Fast, lightweight desktop manager written in AutoHotkey - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/octalmage/mdesktop <comment><USER2> This seems to be a virtual desktops utility. Can anyone explain what it does differently from microsoft's virtual desktops utility?

[http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/cc817881.asp...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/cc817881.aspx)

<comment><USER3> Well, imagine if that utility had 10x the footprint and was written in the worst language for the job.

<comment><AUTHOR> mDesktop compiled uses MUCH less memory and is much faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> this app mdesktop contains adware opencandy and there is no need for it. virtuawin has worked for years [http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/](http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I was testing OpenCandy as an alternative way to make money but I just removed it. It's not worth it.

VirtuaWin is abandoned and slow and most prefer mDesktop:

[http://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/forum/windows_7-d...](http://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/forum/windows_7-desktop/windows-7-does-windows-offer-virtual- desktop/347497d6-d4cd-41d2-a86b-a99092fbd168)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another autohotkey based program is bug.n. [http://www.autohotkey.net./~joten/bug.n.html](http://www.autohotkey.net./~joten/bug.n.html) It combines tiling with desktops similar to dwm or xmonad. Whenever I have to used windows, this is what I use.

</comment><comment><USER6> Back in my Windows days I used LItestep. I have not found anything so scriptable even on Linux:

[http://www.litestep.net](http://www.litestep.net)

<comment><USER7> When forced to use Windows at a previous job, I used [http://code.google.com/p/python-windows- tiler/](http://code.google.com/p/python-windows-tiler/)

In fact I only had 2 applications running: Outlook and Cygwin/X tunneled to a Linux server, where I did everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the most disgusting hack I've seen in a long time.

It's also beautiful. More like this, please.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my favorite, can I use it on the website?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very nice!

</comment><comment><USER10> I love how many people at HN have to preface anything that they say about their usage of Windows with a disclaimer, such as "When I was _forced to_ use Windows..." or "Back when I used Windows..." or "Whenever I have to use Windows..."

It's as if, if they don't hide this perceived weakness, the alpha-nerds will eat them!

<comment><USER11> The only way I'd ever use Windows is through Ludovico.

<comment><USER10> k</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin Foundation Launches to 'Standardize, Protect and Promote' Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2012/09/gavin-andresen-launches-non-profit-bitcoin-foundation-to-standardize-protect-and-promote-bitcoin/

<comment><USER2> _Of course, the Linux Foundation is about promoting an operating system that has been largely marginalized_

Bollocks. Linux has not been marginalized. It is dominating the server market, embedded devices, and smartphones in the form of android.

 _whereas the Bitcoin Foundation will work to promote a cryptocurrency sometimes used for blackmarket activity._

Haven't you heard? The dollars are used for black market activities too.

<comment><USER3> I just want to clarify that kiba is criticizing the betabeat article, not the bitcoin devs.

Given that some core Bitcoin devs are also Linux kernel devs, they would not make the big mistake of saying that Linux is marginalized.

<comment><USER4> That kernel/bitcoin link is something I haven't heard of and pretty interesting, do you have any sources?

<comment><USER5> Jeff Garzik, Con Colivas. Anyone else?

<comment><USER3> Those are the only ones I can think of (and likely the only ones).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A while ago I wrote that perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. And now I will add that the Bitcoin experiment will also contribute to greater understanding of how nonprofit industry associations are organized to protect the economic interests of for- profit businesses. A lot of new industries have discovered that a few bad actors who screw up early can damage the reputation of the entire industry, and there are many previous examples of "competing" companies in a new industry banding together to promote consumer protection, as they say, and to promote the growth of their market. We'll see how this goes for Bitcoin.

<comment><USER7> "A lot of new industries have discovered that a few bad actors who screw up early can damage the reputation of the entire industry"

Please cite some examples. I can't come up with any, and this is intuitively false to me. Productive industries steamroll over bad actors and indiscretion. Railroads, gold-mining, and arguably social gaming were propelled by bad actors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think an encrypted currency base managed only by computers and the market is fairer than a system run by a few men. Also I like privacy.

<comment><USER5> I think it could be fairer or it could be a way to get stuck with a broken monetary policy forever.

<comment><USER9> Bitcoin can easily be forked and changed though.

<comment><USER5> I am not sure that is true. As small as the ecosystem is, I would not want to try to duplicate it.

<comment><USER10> In a very literal sense it can be forked: <https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin>

You wouldn't need to try and duplicate an ecosystem. People with nodes on the network would "vote with their CPU power" to support the version they liked the best - so the best one would naturally get the most support.

<comment><USER5> _the best one would naturally get the most support_

I don't think so. A "better" Bitcoin fork that has no MtGox, no BitInstant, no BitPay, no blockexplorer, etc. would probably have very low adoption.

<comment><USER11> agree and disagree. if a fork is demonstrably, significantly better, then adoption will grow and eventually, in general, the better will win. this is how evolution works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's their website:

<https://www.bitcoinfoundation.org/>

<comment><USER12> Looks down from here :( (and here: <http://www.isup.me/www.bitcoinfoundation.org>)

<comment><USER9> So it is. They also have the domain <http://www.bitcoinfoundation.com/> \- but no luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's a list of all the anonymous donations they have received so far (doesn't include membership donations): [http://blockexplorer.com/address/1BTCorgHwCg6u2YSAWKgS17qUad...](http://blockexplorer.com/address/1BTCorgHwCg6u2YSAWKgS17qUad6kHmtQW) (currently 26.5 BTC)

<comment><USER14> I hope we'll be publishing first-day membership numbers as well. My goal is to publish all our public keys. How cool would that be? Total financial transparency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ah, the long-storied September announcement. Pretty good idea overall. I'd be happiest seeing a set of security best-practices agreed upon and some sort of mechanism for organizations and businesses to elect for auditing.

<comment><USER14> Totally agreed; this and paying Gavin were my two main motivations upfront.

I really desire bitcointalk'ers to have some objective way to assess business quality when they consider how many percent per week return is a reasonable no-risk promise.</comment></comment>


What's New in Thunderbird 68 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2019/08/whats-new-in-thunderbird-68/ <comment><USER2> 90 comments today in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20820524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20820524)</comment>


A Reflection on the Departure of RMS - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84 <comment><USER2> For some context, Thomas Bushnell was the chief architect of the HURD from its founding in 1990 until 2003. He understands the FSF and Richard Stallman as well as anyone does.

<comment><USER3> > Thomas Bushnell was the chief architect of the HURD from its founding in > 1990 until 2003. He understands the FSF and Richard Stallman as well as > anyone does.

I invited Stallman to speak at my law school, along with other high ranking FSF members. I may have worshiped him at the time, but many of the tight-laced budding lawyers in attendance thought he was weird, mildly anti-social, and did not understand his relevance. Developers "got it", but most law students didn't connect. The traits that endeared him to the software community cut against him when trying to reach a broader audience.

Even though "open source" is everywhere right now, the GPL and true sharing of code is not. The Apache license, which allows you to do what you want and not share any changes, rules the day. I wonder if a more mainstream leader, who was just as committed to copyleft software would have been more effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure RMS exhibits most of all of the symptoms of Asperger's and would immediately get the diagnosis if he walked into a psychiatrists' office.

It's a bit ignorant for Bushnell to be degrading RMS by calling him a "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.

It's really unfortunate that people with Asperger's (potentially like RMS) are at a massive disadvantage when holding positions of any kind of power in a public setting.

<comment><USER5> RMS has all the resources he needs to get an Asperger's diagnosis and appropriate therapy.

<comment><USER6> Why should those that are aspie modify themselves to satisfy those that are neurotypical instead of those that are neurotypical learning how to work with aspies?

Not saying the aspies shouldn't work on themselves, but it should be a two way street, where NTs also learn to recognize and tolerate aspies.

<comment><USER2> > _Why should those that are aspie modify themselves to satisfy those that are > neurotypical instead of those that are neurotypical learning how to work > with aspies?_

This isn't an either-or question. _Everyone_ needs to learn how to work productively with other people, if they wish to succeed at multi-person endeavors. For some people it's harder, sure, but that doesn't change the reality on the ground that you can't just say "The fifty of us have decided that we prefer being antisocial, and therefore we're going to start a community for it" and expect it to work.

