic conditions or low familial expectations holding them down. There's also many without intellectual talent who get into college simply because a parent held their nose to the grindstone for years and forced every available opportunity onto them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Colleges vary quite a lot in terms of how much spending they do that can reasonably be accounted for as spending on student instruction, and spending on all aspects of care of students. At some colleges, the list price for the students who pay most out of pocket is BELOW the spending per student. That's because those colleges have sources of income (e.g., endowment income and direct grants to the institution) other than tuition income.

[http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=13...](http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=130794)

(Check the Finances and Faculty tab shown for the college comparison linked above, and then sort by Instructional Expenditures / Total FTE column.)

</comment><comment><USER15> Colleges are engaged in a destructive "fanciest buildings" arms race.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I see a lot of that. Virtually every university I come across has recently completed or in the middle of some huge sprawling campus expansion. It is hard to fathom that the growth from increased tuition aren't directly funding such building projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Remember when middle class parents could afford to pay for their kids' undergrad education?

<comment><USER17> I think you need to qualify your point a little..

 _American_ middle class parents. Middle class parents don't have any problem doing so in plenty of other countries.

<comment><USER17> Why the down vote? The education bubble is not a global phenomenon, and there are plenty of great working educational models in other countries that the US could look to (even if it would be branded as 'socialism' etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's interesting comment after the article about why this may actually be very misleading:

Public college costs used to be covered more by the state, whereas now the states are cutting and cutting and raising tuition and fees dramatically. This raises student's tuition at a much faster rate than the total tuition rate is actually rising.

Worth considering?

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm a 22 year old university student in Sweden (starting my 2nd year now) and I find it hard to imagine life with school costing a fortune like this.

Sure I, and most students in Sweden, take loans to pay for food, rent and books but the school itself is free - even now! We're also getting a good low rent loan with a part allowance. No wonder we're having so many foreign students. That's going to change from next year though when the foreigners will get charged.

<comment><USER20> your school itself is not free, the costs are just hidden from you. You will pay much more in taxes over your lifetime than the college costs cited this article.

There is no free lunch.

<comment><USER19> But of course you're right.

I still find it a bit hard to imagine, where would I be now if I had loan a lot more. I might be studying the same but I surely would work harder, both in school and during the summer.

On a related note things like medical care and laws sometimes makes me feel the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well I have to ask if anyone actually thinks this system of student loan debt and increasing student loan debt, is sustainable? I personally see it coming to a bubble state at some point in the future and with the debt being basically impossible (except for a slim set of cases) to remove in bankruptcy... what are we going to do about it?

</comment><comment><USER22> What's the breakdown in average college cost rise as per Ivies vs. state universities?

The numbers I hear quoted for an Ivy education is usaully 1 order of magnitude higher than I hear quoted for a state U.

<comment><USER6> Here's a recent article that ranks schools on cost vs salaries: [http://www.smartmoney.com/borrow/student-loans/which- college...](http://www.smartmoney.com/borrow/student-loans/which-colleges- help-their-grads-get-top- salaries-1312402692380/?link=SM_mag_inside#article_tab_article)

<comment><USER23> Malcolm Gladwell examined the so-called "advantages" of going to an Ivy League school in his piece "Getting In". <http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html>

From the article...

"As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between," Krueger said. "One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let's look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn't seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don't."

<comment><USER22> My _personal_ opinion is that Ivies bang-for-the-buck is in the networking possibilities. There usually is _some_ cool research, but high-grade official research isn't usually at the undergraduate level these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious- if all schools were run like businesses on the open market, is there anything stopping tuition from reaching an equilibrium price close to the value of the degree (in terms of wages)?

It seems like folks will likely continue paying more to go to college so long as the boost in income is worth it, and colleges will continue to increase tuition until they can no longer get away with it, so it seems like that's where we could be headed.

Why it didn't happen before, I figure could be due to public schools setting a very low bar and private schools had to remain at least somewhat nearby. But as the government continues to pull funding from public higher education, it becomes more and more private, i.e. driven by the market.

<comment><USER25> How can you determine the value of the degree? The only thing you know for pretty sure is that without degree you will have a massive problem on the job market.

<comment><USER26> With any number of arts degrees, you've still got a massive problem on the job market and now you're saddled with debt.

<comment><USER25> Good point! I should have phrased it "the right degree". I could have added "from the right school" too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You want to make college costs come down? Make college loans dischargable in chapter 13 bankruptcies after 7 years of the date of graduation, or 12 years from date of first attendance

<comment><USER27> Wouldn't that just make the cost of borrowing go up?

<comment><USER8> Only for majors that don't pay worth crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What a thorough article.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm disappointed in you, HN. Not a single one of you mentioned Baumol's cost disease.</comment>


Show HN: Robotic pour-over coffee - <AUTHOR> http://www.poursteady.com

<comment><USER2> This looks really cool. I haven't tried the pour-over coffee, yet.

Still using a french press. Other members of the family are using a cheap-o single cup generic coffee maker (the drip kind). I have tried the coffee from both (both take different grind sizes obviously) but depending on type of coffee one can be better than the other. Sometimes it is just different. The drip one tastes almost closer to a cold brew, which I also like.

It seems pour-overs is a realtively new trend. It used to be all about french press, then aeropress became cool. That "vacuum thing" was cool for those willing to spend more money and time. But in recent years I started hearing about pour-overs. Is it just a matter of a cool ritual, or does it do something different to the taste?

<comment><USER3> French press makes coffee that's way over extracted. You can get a Hario v60 for like $10 and it will change your life (well, at least you coffee habits).

Even since moving to pour overs, I rarely go back to espresso. And this is from a 3-5 double espressos a day guy.

Next, try cold filter. Wow.

<comment><USER2> > French press makes coffee that's way over extracted.

I usually control that with the time the grounds are in contact with water and the size of the grounds.

But heck at $10 + paper filters I will get it and try it out. Might even have to get the cute little metal hot water pot. I have to say, like any proper addiction, the ritual of making the coffee, the anticipation, the smelling of grounds and so on. I can see how this provides those elements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool! Are you going to sell this to other businesses? If that's the direction you're going, maybe try to throw some numbers on the speed, consistency and reliability so a business owner can get excited about the investment? Really cool product though - it's certainly has "theater" to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will start trying to sell machines pretty soon. Our background is in robotics so we thought this would be a fun application for the automation technologies we use at our day jobs.

We just showed this at Engadget Expand in NYC this weekend and made about 850 cups of coffee over two days. We wrote a scheduler which takes care of the timing and water volumes so every cup is the same. Parameters are controlled via an HTML5 app. The machine is built like a piece of factory automation equipment for good reliability. We've been running them 24/7 in the shop for months to verify the hardware.

The theater is a big part of it, we're definitely trying to strike a balance between the robot and the barista.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can confirm the awesomeness of the coffee produced by this machine. They were setup at Maker Faire NYC for the last two years giving away free coffee. The robotic pourover was excellent!

