Standing Workstation - <AUTHOR> http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/04/18/how-i-made-a-standing-workstation-for-1999/

<comment><USER3> I often work standing up. One thing he missed, probably because he uses a laptop, is that it is more comfortable when standing to have your keyboard quite a bit lower than your monitor. For some reason, it feels more uncomfortable to me to have my elbows bent as much as would be necessary to have the keyboard directly below the monitor. I have my keyboard at about 42 inches (navel height) which is also where I have my fine assembly workbenches (for electronics and other small work). My monitor I have raised higher, with my eye level about one-third from the top of the screen. Footrests do help, but I just have file boxes around that I can rest my feet on when needed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmm, seems like this writeup is missing the vital recommendation that you have a foot rest and alternate between elevating one foot, elevating the other foot, and having both feet on the floor. I've tried working standing up without a footrest and found it intolerable after a short time, but with alternating feet height I can work standing for extended periods of time - <USER2> me feet/knees/back are happier than when I work seated.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have been trying to work on a treadmill for the last 2 days. The platform shakes, the motor is noisy at low RPMs and so far isn't sustainable for a long period of time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I also think often that it would be much greater to be working standing. Anyone tried?

<comment><USER6> I started about a year ago. I found that I have better focus at work and more energy at the end of the day. I'm happy I made the switch.

My work involves periods of concentration where I'm focused on my workstation for hours. And also periods of activity when I have to move frequently to and from my desk. Remaining standing makes the transition to and from workstation much less of a distraction.

Lessons learned:

\- it's not for everybody.

\- your co-workers/boss may make Rumsfeld jokes about you. (But you will have the Benjamin Franklin / Winston Churchill retort)

\- it will take a week or two for your body to make the transition.

\- a stool or drafter's chair will help with the transition.

\- "Standing Desks" are outrageously expensive. Unless you can find something like Ikea's (out of production) Jerker Desk, or BYO.

\- plan to play with the height adjustment. Your first guess may be uncomfortable. So ensure your desk makes this easy.

\- budget for comfortable shoes and/or standing mat(s).</comment></comment>


Markets are strong, but big startup M&A deals just aren't happening - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/05/markets-are-strong-but-big-startup-ma-deals-just-arent-happening <comment><USER2> The very high multiples are one obvious issue as noted in the article.

The other, is that there are simply a lot less public companies available today to do acquisitions. There are 40% fewer public companies versus 1997, in an economy well over twice as big in nominal dollar terms.

Companies like Tumblr and Polyvore were eaten by Yahoo for large sums. There is no Yahoo to throw around its market cap for acquisitions now. There's also no AOL, and so on. There has been substantial consolidation, with fewer replacement buyers coming into the market via IPO. Is Verizon going to spot the next Flickr? I wouldn't bet on it.

Further, Chinese tech companies, many of which have plenty of money to spend, are finding it almost impossible to make large foreign acquisitions now, due to Xi's very tight policies on capital controls. That has gotten a lot worse in the last year.

<comment><USER3> Yea it is a bullshit situation. Western companies cant acquire chinese ones and chinese ones cant or wont acquire the western ones.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate on why that is a bullshit situation?

<comment><USER5> If you believe in laissez-faire or neoliberal capitalism, the actions of the Chinese government are obstructing "the natural order of things" and are hence bullshit.

<comment><USER6> Given how thoroughly laissez-faire and neoliberalism have fucked the world over, especially the world's poor, you might forgive us for not thinking it's bullshit as strongly as you do.

<comment><USER7> Source?

Extreme poverty has been rapidly decreasing in the past few decades

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Confused: strong public markets are an argument for IPOS.

They are not an argument for M&A. If the acquiring company pays in stock, it may even be an argument against M&A (unless you think it is just "temporarily inflated").

<comment><USER9> Agreed. Strong markets are when startups IPO and established companies merge.

We have seen some big startup IPOs ( like SNAP ) and some decent mergers especially in the pharma sector ( for tax benefits ).</comment></comment>


The Myth of the 'Transparent Society' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/03/securitymatters_0306

<comment><USER3> This is a really great quote: "Forced openness in government reduces the relative power differential between the two, and is generally good. Forced openness in laypeople increases the relative power, and is generally bad. "

</comment><comment><USER4> No real compelling points to the article and it brings up a number of arguments which appear to support the proposition it is purporting to rebut.

The overwhelming impression I get of this guy's world view is that it is all a zero sum game and the most important question to worry about is the distrubution of this finite amount of power.

<comment><USER5> I think you missed his point. He certainly isn't worried about redistribution of power.

I don't think he'd argue that any citizen should have the power of a police officer to arrest someone. That could involve a great deal of violence, and officers are trained for those situations.

His point is more that given existing asymmetry in power, symmetric exposure of information is not equivalent.

You can find out about a cop arresting you. The Cop can find out about you. But the cop can do so much more with that information, and can do it faster.

He often has argued for the inherent benefit of privacy.

<comment><USER4> I was talking about the world view that appears to underpin his opinions - <USER2> specifically what he was trying to say in the article.

So what if 'symmetric exposure to information is not equivalent'? If the net result is benefit then isn't that a good thing? By net result I mean

i.e. net result = gain/disadvantage for cop + gain/disadvantage for non-cop

His argument is that a smaller gain for members of the public plus a larger gain for cops if somehow bad. But if both parties gain what is the problem? Well if you don't really believe that extra 'value' can be created in the world (zero sum game) then you don't see it as both parties gaining. You view it as one party gaining value (power) at the expense of another. This appeared to be the assumption he was making.</comment></comment></comment>


Free course from Yale University teaches happiness and positivity - <AUTHOR> https://sfree.life/happiness-course-positivity-free/ <comment><USER2> Earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22714203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22714203)

Also a bit from 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16250184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16250184)

</comment><comment><USER3> To those who may be less interested in this course, the article has a link to a different one - Elements of AI, from a Helsinki University. From what I can gather it's the very basics, but could still be quite beneficial to those who want to learn a bit about AI.

[https://www.elementsofai.com/](https://www.elementsofai.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be a consistently popular course. For anybody who took it, did it teach you to be happier or more positive?

</comment><comment><USER5> The creator of the course, Professor Laurie Santos also has a podcast on the same topic which is quite good: [https://www.happinesslab.fm/](https://www.happinesslab.fm/)

</comment><comment><USER6> The link to the course:

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well- being](https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being)</comment>


Trigger Happy: An opensource clone of IFTTT - <AUTHOR> https://trigger-happy.eu/ <comment><USER2> Is there anyone relying on IFTTT (or Huginn, or this) for non-trivial things?

There was never any vital day-to-day things I could build with IFTTT: I could email myself the daily forecast or things like that, but it was never a killer app for me. Most of the popular recipes[1] I see on IFTTT seem like fun little annoyances that would ultimately get distracting.

If it's really crucial to how you work day-to-day, what are you doing with it?

[1]: [https://ifttt.com/discover](https://ifttt.com/discover)

<comment><USER3> Absolutely, I have medication that I have to take the 72 hours so I have a recipe that the checks Google calendar for the event that says "medication", and when the recipe finds it at 7:15 AM every 3rd day it makes all of the LIFX bulbs in the house flash green. This is my only reminder as relying upon these recipes for life-saving medication is not a good idea, but it has been an excellent aid d'memoir which hasn't let me down once in about 3 years.

I am quadriplegic and IFTTT as the central hope the so many different aspects of my life that I would be completely lost without it, it's a brilliant tool for disabled people even though it wasn't designed as such. I must have 30 or 40 recipes that I use on a daily basis for things ranging from medication reminders, turning the lights on and off, controlling the fan in my bedroom, turning the lights off in the house when I go out and turning them back on again when I come home amongst loads of other things. It would take something pretty spectacular to tempt me away from their service.

That said, not entirely convinced about the new changes, maybe it's just teething troubles but I've had problems with a couple of recipes over the past week that have been rock solid for at least 3 years so hopefully they will settle down because that would be fairly catastrophic failure if they didn't.

Still, 9/10 would recommend!

<comment><USER4> > ...turning the lights on and off, controlling the fan in my bedroom, turning > the lights off in the house when I go out and turning them back on again > when I come home amongst loads of other things.

Do you have some sort of smart-home controller that controls these devices (e.g. a Wink or SmartThings hub) and IFTTT integrates with said controller? If so, what about the hub is insufficient and requires you to use IFTTT?

I ask because as someone who thinks IFTTT is neat, every time I look at any recipes especially regarding home automation, I don't see anything that I couldn't do with home-assistant or even with my Wink hub or Veralite controller when I used those. Instead, it looks like I'd just be offloading functionality onto a remote service that adds yet another failure point to the system.

<comment><USER3> No, I try to avoid any kind of hub because I don't want to be locked into one particular way of doing things. That's why I chose LIFX over Philips Hue, LIFX bulbs are just plugged in, connected to Wi-Fi and controlled from an app on your iPhone, iPad or laptop and away you go. I didn't want a cupboard full of hubs controlling lots of discrete bits of the house, a hubbard if you will.

