Not-So-Ancient Secrets Of Japanese Life Expectancy (And How You Can Do It Too) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tofugu.com/2010/10/06/why-do-japanese-people-live-so-long/

<comment><USER2> I thought that we recently discovered that the ancient secret is not reporting deaths. Aren't they "missing" 230000 centenarians?

<comment><USER3> Even if they miss 1000000 centenarians it would not significantly change life expectancy - their population is big.

<comment><USER2> They don't have a big headstart on other countries, and if this is just the tip of the iceberg, they might not even be number one anymore.

Especially if you consider the diet, which is the only thing not terribly obvious ("wash your hands", really?), we'd be looking at countries like Switzerland, Iceland and Spain, all which have a significant difference from Japan. Never mind that one should look at those anyway, as Japan is by no means a freak outlier. On average, a lot of countries are close and/or are higher than the US, so the only reason why Japan is often targeted is the allegedly high occurrence of people over 100 – which seems to be somewhat exaggerated.

Generally, the countries with high marks in healthcare seem to be doing well (I know, that might be tautological, depending on what part of the statistics those high marks are derived from). Fish, soy and tea? Not so much. (Apparently you may as well mix it with skyr, toblerone and paella)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Iceland has second longest life expectancy but rather different food and lifestyle: [http://www.iceland.is/history-and- culture/Traditions/Iceland...](http://www.iceland.is/history-and- culture/Traditions/IcelandicFood/)</comment>


Ask HN: What maths should I learn to have a solid basis for Machine Learning? - <AUTHOR> I'm very interested in Machine Learning, especially when related to Natural Language Processing, such as comprehending stories.
I'm a complete beginner following along with dive into machine learning (http://hangtwenty.github.io/dive-into-machine-learning/) and listening to machine learning podcasts etc.
It is clearly very maths-heavy. My question is, if I want to have a deep understanding of Machine Learning, with the goal of one day researching in that area, what should I learn (maths-wise and more)and are there any good resources you know of? <comment><USER2> Linear algebra.

Things like constraint solvers, automata, Bayesian reasoning & other probability/stats topics, etc. may also come in handy, but the core is mostly applied linear algebra.

Also, math will help you understand machine learning _algorithms_ , but if you want to be a practitioner, most of the hard work is in feature selection, data cleaning, backtesting, etc. These don't need a deep understanding of math so much as a deep understanding of _your data_ \- key skills there include graphing data; having an intuition for different statistical distributions; being able to build a webapp that lets you easily graph a candidate feature, drill into examples, and share the results with the rest of your team, and other very mundane tasks that are pretty basic software engineering with a stats focus.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, thanks. Bayesian is a word that keeps popping up time after time. I'll definitely start learning Linear algebra then.

Feature selection, data cleaning and backtesting. I see, well you are trying to get a computer to understand and learn from data, so it's only natural that you would have to have a good command over it to design a system like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This textbook is a classic, and downloadable as a PDF:

[http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/](http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/)

Don't be put off by what you don't (yet) understand. Even someone with a math PhD, but not specifically in the areas covered, wouldn't recognize much of the terminology they're introducing.

But feel free to jump around, and look for concepts that seem more approachable -- particularly where case studies are presented, often with very nice charts and diagrams -- and you can get a feel as to whether it's something for you.

Learning math is like learning a language -- it takes a lot of time, and not a lot seems to happen right away. But in the long run, it can be very rewarding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'll take a look at that. Also, thanks for the solid advice! I enjoy maths, recently I've been going through all the maths I've learnt previously to refresh my memory of it. Maths suits a Computer Science student's brain (Y)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Definitely linear algebra, but also some calculus and some probability theory / statistics. By way of illustration, if you were to go through the Andrew Ng course on Machine Learning, you'll encounter mathematical explanations involving partial derivatives from differential calculus

As it is, he gives you the derivations you need, so you can complete the class without needing to find partial derivatives. But the point is, a certain level of understanding of calculus will help with understanding exactly what is happening.

As for probability / stats, you'll find more than a few uses of probability notation and basic ideas from statistics scattered throughout machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm from a physics background, and I am pretty confident that Linear Algebra is sufficient. Please know variational calculus, as well. You'd think you need a bunch of statistics, but I think highly specific statistics is unnecessary as long as you have a decent understanding.

<comment><USER5> Actually, I would recommend focusing on Linear Algebra before you delve into Matrix Algebra. Some universities offer courses on Matrix manipulation, which is too superficial. Learn vector spaces, basis, orthogonality, operators, transformations, inner products, tensors, etc. and you'll have a leg up on many machine learning scientists lmao.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Khan Academy is a good place to start to learn Linear Algebra

[https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear- algebra](https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll give it a gander. I've used Khan Academy before, but I didn't take a liking to it really. I'll give it another go!

<comment><USER7> If you like videos, but not Khan, give Gilbert Strang's videos at MIT a look. His teaching is fantastic, and he wrote several of the core texts. Or you can just work directly from his books if you prefer that approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll take a look at his videos and books!

<comment><USER4> There are several freely available LinAlg books on the 'net as well. Well, counting pirate books, there are _lots_ of them. But even limiting it to the legally available ones, there's quite a bit of learning material out there. For example:

[https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~linear/](https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~linear/)

or

[http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/](http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/)

This is also a handy resource to keep around:

[https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.h...](https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow fantastic, I'll definitely take a look at these. Thank you very much.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


In 1897, Indiana tried to regulate Pi. - <AUTHOR> http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=2889002ad89d45ca21f50ba46&id=173e5321fe

<comment><USER2> Actually his "discoveries" didn't just claim that pi was 3.2, it claimed (sometimes implicitly) several values. The wikipedia article is more informative:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill>

Google finds many more references of varying detail.

Most people know the approximation 22/7, and many people actually think this is the exact value. A much better approximation is 355/113, unreasonably good, as evidenced by the unusually large integer in the continued fraction expansion of pi.</comment>


2017 Top Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2017 <comment><USER2> duplicate of yesterday's post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14811321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14811321)

</comment><comment><USER3> I love Haskell, but... Haskell is about as popular as SQL? That makes no sense.

<comment><USER4> In real live people dont care about functional programming...

<comment><USER3> I believe that in your real life, they don't.

In the bigger picture functional programming has made huge inroads. Facebook has a Haskell team whose product handles up to 1 million requests per second, and it's also in production at AT&T, Microsoft, Google, Barclays, New York Times and many smaller outfits. The other day I read about a Haskell-like language being used for high-speed, low-latency trading for a hedge fund.

But there are probably at least 100x more SQL developers out there.

<comment><USER4> Because research teams at huge tech companies totally represent the "real life" of normal companies.

<comment><USER3> There are by far more small companies using Haskell & FP than large ones. I mentioned large companies because they are recognizable. So what is your point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand these kind of rankings. What are you supposed to conclude from them?

My point is that computer programming as an industry is so diverse and complex that these general comparisons become almost useless.

Some examples:

* If you live in a town with lots of government agencies and big corporations then it is a lot more important to understand some obscure Java or .Net framework than even mainstream languages like C or C++.

* If you live in a place with a big financial industry or hardware development then probably understanding the arcane details of C++ and compiler idiosyncrasies is more useful than any web-related language.

</comment><comment><USER6> Something's fishy with this ranking, ie. web-only list has "Processing" before "Clojure", "PHP" before "Ruby" and "Go", for enterprise-only "C" before "Java" \- I don't buy it, this data looks like garbage.

<comment><USER7> It's interesting to play with their ranking editor. It really does highlight how variable some of these lists are depending on what you consider to be part of a "top" language.

For example, I'd personally completely remove stack overflow questions. It could mean a language is incredibly complex rather than important or commonly used.

<comment><USER8> Or it could be that the best resources for information about a specific language exist outside of stackoverflow; I think this is often the case with Rust, for instance, where I will generally turn to users.rust-lang.org, or IRC for questions that I would turn to SO for in other languages; and when I end up googling particular questions I more often end up at somebody's personal blog.

<comment><USER9> Perl was also hit hard by this for awhile as it had its own PerlMonks site that was where people went until recently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why HTML is in there? I can obviously understand the scripting languages you can embed in HTML being there, but they're listed separately anyway.

<comment><USER11> They have an explanation for that in the full blog post [http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2017-top- pro...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2017-top-programming- languages):

"(This is a great moment for us to reiterate our response to the complaint of some in years past of "HTML isn't a programming language, it's just markup." At Spectrum, we have a very pragmatic view about what is, and isn't, a recognizable programming language. HTML is used by coders to instruct computers to do things, so we include it. We don't insist on, for example, Turing completeness as a threshold for inclusion—and to get really nitpicky, as user Jonny Lin pointed out last year, HTML has grown so complex that when combined with CSS, it is now Turing complete, albeit with a little prodding and requiring an appreciation of cellular automata.)"

<comment><USER12> >used by coders to instruct computers to do things

I get what they are going for and I don't really disagree but by this logic chrome/firefox .exe should probably be the top most widespread programming languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wouldn't place a lot of importance in the rankings. Instead of trying to rationalize why your favorite language is not higher/lower than others, figure out the area you like programming in, e.g. higher ed, healthcare, database kernels, machine learning, etc. Then search around for the common tool sets used in that area and get proficient at them.