Also, this argument does quite a disservice to women with Asperger's who are harassed out of communities because they lack the inherent social confidence to stand up for themselves when a powerful man acts abusive and other people defend him by saying "He probably has Asperger's." Maybe neurotypicals should learn how to recognize _those_ aspies and stand up for them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm quite willing to entertain the notion that RMS was a problem in _some_ sense (though, if he has been 'coddled' for _decades_ , one has to wonder if that problem was due to any fault of his own that he ought to have been cognizant of!) But pay attention to what this post is _actually_ saying. It's inappropriate to defend Minsky in the wake of the Epstein scandal? (And there _are_ people, considered reliable by others, who have said that when sex was inappropriately offered to Minsky, he turned the offer down! Of course RMS did not say _that_ , and what he did say was rather tone deaf to say the least. But still...) RMS must go because he is fat and ugly, and thus makes women uncomfortable ( _the horror_!) even when he's simply trying to joke around and be charming? Come on.

<comment><USER8> I suggest you read the articles linked in the posted link, and also this story by Steven Levy:

[https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall- of...](https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of-the- clueless-nerd/)

Threatening to kill yourself if someone won't go out with you is terrible behavior at a bunch of levels: [https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard- stallman-appendix...](https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman- appendix-a-a7e41e784f88) (search for "When I was a teen freshman").

It's clear that Stallman was not just "trying to joke around and be charming".

Even if that were his actual intent, acceptable intent does not justify bad behavior.

<comment><USER9> "The fall of the clueless nerd" indeed. The headline in the wired story linked triggers the hell out of me. I suppose we have come full circle, Nerds suck, then they were cool and now they have been consigned back to uncool again. For the life of me, based on the snippets i've seen regarding his interactions with women, the only advice I can give him and ppl like him if they could have a do-over is stay away from women period. Which causes other problems but I will gladly have those problems than have an icon of an industry/space that I love be exiled in such an ignominious fashion.

<comment><USER3> > the only advice I can give him and ppl like him if they could have a do-over > is stay away from women period

Stallman could have been a quirky, uncompromising, and passionate personality and still treat women like equals. Being a "genius" is not a good (or even sensical) excuse to treat people poorly. If anything, it shows you're not really a genius after all.

<comment><USER10> > If anything, it shows you're not really a genius after all.

Plenty of geniuses have not treated people well. Newton was a complete asshole. Even Einstein, who was a staunch defender of civil liberties at a time when most of his peers weren't, wrote some rather unpleasant things about the Chinese in his personal journal.

I agree completely that being a genius is no excuse for treating people poorly. But unfortunately history is littered with such people.

<comment><USER3> > Plenty of geniuses have not treated people well. Newton was a complete > asshole. Even Einstein ... wrote some rather unpleasant things about the > Chinese in his personal journal. ... being a genius is no excuse for > treating people poorly. But unfortunately history is littered with such > people.

I suspect that many of these "geniuses" only became difficult personalities after they recieved recognition and had a taste for power. Power corrupts, it allows people to do things without regarding people that may be affected by their actions.

I don't think there's just a simple correlation between people deemed geniuses and them having difficult personalities. Rather, I suspect there's a causal effect between being granted the "genius" title and abusing the accompanying power that leads to a difficult personality.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Bankers Secretly Cut FB Revenue Estimates In Middle Of IPO Roadshow - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/facebook-bankers-secretly-cut-facebook-revenue-estimates-middle-133648905.html <comment><USER2> The original Reuters article does a better job explaining this than the link- bait title here: <http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USBRE84L06920120522>

FB amended their S-1 to lower revenue forecasts. Following that, a research analyst at Morgan Stanley cut his revenue forecast on FB close to their IPO. Nothing here should fire anyone up.

Equity research must be conducted independently of the investment bankers' non-public information. Given that they are opinions assembled from public data I don't see how disclosing it only to clients is a problem. If you want to publish a newsletter with stock tips and only disclose it to paying clients that is your prerogative, too.

<comment><USER3> >A research analyst at Morgan Stanley cut his revenue forecast on FB close to their IPO. Following that, FB amended their S-1 to lower revenue forecasts. The latter may have been informed by the former but it cannot be said that the former was influenced by the latter without more information.

It was the opposite. Facebook filed the amended S-1, and Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs changed their forecast.

From the Reuters article:

>The change in Morgan Stanley's estimates came on the heels of Facebook's filing of an amended prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in which the company expressed caution about revenue growth due to a rapid shift by users to mobile devices. Mobile advertising to date is less lucrative than advertising on a desktop.

<comment><USER4> So Facebook expressed caution about revenue growth, and the banks downgraded their earnings forecast?

I really don't see what the story is here!

In fact the WSJ suggests that if they had released these revised earnings forecasts publicly, they'd have been breaking SEC regulations:

 _Underwriters are barred by Securities and Exchange Commission rules from publicly issuing research on the IPOs they are involved in. But analysts are allowed to discuss their views with clients during these so-called road shows._

<comment><USER5> AFAIK, in the US, this doesn't prevent the Broker Dealer arms of the bank from publishing reports for an IPO underwritten by the Investment Banking arm of the bank. I know it doesn't in Brazil. There should be a Chinese Wall between the IB and the Broker Dealer and no meeting should happen between analysts from both arms without the presence of compliance. However, this is often not observed and difficult to enforce since members of both banking arms are often friends and socialize together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is not possible to trust Wall Street, the whole thing is built on insider trading. They call customers that are not on the inside "dumb money" and unashamedly try to figure out how to take their money.

<comment><USER7> Is it this bad in Europe and Asia? or just in the US? Almost every day we hear banks doing this, banks doing that - most of it is unethical, and many of it probably illegal, yet nothing seems to be happening to them. This is depressing.

<comment><USER8> Ethics and legality don't always align. You will always find people who are willing to push the ethical line a bit further out to satisfy their greed. Then of course, it's not too much further to meander across that legal line as well.

What can government/regulators do? If they respond harshly and abruptly, they are criticized as being too heavy handed, and enemies of capitalism. If they respond slowly and deliberately, they are called slow and ineffective.

<comment><USER9> Paraphrasing: If government does the right thing, criminals hate them, and if they do the wrong thing, victims hate them.

What can they do, indeed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The bankers surely know how disastrous something like this would be. Facebook has been aggressively indifferent to this whole process, which involves a lot of complexity both in decision making and communication. "Don't make the analysts look bad" is an important rule, but one that's easy to miss unless you spend some time thinking through your communications with the market.

If FB's initial analyst communications emphasized optimism over credibility and deliverability, or FB was impatient with questions casting doubt, the analysts may have had reason to start with high estimates. The May 9 filing comes out and reveals those to be implausible, and they have to dial back to avoid looking silly or as if they're pumping the stock.

If FB management hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about the relationships between the analysts and the investors, they may have missed the point that those investors are the analysts' ultimate clients. If they didn't spend much time with the analysts, they may have neglected building relationships where they could subtly signal issues without tripping regulatory problems.

Or the analysts were idiots and screwed up the biggest assignments of their lives.

Is all this shady company / banker / investor communication good? No, but this is how it's done right now, and if you want your partners to do well you have to work within the rules of the road. It isn't clear to me that Facebook took the time to do that.

<comment><USER11> Does facebook actually lose anything? It sounds like they walked away with the maximum amount of money possible; the bankers might be upset, and I can see that might make it harder for facebook to raise money in the future, but they're unlikely to need to for a while yet.

<comment><USER12> Every employee who is locked into their shares for 6 months is losing money every day.

<comment><USER9> Find me one employee who would feel ripped off that their 5000, 10000, or 100000 sell at even $20 instead of some hypothetical number could have been achieved by better hypothetical management. Oh those poor people, should have taken the offer to work at _____ instead?

<comment><USER12> It's pretty easy to be on the outside and say, "Oh, boo-hoo, they're still millionaires", but it's a different story when it's your own wealth. I assure you I could find people around the world who would say the same about _your_ earnings.

Anyway, the point was that the stock diving isn't victimless. There are real people losing real wealth.

Edit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/finance/comments/u0om7/im_an_employe...](http://www.reddit.com/r/finance/comments/u0om7/im_an_employee_at_zynga_and_own_a_decent_amount/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a bit confused about this. I distinctly remember the news about the earnings warning (due to difficulty of monetizing mobile users) coming out before the IPO. So there can be no complaint there.

The article suggests that the problem is that the banks underwriting the IPO cut their own estimates for Facebook's earnings based on this warning, and then didn't share it with the general public.

Surely this is nothing out of the ordinary- lots of banks/brokers/financial institutions produce research/notes on shares which are only distributed to major clients.