So if there is any centre to my system then it is my iPhone and iPad, and I make sure that whichever piece of home automation I buy it has some ability to connect to If This Then That. This has been made infinitely easier with the new Make channel, which means I can just send a POST request from any old bash script to trigger any number of actions.

I've never heard of any of the three things you mentioned, but unless they were all capable of being controlled from the one device, in this case my iPhone then it would be virtually impossible for me to use them. You see the iPhone has world-class access for disabled people, I can do everything with one switch on my wheelchair that an able-bodied person can do with their two hands. Normally disabled access to devices is some terrible and crippled subset of functionality that we've been stuck with, that's when those of us with motor skill difficulties are even thought of at all, for most people disabled means blind and deaf and that's doubly true in technology circles. There is no other group of devices that a quadriplegic and just take out of the box and start using within five minutes then the iPhone, iPhone and any of the computers running OS X, believe me I've searched!

At the moment I have one iPhone with a series of apps, I also have DragonDictate for Mac on my laptop and iMac which allows me to pair up voice commands with AppleScript's and bash scripts. Which means that the number of things I can do is literally endless as long as the piece of hardware I bought has some ability to be controlled via the network.

That's what interests me so much about this project, I would love to bring something that can do what IFTTT can do in-house and maybe run it on a Raspberry Pi so that I'm only reliable on my local network and not the Internet. That would be awesome.

Anyway, I'm going to stop rambling and hope that I've answered some of your questions! I'm happy to answer any you might have, I'm also open to any new idea that would help me control bits of my house more easily.

I have a couple of websites where I detail this sort of stuff, robotsandcake.org is my not-for-profit stuff where I give talks at places like Google and for the UK foreign office in Mexico discussing how technology impacts the disabled, and I also have inventability.net which is basically a collection of hacks and tricks that my partner and I have learned over the past 10 years of my being quadriplegic. That's only been going a few months, so it's still a little light on content but if there's anything you see missing and you'd like me to explain I'd be happy to make a post about it!

Anyway, the people at IFTTT are lovely and I don't want to hurt their feelings by cheating on them behind their back with this young upstart! :-)

<comment><USER4> If you're interested in running things in-house, you should definitely take a look at home assistant.[0]

Also, if you haven't already, check out the Amazon Echo; it has pretty solid support for a lot of home automation tech.

\-- [0] - [https://home-assistant.io/](https://home-assistant.io/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, will do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's also the hugely popular Huginn, if you're on a Ruby stack (Trigger Happy seems to run on Django) [https://github.com/cantino/huginn](https://github.com/cantino/huginn)

<comment><USER6> Huginn is great, but I wish it was easier to chain stuff together. Node RED has an awesome UI, but the building blocks are aimed at something else entirely.

<comment><USER7> What sort of stuff do you find hard to build?

<comment><USER6> Scrapers of sites that involve some conversion of data. The main gripe is that you can't modify a flow of agents in a single interface, so adjusting stuff involves a lot of going back and forth.

<comment><USER7> Agreed- we hope for Scenarios to evolve into this eventually, but I agree that it can be clicky right now for big changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like the perfect kind of app to build on sandstorm.io, since it's something you'd probably want to own on your own servers.

<comment><USER9> I don't think Sandstorm can run daemons or cron jobs as of yet - the apps are stopped after a bit if the user logs off.

<comment><USER10> I think support for cron jobs is coming soon, but the other challenge is that they're still working out the best way to allow apps to make outbound network connections. It's doable now, but requires administrator access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love IFTTT, but one of the biggest missing features is the ability to do If This ... OR this ... Then That... And That And That.

Unfortunately, all of the recipes are one dimensional - so you can't build recipes like "When my nest thermostats senses someone is nearby AND it is 8AM-10AM in morning and it is December or January then turn on the heat on.

If IFTTT implemented this feature there would be a TON of killer recipes out there.

There's a company out there called Yonami (www.yonami.com) that has an app for mobile that sort of does this - but unfortunately it is a bit buggy and doesn't integrate with as many apps.

<comment><USER12> Hey. You can check out www.triggi.com . We support multiple conditions and actions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> for HN, that's not your best page to start with. I'd go with this one [https://blog.trigger-happy.eu/pages/informations.html](https://blog.trigger- happy.eu/pages/informations.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Why did IFTTT become so bad with the recent changes? Why did they have to "improve"?

The updated app is horrible to use compared to the old one.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure but I'm not happy with the change. I thought they did a great job of making conditional logic easy for the masses through their 'recipes'. The new applets hide what little complexity the service previously had and now its just confusing to me.

<comment><USER16> If you're on iOS (Android soon), try Stringify. Multiple ANDs/ORs/cascading actions, etc *I work for Stringify

<comment><USER14> I do not seem to be able to create a flow that when I push the button it will call some URL with certain parameters. Does that exist?

<comment><USER16> Yes - add the 'Maker' thing - it will send HTTP GET/POST/PUT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why the heck haven't Google bought this, or at least made their own clone? It's a superb service.

<comment><USER18> The whole point of the service is to automate stuff so you don't have to open their webpage ever again if done properly. This doesn't bring advertising revenue in.

<comment><USER19> On top of that, this kind of interactions are usually used by power users (individuals, not business), so it wouldn't be as popular nor profitable as they need (e.g.: Google Reader was a fantastic tool but they shut it down anyway).

<comment><USER20> Are you sure ? What are you basing this on ?

I thought Zapier was mostly business, and it's been running for a while now: [https://zapier.com/](https://zapier.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> i saw ifttt advertising an overhaul lately only to find you STILL can't join two conditions (eg. if I leave work AND its past 5pm, send a text)

<comment><USER22> This. IFTTT is much too simplistic for anything useful. Sure I can let it save all Gmail attachments to Google Drive. But if I want to do that for only certain attachments I'm out of luck.

<comment><USER23> If you want to achieve this, you can use Google Apps Script.

I use it to forward certain mails to Slack and to do automatic Gmail clean up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oh and its made with django. Nice. Going to give this a test drive.

</comment><comment><USER25> One of the great things about IFTTT is the number of services that are plugged into it. (They number in the hundreds) this has about 10 which is nice but nearly enough. Also the ones that make it a killer app for me are the gApps integration which this lacks entirely.

</comment><comment><USER26> I can't take this website seriously. But the project seems interesting.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, another guy posted a better link: [https://blog.trigger- happy.eu/pages/informations.html](https://blog.trigger- happy.eu/pages/informations.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> That's a name that I like.

</comment><comment><USER29> Loved the description of Trello. Kanban application. :)

</comment><comment><USER30> The front page does a terrible job of explaining exactly what this product does.

</comment><comment><USER31> A little nitpick, the slider is hugely unnecessary.

<comment><USER32> I wont be against some help for this main page :-) I just try to do my best .</comment></comment>


Understanding the split personality of Iceland's volcanoes - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/understanding-the-split-personality-of-icelands-volcanoes.ars <comment><USER2> This is rather scary.

 _historically, activity at Eyjafjallajökull has frequently preceded eruptions at the nearby Katla, which is a much bigger volcano and contains more rhyolitic magma. Karson said that there's evidence that Katla has produced events that covered all of Iceland in ash, and could have what he termed "broad regional to global impact."_</comment>


German Airbus A320 Plane Crashes in French Alps - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/24/german-a320-airbus-plane-crashes-french-alps

<comment><USER2> Live updates here: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/32030778](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/32030778)

Seems the extra traffic has taken down their website too: [https://www.germanwings.com/en.html](https://www.germanwings.com/en.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Last reported position: [http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/d-aipx/#5d42675](http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/d-aipx/#5d42675)</comment>


Show HN: Call anybody in the USA free through your browser - <AUTHOR> https://www.calltheusafree.com/ <comment><USER2> I havn't tried your service yet but definitely appreciate you doing this and wishing you success!!

I normally use skype or hangout/gvoice to make calls online, but definitely never found them that easy to use, and skype has dropped my calls before which is annoying.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool service! Only drawback is that I wasn't able to find a dial-pad so I couldn't navigate phone trees. Can't complain though as it's a free service that works!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm actually working on the dial pad right now so that should be updated in a day or two.

<comment><USER3> Neat! Looking forward to it! And thanks for the awesome service :)

<comment><AUTHOR> We just added the dialpad, so you should be able to navigate phone trees as well now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you own the actual machines that connect to POTS? Or is this built on top of Twilio or something?

<comment><USER5> Its built on someone's platform, who they are obviously paying through the nose for. Their FAQ says it costs $5 for 250 minute, which is $0.02/min. Comparatively, I sit somewhere around $0.0028/min and I am not trying to optimize my costs by doing LCR on the few tens of thousands of minutes we push. Could probably halve that if I pulled in more providers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? Your costs are as low as that?

Who are you using for your provider?

<comment><USER5> > Really? Your costs are as low as that?

Uhh, yeah, and I know I'm overpaying too (though its just $20 or so). VOIP is a solved problem in the US if you avoid resellers like Twilio, Nexmo, etc and go directly to either a CLEC or a voice wholesaler.

> Who are you using for your provider? Endstream (NPA-NXX) & Bulk Solutions > (Flat rate @ $0.0045/min), but there are cheaper providers out there if you > spend a few hours and set up Freeswitch to do LCR.

