The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-messy-reality-of-personalized-learning <comment><USER2> _The prospect of children surfing the Web and clicking through their lessons while teachers, or non-teacher chaperones, pace the room is an emerging reality, especially in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, where personalized "ed tech" is offered as a balm for budget austerity. "There's been hyperbolic claims about the ability of these new technologies to radically transform schools," Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education at Brown University, told me._

This is personalized learning at its worst. Startups are marketing themselves to districts as a means of achieving the same outcomes with fewer teachers. That's harmful to society and will result in lower quality education for the poor.

Technology is a powerful tool for education but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction. It's best used for administrative duties such as segmenting students into groups, aggregating data for reports, facilitating collaboration by making longitudinal student information more accessible and digestible to teachers. It's a useful replacement for textbook and handout based homework, and enables students to consume and information from a variety of sources. It's not a substitute for interacting with teachers.

Also, there needs to be more regulation to protect student information. FERPA (the law that's supposed to protect student data) makes student data less secure. Under that law, health records that pertain to the student's education (such as the diagnosis of learning disabilities) are no longer protected by HIPAA. FERPA has no such security requirements.

<comment><USER3> _...but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction_

Curious as to why you say this because recently it seems like people are realizing you DON'T need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, and more and more people are turning to the wealth of education at our fingertips instead of traditional schooling.

<comment><USER4> In my experience as both a student and a workplace educator (informal learning only, ex: "I can't figure out how to do a fuzzy match in excel, can you help me?"), I think you've got the emphasis wrong.

Educators know that not everyone needs a teacher, and most people don't __need __a teacher all of the time. The trick with high quality educators is two- fold, creating motivation for students to want to learn and stepping in to guide a student one on one when a student gets stuck.

While I haven't needed a teacher 50% of the time, I get stuck when learning. I then need a new perspective, or a new mental model, to get me thinking differently. This happens less and less as I get older, and find ways to replace a teacher with other stimuli.

A child isn't an adult. They need and __want __to have their hand held at certain times.

There isn't a substitute for a social interaction that goes beyond "did student 9471827 learn topic 14536?". Humans need to go over things multiple times to remember how to do it. Sometimes there's new learning. Maybe they think they know how to do it, but it doesn't feel right, and they need a partner or authority figure to say "yes, that's a good way to solve this problem or frame a perspective".

So to come all the way back around, I think most people know that we don't need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, but we do want it at times, and the interaction definitely speeds up learning.

I'd argue even more anecdotally that a human will not trust a robot teacher unless they've had a good human teacher, and that the robot teacher resembles some characteristic of that teacher.

I realize that all of this is my opinion, but I hope it was interesting to you as a potential answer for the previous comment! Have a good one today

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your thoughts! Perhaps I am a bit jaded as I went to a large university and I don't think a single professor could recognize me as a student, even the ones I went to office hours for. (always just help I never really struck up a conversation).

I will concede that for K-12 education, especially closer to the K side, having a patient teacher is certainly going to help students learn, and guide them when they are frustrated.

<comment><USER5> >I went to a large university and I don't think a single professor could recognize me as a student

I was in the same situation, and that's where the TAs (Teaching Assistants) stepped in. And most of the time, it made all the difference. Professors for a lot of classes (but not all of them) were just glorified lecture material recital machines, however, the value of TA office hours was insurmountable. The difference between classes that had great TAs vs. classes that had bad TAs was extremely noticeable in terms of the amount of material I learned.

I agree with the rest of the sentiment in the thread though. I didn't need professors or TAs 80%+ of my time, but whenever I got stuck, a good explanation or hint from TA made all the difference. You could easily tell by looking at everyone's scores and knowledge who went to TA office hours and who didn't. Ironically enough, the scores didn't seem to correlate almost at all with lecture attendance.

This inspired me to become a TA myself later on, and I am very glad I did that. It felt really rewarding to be able to figure out that one extra little nudge of information that, if given to a student in struggle, made it click in their heads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in social skills & physical health.

Instead of using the tech start up mentality, I think a lot more benefit could be done by helping teachers build relationships with there students & having open dialogue on what they like & what they don't. I get that this means throwing more money at lower teacher/student ratios which is hard to do but I think it would have a greater impact than tech. I say this as someone whose life & thoughts towards learning did a 180 once they were introduced to the internet & computers in the 90s.

Yes, computers can change the lesson plan & personalize per student faster & better than a teacher. But at what cost?

While multiple techniques exists, are there that many that a teacher can't try multiple out on there students and record how they respond? I feel if we had reasonable classroom sizes of 10:1 this would be fairly easy to do.

I also feel we could cut down the amount of info we jam into students heads & focus on learning the more important concepts. I believe Bill Gates & many others have started preaching this as well.

You don't need to learn everything but there are some core skills that we don't spend enough time on that will benefit us much longer.

<comment><USER7>
        > ...build relationships with their students & having open dialogue...

You're right. And that DOES WORK.

It's why the most elite schools in the world use classroom setups like "Harkness Method" ([https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll- learn](https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn)).

The problem is that it's expensive, class sizes are a fraction of what public schools have to serve. Instruction is "mastery-based" which means that individual students don't move forward in the curriculum until they've demonstrated mastery of prerequisite foundational topics.

This is part of the reason why kids from wealthy families can end up in elite colleges. Connections help, of course, but the kids are well-taught. For them, learning disabilities are just obstacles that can be worked around, fall- behind one semester because of teenage stuff? No problem, they get tutored out of that rut. The same kinds of problems in an overcrowded and overwhelmed public school end with the student being stuck academically and not prepared for college.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement.

I had one truly good math class during my secondary education, and the way the teacher conducted things sounds a lot like this. Small groups, sitting around a table, talking about the subject. The overall class size was much larger, of course. So what we had was a class subdivided into smaller groups, with the teacher circulating among the tables, spending maybe 10 minutes at a time at each one.

I suspect the real problem with this approach, at least from an American perspective, is that it's not easy enough to instrument for data collection. You can't measure "mastery", so instead you measure performance on multiple- choice questions. And then you tie funding to goals related to those tests. . . at which point, no matter what you _want_ the teacher's job to be, what they're really being paid to do is train kids to regurgitate information on multiple-choice tests.

I'm a professional data scientist, and, ironically, being one has resulted in me becoming a deep skeptic of the movement toward data-driven everything. "Data" is understood to be quantitative data, and not everything can be studied quantitatively, so it leads to people habitually deciding, intentionally or not, for better or for worse, to re-frame all their activities in ways that make them easier to quantify and micro-quantify.

To take another example, there's a whole lot of well-established research out there indicating what the best way to pick up a second language is. And you'll never see any of this knowledge being applied to language learning classes in American public schools, because its implications about how we should teach second languages are almost universally incompatible with the teachers' mandate to always be quantifying.

<comment><USER7>
        > Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement.

I think it could to some extent. For some students doing self-paced, online learning for lectures and then following that up with individualized/small- group problem-solving and discussion with peers/tutors/teachers certainly does work.

But kids in early high-school and younger? Someone _really_ needs to be there for them all the time.

BTW, I also had a math instructor that got miraculous outcomes by finely grouping students within each classroom according to skill. She would individualize attention to each group, and then move individual students up or down to different groups depending on their ongoing performance/mastery. She literally had what I would recognize today as a kan-ban chart on a blackboard in the classroom and we, the students, were the projects/products. Thinking back about it now, it must have been a herculean effort. It was also the 70's in a Catholic school and she had total autonomy. I seriously doubt a talented teacher could get away with something like that today.

<comment><USER9> > I seriously doubt a talented teacher could get away with something like that > today.

That's so much of the problem right now. My wife teaches and to be blunt, she is not treated as a professional. She is subject to the exact same kind of intrusive rules that minimum wage phone reps are subject to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _> Personalized learning, though premised on differentiating one student from another, has seemed to work best when it attends, first and foremost, to the needs of teachers as a group. If tech is, indeed, merely a tool of personalized learning, then what does that make the teacher?_

It makes the teacher more of a facilitator/coach/mentor and also a proctor for administering tests.

This is a long article and headline of _" personalized learning"_ and how it was described in the article was unfamiliar to me. That jargon of "personalized learning" seems to translate to "laptop-based learning". The laptop/Chromebook is the _primary_ transmission of material. The teacher becomes a _secondary_ role -- help answer extra questions/etc.

The author of the article is biased with the premise that the teachers that are physically there in the classroom are the best transmitters of the material. This is _theoretically_ possible but reality is that you often get an ok or under-average teacher. The result is a bad teacher that confuses and frustrates the students instead of teaching them. With laptop-led learning, you could assemble the best instructors (or multiple alternative virtual teachers) instead of being restricted to the random quality of the local teacher where you happen to pay your taxes.

As a personal example... None of my math teachers from 1st grade to high school were as good as Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown)[0]. (I think many HN'rs might have a similar life schooling comparison.) I would have been better off with high-quality math lessons from a laptop and then consulting with the in- classroom teacher acting as a coach to supplement the videos. The alternative of watching teachers bored with their jobs did not help me learn math.