<comment><USER13> exactly. the biggest issue is the suspicion of FB giving more material, informational color on rev. growth to the analyst(s) than to the public.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And the domain "facebooksuit.com" was just registered:

Domain Name: FACEBOOKSUIT.COM

       Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC

       Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com

       Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com

       Name Server: NS05.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

       Name Server: NS06.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

       Status: clientDeleteProhibited

       Status: clientRenewProhibited

       Status: clientTransferProhibited

       Status: clientUpdateProhibited

       Updated Date: 22-may-2012

       Creation Date: 22-may-2012

       Expiration Date: 22-may-2014

<comment><USER14> godaddy? really?

<comment><USER15> Problem? They're cheap and easy. I imagine you're disappointed because they're not too highly regarded in the tech industry, but honestly you shouldn't expect your personal political beliefs to be held by everybody else.

<comment><USER14> They might be cheap, but they are far from easy, I would actually qualify it as the most painful purchase process I've ever experienced (my former employer had domains there). And my political beliefs had nothing to do here, technological beliefs at most.

Anyway, Godaddy is where I would expect my father to buy a domain, not someone at HN. Hence my surprise. But turns out the op didn't register the domain himself, he was just pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Facebook : The biggest tech IPO ever. Also possibly the most controversial tech IPO ever. It's down another 3% (On top of 10%). Irregularities popping out left right and centre. Not to mention companies being very public about discontinuing advertising with them.

Someone hates Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER17> "The SEC should investigate this immediately."

Ha, funny!

<comment><USER18> The author of the article, Henry Blodget, was investigated and fined and banned from working in the finance industry by the SEC.

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

He probably doesn't agree with the prevailing (?) wisdom that the SEC is toothless.

<comment><USER17> Oh, wow. I was not aware of that. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No surprises here. I always cringe when I see 'mum and dad' flotations. These type of deals are always plagued with bias, mostly in the favour of the big guys.

The poor retail investors get sucked in by the allure of holding a brand name or having boasting rights. This thinking is dangerous when making an investment. I doubt most people would throw $1000 on a sports bet but quite happily to throw in more on buying a 'big name'.

<comment><USER9> Some people read the sports pages, some people read the business pages, but they are reading the same paper and they aren't so different from each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm loving this sequence of events just for opportunity to see the cognitive dissonance of some HN commenters in action.

The FB IPO strategy was to wait for the peak (or "plateau", if you prefer) in their growth, collect money from the public and then, for the insiders, quickly cash out.

As for why they wanted to collect money from the public through an IPO, we can call it greed, but truthfully it was also the logical thing to do for the company. They knew were not going to grow revenues any further from the Facebook "business model". Revenues would slowly decline going forward. The novelty factor would disappear and advertisers would learn. But with an IPO they could bring in many years worth of revenue, by selling worthless shares to gullible investors, and extend the life of "Facebook Corporation". As long as Facebook has cash, they can stay "in the game". Like Microsoft, they do not need to innovate, they can just acquire or copy new players as they come along. They just sit and wait for the competition to arise, then quickly snuff it out, with cash.

New ideas and innovation are what can kill a company like Facebook (or Yahoo, or Microsoft, or so many others). The way you stay in the game is by having the cash to purchase the work of the innovators who would otherwise render your business obsolete.

<comment><USER12> I can't help but be disturbed that you've lumped Microsoft in with Facebook and Yahoo...twice.

Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world, makes a wide variety of products, both _physical_ and digital, did $17BB in revenue in the first quarter of 2012, and has been a public company for over 25 years, returning massive value to its investors.

So what do they have in common?

<comment><USER21> That new ideas and innovation can kill them.

Likely in the case of microsoft it will cause them to change, along the lines of how microsoft forced IBM to change.

<comment><USER12> > _"That new ideas and innovation can kill them."_

What company on the planet does this not apply to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really don't want to mentally lump Facebook with Groupon. I hope we hear an official statement about this from Facebook.

<comment><USER23> It is a safe bet to group them. Given that we know that zynga constitutes 12% of their revenue, and zynga is useless - unless they charge for privacy, or other features - social networks will always simply be an ad platform and that, while still profitable, is not something eternally sustainable.

<comment><USER9> Google makes good money as an ad platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So if I'm getting the timing right, in the week leading up to the IPO, they were just about simultaneously dropping their revenue forecasts while boosting the initial offer price?

This whole thing just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.

<comment><USER2> There is no singular "they". The equity research analyst, noting the S-1/A revenue forecast amendments by FB, downgraded the stock. The bankers, noting that the issue was 25 times oversubscribed _in Asia alone_ , saw demand outstripping supply.

May the bankers have gotten overzealous? Yes, probably. But we're saying this with the benefit of hindsight. Remember that Morgan Stanley walked into this deal still burning from LNKD popping 90% on its IPO - after the underwriting syndicate had _already_ raised the price by 30% on strong demand [1].

[1] [http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-19/tech/30001969...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-19/tech/30001969_1_linkedin- ipo-ipo-price-morgan-stanley)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not saying it's not true, but would be nice if there was more than an anonymous source to back this up. Unless I missed something.

<comment><USER26> Yahoo says that Reuters has the information. Reuters says the information was delivered by Scott Devitt, Internet analyst for JP Morgan. Scott Sweet, senior managing partner at the research firm IPO Boutique, backed up the story. It was also confirmed by "an official with a hedge fund firm who received a call from Morgan Stanley about the revision."

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/22/us-facebook- foreca...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/22/us-facebook-forecasts- idUSBRE84L06920120522)

<comment><USER25> Ah, I hadn't seen the Scott Sweet quote. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Possible securities fraud? I predict no one is punished and bonuses all around!

</comment><comment><USER28> At current P/E of 104 and earnings per share of $0.31, this stock can only go down. There's no reasonable justification that FB will start making 5X money any time soon.

Current fair price: $6

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't help but feel Facebook is on the way out. Probably not any time soon. But there is just a huge movement of people waiting for a good reason to leave. Perhaps the debacle that was the company's IPO will start the chain reaction that will end in Facebook going the way of MySpace, et al.</comment>


From Bootstrapping To $300M In Value: Meet The Founder Of Directi (TCTV) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/01/divyank-turakhia-directi-tctv/

<comment><USER2> Great article ... its always astonishing how often you here people say that very few people get rich as an entreprenuer when you hear stories of guys like this who virtually noone has heard of that make hundreds of millions. Cool story for sure.

Stories like these are the reasons I always refrain from taking a real job.

Arrington's article the other day spoke to me on many levels when he said his parents still did not know what he did. I have experienced this with my parents very often since I dropped out of college to pursue success with my first software startup.

After making an exit just 18 months later that put me in an entirely different tax bracket and gave me my first seven figure year i can never see myself doing anything else but working for me, however the most common things I hear when i see my parents are:

"When are you going to finish school" and "I have no idea what to tell my friends you do"

lol I guess this is just the life of an entreprenuer. for better or for worse, it is what I am and that is because of stories like this one.

Great write up!

</comment><comment><USER3> I worked in the domain parking industry for a few years. There's no doubt that Divank has many a ton of $$$ and is an impressive entrepreneur. But he does so at the expense of users on the Internet.

Directi/Skenzo is one of the most aggressive domain park companies on the Internet today. They make tens of millions using AdSense to monetize parked domains. Their templates (like those of Oversee) attempt to confuse users into errantly clicking on advertiser links, etc. leading to fewer available domains for start up purposes, poor advertiser returns and an arms race between search engines and parkers.

</comment><comment><USER4> I met this guy in person and he was very impressive. Not only he has keen sense of business, but his technical aptitude is top notch too. Frankly, I never thought a guy who drives a Ferrari to know too much about compiler optimizations for multithreading architecture :|</comment>


Don't Become Trained to Self Interrupt - <AUTHOR> http://www.databoost.org/2013/07/10/dont-become-trained-to-self-interrupt/

<comment><AUTHOR> This has also become a a key focus when organizing work for the team of developers I lead. I find that by rotating certain roles, developers avoid burnout as well and yearn for times when they can become fully engrossed with project work and be left alone.</comment>


Before the Drama (no Node.js forks) - <AUTHOR> http://hueniverse.com/2014/12/04/before-the-drama/ <comment><USER2> this got no comments? wow. such a great post.</comment>


Beginning Ember.js on Rails: Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cerebris.com/blog/2012/01/26/beginning-ember-js-on-rails-part-2/

<comment><USER2> I wonder why Rails was chosen for the backend.

Naively, it seems like a bit of overkill. You don't need a full stack web app framework to create REST endpoints, right?

<comment><USER3> I can't speak for others but I'm building a Rails app that could benefit from an Ember front end for a small subset of the full app. This series shows how easy it would be to 'plug in' Ember into a much broader Rails app.

If you're truly building a one-page style app, Rails is, as you say, probably not your first choice. Sinatra maybe?