</comment><comment><USER14> The fact that the Trending chart lists COBOL at all, let alone as high as 30th place, seems very peculiar.

<comment><USER15> It's huge in finance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Surprised that Python eclipses everything... or am I reading this wrong?

<comment><USER17> It depends. If you changed the ranking there are some instances where it is trailing i.e jobs

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Arduino" is a programming language now?

<comment><USER19> The name Arduino refers to a platform. This platform has its own programming language. The platform is actually a fork of Wiring[1]. It seems there is really no better name for the language other than "the Arduino language."

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiring_(development_platform)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiring_\(development_platform\))

<comment><USER18> The page you linked literally says "programs are written in C/C++".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Swift is already in the top 10. I don't think it has been widely adopted as a cross-platform language yet.

<comment><USER21> I think Swift has the potential (and the chops) to become big. IBM (and a few others) is really pushing hard on adopting it as a server side language, their Ubuntu support is pretty good, but some Windows/Android support will be welcome for sure.

<comment><USER22> Which one? There are two languages named Swift:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_\(programming_language\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_lang...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_\(parallel_scripting_language\))

<comment><USER9> Actually 3 if you count SwiftForth, but everyone knows Swift means Apple's new language as realistically nobody has heard of the other two outside small niches.

<comment><USER22> I never used any Apple device and have no idea how popular Swift is, I also never coded Objective-C despite using C and C++ a lot in my hobby programming.

It'd not surprise me that IBM was supporting something niche/enterprise-y though, especially an "implicitly parallel programming language that allows writing scripts that distribute program execution across distributed computing resources,[2] including clusters, clouds, grids, and supercomputers", seems like their thing.

Thanks for the downvotes for asking I guess.

<comment><USER9> I've never used an Apple device either apart from an iPhone 1 10 years ago and mostly only program in Python. I hope my post didn't come across as condescending/combative or in anyway demeaning (hard to tell context in a post). I was just saying most people on HN wouldn't confuse the 2. Thanks for pointing out the latter btw (which I'd never heard of before, but looks really cool). I didn't downvote you btw, just responded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Where's Kotlin?

</comment><comment><USER24> The reason some people are complaining about this chart is that the weighting of the sources they use seems to bias towards new technologies.

They aren't listing this based on a single metric such as 'jobs in this programming language' or 'sites run on this programming language', but more a level of how trendy it is.

They have 12 sources scored out of 100, the defaults are:

-100 "IEEE Xplore" (Publication): This will bias new popular and emerging languages as a journal is more likely to cover topical interests.

-50 "Google Trends" (Trend Tool): Google trends will also bias as the results from the trends tool are relative and not absolute. If "Arduino" leaped up in searches while "PHP" stayed the same, Google Trends would overweight Arduino.

-50 "GitHub Active" (Code Repo): This one I'm ok with, but it depends on the definition of active and how much weight is given to the size of the project. Does two projects having at least one commit in 30 days mean that WordPress' PHP repo is just as active as my_fist_Haskell repo?

-50 Google (Search): It's unclear what's being measured here, volume of searches? Volume of results? Quality of results? The other consideration is if you know a language well or have sources you trust in that language you might not be searching at all.

-30 GitHub Created (Code Repo): I think this is overweighted unless it filters out inactive repos or those with only a readme file?

-30 Stack Overflow Views (Q/A Site): This seems like it should be much higher.

-30 Stack Overflow Questions (Q/A Site): Unclear if this is questions this year, or questions total. If it is new questions this year that will heavily bias the results to emerging languages. It's also unclear if this counts specialty stack exchanges.

-20 Reddit (Social): Seems like a bias sample to include as some projects choose this as their homebase for communication and others don't.

-20 HackerNews (Social): We're also realistically a bias sample as we're more likely to talk about trendy languages even if it doesn't have a large following.

-20 Twitter (Social): I don't use Twitter enough to comment on this, but I think it is important to define what is being measured here. Raw tweet count? Reach? Engagement?

-5 Career Builder (Job Site): ...Why?

-5 Dice (Job Site): ...Never heard of it.

What's missing?

I would have liked to see jobs from LinkedIn, AngelList, Stack Overflow Careers etc included, as well as volumes of subscribers for educational sites like Udacity, Udemy, FreeCodeCamp etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was hoping to see Elixir on the list, but I suppose it may have been classified as Erlang?</comment>


Show HN: Mosaic – only tool you need for your finances - <AUTHOR> https://getmosaic.io/ <comment> david-gcc-warn Looks really clean. Would love to try out the app once it launches</comment>


Show HN: Can I entertain you? - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yplusplus/?src=external-yc2

<comment><AUTHOR> If you use Firefox : [https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/yplusplus/](https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/yplusplus/)

If you use Chrome : [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fcdbggcngdkcjhicck...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fcdbggcngdkcjhicckdnnhjdehgffici)

Enjoy and Have a nice day !

</comment><comment><USER2> What do you mean by "don't be evil, let it be?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Google...

<comment><USER2> I still don't get it. I get that Google's unofficial motto is "don't be evil". It's the "let it be" part that is confusing me. It's almost like you're admitting that you released a thing containing exploitable defects and are asking people to refrain from exploiting them out of... politeness.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, that's not that. It is for Google. Something like : Google, if something bother you let me know! Just don't be evil and let y++ live. I'm a little paranoid.

Firefox and Chrome review this, so there is no exploit or anything "bad" in it.

Did you try it ? What do you think?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New evidence challenges the story of the Stanford Prison Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/time-change-story <comment><USER2> As a child in primary school (in Lesotho, southern Africa): when a teacher left the classroom everyone was supposed to silently complete work. To enforce this, one student would be appointed "name taker". This person would write down the names of anyone who spoke while the teacher was out. Punishment for being on the list was often physical.

One day I was made the name taker while the teacher was out. Most kids stayed quiet, but two other segments emerged: the scycophants and the outlaws.

The sycophants would attempt to "help" me identify noise makers by pointing them out. In exchange they would hope to be safe from the list, and would use that immunity/privilege to lord over other kids.

The outlaws were kids who, once they were added to the list, talked and joked freely, knowing that they were doomed anyway. They felt they were fearless, and they goaded others to join them.

I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.

<comment><USER3> What incentive is there for you to take names properly, instead of using the power to compel others - talking or not - to do as you wish?

<comment><USER4> I had a similar experience in primary school in Spain (though punishment was never phisical).

The incentive is that if the class is made of, say, 30 kids, you are appointed once and then suffer through the appointments of the other 29 kids (a little less in practice since known troublemakers won't be put in 'power' for obvious reasons). There are plenty of opportunities for mob punishment if your mates don't feel you're being fair.

<comment><USER5> The N-1 could name-take the name-taker on the same day if they can achieve consensus before the teacher comes back.

The N-1 simply have to wait for the teacher to come back, then explain that the name-taker was abusing his position, hoping the teacher will release them from punishment for name-taking the name-taker. AFAICT, there's no incentive for the N-1 to lie about whether or not the name-taker was taking advantage of them.

<comment><USER6> Eould you trust the N-1 if they suddenly started speaking with a unified voice? This from a class you don't trust to keep working without supervision.

<comment><USER5> What incentive is there for them to unify against the name-taker if the name- taker was being fair? N-1 people aren't just going to cry wolf in synchrony, because they don't trust each other. Can't a set of untrusted nodes still achieve consensus assuming more than half are good players? It's unlikely that over half of the class consists of class clowns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems to understate the deception of the study. Many of the individuals involved in the study have spoke of it. You can find plenty of quotes on the Wiki page [1] and many others elsewhere as well. Everybody was coached on their roles, and even the prisoners also saw it as a sort of improv scenario.

The individual who was famously filmed 'breaking down' claiming _" Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside!" and "I can't stand another night! I just can't take it anymore!"_ has been framed as an example of a mental collapse from the study. The individual himself however has stated that he thought he would have been allowed to continues his studies as a prisoner - but that was not the case. So he faked a mental collapse to get out of the experiment early (after 36 hours) and get back to his studies.

\---

As an aside this experiment shows how absolutely crucial objective third parties replicating even keystone studies from reputable institutions is. The one thing that's completely clear is that Zimbardo had predetermined his conclusion and he was going to do anything to get it. That he resorted to something like this (while claiming it was all organic) is far more egregious than an researcher p-hacking or even just outright faking results. That there's no major system for replication means much of what we know about social and even physiological ( _clinical studies have shown major issues with reproducibility_ ) science could be completely wrong.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Cri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Criticism_and_response)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's an interview with the guy who uncovered the deception, from a local Palo Alto newspaper: [https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/07/01/was-the- stanf...](https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/07/01/was-the-stanford- prison-experiment-a-sham-a-qa-with-the-writer-who-exposed-the-celebrated- study)

<comment><USER9> The worst part about choreographing scientific experimentation to comport with what you suspect is true is that in the not-so-distant-future, the negation and dismissal of your results can serve as evidence that your hypothesis was inaccurate.