That said, I can see where some kids won't respond to laptops and need a live instructor to transmit information. This is where we can _personalize_ the curriculum. Some kids use more laptop videos; others utlilize the live teacher.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/videos)

<comment><USER11> One of the things that learning through a laptop does it give people access to world class teachers. I don't think even the biggest proponents of online learning would disagree that having that world class teacher in person is better through the laptop. The question is, is a world class teacher through a laptop better than a teacher that's under the 50th percentile? (Or x percentile)

<comment><USER10> _> The question is, is a world class teacher through a laptop better than a teacher that's under the 50th percentile?_

I would separate the question into different parts to isolate the different roles an in-classroom teacher performs:

(1) a 1-way communication -- the act of purely transmitting information: E.g. compare effectiveness of on-site teacher saying, _" sine is the opposite side divided by hypotenuse"_ vs virtualvideo teacher saying the same thing. For this info-transmission activity, many high-quality Youtubers seem to be better at explaining the topic. They have more insightful metaphors, better graphics, better presentation, etc. (Unscientific survey.[0])

(2) a 2-way communication -- providing a realtime feedback loop of skills assessment to the child. E.g. watching the child work out the problem on the sheet of paper and _immediately_ noticing that she's not carrying a minus sign across a calculation and intervening at that moment. Of course, answering any questions the child has is also in this category.

The emphasis in my previous comment is that laptop-led teaching doesn't have to detract from activity (2) because that's the superior value that in- classroom teachers can provide over virtual teachers.

\-----

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21S9Wpi0y8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21S9Wpi0y8)

Some viewer comments in that video:

\+ 2.6k thumbs up: _" Crazy how an 8 minute video, helps more then a paid teacher"_

\+ 690 thumbs up: _" you are better than my math teacher"_

\+ 115 thumbs up: _" I want you to know my math teacher sucks and you're the only reason I get A's. Appreciate it dude"_

For whatever reason, the viewers' local on-site classroom teacher didn't "click" with them but virtual Sal Khan did. This is the missing pedagogy angle the author of The New Yorker article didn't highlight.

<comment><USER9> My money is on the fact that their teacher was managing some other student doing something stupid.

So much of our school problems are rooted in insufficient resources for classroom management, and an unwillingness to impose significant consiquences on the student and their guardians.

<comment><USER10> _> My money is on the fact that their teacher was managing some other student doing something stupid._

But an ineffective teacher _also happens in college_ where professors do _not_ need to deal with any misbehaving adult students.

Surely many of us have experienced a college class (in USA) being taught by a TA that can barely speak English. Even though the students are all _quiet and respectful_ , nobody understands the lecture.

In those situations, the advantages of on-site presence of the professor is _overshadowed_ by the disadvantages of the ineffective teaching presentation.

That's why many Youtube mathematics videos have comments such as:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly4S0oi3Yz8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly4S0oi3Yz8)

\+ 261 thumbs up: _" Your videos are what college should be like. And isn't."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll give you the other side. Think of this from a developing country perspective - we don't have enough teachers. But we have a billion people. We need to educate them.

We can't train teachers fast enough. Not to mention the 20 different languages that India has.

We need this to work.

<comment> em-bee _We can 't train teachers fast enough_

i don't believe this is true in the actual sense of the words. the problem is rather that we are not spending enough money on education. we could get many more teachers if that would change.

and it has to change regardless. with automation replacing all manual un- educated labor, education is the only way to avoid unemployment for a large number of people.

we need more teachers. many more teachers, and more effective teaching methods. but i believe financially this is all solvable if we are willing to solve it.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. Both of my sisters became teachers. Both of them left the profession after a few years. One even went back to college, negating the "we cant train them fast enough". She already had a masters degree but still went back to college for more education to get away from teaching.

This is speaking from an American perspective but teaching is absolute hell. Teachers are more and more expected to pay for their own supplies, work 12 hour days, become counselors and therapists, plus advocates for special needs or abused children. Many students coming into kindergarten cannot read or recite the alphabet, but even worse many are not potty trained. The parents expect the schools to take care of 100% of the child's education. And more and more in America, teachers are expected to shield students from real, actual bullets. One of my sisters left the profession when the state started talking about giving teachers guns.

All for $30-$40k per year. It's not worth it. It's too much work for too little money. Your job is constantly under fire and political scrutiny. It's not even education anymore.

<comment><USER14> Former teacher here with a similar experience. It's not only that it's not worth it, teaching for the most part doesn't even pay a living wage. You can't make up the difference with a summer job since the "summer vacation" has gotten shorter and shorter over time it seems. In addition, teachers usually have to do professional development over the summer as well as we always started back before the students did.

One of the districts I worked at didn't have an attendance policy and allowed students to do credit recovery with online courses. It's incredibly difficult to convince middle and high school students to struggle through learning when they know from their fellow students they can make up the credit later and just google all the answers since the proctors for credit recovery didn't really pay attention. They all had their phones on their leg under the table searching for all the answers while the proctor sat and ignored them.

<comment> em-bee what's really sad is, it's been like this for decades. when i was in highschool in the US in the 80s i was told that teachers salaries were very low.

now i had fantastic and very motivated teachers, and at that time i concluded that the low salary would help select for teachers that really believe in their work, and weed out those who are in it just for the money.

but paying less than a living wage is likely only attract the desperate who can't get a better job.

this is insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > If every child had a computer or iPad, she could log into a customized cyber > classroom and learn at her own pace.

Who determines what her own pace should be, and how do they do that?

One of the biggest problems I've had when learning things on my own has been pacing. Suppose learning the subject requires first learning A, then B, then C, and so on, each part building upon the previous parts.

I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even though my B is actually sufficient to support C.

Other parts I don't spend enough time on. Let's say I find D uninteresting, but am really looking forward to E. I'll tend to rush through D, just getting a superficial understanding, and move on to E without adequate preparation.

<comment><USER16> >I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even though my B is actually sufficient to support C.

I would think integrated testing and feedback could be built in and even done in "real time" as students are learning. For each section you can do a brief quiz, or constantly ask questions to measure engagement and comprehension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think that the main problem of a customized and changing over time curriculum is that it's hard to maintain connections to information in long term memory over time. Ever since I started using a spaced repetition/interleaving program, I find that I can start learning something, then walk away for as long as I like, and be able to come back to the subject not just fresh, but with the previous information far more entrenched than before.

This allows me to jump around my interests rapidly within the limited time that I have for learning difficult subjects, and means that the time that I do spend on particularly difficult subjects that require deep understanding isn't wasted.

I think that meta-learning is a key subject that any learner should start with, then messiness isn't a problem anymore. If I had learned it 20 years ago, I probably wouldn't have lost all of that wonderful college expertise.

<comment><USER18> completely agree. i use spaced repetition for most things these days, and i justify the time spent on the card making by saying i will keep this this info, with minimal effort, for the rest of my life

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's hard to believe there is no hard data as far as test scores. I would expect more of that in an article like this.

I assume there are studies that show significant improvement in test scores as well as some studies that show no improvement or even regression.

I think how well it works depends on how well the students are supervised, the actual content of the programs, the parameters such as required learning rate, how well the particular software works or not, how closely the software tracks or does not track with the standardized tests, etc.

For things like algebra I had to use pencil. How do computer instructions handle work like equations and math?

</comment><comment><USER20> I am patiently waiting (in fear?) for the day when we have "educational ad exchanges". The Gates Foundation and CZI put up a $500M slush fund for "rockstar" teachers to bid on impressions, while publishers lobby to abolish CIPA, COPPA and FERPA in the name of a "quality" education for all.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not a good example of personalized learning. This is more of a hyper- virtualized school system. I'd say ot's obviously bad for children to be so immersed in technology and not get the necessary personal interaction people need to thrive.

Personalized learning is perhaps best observed in a homeschool-like environment.

</comment><comment><USER22> Personalized learning would work super well if the US has a standard national criculum. Then a student could take the same module online if it wasn't clicking at school and learn the same concept from a different instructor and perspective. Otherwise it's super difficult to match concepts up

</comment><comment><USER23> In the utterly amateur teaching I have done the key thing, which someone will never get from a computer, has always, always, always been convincing the student that they are smart and that they can learn this stuff or indeed anything. Next most important is generic how to learn stuff, which for the people I have taught usually starts with relaxation exercises and other techniques to overcome their fight or flight reactions to get to a place of relaxed enjoyment.

I don't know how that replicates to other, better, more experienced teachers observations of it. If it is as important as I think, I don't know how you get that from a computer.

Learning and study abilities are tortured and murdered by the constant re- enforcement of "you can't, you're not smart enough, them over there, they are better."

Maybe I'm over emphasising a point that is less important than I think but also maybe _not_. It's a point that needs an airing here either way. Interested in your thoughts, especially if you have experience.

</comment><comment><USER24> Lower teacher pupil ratios and more personal attention to learning. Machines have a role but denying the role of the pedagogue feels wrong. And corporatism. Why is education hold hostage by big data outcomes? Ethics potholes.

</comment><comment><USER25> It sure seems like nobody under 25 can read a damn book anymore.

</comment><comment><USER26> The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning in Underfunded Public Schools _

</comment><comment> em-bee individualized learning is also part of montessori, and, it has been championed by the OLPC project as one of the possible outcomes of giving a computer to every child. so this is not new. most of all, montessori is doing it without computers.

<comment><USER9> Note that most Montessori schools have the ability to reject disruptive students.