<comment><USER4> At the danger of plugging it everywhere: if you skip the "view-helper" part of Padrino, its a pretty good backend for sproutcore/ember (I use it as such).</comment></comment></comment>


Pragmatic Bookshelf announces new Pragmatic Guide series - <AUTHOR> http://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2010-08-25.html?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=%5BBookshelf%5D+Pragmatic+Guide+series%3A+Pragmatic+Guide+to+Git&utm_campaign=%5BBookshelf%5D+Pragmatic+Guide+series%3A+Pragmatic+Guide+to+Git&utm_term=View%2Bit%2Bin%2Byour%2Bbrowser_ <comment><USER2> Great to see the prags are continuing to push things forward with another new series.

Really wish they'd bring the podcast back, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this different from their existing book on git? What's the difference between "Pragmatic Guide to Git" and "Pragmatic Version Control Using Git"? I'm assuming the latter is aimed more towards people without version control experience?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. My first book is part of the Pragmatic Starter Kit which is aimed at people who are just starting out. There's a lot of good material in it for people who have used VCS but don't understand them well, but it starts off explaining what a repository is, what a commit is, and so on.

This book is much more concise and assumes the reader has a basic understanding of version control systems and is looking to get up-to-speed on Git.

<comment><USER4> There is no reason for someone who has read your first book to buy the Guide, correct? This is a reduced and reformatted field guide that contains no information that isn't in the larger Git book?

(I'm almost finished reading your first book and as someone who is very capable with Subversion it has helped me tremendously with grokking Git. Thanks!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I might be biased, but I think there's a place for both books on a bookshelf. :-)

The first book is aimed at getting your started down Git with little or no previous knowledge, the second book serves the same purpose assuming you have a basic grasp of VCS, but it serves a dual role as a reference.

Check out some of the excerpts that are available on the book's site to get an idea for what it looks like. The idea is that it gives you a quick reference when you're trying to remember how to do a particular task.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just want to say; I just bought the Git Guide PDF, and its already proved useful as a quick reference. There's definitely room in my Programming PDF folder for guides like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you're already enjoying it. Thanks for the purchase. :-)</comment></comment>


[video] Brazilian IT firm promotes a home-office pod. W/ isolation/surveillance - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrbStP8QRcg&feature=emb_logo <comment><USER2> Such a great country, always ahead

</comment><comment><USER3> rolling back all of the great tech advances during this pandemic time :/</comment>


New Evidence on When Bible Was Written - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/world/middleeast/new-evidence-onwhen-bible-was-written-ancient-shopping-lists.html <comment><USER2> So the large takeaway is that people in further back ancient Israel were more literate than originally thought, opening up the prospect that the Bible could easily have been written earlier than what some scholars speculated. Correct?

<comment><USER3> > Prof. Edward Greenstein of Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. "The process > of transmission was much more complicated than scholars used to think."

Theology Student Here - MY TAKE This is pretty Bogus Study in terms of these are Statisticians' work based on one outpost on one piece of pottery. Someone had to publish something to make use of the research money. This is also out of their domain. Seems like trying to try a new approach and this is all we get?

It is MUCH more complicated and the Oral Tradition of ANE (Ancient Near East) is pretty amazing. This also is not taking up the fact that the majority of the text have very different vocabs, writing styles and different mediums for delivering ideas (Think Epics like Noah and personal stuff like Job and politics like the kings) All very different writings.

I would say that Theology and Archeologist and other disciplines are more and more agreeing that the scriptures have more evidence for a much later date then 300 - 50 year ago "liberal" scholarship believed. Heck I remember old Priest saying the Gospels were written in 250 AD and nothing was written in the first century (To bad we have a bunch of manuscripts from the first century now) Heck Pontius Pilot (The Roman leader who sent Jesus to the cross was believe to be made up until 25 years ago when they found his name inscribed in an unearthed building. This is interesting times.

TL:DR Bad statistical work and very little meat. Nothing to see here.

<comment><USER4> I think the study has very little to do with different vocabs, most people agree that the Torah had multiple authors, JEPD for instance is widely accepted...though perhaps not as it once was. Either way, in the documentary hypothesis or other non-Mosaic origin theories, the books were written separately, from different people and revised over hundreds of years. This study doesn't really refute that. The oral history is much, much older; the question is when could this have begun to have been written down?

A lot of scholars have the Torah being penned closer to the 600BC time frame.

<comment><USER5> > most people agree that the Torah had multiple authors

Source? From what I can tell, most religious people disagree with this point.

<comment><USER6> I have no firm source as the arguments are scattered over the last three decades. I can summarize the current viewpoints:

Pro-JEPD camps point towards style analysis, dividing the pentateuch into four distinct dictions, each with their own (hypothesized) time frames.

Anti-JEPD camps tend to a) pick apart style arguments (with mixed success) and b) argue for a cohesion of content.

I tend to give the Pro-JEPD camps slightly more credit for their empirical approach; this is entirely my point of view.

In any case, "most religious people" will argue for Moses himself writing the Torah in its entirety. AFAIK there is absolutely zero evidence for a historical Moses. In fact, the strongest evidence is put forth by the Anti- JEPD camps themselves.

Contrast this to the Quran, which has cohesion of support around authorship by Muhammad (or in a religious context, transcription of the word of God via Muhammad) in its entirety; argument around authorship tend to revolve around modifications during oral propagation between Muhammad's lifetime and the earliest fragments we have (notably the Sana'a manuscript and the slightly later Uthman standardized version). There is simply not as much evidence for multiple authorship of the core text here, though not as much textual analysis has been performed here as the time period for revision is tiny compared to the bible and the torah.

<comment><USER5> > AFAIK there is absolutely zero evidence for a historical Moses.

Lack of evidence is not evidence of anything. The scientific method is good for eliminating the likelihood of a hypothesis being correct based on evidence...not the lack of evidence.

> "most religious people" will argue for Moses himself writing the Torah in > its entirety

It always amazes me how many people have opinions about the Torah without studying the Talmud in it's entirety.

Why not defer to those Rabbis who have spent their lives studying the talmud instead of scientists who choose to ignore a massive body of research and discourse that is highly relevant.

<comment><USER6> > Lack of evidence is not evidence of anything. The scientific method is good > for eliminating the likelihood of a hypothesis being correct based on > evidence...not the lack of evidence.

I agree completely! But the claim that Moses wrote the Torah doesn't hold any water either, as you just argued, due to ZERO contemporary evidence. The same problem applies to e.g. the figure Lykourgos forming the pugnacious culture of Sparta: he's called out a few places, including Plutarch via Aristotle, but no contemporary evidence of him exists. Most likely he (Lykourgos) is a myth.

> It always amazes me how many people have opinions about the Torah without > studying the Talmud in it's entirety.

What does the Talmud have to do with the Pentateuch authorship? I was not commenting on the authorship beyond Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus. The Talmud also wouldn't present any contemporary evidence as it dates to several centuries after the earliest Pentateuch fragments and ~1.5k years after Moses would have walked around.

I'm very open to arguments that the Talmud IS relevant (it'd be pretty exciting to me, I'm a big fan), but I don't see it off hand. The Rabbis had every reason to present a coherent narrative regardless of its accuracy, and they were certainly not in a position to verify it themselves. If they did, I'd love to see how.

<comment><USER5> >What does the Talmud have to do with the Pentateuch authorship?

As someone who spent 10 years studying and only covered about 10% of the talmud, I can assure it that there is deep and complicated discourse on everything you can think of including the authorship of the Torah. There is nothing taken for granted. No one is given a free pass to "maintain a consistent narrative". There is constant dispute about every single letter written in the Torah (in fact, dispute on grammar, sentence structure, etc.. to the point that there are rules compiled for how to interpret every single word choice, letter, phrase, etc... in the Torah.)

It is highly relevant and these discussions are beyond my capabilities to address fully other than to know to defer to the several dozen people alive today that are truly deep experts, or the several thousand others who at least completed the entirety of the talmud.

It's simply ignorance to have an opinion on the Torahs authorship without being a talmud expert. (Too many people dismiss it because they have no idea whats actually in it!)

<comment><USER6> Somehow i don't think you were interested in addressing anything I said. Assurances are worthless compared to the very specific evidence i requested.

I see no way anything written in the talmud would have any effect.

<comment><USER5> >i don't think you were interested in addressing

Interested, just not knowledgable to address them fully.

>I see no way anything...

I presume this is because you dont actually know whats contained in the talmud. While modern science tools may not have existed, smart scientisits, mathmeticians, liguists, historians, etc... did and in fact, they discuss at length the authorship of the torah.