In summary, it's highly counterproductive. Don't be this guy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Normally, in science, reproducibility is an important qualifier. If an experiment cannot be reproduced its significance to science is low. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility)

People can come up with all kinds of personal reasons to qualify or disqualify an experiment that can never be reproduced, but these reasons are often not scientific and not related to the merits of the experiment.

<comment><USER11> > in science, reproducibility is an important qualifier.

News alert, an alarming large amount of scientific (published, accepted) experiments aren't reproduce-able.

[https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid- on...](https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on- reproducibility-1.19970)

[https://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-39054778](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778)

<comment><USER10> Then I will rephrase to say that in science an experiment gains superior trust and credibility when it is reproducible. Experiments that cannot be reproduced have less or no credibility.

<comment><USER12> It would be good if this were true, but this is just another shibboleth. Nothing done in the Large Hadron Collider is reproducible. Theoretically, yes. In practice, no. Only the LHC itself can run those experiments again, and there's always other new things to do.

Ultimately, one major factor is the credentials of the experimenters. We may not like it, but some of the major experiments done today do boil down to "proof by authority".

<comment><USER13> There are bigger, better, faster colliders in the works (I think) or will be planned. Won't they be able to reproduce it independently?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am tired of hearing about this study when there are so many valid criticisms of its methods and conclusions, and it has _never_ been replicated. In particular (as this article highlights) there's strong evidence that Zimbardo explicitly coached the "guards" into treating the "prisoners" harshly, as opposed to the meme narrative that everybody fell hard into their roles organically.

Ignoring the ethical questions (which are many), this is just straight up asking experimental subjects to help you reach a conclusion, which is . . . a no-no, experimentally speaking.

The Wikipedia page has a pretty good overview of this and other issues: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment)

<comment><USER15> > Zimbardo explicitly coached the "guards" into treating the "prisoners" > harshly

Right... shouldn't the guards have refused, then? Wouldn't that be the expected "moral" behavior?

<comment><USER16> What Zimbardo's SPE apparently did, was really more of a replication of Milgram's earlier experiments showing that people will do bad things if an authority figure tells them to. Which is interesting and important...and not new. It wasn't even new when Zimbardo did it. Milgram's experiment ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment)) was well known even when Zimbardo was planning his, and while this would be supportive of the conclusions from Milgram's earlier work, it wouldn't break any new ground.

<comment><USER17> As I heard in [https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/bad- show](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/bad-show) , Milgram's study is actually much more nuanced but insightful. The participants given an absolute order to administer the highest shocks are the ones who refused! Instead of showing that people do whatever they are told by authorities, the results showed that people go along up to the point where they feel they are still in control and choosing to go forward. When it's an absolute order, they rebel!

<comment><USER18> _inappropriate humor department of humor_ So that's why my wife never orders me around directly. _/ inappropriate humor department of humor_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is yet more evidence of the reproducibility crisis and raises serious questions of the quality of peer review.

Clearly the system needs urgent reform, especially studies that present controversial or extraordinary findings.

For decades this study has been used in discussion 'as fact' and while there is no evidence it was used in formulating policy given policy drafters and makers frequently refer to research it is quite possible it was and that is a dangerous end result.

<comment><USER20> I would throw in a long term view here. Karl Poppers work on scientific epistemology created a big chunk of the modern, working scientific method.

His big concern was unfalsifiable theories. The two big targets he was aiming at were Marx & Freud. Marxism (also other political theories) became more philosphically oriented and stopped calling their theories scientific.

Psychology/psychiatry adopted more scientific methods of enquiry. Still, we have serious quality issues in the field(s).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-the- stanford...](https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-the-stanford- prison-experiment-worked.htm)

</comment><comment><USER22> I have two very rule-testy boys aged 6 and 8 and it would be fascinating to watch them wheel and deal for what they want if it weren't so GD frustrating at the same time.

My 8 year old is very much my way or the highway and will fight tooth and nail. The 6 year old, from dealing with his quick to fight older brother, is much more open to negotiation but very sly and manipulative.

I consider it karma realignment because they're exactly like I was as a child. My poor mother has asked me more than once ".. now do you understand?" Heh

<comment><USER23> 8 or 9 is old enough to just talk about this behavior? "We fight about everything _like such and such_. What can we do instead of that? If we continue to fight, will our relationship get better or worse?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A friend of mine in my UNSW class was in this experiment ( 1973/4), and he told me afterwards that he always knew he could leave at any time. Of course, other Psych departments ( especially Skinner ) did not like social Psych, to put it mildly, and visa versa.

</comment><comment> V-2 The experiment was criticized (convincingly) in "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" by Erich Fromm.

Even without bringing any hitherto unknown evidence in, it's not difficult to see its various flaws.

</comment><comment><USER25> We have research publishing requirements in academia these days, which puts quantity over quality of research. I think we should swap those with required replication studies of published results.

</comment><comment><USER26> This article summarizes Zimbardo's response to them (Reicher et al) as:

> How has Zimbardo responded this time? [By reasserting > that]([http://www.prisonexp.org/response](http://www.prisonexp.org/response)) > 'none of these criticisms present any substantial evidence that alters the > SPE's conclusion'. And at the same time that he berates his critics (without > engaging with their arguments), he reworks his story to now say that, yes, > Guards were told to be tough, but not how to be tough. For Zimbardo, then, > this is all just fake news. Except that it plainly isn't.

Here is Zimbardo's response from that link:

> From the time of being recruited with national ads to be actors in a > "university-backed social science experiment to be shown on TV," every > participant knew their actions and voices (from lapel mics they had to wear > always) would be seen and heard on national TV by family and colleagues. Any > similarity to the intense build-up of emotional confrontations between SPE > guards versus prisoners, 24/7, was diluted by the daily itinerary of the > British research team (Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher). These researchers > frequently intervened, made regular public broadcasts into the prison > facility, administered daily psychological assessments, arranged contests > for the best prisoners to compete to become guards, and as in many "reality- > TV" shows, created daily "confessionals" for participants to talk directly > to the camera about their feelings. Ironically, the results of this show > could be interpreted as further evidence of the "power of the situation," > although in this case the "situation" was that of reality-TV.

> Among the participants in this BBC-TV prison show, several of whom had > contacted me afterwards, was Philip Bimpson, the ringleader of a prisoner > rebellion against the hapless guards. He said, in part:

> > The prisoners won because they had organized themselves quicker than the > guards; their subversive actions and organizational skills outwitted the > guards who were disorganized in their new surroundings. They did not > understand that they had to organize themselves and form a set of rules that > they all agreed on… I think the group is being exploited by the BBC for > commercial gain. Me and my new friends in the group joined the experiment > for the furtherance of science & not to be used as a form of cheap > entertainment." (Personal email communication, 26 Feb. 2002; supplemented by > my subsequent visit in Glasgow, Oct. 10, 2004)

> I therefore reject the use of this "replication" as a scientifically valid > challenge to results from the SPE (for a more detailed response to this > criticism, please see my article in the British Journal of Social > Psychology, 2007, Vol. 127.).

</comment><comment><USER27> Probably a more useful commentary on the enduringly persuasive effect of emphasizing an association with Stanford.

</comment><comment><USER28> Though the experiment appears to have been rigged am I wrong when I say that Abu Ghraib, the torture sessions at Guantanamo and the CIA dark sites and Arizona's isolation units pretty much concur with the SPE results?

From wikipedia:

On August 20, 1971, Zimbardo announced the end of the experiment to the participants.

"... According to Zimbardo's interpretation of the SPE, it demonstrated that the simulated-prison situation , rather than individual personality traits, caused the participants' behavior. Using this situational attribution, the results are compatible with those of the Milgram experiment, where random participants complied with orders to administer seemingly dangerous and potentially lethal electric shocks to a shill.[21]..."

"... The experiment has also been used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority...."

<comment><USER29> Do we have good reason to believe that those cases weren't also caused by leadership?

<comment><USER28> Yes, at Abu Ghraib leadership failures and order abuses: [https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/washington/12detainee.htm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/washington/12detainee.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=91D80460BA7D3BD38A86B48F779A43D1&gwt=pay)

"...The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the report says, "was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own" but grew out of interrogation policies approved by Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials, who "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees."..."

As for GITMO and CIA dark sites — New York Times: [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/report-says- american-p...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/report-says-american- psychological-association-collaborated-on-torture-justification.html)

"...WASHINGTON — The American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror, according to a new report by a group of dissident health professionals and human rights activists. ..."

Amnesty International has a boatload of information regarding Sherif Joe Arpaio and the use on isolation unit and in his words concentration camps: [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/aug/21/arizona- phoen...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/aug/21/arizona-phoenix- concentration-camp-tent-city-jail-joe-arpaio-immigration)

The chants were directed at the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who a few months before had called this outdoor jail close to downtown Phoenix – his own tough-on-crime creation – a "concentration camp" in a speech to political supporters at his local Italian-American club.

When asked about the comment by the Guardian in July, Arpaio brushed it off as a joke. "But even if it was a concentration camp, what difference does it make? I still survived. I still kept getting re-elected," he said...."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The root of the problem is:

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

<comment><USER31> The Stanford Prison experiment goes far beyond the replication crisis. It was a non scientific "experiment" with doctored results. The fact that it was actually taught in the academic field is unbelievable.