Best of luck to these guys!

</comment><comment><USER6> I saw these guys at maker faire. They won a ton of ribbons. I also saw them at Engadget expand conference.

It's was a tasty cup of coffee. :)</comment>


Anyone Can Ride Rails - should I write this book? - <AUTHOR>

I was all fired up to write this, but have started to have second thoughts. What do you think - should I keep going?
Please be as frank and honest as you like. I will warn you in advance though that non-Rubyists might find my tone a little nauseating because I speak highly of Rails and Ruby - not just because I'm a genuine fan but because I see it as absolutely pivotal to keep my readers motivated and excited. (That was certainly what got me through all the books and resources when I was starting out, so apologies in advance for that!)
You can download what I have written so far from here: http://astonj.com/anyone-can-ride-rails.pdf <comment><USER2> I think you should keep going. In my opinion any materials that make it easier for beginners to get started on programming are a net benefit to society. Over the coming years I think there is going to be a divide between those that can program and those that can't as technology continues to be an ever increasing part of our lives. I am in full support of anything that helps break down the barrier to jumping in and getting started.

Great start and I look forward to seeing the finished version. Keep us updated on your progress.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree with you! I think programming has become a lot easier in recent years, with the advent of languages such as Ruby and the sheer number of well thought out learning materially, particularly centring around good programming practises. And of course thanks to frameworks like Rails that do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Thanks for the comment and support!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A few observations. One, you haven't written that many pages, in fact you've written very, very few pages save for the preface and the like. This isn't an issue on its own, except theres no Table of Contents so it's hard for me to see where you are going to take it from here, or in other words what your vision is. The obvious result of this is that it's pretty hard to provide feedback. The flip side is of course, that you've demonstrated enough desire and initiative within yourself to endeavor to start the book, so unless you have a serious reason to stop, maybe forge ahead and try to finish what you started.

One other thing that I just want to put in your head, I'm not sure if I'm even going so far as to suggest it, is the possibility of flexing scope to write perhaps a 50 page e-book, not dissimilar to the Sacha Greif ebook (<http://sachagreif.com/ebook/>) but for getting from zero to the next book on Rails for absolute beginners. The benefit of this would be that you could probably spend about 20 hours writing it (I'm pulling this number out of my ass, so I could be waaay off about this time estimate) and therefore you've risked a much shorter amount of time, which I'm assuming is your main concern.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thank you for the feedback.

I started writing the book on the weekend, and have tried to include details about the main concept and format (it's going to be split into three books). As it's early days I've only really touched on what will actually be included, but my thoughts so far are along these lines:

An introduction to Object Oriented Programming | Ruby basics | -why ruby | -datatypes | -variables | -classes | -etc | An introduction to Rails and the MVC architecture | -why rails etc | A Ruby on Rails tutorial - building your first app! | -1 | -2 | -3 | -4 | -etc | Using Gems | Using Git | Deploying | An introduction to Test Driven Development | \</comment></comment><comment>-? | \</comment><comment>-? | \</comment><comment>-? |

Originally I sought feedback from my friends, and as that's been very positive I thought it wise to get opinions from a wider audience, such as on HN.

Thanks for the link to the Sacha Greif book - I will definitely check it out!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad you start from a 'what you'll need' point of view. This is often missed in most books where they just start with a code 1+1 example.

If you are aiming for total beginners - as in, new to programming and not just new to Ruby/Rails then you might have to re-word your About this book section.

You mention TDD, Git, 'default Ruby stack' within the first 8 lines of the book. While these are important points regarding the book - they only make sense to programmers of some kind.

I think if you give away a sample chapter of your book then this will be the first thing they read. You've got to convince the new folks you'll look after them & that they will actually get as far as building their first app. You may want to consider adding a book subtitle. I presume the readers you want to attract might not even know what Rails is! Maybe something like - Anyone Can Ride Rails - A fresh programming guide for enthusiasic beginners.

I like the informal tone as it's reassuring. I also second the what is Ruby/Rails & why should I use them, what can I build with it etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Helen - thank you for the feedback, you make some great points!

I definitely need to iron out who the target market is, but for the time being I have expanded the note to include "(though you are introduced to these topics later – so don't panic if you don't know what they are just yet)."

I think I had envisaged that people coming to this book would have already made their minds up about learning Rails and perhaps already looked at some of the other books but felt a bit out of their depth - so would have probably come across some of the terms. Hence I though that I'd keep the more in-depth explanations to their respective chapters. But yeah I totally see what you mean so I may have to rethink that! Thanks again for the feedback.

<comment><USER4> Hey Aston,

Glad to be of help. As a side note did you use a template for your ebook at all to get started? The headings look great & it has a nice flow, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Helen, I didn't use a template - it's just a bog standard Open Office document and exported as a PDF :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't want to discourage you, I'm just gonna give you my honest personal thoughts. I think there is a lot of this kind of stuff on the web already. What I think there is less of (maybe there's also less demand for it), is deep rails or ruby VM type stuff. I do most of my programming in c/c++ though (so I'm no ruby expert) and whenever I need to pick up a scripting language or framework like rails, usually I try to grab something that has maximum code, with bar minimum and to the point explanations, and get annoyed whenever anyone talks about intro to OOP or starts explaining functions, variables, etc. So obviously, I'm not your audience for this book.

Having said all that I don't want to be a downer here, I think its great you're writing a book and possibly getting people interested in programming :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for the comment and encouragement!

If you're looking for books on the internals of Rails, this one could be right up your street: <http://patshaughnessy.net/ruby-under-a-microscope>

If you're looking for more general but advanced books there are loads of fantastic ones - some of my favourites are Eloquent Ruby, Design Patterns in Ruby, Metaprogramming Ruby and there's Crafting Rails Applications for Rails (though I haven't started this myself yet - but I hear it's very good).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is your target audience absolute beginners to programming or experienced programmers who want to learn Rails?

One thing I Have never seen is a "why" you should learn Rails and what you can do with it. What kind of web apps can I build? What can I do with it? Why would I want to?

Personally, I don't go for the informal tone, but it wasn't over the top and many books tend to go that way so no problem.

I like that it seems you won't be preaching about side technologies like git or tdd. It is an added difficulty when people add extra complications to a book, especially an intro level book. My personal opinion, don't go preachy on formatting or style either, just use well written examples for people to learn from and they will pick up your style.

<comment><USER7> I had similar thoughts on this. A lot of people express interest in learning how to program. The problem is that the majority of things out there are don't explain why, and choosing which language or framework to use ends up being a flip of a coin.