You wrote previously that the rabbis wanted a cohesive narrative. This is patently false. There is even a concept within torah study called "eilu ve'eilu" which means we can disagree, and still both be right. My point being that there is nothing cohesive or narratove based in the talmud other than a rigorous search for Absolute Truth.

Pretty much every word mentioned by someone in the talmud is followed by an aggressive quest to disprove it...and many things are even left unanswered...

Without taking a peek into the talmud, it is not intellectually honest to dismiss it...especially invoking modern science without even seeing if its consistent with that science or not.

<comment><USER6> You misunderstand me.

A), i have read some of the talmud; i do not believe i have the collected texts in their entirety.

B), i meant to say it is in the interest of the rabbis to propagate the cohesive narrative of Moses authoring the pentateuch, NOT that the talmud itself has a cohesive narrative.

Perhaps there was some confusion about the word "torah"\--I was refering to the pentateuch, ie the original five written texts, not the broader meaning including the rabbinical texts. To my knowledge, authorship of the latter is entirely a different topic of which I do NOT have much knowledge or interest-- not because it is not interesting, but because it is orders of magnitude more complex and (personally) I just enjoy reading it and the authorship does not play into my enjoyment the way the authorship of the pentateuch lends it meaning. Can you understand how it would be different written by the patriarch of an entire ethnicity vs some unknown goat herders? The text means entirely different things under these interpretations, so the argument over authorship is worth the pursuit. Personally, i dont think it means any less in either interpretation; i think the pentateuch is invaluable regardless of your beliefs, ethnicity, or stance on JEPD. Genesis itself just might be the greatest text ever written in my humble opinion--I see new things every time I read it, and it is the closest we will ever get to understanding the the, erm, human experience of civilization itself.

Sorry for the confusion!

<comment><USER5> No real confusion about the Torah, I was also only referring to the pentateuch as well. The talmud does however discuss who wrote each of the later texts.

> the cohesive narrative of Moses authoring the pentateuch There is a > disagreement in the Talmud about this point.

When you say you read talmud, have you ever studied it in a Yeshiva, while learning the commentary, or just read an english translation of part of it?

I think the point that seems to be lost in this discussion is the following. Picture a conversation on reddit like this... redditor1: my opinion is the truth. redditor2: source? redditor1: here is the link redditor2: but three years ago you said this competing theory. redditor3: those opinions are consistent because of differing circumstances... redditor4: what this other thing he said that is the same circumstances as the old post but supports the new one. redditor3: I guess i was wrong. I am stumped. redditor4: it makes sense because if you look at the sentence structure, they are really the same thing said in two different ways.

Now imagine a conversation like that trying to determine the veracity of every single word in the Torah, every single law and theory mentioned in the talmud and mishna, etc...

Studying the talmud is not some text some guy wrote down. It is an intense and deep analysis that considers math, physics, science,logic, language analysis, etc... all with the goal of finding the truth about the torah and mishna...not to support a theory about G-d giving over the Torah to Moses who than transcribed most of it.

What I am trying to say is that while I don't know the relevant discussions around the pentateuch authorship other than the link I shared earlier from Ohr.com ... These scholars who analyzed the text to determine if there were multiple authors, etc... really need to look at the explanations in the talmud for why one sentence is written one way and another is written another way...

It seems intellectually dishonest to me to analyze these things without consulting the talmudic experts who have studying the relevant sections...As there might be discussion and context that is very relevant.

<comment><USER6> Then it was I who misunderstood.

I tend to prefer arguments that stand on their own, and i highly doubt that the persuasive aspects of the talmud's authorship discourse are disjoint with the academic discourse. It would be shocking to me to find parallel communities discussing the same topic unaware of the other's existence. Regardless, at this point i am willing to admit I am out of my depth and cannot devote the time to pursuing the topic without enrolling in yeshiva myself; much of my interest focuses on its historical context and its relation to abrahamic religions, not just rabbinical judaism. I will have to settle for comiserating with you: it is indeed a shame that I have not consulted the talmudic experts. Perhaps soon. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So somebody found some commercial records in Hebrew, and this immediately gets extrapolated into religion. Somebody is obsessing.

Nine out of ten surviving Babylonian tablets are financial records.[1] There are surviving financial records from Ur two millennia older than Christianity.

[1] [http://viking.som.yale.edu/will/finciv/chapter1.htm](http://viking.som.yale.edu/will/finciv/chapter1.htm)

<comment><USER6> > Somebody is obsessing.

Welcome to biblical studies.

This is relevant because people have traditionally argued for later dates based on literacy rates; this provides shaky evidence against that argument. It's more like the null hypothesis than firm dating data in itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find this discovery very interesting when juxtaposed against a similar discovery on the other side of the continent:

"A Revolutionary Discovery in China" by Ian Johnson [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/revolutionary- dis...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/revolutionary-discovery-in- china/)

The manuscripts' importance stems from their particular antiquity. Carbon dating places their burial at about 300 BCE. This was the height of the Warring States Period, an era of turmoil that ran from the fifth to the third centuries BCE. During this time, the Hundred Schools of Thought arose, including Confucianism, which concerns hierarchical relationships and obligations in society; Daoism (or Taoism), and its search to unify with the primordial force called Dao (or Tao); Legalism, which advocated strict adherence to laws; and Mohism, and its egalitarian ideas of impartiality.

...

Do these old texts matter today? They do in several ways. One has to do with the antiquity of China's written culture. In the West, many classic texts, for example by Homer or stories in the Bible, are widely accepted as having been oral works that later were written down—a view of history picked up by Gu and the antiquity-doubters of the early twentieth century. Even though Gu was sidelined in China, his heirs in the West have tended to dismiss traditional views that important works in China were written down early on, or even composed as written texts. For many of these skeptical Westerners, Chinese efforts to prove the antiquity of their culture is closet chauvinism, or part of a project to glorify the Chinese state by exaggerating the antiquity of Chinese civilization.

But the new discoveries should give pause to this skepticism. Allan argues that the texts were indeed primarily written down, and not transcribed oral tales. Besides the Daodejing, only a few of the texts excavated over the past twenty years have mnemonic devices or rhyme. She writes that even the texts that claim to be speeches of ancient kings originated as literary compositions. And as the Guodian texts show, works like the Daodejing took a written form earlier than skeptics believed, possibly even as early as the traditionalists have always claimed.

</comment><comment><USER9> Title should refer to the Old Testament not the Bible as a whole.

<comment><USER10> More like 'Torah'. Half of what's referred to as the Old Testament refers to events that happened during and after the Babylonian exile...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is it even possible that a page like the NY Times serves me one of those fucking whatsapp-you-have-7-viruses-and-let's-vibrate-your-phone ads?

Don't they have _any_ quality control? It's time to finally root my phone and install an adblocker.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's very interesting to see that they used image processing algorithms (machine learning!) in their study!

</comment><comment><USER13> It seems as though, in some online communities, the discussion about faith and purpose has begun to evolve beyond some variation of "OMG you believe XYZ? That is proven completely false by ABC - Lolz".

I won't hold my breath but increased meaningful discussion can only be a good thing.

<comment><USER2> I'm ready to receive the down-votes here, but I've been reading through those posts along with scientific articles for years and I'm still not convinced that the Bible was made up. So it's refreshing to have actual open discussion rather than atheist and bible bashing fights.

<comment><USER14> Of course the Bible was made up, it didn't write itself; it's a work of fiction by men, nothing more. Nor is there a lick of evidence to the contrary.

<comment><USER15> Do you mean that because a book doesn't write itself, which is an impossible task, it can't be true? That seems to remove the possibility to know anything from a written text including science, history, autobiographies, and other forms of non-fiction.

<comment><USER14> Any written text can be either true or false, fiction and mythology have always been wildly popular. The bible, like all works of fiction, was made up by men.

> That seems to remove the possibility to know anything from a written text > including science, history, autobiographies, and other forms of non-fiction.

Things aren't true because they're written, they're true because they can be verified as true; writing merely adds the possibility to pass on the knowledge required to verify a truth. Absent re-verification, nothing is true simply because someone wrote it down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No real substance to add to this discussion, but I love it when these kind of studies come out. By the reaction of the relevant parties you can see who accepts humility and science.

<comment><USER17> I would prefer if you spelled it out for us. Are you trying to say that if someone is religious, that they do not value the Scientific Method, and that they lack humility? Or are you saying it is the other way around? If I interpret it either way, I could not agree with you. Your statement comes off as presumptuous and ignorant, and therefore it is ironic and hypocritical, since you have drawn such a tremendous conclusion that is a sweeping generalization based on what exactly? Please correct me if I did not interpret your words the way you intended them to be interpreted.