They also literally have a term for a student who needs to learn the behavioral prerequisites for successfully learning. A "poorly normalized" student will be held back until they have developed enough to see that that need to change behavior to move on.

<comment> em-bee i get your point, however i am not sure if disruptive students are actually a problem in a montessori class. i'd really like to see some actual reports from the field here.

since in a montessori class each student does their own thing, a disruptive student can do far less damage than in a traditional class.

in a traditional class the disruptive student takes away attention of the teacher from the class. and class learning is indeed disrupted while that happens. in a montessori class, the teacher can take care of the disruptive student individually without disrupting attention from other students. oh, sure, it may happen that a a teacher-student interaction is disrupted once in a while, but in that case the teacher can tell that student to work on something else while they deal with the problem child. further, if we assume that most students are disruptive because they seek attention, i expect that such students will actually be much less disruptive than in a traditional class.

also, one of the key points of montessori is to teach children individually to work with their material on their own.

this goes so far that in some schools the beginning of the year is split in stages. on the first day only a handful of children are coming to school. the smaller group makes it easier to get each child to calm down and get used to the classroom setting. once they are fine, the next batch of children enters (the next day or a few days later). the first group is already quiet at work, and so the teacher now can deal with the next group, and so on until all children are present.

this not only allows the teacher to adjust their ways for each child individually, but doing that is the very point. therefore a montessori teacher has much more powerful tools at their disposal to deal with problem children and help them integrate into the classroom.

chances are that a child that is disruptive in a traditional class simply won't behave like that in a montessori class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The education industry is not doing its job? Who knew?! Me! Because I went through it and had my life ruined by it. I say this as a 30 year old man. I went to public school where the following happened:

\- I was not only intellectually neglected, I was intellectually poisoned. The result was worse than if I had just been left by myself as far as education and intellectual development. They don't just not do their job, they sabotage kids

\- I was subjected to bullying that has had mental health ramifications that persist even now. Everyone knew and nobody did anything. The teachers don't do anything and the admins don't do anything. They watch knowingly as kids under their care are viscously bullied, doing nothing.

Teachers are stupid. There is no other way to put it. Public education is a free daycare service. The kids who succeed in public school succeed in spite of the teachers and their circumstances, not because of them. It is not an exaggeration to say that subjecting a child to public education is abusive. Look at the average Americans understanding of maths and geography — they are basically retarded compared to other western nations. But nobody cares and nobody does anything. Saying that any alternative is too expensive is bullshit. Utter bullshit. Take grandma, who is starved for human interaction, and move her in. She watches over the child while he does assignments given to him by you and while he is tutored by starving PhD candidates and undergraduates who are actually smart and passionate. They will do it for peanuts. I know I would have when I was a starving student. Socialize the child by engaging in social activities such as soccer leagues and other things. Sleepovers, whatever. I just invented a method of education that is guaranteed to give you better results than a public school and probably costs a similar amount when you account for all the therapy you'd have to pay for from the bullying and whatever.</comment>


Creating a top 200 website - <AUTHOR>

I've been thinking about what it takes to create a top 200 website.
http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US/2
These elements seem the most important:
- Large set of permanent of content (travel, wiki, imdb) - Endorphin hit content (news, images, Reddit) - Ego boosts for users (flickr, Pinterest, tumblr)
Am I missing anything? <comment><USER2> You want a top 200 website?

babieswithkittens.com

have users post pictures of babies playing with kittens.

A division of babies & puppies llc

<comment><AUTHOR> That's reddit.com/r/aww

<comment><USER2> I've honestly never been on reddit. Didn't even know that segment existed.

<comment><USER3> /r/aww is a huge chunk of reddit</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk ordered Tesla engineers to stop doing a critical brake test on Model 3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-orders-engineers-to-stop-brake-and-roll-testing-2018-6 <comment><USER2> There doesn't seem to be much actual content here. The article states "Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to have" without ever mentioning what caused them to believe Elon Musk is involved. Then it states "It's not clear how many cars, if any, have left the station without doing this test."

So, they not only have no evidence Elon Musk is involved in this, but have no evidence that proper testing has been skipped on cars. And then they go ahead and title the article "Elon Musk ordered Tesla engineers to stop doing a critical brake test on Model 3s".

Stop it with the bullshit clickbait headlines. It's bad enough having them completely permeate politics, but now that it's becoming so widespread in other areas is just proving how correct people like Elon Musk are in their criticism of the media.

<comment><USER3> How many of the recent negative Tesla accounts would you say are "bullshit clickbait"?

<comment><USER2> I have no clue. It's too hard to tell the fake content (or similarly exaggerated content) from the real content (that actually matters and is mostly true) unless you devote a lot of your time to it, and I usually try to focus on other things besides reading about Tesla.

In general I try to read articles with much more skepticism now, regardless of what narrative they're trying to push.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow.... a whole lot of speculation, a screenshot likely taken out-of-context, and a lot of FUD. BusinessInsider is getting the clicks though. Best quote ever: "It's not clear how many cars, if any, have left the station without doing this test."

It's stuff like this that makes me actually believe Musk when he talks about people actively campaigning against Telsa. [1]

1\. [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/15/elon-musk-said-tesla- short-s...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/15/elon-musk-said-tesla-short- sellers-are-jerks-who-want-us-to-die.html)

<comment><USER5> If it was FUD Tesla would have denied it.

Tesla responded with spin and a refusal to deny which is confirmation in the minds of anyone who is used to dealing with corporate PR.

<comment><USER6> > If it was FUD Tesla would have denied it.

Have you ever denied being the mastermind behind 9/11?

Must be true, then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The leaks, they keep on coming for Tesla. Tesla employees seem genuinely worried about shortcuts, despite taking pride in being associated with the most innovative automaker of our times. I believe Musk should heed to concerns, instead of foaming at the press, or branding concerned employees 'disloyal'

Can Musk be sued personally for cases of faulty brakes (if any)?

<comment><USER8> I have the opposite opinion. The press has gone on a tyrannical campaign against Elon as of late. People, we should know why... Outrage sells and generates clicks way better than unbiased and factual news.

<comment><USER9> Business Insider is interested primarily in clicks, but not the worst of the bunch. I don't generally see outright lies or anything. This article included. It stated the facts that they had access to. But in any event, it isn't fair to brand all media with such a cynical brush.

Such a broad brush is reminiscent of talking about "the blacks," etc. You just can't say much that is meaningful about such a large group.

Musk has been a media darling for the last ten years. Only recently when he has run into production difficulties, high executive turnover, etc have there been any negative press at all, and Musk didn't like it one bit. He seems to have initiated whatever "tyrannical campaign" you are alluding to, not the reverse.

He's a celebrity, thanks to the media, and yet somehow he hates them? Seems like mainly a tactic for dealing with the negative but factual stories.

This story was lacking in information, but largely because of secrecy on the part of Tesla. Looks like it was reported on fairly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey let's not forget that business insider is part owned by Bezos who competes with Musk in the rocket business so articles like this should be taken with a grain of salt.

I saw my first parked model 3 about a week ago and got out to do a walk around. It's a _much_ more impressive car in real life that it is in the photos. In particular the wide track and the design evoke very much a Porsche though, of course, it would have better performance and handling.

Full disclosure I don't own any Tesla (or SpaceX :) But I do have a soft spot for very nicely engineered objects of all kinds. I wouldn't be betting against the Tesla 3 because there's every reason to believe that, at a manufactured cost of $28k, this will be the best automotive value for quite some time.</comment>


Visit to Fed Shows Where Any Reform Should Start  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704588404575124131772747418.html

<comment><USER2> Why post WSJ items that require a subscription?

<comment><USER3> Well, a subscriber can't easily figure out which articles are fully free or mostly behind the paywall.

And it's easy to get the full test by doing a Google search on "unique fragement" site:wsj.com and then clicking on the result. But submitters ought to include a link to such a search in a comment.

E.g. for this article: [http://www.google.com/search?q=%22great+reshuffling+of+U.S.+...](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22great+reshuffling+of+U.S.+financial+regulation.+The+bill+he+introduced%22+site%3Awsj.com)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: IDE / environment for developing image tools? - awinter-py Anyone know a software platform for testing & visualizing code that operates on images? My goal is to have a basic environment for viewing the images before and after filters, as well as basic libraries for image manipulation.
My use case is that I want to improve the quality of a photogrammetry tool for a specific and simple use case, but I don't want to build the whole stack.
Could imagine countless other uses in the AR / OCR spaces.
Have seen jupyter and matlab used for this, not sure what's state of the art though. <comment><AUTHOR> What is your feedback on Jupyter notebooks for this task. Have you tried to do it with a notebook?

<comment> awinter-py yes a while ago -- didn't stick with it long enough to really learn the tools, so am uncomortable drawing conclusions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have a set of libraries in mind? We do have an internal machine learning platform with a bunch of functionality. We mainly use it for one- click transformation from notebooks to AppBooks where domain experts can tweak training parameters or use a model for inference without being intimidated by all the code or changing code, and for one click deployments of models, plus automatic tracking for parameters, metrics, and models.

But the notebook comes with a _lot_ of libraries preinstalled and uses GPU so our colleagues don't have to go through configuring a workstation with CUDA and all.