I know this is how I chose to start programming in Python back in the day. More or less flipped a coin between it and Ruby because there wasn't anything I could find that explained why one might be better or worse for what I wanted to accomplish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it can be tough - I agonised over Python and Ruby too, there was a lot going for them both, but in the end I followed my heart as I just felt more comfortable with Ruby :)

Thanks for the comment!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not see what the market thinks of your idea by trying the 'lean publishing' route? Check out <http://leanpub.com> as one [good] way to do it. It's working out pretty well for me so far. It would mean moving from OpenOffice to Markdown formatting, but the whole Dropbox + Markdown approach that Leanpub uses is pretty good and there is decent support for code blocks etc

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea - thanks! Will definitely check out leanpub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a RoR beginner with a little know-how from other languages like PHP and think you should also include some other interesting parts like Stackoverflow, GitHub, Heroku etc. There is plenty of stuff out there with no real description for a programming-beginner. In my early days I have search for a long time a good description for what a gem is. And this is only one example, lol.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, a glossary sounds like a great idea - thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://astonj.com/anyone-can-ride-rails.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice start. I think you should keep going. This might be helpful. [http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/why-every-entrepreneur- shou...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/why-every-entrepreneur-should-self- publish-a-book/)

What software do you use to write your book?

<comment><AUTHOR> I started off writing in WriteRoom (I love the full screen mode) but then it started to mess up my formatting so I moved to Open Office.

Thanks for the comment and link, I'm off to read it now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Okay - if you are going for the absolute beginner market, then, in my opinion, you have too much front matter. I'm new to code, I want to build something cool - let me at it now, not 20 pages in.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a ruby & rails beginner so I would definitely be interested in a book like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks for the comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whatever will be your decision, this is a great book title!

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha thank you! I love the name too :)</comment></comment>


Mathematicians Team Up on Twin Primes Conjecture - <AUTHOR> https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20131119-together-and-alone-closing-the-prime-gap/ <comment><USER2> To clarify, this result means that there are infinitely many pairs of primes separated by at most 600. This doesn't mean that the gap between subsequent primes must always be less than 600.

<comment><USER3> Ah I had missed it too. Is there a bound on the gap between subsequent primes as well?

<comment><USER4> For any natural n, the n consecutive numbers (n+1)! + 2, (n+1)! + 3, ... (n+1)! + (n+1) are all composite -- the first one is divisible by 2, the second one by three and so on.

Thus there are arbitrarily long sequences of consecutive numbers that have no primes in them.

<comment><USER5> I seem to remember that there's always a prime between n and 2*n? (Still an arbitrarily large absolute gap, but a fixed relative gap.)

Can anyone deny or confirm?

<comment><USER6> Yes, that's called Bertrand's postulate, first proven in 1850 by Chebyshev. For any integer n > 3, there's at least one prime strictly between n and 2n-2.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand's_postulate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand's_postulate)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ah, an earth-shaking discovery made by a man in his fifties who was barely within academia [1]. Guess he won't get a Fields Medal for that.

It seems like more and more of the really big discoveries are being made by people who go off and work really hard on their own.

I vaguely recall a claim that the greatest discoveries aren't being made by people in their twenties any more just because math is so huge you need ten years of study to get to the bleeding edge.

Anyway, it seems to say something about academia.

Edit: Just to be clear I neither deny that academia can achieve great things nor do I claim that young people can't do similarly. Certainly, anyone halfway near academia probably see many flaws but that's for another post.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang)

<comment><USER8> I don't get it. The article talks not just about Zhang, but also about James Maynard, who is a postdoc and looks young, and is part of what you might call standard academia. His result is independent of Zhang's and is orders of magnitude stronger and is much easier to understand. Comes off pretty good for academia, really.

Also, remember that most people on Earth aren't in academia, but most people still think. So the null hypothesis is that most innovations won't come from academia. But a _huge_ amount of them do anyway, including even your counterexample, who--despite his economic struggles--was still a lecturer at a university. You could make a similar argument for young people.

Our university system and our cultural obsession with youth deserve plenty of criticism, but the accusation that they're not making important discoveries isn't one of them, and it's totally unwarranted from this article.

<comment><USER9> > The article talks not just about Zhang, but also about James Maynard, who is > a postdoc and looks young, and is part of what you might call standard > academia. His result is independent of Zhang's and is orders of magnitude > stronger and is much easier to understand.

Maynard has done some stellar work to be sure, but he built off of Zhang's breakthrough. Maynard's result is one of a sequence of very quick findings all happening in just months after Zhang's work became public, all make possible by that work, and relatively easy, as can be seen from their number and rapid pace.

I have not read all the papers here, but my guess is that Zhang's result is hugely more impressive.

<comment><USER10> Actually at the bottom of page 2 of Maynard's preprint he states: "We emphasize that the above result does not incorporate any of the technology used by Zhang to establish the existence of bounded gaps between primes."

So it seems like it is actually a coincidence, though they were both building off of the same previous work (GPY) so maybe it's not that surprising.

<comment><USER11> That is only a tactic move. it is Zhang's work inspired him to look for a quick better alternative. Zhang showed " there is gold! " And then Maynard ran towards that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So if I understand this right...it means that no matter how far along the number line I go (and I can go a long ways out) I will always be able to eventually find a pair of primes that are separated by no more than 600?

The crazy thing to me is that primes get less and less dense as you get further and further out. It would seem to me that once you reach a certain threshold you won't be able to find two primes "close" to each other anymore because primes will be so far apart from each other. But this says I will always be able to find a pair pretty close together? (I may be looking a long time though)

<comment><USER13> > It would seem to me that once you reach a certain threshold you won't be > able to find two primes "close" to each other anymore because primes will be > so far apart from each other. ]

That is not quite correct. The _average gap_ between primes gets larger as you move further along the number line. But, you will still get the occasional consecutive odd numbers that are close to one another. In fact, there is an old conjecture (Twin Prime Conjecture[1]) that claims that there are an infinite number of pairs of consecutive primes separated by 2.

PS. I'm not a mathematician (engineer with some decent math background), so I might very well be wrong.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, this result is effectively getting a little bit closer to proving the Twin Prime Conjecture.

It would be interesting to see the proof get progressively closer to 2, but more and more difficult each time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, this is a great story. First of all, props to the writer for weaving a bunch of different threads together in a way that made sense and was understandable to non-mathematicians without dumbing it down too much. And this is why I love math. There are so many great characters and themes in this story.

I love problems that can be stated so simply and yet are so fiendishly difficult to prove.

I love the idea that there is room for everybody in mathematics, from the lone genius outside of academia, to the young post-doc, to the unlikely collaborators.

Most of all, I love the idea that it's okay to fail, to throw out dumb ideas along with brilliant ones and that everyone makes mistakes, even Ph.D.'s in mathematics. We need more of that in education and academia generally.

</comment><comment><USER16> My understanding of the Riemann Hypothesis is that it can be reformulated as a statement about prime density. If this result is a concrete outer bound on density, does it have implications on RH?

<comment><USER17> Speaking of reformulations of the Riemann Hypothesis, there is a surprisingly elementary statement that is equivalent to the RH.