We bring in another CLEC for our DIDs (though we have a few dozen with em), SMS/MMS & E911 due to price & convenience, Endstream is still shaping up their offerings in the SMS/MMS arena.

<comment><USER6> "if you spend a few hours and set up Freeswitch to do LCR"

Is this because the cheaper providers don't cover the whole of the US? I mean, you're using different providers for different number ranges?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How do you prevent abuse?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now we've got Google's reCaptcha set up. We're also going to be implementing a way for recipients of the calls to control what they do and don't receive.

After that we're going to have to watch the behavior patterns and compensate for anything that comes up.

It is one of our biggest concerns but something we believe can be conquered.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I wanted to post my prototype here and get HN's feedback before submitting my YC application.

This project came out of the combination of my work on web telephony from the last several years and the troubles that I've had communicating with the family members that I have overseas.

Skype is amazing. But it can't beat a phone call. And if you're trying to deal with a company, a bank, or (god forbid) trying to sort out Visa issues you need to be able to make a call from anywhere.

I realized that its the 21st century and it doesn't make any sense for international calling to be so difficult or expensive. Calling should be free and available to anyone in the world and I wanted to make that happen.

I believe that through sponsors and a Tom's Shoes-style model where those that can pay for extra features subsidize the costs for those that really need the free service, we can make this work. And not only can this be a viable business model but also something that brings a huge amount of social good to the world.

International communication should be easy. And we want get there, even if its one country at a time.

I appreciate any and all feedback!

<comment><USER5> So, what sets you apart from all the other WebRTC providers out there? How are you unique?

It could be offering HD Voice interop with AT&T/VZW/T-Mo, selling user verified CNAM, or anything that adds value you can't get elsewhere.

I'd just avoid trying to become a voice wholesaler, its a very competitive space filled by a bunch of hyper competitive sub-5 person businesses that are super nimble due to their size. Most are pushing a few tens of millions of minutes a month.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly just ease of use. No fees. No ads. No account required. Nothing to download or install.

Just go to the website, put in the phone number and call.

From what I've experienced with my relatives overseas this is something that's really needed and something they have not been able to find.

<comment><USER5> > Honestly just ease of use. No fees. No ads. No account required. Nothing to > download or install.

So how are you going to stay viable in 3 to 5 years?

> Just go to the website, put in the phone number and call.

Ok, there are a million WebRTC betas out there right now to use for free, even AT&T offered one for the past 2 years up until they killed their WebRTC program in January.

> From what I've experienced with my relatives overseas this is something > that's really needed and something they have not been able to find.

Sure, but once again to maintain viability, you need to offer something unique, telecom is a very competitive space, and to scale it you need to build key relationships. Setting up a WebRTC client is awesome, but they are a dime a dozen currently.

<comment><AUTHOR> So first I have to grow this to some decent amount of usage where it even matters really planning out the long term. :)

But, the current plan is to charge the businesses that want to receive calls from their international customers for tracking and control.

We can allow the businesses to have branded links that auto-dial their number that they can share on their website, email, etc. With these they can also track the source of the caller, do call recording, and route the calls how they want.

For travel businesses, for example, that do business with primarily customers outside their country this is a problem that we can solve for them. Most people would never dial an international number, but they'll click a link and make a free call from their browser.

<comment><USER5> > So first I have to grow this to some decent amount of usage where it even > matters really planning out the long term. :)

Eh, if you avoid Level 3 and Bandwidth.com directly, and go to a wholesaler like Endstream, you won't need any volume. Just throw $20 in your account every few months and you should be good.

> But, the current plan is to charge the businesses that want to receive calls > from their international customers for tracking and control.

Mmm, you could totes do this, make sure to use Opus and pitch it as Full HD Audio (better than that tin can HD that carriers are pushing now). Grandstream supports Opus straight to their deskphones by the way, so you may wanna look at them. Their middling quality, but rock bottom price wise.

> branded links that auto-dial their number ... track the source of the caller

How do you plan to get the caller's name?

Also, travel businesses might be a viable model for this, I'd just encourage you to think outside the box, what other areas could use this kind of service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice!

I'll look into those providers and see what I can set up. If I can get the costs down by an order of magnitude that would obviously be amazing.

As for tracking the source of the caller, I'm not talking about their name but how they came to the website to that then generated the call. Whether thats though organic search, PPC, advertising, some random forum post, etc. It's a lot easier to get exact referral information when the call is a web event rather than an actual phone call.

<comment><USER8> So I can understand this. You're sort of offering an international 1800 number? Except instead of using a phone number prefix, you're using links and WebRTC? It does sound pretty cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AMD Set to Crack Intel's Lock On Data Centers - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/amd-set-to-crack-intels-lock-on-data-centers-1534439566 <comment><AUTHOR> Paywall bypass courtesy of archive.is:

[https://archive.is/sjMAS](https://archive.is/sjMAS)</comment>


Watch a £60m Bitcoin Heist in Real Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2013/12/theres-%C2%A360m-bitcoin-heist-going-down-right-now-and-you-can-watch-real-time

<comment><USER2> Assuming the current bitcoin tulip mania keeps going for a while, can't the thief just launder small amounts over a long period of time?

Right now, a small army is attempting to track the thief, but how many will still be doing so in a week, a month, a year? Obviously there is a risk that in a year bitcoins will be worthless, but at current value, couldn't the thief be cashing out $1,000 a day (a single bitcoin) without being traced?

<comment><USER3> We really don't know, if enough effort is put here, in terms of expertise and cpu power, I think that it will be very hard for him to cash out somehow. Especially if other exchangers support this kind of witch-hunt. You could write a program to trace the addresses 24/7 and do the math. It's kinda complicated, with mixers, but with kind of sum... It's not easy to hide/cash out without getting noticed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fascinating stuff. I hope the administrator, if not involved, manages to somehow identify the thief.

I wonder if such a huge heist level can be tracked down by the NSA's infrastructure.</comment>


Three years since being rejected from CS - <AUTHOR> http://www.vutran.me/3-years-since-rejection/ <comment><USER2> Hah! Fun story: I was rejected from University of Washington CS as well. Since then, here is a list of some projects I've made that are used by tens of thousands of companies/orgs worldwide (including UW ;)): Vagrant, Packer, Serf.

For more backstory: I applied direct to UW CS from high school, rather than waiting a year or two into undergrad to apply. I had a background in programming (not what I'd call "CS"), I had successfully run a software business for 4 years, I had a 4.0 high school GPA, had perfect 5 AP scores across the board in basically every subject imaginable, played varsity sports, was part of extracurriculars, etc etc. I thought it was a safe bet, an easy in. Surprise surprise: I was accepted to UW, but rejected to the CS college. Ego blow.

At the same time, I was directly accepted to the Carnegie Mellon CS program, which is a pretty good school, if you don't know. My ego tempted me to accept this. After all, in much of the CS academic community (and to some regards industry as well), having a CMU degree is regarded VERY highly.

But, I visited Seattle anyways since I had those tickets booked already and I ended up falling in love with the city and atmosphere. So I attended UW anyways. I failed my first quarter of college (whoops, was too cocky, never attended class), got a 4.0 in my 2nd quarter, and re-applied to UW CS. Miraculously, they accepted me. I graduated in 2011, and here I am. I'm a big Husky at heart and the UW CS program is amazing.

I was bitter for a short while, but the things I'm working on today would simply be impossible without a strong academic background, so I'm thankful I pushed through and got my degree in CS rather than sitting on the sidelines.

This has absolutely nothing to do with this post, but figured someone might find this anecdotal story interesting.

<comment><USER3> Wow, the acceptance into CMU's CS program is more meaningful than you may realize. Besides being one of the top 4 schools for CS in the world, Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT are the others, unlike the 2 other private schools (don't know so much about Berkeley), they limit their class size to 135 students, and have a separate admissions program for that.

That they would accept you and UW didn't suggests either UW screwed up, or just had too many qualified applicants and your luck initially wasn't good.

<comment><USER4> Did the CMU CS program have separate admissions 20 years ago? I applied to CMU for CS, got in (but don't remember if it was for CS or just CMU in general) and then couldn't afford to go even with the aid package (biggest mistake of my life!).

<comment><USER3> Do not know, I've only been recently studying the top 4 after the dot.com crash, when CS enrollments also crashed.

While not actually being an EECS major (science was my calling), I have close ties to the MIT EECS undergraduate program and wanted to see how the other schools were dealing with these problems. The department's enrollment crashed by more than half after decades of being 40% of the undergrads; they were panicked into developing a new curriculum, and a new meaning of what it meant to get a MIT EECS degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, um, what have you been up to? Text doesn't convey inflection so please know that I'm not being a twit about it. I can't find an "About Me" page anywhere, though your list of Seattle stereotypes is rather funny. Maybe I'm being too nosy; I just like to read other folks' successes.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.linkedin.com/pub/vu-tran/42/586/9](http://www.linkedin.com/pub/vu- tran/42/586/9)

<comment> FLUX-YOU From Lead Dev to Consultant. That's a hell of a nice trajectory.

<comment><USER7> For those of us who can't view his LinkedIn account, that still doesn't offer much information; anybody can call themselves a consultant.