<comment><USER30> I'd argue the best way to root out doctored results is with replication of experiments. It's not just because there might be different segments of populations that might react differently and different approaches to doing the study, but also to protect against something more malicious.

<comment><USER31> There is no replication attempt necessary. It wasnt a scientific experiment, it was little more then a publicity stunt.

The topic itself is extremely important. If anyone is in the situation to make a study with consenting subjects in those circumstances, which is rather hypothetical, they should much rather stick to original research.

I do agree, the replication crisis is an important topic, but it assumes the studies in question have at least an academic standard. If they dont, and its not publicly acknowledged in the field but instead celebrated, its a failure of the field itself.

<comment><USER30> I understand your point better now. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It was what it was. There were things to learn from it. This blame game is not especially helpful?

<comment><USER32> It's less about the blame game, more on the changed circumstances around the end results. When the experiment has become a standard and referenced within a field with purportedly incorrect or nonfactual information.

<comment><USER23> Really? Wasn't it discredited decades ago? All that remains is sensationalist articles about who knew what, when.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why is there a push to discredit this study, seemingly all of a sudden?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387601)

<comment><USER34> Why do you ask? Do you think it's unusual to question something when new evidence comes to light? Seems entirely reasonable to share updated information on a very well known study.

<comment><USER35> That "new evidence" came to light in 2017. An entire book has been written and published since then. So why now?

<comment><USER36> Are you suggesting some conspiracy? 2018 comes after 2017. This is not a long gap in time for academic research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It seems to me that the main point of the study is to demonstrate the plasticity of human morality. That people will adapt to different situations in ways that are surprising. People will become "bad people" if they are in a situation that rewards it, especially over time.

This is "situationism," as opposed to "dispositionism."

Even if the study is very flawed, and even if the implication that this shift can happen in the course of days rather than longer periods of time is not accurate, I think it is an important concept for people to take in, that can help in everything from crime and punishment, to the design of online forums with automated moderation (a.k.a. "karma systems") so they don't turn toxic, to understanding how voting systems can potentially polarize and divide people, and, extending that last point, to understanding what happens to people at Trump rallies.

I suspect a lot of the people who seem so eager to discredit the study have a bit of an agenda, in that the find the implications of the study so uncomfortable. They want to believe they'd be a good person even if in a situation where badness is consistently rewarded over long time periods.

<comment><USER38> No. If the study was flawed, there is no real take away. Pretty much period.

Imagine if physics claimed it was ok that they couldn't predict the motion they were trying to describe, because they still had fancy equations. The entire point is the predictive point.

Now, if there are parts that are replicating, then good. We hopefully learned something. But if the study doesn't replicate, you are just pushing an agenda. Odd, as that is what you claim others are doing.

<comment><USER39> Correct. As a study stands flawed, there is no real takeaway.

However, a flawed study does not mean the original conclusion is false. Merely that the evidence the study provides for it cannot bolster it.

But now the study is part of the societal conversation, and this means the idea of moral plasticity is something on people's minds, especially in the context of the study.

This isn't the same thing as a rigorous study, but it does prove the point that many people /feel/ that moral plasticity /is/ a thing.

This is not rigorous, but in a way, it gives a weak confirmation of the relevance of the idea. Think of some alternatives: we aren't wondering if the study suggests people will become hyper moral when given the power to act harshly. Nobody talks about that.

<comment><USER40> It's possible that the notion of moral plasticity has taken hold in part because of this flawed experiment that set out to prove it. That people _feel_ moral plasticity to _be a thing_ in the wake of being systematically lied to the tune of "moral plasticity is a thing!" should not be taken as evidence of moral plasticity. That is at best circular reasoning.

Indeed, by that line of reasoning every religion should be thought to be true simultaneously, as their respective adherents _feel_ them to be true.

The only confirmation I see here is that of squishies being over-eager to fit facts to convenient and familiar narratives.

<comment><USER41> There is a persistent story that there are "good" people and "bad" people, and that "good people" only do bad things under very extreme circumstances. Everyone wants to believe they would never do _that_ , for various definitions of that. Only real monsters would do that.

There is plenty of evidence that this story is false, yet one sees it constantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> No matter what evidence is brought against it, the Stanford Prison Experiment is going to continue to be part of the psych 101 curriculum. It's going to be taught as a revealing experiment about human nature, or an example of poor experimental ethics, or both at the same time.

It's just so deeply ingrained in the way the subject is taught that it's going to stay there even if the conclusions are phony.

<comment><USER43> We once taught creationism in schools too

<comment><USER44> Unfortunately, in some places we still do (kinda what the OP was saying).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hours of flow per week? - <AUTHOR>

Having moved from free lance to a full time 9-5, I have struggled with getting 'in the zone.'  I used to do virtually all of my hacking in the evening to the wee hours of the morning.  I have had to supplement my 'regular hours' with late-night sessions more akin to the free lance days to keep up production.<p>It got me wondering how productive some people are, and what you have done to increase the amount of flow you can achieve in a given week. <comment><USER2> If anybody has any good tips for getting in the zone, I'm all ears.

Meanwhile, my advice would be: learn how to be as effective as possible when you're _not_ in the zone.

"Flow" feels magical, and it's easy to get addicted to that feeling. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that people lose sight of the fact that what we do is work, and it's not always going to be fun. If you're relying on the buzz of being in the zone to motivate you, you're setting yourself up for failure (if the "flow" fails to materialize.)

My advice: start where you are. It's a truism that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but what people often forget is: it's _all_ single steps. So, even if you're not in the zone, take the next step. And the next.</comment>


Art.sy (Pandora for fine art) raises seed from Schmidt, Dorsey, Murdoch, Breyer - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/24/art-sy-1-25-million-schmidt-murdoch-dorsey/

<comment><USER2> I really like this idea and business. It has serious potential...and it's a service that simply does not exist in any shape in form at the current moment. This will change the world!

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what PG thinks of this. Has the time come for Artix?

</comment><comment><USER4> I've seen Carter take this from exhibityes (what art.sy was called before) to what it is today. He is an impressive founder and has an amazing team/investors.

Can't wait to see the product live and in action, and change the face of the art world as we know it today.

</comment><comment><USER5> But I already get all the fine art I need from Limewire...</comment>


Ask HN: What Are SaaS Adoption Hurdles for Large Enterprises? - <AUTHOR> Dear All, _Not sure if this was discussed earlier_
The Large/Mega Enterprises are still a tad shy of adopting SaaS in their Core Processes. What do you see are the biggest Hurdles?
Say, - Heavy customizations needed for Business Processes? - Unable to Host Customer Data outside? (eg. GDPR) - Deep Integrations needed, to other 3rd Party systems in the landscape. - Too much legacy code?
Context: Sure, a lot would probably use an Office 365. Or a Social Media CRM System or an Accounting System or an HR System. They are usually not the core business of most companies, unless you are in the above business.
But - what I am referring to here is more of - in the Core Processes. For example,
- A Telecom company still is reluctant to bring in SaaS offering in the Network Management - A eCommerce Retailer in it's Customer Management - A Manufacturer in the core ERP
(_Sure, there are exceptions, but the above are just my observations, happy to be corrected_) <comment><USER3> _But - what I am referring to here is more of - in the Core Processes. For example, - A Telecom company still is reluctant to bring in SaaS offering in the Network Management - A eCommerce Retailer in it 's Customer Management - <USER2> Manufacturer in the core ERP_

I think any company would be understandably cautious about this because that's their core business. I probably wouldn't adopt a Saas or outsource that either if I was in charge.

I think it's better for a SaaS to focus on doing well something that the business needs to do but is not replacing something along their core stack and offering.

I'm founder at Tesults ([https://www.tesults.com](https://www.tesults.com)) and the biggest hurdles I would say are around the general fears around not having an on premises solution. Some people are totally fine with this, usually those who have already adopted and are used to services like Slack, Asana, Google Docs, Trello, BaseCamp etc. Then there are also concerns about where data is stored. Usually though I think they're concerned most about the fear of embarrassment internally for introducing something that doesn't 'work' as expected or has bad support. Most people want to solve a problem but also want to cover their backs so trust is a big part, often more than the features being offered.

</comment><comment><USER4> Large enterprises are mostly concerned about whom to hold responsible and get support when stuffs break. For this reason, they have no problems shelling out big $$$ to buy from big players (even if your SaaS product is better) because they are guaranteed to be around when required.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, accountability is one valid point, and large companies typically are used to having people on speed dial, when things break.

But then - aren't there questions about - how really agile they really are?

Large operations with a lot of custom software, and license based models and Time & Material based customization - it is always very hard to get things moving faster.

Also, I feel Large Operations have to hire a lot of people - just to manage what vendors are deploying. Very large operational costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I consult on Oracle ERP software who are attempting to transition customers from their legacy, on premise (EBS) system to their hosted / managed SaaS (Cloud) offering. Main issues are:

1) Lack of customization options - in Oracle's case, their Cloud offering is hardly customizable (no database access) compared to the on prem version. Thus, key functionality is lost which makes running a business difficult.

2) Cost - you basically need to re-implement your business, which is a $1MM+ affair and tons of time and risk and consultants and work for your team. Plus the Cloud solution isn't that much cheaper in the end.