Let H(1) = 1.

Let H(2) = 1 + 1/2.

Let H(3) = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3.

...and so on.

These are called the harmonic numbers.

Let S(1) = 1.

Let S(2) = 1 + 2.

Let S(3) = 1 + 3.

Let S(4) = 1 + 2 + 4.

Let S(5) = 1 + 5.

Let S(6) = 1 + 2 + 3 + 6.

The pattern here is harder to spot than the pattern for the harmonic numbers. S(n) for a positive integer n is the sum of the divisors of n. For instance, 6 is divisible be 1, 2, 3, and 6, so S(6) = 1 + 2 + 3 + 6.

Conjecture: for any positive integer n, S(n) <= H(n) + exp(H(n)) log(H(n)), with equality only when n = 1.

Believe it or not, this conjecture is equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis!

Proof here: [http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/math.NT/0008177/](http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/math.NT/0008177/)

<comment><USER16> That is surprising. It's pretty incredible to see a formulation that doesn't involve any advanced Number Theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That is the most beautifully well-written article about mathematics that I have read in my life.

The explanations made it completely accessible as a CS student with nothing more than calculus experience and familiarity with the concept of the search for primes.

</comment><comment><USER19> I knew about the Wiki [http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Bounded_...](http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Bounded_gaps_between_primes)

However, I did not know about the solo paper [http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.4600](http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.4600)

      In their celebrated paper [5], Goldston,
      Pintz and Yıldırım introduced a new method for counting
      tuples of primes, and this allowed
      them to show that [eq 1.1]

      The recent breakthrough of Zhang [9] managed
      to extend this work to prove [eq 1.2]

"Sieve methods" say integer properties like divisibility are essentially random. This is how we can show two integer randomly chosen are relativley prime with probabilty pi²/6= 0.608...

[http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/64498/probability- th...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/64498/probability-that-two- random-numbers-are-coprime)

Here we are trying to count primes separated by certain small gaps.

</comment><comment><USER20> Montreal..on the map, finally. There's a lot of talent here.

<comment><USER21> Montreal was already on the map for Bixi. And probably other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not a mathematician, but this is an interesting subject to me.

Does this imply a certain density to prime numbers? And given this new information, does it mean that it could be less computationally hard to find or verify primes?

<comment><USER23> The overall density of primes is known, and decreases continuously as the numbers get larger (See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem))

What this theorem says is that no matter how large the numbers get, no matter how sparsely the primes are spread out, _on average_ , there will always be pairs of primes that are relatively close (within 600 of each other)

<comment><USER24> "on average" is the wrong concept here. Just leave it out of your sentence and it's correct.

<comment><USER25> That's what I thought, but if you apply "on average" to the clause preceding it rather than the one following it, it is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The bigger implication is that if you know the frequency of prime numbers and have a way to calculate when to expect them the difficulty in calculating new large primes is greatly reduced. In effect the strength of all encryption based on Primes is greatly reduced.

BitCoin, PGP, HTTPS, Certs, all just got orders of magnitude easier to crack. Well not just... It will take a little bit for time to use this information to create optimizations for beating each of these. But soon.

<comment><USER27> What? No. RSA doesn't depend on finding prime numbers, it depends on factoring large numbers, which is a completely separate problem. Elliptic curve cryptography doesn't depend on prime factorization at all.

Even if they did, I don't think this really helps you; knowing that there _exist_ arbitrarily many primes within N doesn't help you find primes any faster.

<comment><USER26> What do you think Factors are? Do you know what a Prime is? Do you know what a Factor Is?

I am skipping the rest of your arguments since. "What, Yes" is more correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A mathematician once told me that he doesn't appreciate research which leads to small improvement of a bound, but only research that leads to a conceptual novelty (like possibility). I guess this story shows that there is room for both.

</comment><comment><USER29> I might be way off here ... but does this not have implications for RSA encryption .. isnt the whole concept resting on the fact that two prime numbers cant be factored ... (I don't know shit about encryption obviously)

<comment><USER30> It has not actually been proven that RSA is backed by the difficulty of factoring. That is to say, it may be possible to break RSA without an efficient way to factor numbers. However, an efficient way to factor numbers does break RSA.

Having said that, there is no obvious way that this result helps with factoring. Indeed, the Twin Prime Conjecture states that the gap is actually 2. Obviously, this has not been proven, but if there was a way to use a proof of this fact to efficiently factor numbers, then we would have used that method without the proof. If it ends up not working, then we would have disproven the Twin Prime Conjecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maynard is too eager. He talked too much that is a coincidence. But the fact is that he is a member of the polymath project and all the works are consequences rather than coincidence.</comment>


Ask HN: If you self publish a book and sell via iBooks can you do well? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
I've put together a draft of a book - it's a photo book with quotes from a bunch of inspiring people. The pictures are great, the quotes are cool and it's about 100 pages long. I've created the book via blurb. My question is has anyone published this type of book (picture/photo book) via the iBooks store? And if you have, did it do well?
I am not so interested in making money but instead getting eyeballs on it. Is iBooks a possible way forward do you think? Any other advice?
thanks! <comment><USER2> Take a look at books like yours on iBook, compare price etc. If you self published = you get it all, less the 30% to Apple. If you have a publisher he will not use iBooks because their profit will be larger than his or yours.

Attracting the eyeballs to consider buying your book. That is what AMazon and iBooks does well, as do publishers. Eyeballs cosr $$ per click, 5 cents and upwards. Publishers usually give away a number of paper books to hope for good reviews. What does Amazon or iBooks do?

See if you can find some self publishing sites, with near zero fees and see how popular they are.</comment>


Google responds to Oracle's patent lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/05/google-responds-to-oracles-android-patent-lawsuit-we-break-it/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a summary posted by Engadget. I thought it'd be more friendly than the full doc.

Here's the link to the full document if anyone's interested: [http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/oracle- google-a...](http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/oracle-google- answer.pdf)

<comment><USER2> But the full document is unintentionally hilarious.

The various invocations of

 _Google is without knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations of paragraph _, and therefore denies them._

amused me greatly when I looked at what was denied. Similarly there was a lot of _Google denies any remaining allegations of paragraph _._ when every claim of that paragraph had been admitted.

<comment><USER3> Not a lawyer, but knowingly infringing on a patent opens one to treble damages: <http://www.patent-infringement.org/recover.html>

So maybe it's legal speak for "Regardless of what the patents say, we weren't aware of them."

<comment><USER2> You clearly did not compare the documents. Google denied statements such as that Oracle is a software company, is headquartered where it is headquartered, and denied that Oracle purchased Sun and owns the copyrights to Java.

Worry about triple damages was not the reason.