If you have a list in mind, let me know. Of course you can always install them, as we use a Dockerfile for our notebook servers and users get a workspace and can install libraries that are missing.</comment></comment></comment>


8 Years of Experience Isn't the Definition of a Senior Software Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://levelup.gitconnected.com/8-years-of-experience-isnt-the-definition-of-a-senior-software-engineer-f3ed904e3bc9?source=friends_link&sk=e258f48e7af205ff738afd280c944bac <comment><USER2> I kind of agree, and the overall thrust is right. But a degree is a useful shortcut in many cases. Or maybe I've just not worked with any non-degreed experts yet.

The trouble is that when those points aren't true they can be disasters. It's all very well saying "you don't need to know big O", but then you do need "good coding practices"... which are not fixed formulas, you need to know _why_ you do them, and that comes back to stuff like Big O. Grit and learning likewise... but without a base of knowledge people can easily learn the wrong things and apply them with great diligence.

I have worked with a web developer who had on his desk a wee plaque saying that he had a non-university diploma and had failed both the software design courses in it. I don't think it was coincidence that he also regularly needed help to understand why his designs were not great, and often had to be pulled up before he committed horrors (he escaped once and produced a roughly O(N^40) treeview. Sounds ridiculous but the underlying antipattern was linear searches of the underlying array to produce every node in the tree. Just adding parent, first-child and next-sibling links to each node gave a dramatic improvement).

We also had a hard coded root credential issue because it was easier to do that than dig through the proper channels. Again "good coding practices" balance getting the job done vs not creating horrible security issues, but someone who doesn't understand _why_ the security guidelines exist isn't capable of making good decisions consistently.

Having to do that level of constant supervision was tedious, because even though 80% of their work was fine you always have to check to make sure. Not being able to let that person supervise anyone was annoying. Pair programming is all very well, but when "finish coding this" can turn into tomorrows "let's review... ok, let's throw that away and start again"... it wears you out after a while.

It brings to mind "some people have ten years experience. Others have one years experience ten times".

<comment><USER3> > But a degree is a useful shortcut in many cases. Or maybe I've just not > worked with any non-degreed experts yet.

When we were trying to find new developers in our team, we didn't make that observation.

When I worked with other developers as colleagues or partners, I didn't make that observation.

Basically, there were only good and mediocre people, without any correlation with the fact they hold a degree or not.

(It was in France, maybe CS education is not very good there, I have honestly no idea)

<comment><USER2> In Australia and Aotearoa there seems to be a solid correlation. I've worked with a few mediocre degree holders and possibly one competent non-degree holder. But I've experienced the opposite as a matter of course (not that I assume up front, but that's the way it works out).

(edit) I work in smaller companies, and used to consult into companies who were having performance and especially server threading issues. That biases who I work with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Conversely, I have a CS degree, and I remember Knuth's books and big O notation, etc....

But I'm not a developer. You could ask me those questions and I would have a decent chance of being able to tell you the right algorithmic answer, but then fail to be able to do anything at all useful in Java.

There's overlap, but not a causal relationship.

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree with the qualities of a senior engineer that he listed. Unfortunately these are all really difficult qualities to detect in an interview. Much harder than testing whether someone knows the big O of a hash table vs a sorted list lookup.</comment>


Ask HN: Net Neutrality Repeal Consequences? - <AUTHOR> Now that it's been two years, what kind of consequences did (and does) have the repeal of Net Neutrality in the US? I've heard about the repeal, but since I don't live there, I don't know what it did change. Did the prices skyrocket? Quality of service went down? Netflix/video streaming access is now charged? <comment><USER2> The repeal of net neutrality radically changed the FCC's position on regulation of cable authorities in America. In particular, the FCC no longer regulates broadband under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, and actively attempts to strangle alternative methods of regulation. This has had ramifications for cities regulating their cable franchisees. For example, in 2015, my city was able to use the threat of increasing cable TV access fees in order to accelerate their timeline for offering gigabit speeds in my area.

This is no longer possible in today's regulatory structure: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/pais-fcc- orders-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/pais-fcc-orders- cities-and-towns-to-stop-regulating-cable-broadband/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

I was also looking at material consequences, not just regulatory changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Current internet was designed for Net Neutrality. They would have to rebuild the internet to do what you mentioned. And they most certainly are doing that. Look up 5G network slicing.</comment>


Geohash in Golang Assembly (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://mmcloughlin.com/posts/geohash-assembly <comment><USER2> That was educating and fun, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER3> geohash is a stable encoding algorithm. It should be a one time transformation of data point to a geohash value. Squeezing out absolute performance of the geohash algorithm is not practical use of time and resource.

<comment><USER4> What if I need to do this to a large dataset that hasn't been geohashed before?

<comment><USER3> You run it once, and on each new data element you introduce into the collection.

Or if you prefer, geohash it JIT style, and once it's persisted, you don't run it again thereafter.

<comment><USER4> If I have a billion of them to hash, it's still worth it to think about how to do the hashing more efficiently. Just because it's not something I need to do to a large dataset constantly doesn't mean that it's not worth thinking about how to do it efficiently because I only have to do it once.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hulu to Charge Users in 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tvweek.com/blogs/tvbizwire/2009/10/hulu-to-charge-viewers-money-i.php

<comment><USER2> It seems like the big players that give away their content for free (Hulu, youtube, most newspapers, etc) seem to be struggling financially whereas the ones charging for it (netflix, itunes music store, WSJ, economist) seem to be doing well. Perhaps the 'free' business model isn't quite what it's cracked up to be.

<comment><USER3> Wait. Youtube's struggling? I thought that report was founded on an oversimplified bandwidth-cost model.

<comment><USER4> According to RampRate, YouTube is losing $174 Million. Not as bad as losing $470 Million as originally reported by Credit Suisse but still a loss.

Ref: [http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090617/credit-suisse- fa...](http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090617/credit-suisse-far-better- at-analyzing-derivatives-than-youtube-infrastructure-costs/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You'll pay for it _and_ watch their ads. It's happened twice before, once with cable TV and again with satellite radio.

<comment><USER6> Piracy was never so easy with TV and radio. Once my grandmother knows how to torrent her shows, they've lost.

<comment><USER5> Grandma better hurry, with big content writing the next wave of international copyright policy, mainstream piracy of TV and movies will be dead in a couple of years.

That, or, she better read up on Tor. :)

<comment><USER6> We have yet to see the outcome of the current copyright conflict. I think there's a point we're nearing soon where technology makes tracking impossible.

<comment><USER7> Only if technology also makes paying unnecessary. Open WiFi didn't happen because it makes the owner of the access point appear liable; IMO the only way we're going to get around this sort of effect is to build One Big Mesh, which doesn't look likely to happen soon.

<comment><USER6> It's too expensive to hunt down everybody involved. The world isn't able to go after millions of people at once. The more people use it, the harder it is to track.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm guessing it was part of the plan all along. Lets create a cable channel(s) and deliver it over the internet. We won't have to deal with all of the franchise carriers or split the profit! How to get people interested in the first place? Oh! Offer it _free_! Once we get some viewers and some interest, _bam!_ subscription fee. Its cable, but with teh intertubes. Its diabolically brilliant if you think about it from the right perspective.

I'm predicting a _"return of napster"_ sized crater where hulu.com used to be.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've actually been hoping they would start charging for a long time.

I hate how they only have a few episodes of my favorite shows--obviously because they only do ads.

I'd gladly pay a reasonable annual fee to be able to watch all the episodes I want.

<comment><USER9> What on earth makes you think that there's a correlation between paying and watching all the episodes you want? I'd be more inclined to believe that they'd throw the existing Hulu behind a paywall and call it a day.

Netflix does a similar thing on Watch Instantly with their relationship with Starz Play - content only exists for a certain amount of time, then drops off.

<comment><USER4> Isn't the lack of significant revenue one of the reasons why networks hold back from posting more than a handful of episodes from popular shows?

My thought was that if the networks saw there was money to be made, it would encourage them to make more content available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> ... and I'll pay, if they give me DRM-free 1080p H.264 downloads, the same way the music industry lets me have DRM-free 320kbps MP3s now.

And of course they're sensible enough to go for that market... right?

</comment><comment><USER11> NewsCorp leveraged their equity in MySpace to force them to increase revenue at the cost of quality. Now it seems they are following the same pattern with Hulu.

However, I think with Hulu they stand a better chance in the face of competition for two reasons. First the revenue model for streaming content is well established. Secondly, copyright law provides too high a barrier of entry into the space for competitors.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know if there is anything technically that is stopping someone from downloading the hulu broadcasts?

I was talking about this last night I think it is almost time for a DVR for my computer, so I don't have to watch the hulu commercials.

<comment><USER8> Hulu's got about the most hard core anti-ripping technology on the web going right now. They're about the only ones out there who have stayed ahead of the curve preventing that sort of thing. The only thing I know of that works right now is a realtime screen scraping thing, which isn't very practical.

<comment><USER13> Really? It's just Flash video, isn't it? What's to stop me from yanking the data out of memory?

<comment><USER8> Its actually adobe rtmpe streams. These are encrypted so you have to find a way to pull the keys from the plugin's memory as well. No one's got it just yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's fine with me, if it's a small fee and they drop the ads. It would seem like a bit of a waste to pay for cable and Hulu, though.

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank god for Justin.tv & BitTorrent!