Regardless of the details, it's an inspiring story of someone persisting with their dream after facing rejection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _> "It's great because I almost get monthly emails from recruiters from companies such as, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and this time around, I'm the one dishing out the rejection."_

This seems to be standard practice. Recruit people who've ostensibly been vetted by someone else already and surely pay a premium versus "taking a chance" on the same guy 3 years earlier.

I wonder if/how hiring processes could be improved to surface desirable people in the first place?

On a semi-related note, I find it mildly annoying to see job postings looking for people with say 3 years of experience in technologies that are 3 years old.

<comment><USER9> Still better than requiring 8 years of experience in a technology that is 3 years old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> backstory: it used to be extremely difficult to get into that program, but since expanded by 55%, so rejection is no reflection on the student

[http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2016987078_danny1...](http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2016987078_danny11.html)

[http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2022132141_b...](http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2022132141_briercolumn28xml.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, this really helped.

I got rejected from UCLA's bioengineering program this morning. I've been volunteering here full-time for about 19 months. Really, it hurts a lot. I feel like a sucker. I feel terrible for believing in people that are obviously taking advantage of me. Like a soiled napkin, that's how it feels.

But, your piece helps. I know that I have to move on, that I'll be stronger and better in the future. That I'll be the one rejecting them soon enough. I hope, at least.

Anyway, thanks.

<comment><USER12> Try applying to Human Longevity, Craig Venter's latest startup in San Diego. [http://www.humanlongevity.com/careers/open- positions/](http://www.humanlongevity.com/careers/open-positions/) Nothing like Craig Venter's network to jumpstart your career.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Based on your post, I am wondering whether "big" tech companies have any minimum filters? If you weren't already eyed upon or networking, and you are just filling in the form or however you regularly apply for an internship these days, what is the absolute minimum tech companies ask from you?

Or do they read every application/CV/motivation independently and check whether it's a match? Is there a checklist or something?

</comment><comment><USER14> While I didn't get a lot out of this blog post, your prior ones ("what would you PAY for it?" and "shit goggles") were really well done. Good work!

</comment><comment><USER15> From intern to director in 3 years, whew I must be doing something wrong then. Nice work sticking too it, I'd love to hear more details.

</comment><comment><USER16> "We are all main characters in our own movies." nice line.

<comment><USER17> It's also the basic definition of narcissistic personality disorder, the inability to see other people as anything else but supporting characters in a scripted life about you.

<comment><USER18> Diagnosing mental disorders is an extremely complex process. You can't just read something and say, "well, that's pretty much the definition of Disorder X!"

<comment><USER17> Someone likening life to a movie is pretty out of touch with reality no matter what you call it. That was the only point of my comment.

<comment><USER19> movies are representational of reality, some more than others. How is this so far from "life is but a stage"?

It seems like a short-handed narrative for purpose of communicating a train of thought to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So it was CS at that specific university or no CS?</comment>


My experience selling a draft novel on the Amazon Kindle - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronrosspowell.com/blog/my-experience-selling-a-draft-novel-on-the-amazon-kindle <comment><USER2> Summary: Amazon has a pretty good setup for publishing to the Kindle. He's sold roughly a copy a day since August for a couple of bucks a pop. He seems rather upbeat about this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Appreciate the link, since I didn't know about Kindle. My own experience supports Aaron's experience.

My "beta book", serialised novel is up on scribd [http://www.scribd.com/doc/3717607/The-Cookie-From-the- Cookie...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/3717607/The-Cookie-From-the-Cookie- Jar-2008) and therefore free to download. With 120+ views I imagine a good (read: low) pricing model might have created some sales.

Regarding feedback, however, my experience on Scribd and the original message board I created during serialisation in 2004 was lackluster. It's one thing to read - another thing to make the effort to contribute constructive feedback effectively.

I'd also point out that "people buying" does not mean "people reading". Still, we writers will always live in a world of optimism in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER4> I made my hardcover book available for sale on the Kindle, and have had rather poor results in terms of sales, even at a pretty low price point (~$7.49 after Amazon's discount). As a publisher I'm not really impressed with the market's reach. I've made more money through OverDrive's encrypted PDF e-book sales to libraries, actually, though it gets considerably less hype from the media. On the other hand, at least Amazon pays its bills, which is more than can be said about the rest of the publishing industry.

</comment><comment><USER5> Last time I looked, Amazon required a USA bank account for payments. That is annoying...

<comment><USER6> For paying or for receiving payments? You can buy from outside the US with any international credit card, like Visa, whatever your bank account is.

<comment><USER5> Receiving, as an ebook publisher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neat, I didn't know you could do that.

Unalone, have you looked into this?</comment>


Show HN: The Let's Code JavaScript Sampler (please critique) - <AUTHOR>

I've recently put up a page of sample videos for my screencast, Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript. I'd love your feedback and critique. The page is here:
http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/sampler
(The plan is to link it as the "free" option on the subscribe page, but I haven't done that yet.)
I've talked about my experiences with Let's Code JavaScript here on HN before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6433110
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226 <comment><AUTHOR> Here's those links again in more easily-clicked form:

The sampler: [http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/sampler](http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/sampler)

My previous posts about the business of the screencast:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6433110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6433110)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226)</comment>


Run IE8/IE7/IE6, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera from the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.xenocode.com/Browsers/

<comment><USER2> Seems like a great idea, but...

Didn't work on Chrome 188.8.131.52 (shows "An error occured...", downloads .exe, silently does something, "Installed!", restarting Chrome, same routine: error, exe...).

Didn't work on Firefox 3.0.10 (shows "An error occured...", downloads plug-in, restarts FF, then same again: error, plugin).

Didn't work on Opera 10.00 alpha (doesn't even show list of browsers).

</comment><comment><USER3> I had my team start using that at work a while back.

So far, the Xenocode VM browsers have been great for checking CSS and smoke testing, but for troubleshooting more involved issues (particularly those nasty javascript-blows-up-everything-in-IE type of bugs), I find that you really want to have a full blown Windows VM or spare PCs with different version of IE installed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a Firefox extension that launches virtual browser instances so you don't have to have a native install. Windows only I'm afraid.</comment>


I came to the Silicon Valley to get an internship. Now what? - <AUTHOR>

I am a CS senior undergrad at a state school in the east. Though it's a mediocre school, I have a very high GPA, and my resume is not weak. ( https://www.dropbox.com/s/icnpwwelsswtyec/Eric_Na-resume.pdf )
However, througout the last semester, I found it extremely difficult to find a tech internship, and after a lot of thoughts, I decided to come to the Silicon Valley.
Now I am staying in Santa Clara, and I have about 36 days until I go back. I like the town and its neighborhood, but I have no idea what to do in order to boost up my chances of getting an internship.
Meetups may be helpful, but one I went to tonight was nothing more than a seminar. Also, I doubt anyone there would be willing to help me.
Hackathons are not held until Spring.
What should I do? Please help me.
p.s. I am an international student, but I am legally authorized to work as a full-time intern, and at this time I don't need any type of visa support. <comment><USER2> Was the meetup in Santa Clara?

Santa Clara is _not_ where the "action" is, so to speak. SF is the center of action in Silicon Valley, even though it is technically not in the actual geographic valley. Other hotbeds of startup activity would include the Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Menlo Park area. As it stands, Santa Clara is quite far from the epicenter of Silicon Valley. Along those lines, 90% of meetups in Silicon Valley happen in SF. Another 10% occur in Mountain View / Palo Alto / Menlo Park.

Yes, the big tech companies are in Mtn View / PA / Menlo, but most meetups are in SF because of the sheer density of engineers.

There are events happening quite frequently. Check out meetup.com and Eventbrite to stay up to date. _You_ also have to go up to people and take the initiative to talk to them: most meetups have a format where there's a speaker and then after the meetup ends people socialize. Lots of people at meetups are looking to hire; a typical conversation would be something like you introducing yourself, asking what the other person does, and then telling them that you're looking for an internship. Many times I've had conversations with people and then _they_ will mention that they're looking to hire.

I've never had luck with craigslist or indeed. Some great resources for finding internships: AngelList (the talent portion of the site) and LinkedIn.

Also, nothing wrong with directly applying to companies through their websites. A lot of startups also like it when you take the initiative to email them - a short intro about why you're ideal (I'm Eric and I'm really interested in <foo>, having done <bar>, bla bla bla).

You also need a GitHub account and should put some code there.

This is totally unrelated to your job search, but ericna.com is available. You should buy that domain name and someday put a portfolio up there.

Also, I've heard of SUNY Buffalo and I wouldn't say that its reputation in the US is that of a mediocre university. I would say it's a "decent" state university. Have you tried contacting SUNY Buffalo alumni on LinkedIn that work at startups?

Also, I'm a bit confused as to what kind of role you're looking for. You experience with Java/C++ leads me to slot you into a systems developer position. Those positions can often be difficult to get. Android is definitely an in-demand skill and I think it would improve your chances of a job if you had an actual app on the Play store.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. The meetup was in Menlo Park. I had to take VTA for more than an hour and bike for another hour to get there. And yes, I should have chosen to stay in SF.. but I've already paid the rent and there's nothing I could do now. I will travel to SF whenever needed, though that costs me a significant amount of time and money.