<comment><USER3> You're right. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a diagram showing who is suing who in the mobile space: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft-m...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft- motorola-android-patent-lawsuit)

<comment><USER5> Much clearer redesign of the diagram: <http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1252039209>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I understood correctly, Google is positioning itself not only to defend Android for themselves, but to further open the Java platform and support Apache Harmony in the process. This sound like great news.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not a lawyer, but I'd summarize: In Google's view, their use of the parts of the Harmony code as is allowed as the Harmony code is a clean room implementation and Android doesn't use that code to run Java, so there was no need to get licenses from Sun/Oracle. Regarding patents, they simply claim they don't infringe, I don't see that they claim why -- maybe because they don't actually use any code, but the device makers who install them on their hardware?

<comment><USER8> Clean room design would be a defense against the copyright charge. They broke clean room design by hiring engineers from sun, jvm engineers etc. Even google's ceo came from sun and he lead java at sun.

The patents are integral to the JVM.

Google should have bought Palm and Sun for the patents.

.NET can step on the JVM patents: <http://www.itworld.com/040409microsoftlegal>

They got lucky with yahoo: [http://news.cnet.com/Google,-Yahoo-bury-the-legal- hatchet/21...](http://news.cnet.com/Google,-Yahoo-bury-the-legal- hatchet/2100-1024_3-5302421.html) They could have been pushed out of the space. They are use to getting sweet deals in stomping on others patents, copyrights, etc.

<comment><USER7> > They broke clean room design by hiring engineers from sun, jvm engineers > etc.

AFAIK not unless Oracle proves that exactly these engineers were involved. And a lot more must be first proved to establish even "involved in what."

> The patents are integral to the JVM.

Google doesn't use JVM in Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it whatsoever possible for Google to get a group of companies together and counter-sue Oracle and Microsoft en masse? I mean Motorola isn't without a strong patent portfolio, and I doubt they'd be the only ones on board?

Forgive me if its a naive thought, but it seems like we might just be seeing the beginning of Google patent issues (and I obviously treat the MS/Motorola thing as a Google patent issue).

Is the risk of pissing off MS/Oracle too great (not for Google, but for potential allies?)

Why haven't they gone nuclear yet?! I wanna see that bad.

<comment><USER10> Google already licensed the patents from Microsoft that Microsoft is now suing Motorola over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, the standard opening moves to the multi-year patent litigation dance.

</comment><comment><USER12> On a related note, I haven't heard much on here / proggit about MS sueing motorola over android patents, any news there?

</comment><comment><USER13> it's gonna be so much fun, can't wait.</comment>


Why the iPhone doesn't have copy+paste - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2007/08/clipboard_and_arrows

<comment><USER2> This article's justifications for why the feature is missing typifies everything I hate about macs and their apologists. It's the whole 'we know better than you' about what you should be allowed to do. Give me an environment that is alive with all sorts of applications, methods of use and even viruses/trojans any day over this sterile Mac-world

<comment><USER3> I haven't missed copy and paste. I'm glad that they left it out, because it's another chance to introduce even more bugs into the iPhone (the thing crashes around once every other day).

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's best not to introduce more features lest they introduce more bugs. Let's just use white shiny plastic boxes connected with a metal cable then, shall we?

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what your point is, but I'll take the iPhone the way it is now rather than chance even more bugs. There's no reason to need copy and paste except under extremely specific circumstances that don't come up often.

It's not a laptop.

<comment><USER4> Actually there is. I use a blackberry which also has a similar feature - if a number on a web page looks like a phone number you can just click it and it will call the number. However I routinely need to copy paste things from one email to another or from a web page to an email.

You may be happy with your iphone, good for you. My point is that you can't call a feature extraneous just because you don't need it and that if you have to reduce features to reduce bugs you have a very serious problem. If your engineers are prone to writing buggy code, the product will be buggy even if it has very few features and vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use an iPhone daily and there have only been a few times I've missed copy and paste. Usually it's been when I'm tapping out a reply email or posting on a site such as YC News and need to quote someone. To route around the lack of copy and paste my replies end up being similar to using a word you know how to spell instead of one you don't; I just write what I think rather than writing about what someone else has written and think nothing of it. There are certainly cases when this analogy doesn't hold and copy and paste functionality would be nice, but it's definitely by design that there isn't one.

Constraining developers and themselves to create simpler ways to do things is smart of Apple. Emailing photos is the perfect example: I want to email this photo that is on my screen -- not open my "photo application", copy a photo, go back to the main screen, open my "email application" and paste the photo. Most of the copy and paste scenarios can be handled in a similar way: links to maps, links to phone numbers, links to URLs, and so on.

Maybe there are better ways to perform actions on mobile platforms instead of following the decades-old clunky mouse way to do them?

</comment><comment><USER6> because is the not the nokia N95

apple repeated the same mistake they made with the mac 20 years ago, thats why the will never lead the mobile market.

<comment><USER7> oh, man. now there is a bet i would really, really like to take.

i used a motorola razr for a year, then got an iphone as soon as possible. i wouldn't go back for any reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it is retarded that I have to manually re-write stuff that is already in an email into a text message or vice versa. At least several times every day I wish my iphone had copy and paste</comment>


Homes of wealthy Americans have carbon footprints 25% higher than lower-income - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-07-homes-wealthy-americans-carbon-footprints.html <comment><USER2> This figure ought to be compared to the square footage, I'd imagine that the wealth homes are more efficient pre square foot and that the low incoming housing lacks repairs and upgraded insulation.

They also seem to neglect climate and weather in their state comparison. Three northern states with minimal population are the most energy intensive, while 3 states with large land areas are the least intensive. There seems to be a strong connection I would have investigated and accounted for. Those northern states have some of the toughest winters and heating is not cheap.</comment>


Ask HN: Millionaires of HN, how did you go from $0 to $1m. How long did it take? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> About twelve years, spanning my first two startups. Would have taken longer, but the sale of #2 coincided with the end of the dotcom era. (We were definitely _not_ a dotcom company, but we rode the wave.)

</comment><comment><USER3> 14 years after my first job. The lost decade after the dot com crash didn't help. 1M to 2M took a lot less time. Then last quarter happened...</comment>


Willa Cather, Pioneer - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/27/willa-cather-pioneer/ <comment><USER2> I am currently reading "Death comes for the Archbishop". A great writer of the American West.</comment>


Career-Launching Companies Newsletter - <AUTHOR> https://www.smarthires.io/newsletter/career <comment><USER2> Wealthfront's list, cited in the link, constantly misspells "SAN FRANCSICO"

</comment><comment><USER3> A newsletter subscription form doesn't count as a Show HN.