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't care much for them until they stop fighting with boxee.

</comment><comment><USER17> It will be worth it if they make it as good as cable tv with out ads. Unfortunately they will properly just double the amount of ads.</comment>


Use Zsh - <AUTHOR> http://fendrich.se/blog/2012/09/28/no/ <comment><USER2> There's one of these "why you should convert from X to Y" posts every week or so. I understand that a person can be somewhat excited about finding a better application to replace their old stand-by and might feel the need to evangelize. I don't see anything wrong with wanting to introduce others to new software with a helpful attitude.

However, it seems like all of the bash-to-zsh posts boil down to better autocompletion and oh-my-zsh. I haven't really seen anything fresh in quite some time. This is something that I do not understand. Does the author think he is saying something that hasn't been said, or is the hope that if we keep saying the same thing over and over that we can get more people to try zsh? I really can't say.

Also, I recommend _not_ using oh-my-zsh if you are a beginner. Rather, I recommend that you start with a blank slate and read the documentation. This is the only way to get the exact configuration you want. If you don't really care about your shell that much, then why are you switching in the first place? Alternatively, you might try using the "recommended" config offered on first run (I can confirm that the default config on Debian is a good start and will work for most people). Then go through that config while reading the Zsh User Guide[1] and tweak it to your liking. It is my opinion that oh-my-zsh ultimately stops people from reading documentation and offers an incentive (ease of use) for using code that may not be understood (when it probably should be). However, a lot of people seem to like it. Perhaps I am missing something.

My intent is not to discourage this author specifically, but rather to call into question the underlying motivation and behind and utility of all posts of this type.

1 - <http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Guide/>

<comment><USER3> The killer feature of zsh is not the tab completion but the globbing. Really.

More or less, you never need the 'find' tool when using zsh. For example, if I want to find all the Makefiles in this or child directories that have the string 'abc' and have been modified less than 1 hour ago, I can do

      $ grep -l abc **/Makefile(mh-1)

If I want to look at the most-recently-modified file, I can

      $ less *(om[1])

If I have a symlink 'dir' that points to a directory and I want to cd to the pointed-to directory, I can

      $ cd dir(:A)

Clearly, there are lots of codes, but you don't need to remember them, since the tab-completion gives you online help. I can type the '(' then press 'tab', and it'll give me a list of the various codes that can follow and what they mean. There are tons of others. If I want all

      *

EXCEPT

      *.h

I can use

      '*~*.h'

Or for instance, say I have a directory of photos. I want to pick DSC00095.jpg through DSC00107.jpg. In bash, you cry; in zsh I say

      DSC<95-107>.jpg.

After I've typed in the glob, I can press 'tab', and it'll expand the glob in- place, letting me know if the code worked without executing. I can then undo to get the code back and have it live in my history.

This feature alone is enough to make a switch worthwhile. It did take me an hour to set up my .zshrc to work like bash, but this has easily paid for itself.

<comment><USER4> > Or for instance, say I have a directory of photos. I want to pick > DSC00095.jpg through DSC00107.jpg. In bash, you cry; in zsh I say > DSC<95-107>.jpg.

No need to cry -- Bash does it this way:

       DSC{95..107}.jpg.

<comment><USER3> Ugh... Did you actually try this?

      dima@fatty:/media/usb/DCIM/100RICOH$ ls R<22399-22402>*
      R0022399.JPG  R0022400.JPG  R0022401.JPG  R0022402.JPG
      dima@fatty:/media/usb/DCIM/100RICOH$ bash -c 'ls R {22392..22402}*'
      ls: cannot access R22399*: No such file or directory
      ls: cannot access R22400*: No such file or directory
      ls: cannot access R22401*: No such file or directory
      ls: cannot access R22402*: No such file or directory

Bash seems to treat these as strings, not like numbers. So in this specific case, I could have manually counted the number of 0s that are required. In some other case where the field width wasn't constant, I wouldn't be able to do that. What if I have files

file.1, file.2, file.3, ..., file.9, file.10, file.11, ...

How do I pick 9-11 in bash? The point is zsh has features that are a real productivity boost. It's certainly arguable whether a switch is worthwhile, but claiming that these features are just "cosmetic" is wrong.

<comment><USER5>
      > How do I pick 9-11 in bash?

Like so:

      file.{9..11}

I think that you mean for the files to be numbered like:

      file.009
      file.010
      file.011

Bash would try to expand:

      file.{9..11}   => file.9   file.10.  file.11
      file.0{9..11}  => file.09  file.010  file.011
      file.00{9..11} => file.009 file.0010 file.0011

Neither would match all files.

<comment><USER6>
        echo file.0{09..11}
        file.009 file.010 file.011

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to use zsh but switched back to bash a couple years ago simply because the benefit wasn't worth the trouble. When I first changed back I went to some difficulty to get my PS1 to have color in it. That slowly faded away and now I have a visceral, negative reaction to prompts with that much colorful whizzy fu. Maybe in a few more years I'll trim out the username/hostname/path and become content with just a %.

<comment><USER8> It faded away because it was too difficult to get the prompt working?

<comment><USER7> When you have access to a lot of machines run by different organizations but not administration privileges on most of them, it's a hassle.

<comment><USER9> So put your zsh config in a git repo, clone it wherever you need it and symlink to the repo?

<comment><USER7> Uh huh. Now I have to install git on all those computers as well as make sure there's a recent-enough copy of zsh. Much less work that way.

Or I can just use the bash that's already there.

<comment><USER10> Your concern about git however is unrelated to shell choice. I customize bash quite a bit (my own completions, etc.) and maintain dotfiles in a git repository. I have a post-receive hook that tars up my dotfiles and puts them at a public location on my http server that only I know about so that I can easily get them when I'm on a machine without git. I'm not going to do that for every machine, but if I'm stuck debugging something on some odd machine, at the very last I want my vim settings around.

<comment><USER7> It makes more sense for vim than zsh though. What color your prompt is has a lot less bearing on your productivity than your editor configuration. (Though I don't do much of that either).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's another perspective: <http://sstephenson.us/posts/on-configuration>

<comment><USER12> I independently wrote pretty much the same post.

[http://www.apreche.net/dont-change-the-computer-change- yours...](http://www.apreche.net/dont-change-the-computer-change-yourself/)

<comment><USER13> Probably you used Linux at the time it wasn't very mature. I'm running Gentoo now and never had to reinstall to fix things. With modern computers compiling is very fast, most software compiles in less than a minute. I spend more time solving binary compatibility problems with CentOS (at work) than compiling stuff via portage.

I recently bought a new video card (nvidia), plugged it and then booted linux. It just worked out of the box. Then I proceeded to boot windows, it started on a low resolution video mode because the current driver failed. So had to download and install latest drivers manually. The whole procedure took like 3 or 4 restarts.

<comment><USER14> That's the huge advantage of distros without discrete upgrade paths. I have the same Gentoo install on my desktop since I built it in 2008. Meanwhile I tried Ubuntu on my laptop for a couple of years and every time a new version came out, I tried to upgrade only to find my system borked, hours wasted, and ultimately my giving up and doing a fresh reinstall.

And yes, so many more things work "out of the box" today than ever before (as long as it isn't ATI/AMD :P). The Linux ecosystem has grown and improved incredibly over the last few years. I wouldn't dare argue whether it's better than OSX or Windows, but I can comfortably say that it has advanced a much further distance in the last few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using zsh for over ten years. Since one of my best friends (now a computational physicist) convinced me to try it in college.

Over time I've temporarily switched to others just to make sure I wasn't being stuck in a rut, but I always have come back to zsh. It's a joy to use as a day to day command line interface.

For writing shell scripts, i.e. actual software implemented in shell, I actually prefer bash. In large part because it's more portable, in the sense that any given machine is likely to have bash already installed.

<comment><USER2> If you really want your scripts to be portable, you should probably write them in POSIX sh. There might be a high probability that any given machine with a Unix-like operating system will have bash installed, but it is essentially guaranteed that it will have sh.

However, if a person really wants to run your scripts, he can probably install the interpreter for which they were written.

So choosing bash as some sort of middle-ground isn't really justifiable.

<comment><USER16> When it probably covers mostly all computers that will run your script, I don't see why it isn't a good compromise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article really feels like bikeshedding to me. I'm always going to use whatever shell comes default with the OS I'm on (which almost always means Bash), simply because changing the shell is an unnecessary block of time that could instead be used writing software. I need a _really_ good reason to switch, something the equivalent of pipes, and if the #1 reason you can give is "Powerful context based tab completion", I'm confident in dismissing zsh as a cosmetic improvement on bash that I don't need to waste my time on.

<comment><USER13> zsh's tab completion is definitely not cosmetic. It can do very useful things like completing scp destination paths over remote hosts.

<comment><USER18> This has been done by bash_completion for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > In Bash, we often use PgUp to search through the command history. In Zsh you > just write part of the command and press Up. This will let you cycle through > all command lines that contain what you have written, not just those that > begins with it. If you don't write anything Up works as usual, by cycling > through all commands.

This is not true, you can do that in Bash too (via .inputrc) [http://blog.theliuy.com/2011/inputrc-keyboard-mapping- config...](http://blog.theliuy.com/2011/inputrc-keyboard-mapping-config-file/)

Edit: Maybe I misunderstood though, does pressing Up really let you search all command lines that contain what you have written, not just those that begins with it? It doesn't seem to do that on my zsh.