My biggest concern is that, I do not have experience in IT field, and thus I am not sure what I want to do. I am 'interested' in learning Android development, so I listed it on my interest, but I do not know anything much about it.

Literally, I couldn't do anything outside the CS courses(from Intro, up to OS), because I changed my major in my Junior year Spring(last April), and this probably makes me an unattractive candidate. I think I achieved a lot in a short period of time, but no company values this.

Also, it is confusing if I should tell them honestly that I just stared learning Web or Android, but I am a quick, passionate learner.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that sucks. Even living near the Caltrain (in the south bay) would have been okay (1 hour to get to SF, which is not that bad).

SF is quite expensive. Another option for the future is to live in the East Bay (Oakland or Berkeley), near a BART station.

I see now that you listed Android under your "Interests," which is okay, but it will lead many employers to think you actually have experience with Android. If you want to get into Android development, the burden is on you to teach yourself the basics and get an app into the Play store. Doing this will greatly improve your chances of getting an internship with Android dev. Most startups are not actually interested in teaching intern on the job. Most startups use internships as an extended interview.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://sfbay.craigslist.org/jjj/](http://sfbay.craigslist.org/jjj/)

[http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=&l=Santa+Clara%2C+CA](http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=&l=Santa+Clara%2C+CA)

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Short answer: go camp out at HackerDojo and talk to everyone you meet while you are here. Showing up in person was an odd move. Take the time to tour Stanford, the Computer History Museum, UC Berkeley. Go to SF meetups and knock on doors.

</comment><comment><USER5> Agree with comment that you should be in SF.

Look through craigslist tech jobs for small co's and email saying you'll do the job as an intern.

</comment><comment><USER6> Send me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com and I will try to help you find an internship

<comment><AUTHOR> I sent you an email. Thank you!</comment></comment>


Google boss claims he does not know his salary in Commons grilling - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/11/google-matt-brittin-salary-public-accounts-committee-tax-deal-grilling <comment><USER2> I wouldn't want to publicly disclose my compensation either to a hostile politician trying to make a point. But very interested on how they're calculating both the 3% and the 20%

<comment><AUTHOR> I would understand that, yes. But you have to be incredibly filthy rich to not "know" how much money you make.</comment></comment>


Rich Germans demand higher taxes - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8321967.stm

<comment><USER2> Posted about 4 hours ago and killed:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=898559>

I guess people don't think this is Hacker News - certainly I don't.</comment>


The understated innovation of static site generators - <AUTHOR> https://www.contentful.com/blog/2018/07/17/understated-potential-static-site-generators/ <comment><USER2> We are using a GatsbyJS powered static site that triggers a build via Netlify whenever an editor is hitting publish in their Contentful. Best developer experience for a modern website in ages.</comment>


Floyd Mayweather, DJ Khaled Settle with SEC in Cryptocurrency Probe - <AUTHOR> https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/11/29/floyd-mayweather-dj-khaled-sec-crypto/ <comment><AUTHOR> I don't follow Crypto very closely (my background is Investment Management aka Finance), but I saw HackerNoon banner that says "Own Shares in Hacker news" then looked at SEC definition of security, and honestly it really baffled me how an ICO wasn't being regulated by SEC. I'm guessing because it's a "new technology" and that the SEC has been slow to react.

Anyways, I am curious if anyone thinks that some of the recent drop in Cryptos is due to SEC crackdown in ICO's?

Thank you

<comment><USER2> I'm sure the current drops are some what related to SEC crackdown (not just on ICO), from what I've seen Tether seems to be a suspect in price manipulation. But it is very clear just looking at the charts on coinmarketcap that bots are running the show on nearly every coin/token.</comment></comment>


The Zeroth Rule of Presentations - <AUTHOR> http://arkitus.com/ZR/

<comment><USER2> The hierarchy of slides goes something like:

        Relevant images which support the speaker
        Relevant graphs, rendered for projection
        Relevant microcopy which gives context or focus
        Relevant videos which are kept as short as possible
        Bullet slides which double as effective microcopy

        Bullet slides which double as speaker's notes
        Most slides which animate in point-by-point
        Irrelevant or unnecessarily long videos
        Unreadable diagrams
        Unreadable walls of text

The zeroth rule of presentations is _don't_ _waste_ _your_ _audience's_ _time_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Michael Alley describes an "Assertion-Evidence" structure for slides, in which the heading becomes something more like a sentence that states the point, and the rest of the slide presents evidence in support of that. <http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html>

This approach tends to do away with traditional headings altogether, so it tends to push you in the same direction as, or even a step beyond, the production-oriented advice given here.

</comment><comment><USER4> You shouldn't even have text at all on the bottom half of the slide. Text on a slideshow presentation should be minimal. The audience should be listening to you, not reading your slides.

</comment><comment><USER5> That seems like rather venue-specific advice. In the average lecture hall or conference room I've presented in, all the seats can see the full screen just fine.

In fact, I've sometimes put important graphics as low as possible, knowing the lights in a particular room tended to wash out the top half of slides a bit.

</comment><comment><USER6> Also, don't save the best for last. In the first slide put the results/outcome/point of your presentation and THEN explain how you made such a brilliant deduction in the rest of the deck. Its not a movie, you're not there to create drama and keep us on the edge of our seats pining for the answer, you're there to transfer information - optimize for this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now that I'm a crotchety old man, my zeroth rule of presentations is to always use the bathroom before presenting.

<comment><USER8> Actually, it's a good idea for anyone. Get everything in order, because you're talking for up to an hour. You don't want to be in the middle of a talk and some part of your brain pokes you about not having used the washroom, and another part of your brain idly speculates about how the audience would respond to an intermission...

Same with eating a reasonable while beforehand. Not too close to the talk, so you're not processing food too much while talking, not too far before... Helps your distributed mind care about your audience. And sleep helps you improvise better and have a sharper sense of humor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Surely it's "know where you're presenting".

</comment><comment><USER10> This is what I hate about these "I put up funny photos and slap some clever sentence below them"-style presentations. If you're not sitting in the front row, you cannot read anything.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a handy tip but calling it the zeroth law just because a cranky blogger got stuck at the back of a presentation is extreme.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd say it was "know what you're talking about".</comment>


Show HN: Ntee – portable Unix shell tee command in Node - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stefanmaric/ntee

<comment><USER2> I use this alias for tree:

alias tree='_tree(){ ([ -z "$1" ] || \cd $1 2>/dev/null && \find . -print | sort | sed -e '\''1s/. _/ ┬/'\'' -e '\''s;[^/]_/;│ ;g;s;│ \\([^│]\\);├── \1;g'\'';)}; _tree'

On Unix systems who doesn't have it

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey awesome! I usually have to install the `tree` package for that.

But `ntee` reassembles `tee`, not `tree`. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very good way, and it's a good boilerplate for new CLIs :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Need to install node runtime for this very simple cli?

<comment><USER5> Yes. You wouldn't use this unless you're used to work with node.js, you have `tee` on all unix-like systems.

I created `ntee` to replace `tee` inside NPM scripts, so they support both unix-like systems and windows systems.

This is an interesting article that explains what NPM scripts are: [http://blog.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build- tool...](http://blog.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: CaliforniaBirthIndex.org – look up people born in California - <AUTHOR> http://www.californiabirthindex.org <comment><USER2> There are some things that should remain secrets only known to the state and retrievable by judges upon request. This is one of them.</comment>


Hiring the 'rockstar'? All star teams don't perform well - <AUTHOR> http://jeremy.tregunna.ca/articles/2011-08-17/hiring-the-rockstar-all-star-teams-dont-perform-well <comment><USER2> Having just recently been through a drawn-out, multiple interview process recently only to be given a generic rejection email in the end, I really appreciate some of the points the author is making. Particularly that (1) hiring for personality fit is at least an important as technical "competence" (insofar as competence can be measured in an interview) and (2) respecting the developer's time as well as yours.

In my recent experience, for example, I devoted at least 15+ hours to the process and got nothing in return (no meaningful feedback or criticism). There is an obvious benefit IF you get a job offer you are happy with, but it's all too easy for companies to cast a wide net when interviewing and waste lots of hours of my time. At a minimum, I'll be more leery of inefficient interviewers in the future.</comment>


How to migrate Flat Text File into MySQL? - <AUTHOR>

I am running a VB.NET loop that imports a flat text file of 122677 towns/cities of Japan into an online MySQL table. MySQL Workbench crashes when you upload table this big, so export/import won't work. It took less than 2 hours when I first run it for local migration, now it's only at 55600 after 3 hours.<p>Is there a better way to do this? <comment><USER2> Do it on the server.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have a shell access to my client's shared server, so I can't do it using perl/bash. Yes, I'll try this with PHP instead.

<comment><USER3> you could upload the file to your server and do a mysql_import (I assume it's tab/comma delimited).