Please read [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

</comment><comment><USER4> You can make a difference working at any company. It doesn't have to be a special one that currently has over 50% growth.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but the amount of difference you make at a company isn't directly proportional to the career value of making that difference. If you make a difference at a company with over 50% growth, that's almost always going to be more valuable to a career than making an equal difference at a company that's going to go bankrupt in a couple years. Similarly, making a small difference at a high growth company will arguably have more value than making a larger difference at a low growth, stagnant, or failing company - assuming your difference doesn't reverse that trend (which it likely wouldn't, regardless of magnitude).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "These 136 companies are on the verge of becoming successul (sic)"

Not a single one of them is "successul" _now_?</comment>


Facebook Traffic Declines 10% in April  - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2008/05/20/facebook-traffic-decline/ <comment><USER2> The year-on-year figure is up 56%, and myspace is also up y-o-y and down from March. Could it be that as spring kicks in, people leave their computers more? Or as end-of-year exams approach, students procrastinate less?

I wouldn't cry wolf just yet.

<comment><USER3> Facebook should be growing internationally enough to cover that hit, shouldn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds pretty bad. They should have seen a big bump as students go into finals (at least in the past it seems like people I know are more active on facebook when they have lots of work to do).

Just from my personal experience, I've noticed less and less of my friends using facebook - people aren't listing parties/events on it anymore, groups are annoying, and the apps are mostly useless spam.

<comment><USER5> _I've noticed less and less of my friends using facebook - people aren't listing parties/events on it anymore, groups are annoying_

Ditto, but that might be just because we're getting older. Maybe first- years/high schoolers still love it as much as we did back then?

Hard to judge without concrete numbers, and only fb has those :-P

</comment></comment><comment> a-priori You know what happens in April? Exams.

To me, all this means is that their prime audience (students) are actually working. It'll be interesting to see what happens with their May numbers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Facebook is boring. I like FriendFeed, Twitter, for keeping in touch, sharing new things, etc.

Only problem is, none of my friends use those (Well, except one), most of my other friends aren't really "early adopter" crowd and essentially a ton of apps and various things plague their Facebook profiles. To me, Facebook seems like a waste of time apart from hooking up with a few older colleagues. Once I hook up with them, I can find other methods to stay in touch (IM, Email, etc)

</comment><comment><USER7> What's strange about it? Facebook, twitter, ...., don't solve any tangible problem: they are generic social networks that are more subject to fashion than intrinsic value, because people to communicate and get in touch need very little: ability to send message, profiles with photos, and so on.

This is why I never understood the facebook buzz around tech people, for example here in YC news: it does not care. I don't want to state that only things like a search engine or a bug tracking system can care. Flickr cares a lot, changed the way people put photos online, is a social community in some way but driven by a common interest: it as a side effect it's a database of images.

The same like delicious, social bookmarking cares: it is a place where you can really find interesting resources, and it is useful for individuals. It is also one of the best applications for tags that is a very important semantic concept.

Instead generic social networks will came and go away one after the other, like Pubs do: they are mostly about fashion.

</comment><comment><USER8> School's out and it's warm. I'll get back online when I get bored of the pool.

<comment><USER9> You're online now...

<comment><USER8> Touché. Though, I'm at work, and YC looks a lot better than Facebook on my screen as co-workers look on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You know what happens in may? Prom. That means tons of pictures. That means tons of traffic.

</comment><comment><USER11> Removing the clutter is definitely a step in the right direction, not sure if its a big enough step...

</comment><comment><USER12> Social networking is a commercial trend. Why? Technology replacing social life in the real world is a bad idea.</comment>


Doing a Job (1982) - <AUTHOR> https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm <comment><USER2> This article is great. I particularly liked this part:

> Some management experts advocate strict limits to the number of people > reporting to a common superior—generally five to seven. But if one has > capable people who require but a few moments of his time during the day, > there is no reason to set such arbitrary constraints. Some forty key people > report frequently and directly to me. This enables me to keep up with what > is going on and makes it possible for them to get fast action.

It's interesting to know that at least one successful manager of a large organisation found that limit of 5 or so direct reports to be unnecessary. The article was written in 1982. I would have thought the increased use of technology in the workplace would make it easier to manage many people these days – but the trend seems to be the reverse.

<comment><USER3> It just depends on the nature of the reporting - if you need intensive reporting from your directs, then yes, less is more - if your people work in relative isolation then more is more.

<comment><USER4> Right, it's silly to compare the line manager of 40 assembly line workers doing the same task, vs a leader of a SEAL team.

<comment><USER3> You can have one manager managing 20 engineers doing project work too, because often there is a project manager attached managing the specific issues with the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > When doing a job—any job—one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he > will remain in the job forever. He must look after his work just as > conscientiously, as though it were his own business and his own money.

I hear this kind of talk from managers at my workplace as well. Extreme ownership seems like the management technique du jour. I am quite sceptical of it. I'll treat the work as my own business when it _is_ my own business and when I have a significant stake in the outcome. Otherwise, I am just a guy you pay to do a job, not a business partner and definitely not a loyal slave.

</comment><comment><USER6> > All work should be checked through an independent and impartial review. In > engineering and manufacturing, industry spends large sums on quality > control.

I feel that the code reviews I've been a part of were not as effective as they could have been. I think there is social awkwardness at criticizing design or conceptual aspects, and a multitasking aspect that means the reviewer is in a hurry and mostly checks conformity to the style guide. Very little checking out of branches and manual testing happened, so we had more regressions than expected.

Is this the norm? What practices have you seen that lead to better results?

<comment><USER7> I think code reviews on teams without architects are awkward. Someone naturally might step up to take on that role, but if there's no clear decision maker for hard technical choices, then it's just a bunch of awkward, passive suggestions. And with no clear leadership, it's hard to resolve disputes. People need to be empowered to do their jobs, but I've noticed that on a lot of dev teams that empowerment isn't explicit. So you end up with the strongest personality being the one that makes important technical decisions or architecture decisions, regardless of whether or not they're qualified. Personally, I'm not a fan of this approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > When important decisions are not documented, one becomes dependent on > individual memory, which is quickly lost as people leave or move to other > jobs. In my work, it is important to be able to go back a number of years to > determine the facts that were considered in arriving at a decision. This > makes it easier to resolve new problems by putting them into proper > perspective. It also minimizes the risk of repeating past mistakes. Moreover > if important communications and actions are not documented clearly, one can > never be sure they were understood or even executed.

In my limited experience, I have not seen this done effectively in a software project. What does this actually look like when done properly? Ie, how do you store the data and keep it from becoming busy work?

<comment><USER8> Git is an immutable history of all work ever done on code.

Take a look here: [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master)

And here: [https://lkml.org/](https://lkml.org/)

Wikipedia does a pretty good job of maintaining document and discussion history as well.