As far as the study is concerned, here it is: [http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2016/04/05/1522200113.DCSu...](http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2016/04/05/1522200113.DCSupplemental/pnas.201522200SI.pdf) It looks like they had to develop new techniques because of the condition of the writing, for the purpose of processing the images, and analyzing them. I will have to read more before I can form an adequate to my own taste, but my preliminary opinion is, that they are filling in too many blanks in order to form a meaningful conclusion.

<comment><USER16> Neither, so no offense implied or taken, I'm a regular churchgoer mysel. All I was saying is when confronted by new science, weak or overstreched churches will deny obvious truths (example:evolution) while churches that are actually focused on the orignal mission of Christ will simply say 'thats cool'.

<comment><USER17> My apologies then. Looks like I was the one jumping to conclusions and being insulting to top it off.

<comment><USER16> No worries, I went back and read what I wrote and realized it could have been perceived that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _literacy may have been far more widespread than previously known in the > Holy Land around 600 B.C., toward the end of the First Temple period._

Interesting correlation to the Book of Mormon, which originates ~600 BC in Jerusalem. In fact, page 1, verse 2 says:

> _2 Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the > learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians._

And further discusses how Lehi "hath written many things which he saw in visions and in dreams; and he also hath written many things which he prophesied." Lehi was of a priestly order, of which there were at least hundreds, if not thousands, of members, which also correlates well to this finding:

> _But if the literacy rates in the Arad fortress were repeated across the > kingdom of Judah, which had about 100,000 people, there would have been > hundreds of literate people, the Tel Aviv research team suggests._

So anyway, the linked article and this source seem to corroborate each other.

Edit: Okay, lots of down votes. How does this comment not contribute to the discussion?

<comment><USER19> > Interesting correlation to the Book of Mormon, which originates ~600 BC in > Jerusalem.

The Book of Mormon was written in 1830. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER18> It certainly was published in 1830. The account within it originates ~600 BC.

<comment><USER20> "The theory that the Book of Mormon is an ancient American history is considered to fall outside academic credibility." [https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/wp- content/uploads/sbi/arti...](https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/wp- content/uploads/sbi/articles/132%2022-55.pdf) page 37

<comment><USER18> Hmm, we're not talking about American history here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Good Developers Write Bad Unit Tests - <AUTHOR> https://mtlynch.io/good-developers-bad-tests/ <comment><USER2> Writing tests seems to actually be the easy part. Figuring out what to test is the hard part. Integration tests or unit tests. To mock or not to mock. How deep to test my logic in controllers. How many edge cases is enough. And no matter how good your tests are you can still get bugs.

Good QA people are worth their weight in gold.

<comment><USER3> Doing Django dev right now. I always right unit tests for a component but not necessarily integration tests. Depends on whether or not the component interacts with an outside system (db, redis, aws, etc.). Always mock those systems if the component does. Also always assert as specific as possible on those mocks. I usually find by the time I have to write integration tests the majority of the issues are worked out as long as I'm very diligent about mocking the return values correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think good developers write bad tests. Developers inexperienced in writing tests for the type of task they are working on write bad tests.

But also, given how standard setUp method is and how often it is used, putting set up config there is not forcing anyone to "read your entire test suite". It forces them to read setUp method and that should be no shock to whoever is making the test. I dont mind doing it the way author suggests, but I also think that difference between the two is minimal.

Helper methods deserve equal treatment in code and tests. Operating on two different layers of abstraction as well as other complains he has about their bad use would be same bad in main code.

Likewise, most other problems are also bad in code under test code. Helper methods should not bury critical values or interact with state unless it is very clear from their name. Overly concise names are bad too and trying to save key strokes is pointless. Pointless constants (FOUR=4) are pointless.

</comment><comment><USER5> A lot of the points in this article are also in other works on the topic such as Kent Beck's Test-Driven Development by Example, and Clean Code by Robert Martin.

</comment><comment><USER6> Please, avoid abstraction/helpers for tests.

When you then edit such a function it affects multiple tests at the same time. But you rarely check if that modification neutralizes some of them or not.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Suppose I invented a new ruler that measured in "abstract ruler units." To > convert from "ruler units" to inches or centimeters, you'd use a separate > conversion chart. If I offered such a ruler to a carpenter, they'd smack me > in the face with it. It would be absurd to add a layer of abstraction to a > tool that gives clear, unambiguous information.

Assuming these ARUs are linear (like every unit of measure for distance), you don't need a chart. You just need a multiplier. In that case, it sounds like this is describing a _scale ruler_ [1] -- and your carpenter probably loves it.

For anyone who ever has to read (or draw) an architectural diagram, they're great! Rather than adding a level of abstraction, they remove one. I'm glad rulers _haven 't_ simply "existed in the same form for hundreds of years".

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

</comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting that the author sees helpers and abstractions as being uniformly opposed to simplicity. If that's the case, why use helpers or abstractions in our production code either? Why not apply the author's advice in production code as well?

Badly designed helpers and abstractions are certainly ... bad. But well designed helpers and abstractions make the code much simpler to read, understand and maintain. That's their entire purpose.

There's certainly a lot of badly designed abstractions out there. If you come across one that makes the code _harder_ to understand and maintain, you should certainly get rid of it and inline it instead. Regardless of whether it's production or test code. The flip side of this is that if you see an opportunity for abstractions that make the code _easier_ to understand and maintain, you should certainly use it, even in test code.

<comment><USER9> The way I've always thought of it is that my unit tests have to be a level of complexity simpler than the code under test. Otherwise the "bugs" are equally likely to be in my test code as the production code.

I think he makes a very strong point that if the code is too complicated to use in tests then the production code should change. Simply because if it's hard to set up for you in tests; then it's almost impossible for someone else to use in real code. When they should be reusing your component they will give up and write a 'better' version for themselves.

<comment><USER8> I don't see how replacing a bunch of copy-pasted code with a helper method, makes your bug risk any greater. If anything, it reduces your bug risk because when you need to make changes everywhere, you won't miss out in a couple places by accident.

Not to mention that the right abstractions will actually make your code simpler, instead of more complex. Imagine if someone needs to use an arraylist in a test, but decides to reimplement inline using arrays instead. Sure, they have avoided the use of a higher level abstraction, but the resulting code is now both harder to read and more likely to contain bugs.

<comment><USER9> I think the point was to avoid the need for a bunch of copy paste by making the code simple to interact with in the first place.

He isn't really advocating never using helper methods either. In fact he gives an example where the helper methods hide some irrelevant values.

If I were to rephrase it as "repeated code isn't necessarily bad in tests" does that make it more palatable?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vibration overcomes gravity on a levitating fluid - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02451-w <comment><USER2> This reminds me a bit of quadrupole ion (Paul) traps.

These confine charged particles using just electric fields. This is not possible with static fields (Earnshaw's theorem), but can be done with oscillating fields, even with sensors to determine the positions of the trapped ions.

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

If I recall correctly, the principle was also illustrated in Feynman's lecture notes, where a vertical rod supported by a ball joint from the bottom is kept from tipping over by rapidly moving the joint up and down.

<comment><USER2> "even without sensors"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Vibration can, in principle, be used as a propulsion technology, no?[1]

> Woodward's MEGA drive is different. Instead of propellant, it relies on > electricity, which in space would come from solar panels or a nuclear > reactor. His insight was to use a stack of piezoelectric crystals and some > controversial—but he believes plausible—physics to generate thrust. The > stack of crystals, which store tiny amounts of energy, vibrates tens of > thousands of times per second when zapped with electric current. Some of the > vibrational frequencies harmonize as they roll through the device, and when > the oscillations sync up in just the right way, the small drive lurches > forward.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/story/mach-effect-thrusters- interstell...](https://www.wired.com/story/mach-effect-thrusters-interstellar- travel/)

<comment><USER4> That drive would need extensive testing, because it violates Newton's third law. Similar reactionless drives like the EM drive also warrant skepticism. Occam's razor, it's more likely the tests measuring their thrust were not accounting for a background element, even the article acknowledges this.

<comment><USER5> A levitating frog warrants even more skepticism, but it's levitating.

<comment><USER6> No, the levitating frog is exactly what you'd expect if you had a strong enough magnetic field.

[https://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic- levit...](https://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic-levitation/) "Lesson #1: Everything can levitate It is possible to levitate magnetically every material and every living creature on earth. Molecular magnetism is always present, although it is very weak and usually remains unnoticed. It might give you the impression that materials around us are mainly nonmagnetic. But this is not true. They are all magnetic. We call them 'diamagnetic'. With magnetic fields high enough you can levitate all diamagnetic materials. At our lab, we develop and build magnets that have a very high magnetic fields. We use it to investigate molecules and materials. And show the world a levitating frog."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362808)

</comment><comment><USER8> In the next few decades, we'll start seeing all kinds of crazy applications of vibration. There might be a physics and engineering revolution coming.