PHP can call system commands, so you could do system("Mysql import ...(file)...").

more info about the command here: <http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqlimport.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I am familiar with that, thank you @rick888.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> are you doing bulk inserts or one-per-transaction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not using transaction, auto-commit.</comment></comment>


How Does Bruce Schneier Protect His Laptop Data? With His Fists – and PGP - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/essay-199.html

<comment><USER2> *2007

Only noticed when I saw the reference to Windows Vista.</comment>


Instantly download any song Without knowing the name of the song - <AUTHOR> http://iyask.me/Instant-Music-Downloader/ <comment><USER2> The submission title sounds like a new music store clone, but if I understand correctly this is a python program were you type a part of the lyric and the programs try to identify the complete song and download the complete mp3.

If this description interpretation is true, you should change your approach.

1) Pick a catchy title like "Machine learning program to identify and download a song (in Python)" Edit the title until it's true and sounds nicely.

2) Write a blog post about it, discuss some common problems, tech stack, heuristics, problems with songs in other languages, most difficult to distinguish songs, too recent hits.

3) Later, write another post about the name in a string to mp3 download conversion. Problems with alternative versions, singers, editions, ...

An interesting problem with a nice solution usually makes a good blog post with more points here.</comment>


LA and SF DAs: A Killer, a Burglar and a Kidnapper All Drove for Uber - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/08/19/la-and-sf-das-a-killer-a-burglar-and-a-kidnapper-all-drove-for-uber/

<comment><USER2> We say this about stocks, and companies: "past performance is not indicative of future results"

People are the same way.

LA and SF DAs: A Killer, a Burglar and a Kidnapper All Drove for Uber, Admit that the american justice system encourages recidivism rather due to a lack of rehabilitation.

Are cab drivers held to this standard? How about limo drivers?</comment>


The Earliest HTML Document on the World Wide Web, Written by Tim Berners-Lee - <AUTHOR> https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Link.html <comment><AUTHOR> More info here: [http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/](http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/)

> In fact, the earliest HTML document on the WWW at the moment dates from 13th > November - a couple of weeks before the conference - as evidenced a HTTP > HEAD request, which returns "Last-Modified: Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT". > The page is still functional in most modern Web browsers, and even contains > a functional HyperLink!</comment>


Podcast App Playback Speeds - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/10/18/podcast-app-playback-speeds

<comment><USER2> Thanks for using the correct labels. As someone who listens to podcasts at custom speeds (I use an applescript on the mac to go between true 1.8x and 2.25x depending on the show) the original app's bad labels always bothered me.

I had no idea that audioUnits only supported a handful of speeds, that explains a lot.</comment>


Techcrunch vs Scammers (see blog post vs ads on the right) - <AUTHOR> http://imagebin.ca/view/NCVkgLMS.html

<comment><USER2> Somebody from TC responded to that already.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=914738></comment>


An iOS Client for the AeroFS Private Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aerofs.com/an-ios-client-for-the-aerofs-private-cloud/

<comment><USER2> I've tried using AeroFS, over and over again to no avail.

I've emailed support numerous times for help - nothing. One response only literally 10 days after a few follow-ups. That's unacceptable.

Their OSX Client doesn't work with Mavericks (10.9) "not supported" was the answer I received.

Syncing is another issue, files not syncing, little explanation as to why, across systems without the Virtual Appliance. Confusing documentation.

I would love to use AeroFS or another private-cloud variant, but the above problems/issues have made both myself and my team very hesitant to ever using or trying this product again.

I think it's important for the team to hear this, and I hope you guys work on what's important to end-users.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing i'd be interested in is some sort of trustworthy 3rd party audit, i.e. vouch for no back doors, penetration testing, etc, in both AeroFS and BitTorrent Sync. The last time this made the rounds on HN, I couldn't really find anything on this...has there been any sort of progress on this? I realize both are proprietary/closed source products.

</comment><comment><USER4> I want something like this for my "family cloud". Are there any open source equivalents except for Owncloud?

<comment><USER5> I tried out ownCloud as well, and I ended up moving to Seafile ([http://seafile.com/en/home/](http://seafile.com/en/home/)). I don't have any hard numbers to show for comparison, but it was easy to get up and running, everything is open source, and it seems to handle large files better than ownCloud did for me. Currently using it across ubuntu, OS X, iOS, and android, and I haven't had any real issues yet.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the Seafile link, that looks perfect for what I've been looking for.

I was surprised to see such a mediocre HN thread on Seafile 6 months ago[1]. Haven't people been clamoring for an open-source Dropbox ever since Dropbox was released?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051037](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051037)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi Yuri, Do you guys have any plans of releasing or customizing it for end users ? Right now, the website screams like an enterprise use case.

also, was your web page developed in house originally ? Or did you hire professionals ? It looks great !

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this an advertisement?

<comment><AUTHOR> In the sense that we're advertising our iOS product launch, yeah :)

I know, I know, this is probably one of my more "PR-ish" blog posts. Not really intentional, but so it goes.

<comment><USER9> Is this product HIPAA compliant?

<comment><USER3> I'd be interested in this too...I deal with a lot of projects where researchers have to handle this sort of data.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reflections from a First-Time Manager - <AUTHOR> http://blog.capwatkins.com/reflections-on-managing-people?beta=1

<comment><USER2> Bravo! I think being a good manager can be learned but some people seem to just have a knack for it and for others it is definitely learned behavior. Sounds like you fall into the "I've got it" group.</comment>


To Beat Uber and Lyft, This Startup Vows to Give Its Drivers the Full Fare - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2019/08/22/nomad-rides-commission-free-ride-hailing/ <comment><USER2> Although Nomad says that it's rides are 20% cheaper than Uber/Lyft, it doesn't seem like they'll be able to give out rider credits easily. My several $5 monthly credits on Uber/Lyft amount to much more than 20% of my fair (especially with short/medium length rides). I choose what service I used based of price and promos.

We've seen that that startups lose a ton of money trying to get customers, hopefully they can use this coolness factor to their benefits on college campuses.

I understand that they want to give the driver 100% of the fee, but charging them for insurance (or needing to find insurance) seems a little conterintuitive to me. If a driver only did a few Nomad rides in a month (it is the gig/on demand economy after all) they may not even make the amount to pay for their monthly driver/Nomad insurance. To me, this breaks the idea of the Gig economy, "work when you have extra time and get paid."</comment>


Robots.txt as a Security Measure? - <AUTHOR> https://www.cdsrc.com/posts/robots-txt-security-measure/ <comment><USER2> I was hoping this would be about putting an orphan path in your robots.txt and then black-listing clients who tried to fetch it -- nobody should know about it except robots who are told not to go there, so anyone who visits the link is an adversary.

<comment><USER3> As one small data point:

I've been running this experiment (another comment). While bots continuously hammer on port 22 (ssh), and repeatedly try to get things like _/ wp-_* (I don't even run PHP), they don't bother fetching robots.txt in the first place, and my honeypot hasn't a single hit.

Definitely do not try to "secure" your site this way, but bots are either not sophisticated enough to analyze the .txt, or it might already be a known technique. Seems many other commenters come up with the same idea.

<comment><USER4> If you're an adversary trying to snoop on port 22, why would you bother to respect the conventions of robot.txt to begin with?

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily the same bot. And they're not snooping so much as brute- forcing default/common/random(?) usernames & passwords.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "I don't always expose my production database on a public URL, but when I do, I put a 'Disallow' in my robots.txt for it."

<comment><USER6> It reminds me of that scene from _Spaceballs._

"The combination is... 1-2-3-4-5."

"That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a running joke among web pentesters about robots.txt being the first place you look when hitting a new site.

<comment><USER8> Meanwhile over in .gov I've had to explain to a pentester that it wasn't a security problem that robots.txt was accessible without authentication, based on a very big vendor's scanner having badly regurgitated the OWASP advice.

<comment><USER9> The "security" world has an unusually high level of total incompetence. It is scary.

<comment><USER8> This is common any time there's so much demand: in the late 90s it was not uncommon to be in a room full of people who were ostensibly web developers and didn't understand how the web or their backend servers worked but were certain they were about to become rich.

Security is especially bad because so many large organizations are under pressure to improve but the market is tight and the pool of experts is limited. Also, many places have outsourced to large contracting companies who don't want to admit they don't have enough qualified staff and will hope that you'll be satisfied with whoever they deliver.

<comment><USER9> Yeah no doubt it is a phase.

It's just a really nasty phrase right now.

I always think of this:

[https://medium.com/@djhoulihan/no-panera-bread-doesnt- take-s...](https://medium.com/@djhoulihan/no-panera-bread-doesnt-take- security-seriously-bf078027f815)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly, I think it couldn't hurt, _if done appropriately_. If crawlers are indexing those pages, then they're publicly available anyway, and could be crawled by a determined attacker - so nothing in robots.txt ought to be truly sensitive. But if there's pages that _ought_ to be secure, but might contain an exploitable vulnerability, putting their path in robots.txt at least limits their exposure to those determined enough to look, rather than any lazy script kiddie using Google to search your site.

Obviously you shouldn't _rely_ on it, but defense in depth as always.