3) Bugs - the Cloud software is new and still has many problems. Let someone else fight those.

</comment><comment><USER6> They all have SaaS. Have done since the 1970s. Meaning they have software licenses with renewing service-level agreements and support contracts.

The difference is the mainframe is now AWS.

They understandably don't want to host outside their own infrastructure.

Can you host on their infrastructure?

That I find is the biggest hurdle.

Beyond that it is the usual switching cost set of questions. You have to find the problems their current solution offers and sell a unique new value proposition only available on the new platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> You bring a valid point.

But then, What stops SaaS providers from Hosting in their own environment?

With Modern day Containerization technologies and orchestration layers, I believe it is not as difficult as it used to be - to be infra agnostic. A lot of large Enterprises are now - investing in their private cloud (AWS, Azure etc.)

IMHO, it is much beyond the Hosting part (which is mostly applicable during the installation stages).

There are questions about, \- Accountability in case of failures. \- Continuous Support and Customizations \- Is there a Dedicated Support team etc. \- more ...

<comment><USER7> > But then, What stops SaaS providers from Hosting in their own environment?

You mean why SaaS providers are reluctant to provide their stack on-premise?

If your main tech is providing a web daemon that "just works" it is simpler (cheaper) to provide (install, update, configure) it on your (the SaaS- company's) infrastructure, as otherwise you have to support integrating your SaaS into the security domain of your customer which is _very_ non-trivial (that's why you often see Team-Support and certain variations of authorization and authentication in the higher-priced plans).

I understand that many customers would like that but I also understand that it is harder (more expensive) to support for SaaS companies. I wonder how long GitLab will support their dual-approach using .com and the self-hosted, on- premise variant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, a lot of people think SaaS = Deployed on Cloud.

But a significant part of sustainable deployment is the _Service_ part, in Software as a _Service_

I understand, it is much harder for many SaaS companies to provide that 1:1 attention. Specially when the company would like to focus on the Product.

But there are ways to offsetting it, such as System Integrator, Localized Partners etc.

Large enterprise companies have been traditionally doing the same thing, Seibel for example grew like that. SAP, Oracle, is thriving on it.

But my question was also from the companies purchasing the service? What stops them from adopting SaaS in their environment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it´s not only GDPR and the problem who would be responsible for support, technical failures and other problems. It´s most likely that large enterprises don´t want to use a SaaS because it needs time and resources to get all information from your old system into the new one and get everyone trainings with the program.

</comment><comment><USER9> Compliance (GDPR, SOX, PCI...), or more in general lack of a standardized security questionnaire (where do you store my data, how do you protect it, who are you sending my data to, what do you do in case of incidents...).

Plus there's the business - will the SaaS still exist in 2 years?</comment>


Ask HN: Where to post your product on launch day? - <AUTHOR> I have been using IndieHackers, Reddit, and HackerNews to ask for feedback about my landing page.<p>I feel like I am getting close to launch day, so I would like to know in which places you recommend to post a newborn product? <comment><AUTHOR> My product, [https://autenti.ca/smile](https://autenti.ca/smile) is a tool to boost your mood that uses facial recognition to detect whether you are smiling or not.</comment>


What is going on with Cloudflare support? - <AUTHOR> Looking for some input from other Cloudflare (CF) users on here, as I suppose there are many of you. I am beginning to feel somewhat cheated by the promised turnaround times for CF tickets.
The Free tier states a 'median response time' for e-mails of less than 24h.
Pro: Less than 4h. (This is the tier I am on)
Business: Less than 2h.
Enterprise: Less than 1h.
There is a notice stating that COVID is causing delays, of an unspecified severity. I fully understand the issue. I am also impacted by COVID, so I can only imagine what an organisation like Cloudflare must be experiencing.
It took 8 days to get a first response. Anyway, it has now been another 6 days. (Remember, on a 'median' response time of 4h + COVID delays).
I desperately need a better estimation of how long tickets take to turn around. I would also strongly recommend that the estimates on this page[1] (and related pages) are either removed or updated with massively increased timeframes, to ensure CF's customers can manage their customers' expectations.
How is everyone else experiencing support at the moment? Is anyone on the Business / Enterprise plans and doing better?
P.s. This message is not intended to push my specific issue in front of the line, so I won't mention either my account name or ticket number here or to any CF representatives that may respond. I am simply after some input from other community members (or CF representatives) on how long their support queries are taking currently, so that I can tell my customers what to expect. I should also note that I am generally quite fond of CF and their team members, and have had mostly good experiences dealing with them.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/ <comment><USER2> On Pro level. Sent in a few tickets a couple of weeks ago. Replied within an hour. One was not time sensitive and needed to escalated up to management, got a final answer on that 3 days later.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is very interesting. Thanks for the input. Seems you have had a much better experience. Interestingly I would rate mine as blocking-level priority, aka what my previous employers would have treated as the most critical. Hard to judge though.

<comment><USER2> You might also want to check if you have a point of contact in their customer development team and contact that person. Likely you received an email from them sometime after you first upgraded to a paid level.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I am not sure I did. I do however have a few contacts at CF, which I will use shortly as well. Thanks again for your input!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I get a weekly email with the response times for our plans. For the Pro tier the median response times for the last four weeks have been 31 minutes, 20 minutes, 17 minutes, 19 minutes.

So 8 days is a crazy outlier. Not sure what's happened but if you send me (jgc @ cloudflare DOT com) an email with the ticket # I'll ask the support team to investigate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for getting in touch. That is indeed a huge discrepancy. Ok, despite saying I wouldn't, I will on this occasion let you know the ticket number, so that you can see your end what's happening. Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to add that this was swiftly resolved upon John's help. Thanks to the CF team for sorting this out.</comment>


Show HN: Self-generated custom art for your home or Airbnb - <AUTHOR> https://www.eliotand.me <comment><USER2> It's very nice, I just wanted to wish you the best in this venture. It's functional, well-priced, addresses a need, doesn't claim to be more than it really is, and is pulled off very nicely.

Suggestion for more layouts.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words and the suggestion. We will add a landscape format and new styles (color schemes) in the near future. Which style is your favorite?

<comment><USER4> I would love an option for a darker colour scheme. A blueprint-style white on a dark blue would be cool.

<comment><USER3> Love it! Added to the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this. Thanks for adding the free image export option!

A word of warning: Your Foursquare API client ID and Secret are completely visible to anyone and can easily be abused. [1]

Also, currently the client ID is exceeding its rate limit, so I cannot add my own locations.

[1] You are making these kinds of requests: [https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/suggestCompletion?query...](https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/suggestCompletion?query=Benaroya%20H&ll=47.6,-122.3&v=20180101&limit=10&client_id=XXXXX&client_secret=XXXXX)

<comment><USER5> Possible solution:

Maybe proxy your Foursquare API requests via [https://www.eliotand.me/airbnb- poster/search](https://www.eliotand.me/airbnb-poster/search) or a similar API endpoint you'd create. Disallow CORS on that new API endpoint. You can keep the API call signature but remove the client ID and secret.

On your backend you can then make those Foursquare API requests and add the client ID and secret to the request.

<comment><USER6> I built a microservice that does something similar[0] for Mailchimp. They have an API that requires a secret key, but we didn't want to keep a server running for it (and obviously didn't want anyone on the internet playing with our key). So I set up a little python service that serves a page and 'proxies' the API to the end user.

[0] [https://github.com/sasha42/Mailchimp- utility](https://github.com/sasha42/Mailchimp-utility)

<comment><USER5> Very nice!

You could also do this simply by running on Azure Functions (free consumption plan). All you need to deploy is a simple proxies.json, see [1].

On the AWS side it appears you can entirely use API Gateway. Here [2] is a Swagger 2.0 definition file I just wrote which upon import creates an API endpoint that should proxy requests to an external API while adding your secret credentials.

[1]: [https://aka.ms/apiproxy](https://aka.ms/apiproxy) [2]: [https://gist.github.com/berndverst/b59fa0b38544f13c05ae0b77f...](https://gist.github.com/berndverst/b59fa0b38544f13c05ae0b77f21d9939)

<comment><USER5> And for posterity, here is to create this kind of API proxy in Azure Functions. It's even easier!

[https://gist.github.com/berndverst/37d87570418bbee77641777e1...](https://gist.github.com/berndverst/37d87570418bbee77641777e13bc10c9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice! I downloaded the web (png) version for my brother's little guest house outside US. I'd love to be able to

1\. Change/remove various texts on the poster (e.g., even if we have no rules, it still adds 'House Rules').

2\. Download a bigger png file for a little charge to print locally (to avoid international shipping charges).

But this is nice as it is!

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a great idea and I'm going to order one for my parent's rental house. Really nice job!

As constructive feedback I really wish the favorite places list showed the address of each location rather than the location type. I think the address would be much more useful information and the type is obvious from the name for each location I added so it's kind of superfluous. I also wish this secondary text didn't awkwardly wrap onto a new line when the location name is long—I think ideally each place would have its name on its own line followed by its address on a new line directly underneath it.

But that's just a quibble—this is awesome!