In both projects, you can pull on any random thread and trace it all the way back to its origin. And if the team (and maintainer) is doing a great job of capturing the thought process behind a decision in commit messages (as Linus does so well), then you're in really great shape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One small past thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18153566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18153566)</comment>


US, without a hint of irony, warns US travelers about privacy threats in Sochi - <AUTHOR> http://privacysos.org/node/1320

<comment><USER2> It is allowed only to NSA. :)</comment>


Pokémon [GBA Ruby Sapphire Emerald] source code leaks, new details discovered - <AUTHOR> https://nintendoeverything.com/pokemon-gen-3-source-code-leaks-some-new-details-discovered/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original title used Pokémon generation numbering which may be unfamiliar to casual fans of the series. An edit for clarity was made. The original title was:

Pokemon Gen 3 source code leaks, some new details discovered</comment>


A Backlash Builds Against Sexual Harassment in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/technology/silicon-valley-sexual-harassment.html <comment><USER2> The fact that a backlash against self-evidently disgusting behavior needs to 'build' is disturbing.

<comment><USER3> There are many facets to this backlash (if indeed there is one). At the most fundamental level nobody disputes that women have a right to the same kind of respect that men receive (including not being harassed), or that women have a right to the same opportunities as men do.

But the devil is in the details. For example, there are a lot of insane ideas thrown around as to how to fix the problem. There are people who argue accusations of harassment should not only be taken seriously (which everyone agrees with) but also be automatically taken as true regardless of their veracity and verifiability, and with the the social, personal and professional cost suffered by those accused being an irrelevant detail.

Second, is this is a Silicon Valley problem, or every-industry problem? How are women treated in the NY Times newsroom compared to Google compared to GM? This is always side-stepped or is treated in a sloppy manner. This sloppiness is evident in the original NY Times article which profiled personal experiences of a number of women in tech with no attempt to verify the claims or set it in a wider context. In the most memorable example, Dave McClure was outed by name in the article for asking one of the women out as she was applying for a position of at his company. Unprofessional? Yes. Creepy? Yes. But that crime relative to the public shaming in an international newspaper read by millions, isn't justified. The irony of that specific case is that there were more egregious examples of McClure's conduct that may actual warrant this public shaming, but that would require some actual journalism.

<comment><USER4> Second all the points you made.

There are other unintended consequences that are also worrying. I'm a bisexual/pansexual man and software engineer and the climate has become so antagonistic between the sexes in the past few years that I personally feel a massive relief whenever a professional setting is devoid of attractive women. I feel no such concern with attractive men or unattractive people of any gender. Even the most innocent interactions these days are liable be construed as harassment, especially by those with a socialized victimhood-mentality.

The fact that accusations based on perceptions/interpretations of the accuser involving situations and circumstances that are often highly ambiguous are accepted as unassailable fact is highly troubling. There is no room for nuance and misunderstanding anymore. The fear of public reprisal through shaming over misunderstanding and ambiguity is very palpable and meets the criteria for a hostile work environment.

Personally, I have the luck of being relatively attractive, but I have concerns for less attractive male colleagues whose innocent interactions will almost invariably be taken as creepy simply by virtue of being less attractive. The precariousness of their situation is made worse when some of these colleagues are on the aspie/autistic side of the spectrum and are often wholly unaware of how their interactions may be misinterpreted. Engineering used to be a safe haven for those on that end of the spectrum, where they didn't have to worry about their inability to pick up on nuanced social cues they don't possess the psychological skills to readily perceive in realtime so they are aware of a potential transgression before they commit it.

Work environments designed and curated by neurotypicals is actively hostile to those that are not neurotypical and we're witnessing the colonization of one of few professional areas where those who are not-neurotypical could safely operate. For all the talk of the value of diversity, cognitive diversity is never ever considered or even a topic of conversation.

To be clear, I'm not excusing overt and unambiguous sexual harassment. I'm merely making the point that human sexuality and human socialization are very messy affairs and that most situations are hardly ever free of ambiguity and misunderstanding. If we don't acknowledge that there often is a grey area, we risk creating very hostile social spaces for those who don't have neurotypical privilege and have little to no sexual capital to mitigate their interactions from being considered "creepy" by default.

[http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html](http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html)

[http://ozarque.livejournal.com/176349.html](http://ozarque.livejournal.com/176349.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Susan Fowler tweeted that Chris Sacca has been DMing her on Twitter, tring to "manipulate" her to stop tweeting about him. This after his blog post claiming to be changing his ways.

[https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/881198112923987968](https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/881198112923987968)

<comment><USER6> Isn't such a statement without example a form of public manipulation? The NYT article that got this going only said about Sacca, "At a mostly male tech gathering in Las Vegas in 2009, Susan Wu, an entrepreneur and investor, said that Mr. Sacca, an investor and former Google executive, touched her face without her consent in a way that made her uncomfortable." And Sacca publicly responded, "Yesterday, the New York Times wrote that, back in 2009, a woman I knew well at the time accused me of touching her face at a mutual friend's party in Las Vegas. At the time, we had known each other for years, were in a private party setting in Vegas, not a work event, with no investor-investee relationship, we were not in business together, we didn't work together in any capacity, and I also wasn't even a venture capitalist yet as I didn't close my first fund until May of 2010. There was no imbalance of power between us."

Given this, would a message to Susan Fowler, concerning tweets, "That's really gross. And so many people praised him for it! Ew! No!" and "Wait, so: the day before a story is published in the NYT about him being a creep, @sacca writes a medium post about how much he's evolving" asking her to not continue attacking him be necessarily unjustified?

A message that encourages her to direct her energy more constructively towards the real perpetrators could be called manipulative, but if many would find them agreeable, they'd never be posted by Susan, as they'd reveal her to be acting manipulatively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One interesting thing to me is use of the word "outed" to refer to people who commit sexual harassment:

> "Some men have the feeling that the conversation has turned into a witch > hunt," said Aileen Lee, a founder of Cowboy Ventures. "They're asking when > people will stop being outed."

Now, when I think about being outed, it's definitely in an LGBT sense. But in general, I feel when you are "outed" it's about something that might be bad, but you can't change, and shouldn't really matter anyway. Some examples would be being gay, previously being convicted with an unrelated crime, etc. Being outed is usually bad, as it usually means that you're divulging information that reflects poorly on the person who to a group who doesn't know it.

So what's the difference between being "outed" and being "called out"/"reported"/etc? I'd say it's bad purpose/intent or harm to others. I don't say I outed that meth dealer to the cops right?

I also recently saw this in a reply to a comment I made here on HN, about how the commenter hopes people won't "out" those managers who don't feel it's appropriate for members of the opposite sex to have 1:1's alone.

It's an interesting choice of words, and it does get the point across. But to me, this sticks in my throat, because it seems like people are implicitly saying it's okay to do these things, as long as nobody knows. Which seems to be and have been the status quo.

</comment><comment><USER8> Now that women can mostly route around the venture industry by doing crowdfunding, have the demographics of teams that raise money changed significantly? Already one of the biggest ICOs, Tezos, is run by a female entrepreneur, and so is the upcoming AI Gang ICO, but I don't know of any overall statistics.

I wonder to what extent, if any, these scandals are coming out now due to things like AngelList and ERC-20 being viable-ish funding options.

<comment><USER9> There's a meme around that if you crowdfund the VC industry will see this as "negative signaling" and blackball you.