<comment><USER8> If you want that as an additional safeguard, set the noindex header on that path at your edge so you're not calling attention to it:

[https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...](https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag)

I'd also strongly recommend pairing this with outside monitoring which alerts if something accidentally becomes reachable since it's really easy not to notice something working from more places than intended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _It would even be a million times better to place the sensitive files inside /TOP_SECRET_FOLDER and disallow the entire path, avoiding to explicitly name the paths at least._

This is the only way to use robots.txt for semi-sensitive info, and obviously not for info so sensitive that it would be awful for it to get out. URLs can leak through proxy logs and shared browser history.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just put a fake /wp/admin/login URL (or similar) in the disallow rules, then just IP ban everyone trying to access it for 24 hours. That's how you do robots.txt Security.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why in the world would you put things that shouldn't be downloaded ON THE INTERNET to begin with.. If you then proceed to also tell the whole wide world that you did it.. It's difficult to feel any empathy.

</comment><comment><USER14> You can also use robots.txt as a honeypot. Simply add some realistic looking url's to the Disallow pattern and create rules in haproxy, nginx, or your own custom scripts to catch anyone hitting those URL's and put them in a hamster wheel. i.e. give then a static "Having problems?" page, or just outright block them. On my own personal systems, I use "silent-drop" with a stick table in haproxy.

</comment><comment><USER15> On a similar note, tools like [grabsite]([https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab- site](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site)) wisely use robots.txt as a method of finding additional paths to archive when crawling sites.

</comment><comment><USER16> Storytime!

In my ex-job we were developing e-commerce system, which was super- old|big|messy 0-test PHP trash. After two years of actively working on it, I still couldn't form a clear picture about the details of its subsystems in my head.

One day there is a call from a client, saying that he is missing many of his orders. The whole company is on its feet and we are searching for what went wrong. We are examining the server logs just to find out that someone is making thousands of requests to our admin section and tries to linearly increment order IDs in the URL. Definitely some kind of attack.. Our servers are managed by different company so we are opening a ticket to blacklist that IP. Quick search told me that the requests are coming from the AWS servers, and the IP leads me to an issue on GitHub for some nginx "bad bots" blocking plugin, saying that this thing is called Maui bot and we are not the first one experiencing it. Nice. Anyway, this thing is still deleting our data and we can't even turn off the servers because of SLAs and how the system was architected. So we are trying to find out how is it even possible, that unauthorized request can delete our data. We are examining our auth module, but everything looks right. If you are not logged in and visit the order detail (for example) you are correctly redirected to login screen. So how? We are reading the documentation of the web framework that the application is using. There is it. $this->redirect('login');. According to the documentation it was missing return before that statement. So without the return, everything after that point was still executed. And "everything" in our case, was the action from the URL. No one ever noticed, because there were no tests, and when you tried it in the browser, you were "correctly" presented with the login screen. Unfortunately, with side-effect.. Guy that wrote that line did it 5-6 years before this incident, and was out of the company for many years even before I joined. I don't blame him..

Fix. Push. Deploy. No more deleted orders.

POST MORTEM:

The Maui bot went straight to the disallowed /admin paths in robots.txt and tried to increment numbers (IDs) in paths.

I remember, that because Maui bot actions were (to the system) indistinguishable from the normal user actions, someone had to manually fix the orders in the database just by using server logs and comparing them somehow.

Sorry for my English, and yeah, (obviously) don't use robots.txt as security measure of any kind...

</comment><comment><USER17> i move my not-to-be-indexed stuff around a lot: renaming, archiving, etc. & i've a bit of shell scripting and a commonlisp program that automatically add things to robots.txt so that barely any of the things listed won't 404, and the ones that won't are protected via htaccess.

not sure why i did this aside from that it was fun!</comment>


The Innovation Age Bias At Sequoia Capital - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconbeat.com/2010/01/05/the-innovation-age-bias-at-sequoia-capital/

<comment><USER3> It's truly a mysterious paradox that you can only innovate when under 30, but finding and funding innovation can be done at any age as long as you are over 6 feet tall, white, and male.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a silly, misleading, and self-serving statement Leone made.

The reason guys like him target 20-somethings is the same reason con artists target the elderly. They are vulnerable.

In the case of 20-somethings, they're vulnerable because they are still green/naive. All they see is some friendly dude with a slick pitch who knows how to throw around a few buzzwords and sound smart to their virgin ears.

They don't yet realize that 99% of VCs are reading from the same used-car salesmen's script, jumping on the same latest-and-greatest bandwagon, and generally trying to position them for an *ss f-ing. You can do that to a 20-something. Not so much to a 30 or 40 year old.

I'm exaggerating and using loaded language for effect and spice, but that's the crux of the biscuit.

Cheers!

<comment><USER4> Got an interesting reply and links from guest TechCrunch writer connected with UC-Berkeley, Harvard, and Duke: [http://www.siliconbeat.com/2010/01/05/the- innovation-age-bia...](http://www.siliconbeat.com/2010/01/05/the-innovation- age-bias-at-sequoia-capital/#comment-8868). Bottom line was: "You have explained why."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mike Moritz said something similar at a forum with Guy Kawasaki once. His take was a little different. Basically big success are common with the under 30 crowd because they can take more risks, swing for the fences, not worry about feeding mouths, etc.

He put a finer point on it quoting Evelyn Waugh who said something to the effect of "the greatest impediment to creativity is the sight of a pram (baby carriage) in the hallway"

I'm sure there is some age bias, but also a lot of it has to do with risk profile.

</comment><comment><USER6> "... Leone came right out and said they focus on people under 30 because people over the age of 30 can't innovate. If you're over 30, you can still be in management, Leone said, as a kind of consolation."

If true, I wonder how many missed investments and exits that attitude has cost Sequoia? Salesforce and Android were founded and conceived by people in their 30s. Steve Jobs' company released the iPhone, OS X, the iPod, and many other products while he was still in his 40s and 50s.

<comment><USER7> Was android really that innovative? I was under the impression that it was written by ex-Danger people, in a style similar to their previous OS for the sidekick.

Open sourcing it doesn't make it innovative.

Likewise, OS X, especially in the beginning, was NeXT with the benefit of hindsight. Not innovative, polished.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fortunately, nobody needs permission to write software, and VCs seem to be losing clout because of it. PG is less enthusiastic about bootstrapping, but other influential voices (like 37Signals) think it's the best way to go.

I used to think that this was a boon for the young, but after reading this blog posting, I suppose it can be helpful to the old as well. It sucks that the VCs at a top firm are openly skeptical about the creativity of people over 30, but fortunately, people over thirty (or under thirty, for that matter) don't need their permission to create.

<comment><USER4> The guy is not skeptical, he's just talking his book, as they say. I.e., he has a conflicted interest. See the comment thread to the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I seem to remember something (possibly posted here) about most company founders actually being in their 30's and 40's. There's something to be said for the value of years of knowledge and experience.

<comment><USER10> Possibly this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180204>

It's based on actual data, not what sounds like a clueless VC's musings.

Statistically, the VC may even be right that people in their 20s innovate more, on average. But their problem is to figure out whether a specific person will innovate, not what's happening on average. Using non-causal correlates like age (or, for that matter, race, or citizenship, or a bunch of other things) is a bad mistake, in my opinion.

To be a bit more concrete, proportionally I'd guess that more whites than blacks have built silicon valley companies that are successful, by any measure you like (say, IPOing). But to use that fact as the basis for judging a potential founder wouldn't just be discriminatory and unethical, it'd be lazy and stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I disagree with the best venture capital company in the world about how venture capital should be done, it's probably not because I'm a better VC than they are.

</comment><comment><USER12> This guy's arguing against Sequoia and he brings up Tim Koogle as a counterexample?

 _Leone made some other silly remarks. [...] He said that it's never the grey hairs that come in and figure out how to make money or make an idea work. Actually, that's exactly what happened at Yahoo when the company hired Tim Koogle to be CEO in 1995_

There must be some award for this degree of cluelessness.

</comment><comment><USER13> Or maybe they are naive enough to accept a bigger (which Sequoia can do) but worse deals?

I am in my 20's.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get it. Looking at Sequoia's internet portfolio the majority of the companies listed have founders > 30\. They're involved in other sectors, so maybe Douglas was talking about one of those?

</comment><comment><USER15> Its typical discrimination - which is common because it works. MOST people are unwilling to give up their notions. People over 40 have more notions. They have a harder time adapting to new notions.

<comment><USER15> Hey! I didn't mean to imply that discrimination is right - just that it works. I'm 50 btw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm 32. Might as well flip on VH-1 and eat worms.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm 26, so apparently the clock is ticking...

<comment><USER17> lol I'm 29, I better apply!!! I'm gonna have to remember to point out that I registered my domain and started work on my idea when I was only 25

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> any chance at all these direct comments were one of those jokes I've been hearing so much about lately? It's hard to believe that a successful person would have such a bias for round numbers rather than state changes - <USER2> there is a state change that goes on around that time, with kids blah as another poster has said.</comment>


AMSxTech: Amsterdam tech Slack chat community - <AUTHOR> http://amsxtech.com

<comment><USER2> This website doesn't tell me anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> registered, hope to find out about some local tech meet-ups :))

<comment><USER4> registered.:) no response yet though.:(

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> does x stand for expat?

<comment><AUTHOR> X is a reference to the three X'es in the Amsterdam coat of arms. We decided we didn't want to have the three X'es otherwise it would look quite porn related.