<comment><USER20> In bash, I press ctrl-r and then enter part of the command. additional ctrl-r's cycle.

<comment><USER21> Zsh does that as well with the same exact shortcut

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I tried using oh-my-zsh, but all of a sudden bringing up a new terminal (on OS X) went from taking ~1 second to ~5 seconds. Totally killed my interest in zsh.

I'm sure there's a way to make it all work nicely, but bash has been doing just fine for me, I don't feel the need to figure out an entirely new configuration system for a tool that ultimately has little new utility in my workflow.

<comment><USER23> There is a cleaner 'version' (==fork) of oh-my-zsh that fixed the long startup time for me: <https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto>. With nice, fast setup (overwrites your .zshrc file!) and lots of documentation.

<comment><USER24> Thanks, I have the same slow startup issue with oh-my-zsh. But the link does not talk about how to migrate from oh-my-zsh to prezto.

Which files should I copy over, or compare and update once I install prezto ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So I heard "use zsh its so cool" since about 12 years, every 3 month. Here's the new post, just in time.

Don't get me wrong, I use zsh. I also use bash. I end up using more bash than zsh though. The reason are the same as 12 years ago. If zsh was the most popular shell _right_ _now_ the same people would be praising bash.

\- they're equally fast for what we need them to do

\- they've similar features

\- bash is _everywhere_

\- bash is _the_ standard for all scripts

\- zsh has extra complexity

Oh yeah and stop using pg-up in bash, use ctrl-r. And if different is cool, I don't know, use fish.

</comment><comment><USER26> Any one else using Fish?

<comment><USER27> Me. Just came to tell, that it's even better than zsh, but ultimately it's a matter of preference.

<comment><USER8> What are your top reasons to use fish over zsh? (Bearing in mind, of course, that it's ultimately a matter of preference...)

<comment><USER28> Syntax. I much prefer the fish syntax, even though the fact that it's different from bash can occasionally cause headaches. When I'm mucking with my shell, I'd rather not be remembering [[ -z ]], because I don't do it often.

Basically most shells are designed around power, which is fine. Fish is designed around ease-of-use, which I consider to be a better idea since there's already a ton of power in the UNIX tools that are on the system. That's not to say fish isn't powerful, mind you. Just that you detect a different emphasis when using it.

Consider setting colors in a prompt, for example. zsh and bash use PS1=$'\e[0;31m$ \e[0m'. Ouch. More recent versions of zsh do let you do PS1="%{$fg[red]%}%n" type stuff, I'll confess.

For fish, setting up a colored prompt or whatever:

      function fish_prompt -d "Write out the prompt"
        printf '%s%s@%s%s' (set_color brown) (whoami) (hostname|cut -d . -f 1) (set_color normal)

        # Color writeable dirs green, read-only dirs red
        printf ' %s%s' (set_color green) (prompt_pwd)

        # Print git branch
        if test -d ".git"
          printf ' %s%s/%s' (set_color normal) (set_color blue) (parse_git_branch)
        end
        printf '%s> ' (set_color normal)
      end

It's stuff you already know how to do. It's not an environment variable, it's a function. Commands you use normally. Invoking other regular fish functions/commands. Etc etc. It just feels cleaner (to me).

<comment><USER8> Ah, so a lot of it is that you like the config language better! That would not have occurred to me. Thank you for your reply.

<comment><USER29> The biggest draw of fish is the syntax highlighting at the command line. I still write scripts in bash though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Everything in the "Context based tab completion" paragraph is already done by bash_completion.

* It knows which commands git takes? Yes. * which hosts are in my hosts file for ssh? Yes. * which users my system have when I write chmod? Yes. * available packages to apt-get? Yes.

Plus everything in /etc/bash_completion, plus the hundreds of additional commands in /etc/bash_completion.d, plus many, many online resources for creating your own...

<comment><USER30> One important difference between how that completion works and zsh's is that zsh cycles between the available completions if you repeatedly type tab. E.g. if you have the files [less01.png, less02.png, less03.png] and type "eog less<tab>" in bash will show you the files. Press tab again and it will list the files again. In zsh, the second tab press would fill in "less01.png", then "less02.png" and so on.

It's a matter of preference which completion strategy is the best, yes. :) But for me I've found that zsh's way to do it saves me many more keystrokes than bash's way.

<comment><USER31> That is an inputrc configuration not a shell feature.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7179642/how-can-i-make- ba...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7179642/how-can-i-make-bash-tab- completion-behave-like-vim-tab-completion)

Yay Unix. Input collection is a pluggabls component.

<comment><USER30> That almost works. But it seems like you can't have tab to both bring up a list of completions and cycle through completions which zsh does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> lr--rw-rwx My concern with Zsh is that is just not that much better than Bash and that's the (valid) reason, why it's not getting widespread adoption.

It's like with Plan9 and Linux or new systems languages which try to make a better C. The technology _is_ better than the existing one, but not that much better that it's that relevant.

I think one of the main problems of current shells is that they try to be a CLI and an interpreter for a programming language (e.g. Bash script) at the same time, but the user uses mostly just one of these features for certain periods of time. At one point he wants to control the computer in a very efficient matter (system usage), so short keystroke sequences are convenient. At other times one wants to do more complex stuff which involves programming (development).

However current Shells are at any point in time prepared for both and that's the reason why both tasks are sometimes cumbersome.

</comment><comment><USER32> Just started using Zsh. I never really had any qualms with bash, and so had the mantra if it's not broke don't fix it.

Then I worked with a couple of junior developers and noticed them doing some cool looking things on the terminal.

Suffice to say I've now switched to Zsh and can't see myself going back to bash any time soon. Thanks junior devs :)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's not portable.

And I have to invest time to learn all the codes.

In the times it takes to learn zsh, I could write the same functionality into small sh scripts which I can run on any machine. Put them in a folder, add it to my PATH and I'm in business.

I can tar up this folder and upload it to some internet-connected machine so I can download it to any other machine with an internet connection.

zsh is wonderful. It is the ultimate "interactive" shell. But it's not portable.

Moreover, the less "interactive" I need to be on the command line the better. If I have short, portable scripts to do certain things, and I can run them on any machine with /bin/sh (no need to install anything; sh is the universal interpreter), that's a nice thing to have. zsh won't give me that.

</comment><comment><USER34> Been trying zsh for a while, ran fish for 1 or 2 years. Am back to bash because to many scripts rely on bash and wont't work on zsh or fish.

Thing is, it's note that hard to get the mentioned features in bash. Good tab completion, good git enabled color prompt, ssh completion, host completion, command completion and (my favorite) "start typing, press up, cycle through command history with the given input" aka reverse search. I really really liked fish. But incompatibility with bash was just too annoying after a while.

<comment><USER35> I use zsh and write all my ~/bin/ scripts in bash.. what problems did you encounter? I don't see how issues could possibly even occur.

<comment><USER34> You write YOUR scripts in bash, it's not about my scripts though ;)

Also, it's annoying to constantly switch between zsh and bash when you are working on other servers over 50% of your time.

<comment><USER35> I was wondering what you mean by "many scripts rely on bash". If you write a script in bash it will work from zsh just fine.

I guess I don't really run into the same adoption difficulty other people seem to, since at work we use zsh instead of bash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've been using zsh for a decade or so, and I like it quite a lot. For basic things, it works enough like bash to hardly notice it; but slowly I've learned all the special tricks.

Now, I would recommend against using /oh-my-zsh/ and the like wholesale; just add useful things to your zsh setup step-by-step, where you actually understand each step.

Otherwise you're just importing a blob of magic that can interact with other things in weird ways. /oh-my-zsh/ contains a lot of gems, but take them one by one.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm not going to elaborate much because I feel I'll waste my and I have a plane to catch but I have yet to see a compelling argument to make me believe zsh is in any way superior to bash.

All posts on the subject show that theirs authors have been using a shell they don't know and have replaced it by another shell plus configuration files made up by someone more clever. All posts are also bullet lists of features bash can actually be configured to do.

Someone wake up.

<comment><USER38> That's exactly how I feel about this as well. I can actually confirm that my bash config does _each_ of these things other than some of the globbing features (* * for instance does work though).

edit: should be two asterix characters with no whitespace in between, but if I do this they're not displayed. Any advice on how to get that working?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I use prezto (<https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto> \-- initially a fork of oh-my-zsh).

<comment><USER40> Same here. oh-my-zsh was too slow for me and took away one of the advantages of zsh (that of being faster to load than bash). Also, a great number of oh- my-zsh config options are, to me, incredibly annoying (the long completion menu is the worst shell interface ever invented).

I'm in the process of trimming down prezto to exactly what I need, since it also has too much fluff. It's a great resource, I'd recommend it to anyone wanting a slimmer and easier to grok zsh configuration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I use zsh for day-to-day use. It's mostly been good to me but sometimes I contemplate switching back to bash because of the performance: sometimes zsh simply hangs for seconds at a time. I'm sure one extension or another is at fault and I could fix the performance issues by reconfiguring things, but I really don't want to put the time into doing that.

</comment><comment><USER42> No, really. Use what you like/know. I hate posts about "you should use X because I like it".