I have wondered first of all if it's true. Good numbers are good numbers right? Is a VC going to pass on a great deal because they crowdfunded a prior round?

Secondly if it is true it seems self serving protectionism, like taxi companies trying to scare you away from Uber and Lyft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The biggest issue here is not that Dave is a creep and that he has been let go.

The biggest issue is that the leaders of this 500 Startups organization let this go on for years without taking action.

Who are the people who let their organization's logo and name appear in this guy's slides together with the words "GET YOU LAID (=SEX)"?

[https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/dmc500hats/how-to- pitch-a-...](https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/dmc500hats/how-to-pitch-a-vc- sept-2010)

It does not matter if they are men or women. THEY ARE COMPLICIT in this mess.

<comment><USER11> You assume a company should be all serious. There are way worse stuff in South Park, Monty Python or Naked Gun. The slide is just an attempt at being funny. It may not make you laught, you may find this humor borderline, you may want this should never happen in your company, but it's not shocking that they allowed this in there.

What are shocking are sexist actions. Any agressive/unfair action toward somebody actually, this is not a gender issue.

The dubious slide ?

Meh.

<comment><USER12> But those movies are clearly meant as comedy and everyone watching it knows that.

Some comedians say things that are accepted because they are comedians and anyone repeating their jokes in public in a setting where it might be taken quite differently than as a joke might get into some trouble for doing so.

I really do not see how the two compare..

<comment><USER11> If I watch this slide, I'm not going to take it to the letter. Only an idiot would. "bigger is better" ? You take that phrase seriously in a corporate slide ? It's clearly an attempt to humor. I get you don't find that funny. I just don't get how shocked everyone is.

The US elected a president that "grab them by the pussy". You have real problems. Those slides are not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love it if someone with the skills could do a sentiment analysis of all the comments under SV sexism/sexual harassment articles posted to HN, and quantify the amount of denialism versus recognition there is, as well as graph whether there is at least a downward trend in denialism, whether the tipping point mentioned in the article is happening.

On this topic I've been disappointed in HN more often than not. HN users pride themselves on objectivity, but sadly much of it is ditched in favor of defensiveness (or the other dismissive reactions mentioned in the article) when SV culture is put under a critical microscope.

<comment><USER14> > HN users pride themselves on objectivity, but sadly much of it is ditched in > favor of defensiveness (or the other dismissive reactions mentioned in the > article) when SV culture is put under a critical microscope.

Can you clarify how exactly objectivity clashes with opinions on fairly subjective matters(e.g. sexism)? Is there an objective standard of sexism that was applied in a rigorous analysis of "SV culture"(whatever that is..) that HN users are being defensive about? Can you provide some examples to what you mean?

<comment><USER15> What's necessarily subjective about sexism?

<comment><USER14> I had two objections to parent's point, so forgive me for ranting on a bit here.

The strict definition of sexism is a mindset, and the only way to reliably determine that mindset is to have a mind-reading device. That means that almost every time we evaluate sexism, we use a heuristic, and choosing which heuristics to apply is necessarily subjective. For example, I find most of the sexism controversies do not have clear indicators of sexism, but I acknowledge that I applied my own opinion to determine those, and opinions can differ.

Since the strict definition of sexism is difficult to apply, it's also possible to use an operative definition and still remain objective. If we could agree to a set of heuristics, a set of measurable actions through which we can objectively determine that something is "sexism", then we could use that to make our judgement calls. However, I don't see such a standard proposed and agreed upon - in fact, the reason the issue is so controversial is that it seems there is very little "standard" about sexism that we agree on, and opinions about it have a lot of variance. I think it's normal for HN users to then express skepticism and criticize an ad-hoc application of rules to slap a label on someone when we can't agree on what that label means.

This is why I was looking for an objective standard to replace the dictionary definition of the word, which HN users agreed upon and then failed to apply when "SV culture" was put under a microscope.

EDIT: reduced repetition and improved wording.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Private sharing has never been needed more - <AUTHOR> http://drop.mx/blog/private-sharing-has-never-been-needed-more.php

<comment><USER2> This is really true... Instagram is off their rocker. I don't see how many people can stick with that service after what they are trying to do.</comment>


Memory Footprint of GUI Toolkits - <AUTHOR> https://szibele.com/memory-footprint-of-gui-toolkits/ <comment><USER2> Flutter's memory use is between 80-100MB??!! That's just as much as Carlo [1] or Lorca [2], that use Chrome as the front end! This is NOT what I expected, and certainly not in line with the "lean, performant" GUI marketing that flutter claims

[1]: [https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo)

[2]: [https://github.com/zserge/lorca](https://github.com/zserge/lorca)

<comment><USER3> There's an update at the end of the article saying that all Flutter builds are currently debug, and have tools enabled.

<comment><USER2> OR - since flutter re-uses chromium code (Skia, etc ..) and possibly has an IPC architecture similar to a browser to isolate the dart VM from rendering/painting pipeline, flutter's memory and CPU footprint is _likely_ to be close to chromium, despite best efforts.

Maybe someone from the flutter team can comment on this as I'm postulating here.

<comment><USER4> You don't need someone from the Flutter team to tell you that that's jumping to wild conclusions. Skia is a mere blip in Chromium (both in terms of source code and resource usage).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be interesting to see input latency comparison.

</comment><comment><USER6> What was the electron version? Would be nice to see if it decrease or increase with releases.

Also it would be nice to benchmarck with [https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo) With an up to date chrome instance (76) And optionally with chrome canary. And optionally again with some chrome flags: E.g [https://www.google.fr/amp/s/www.digitaltrends.com/computing/...](https://www.google.fr/amp/s/www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google- chrome-finally-reduce-memory-usage/%3famp)

Cordova and geckoview would be nice to test too.

But _please_ at least test on modern electron AND Carlo to show us how modern Web app Empty window compare to other GUIs empty window.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't expect it to be much better, but if the author included two Java frameworks, he could as well have included SWT.

</comment><comment><USER8> A lot of those are not GUI toolkits.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems that the cross platform GUI toolkit with least memory footprint is FLTK...

<comment><USER5> Nope, nana. [http://nanapro.org/en-us/](http://nanapro.org/en-us/)</comment></comment>


Did Coronavirus Leak from Lab? Experts Disagree - <AUTHOR> https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronavirus-is-not-a-bioweapon-they-disagree-on-whether-it-could-have-leaked-from-a-research-lab/ <comment><USER2> The article needs to be read. "Experts disagree" is a palimpsest of what it actually says. Experts say it's hugely unhelpful to run this story is what it also says.</comment>


Show HN: I made a web wrapper for the Spleeter algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://voxremover.com/ <comment><USER2> Are you allowed to make money using their algorithm? Did you verify that?

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't work very well for the hip hop track I tried (which has very repetitive accompaniment). It might be a bit too good to be true unfortunately.</comment>