<comment><USER9> I have wondered about this too, after reading about other interesting experiments with vibrating oil droplets a few years ago.

[https://www.sciencealert.com/these-bouncing-droplets- behave-...](https://www.sciencealert.com/these-bouncing-droplets-behave- strangely-like-quantum-particles)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite example of these water experiments is sonoluminescence: a tank of water is driven by a high-frequency acoustic transducer to create a 3d standing wave, which forms a tiny bubble of air or other gas that, when collapsing, produces a burst of light.

That tiny burst of light is still an unsolved mystery. Despite it's trivially reproducible, there's still a range of competing theories that estimate the temperature of that bubble from 2,000K to 20,000K (some researchers add a few zeros there), and attribute the light to anything imaginable, including fusion and the Casimir effect. Quoting Wikipedia: "the rapidly moving interface between water and gas converts virtual photons into real photons."</comment>


How to land a 747 - <AUTHOR> http://www.sampottsinc.com/info/plus.html <comment><USER2> Here's another article on how to land an airpline:

<http://airplanepilot.blogspot.com/2005/08/how-to-> land-airplane.html</comment>


Whats the tool that you have to use but dislike the most? Why? - <AUTHOR> I felt this would be a great Q&A to identify some bad tools. To start with, really have been disliking hipchat a lot. Have to use it as a company stickiness to Altassian. <comment><USER2> UPS Worldship. Dog slow, (you sit there and watch it redraw each form multiple times) confirms on exit, and will refuse to exit if it's talking to the server, since its programmers had never heard of background tasks.

Stamps.com is equally bad. SCAN form reprint doesn't work, crashes randomly on return from sleep, sets the Windows default printer to whatever thermal printer it's using at the time, has the most braindead address correction algorithm I've ever seen. (For one, it doesn't like state names that are two words!) Also they haven't updated the 13oz -> 16oz cutoff for first class mail on return labels yet.

Madcap Flare is also some pretty miserable enterprise-ware.

Magento is also bad, of course, but that's universally hated, no surprise there.

</comment><comment><USER3> StealthSeminar. Automated Webinar platform. Awful value for money, awful UI. Buggy.

Problem, it's arguably the best of the bunch which just shows how bad things are.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> forgot Ask HN, can someone edit the title ?</comment>


Google is down - <AUTHOR> http://google.com

<comment><USER2> nope. up and running for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Twitter talks about DNS issues.</comment></comment>


Insurance coverage denied because of Facebook photos - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/11/creepy-insurance-company-pulls-coverage-due-to-facebook-pics.ars

<comment><USER2> Insurance companies regularly engage private investigators to spy upon and photograph people they suspect of fraud, or whom they just want to find an excuse to stop providing benefits to. Sadly, I don't know how controversial or different this is (putting aside my personal feelings about it). The only real difference here is that an insurance investigator found photos instead of taking them. Either way, the same photos taken by an investigator would have been used the same way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sick benefits mean: if you convince a doctor you are too sick to work, you can stop working and the insurance company pays your salary indefinitely instead. As you might imagine, some people try to take a long paid vacation this way using vague subjective illnesses like depression. So insurance companies really do have to defend themselves from fake claims and malingering. I dunno about this case, but in general you can appreciate why they have to try to catch fakers.

<comment><USER4> The question is about whether a photo depicting someone looking happy or having fun precludes the condition of depression, and is in itself a sufficient basis for terminating benefits.

It is no a part of the known clinical attributes of depression that a person must appear unhappy and detached 100% of the time. In fact, I have not known a single depressed person - including those with severe clinical depression - who exhibit such consistency.

In fact, volatility of mood, including extreme variations, is often a key characteristic of whatever it is that depression is. People who suffer from depression often have no problem participating or "blending in" various social gatherings, events, etc. - it's more that in their private world, they are unable to maintain stable emotional equilibrium.

In any case, this is irrelevant. The point is that a photo of someone with a smile on their face on a social networking site does not meet the evidentiary burden required to make decisions with nontrivial political and legal weight such as denying someone insurance coverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Douglas Adams on the "Internet":

 _I don't think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn't becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it's very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day._

</comment><comment><USER6> "Facebook doesn't allow any accounts created on their servers to be used for commercial purposes (So the existence of all-access corporate accounts would violate their own terms of use). What they do, however, is handle requests for private data individually, and their standard for decision isn't very well defined in the terms of service or privacy policy."

<http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=21092>

</comment><comment><USER7> Now I know how to monetize social sites. Just sell the information to insurance companies! (What's next, deranged exes who were just released from prison?)

<comment><USER8> Isn't the solution to simply be more conservative with what you post on facebook? we all know that nothing on it is private... If you are looking for a private more secure social networking site, use intronetworks, not facebook... Posting pictures of yourself is a cry for attention...</comment></comment>


I just launched my first revenue-focused project. Can I get some feedback? - <AUTHOR>

The URL is http://typed.it/, and it's a site in the same vein as Compete.com and Alexa, but it's focused solely on traffic generated by direct navigation (typing into the address bar). The idea for the site stemmed from the discussion around this blog post I wrote analyzing a portion of the traffic data that I had been collecting: http://www.chrisfinke.com/2011/07/25/what-do-people-type-in-the-address-bar/<p>I'd love feedback on everything from the design to the name to usability to the validity of the idea itself. <comment><USER2> I see some decent potential here for domain typos. Domain parkers would love to be able to locate some high volume unregistered domains. It doesn't look like you have a page just for the most common typo'd domains across all domains. Is that a pro feature? If not, it should be.

Also, Good shit, Chris!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a feature that I've considered, but I don't have the computing resources on this server to do that many whois lookups to determine registered vs. unregistered domains yet. It's high on my list of v2 changes though.

<comment><USER3> I believe most people in the name spinner business use a cached zone file rather than doing live lookups. Perhaps look in to that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reddit Writes A Law: First Draft Of The Free Internet Act Emerges - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nei0Q_-th2J0fkqZU0hyBrSKklQqoc-8eXpXEwoLDwE/edit?pli=1

<comment><USER2> Looks like the vandals have taken their toll... Instead of open google doc, this should be a git repo.

edit: Created one: <https://github.com/bradherman/Reddit-Free-Internet-Act>

<comment><USER3> While I at first agreed that this should be a Git repo, it could in the end defeat the document's purpose. This document is meant to be seen and governed by everyone, not only those who know how to use Git.

<comment><USER4> FYI, GitHub now allows you to fork, edit, and make a pull request all from its online interface, without ever cloning on your computer. Each save is a commit, and submissions are pull requests. The feature hasn't been publicized widely, and there isn't real documentation for lay-people, but all the functionality is there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Censorship is only permitted if content is found to be illegal content in > accordance with this treaty.

> _All false information stored to misguide, scam, cause damage, trap users > financially, or mutilate collateral are illegal content._

The italicized text concerns me. Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because I can easily imagine an unscrupulous politician claiming (for instance) that arguments critical of government economic policy are "false" and are intended to "misguide" and "cause damage" to the economy and well- being of the nation.

The Constitution of the United States has been rendered effectively worthless by this very tactic—a couple of its clauses are routinely used to justify _anything_ , because of their less-than-specific wording.

I suspect documents like this are a _symptom of the cure_ rather than the cure itself. They can only be enacted—and can only continue to serve their purpose—as long as the citizens and their politicians support the documents' causes.

<comment><USER6> It looks like it's becoming a "status quo" document because, for the sake of credibility, noone wants to stand up on copyright, privacy, censorship, and human rights. The "what if someone posts illegal content!?" questions dominate, just like in the Reddit meshnet plan.

We've been having this debate about the Internet for years and decades later, we're still not willing to stand up for the bad speech to save the good speech. (You can't have one without the other -- that's what that amendment was about.)

Yes I think it's that black or white.... Iran has shown us it IS possible to go back to the stone age, and the scary part is, the US and Canada BOTH have a 1984 bill in play as I write.

We've come a long way in terms of technology, but people are less willing to stand up for the free flow of information than ever. We are crawling back into Plato's cave.

As difficult as some information can be (and it's strictly that -- information -- bits -- not murder, or rape, or worse; not a physical act but merely the vapors of physical acts), I think I'd rather have the truth and an open sky than the comfort of a lie.