<comment><USER43> How do you ever learn anything or improve your workflow if you never try new things?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I used zsh for years. Loved it. I just don't do as much command line stuff anymore so vanilla bash works fine for me. I do miss the history stuff mentioned at the end of the article, though.

</comment><comment><USER45> Been meaning to start using it for a while. You convinced me to download it and see what all the fuss was over.

Couldn't be happier!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Not sure if this is good ask. But windows needs a tool like this. Why not have a port for windows as well.

<comment><USER18> like cygwin zsh? Or are you talking about oh-my-zsh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> just installed zsh but now my rvm is broken, any quick tips? tried adding the following to .zshrc but it doesn't appear to have fixed the issue:

      if [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] ; then source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ; fi

<comment><USER48> Are you using 1.16.x? The changelog mentions improved zsh support.

<http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/rvm-1-16/>

<comment><USER47> Got it figured out, turns out .rvm/bin ended up in PATH which screwed it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I've never read about zsh on HN before. I swear it officer.

</comment><comment><USER50> what a joke!

</comment><comment><USER51> As someone who used zsh for a while but got tired of setting it up everywhere I go and losing the "local community" bash stuff, I humbly request:

someone please post a rebuttal showing how to do all this in bash with appropriate .bashrc/functions and utility programs like fasd.

<comment><USER52> In spirit, here's mine [0], where I maintain a configuration that works in a similar way for _both_ bash and zsh and does not try to make one identical the other[1]. It respects login vs interactive, and is reasonably fast on start (i have a few ideas to make it faster).

It's designed to be lean, DRY, simple and modular. You can use it as is, overwriting you own dotfiles with setup.sh, or you can pick-source each file/feature you want individually (some need a couple vars set, grep for _DOTFILES__ ).

It leverages available software but tries not to break when it's not available. It works under both Linux and OSX.

It includes an implementation of something like vcs_info for bash, leading to a much more configurable PS1 than git's provided bash prompt support.

Its prompt tries to use colors semantically, and keeps things logical and non- cluttered.

If this reads like this is the best thing since slice bread, that's because it is! ... for me. But I'm sure you could find a useful thing or two in there.

[0] <https://github.com/lloeki/dotfiles>

[1] I went all the way to hack support of right prompting and reverse-% cleanup on non-newlined output in bash. It works well... most of the time, but when it breaks it's ugly so I just disabled it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should company use Discord instead of Slack/Zoom? - <AUTHOR> Many companies and schools in Russia started to use Discord as a free replacement for Slack/Zoom.
I've heard P2P is not the best choice for some domains and Discord might sell your data to their partners.
Is it really a good idea? If not, how to minimize possible negative consequences (like role management)? <comment><USER2> I get that Discord has some appeal considering the current situation. Aside from the price, there are some clear advantages over Zoom, Slack and others, though I would very much discourage the use of Discord for companies or public institutions.

Firstly, Discord's privacy policy makes it unsuitable for most corporate settings: [https://discordapp.com/privacy](https://discordapp.com/privacy)

It also lacks any first-party support for E2E and does not offer any extended support you might require if you want to roll out a solution at this point in time.

Lastly, Discord's UI is very much tailored to their target audience, gamers, and while some of it may be easily ignored, the rather prominent dedicated "Games" Tab and in jokey quotes (Do a barrel roll, the cake is a lie, etc.) may not be received positively by ones superiors.

<comment><USER3> Piggybacking onto

> Lastly, Discord's UI is very much tailored to their target audience, gamers

We've been using Discord to talk to each other while playing board games with a group of 4. I've noticed I have a harder time hearing female voices through it - the sound seems to cut out quite randomly, so that the women in the group tend to have repeat themselves.. I'm not sure if this is anecdotal, but after this experience, and knowing how dependent voice recognition is on extant training datasets, I would think twice before trying to use it for business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You get what you pay (or don't) for, if the business is going to rely on it then pay for something that will meet your needs and come with some degree of actual support

</comment><comment><USER5> Discord for a company is a bad idea. The best part of slack is slack integrations. Sooner or later you are going to miss the option of your CRM talking to Slack</comment>


Self-Host Everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/17/self-host-everything/ <comment><USER2> Totally OT rant here: more and more I'm seeing certain grammatical mistakes crop up that disturb the hell out of me. I understand that the first two 'w's in www are for 'world wide,' and that not everybody is a native speaker of English.

But these things are creeping into native speakers' use also. They are:

1) Confusing the words 'lose' and 'loose.' Lose is the word you use when you mean the opposite of 'find.' It is also used to mean the opposite of 'win.' Loose is something that is the opposite of 'tight.' There is no 'loosing,' (EDIT: a1k0n corrects me here, see his comment below) there is 'loosening,' however, as in what you do to your belt after a large meal. OP makes this error.

2) Using apostrophes for plural. Apostrophes are used to show (a) possession and (b) contraction (leaving letters out of a word). Writing "I'm buying two car's" is incorrect. Replacing your car's winshield wiper blades is ok. So is leaving out the car entirely when drawing a 'toon.

<comment><USER3> To be even more pedantic: There is 'loosing', as in releasing, but it's probably not what you mean unless you can already spell 'lose'.

<comment><USER4> My favorite mistake along these lines is "payed", which is a nautical term and not synonymous with "paid".

<comment><USER5> AFAIK both forms are acceptable [in en_GB] for both the past participles of caulking your boat and making a financial transaction, cf <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pay#English> or <http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pay--2>.

This IMO highlights why one shouldn't get too anal about specific word forms as long as the intent is apparent. Of course one can generate inaccuracies this way but generally an honest attempt to receive the communicated information doesn't _gan aft agley_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have to admit, I smirked that SlashGeek is outsourcing its comments system to disqus.

Edit: even better, the Disqus comments are now failing to load with the message "Sorry, we're undergoing temporary maintenance."

</comment><comment><USER7> I would say you should own your own domain and only use services which can hang off your domain. That way you get the convenience of third party services, but any time you want/need to, you can shift to self-host without having to change your email/blog/whatever addresses.

<comment><USER8> I totally agree. I started on the Internet circa 1998 and I've always regretted using popular free services back then, because most of them didn't survive to our days (the popular "X got acquired by Y, X was closed").

I got a domain in 2002 and since then I've used it as part of my identity. It costs some money, but not much and it's totally worth it.

Non technical people may freak out a little bit when they ask you for your mail address because you don't answer with the expected gmail.com (and hotmail.com before that), but that's all right.

EDIT: typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Self hosting is fun and fulfilling. It's simple and cheap. The problem of course is replicating the services you already use. Web hosting is painless but email is absurdly involved if you want to make sure that gmail etc. accept your messages as non-spam. The rules are not made clear and there doesn't seem to be a universally accepted way of setting up email where you can say "this message I'm about to send will 100% be accepted by the recipient's mail server"

<comment><USER8> I've never had problems to get my email accepted by gmail, but well... I don't think Google gets a 100% either.

There must be a checklist somewhere, but off the top of my head:

\- Your server's IP must be static and must have a reverse map (IP -> name); check your IP is "clean" and not in a blacklist, specially when you get it from your ISP range (may be someone used it before you and it has a poor reputation).

\- Setup your DNS correctly using MX records.

\- Use SPF or DKIM so other servers can detect forged emails not coming from your server(s); besides this is nice to filter backscatter spam.

\- Obviously don't configure your mail server as an open relay, use SMTP with SSL or TLS, always with user authentication.

I've been using this setup for years and most of my problems are receiving mail and never sending it (ie. misconfigured servers not playing nice with graylisting, Google servers blacklisted by my DNSRBL, etc).

EDIT: formatting

<comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing the tips. Will give email another attempt soon, and maybe write something up

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One problem with self-hosting is that getting security right and tight is really hard. You have to be aware of all the components used in your stack, and monitor them all for known security problems. And then know how to react to them.

And then you probably want backups, and monitoring, and what not.

Ideologically I'm fully a favor of self-hosting many bits, but having some experience with it, I'm also acutely aware of the downsides.

</comment><comment><USER11> Somebody needs to come up with a universal self-hosting plan that automatically captures everything I create on to a box where I have _total_ ownership. I'd pay for that. So if I reply to a friend on FB, it captures the thread including my reply. If I tweet, it captures that. My email would be a separate folder. And so forth. Heck even lifelogging would go there.

In this fashion the things I create in my life would be under my control, at least to a certain degree. Computers are an extension of our minds, and we deserve to own and control our output in one place, even if we choose to share lots of things in various forums.

<comment><USER12> Have you considered (for the time being) moving to e.g. Tent (<https://tent.io/>) and/or Diaspora (<https://joindiaspora.com/>)? Of course the whole trouble is migrating your current implementation-dependant social circle (e.g. facebook friends), but I've seen people tweet their last messages along the lines of "I'm not staying in twitter for reasons X,Y; moving to Z (join me if you'd like [to follow me])"; my (very limited) exposure to these cases would seem to show that it might just work (to an extent / YMMV) for (at least) folks on twitter with significant amounts of followers.