Expats are very much welcome though, most conversation is done in English to keep it expat friendly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> great initiative!</comment>


Show HN: Byte Arena – Code Your Fighter Bot - <AUTHOR> https://doc.bytearena.com <comment><USER2> Back in the day I really enjoyed RoboWar on the macintosh: [https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3842-robowar](https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3842-robowar)

I've seen other robot fighting games, but I always liked the low-level- programming aspect of Robowar. It used a stack-based machine language with IO via register accesses, and it had some instructions for complex functions like trigonometry, which still only took a single cycle, so it was easy to reason about performance. I guess what I liked about it was that you had to be clever, and it gave you the right tools to be clever.

Unfortunately, while RoboWar is a lot of fun, after many tournaments it is somewhat played out. Just about every paradigm and technique has been extensively tested, so it's hard to come up with a surprising or exciting new idea. A successor that stuck to the simple low level machine programming concept but introduced new concepts would help.

<comment><AUTHOR> > A successor that stuck to the simple low level machine programming concept > but introduced new concepts would help.

Byte Arena is structured in such a way that we can plug in entirely new Game Modes with gameplays (and vizualizations) radicaly different of deathmatch.

So I can totally see such a gamemode happen, not based on physical movements but for instance on resource management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> See also RoboCode: [http://robowiki.net/wiki/Robocode/My_First_Robot](http://robowiki.net/wiki/Robocode/My_First_Robot)

I like that ByteArena is language-independent. That's a pretty uncommon feature, in my limited understanding. Good luck, folks!

<comment><USER4> Robocode was my introduction to Java in highschool. I attribute a lot of what drove me to programming from trying to figure out how the wave surfers worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love projects like this, and I'm probably off to go code an agent after this comment.

I've also been thinking about building one of these based on killing the barrier of entry inherent in telling people "you can play, but you need to code a bot -- here's a tutorial". Perhaps it's just me itching for a fun little side project, but I've always wanted to code up a server and client as projects on github that could just be cloned, and use GitHub's API to e.g. automatically detect all repos forked from the client repo and run them in a persistent world -- and then also detect all servers forked from the server repo and run all clients across all worlds with some free hosting.

Obviously, there's a lot of security and stability concerns with hosting arbitrary code and effectively spinning up free instances for anyone who just clones a repo, but I think it'd be a super-simple entry for this kind of game that really benefits from having more players (especially when you bundle in some kind of skill-based matchmaking so newer players are often matched with players of their own skill and "move up" instead of just going against the top players all the time).

Is there any reason something like the above wouldn't work? I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen many "just clone this repo and it's automatically synced to your client hosted here" AI games.

</comment><comment><USER6> Games like this one seems to be soo fun but when I'm back home after a whole day of coding I just can't find energy to write any more. I thought: why not create a game where you show examples of 'good' moves to your bot instead of coding them? So I've implemented my idea in [https://top- tactic.com/en](https://top-tactic.com/en) where you can teach bots to play soccer just by showing examples of good moves. Noone plays it, but it was fun to create :) and great way to gain some experience with neural networks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. The project is beta, we need feedback from the HN community to improve things and make it to public release!

<comment><USER7> Shouldn't this be in Show HN then?

<comment><AUTHOR> It should, and now it is, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's open-source here [https://github.com/byteArena](https://github.com/byteArena), if you guys want to look at the source code.

<comment><AUTHOR> The two main repos are:

* [1] ba: The CLI

* [2] core: The lib containing the bulk of the implementation

To make Byte Arena, we made also made these projects:

* [3] Box2D for Go: Box2D 1:1 port to Go

* [4] ECS: An efficient and easy to use Entity Component System for Go

* [5] Schnapps: KVM tooling and API

[1]: [https://github.com/ByteArena/ba](https://github.com/ByteArena/ba)

[2]: [https://github.com/ByteArena/core](https://github.com/ByteArena/core)

[3]: [https://github.com/ByteArena/box2d](https://github.com/ByteArena/box2d)

[4]: [https://github.com/ByteArena/ecs](https://github.com/ByteArena/ecs)

[5]: [https://github.com/ByteArena/schnapps](https://github.com/ByteArena/schnapps)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love the idea! Congratulations and good luck for the project.

It's cool that people are sharing other projects alike, there is some kind of curated list of this games/playgrounds?

<comment><USER8> Thanks, that's highly appreciated.

Currently we don't have enough material for such a list tho but we can create an awesome-bytearena list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of crobots ([http://tpoindex.github.io/crobots/](http://tpoindex.github.io/crobots/)) a great little game I played many years ago. In it you program your robot in a C like language and watch them compete in a curses based command line arena.

<comment><USER11> Came to mention the same. However, Wikipedia[0] says _crobots_ borrowed the concept from _RobotWar_ [1] on the Apple ][, but "originally developed in the TUTOR programming language on the PLATO system in the 1970s". It's a whole genre... the young'uns just haven't seen it yet! Everything old is new again!

I'd like to see a twist where you could actually engineer your own weaponry using simplified physics, sort of like a cross between _Kerbal Space Program_ and _crobots_ , but with WebGL. I once coded a two player button bashing QBasic[2] snake version something like that, where you had competitive weaponry like flamethrowers and manually future-operable mine deployment. It was popular in our school for a few weeks.

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

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool project. As noticed by somebody I think visualization side would need some polishing too. Maybe pair with Airmash[1] creator - merged together would be the killer app! ;)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15892066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15892066)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, our project is still very beta and the visualization need indeed some polishing.

Airmash is looking really cool, we'll definitely take a look at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I played it and it's awesome. Loads instantly, gameplay is a no-brainer, and action is fast :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is the visualization of the battle so boring? Unless I'm missing something, it looks like the projectiles look the same as the agents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, design sucks a bit right now.

Major improvement is on the way as we've worked with game artists to make up colorful worlds and agents specificaly for Byte Arena.

It's gonna look like this: [1] (actual rendering of the visualization)

[1]: [https://www.facebook.com/jerome.schneider.officiel/videos/19...](https://www.facebook.com/jerome.schneider.officiel/videos/1987901168118447/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Like a 3D version of Core Wars

[http://www.corewars.org/](http://www.corewars.org/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Have you heard of Screeps[1]? It's kind of similar in that you have to program your units to play the game. Can you tell us if it's comparable in any way?

[1] [https://screeps.com](https://screeps.com) (I'm not affiliated with it)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we know Screeps, it's awesome :)

Byte Arena is similar in that you're expected to code agent behaviours to get it in the game.

What's different though:

* we support every programming language that has networking features

* in BA, you define behaviour for a single agent and not for a swarm

* we will support multiple game modes (deathmatch, CTF, speed racing) for agents that'll specialize in these game modes

* the perceptions in BA are very low level, and thus if your actions are within physical contraints, you may do things we have never imagined possible (it's sugarcoated by SDKs wrapping things for you if you don't want/care to make sense of the perceptions yourself)

<comment><USER16> > we support every programming language that has networking features

If that's the case it should be highlighted in the docs, a short guide would help as well I guess. Just by quickly looking at the docs I assumed it's javascript only.

Having example bots in other popular languages would be perfect. People could focus on what's important and don't worry about integration details.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions!

> it should be highlighted in the docs, a short guide would help as well I > guess

I had the feeling these points were adressed already in [1]; are you thinking about something more prominent in the documentation ?

> having example bots in other popular languages would be perfect

You're right; we're definitely going to focus on this

[1] [https://doc.bytearena.com/#getting-started-guides-getting- st...](https://doc.bytearena.com/#getting-started-guides-getting-started)

<comment><USER16> You are right, I missed that, sorry about that. After quickly skimming through the main page I went to getting started, skipped first paragraph where it's written AGAIN and red just this [https://doc.bytearena.com/guides/getting- started/#prerequisi...](https://doc.bytearena.com/guides/getting- started/#prerequisites) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> These things always remind me of brains and borgs for Bolo, and the AI competitions people would have between brains.

Wish I'd gotten in on that, but Bolo still exists, so I suppose I still can.

</comment><comment> ivo-georgiev Seems like Robocode ([http://robocode.sourceforge.net/](http://robocode.sourceforge.net/)) but is language independent.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wasn't this kind of game in ICFPC[1]?

[1]: [https://icfpcontest2017.github.io/](https://icfpcontest2017.github.io/)

<comment><USER19> This kind of game is old. I remember I saw something very similar called "red code", about twenty years ago.

<comment><USER20> Yes, Corewar! A programming game going back to ancient times [1]. Corewar had as inspiration the apocryphal story of the Creeper and the Reaper. The Creeper was a real program that would copy itself to other computers. It was probably the first computer worm [2]. The Reaper was then created to also move across computers and delete the Creeper when it was found [3].

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeper_(program)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeper_\(program\))

[3] [http://corewar.co.uk/creeper.htm](http://corewar.co.uk/creeper.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Robocode meets Halite? I love this!

However, more dramatic camera angles and close-ups of the action would be awesome!

<comment><USER8> Thanks, we'll add more drama to the game soon-ish :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This brought back memories of Omega for the commodore Amiga I had way back in the day.</comment>