</comment><comment> Harvey-Specter It would be nice to have an option to remove the House Rules / Contact section. I just want one for my home.

<comment><USER9> Yep. I'd like to get a series of these for something like "where Mom and Dad met", "where you were born" etc. for my sons room.

<comment><USER10> Actually for the air BnB rental, I think it would be real sweet to think of some way you can make procedural inputs from suggestions from the current guests, and send the resulting design to them in a choice of mug or mouse mat or tea cloth or what have you. The dates of their stay and so on . . But be sure to advertise on the output, naturally. Anything you can do to multiply good word of mouth is (deductable) pennies well spent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is fantastic! One feature request would be to reduce the size of the "You are here" circle; it's covering many blocks surrounding my place and I'd love to make it smaller, more of a pin so it's clear what block you're on.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd love some options to let me use this for my office. Different icon, "guest wifi" instead of "house rules", etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really like the concept, but in addition to the free png (which is nice!) what about offering a stack of handy portable map-sized ones?

I could imagine a stack (maybe fused at the top like a post-it note pad) to let sit out on a table so people can take one, etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, this is something we were already considering.

<comment><USER13> Cool! I'd definitely order something along those lines. I love handing out little guides to guests, and this would make it super easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You are violating licenses. "© Mapbox © OpenStreetMap © Leaflet" is not appropriate. Including a copyright mark for Leaflet suggests that you have no idea why, so make sure you really understand whose data and art you use and how you are allowed to do so.

<comment><USER15> Having trouble finding this and am curious, if anyone could point it out -

<comment><USER14> Finding what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great idea!

Handling of favorite places is done really good.

I would choose the second or the fourth style as default. The first one is to "monochrome".

If I change the size to 18x24 the circle around the "You are here" gets stretched to a oval.

This is so cool, it deserves his own domain.

</comment><comment><USER17> That's perfect for the office too! A nice looking poster highlighting all the nice 5-7 meeting spots is really cool.

I wish we could edit the "House rules" title for something more corporate.

<comment><USER3> Added to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow very nice! I don't AirBnB my house but could see using this in a corporate office esp. where hosting people from out of town for meetings, etc. Might be cool if you could highlight a route - 'to the airport' 'to the beach' etc.

<comment><USER3> Re: Highlighting a route. Great suggestion. Added to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome work!! I want to order one for our new corporate HQ office we are moving to..

Wish list: \- ability to change the "home" icon, \- remove some of the headings (house rules, etc) \- less priority: upload logos (not really necessary, but would look awesome)..

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. We are making the titles "house rules" etc... customizable. Coming soon. What would you like to the change the home icon to? You company logo?

<comment><USER19> Thats a good idea, or allow for a "work office" icon...

<comment><USER20> Could turn it into a family map -- home, mom work, dad work, kid 1 school, grandma's house, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's a really nice result. A few customization options would go a long way to making it useful even beyond just airbnb rentals. I was considering buying one for a foreign exchange student who's visiting. Though, airbnb owners are probably easier to service and less price sensitive than me. Seems like you targeted that product really well.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great idea and great website. I am jealous of your design skills!

It would be great to be able to move and resize the zoomed bubble. Even a quick toggle between the corners would do.

<comment><USER3> I like the toggle idea. Added to the list and thanks for the suggestion. I think we'll probably introduce different formats/configurations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is awesome. Since you are on HN, I imagine you are looking for feedback. It would be great if you could easily reorder the list under favorite places.

<comment><USER3> One way to do that(not ideal) is to add the places in the right order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The ability to edit/pan the map by hand afterwords is really nicely done. Excellent work!

</comment><comment><USER25> What a fantastic idea!

I wish you and your team all the best.

My only quibble is that the location data for one of my "Favourite Places" is wrong - it would be nice to be able to manually move the location bubbles.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. Added to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We created the Hospitality art to help people and hosts share useful info with guests, like favorite places, house rules, WIFI, contact info etc... all that packaged in a beautiful poster.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's a bit silly, but I love that you can zoom out the circle map to make it more of an overview of your location in the larger context of a city or country even.

It's a nice little touch.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is awesome. My first thought was I wish I could make this map for all the key places for my wedding, although forcing the "House Rules" and "Contact" section make that awkward. Also wish I could adjust where the zoom bubble is located.

<comment><USER3> We're are making the "House rules"/"Contact" titles editable. Coming soon... Moving the bubble will be a bit trickier, you can pan the map though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seems like a copy of [https://www.tiltmaps.com/](https://www.tiltmaps.com/)

<comment><USER29> There are a lot of websites like this. First and most successful being [http://mapiful.com](http://mapiful.com).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's a similar service for multilayered depth maps of lakes that I've always thought was pretty cool. Although the UI here is much slicker.

[http://lake-art.com](http://lake-art.com)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a great idea! Clear target market, well implemented. I feel like investment in advertisement will be a certain ROI.

</comment><comment><USER32> I love this! Great use of technology to build a great product.

Can you talk more about the procurement pipeline? Who actually does the printing and shipping/handling? Did you outsource that to someone else, and if so, who?

<comment><USER33> Could be something like Printful. They have APIs for to order prints and delivery

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What are you using to generate the default "favourite places" list? it picked some pretty good ones.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is nice, simple and easy to use. I run a small print shop and have an idea to build something like this, where my customers can upload their design and order from our site.

Is it possible to build something like this without back-end work? Can I build this on static site? I know little bit of JavaScript. We build our static site with Jekyll and GitHub.

Edit: No need to edit the file. They can only upload and order (maybe send it as an email when they push "order"?). That's it, nothing else. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER36> This is great. For adding favorite places, would it be possible to show the addresses in the autocomplete? There are more than one Safeway or Starbucks in my area, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, added to the list.

<comment> forgot-my-pw Keeps getting error now with address lookup. "Oops, something went wrong"

<comment><USER37> Probably api quota limits?

<comment><USER3> It fixed now. We had some issues when we reached the #2 spot on the HN homepage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I love the idea, and I'd be interested in buying with a few tweaks.

\- I tried both a high-density (Manhattan) and a low-density (Very small, rural town) location. I had trouble finding a good balance between the zoom level on the large and small maps for both. For the dense location, I'd like the option to remove the smaller map and just have a big map of the immediate neighborhood.

\- The numbers for locations across the street from each other overlap and one isn't readable. I cant' choose between suggesting the best brunch nearby and the best chocolate chip cookies in the whole city!

\- Landscape mode would be a huge improvement.

\- It looks like numbers are assigned to the small or large map without considering the zoom level. When I zoom in on the small map, numbers that move outside the boundaries should show up on the large map, not just dissappear.

\- I can't change the section titles. For example, I'd like to change "My Favorite Places" to "Our Favorite Hangouts"

\- For the rural location, only the first color option draws the roads correctly in the big map. The other three themes omit the roads!

</comment><comment><USER39> Nice, simple, functional. Does a single job and does it well.

I would second the suggestion for some extra layout options (particularly a landscape variant which would work much better for some areas), though take care not to go OTT or you'll complicate the nice simple interface and put off more users than you help with the changes. Perhaps have one or two extra options (the most significant ones like landscape/portrait) and hide others being an "advanced options" click. That way most people get the simple interface but those that want to be more fussy are catered for too. Though as always don't try to please _everyone_ , the really fussy users will never be entirely happy and you are better off recommending that they produce their own posters by hand!

Also, do look into the potential licensing issues mentioned by anc84. Some effort here and now ensuring that you are compliant (either because you just are or by negotiating different use rights with these or alternate services) may save you a _lot_ of hassle and expense later down the line.

</comment><comment><USER40> I have a unique requirement for this sort of thing without any of the locational information but a region of the map highlighted (like a zone map). It's probably not something you can help with, but these maps are beautiful.. is the tech stack open source?

</comment><comment><USER41> Maybe it could be nice to be able to upload a picture and have it embedded somewhere on the main map? I am thinking of stuff like... floorplans. Or a pic of the facade/entrance... or maype a picture of the view from the place itself?

</comment><comment><USER42> I like the idea, but it would be nice to see pricing info without first having to create one

</comment><comment><USER43> Great idea! This is something hat seems so obvious after the fact, but I would have never thought of it.

I would suggest that you enable a more responsive preview. Viewing it on a 1440p monitor, the map preview could be about double in size.

</comment><comment> trevor-e Very neat, I've seen a few websites like this pop up over the past year.

Some feedback: it would be nice if the order details were part of the URL structure so I can easily share it with people.

<comment><USER3> We'll fix that very soon. In the meantime, you can use the following trick : Click on "get this poster" button, on the checkout page, there's an edit button, click on it. It will send you back to the edit page with a deeplink to your configuration, you can share this link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Cool idea and great execution. Just a heads up, it looks like there's some padding on the house icon in the blown up map that can cover up nearby roads at some zoom levels

<comment><USER3> This was done on purpose :) to make the home icon more noticeable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Awesome idea but is there any way to remove some of the sections like 'House Rules'? Maybe have custom sections? I don't rent my place out but love the concept.