In any case, I like Tent as they are developing / have developed a generic distributed social networking _protocol_ (with some sample implementations etc.) [/old news]

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Small plug related to the learning curve. Many of the most popular apps, like ownCloud, WordPress, etc. you can get free, easy to install packages at <http://bitnami.org> You can choose to self-host (downloadable installers) or run on Amazon/Azure

</comment><comment><USER14> I've self-hosted as much as I can since 2000 and as with everything, one should weigh up the costs of self-hosting versus the benefits. First, honestly assess your own level of skill. Then pick a service and decide what it would cost you to host and the cost of failure. For example, let's look at hosting your own email service.

The cost of hosting for someone not comfortable with email is quite high. Setting it up correctly requires many steps and if you get it wrong, perhaps your emails don't get delivered and you lose business. Compare this to the cost of using Gmail - effectively zero. However, this does not take the risks into account. Google owns your email and email address. If they, or one of a number of governments decide that the service should no longer be available to you for whatever reason, your email is lost. You could mitigate this by mirroring all your Gmail through IMAP/POP3 and using your own domain name. In security terms, the risk of Google taking away your account is low, but the impact is very high.

As an aside, I'd love to use Owncloud but after a incidence where it deleted files, I decided that it's not yet ready for production use.

</comment><comment><USER15> For me it's not so much about hosting it myself as it is having control of my data. It's a trust issue.

I used <http://github.com/coto/gae-boilerplate> to write a few sites which host data objects in GitHub gists. Here's my OpenStack blog which uses it: <http://StackGeek.com/>, and an example of a raw post stored in a gist: <https://gist.github.com/kordless/93e491c4880a416907be>.

I still rely on GitHub for keeping my data safe, but most of my code there also lives on my desktop in the form of cloned repos.

</comment><comment><USER16> Coincidentally, I just gave a talk last tuesday at the Philadelphia LUG on DIY email hosting at home. [http://jve.linuxwall.info/ressources/taf/DIY- eMail@Home-PLUG...](http://jve.linuxwall.info/ressources/taf/DIY-eMail@Home- PLUG20130212-jvehent.pdf) [PDF, 4.5MB]

</comment><comment><USER17> I wouldn't use something like owncloud as a dropbox replacement right now if you were looking to go ahead with this. It seems to be going through that phase where the security bugs are being identified and fixed.

</comment><comment><USER18> I self-hosted for a long time, knowing it breaks my ISP's ToS. just recently, I received a letter regarding the web server and an extremely throttled connection until I shut it down.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you use just a couple services, good. Now imagine self-hosting all of these:

        - version control
        - bug tracker
        - invoicing app
        - document sharing
        - project management
        - file server
        - mail server
        - static server
        - ruby/node server
        - php / wordpress blog

Just off the top of my head. That will cost you _a lot_ of time and head- banging.

<comment><USER20> I do at least some of this with the server in my basement.

* version control - git and gitweb - I mirror all my repos to github for discoverability though * invoicing - I've done this with text files to track hours and PDFs for invoices (via LibreOffice) - low tech but simple enough * document sharing - my home dir on my server (weak, I know, but simple) * file server - see above * mail server - postfix, amavis, and spamassassin aren't _too_ hard to set up * static server - apache or nginx are trivial to set up * ruby/node - well, I mostly serve Perl stuff, but same deal using Starman - this isn't too hard either * wordpress - yep, installed this too

Things I don't host myself:

* bug tracker - I mostly use rt.cpan.org and github * project management - I use Hiveminder

Now if I had to learn all this from scratch it would indeed be a lot of time and head-banging, but I've learned about this stuff over many years of using Linux and hosting my own stuff. And they're all useful skills to know as a developer.

I think any developer who's working on web apps should understand at least the basics of how web and mail servers work. Even if you outsource this stuff to a CDN and something like Sendgrid you should know the tradeoffs involved instead of just picking the outsourcing because you can't set it up yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can be fun if you have your own server, I have webhosting with 1and1 but no virtual/dedicated server. So hosting everything myself would cost me money to take the server.

Also I don't find it very secure, you would need to have multiple backups to make sure nothing gets lost if your server gets erased.

<comment><USER22> What is the backup guarantee of 1and1 ? Usually hosting providers don't give any guarantees for that.

And even if it feels safer because you assume they have people working on it that know what they're doing, in many cases this is a very bold assumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How would one go about self-hosting a website? I have shared hosting but would love the challenge of setting up a LAMP server that is physically in my possession and have full control over it.

<comment><USER9> Pretty painless:

1\. Get an old computer and plug into router

2\. Install ubuntu server

3\. Buy your domain from namecheap.com and look up their documentation on dynamic DNS (assuming you are on a home net connection

I did self hosting for years (age 16 - 24) with the same K6-II box. Just recently retired it and use a VPS now, but I highly recommend doing it to anyone

<comment><USER24> 4\. Fight with your ISP who doesn't want you hosting services on a "home" internet connection.

Honestly this might work OK for a personal blog or something but is not a realistic approach to hosting anything with volume or for business purposes. Also you will still probably need to pay for SMTP service as there is almost no chance of anyone accepting mail from your self-hosted SMTP server when the reverse lookup resolves to an e.g. Comcast residential DHCP name.

<comment><USER9> Of course you aren't going to have access to outstanding bandwidth, but I've used it for business purposes for years. Whether or not you would want to use it for business depends on a number of factors, but I don't think you can flat-out say it isn't realistic for any business.

I've personally never had issues with my ISP blocking it, but I read accounts from time to time (in this thread for instance) where people had issues with ToS enforcement. You'll have to evaluate your own situation, or just give it a shot until they explicitly react.

But you are right about email- it's a pain. Most likely you will have a bad time trying to get something authentic-looking working with a home ISP. Even doing it on a legit VPS is fairly complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> self hosting an e-mail server is a headache.

<comment><USER26> Well, the headache is in making careful selection and configuration choices.

Done properly, it really requires very little ongoing maintenance. Maybe a few hours per year. DNS requires even less.

<comment><USER27> Spam filtering? Security updates?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Add to the list of reasons it's a bad idea: Security.

Unless you're confident you can securely configure your network and services AND stay on top of patches, etc it's probably a bad idea to self host.

</comment><comment><USER29> Couldn't we start a co-op where every member user/company/organization owned the servers? That way nobody is hosting on a third-party server where the federal government feels that they have eminent domain?

<comment><USER30> Whether the servers are owned by a co-op or a big company, if the U.S. federal government comes calling, you will have to answer if you or your servers are in the U.S. That is just the nature of a government.</comment></comment>


Would you pay for Android updates? - manu-chroma http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11795342/would-you-pay-for-android-updates <comment><AUTHOR> Cyanogen is supported on any major flagship for free. Android's problem are carriers and vendors cra... I mean customization software.

It has been that way forever. Turn carriers into dumb pipes, unlock the bootloaders and the problem magically vanishes. There has been support for samsung devices that span 4 years. Or sony. Or HTC. Note 2 is good example.</comment>


The court document that shows how Tim Cook does business - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/288917/the-court-document-that-shows-how-tim-cook-does-business/

<comment><AUTHOR> $50 million dollar confidentiality penalty? Have you heard of anything close to this figure for other companies?</comment>


Windows 10 Is Only Making Windows Fragmentation Worse - <AUTHOR> https://www.howtogeek.com/400961/windows-10-is-only-making-windows-fragmentation-worse/ <comment><USER2> Maybe part of it is updates that are just failing to finish.

I have a PC that's been "updating" to version 1709 forever. Its progress- tracking is abysmally primitive (one spinning indicator for an entire OS update; this is useless for any length of time, much less when spinning for literally _days_ ). Occasionally it reboots to "install Windows updates". Returns to the same point though, spinning, hoping to install 1709 yet again.

And I don't care because I don't use Windows 10 by choice. Still, I don't know how they could tell if half their customers were just never _able_ to update.</comment>


Phoenix 0.10.0 released with assets handling, generators, and more - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoenixframework.org/v0.10.0/blog/phoenix-0100-released-with-assets-handling-generat

<comment><USER2> I'm implementing an API using Elixir + Phoenix right now and the community around this has been incredibly helpful. Despite the relative newness of Elixir, the ecosystem is really quite rich, at least partly because it can draw upon the entire Erlang ecosystem. Highly recommended!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Phoenix creator here. This is a huge release for us that really streamlines the development process and adds some big ticket items on our way to 1.0 later this year. I would be happy to answer any questions.</comment>


Ask HN: Does Anyone Work at CERN? - <AUTHOR> I'm really impressed with what CERN is doing and their philosophies on research and development of tools. Their career site is really eye-opening: https://careers.cern<p>Does anyone work there? What is the environment like? What's it like to be a software engineer there? <comment><USER2> Apparently around 2,500 people work at CERN.

[https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-people](https://home.cern/about/who- we-are/our-people)

Some have written about it.

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at- CERN](https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at-CERN)

Thanks, Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to Google, yes and I see that. My hope was to hear from an actual person in a venue I already participate it. I apologize I didn't make that clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sorry I can't answer your question, but I did enjoy the doco "Particle Fever" about CERN, life at CERN and the Higgs boson. You might enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Off topic, sort of. You can get a free 2 hour tour of CERN and the LHC buildings in Geneva. Did it last year and was awesome. Tour guides are working scientists, not PR department employees.

<comment><USER5> I have been there, for a tour and also participating in a CERN Hackaton, it was amazing and now I know a couple of people working there.</comment></comment>