I'm more afraid of a world without Wikileaks than one with Wikileaks.

<comment><USER7> >the US and Canada BOTH have a 1984 bill in play as I write

What bills are you referring to, specifically?

<comment><USER6> US: HR.1981 Canada: Bill C-30

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a preference for "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" written by John Perry Barlow in 1996:

<https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>

It's more inspirational and make it more universal. Just like the "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights"...

</comment><comment><USER9> Why do they want to write this sort of stuff in stuffy 19-th century pseudo- legalese?

Cant they just have a plain speech normal copy and let this be translated into proper referenced legal documents (for various jurisdictions) by people who know what they are doing?

<comment><USER10> 'Legalese' isn't just obfuscated English. It's very precise English designed to smoothly interface with the entire corpus of law. Since Redditors were trying to draft a bill it seems appropriate.

<comment><USER9> Looking at the various Reddit pages, I assumed this was not just for the USA. Words have different legal meanings in different legal environments.

Having said that, some of the contributors (and yourself assumedly) seem to feel the opposite.

<comment><USER10> Oh - I assumed it was. A draft bill for no house of law is sort of pointless.

More effective may have been a memo for legislators defining the minimum requirements for a country to have "Internet freedom".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ok, I can't keep track of the chaos. I made this if its useful to anyone. You know what to do. <https://github.com/mgirouard/free-internet-act>

<comment><USER2> you beat me to it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting that Reddit could really be emerging as a force for good on the internet...not just a bunch of time-wasting, cry babies. Don't mean to be harsh, but while there is some good stuff, there is a lot of just time-burning stuff.

That being said, if they are able to marshal the productive collective and produce actual legislation that can work - that would be very interesting.

I wonder if legislation ever written by 'non-legislators' has ever been passed into law.

Is that even legal?

<comment><USER13> Between lobbyists, interest groups, the executive branch, staff attorneys, various agencies and congressional staff I doubt even a significant minority of law is written by actual legislators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's a question - is there any piece of Javascript you would wack into a html page which would allow users to query the contact details of their representatives? It would be good if this was as international as possible (though in some countries it would be impossibl).

</comment><comment><USER15> Neat idea, but the current version of the document just looks like a jumble of loosely related points, somewhat like the laundry list of demands that somebody claiming to represent OWS posted on Reddit a few months ago. What does a damage cap on copyright infringement have to do with a general prohibition of censorship? Why does the document suddenly make up an arbitrary definition of derivative content? Closely related items should be placed together, but different topics should be grouped separately.

I'm also a bit skeptical about the way the document so quickly excludes "illegal data" from its purview. So much of the surveillance and censorship measures that people are worried about take place in the name of preventing and/or prosecuting illegal activity. Therefore, the scope of "illegal" must be very carefully defined in order to prevent gaping loopholes. Is downloading child porn "illegal" in the same way that uploading a copyrighted song is "illegal"? At the very least, cases involving damage claims in a civil suit should be distinguished from cases involving criminal prosecution.

Also, basing damages on the retail price of copyrighted works, multiplied by the number of copies produced, seems odd to me. If you upload 0.8% of a copyrighted file to 100 people over BitTorrent, how many copies have you produced? 0.8 copies? What if the infringed work is not on sale in the first place? What happens if you violate an open-source software license?

But I don't hang out on Reddit all that much, so maybe these apparent shortcomings have good reasons behind them?

<comment><USER10> It's ironic that the effect of special interests, pork, and other forms of Congressional "trolling" writing a bill in Google Docs seeks to mock come home to roost regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Full text: <http://pastebin.com/7VY4VTLn>

</comment><comment><USER17> This is why we can't have nice things; the message is getting overwritten every few seconds by a kids pasting in goatse and jailbait references. wisdom of the collective is neither when one party is overpowering.

</comment><comment><USER18> proud of you.. you cat, bacon, narwhal loving bunch of weirdos

</comment><comment><USER19> It's a nice thought, but the only thing you'll get from large scale group editing & group think is mediocrity, endless confusion and endless debate.

There has never been an amazing piece of 'legislation' drafted by a huge group of people. There's a very good reason why that's the case. Intelligent discourse in which critical differences and conflicts can be sorted out, can't occur at hyper scale because it becomes an echo chamber - all you'll end up hearing is everybody shouting back and forth, resulting in absolutely nothing.

The only way they can do this, if they're serious about it, is through using a representation system, in which a group of people empowers one person to speak, negotiate and resolve on their behalf so that things actually get done.</comment>


Google thinks the largest prime number is 257,885,161 - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=largest%20prime%20number

<comment><AUTHOR> It surprised me that Google didn't see this as 2 to the 57,885,161, because the Wikipedia page from which the number was gleaned used a <sup> tag to describe the exponent value.

To be fair, it does place the full excerpt below the answer.</comment>


Can someone explain how Clipper (SF-Bay Area) can suck so hard? - <AUTHOR> https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperCard/errorTooMany.jsf

<comment><USER2> I don't know whats so bad in particular about it, aside from the bureaucracy behind it. To understand that, you'd need to be a bureaucrat, so just hit yourself in the head with a rock about 100x and you'll get there.</comment>


Show HN: Teech.io - Parse for education apps developers - <AUTHOR> http://teech.io

<comment><USER2> I'm not seeing any compelling reasons or examples on your landing page about why this is a better fit for the educational market than something more general, like Parse.

Digging more into your docs show that you have specific endpoints for modules and materials, but its still not really clear why those are better than using mongo without your layer over it.

Would love to see an example of an app that can be made much more quickly with Teech vs Parse or other BAAS providers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now our data management API is very similar to Parse and other BAAS indeed, I agree. What we offer that you won't find in Parse are the assignments, assessments and submissions endpoints that basically allow you to register students submissions to quizzes for example and automatically tracking the students performance. This week we're releasing our data analysis API that is really core and will allow to perform analysis on the data that devs gather using teech.io to power their apps. So let's say for example that you want to build a custom dashboard for teachers and show the students performance level over the time or show a sunburst chart with performance of your classroom grouped by a bunch of different properties. Well, using our API you will be able to this with just one API request querying your teech.io backend data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks interesting. I'm wondering what there is to be gained by constraining your API models to your modelling into materials, modules, enrolments etc?

We are developing an education website for anatomy[0], and our quiz types and data model is quite different - at least from a first glance. We do store everything ourselves already, but if we were to move to parse / firebase / cloud data store/API - I'm not sure what would make us choose teech over a more generic solution.

Am I missing something?

[0] [https://www.kenhub.com](https://www.kenhub.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool project you have! Well as I wrote in the other comment, we're very similar to Parse right now but we are about to release our analytics API that will allow you to perform learning analytics on top of the data that you store in the backend and deliver for example custom dashboards to teachers. This is something specific for education and you won't find anything like that in other BaaS providers products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That API counter keeps resetting! How can I trust anything?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you're right because that is actually just an animation. What we do is basically gather the real API requests count here [http://api.teech.io/rest/total_count](http://api.teech.io/rest/total_count) \- we don't have nothing to hide :) -, we subtract couple of calls from the total and we do the animation. A quick and dirty solution to bring some real- life to website, we'll fix it in the near future but glad you noticed it!</comment></comment>


This Christmas, turn your gifts into charitable giving - <AUTHOR> http://blog.swipegood.com/this-christmas-turn-your-gifts-into-charitabl

<comment><USER2> I have tried to do this before. (Manually, but still.)

It does not work. People genuinely want to buy you useless junk you don't actually want.

<comment><USER3> This is kind of true. If you stick with it people eventually come around. I've been doing it for years. Dig it:

<http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/new-rules-for-christmas/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "... your favorite charity"

Tried to sign up because I want to do this. But there are only 7 charities to choose from, none of which are my favorite

</comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, if it was up to me (and I didn't have any kids) I would probably just skip Christmas entirely, save the part about eating a bunch of nice food. Spending a bunch of money on family that I only see at Christmas (purposely) and chopping down a perfectly good tree, dancing around it singing songs in honor of a nonexistent diety whose supports have murdered people I respect by burning them on the stake is just not my idea of a great time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry, but I'm not giving my credit card information to any website that allows me to authenticate through facebook.

<comment><USER7> You can opt to create a swipegood.com account instead of connecting via facebook.

<comment><USER6> I did see that, but the fact that facebook is even an option just put me off straight away.

<comment><USER7> Understandable. But frankly, if you've ever seen how banks operate their technical infrastructure you'd want to store all your money in a matress. I'm confident Facebook has much smarter people working to make sure their products are secure.

<comment><USER8> Most banks have ssl encrypted sites.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>