<comment><USER46> I don't rent my place either but instead I wrote the name of the guest wifi under house rules. And in the big textarea I entered two line breaks so that I can paste a sticker with the current password on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Love it! One request: the ability to move the house icon. It's not completely correct on google maps, and it would be nice to manually move it to the correct place.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. Added to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> First, very cool! It'd be tempting to get something like this even if I'm not an AirBNB host.

I'm sure one could find loads of strange visual artifacts given this covers the whole world(?), but here's one:

Some of the map styles fail to render sections of the Chicago River and North Branch Channel. See 5500 N Lincoln Ave, Chicago, IL 60625 as an example.

Maybe it's an issue that affects waterways in general.

<comment><USER3> Can you try again? I tried this address and it worked fine for me.

<comment><USER48> Yep issue persists. Only the orange and blue style correctly renders the waterway fully. The others omit a portion of it. In that section I believe there is a park on either side so perhaps that's got something to do with it.

I'll share a screen shot later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is really cool, and something I will definitely want to buy whenever I own a home and have Airbnb guests. Nice job!

</comment><comment><USER50> FYI: I keep getting "Oops, something went wrong" with any address that I try in chrome and firefox.

Looks really cool though!

</comment><comment><USER46> I immediately wanted to order one, just for my home, no airbnb.

But I'm unable to add new places. I've deleted most of the pre-selected places and tried entereing a few different ones in the field but nothing happens. If I click done I just see the one I didn't delete on the map and no new ones.

FF 57.0 (64-bit) on Fedora 26.

<comment><USER3> Could you try in Chrome? I didn't test the site with Fedora.

<comment><USER51> Fedora is a linux distro. FF = Firefox

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is amazing, I hope you make millions!

</comment><comment><USER53> That is very cool. These are the kinds of fun novel ideas that got me interested in making web applications.

</comment><comment><USER54> When panning the zoomed-in circle, the "You are here" sign should also move around the big map (i.e. should stay accurate); doesn't seem to behave so for me.

Also, it would be nice if reordering of items on the list would be possible.

That said, it's obviously an awesome MVP already :)

</comment><comment><USER55> Just wondering what sort of Mapbox account you're using for this? I previously enquired about doing something similar with Mapbox, and was told if you intend to use the images commercially for printing you'd be capped at 2,000 prints and it'd cost you up to $5k annually.

<comment><USER14> Just use [https://openmaptiles.org/](https://openmaptiles.org/) for a fraction of the cost (512USD) and no restrictions on how you use them commercially.

<comment><USER56> AFAICS, you do still need to provide attribution to OpenMapTiles?

<comment><USER14> To OpenStreetMap and OpenMapTiles. [https://openmaptiles.com/terms/](https://openmaptiles.com/terms/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The poster generator isn't working for me. Chrome 63, El Capitan, from Canada, using uBlock Origin but I turned it off. Here's what I get. [https://imgur.com/a/qYoFV](https://imgur.com/a/qYoFV)

<comment><USER58> Check out [https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl- js/issues/4679](https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/issues/4679) Also try on a different browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Congrats, really clever! How are you getting data from Airbnb? Just scrapping or using any available API? I was trying to create a service based on Airbnb data as well but didn't find any available API to get the data

</comment><comment><USER60> Very nice idea but it took me far too long to find the YOU ARE HERE circle that presumably corresponds to the detail circle. There should be some clear obvious connecting element so I can find YOU ARE HERE much more easily. Good luck with this!

</comment><comment><USER61> Lovely idea. I bought one for my home, but the email confirm I received had an image that looked much different than the one that I customized. The text was much bigger and overlapped, even though I had customized it to not be like that.

<comment><USER3> The actually print will look the same as what you saw on the site, while editing. This screenshot in the confirmation email is just an approximation. We'll fix that in the future. Thanks for pointing that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Might be missing something, but I'm fairly certain that Mapbox requires you to include attribution here. They also prohibit printing for commercial purposes, although that's lifted for enterprise plans, which you might have.

<comment><USER14> This is using Mapbox vector tiles with a style custom designed by the ellotand, right? Does Mapbox really prohibit using a product created that way on their platform and _can_ they?

<comment><USER63> I don't know what the law is, but in principle at least, the selection of the data to include in the tiles (in general and for specific scales) and processing like generalization are both "cartography" at least as much as they are "database queries".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Good idea and execution. Hope you succeed.

I noticed one bug: If I edit and move the position inside of the "zoom-in" area, "You are here" circle position on the big map remains on its original place.

</comment><comment><USER65> Is the instant autocomplete in the address box ("whereInput") part of the Mapbox API or offered directly by google? What is that called because I can't find it by searching? It's very nice.

<comment><USER3> We use google autocomplete for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Is this from Google Maps or somewhere else? How do you handle the copyrights?

<comment><USER67> The footer mentions OpenStreetMap.

<comment><USER68> Generated PNG does not mention OpenStreetMap. It seems that it violates OpenStreetMap requirements laid in [http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright/en](http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright/en):

"How to credit OpenStreetMap

We require that you use the credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors"."

<comment><USER69> There's also slightly more requirements than that. The credit must be placed so a reasonable user will see it. This is important if you have (say) an app. You cannot just bury the credit deep in the settings screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Very nice! Bought one immediately (not even for an AirBnB listing, btw).

</comment><comment><USER71> Neat! Btw with my monitor in portrait half the example poster is cut off

<comment><USER3> Thanks, will fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Love it! And Balthazar is awesome too :)

Best wishes, this is such an awesome idea.

</comment><comment><USER73> it looks really good! The printed map would be nice even as a gift.

</comment><comment><USER74> What is the source of the autogenerated favorite places? Is it looking for the most+highest rated places or something? I ask because I was impressed with what it came up with

<comment><USER51> [https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/suggestCompletion?query...](https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/suggestCompletion?query=Benaroya%20H&ll=47.6,-122.3&v=20180101&limit=10&client_id=XXXXX&client_secret=XXXXX)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> FYI : We just added the ability to customize titles and remove sections (if you delete all data in a section). This was the most requested feature.

</comment><comment><USER75> Doesn't seem to work in Firefox 57 on Linux. I disabled uMatrix, but do have Privacy Badger & uBlock running.

Also, checkout says 'Get your hospitality poster.'

Looks awesome though!

</comment><comment><USER76> Love this but saw a small typo.

When you select free, the modal that appears to enter in an email says "Get yout hospitality poster".

It should be "Get your hospitality poster"

<comment><USER3> Thanks, will fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> This is a great idea. I've sent it to several people I know that rent out their homes.

Are you printing yourself or outsourcing it? If you're outsourcing it, to whom?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are using a local company for now, but might switch to a service to handle high volume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Minor suggestion - would be nice to be able to rotate map to align street grid (eg, NYC) to top vs true North as used.

</comment><comment><USER79> Nice, but some base set of of notable (and editable) landmarks would bring it from "meh" to "yeah".

<comment><USER3> You add/edit landmarks already. Just click on the map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> What about overseas customers and shipping options? Could it be printed in Europe or a PDF be had instead somehow.

<comment><USER3> We are shipping to Europe for a fee. See booking page

<comment><USER81> Honestly, shipping to Europe is prohibitive (at least for me) right now. I'd happily pay for a super HD pdf to print at my local print shop !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> It should hide "House Rules" and "Contact" headings when the inputs for those sections are empty.

<comment><USER3> We're changing that in the next few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> What service do you use for printing? Been interested in prototyping some similar ideas with on demand printed work

</comment><comment><USER84> Amazing !! Three out of five restaurants are the ones I would recommend. Is this from yelp or google maps ?

<comment><USER3> We use foursquare. BTW, you can customize the list if you'd like. Just click on the map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Wow, this is a great idea! Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER86> Wow this is beautiful and well-done. Are you getting the top 5 things to do data from Yelp?

</comment><comment><USER87> Cool, you should integrate with levelframes.com to offer people framed versions too!

</comment><comment><USER88> Frankly, this looks like something that was created by a company, not an artist.

<comment><USER89> [https://www.eliotandme.com/about](https://www.eliotandme.com/about)

<comment><USER88> Yes, it's a company. But that doesn't mean that the artwork should have a corporate style. I suspect most people here like this style because of professional involvement, but most people will not experience this as art, not by a long shot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> It would be great if you could re-arrange your favorite places and add notes

</comment><comment><USER91> Nice idea

</comment><comment><USER92> My place is in the middle of nowhere, there is nothing detailed to show in the circle, so although the circle is the fanciest feature of the poster it would still be nice if there was a way to disable the circle. That would make it useful to me.

</comment><comment><USER93> put in my address and got "oops something went wrong?"

<comment><USER3> We had some server issues earlier today. This is fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Bravo! This is very well done. Thank you for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER88> "Hapiness guaranty" is wrong spelling.

</comment><comment><USER3> My favorite style is the retro looking one.

</comment><comment><USER95> Email web/png not working for me

<comment><USER3> Can you try again? We had to restart the servers to push a fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> This is great, I'm ordering one!

</comment><comment><USER97> Very nice

</comment><comment><USER98> "or Airbnb"? what?

</comment><comment><USER99> Serious question: if you care about your privacy how can you stay in an Airbnb with little way of thoroughly checking whether the owner has put a camera in the bedroom, bathroom, etc?

<comment><USER60> A little faith in humanity and in your ability to judge character. If you're absolutely paranoid about this sort of thing, how do you even use a public restroom? How do you know your own house doesn't have cameras watching you? Even James Bond lets his guard down now and then.

<comment><USER99> Well I'm asking because there have been news stories about this exact practice. And those are only the ones that have been found.</comment></comment></comment>


"Wait, Google Sent Me" Google: No We Did Not - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wait-google-sent-me/igloabeeeiagmdkhellmibpnlnjdmdbb?down

<comment><AUTHOR> This pay wall circumventing extension, gained alot of attention and made the front page of Hacker News. Now it is gone. Why?

See the discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941)</comment>


We built a new social media experience, but we need help testing it - <AUTHOR>

Hello Hacker News,
We are a group of second year computer science students who have spent our summer developing a new and different social media experience.
We have just launched our beta phase and would appreciate any feedback you might have regarding design choices, functionality, user experience, or anything else you may notice.
You can find our site here: http://rankopolis.com/
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I get an exception when I try to view the page:

ErrorException

Trying to get property of non-object (View: /home/forge/rankopolis.com/app/views/pages/dashboard.blade.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, just caught some bugs in our preview feature and are fixing them now.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Obfuscation techniques against patent trolls - <AUTHOR> I'm building a product, and plan on launching in about a month.
What are some prominent software concepts that patent trolls target? For example, somewhat recently many companies were sued by Guyzar for "keeping user sessions after a user has logged in", which would basically effect all known sites that use some form of authentication. (https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/guyzar-llc-trolling/).
I thought about renaming my authentication end-point from /api/oauth/v2 to /api/a2, or something cryptic.
Obviously, I need authentication. And I'm using OAuth. Do you see obfuscation as suitable obstacles to patent trolls, for small companies and startups?
What other concepts do patent trolls target, and how would you obfuscate them in your code to make it less obvious to the trolling lawyers? <comment><USER2> I wrote a dozen patents and I can assure you that obsfucation is certainly not the solution to your problem. Think of a patent as a recipe in law language, it makes statements about processes that are observable and quite factual. Big companies use patent pools to protect themselves against trolling ... by other big companies. Obviously other people cannot rely on patent pools, but there are other solutions, here are three of them:

* Use a patent that was placed in public domain (either it is old or the user did not pay the annual fee).

* Use a patent that a big company offers for free (like Tesla)

* Use an external service that may use patents, if it gets sued it is its problem, not yours.

Best luck!</comment>


Startup Book Publisher Unbound Raises $2M For Kickstarter For Authors Platform - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/22/startup-book-publisher-unbound-raises-2m-for-kickstarter-for-authors-platform/

<comment><USER2> I really like the idea. A few months ago, I used IndieGogo for the same: a book project - and it was an amazing experience. I sent proof copies, sketchs, etc., and share more with my readers.

It is a better experience for the author (you know there are people who really want to read what you have to say!) and for the readers, who can share more of the creation process.</comment>


Our world is turning into the one depicted in Ray Bradbury's "The Murderer" - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderer

<comment><USER2> I'd love to hear your reasons why. Keep in mind that the population of tech savvy people in the world, of which we both belong to, is a tiny percent of the worldwide population. Tens of millions (maybe even billons? Please correct me) of people are struggling just to survive. I believe that the 'our world' you're thinking of is middle class+ and teens with regular access to computers (how many are there, really?)

<comment><USER3> The OP did say 'our world', not 'the world.' In that context, I'm inclined to believe he's pretty right!</comment></comment>


Test DNS query time and geo-targeting accuracy of 10 Anycast DNS providers - <AUTHOR> http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest <comment><AUTHOR> We just released this, and are looking for feedback. Here are the providers currently supported (only 5 of 10 support the geo-targeted testing): Route 53, Dyn, Cotendo, UltraDNS, EasyDNS, DNS Made Easy, Rackspace Cloud DNS (not Anycast), LoadDNS, DNS.com, SoftLayer</comment>


Perl 6 is my MMORPG (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/perl-6-is-my-mmorpg

<comment><USER2> What about the rogue?</comment>


RubyMonk – Free, interactive tutorials to help you discover Ruby idioms - <AUTHOR> https://rubymonk.com/

<comment><USER2> I just stumbled upon Ruby Monk two days ago and loved it. I've done some Ruby in the past and needed a refresher. CodeSchool seemed very disjointed, even for someone who isn't a beginner. Ruby Monk takes you through the basics without dragging it out and logically progresses so that you're never at a point and wondering how you got there or what it has to do with what you learned before.

Ruby Monk has the perfect formula for self-paced language learning.

</comment><comment><USER3> This site seems awesome! The only thing that is confusing is that there doesn't seem to be a 'next lesson' button anywhere. I had to go into 'Library -> View Contents' to see all of the lessons.

<comment><USER4> fokinsean, there is a 'Next' button in the sticky footer on every lesson. Hope that helps.

<comment><USER3> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By far my favorite resource for learning Ruby, still the first link I share with anyone looking to learn. Personally I like that it is rather to-the- point, I find most sites to be too wordy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Note to tomc1985: it looks like your posts are all dead going back a very long time (years). Could be a mistake, or an ancient comment; might be worth contacting the HN management.

\---

 _tomc1985 59 minutes ago [dead]

Yukihiro Matsumoto Creator of Ruby "I am having fun learning Ruby at [http://rubymonk.com](http://rubymonk.com). I like this type of lessons ;-)"

Huh? This is the guy who wrote the language. Weirdest endorsement ever..._</comment>


Opposum protein protects mice from poisons and toxins - <AUTHOR> http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=s0104-79301999000100005&script=sci_arttext

<comment><AUTHOR> From the study: On the other hand, LTNF is effective against the venoms of all species of snakes. Therefore, LTNF can become a universal treatment for snakebites. Furthermore, LTNF is effective against scorpion and bee venoms, plant-derived ricin and bacterial toxin botulinum. Therefore, LTNF can become a universal treatment for toxins derived from animals, plants, and bacteria.</comment>


Devirtualization in LLVM and Clang - <AUTHOR> http://blog.llvm.org/2017/03/devirtualization-in-llvm-and-clang.html <comment><USER2> Impressive undergraduate work: Undergraduate student at University of Warsaw, currently working on C++ static analysis in IIIT.

</comment><comment><USER3> On the Java side of things, devirtualization in the JVM's JIT compiler is discussed in articles like: [http://insightfullogic.com/2014/May/12/fast-and- megamorphic-...](http://insightfullogic.com/2014/May/12/fast-and-megamorphic- what-influences-method-invoca/) ; [https://shipilev.net/blog/2015/black-magic- method-dispatch/](https://shipilev.net/blog/2015/black-magic-method-dispatch/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe we should take the stackoverflow approach and code up some examples to show the virtual function performance tax?

<comment><USER5> The most significant cost of virtual functions is hard to demonstrate in micro-benchmarks: It's the optimization opportunities lost because you can't inline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious how helpful this is in practice. Often, if you're going through the pain of using C++, you probably care a lot about performance, so you also try to make sure to minimize use of virtual calls.

<comment><USER7> A virtual call on a modern processor is typically not very costly. Too much inlining, OTOH, can be (if it generates bloated code that trashes your cache)

<comment><USER8> The call itself is not very expensive, but the effect of having to jump through vtables can prevent other optimizations in a way similar to calling a function in a DLL.

Not a huge issue for business logic bits or if your virtual functions are quite large, but using virtual functions for small often used calls such as specific getters or some mathematical function can cause a big performance hit.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. The cost is not the overhead from the actual call - it's the fact that it inhibits other optimizations. The same applies to normal function calls when link time optimization is disabled.

This only becomes relevant in hot loops, but inlining can give big wins when combined with other optimizations.

<comment><USER7> I've seen some speculative inlining happening even without LTO (so obviously, in the same TU) with GCC.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely. Seems like modern compilers inline everything they possibly can, regardless whether you mark your functions inline or not.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Future of code editors for JavaScript: keeping it more DRY and easy Refactor - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdesignporto.com/future-of-code-editors-for-javascript-keeping-it-more-dry-and-easy-refactor/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=post&utm_content=code-editor&utm_campaign=hackernews

<comment><USER2> I've been struggling with this same issue a bit while I'm building an editor in javascript.

My problem isn't only in the ability to keep DRY, but in Angular, when I want to include modules, and bind controllers to directives, etc. I don't want to have to keep diving into the code to update the injection.

However, I disagree that this is the job of the editor/IDE. What I've done instead is built a config file which manages my injection for me, and I'm looking at extending the config manager to use either Require.js or Browserify (I'm leaning toward Browserify).

Any thoughts on that? would you prefer the IDE to manage this? Or is doing this through a config/build process possibly a good solution?

<comment><AUTHOR> From my point of view the refactoring should be completely managed by the IDE.

About the other stuff that can be DRY-ed I think could be managed by the IDE too. But don't forget the right tool for the right job. If you need class hierarchy don't use the 'instance' option in the IDE, use proper class hierarchy.

The 'instance' for code should be for stuff that cannot be or is not worth to encapsulate within a single method.

Thanks for the comment, pedalpete.</comment></comment>